My Emails from Sven Olaf Kamphuis…

Hi,

The real spammers we refer to are actually companies like mediasentry and websherriff that besides knowing better keep harassing us and tons of other isps by automatically sending email (lots of it too 😉

trying megavideo and the other streaming sites, indeed makes hell a lot more sense, as that’s where the streams come from in the end,

most of our clients in this field simply link there, and most of the video-stream hosters actually DO comply with the dmca and dmca-like regulations.

The annoying thing is companies like disney inc (most recently 😉 trying to force us to cut off the piratebay (by trying to punch holes and undermining provider immunity), dispite the fact that the piratebay itself does not “distribute” anything, it merely connects people that want to exchange files, regardless of which kind of file, in the end it’s the end users that publish content.

I can see you went for the conventional model of DVD distribution, however, considering the profit margin on that, why not just sell your movie online on your own website in the 50 cent-2 euro price range, surely the profit margin on that is a LOT higher than having the entire distribution chain of distributors, truck drivers, shops, etc taking the profits away, and the market is global.

If you simply make it possible to download your movie from your website, maybe the itunes store, or amazon (i think they do that too), nobody in his right mind would go for a crappy flash based stuttering low-resolution watch-movies-online kinda thing if they can have a fast download of the full HD version, without having to spend hours in going to a shop, parkign the car, buying a dvd (if its in stock), going home, putting the thing in the player, etc (its a lot more work ;).

In our years of conducting business online (we used to do mass domain registration and mass shared webhosting, nowadays that would be called cloud computing), we found that people will gladly become your customer if you simply make it EASY enough for them to register and pay online with instant delivery of the services, I guess the same goes for music and movies as otherwise the itunes store would not be there 😉

We actually wrote something very simular to the itunes store. way before they (apple inc) did (1998-1999) which now is at www.huge.nl, it’s dysfunctional because its ugly and the payment processors aren’t linked anymore, but something like that could well become a central spill in the distribution of movies and music (or maybe we can keep the itunes store around once they learn to make it possible for ANYONE to sell their products there, not just their RIAA friends 😉

Now, primary problem I see with movie sites is that they don’t have a license (the ones that actually distribute the content that is).

This is due to the berne convention, which was pushed by the recording and printing industry of it’s days (1933).

GEMA, BUMA, STEMRA, etc are all in existance today because back in 1933 it was a pretty good idea to have the “rights’ managed by an organisation -per country- (after all, back in 1933 you still had several fairly small markets, its not like you had 5 billion books printed in korea and then shipped to your customers, there was no internet, satellite tv wasn’t invented yet, etc)

The result of this is that disney could not give a license to a movie site to put disney movies in full hd/3d for a global audience (worldwide distribution) if they wanted to (which, they btw, do not, otherwise they would not be trying to sue US for routing the piratebay all the time 😉

But then again, they have been part of the ‘usual suspects’ that kept lobbying for such regulations that now (also) get in their own way, deratifying treaties isn’t quite so easy as creating them 😉

This is also a reason why southpark, for example, doesn’t make their episodes available on one central worldwide site anymore, but rather has sites per country now, eventhough it’s their -own- created content.
(southpark studios also just includes the advertisements themselves and makes their streams high quality, as opposed to third party streaming sites which usually are captured from tv airings)

I’m quite sure you’ll still earn your investment back on the DVDs as a lot of people (still) buy those, and TV stations are (still) around and still get paid to put ‘something” between advertisements (which in the end makes the cash, also online, in most cases, except for direct sales).

Now as far as I understand, these movie sites, get paid by their advertisers, depending on how popular their site is in the “alexa ratings”. Why don’t you just set up your own movie site, together with some colleguas, that does exactly the same, watch the movie in low-res streaming with advertisements for free, or download it in full-hd and pay for it, I bet a lot of those movie link sites like the one you were complaining about would simply link to your site and therefore also generate advertisement income for you.

