French Porn Execs: Ignore Piracy, Focus On Quality; Japanese Porn Execs: Sue Everyone

from the a-bit-of-a-split dept

It seems that the porn world has had a "love/hate" affair with file sharing. Over the years, we've seen stories of porn film makers embracing piracy to their advantage, and others complaining about it. It's really not all that different than the rest of the entertainment industry. So, it should come as no surprise that different porn execs are responding quite differently in two recent stories. First, comes the news that Japanese porn film producers are looking to sue 65,000 people in South Korea for uploading. That's about double the number of people that the RIAA sued in the US for uploading. Wow.

Meanwhile, reader PrometheeFeu alerts us to quite a different story in France, where industry execs are taking a much more reasonable view on things (article in French, translation provided by PrometheeFeu). The execs admit that it doesn't make sense to try to keep things from users:

"Today all of our new productions simultaneously come out in DVD, download and streaming on our website and on our partner's VOD platforms. Back then, we looked at the music market as an example of what not to do and how to react"

And they know piracy happens, but they figure that it's just a part of the market, and you can't blame people (or sue people) for file sharing:

"If you leave unattended a bag of candy and some children, they will not understand why you punish them for eating the candy. Illegal files are 3 clicks away for just about anyone. It's normal that consumers will take advantage of those."

But, they're figuring out ways to compete, by focusing on high quality, high-end material:

"Of course, the large majority of free and illegal content is low-end. [...] The public rejects this mass of identical video. Whatever small amount of high end content obviously stands out."

The producers in Japan might want to visit France for a lesson on how this works.

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Blizzard To Korean Video Game Sports Assocation: How Dare You Promote StarCraft Without Paying Us!

from the entitlement-culture dept

Once again, we get a story of entitlement culture, where a company gets pissed off that someone is promoting their products, without getting a direct cut (not realizing, of course, that they get payoffs in other ways). This one comes to us via Rob, who sends in the story about an ongoing battle in Korea over the broadcasting of professional StarCraft matches. StarCraft has been amazingly popular for quite a long time, and there are professional players in Korea. It's such a big deal that a ruling body called KeSPA was put together, and organized the broadcast of professional StarCraft games on two separate networks. This has, undoubtedly, driven massive sales of StarCraft for many years in Korea. However, with StarCraft II, Blizzard is upset that it doesn't get a cut of the TV revenue and is trying to route around KeSPA. Apparently, as the fight has escalated, KeSPA has asked the gov't for help, and apparently regulators are threatening to rule that StarCraft II is an "Adult" game, which would make it difficult to broadcast on TV in valuable time-slots. You shouldn't bite the hand that promotes you...

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Google Doesn't Want To Disclose Korean YouTube Uploaders; Turns Feature Off Instead

from the letter,-not-the-spirit dept

Some new internet regulations recently went into effect in South Korea, forcing sites with more than 100,000 users per day to confirm users' personal information before they upload content or leave comments, so they can ensure people post content under their real names. The cutoff was lowered from sites with 300,000 daily users, and the new, lower bar caught YouTube Korea. But instead of complying with the system, Google has instead disabled uploading and comments on its Korean site (via PaidContent). Google's stance on censorship of its search results in China garnered it a lot of bad press; the fact that YouTube Korea lags behind other local video sites in popularity probably made this latest decision a bit easier. Apparently, though, people can easily get around the ban by using versions of YouTube aimed at other countries -- highlighting the frivolity of these sorts of laws given the global nature of the internet. Unless countries want to go as far as setting up Great Firewalls of their own, users will easily circumvent the rules, should they so desire.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Warner Bros. Make Up Your Mind: Are You Competing With Piracy Or Not?

from the mixed-messages dept

It really was just last week that we were somewhat impressed that movie studio Warner Bros. recognized that it needed to compete with piracy in China, and was doing so by offering super cheap movie downloads there. However, apparently that strategy isn't universal across Warner Bros., because, as a few readers have alerted us, the studio is acting in quite a different way in neighboring Korea. Rather than compete, Warner Bros., is apparently throwing in the towel and pulling out of Korea entirely.

