Media

After years of anticipation, The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK was finally released to the public in February. The film, created by Simon Klose, is available for no cost and has already been watched by millions of people. The public response to this free release model has been overwhelmingly positive, but it’s now meeting resistance from Hollywood, TPB’s arch rival. Over the past weeks several movie studios have been trying to suppress the availability of TPB-AFK by asking Google to remove links to the documentary from its search engine. The links are carefully hidden in standard DMCA takedown notices for popular movies and TV-shows. The silent attacks come from multiple Hollywood sources including Viacom, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate and are being sent out by multiple anti-piracy outfits. Fox, with help from six-strikes monitoring company Dtecnet, asked Google to remove a link to TPB-AFK on Mechodownload. Paramount did the same with a link on the Warez.ag forums. Paramount DMCA notice Viacom sent at least two takedown requests targeting links to the Pirate Bay documentary on Mrworldpremiere and Rapidmoviez. Finally, Lionsgate jumped in by asking Google to remove a copy of TPB-AFK from a popular Pirate Bay proxy. Lionsgate DMCA notice While it’s entertaining to think that these takedowns are truly targeted at TBP-AFK, the more likely explanation is that they are collateral damage. Most DMCA takedown processes are fully automated and somehow the TPB-AFK links were (mistakenly) associated with infringing titles. However, that doesn’t make it less of a problem. The whole episode shows once again that something is seriously wrong with the current implementation of the DMCA takedown system. At the moment rightsholders get to take down whatever they want, with almost no oversight and no incentive to improve the accuracy of their systems. Perhaps a six-strikes plan or some other form of “education” is in order for copyright holders who fail to learn from their mistakes? Source: Hollywood Studios Censor Pirate Bay Documentary

Internet measurement techniques need a complete overhaul. New ways have emerged, potentially displacing older panel-based technologies. This will make it hard for incumbent players to stay in the game. The web user is the most watched consumer ever. For tracking purposes, every large site drops literally dozens of cookies in the visitor’s browser. In the most comprehensive investigation on the matter, The Wall Street Journal found that each of the 50 largest web sites in the United Sates, weighing 40% of the US page views, installed an average of 64 files on a user device. (See the WSJ’s What They Know series and a Monday Note about tracking issues.) As for server logs, they record every page sent to the user and they tell with great accuracy which parts of a page collect most of the reader’s attention. But when it comes to measuring a digital viewer’s commercial value, sites rely on old-fashioned panels, that is limited user population samples. Why? Panels are inherited. They go back to the old days of broadcast radio when, in order to better sell advertising, dominant networks wanted to know which station listeners tuned in to during the day. In the late thirties, Nielsen Company made a clever decision: they installed a monitoring box in 1000 American homes. Twenty years later, Nielsen did the same, on a much larger scale, with broadcast television. The advertising world was happy to be fed with plenty of data — mostly unchallenged as Nielsen dominated the field. (For a detailed history, you can read Rating the Audience, written by two Australian media academics). As Nielsen expanded to other media (music, film, books and all sorts of polls), moving to the internet measurement sounded like a logical step. As of today, Nielsen only faces smaller competitors such as ComScore and others. I have yet to meet a publisher who is happy with this situation. Fearing retribution, very few people talk openly about it (twisting the dials is so easy, you know…), but hey all complain about inaccurate, unreliable data. In addition, the panel system is vulnerable to cheating on a massive scale. Smarty pants outfits sell a vast array of measurement boosters, from fake users that will come in just once a month to be counted as “unique” (they are indeed), to more sophisticated tactics such as undetectable “pop under” sites that will rely on encrypted URLs to deceive the vigilance of panel operators. In France for instance, 20% to 30% of some audiences can be bogus — or largely inflated. To its credit, Mediametrie — the French Nielsen affiliate that produces the most watched measurements — is expending vast resources to counter the cheating, and to make the whole model more reliable. It works, but progress is slow. In August 2012, Mediametrie Net Ratings (MNR), launched a Hybrid Measure taking into account site centric analytics (server logs) to rectify panel numbers, but those corrections are still erratic. And it takes more than a month to get the data, which is not acceptable for the real-time-obsessed internet. Publishers monitor the pulse of their digital properties on a permanent basis. In most newsrooms, Chartbeat (also imperfect, sometimes) displays the performance of every piece of content, and home pages get adjusted accordingly. More broadly, site-centric measures detail all possible metrics: page views, time spent, hourly peaks, engagement levels. This is based on server logs tracking dedicated tags inserted in each served page. But the site-centric measure is also flawed: If you use, say, four different devices — a smartphone, a PC at home, another at work, and a tablet — you will be incorrectly counted as four different users. And if you use several browsers you could be counted even more times. This inherent site-centric flaw is the best argument for panel vendors. But, in the era of Big Data and user profiling, panels no longer have the upper hand

