Considering how much time the MPAA has spent arguing that the sky is falling, that jobs are disappearing and the movie industry is collapsing, you'd have to imagine that its PR people had to think long and hard about how they "spin" the news that global box-office receipts set yet another new record in 2011, as they rose by 3%. It really is quite the PR challenge, and the MPAA pulls it off with a bizarre press release patting itself on the back, and then insisting that piracy is right now... just about... this close... no, really... finally.... maybe... having an impact. How's this for awkward:

"Innovation and technology continue to be a driving force for our business," Dodd said. "People are driven to fill theater seats by the promise of great films and a great, technologically enhanced movie going experience. But online content theft continues to threaten the economic success of our industry -- an industry that employs millions of Americans and brings money into the U.S. economy from around the world. We should protect that success, not undermine it by stealing products and cutting the revenue it puts into the U.S. economy."

Yup. Love the spin, overpaid MPAA PR people: "protect that success"? Good stuff. "We're dying so bad that we're setting tremendous new records..." Digging into the details a bit, yes, the US numbers were off ever so slightly, but there's growing evidence that was almost entirely about the quality (rather, lack of quality) of the movies that were released last year, as the MPAA is also gleefully talking about how domestic box office is already up by 14% this year. And, even with the very slight dip last year, the MPAA notes that domestic box office is up 6% in the last 5 years, so the trend is still clearly upward. They also note that 67% of all people in the US and Canada went to the movies at least once in 2011, with the younger generation again going quite frequently -- with the 25 to 39 demographic and the 18 to 24 demographic (also known as the prime demographics for knowing their way around the dark underbelly of the interwebs) being the biggest movie-goers.

Also, pretty much anywhere around the globe that you look, box office revenue is up. Over the last five years, box-office revenue from Europe, the Middle East and Africa is up a whopping 24%. Asia Pacific? Up 38%. Latin America? Up an astounding 86%.

Buried deep within the MPAA's report is the basic admission that the reason for the drop in 2011 certainly wasn't "piracy," but rather the lack of Avatar:

3D box office was down $400 million in 2011 compared to 2010, which contained Avatar’s record-breaking 3D box office performance, while 2D box office was consistent with 2010.

Some keep trying to make a big deal out of the fact that the actual number of tickets sold has shown a steady decline, but that's silly. No business is focused on maximizing tickets sold. They focus on maximizing revenue. If the goal was to maximize tickets sold, that's easy, just lower the price to a penny and watch the number of tickets sold go sky high. Instead, as the report shows, ticket prices have continued to rise, though it rose by the smallest amount (1%) in 2011 that it has since 2002. That suggests, at least, that earlier in the decade they may have been underpricing a bit, but may have found something of a ceiling, for the time being.

We've talked, at length about the ridiculousness of regional restrictions when it comes to content on the internet. So, to some extent, it's nice to see that News Corp./Fox is actually more or less admitting that such restrictions are silly and has released a new TV show simultaneously around the globe:

But this week, News Corporation is staging a worldwide premiere of “Touch,” a new drama starring Kiefer Sutherland that celebrates the very kind of interconnectivity that will allow the show to start almost simultaneously in 100 countries and territories. In the United States it will appear on the Fox network on Thursday night; in Canada, on Global Television; in Germany, on ProSieben; in Russia, on Channel One.

The worldwide rollout will allow American viewers to react to “Touch” in almost real time with viewers on other continents and in other languages, presuming, of course, that they are motivated enough to do so.

Of course, part of what made that happen was they were able to find a global advertiser (Unilever) to agree to put its ads everywhere. What's still amazing to me, however, is that in 2012 this is still considered a "big thing." This should have been done a decade ago, at least. Because while the networks are finally waking up to this, internet users had routed around them ages ago anyway.

To Tim Kring, the show’s creator, the shift is stark. In spring 2007, six months after his show “Heroes” started in the United States, he watched hundreds of “Heroes” fans line up for an event in Paris, even though the show had yet to be seen on television in France.

“Every single person there had seen every episode. They had all gotten it illegally off the Internet,” he said in an interview. It was then, he said, that he realized, “Audiences will find these shows no matter where they are.”

And yet, here we are in 2012 and it's still "big news" that a show and TV network realize this. Progress certainly seems to come slowly to some industries...

Twitter has taken quite a lot of heat for putting in place the capability to block tweets on a geographical basis. This begins to look a little unfair in light of the fact that Google quietly adopted a similar policy before Twitter. That's shown by the answer to a question on Google's Blogger site about blogs being redirected to country-specific URLs, which at the time of writing was last updated on 9 January 2012. Here's what it says:

Q: Why am I seeing a URL change?
A: Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or "ccTLD." For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.

Google is quite frank about why it is doing this:

Q: Why is this happening?
A: Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.

