Bias much, CBS? The network ran a report on 60 Minutes the other day (which shows how far off our radar the show is, seeing as though we just found out about it) that, according to TechDirt’s fantastic report, is basically a piece of MPAA propaganda. It makes all sorts of ridiculous claims that can easily be disproven by, you know, spending two minutes looking this stuff up.

The premise was this: Internet piracy is ruining the movie business. No dissenting opinions were presented to dispute that idea, so right away the report was a little fishy.

The report said that because so much money is being lost to piracy, less fewer movies are being made, and Hollywood is doomed as a result. Of course that’s a lie, since TechDirt dug up the statistics that show that nearly twice as many movies were made in 2008 as there were in 2004. And yes, more money was made.

I’ve embedded a clip (I don’t know if it’s visible outside the U.S., sorry about that) to illustrate what a piece of garbage the report was.

The beauty is that the report was presented as Lesley Stahl Reports, some really official thing, when I can guarantee the woman has no idea what she’s talking about. The look on her face when the guy explains peers and seeders and whatnot to her is priceless. That’s a good way to get an accurate report: have someone who is so clearly out of their element present the information.

And to address a TechDirt comment, as to who watches CBS anymore. That’s the thing: the people who use these technologies, who actually know what’s going on, aren’t watching, but the people who have the power to impact said technologies do. The show 60 Minutes may not mean a damn thing to anyone under the age of 60, but how many people running uTorrent all day long know how to hire a lobbyist who can call a congressman to put the wheels in motion for a DMCA-type law? What do you think your senator is more familiar with, 60 Minutes or Slashdot?

Years from now, when the history of BitTorrent-related Internet piracy is written, there will have to be at least one chapter devoted to The Pirate Bay. It showed up just as the likes of Suprnova and LokiTorrent were being shut down, and quickly became the go-to place for, shall we say, the less savvy BitTorrent user. It also became a symbol of the copyright reform movement, though the site’s cavalier attitude toward any sort of authority ultimately led to its undoing. (The whole “we’re untouchable!” gimmick the site had played up was, we can now say, ill advised.)

But if an entire chapter is to be devoted to TPB, then it only makes sense that the sale of TPB being given at least two. It emerged two days ago that Global Gaming Factory X, the company slated to buy TPB for nearly two months, had acquired the financing required to go through with the acquisition. The plan, somehow, was to turn TPB legitimate, completely ignoring the makeup of its user-base. These people use TPB: do you really think you can take this community (if you can even call it a community), take away the one thing it had going for it (“Free stuff!”), and completely turn it on its head? Laughable. Even more laughable when you consider what a key would-be technology partner of TPB 2.0, Peerialism, has said. And that is, essentially, that GGF has no money. No money to buy TPB, and no money to buy Peerialism.

It is, in fact, difficult to buy something when you have no money, a concept that’s perhaps lost on people who are used to getting things for free.

Oh, there’s more. The CEO of GGF, Hans Pandeya, has had his car and motorcycle repossessed after being unable to pay back a tax debt of $110,000.

I can’t stress how bad that makes GGF look, if it’s even possible to make these guys look any worse. Here you have a company that’s trying to buy, and turn legitimate, the best known piracy site on the Internet. According to the company that was set to transform TPB into a prim and proper organization, it has zero money to do so. And now, its CEO is seeing his personal property being hauled off for his inability to pay tax debt. If you can’t afford a motorcycle, you probably shouldn’t be in charge of a company that’s trying to spend millions of dollars to turn TPB into a shining beacon of legitimacy.

Good luck to all parties involved, of course, I’m just a little bit skeptical.

Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders.

We all know why this is happening: rights holders there (the UK’s version of the RIAA and MPAA) are freaking out because they never bothered to update their business model, and now are seeing their business (standing in between musicians and their fans, “distributing” music) blow up. Ten years ago, all these companies should have seen the success of Napster, hired the best and brightest right out of college, and have them develop a service that would have limited the proliferation of Internet piracy. I’m thinking OiNK and What.cd: far and away better than what iTunes offers, in both selection and file quality. Now, if the record labels had introduced something like those sites in 2000, or 2001, charged a reasonable amount, they wouldn’t be in this position today.

Again, read Ripped for more on how the music industry screwed itself so, so badly.

