slack

So, yes. I've been completely slack with the whole blog thing. Blame Christmas for being just round the corner. No, really - the only break from thinking about it is a few days in September.

The Weekend Herald report on Hollywood Studio's spying on internet traffic to catch P2P users downloading their content is a worry.

The software, developed to hunt movie pirates, can track internet searches in what an international privacy watchdog says is an alarming intrusion. It can trace Google searches and other download attempts back to the computer they came from.

I have two problems with what the Motion Picture Producer's Association of America, via their representative NZfact, is doing. Firstly the concerns over piracy are mind boggling. Juha rightly pointed out that,

...it's hard to see how NZ FACT can obtain the above data without accessing computer systems somehow, or sniffing ISP customers' network traffic. If this is what's happening, is it really legal for NZ FACT and its employees to do so?

I can't actually fathom how this software works without actually being spyware on the systems of search engines or search users, or without cooperation from the likes of Google (very unlikely), or Pirate Bay (yeah, right). But if the software works like it is claimed to, we should be very worried. I'm sure the MPAA will have requests to adapt the software for some very disturbing uses, from the concerning (market research), to the dirty (blackmailing), and worse (electioneering, Church recruitment, identification of gays to hunt down and stone).

My second problem is Hollywood treating the Internet as the problem. Sure people are downloading movies and television programs like there's no tomorrow. Catching the likes of John Mansfield Houston is one thing, but the so called pirates who use P2P are the same people who go to movies and watch network television.

People who see content at the cinema, on television, newspapers, radio and the internet don't care about the revenue of the producers. They really just don't. All they care about is the content. All they gotta do is make it pay, either by pay-per-download, or putting commercials in. Or both. While most users would make the effort to fast forward a 3 minute commercial slot, it wouldn't be worth the effort to fast thru a 5 second iTVC sold to Coke for $10 million. In fact, I'd bet that having free downloads for movies & TV episodes with no more than 30 seconds of commercials per commercial half hour (22 mins or so) would drive people to the movies and get them buying DVDs for the commercial free versions.

So grow up Hollywood.