I cannot interfere in what my customers do, If some guy just buys your DVD and copies it and ships it with deutsche post, you can’t expect the mailman to open the package, see whats inside, refuse to deliver from or to specific addresses, etc, the same applies to data and telecommunications (and that’s a good thing or we’d have EVERYONE who could possibly have a problem with something at our door every second 😉

I cannot force him to remove it (which this specific customer probably won’t do anyway, but the streaming video providers he links to may do it if you ask -them-)

We just deliver traffic, indistriminately of what it carries, even if we know what it carries, we are protected from liability, even if what it carries is SEVERELY criminal (there are a lot things worse than copyright violations 😉 and that’s a good thing, not just for us, but for everyone
Your movie (i’ve watched the trailer) i’m suer would raise some eyebrows in most islamic countries for example, you don’t want your isp to remove it because they could possibly have objections to it 😛

Why don’t you get some of your colleguas together and set up a central distribution company for independant movie productions, which doesn’t ‘enforce copyright’ but rather just makes it easy to obtain high-quality copies at a reasonable price and low-quality streaming with advertisement income, so a lot of it is on one central, easy to find, well promoted, website, online ordering of an actual DVD/blue ray disk should be possible too ofcourse.

There are several more issues with copyright as a concept, one of them being the fact that i already managed to have my 386 “compose” all musical patterns (sheet music) in digital form back in 1996 up to 30 seconds in lenght (the requirement for copyright), and i mean -all- of the possible combinations of musical notes in any order 😉

Technically, that means i could sue each and everyone of those artists and their labels out there not to release any bit of music anymore as i own the rights to -everything- already, as it will always contain a sequence out of my billions of composed patterns, no matter what they compose 😉

now that was in 1996… computers are at least 1000 times faster and bigger now, and we own quite a few of them, i’m quite sure we could do the same for let’s say all english words in any possible combination (copyrighting all possible book texts before anyone else gets the chance) etc.

they could claim it’s not a “work of art”, which is a requirement for copyright, but then again, they compose using computers themselves, it’s all just a matter of interpretation of how many manual interventions one makes in the process 😉

I don’t consider copying “theft” either, as nothing really gets stolen, and it’s all rather vague.. it’s all common knowledge…
now breaking into someone’s house or his computer, stealing his data and making it public, ofcourse is theft
breaking into a factory, stealing the plans for their next model car, is theft, breaking into a bunker, stealing the nuclear launch codes, is theft (not to mention espionage 😉

making something which is already public knowledge more poblic, isn’t theft at all.

Me, using copyright to stop all artists from composing any music because my computer (or me) “did it first” WOULD however be ‘theft’, but it would be 100% legal for me to enforce that by the exact same law they promote.

(germany itself for example uses copyright to -prevent- distribution of mein kampf, despite not having the intention of distributing it itself).

So no, I don’t see any future whatsoever in copyright, you can probably still get away with the old business model of selling dvds for the next few years, you’ll definately make your investment back, one way or the other, but don’t expect that all to still work in let’s say 10 years from now.

When i started working in the internet industry at xs4all, they actually never gave people contracts that lasted longer than 3 months because they weren’t sure the internet, as an industry would survive that long, now, xs4all ofcourse is one of the biggest dutch ISPs out there, I’d say “easy money”, including copyright, should always be treated that way… don’t expect it to work/bring profits 3 months from now even if it does now, always cover your ass, just as with any other investment…

Now for companies like disney, there actually is no excuse 😉
they should simply give people a disney tv with a disney-disc player that only plays disney movies and doesn’t connect to anything else and can’t be filmed with conventional cameras (refreshing the screen the other way around, bottom to top, already solves that 😉 and call it a day 😛

see, your camera would not work in a cinema, if the screen refresh of the cinema would work significantly different than the way your camera ccd/vidicon scans it’s image. it would have black bars all over the image all the time, or even just random dots instead of an image, and as long as your hardware doesn’t have any standardised output, good luck on simply connecting it to a vcr or digitizer 😉

Disney however, despite having the cash and resources, would rather wait for other people to distribute their movies for them, and then sue them or third parties afterwards 😛 instead of actually taking steps to protect their content, in which they claim to take so much interest 😛
(which is why we put a bunch of attorneys on disney, as they were becoming a bit too much of a pain in the ass, and them trying to undermine european commission desicisions that protect providers from having to commit censorship is completely inacceptable 😉