We know Intel shunned ARM processors and played virtually no role in the smartphone revolution. But we now learn Steve Jobs asked Intel to build the iPhone microprocessor. Paul Otellini, Intel’s departing CEO, admits he should have followed his gut – and made the smartphone world a very different place. CEO valedictions follow a well-known script: My work is done here, great team, all mistakes are mine, all good deeds are theirs, I leave the company in strong hands, the future has never been brighter… It’s an opportunity for a leader to offer a conventional and contrived reminiscence, what the French call la toilette des souvenirs (which Google crudely translates as toilet memories instead of the affectionate and accurate dressing up memories). For his farewell, Paul Otellini, Intel’s departing CEO, chose the interview format with The Atlantic Monthly’s senior editor Alexis Madrigal. They give us a long (5,700+ words) but highly readable piece titled Paul Otellini’s Intel: Can the Company That Built the Future Survive It? Photo: Guardian.co.uk The punctuation mark at the title’s end refers to the elephantine question in the middle of Otellini’s record: Why did Intel miss out on the smartphone? Why did the company that so grandly dominates the PC market sit by while ARM architecture totally, and perhaps irretrievably, took over the new generation of phones — and most other embedded applications? According to Otellini, it was the result of Intel’s inertia: It took a while to move the machine. Madrigal backfills this uneasy explanation with equal unease: “The problem, really, was that Intel’s x86 chip architecture could not rival the performance per watt of power that designs licensed from ARM based on RISC architecture could provide. Intel was always the undisputed champion of performance, but its chips sucked up too much power. In fact, it was only this month that Intel revealed chips that seem like they’ll be able to beat the ARM licensees on the key metrics.” Note the tiptoeing: Intel’s new chips “seem like” they’ll be fast enough and cheap enough. Madrigal charitably fails to note how Intel, year after year, kept promising to beat ARM at the mobile game, and failed to do so. (See these 2010, 2011 and 2012 Monday Notes.) Last year, Intel was still at it, dismissively predicting “no future for ARM or any of its competitors“. Tell that to ARM Holdings, whose licensees shipped 2.6 billions chips in the first quarter of this year. Elsewhere in the article, Otellini offers a striking revelation: Fresh from anointing Intel as the microprocessor supplier for the Mac, Steve Jobs came back and asked Intel to design and build the CPU for Apple’s upcoming iPhone. (To clarify the chronology, the iPhone was announced early January, 2007; the CPU conversation must have taken place two years prior, likely before the June, 2005 WWDC where Apple announced the switch to x86. See Chapter 36 of Walter Isaacson’s Jobs bio for more.) Intel passed on the opportunity [emphasis mine]: “We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it, […] Indeed, the world would have been different. Apple wouldn’t be struggling through a risky transition away from Samsung, its frenemy CPU supplier; the heart of the iPhone would be Made In America; Intel would have supplied processors for more than 500 million iOS devices, sold even more such chips to other handset makers to become as major a player in the smartphone (and tablet) space as it is in the PC world. Supply your own adjectives… Indulging briefly in more What If reverie, compare the impact of Intel’s wrong turn to a better one: How would the world look like if, at the end of 1996, Gil Amelio hadn’t returned Apple back to Steve Jobs? (My recollection of th