To be honest, I'm quite confused as to how the same company could make both of those decisions in the course of a single week. Perhaps the situations are really different between China and Korea (though, I doubt it), but it's difficult to see why it would make sense to try to compete against widespread piracy in one country, and then insist it was impossible to do the same thing in another country.

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Once Again: People Just Aren't That Interested In Mobile TV

from the no,-really,-we-swear dept

For years and years we've wondered why various companies were spending billions on building mobile TV systems that simply mimic traditional broadcast TV to mobile phones. In an age of time shifting and place shifting there's little reason for a mobile broadcast TV system that's separate from your other ways of accessing television. People don't want to have to buy into a whole different (expensive) mobile subscription service when they already have a cable subscription at home which they can save via their TiVo. And, if they really want to access it on the go, they can just pick up a Slingbox and not have to pay for an entirely separate subscription. But that hasn't stopped billions from being poured into various mobile TV systems, even though pretty much every test shows very little interest in paying for mobile TV.

Of course, sometimes when we talk about this, people tell us that the experiences in Asia -- specifically Korea and Japan -- show that there really is a market for fee-based mobile broadcast TV. Turns out that's not true. A new study in Korea points out that the highly touted mobile broadcast system there gets very, very little usage. In the meantime, Toshiba is backing off plans to offer a fee-based mobile TV subscription service in Japan. So much for those "success" stories.

What's really stunning about this is that it wasn't hard to predict that this would happen years ago, before billions were wasted on such systems. None of this means that video alone isn't an interesting space in the mobile market, but it has to be allowing users to access what video they want -- not taking us back in time to an old live broadcast system, and adding yet another subscription fee for the privilege.

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Korea Using Copyright Law To Crack Down On Protests It Doesn't Like?

from the misuse-of-copyright-law dept

Copyright law, by its nature, is an abuse of free speech. Many, of course, consider it to be a reasonable restriction on free speech -- but any time you open that door, you open up the possibility that copyright will be abused in a way to prevent other types of free speech. For example, Techdirt reader cram writes in to point out that Korean officials have arrested the CEO of a video streaming website, charging him with copyright infringement, noting that the site encouraged people to upload copyrighted works by giving uploaders a share of money earned. However, many are suggesting that copyright infringement charges have little to do with the real reason behind the arrest -- as the guy arrested also runs another site that has helped publicize videos protesting Korean policies on importing US beef. Well, no matter what they think of imports on US beef, now they know what happens when they import US-mandated copyright law.

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The Real Cost Of Copyright Extension In Korea: $170 Million

from the ouch dept

Earlier this year, we pointed out how ridiculous it was that the US was forcing South Korea to extend the length of copyright in the name of free trade agreements. After all, copyright is the opposite of free trade -- it's about monopoly protectionism, and that's very costly. Now we actually have an idea of just how costly. William Patry writes about the history of copyright extension, highlighting how it's really just a game of leapfrog, where Big Copyright holders use the differences in copyright law to continually extend it out further and further -- completely going against the purpose of copyright law. However, the real key to Patry's writeup is to point to a report from South Korea talking about just how much damage copyright extension is doing to local publishers. That's quite a statement, since copyright extension supporters always talk about how it's designed to help publishers. Not so. Publishers are complaining that the new rules will limit how many books they can publish, and the government is being forced to hand over approximately $170 million to keep the publishers happy. So, for all the talk of how copyright extension is necessary to protect the publishing industry, in South Korea, it seems to be costing taxpayers at least $170 million -- while making sure that fewer books are published. How is that possibly aligned with the stated purpose of copyright to encourage more content creation?

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WiBro's 'Success' Not Boding Well For WiMax

from the ouch dept

Many people confuse the future with the present. For years, I've heard variations of the following phrase at numerous conferences and multiple articles: "Well WiMAX is here so it has a huge time to market advantage over -blank-." The author or speaker usually then moves on to cite how WiBRO is entrenched in Korea, and Sprint will have Chicago and DC hooked up by end 2007, so WiMAX is here. Citing future dates, and using the present tense is a grade-school error, and the future has ways of making fools of soothsayers. The end of the year is fast approaching, and the news out of Sprint is about a failed partnership, not a pilot launch. Meanwhile, back in Korea, WiBRO is still faltering. WiBRO was a proprietary deviation of mobile WiMAX that the Korean government promoted because they didn't want to wait for WiMAX, and they wanted to drive the standard by getting out of the gate early. But back in September 2006 after 3 months of service, the 2 WiBRO networks in Korea had attracted 479 and 15 subscribers. By February 2007 KT was up to 906 users while SK Telecom (a former employer of mine) was at 151. We joked that that represented a staggering 1,000% growth since September!