Now as with making your investment back, i’m can’t help you with that, should you decide to do the video streaming/download thingy yourself or with some friends, we do offer guaranteed port-speed (100/1000base) dedicated servers, and i’m quite sure that we can find one of our companies to provide management services and software-development services with that (although cb3rob ltd. & co. kg just offers the actual internet capacity and the hardware ;)… however, we own quite a bit more companies in the consulting, hardware and software development field and research field that can supply “what goes on the server” and manage the things for you, google is expected to make the vp8 video codec open source in the coming weeks, which should work hell a lot better than that flash crap too, and will be supported by all html5 browsers (also all browsers, without plugins 😉

the fact that we don’t run the sites for customers doesn’t mean we can’t ;), we have some quite capable people around that can put this together in no time… (the cyberbunker group actually exists of 20 or so active companies registered around the world, most of them in the isp/telco and research and development fields, it’s pretty much more of a  cult than they are normal companies 😉

(once again, we were around before google and we’ve seen it all 😉

(And despite disneys efforts, we will be around long after disney has evaporated into oblivion 😉

I -wrote- audio and video streaming protocols long before most of those moviesite kiddies knew what a computer was haha 😛

(now besides accidentially having the odd patent here  and there and copyright on a lot of program code, most of which is internal-use only and therefore not open source 😉  as well as -all- possible musical patterns, we never make claims to any ‘intellectual property’ simply because we don’t
believe its a wise thing to do, it’s better if people take your ideas after
you show them that it works and can be done and improve on it)

there even are some people running away with our “trademarks”

I found a “cyberbunker ltd.” as a registrant to ip space that has nothing to do with us for example, there is a cyberbunker.com.au somewhere in australia running an internet cafe and a golf course, etc, oh well, just let them, if that makes them happy, who cares, people will know where to find the “real” one anyway 😛

people always claim intellectual property laws would “promote” innovation…

question: where would the world be if motorized vehicles using 4 wheels were patented and nobody else would be allowed to build simular products 😉

anyway, it’s quite easy to keep control over what you’ve made if you really want to and monetise on it by keeping control and limiting its distribution.

This is what software companies in the 80s did when it got ‘really expensive’ (novell netware, autocad), you simply only make the software work with a specific piece of hardware of which the inner workings are non disclosed plugged into the printer port 😉

It doesn’t matter if peope copy the software from their neighbor and can buy their computers at every street corner, the software still won’t work without your custom hardware, which only you know how to build 😛

it’s even easier to just distribute it and monetise on it by means of built-in advertisements, paid -easy, high quality, fast- downloads or other unique marketing aspects other parties cannot offer (or not that easy anyway).

there are tons of companies in the world offering internet hosting, it’s not about wether you ask 3 euros or 100 euros, its about how easy you make it to buy it from -you- rather than your neighbor, that’s what brings in the customers.

(we have btw left the mass hosting market, so the whole online registration and payment stuff has been removed from our website, but the concept still applies equally well to any market).

and having to go outside, and buy a disk, and then take it out of the box, and put it into some player (usually the computer anyway 😉 just isn’t the easiest way for the user to obtain his entertainment, which, still, is compensated by the higher quality, but that can’t possibly take much longer anymore (users nowadays have 50-100mbit at home, that is quite common in the netherlands and germany anyway (vdsl, cable, fiber to the home (ftth)), so the quality aspect of dvds vs downloads/online watching will soon disappear, the movie industry would better adjust to that, as sueing isps will only lead to the isps sueing them back, and thats a fight the isps will win in the end, the same goes for lobbying, funding political parties and politicians, etc 😛

and no, we will not keep them artificially alive by stuff like “a tax for “culture” on internet connections” as -they- choose to invest in movies, people have made music and danced etc since the stoneage, we really don’t need disney to provide the world with “culture” 😛

nobody asked them to invest millions into movies

If i invest millions into restoring an oldtimer car, and i drive it in the street, and people take pictures of it, i can’t charge them for my millions either, the same goes for movies, nobody asked them to make them, nor to make them public, so they can’t really complain if once they are public knowledge, people watch them without paying back their investment.

nothing to do with your investment, i’m qutie sure you’ll still make that back and a profit on it too, with or without low-res video streams on the internet

oh btw, in case of european providers, don’t even mention ‘dmca’ 😛
the dmca is a strictly american thing that can, if the provider chooses to avoid a court case, provide him with limited immunity (unlike european regulations) under the safe harbor protection, which basically means: remove the content, and let the customer protest against it 😉

which even if we were an american company, we would never do, but most american companies don’t have the balls to simply take that corrupt piece of shit through the court process and win (maybe there is something severely wrong with the american court process in the first place 😉

anyway,

enough of that for now 😛