This is not only what Twitter is doing, but employs exactly the same topsy-turvy logic: by enabling local censorship, we are promoting free expression. That in itself is obviously troubling, not least because Google may be setting off down a slippery slope that sees all of its services segmented by geography to avoid local problems. But there's an even deeper issue.

If more and more companies follow the lead of Google and Twitter, as seems quite likely, it could represent the beginning of the end of the truly global Internet. In its place will be an increasingly balkanized online world subject to a patchwork of local laws. Looks like geography just made a comeback.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Last week, Twitter announced that it now had the ability to block tweets geographically, if necessary. As we noted at the time, this appeared to be a way to limit the impact of censorship to certain countries. That is, rather than completely taking down content (as it would do before), instead it would limit the blocks to just the geographic region. On top of that, it would be quite transparent about this -- posting all info to ChillingEffects, and trying to let users know if they were visiting the page of a censored tweet.

Unfortunately, many people interpreted this as Twitter giving in to censors and allowing censorship. But that's a misreading of the situation. Again: Twitter already takes down content when required by law. Now it's trying to limit such takedowns. However, because people interpreted this to mean it was getting into the censorship business, there were protests against Twitter, which I think missed the point entirely.

The folks over at EFF have a good explainer post that details why this policy actually means less censorship, not more.

That said, Twitter still deserves some of the blame for the way in which it presented this. While it mentioned it in passing, it should have focused much more heavily on the fact that this was an attempt to limit the ability of countries to more widely censor info. Of course, there are some who believe Twitter should simply stand up against any and all attempts to take down content -- but the fact is that there are legal situations in which content is ordered to be taken down via a court order. In this case, Twitter is providing a lot more info and transparency than it was before. That's a good thing... but it's really not how they positioned their own story.

Twitter just announced that it has set up the ability to block content on a country specific basis (e.g., if Germany demanded some content be taken down, Twitter can now just have that content blocked in Germany). I know some people saw this and got upset about "censorship!" but looking at the details, it actually looks like Twitter is doing a smart thing here. You could argue that the proper response would be to stand up to local governments and say, "sorry, we don't block anything" -- and I'd actually have sympathy with that response. But the truth is that if a government is demanding censorship, then Twitter is likely going to have to comply or face complete blocking. The solution that it came up with is somewhat more elegant: it will just block the specific content in the specific location and (importantly) will try to let users know that the content is blocked while also sending as much info as it can to the Chilling Effects website so that people can learn about what's being censored. This is a lot more transparent and hopefully actually shines more light on efforts to censor Twitter.

As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

Oh, one useful tidbit of info? While it says it hasn't had to use this country by country blocking yet... and it uses the example of Nazi-related content, the place where it's already been censoring content... is in the US, in response to DMCA complaints as per Danny Sullivan:

Twitter’s already been pulling content where piracy or copyright claims are lodged, under the existing DMCA law. Today’s announcement isn’t changing that, though potentially, Twitter might begin disclosing DMCA takedowns within its own search results and Twitter timelines. That doesn’t happen yet, but Twitter says it hopes to do so over time.

We've covered some of those activities in the past, and if this actually brings more attention to highly questionable takedowns (such as many we've seen issued to Twitter...) that might actually be a good thing.

It's kind of amusing to read this NY Times article about how the producers of Doctor Who had the brilliant idea of showing the latest season in the UK and the US on the same day this season, rather than showing it in the UK and then delaying the US release for a while. It's typical that TV shows are released at different times in different countries, which is a massive frustration to fans, and generally encourages more file sharing in that people want to know what happens (and what others are talking about online). So it took a huge revelation to realize that perhaps these kinds of regional differences in release schedules is pointless. That realization is good -- but what's amusing is how it's made out to be such a big revelation, when it's something that plenty of people have been talking about for years... and wondering why the TV folks took so long to figure it out.

Is Universal Music really that out of touch with how the world works? It's attacking online video sites that promote its music. It's testing DRM-free music in a way that's likely to fail and apparently wants to claim ownership of CDs it gave away. The company is also trying to push makers of music playing devices to pay Universal a cut for no good reason. The latest may be the best yet, however. Not realizing what a global world we have these days and the easy ability for products in one market to be shipped to another, Universal Music released a CD in Europe only, with a plan to release a US version months later. Yes, this was pretty common for years -- but it's ridiculous to do that these days, because people in the US will still hear about the CD and order it as an import. Now, here's where Universal Music gets even more ridiculous: it's threatening the stores that are selling the import. Again, it seems to think it owns something that it really does not own. And, as the link here points out, all this really does is push customers who actually want to buy the CD to go online and download the music from a file sharing site. That takes a special level of incompetence. First, you make a really bad business decision that doesn't reflect the reality of the market, and then to cover it up, you threaten legal action and drive willing customers away to other sources. Nice work.