A simile is a kind of metaphor. Rather than saying this noun “is” that noun, we say it is “like” that noun. We insert a little distance between the two things. The bleeding glacier in Antarctica is like a wound in the ice. Our first instinct in viewing the photograph is to ask what it “really” is. That’s not really blood, what is it? I mean scientifically. Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valley, in 1911, is in fact the run-off from a microbe-filled lake deep beneath the surface of the glacier. The run-off seeps out through a fissure in the glacier, and it is red not because the poor microbes are bleeding, but because it comes from a very iron-rich environment. The power of the image is defused in its scientific explanation. It’s iron-rich microbe run-off. That’s not blood. The ice isn’t wounded; it isn’t bleeding. Blood is a bodily fluid in animals that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells. The image is arresting, it’s like the ice is bleeding. Even in this remote place at the bottom of the world, the earth has suffered a wound and bleeds into the ocean. What does it mean that the earth shows the signs of a stigmata? Why does the earth bleed from this glacier of ice? Does the earth grimace in pain? How would we view this image differently if it was created by the artist Andy Goldsworthy? Is it only through the medium of an artist’s work that it can be considered and read as a work of art? Today we say that an artist is a genius. “Genius or Genii” was once what we called the attendant spirit of a place. Imagine that this mass of ice, flow of microbes and change in temperature joined forces to create a work of art — an image that is meant to resonate and find a permanent home in your mind’s eye.

MONACO – Tumblr, which has been a non-commerical blog platform, has announced an agency program for brands who want to share their messages in the form of “story telling,” explains founder and CEO David Karp in this interview with Beet.TV We spoke with him in last year at the Monaco Media Forum where he was a speaker. News that Tumblr will be acquired by Yahoo! was just reported. Andy Plesser

After its launch in 2004, RapidShare’s speedy growth saw the company become one the largest file-hosting sites on the Internet. However, like all sites of this nature, RapidShare became popular with those looking to store copyright-infringing material. It was a relationship that would prove problematic. RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, but it was a big surprise three years ago that really caused it to take stock. In 2010, the RIAA submitted their list of foreign “notorious markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative and among the usual torrent site suspects were RapidShare. In the year that followed the company spent huge amounts of cash – reports suggest around 500,000 euros – lobbying to change the site’s image and convince entertainment companies that it was serious about protecting their copyrights. In the short-term at least the strategy appeared to pay off. RapidShare were absent from the USTR’s 2011 list, a sign that entertainment companies felt they had the file-hoster reasonably contained and on the right track. In the months that followed, particularly following the shutdown of Megaupload, RapidShare made further adjustments to its business plan, publishing a controversial “anti-piracy manifesto” and taking increasingly harsh measures to deter file-sharers. As a result, traffic plummeted. As can be seen from the chart above, not even a temporary boost in traffic following the 2012 shutdown of Megaupload could disrupt the downward trend for long. RapidShare’s actions caused a continual reduction in traffic from its heyday in 2010 (50th most popular site in the world) but the worst was yet to come. Late November 2012, RapidShare was still very popular, ranked 150th in the world by Alexa, but now, just six months later, the site is ranked 860th. The effect on the company has been dramatic. According to an insider who spoke with Swiss news site 20Minuten, RapidShare has been forced to fire 45 employees – 75% of its workforce – even after assuring them late last year that their jobs were safe. Of particular concern is that only a few weeks ago the company was still hiring fresh staff from abroad. They will be told to leave in seven days, the insider reports. “The employees themselves, no matter who you ask, do not believe in the survival of the company,” the source said. According to the source, late last year then CEO Alexandra Zwingli announced a “strict austerity program” for the company. Zwingli was subsequently replaced by Kurt Sidler, the former head of business software company Sage. 20Minuten confirmed the departures with RapidShare. “The situation is undeniably so that we can reduce costs and unfortunately we have to part with a number of employees,” said Sidler. “RapidShare is maintained and the operation has concrete plans for the future.” With RapidShare having publicly turned its back on the very community that made it rich over the years, never again will the site be able to return to the business model that once elevated it to elite status on the Internet. The appointment of Sidler, who says his job is to “align RapidShare with customer needs and requirements”, suggests the company will now move in a very different direction. Source: RapidShare Fires 75% of its Staff After “Rogue Site” Revamp Bites

