Archive for February, 2009

Over the past year, a few of you have written comments asking for information that speaks to USVO’s strategy and financial position. This is not the appropriate venue for that information for a number of reasons. Those questions should be directed to corporate leadership. As a publicly traded company, USVO must adhere to rules about ‘news’ and the use of the blog page has not been deemed as the channel for this type of news.
We appreciate your interest in USVO and the issues discussed here, which are the core technical, business and social issues surrounding digital content distribution and security.

Wednesday the New York Times printed on its front page an article with “Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Studios” as the headline. It’s first bit of evidence to support that idea was that Warner Brothers had ‘failed miserably” in its attempts to keep track of every physical copy of the film. Yet “By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world”
The article goes on to suggest that “Hollywood may at last be having its Napster moment”, as if 1) Napster was the cause of the music business’s woes or 2) Hollywood is suffering anything like the music business.
The evidence otherwise is right at the top of the nation’s agenda, as Hollywood had it’s tax break in the stimulus bill removed based upon the simple fact that Hollywood had a great January.
In fact when one examines the “The Dark Knight” ( I can’t share with you the IMDB Pro page where one finds this data) the $185 million production has grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide as of today. Hardly a failure, and certainly nothing to cry about.
At the same time, if even a fraction of those seven million estimated illegal downloads could have been converted into transactions, the success would be that much greater.
The MPAA, source of the often quoted figure of $18 billion annual losses to the industry, had its voice in the article. John Malcolm, the association’s director of worldwide antipiracy operations, said “There are a lot of very technologically sophisticated people out there who are very good at this and very good at hiding. We have limited resources to bring to the fight.”
This last statement begs the question, not asked by the writers, of just what Hollywood’s budget is. Also missing is any discussion of alternatives. Fortunately the readers of the NY Times have supplied this in their comments.
Some of the highlights include our favorite- “one way to protect streamed content is with a digital watermark.”
We have written extensively here in the past about why and how watermarking is a solution not just to piracy but capturing new business for Hollywood. And we have written about what we think is required. Unfortunately, we are not yet operating at a level where we can take those lines of thinking to the forums where the Hollywood is listening.
We need your help. We need your voices to chip in and saturate those writers with encouragement to follow these ideas instead of accept studio sourced quotes, and old interpretations. Write them at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/brian_stelter/index.html?inline=nyt-per and http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/brad_stone/index.html?inline=nyt-per