But anyway, this UK thing. For their part, the Internet Service Providers’ Association claims to be “disappointed by the proposal to force ISPs to suspend users’ accounts.” It even referenced an earlier ruling by the European Parliament that called kicking people off the Internet a violation of people’s basic rights.

In a coup, I asked in a bunch of file sharing-related IRC rooms that I idle in all day—Linikus for Mac OS X is a great piece of software, even if the thought of paying for an IRC client is 100 percent bonkers—what UK users thought about all of this. They’re very skeptical, with one user claiming outright that “it’ll never happen.” He gets letters from Virgin (a big ISP in the UK) all the time, yet nothing ever comes from it. So if this whole campaign is there to scare people, well, it doesn’t seems to be working.

Hold onto your hats, everyone.

Flickr

And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session.

An MP there, Tom Watson, has written on his blog (apparently he was the first MP to have a blog) that people do have the opportunity to affect any such legislation. For one, people who’d be affected by the legislation—British CrunchGear readers; we’re huge in Sunderland for some reason—should contact the Department of Business Innovation and Skills.

Tell it this: how will it benefit the UK to target 6 million citizens and throw them off the Internet? Who’s to say how many of these people don’t improve British society on a daily basis? Doctors, teachers and professors, you name it. And for what, to appease the record labels, which are most concerned with improving their own bottom line? It’s just something to consider.

(In fact, in the book that I mentioned the other day, Ripped, the author estimated that if the RIAA truly wanted to “go after” everyone who’s ever downloaded a song, it would have to sue nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population. And if we’re treating copyright infringement as a criminal matter, then you’d have to build an awful lot of prisons to accommodate all those people.)

Maybe if the music labels had spent more time figuring this Internet thing out than it did suing single mothers? Because things like that wacky file format we mentioned last week are far too little, far too late.

So here’s an interesting look at Internet piracy you may well enjoy. The English Premier League complained the other day that illegal Web streams of live games (from Justin.tv and the like) were eating into its profits. No profits, no Premiership, was the implied threat. Then explain this to me: WWE ran a pay-per-view event in June called The Bash, and it marked the first time the company aggressively pursued illegal Web streams (again, from Justin.tv, Ustream, etc.). According to the company’s recently released financials [PDF], by way of the latest Wrestling Observer newsletter [that's a pay site, by the way], The Bash was the third least purchased pay-per-view event “in years.”

Why should any of you care? It merely illustrates that, despite the fact that WWE had gone out of its way to snuff out piracy, such actions had no measurable, positive impact on the pay-per-view buyrate (the number of people who buy the pay-per-view). Despite the fact that there were no streams, the buyrate didn’t respond in kind.

And the idea that these jitter-prone streams, which often went down even without the long arm of the WWE’s legal department getting involved, could somehow replicate the effect and utility of actually buying the pay-per-view (in HD!) and watching it with your friends and family is ludicrous.

The Bash was positioned as the company’s bellwether: do these illegal Web streams detract from the buyrate, or is the number of people watching them so insignificant that it’s not even worth pursuing? Or, more to the point, do these streams siphon off business? Well, again, with no streams out there, The Bash didn’t seem to have benefitted at all from all those stream-less people buying the pay-per-view.

Now, WWE’s own idiosyncrasies aside—despite seeing revenue drop by some 16 percent, this past year was its most profitable ever—this whole Bash business, I think, should at least temper the Premiership’s arguments. Justin.tv isn’t going to destroy the Premiership, or any other entertainment venture out there. Saying otherwise is disingenuous.

Of course, that’s how things stand in mid-2009. If 2012 rolls around and the Premiership (or whatever sports/entertainment property you want to mention) still hasn’t figured out a way to make itself legally accessible to the Internet generation, for lack of a better term, then clearly something is wrong. The fact is that you can already purchase Internet streams of Champions League games from UEFA, and have been able to for a few years now. Yes, it requires Windows, but the fact is it’s available, which is something you can’t say about the Premiership.

France’s controversial attempt to crack down on Internet piracy was dealt a setback Wednesday when that country’s highest legal authority struck down a provision that would have denied Internet access to those who repeatedly download copyrighted material illegally.

The French Constitutional Council rejected a key provision that would

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