Among other topics, Mr. Miles, who specialized in unearthing lost material about forgotten subjects, made films about the history of Harlem and a black regiment that fought in World War I.

Over the past months we’ve discovered ‘pirates’ in the most unusual places, from the FBI, through major record labels and the U.S. Government to the Vatican. Inspired by these revelations the Canadian Pirate Party decided to take a look at the downloading habits of their local Government and police, against a backdrop of vigorous recent debate surrounding online piracy in Canada, and the copyright troll phenomenon in particular. With help from the pirating anti-piracy group Canipre several movie studios are gearing up to sue thousands of Internet subscribers. Interestingly, the Pirate Party’s findings suggest that even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Government’s Industry Canada could become potential targets. “This discovery shows that copyrighted materials have, in fact, been downloaded via the RCMP and Industry Canada networks,” states Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea. McCrea notes, however, that like most copyright trolls, their evidence is far from rock solid and can’t be linked to individual downloaders. “However, we cannot be sure who is responsible for downloading the material, or even if it was downloaded by employees, contractors, or a person who was using an open wireless connection. This is why this type of intellectual property enforcement doesn’t work – there is no method of reliably telling who actually engaged in the infringement of copyrighted materials.” Below are a few “hits” that were found with data provided by BitTorrent tracking outfit Scaneye, starting with the police IP-addresses. The pirated titles are not unusual and the list mostly includes popular TV-shows and movies. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Pirates Industry Canada IP-addresses have also been caught pirating movies TV-shows and games, including episodes of The Voice, Duck Dynasty and The Ultimate Fighter. The IP-addresses that were found are pulled from peer lists which increases the possibility of false positives, which is exactly how many copyright trolls are believed to gather evidence. Industry Canada Pirates In the months to come thousands of Internet subscribers may be dragged to court, with movie studios demanding thousands of dollars in compensation. The Pirate Party Canada speaks out fiercely against these trolling actions. They point out that despite the crackdowns on individual citizens, the police and the Government can seemingly continue to pirate without repercussions. The fact that the makers of Game of Thrones and other frequently pirated titles don’t seem to mind, makes it all the more confusing according to the Pirate Party. “Between the difficulty of targeting individual pirates, the double standard of targeting individuals more harshly than organizations, and the fact that many content creators don’t see piracy as detrimental to their business, it’s clear that something is wrong with the way intellectual property rights are currently enforced,” the Party comments. “If the goal of copyright enforcers – and the creators they represent – is to increase profits and protect creator rights, shouldn’t there be a better way to accomplish this than by harassing individuals who may or may not bear any responsibility for copyright infringement happening on their IP address?” For the many future troll victims in Canada, we hope that the judges handling these cases will ask the same questions. Source: Canadian Police and Government Caught Pirating Movies and TV-Shows

There are over quarter billion people who have Shazam installed on their mobile device. This astounding number instantly makes Shazam a big player in the second screen market. When Shazam enabled TV recognition in September they made a big splash and instantly interested advertisers in seeing what they can do. Now, the mobile-first company has just announced a new CEO, Rich Riley to help take them into the now more mature mobile-first environment. We interviewed Riley, the former EVP of the Americas for Yahoo! about the importance of TV and what to look out for in the future as Shazam grows.  continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sony Pictures is under pressure this summer, and not just to produce hit movies. Daniel S. Loeb, an activist investor, wants Sony to spin off part of its entertainment unit.