In the latest news out of Korea, Telecoms Korea reports that 17 months after launch, SKT's WiBRO has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. What an abysmal record. Of course, it's reminiscent of the early days of FOMA or of Hutch 3 UK. It's tough to shoulder the growing pains of a new technology that was launched before its time. Arrows in the back are the common reward. The government is pressuring the carrier to continue deployment of the network to meet regulatory minima. SKT will respond by increasing the number of "Hotzones" from 56 in 23 cities to 100 in 42 cities, and will eventually upgrade to Wave 2 which should double speed and capacity. Of course, as is typical of WiMAX rhetoric, it'll be hard to get clarity on whether they mean "double speed AND double capacity at the same time" or whether it really means "double speed and thereby double capacity". WiMAX now may be entering the "trough of disillusionment," but that doesn't mean it's dead in the water. If they can get the darned thing to work well, the global reference cases of WiBRO and Sprint's Xohm will shine like a beacon. If they don't get it to work in 2008, it'll be more like bacon...fried.

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Korea's Internet Addiction Bootcamps Mistargeted

from the the-symptom-rather-than-the-disease dept

For years, we've pointed out how ridiculous it is for people to be blaming internet addictions for things, when almost every case of "internet addiction" that's demonstrated that the actual problem was something else, and the internet usage was just a way of "escaping" from those other problems. It didn't help that many of the big supporters of "internet addiction" happen to be the people (i.e., doctors) who are most likely to profit from such a thing existing. On top of that, reports have shown that so-called "internet addictions" tend not to be particularly harmful, and it makes you wonder what the big deal is. However, more recently, we're seeing some governments take the "threat" seriously. The NY Times is running an article about a "boot camp" in Korea to help cure kids of internet addiction, incorrectly suggesting it's the first such camp in the world. Earlier this year, we pointed out that China was opening a summer camp for internet addicts, which followed Chinese attempts to cure internet addiction with electric acupuncture, shock therapy and special halfway houses.

Still, as you read the NY Times piece about the Korean boot camp, you see that the folks running the camp are marking the same assumption: that it's the internet or computers to blame, and therefore, the solution must be to remove kids from the internet and computers entirely. This is fighting the symptom, not the disease. There's a reason why people started spending so much time online, and simply taking away access probably won't change that. The one kid that the article discusses in any detail started spending more time online because he wasn't very popular in school. Taking away the internet isn't going to fix that. There's no doubt that some people can spend way too much time at their computers, and it can potentially damage other parts of their lives -- but simply blaming the internet and pulling it away completely seems like a cure that's not likely to help very much. If the real problems that lead the person to spend so much time online aren't dealt with, then they will simply manifest themselves in some other manner soon enough. Calling something an internet addiction seems easy enough (and it's catchy, so it gets headlines), but if people are treating the internet part, rather than the real problems, it's not doing anyone any good.

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Microsoft Gives In On Antitrust Claims; Will It Make A Difference?

from the probably-not dept

Just a week after dropping an appeal on an antitrust ruling in South Korea, Microsoft has now agreed to the EU's antitrust ruling. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as Microsoft's appeal had already been smacked down by the EU courts. While this may appear to be something of a shift from Microsoft's more common willingness to fight these sorts of things to the end, it really shouldn't be that surprising. At some point, the company had to realize that things weren't going to get any better. And, at the same time, Microsoft had really held out for long enough on many of these issues. The remedies (beyond the fines) in the EU don't appear to be all that onerous and, if anything, should actually make Microsoft's operating system somewhat more attractive to purchasers in Europe, as it could make it easier for other applications to work well on the Microsoft platform. So, while some in the press are saying that Microsoft "blinked," it seems more accurate to say that it was able to drag the process out for long enough to serve its own purposes.

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