Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism

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The RAND corporation has published a heavy document entitled: “Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism”. This 162 page document is extremely well documented. Through published facts, it sheds some lights on the proven links between film piracy and organized crime (and even terrorist organizations) all over the world. It also shows some examples of legal authorities that are helping piracy. My preferred story is this Russian illegal replication DVD plant (pressing capabilities of 800,000 per month) which was closed after a first raid. It was sealed and put under surveillance by the police. Four months later, a new raid seized 55,000 new illegal DVDs (while the plant was supposed to be closed!)

Film piracy is an activity that has a low entry barrier, and low risk of heavy jail sentencing. It has even a better margin than drug selling (at least 3 times bigger).

This document is somewhat frightening. We are far from the student downloading a movie and distributing it to friends.

Of course, no technological answer can help in this case. The only thing we can do is to delay as much as possible the availability of bootlegs! But once available, technology is out of game.

The answer is obviously legal. The report is not very optimistic. Film piracy is still considered as victimless counterfeiting. This is not the case for pharmaceutical counterfeiting. Thus, it may not be the first priority of the authorities. The report expects that if public awareness of the links between film piracy and organized crime or terrorism would increase, then people would be less attracted by cheap illegal DVDs.

17-march:repaired the broken link to RAND document

DRM and games

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I often described the ruckus generated by DRM for games (see Game and DRM or Spore and the DRM fury). Yesterday, I discussed with some French game editors. Their position was rather negative. According to them, game protections are today too weak. The result is that soon patches are available on P2P to defeat the protections. The paradoxical outcome is that honest customers who purchased games suffer of the constraints imposed by the game protection (for instance, checking the presence of a physical disc in the drive…) whereas dishonest users have the game without the constraints.

Using game theory (see the DRM game)), the winning strategy would be to steal the game! Thus, to change the winning strategy, there seems to be two possible solutions:

  • Make more robust DRM
  • Make DRM that are transparent to the customers but not to the dishonest users

Currently, I do not see this trend.

SF: The Disc World

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The world is a disc carried by four elephants that stand on top of a huge turtle. Magic replaces technology. Humans interact with dwarfs, trolls, werewolves, vampires, and even a librarian orang-utang… For 25 years, Terry Pratchett has wrote a series of hilarious mad books.

If you spent (or even still spend) nights playing advanced Dungeon & Dragons, if you are hooked on “The Lord of Rings”, and also on Douglas Adams’s silly humour, then the Disc World is for you.

How did I discover Terry Pratchett? Through a collaborative project! Many years ago, we tried to set up a project with Philips about an European equivalent of TCG. The project leader decided that the project’s name would be: Ankh Morpok. Ankh Morpok is the main city of the Disc World. It was the first time, I heard about Terry Pratchett. The project was not accepted. Some years later, I found one of the title in my local library. It was an error, I got addicted.

My favorite characters:

  • Lord Vetinari, the patrician; The members of my team who claim that they could have guessed it
  • Death would always speaks in CAPITAL

I would recommend to French readers to read the books in English. I find it far funnier, although at the start you will have to get used to slang writing. But after a while, you get used to.

Be aware: Highly addictive books I warned you.

Olivier BOMSEL explains the economics of the graduated response

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Olivier BOMSEL, French economist, has always presented interesting views on the media industry. Thus, he has been invited to participate to the French commission Olivennes. The outcomes of this commission have given the basis for the French graduated response.

It was normal that Olivier justifies the outcomes. In Decreasing copyright enforcement costs: the scope of a graduated response, he explains why it is an economically rationale decision.

Section 3 is my preferred one. He explains why free riding on copyright content was an incentive for a strong roll-out of broadband. ISPs had no incentive to fight piracy. According to him, once broadband successfully deployed, a second phase starts. ISP search new revenues through paid distribution. Butt due to piracy, cost of content raised. ISP have now some incentives to fight piracy.

Section 4 explains the graduated response. The purpose is to increase the probability to be caught, thus through fear have a deterrent effect.

With the French case, he shows that the ISPs will bear the cost of this fight and not the content owners. One interesting application of the polluters pay principle.

This section is less convincing. Nevertheless, the paper is highly recommendable.

Warner threatens French Fansubbers

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On 17th February, Warner Bros. entertainment France SA sent a mail to the administrators of the main French sites of fansubbers. Fansubbing consists to translate and write subtitles for TV series or movies. Typically, it results in a file with extension .srt that can read with most players such as vlc.

Clearly Warner indicates that subtitles are protected by the copyright laws.

En effet, est constitutive des délits prévus et sanctionnés par les articles L.122-4 et L.335-2 à L.335-10 du Code de la Propriété Intellectuelle (”CPI”) toute reproduction, représentation, mise à disposition du public, adaptation, traduction et/ou transformation d’œuvres protégées, sans autorisation des titulaires de droits.

What is the reaction of these sites? The site all-abou-subs has decided to favorably answer the request of Warner. But, they just removed the fansubs of the series mentioned by Warner in its mail. Other sites, such as sub-way, Forom, SerieBox or Subbers In Black do even not mentioned Warner’s threat.

Will Warner France escalate its threat with more legal actions? Is it worthwhile? It is rather easy to find TV series with French subtitles on the P2P networks sometimes even the day after the first broadcast (sometimes with broken translation :Happy: )

NIST SHA3 and buffer overflows

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For several months, NIST launched the public challenge to define SHA-3, the successor of SHA-1. All the 42 contenders had to submit the description of their algorithm together with C reference implementation.
Tool supplier, Fortify, decided to analyze these implementations. They used their source analysis code on these reference implementations. Guess what? They found some common mistakes, such as buffer overflows. See the the report. But, most implementations were excellent.

The fact that the implementations had weaknesses does not mean that the algorithm itself is weak. But we may learn two lessons:

  • – As we all know, writing a secure implementation of an algorithm is a difficult task. And Fortify did not test the robustness against attacks, just the programming errors.
  • – Using software testing tools such as static analyzers, memory manager, … is MANDATORY when developing software for security. It will not eliminate all the weakness, but at least avoid some basic ones.

The SongBeat case

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Warner Music has succeeded in its lawsuit against German Start-up SongBeat. SongBeat allowed to search for mp3 songs using integrated search tools from Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM or iASK. SongBeat offered even the possibility to download the songs. Unfortunately, the downloads had not the blessing of majors.

This did not worry the start-up. According to its CEO

The downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand.

Well, the judge did not have the same understanding. veoh was smarter about this issue (see Veoh versus Universal Music Group) SongBeat will ask for an appeal. Nevertheless, the chances are weak.

When reading the last IFPI report 2009, we see that music industry will look for new revenues through digital music. The trend is also towards DRM free music. Nevertheless, DRM free does not mean without any control. Music industry is not ready to loose its control on who makes money and how much. Music industry will probably not tolerate uncontrolled distribution of its copyrighted songs.