MPAA Costs Hollywood More Than US BitTorrent Piracy | Hacker News Reader

MPAA Costs Hollywood More Than US BitTorrent Piracy

torrentfreak.com

125 pointslomegor16 comments

> 16.5% of total Internet traffic on an average day comes from BitTorrent. Since BitTorrent traffic goes both ways (upload and download), 8.75% of this is downstream traffic.

Uh, what? No. In a closed network, 100% of all traffic is downstream somewhere. It's like saying that 50% of all phone calls in the world are phone calls to someone, and the other 50% are phone calls from someone.

Moreover, bittorrent connections are almost never as simple as Alice sending a file to Bob. The network topology is far more intricate, with Bob and Alice sending and receiving chunks simultaneously from dozens of seeders/leechers.

Doesn't matter. The sum of the size of the chunks downloaded for a movie is the same whether they came from one server or dozens.

You're totally right.

For some reason I was thinking the quantity downloaded could exceed the quantity uploaded in a torrent swarm, but that's just wrong. The inputs equal the outputs.

I now see that { A->B, A->C, A->D } is three separate one-to-one mappings, instead of a single one-to-many mapping, in the context of A sharing a chunk with B, C, and D.

That depends on how they count traffic. They may double count all traffic (i.e. count traffic on local links, so the upload and download are counted separately).

Or they could count only transit traffic, in which case it would only be counted once - but they would have to make sure not to miss traffic from close neighbors.

Personally I would count local traffic (i.e. to each single computer) and record upload and download separately - including servers of course.

If I send you a file then yes, obviously that is one file being sent, not half a file. But the way bandwidth is measured, it will count my bandwidth uploading it and yours downloading it.

It doesn't matter how much the MPAA costs in relation to current levels of BitTorrent traffic. The comparison you need to make is the cost of the MPAA vs. the amount of money Hollywood made from Netflix. From the MPAA's perspective, if there was unfettered piracy and no making/enforcement of the laws, everyone would pirate their content. Thus, the MPAA is protecting the $180 billion that Hollywood made off Netflix because those customers did not steal.

Now obviously lawsuits and lobbying drive some customers to choose Netflix over BitTorrent, but there's also the fact that Netflix and BitTorrent deliver completely different online movie services. Netflix serves customers a limited selection of movies that they can start watching right now. BitTorrent delivers "customers" any movie they want, but they need to wait before they can start watching it the first time. They can watch it right away any time after that, even if they aren't on the internet, however. The author assumes that, cost aside, Netflix provides a superior offering. That might be true, but if both were legal, I know what I would choose (and it's not Netflix).

Most people will choose the most convenient solution that doesn't cost a ton, it's definitely not lawsuits, lobbying, or anything to do with the MPAA that's driving people to use Netflix. In the cases where Netflix has something I want to watch, I much prefer to watch it there. If Netflix had a library as complete as BitTorrent, very few people would continue watching things via BT.

Thus, the MPAA is protecting the $180 billion ...

That should be 180 Million, not Billion.

Yeah, I was looking at this earlier - it's a good demonstration of the limitations of napkin calculations, especially when you stack the napkins on each other. There's a lot - a loooot - of information missing here, although it is a thought-provoking little post.

The actual figure wasn't quoted in the article, but some quick Googling reveals an LA Times article that indicates that the MPAA's budget was $64m in 2009: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/10/business/la-fi-dodd-...

If you also correct for that spurious division by 2 but keep the other assumptions, the correct figure for increased revenue should be $120m.

Needless to say, 64 is not greater than 120.

It's also worth pointing out that fighting piracy is only one part of what the MPAA does. Their budget also covers the entire film rating system, quite a bit of industry research and reporting, and lobbying at the state and federal level for things like tax breaks, union regulations, etc.

The article assumes that Netflix's revenue is a function of traffic, not subscribers. Without any data to show that BitTorrent users (a) aren't already Netflix subscribers but (b) would become subscribers if.. something..

it's a meaningless exercise, even before you ask 'OK, what's the something?'

Which they also don't do. In fact, they seem to think that if the MPAA stopped suing file-sharers, the file-sharers would all move to Netflix. I'm not really clear why that should happen.

What if Wal-Mart busted a shoplifter and charged him with both the cost of the item and the lost opportunity of him buying the item?

If I'm never going to buy a movie, then there is no loss. Whether I watch it on a friend's TV or download it, there is no lost value and no lost opportunity.

Furthermore, 0% of 100% is nothing. Let me pay $1.20 to download/rent a new movie or give me a simple way to pay after viewing a movie I watched at a friend's or downloaded.

If it's a great movie, I want to support the filmmakers. There's many movies I'd never had paid to watch but after seeing wanted greatly to show monetary support but can't.

I can't help but feel as though this article is almost purely sensational. The figures are based on such loose generalizations that they hardly prove a point. Better would have been an article comparing the hard numbers regarding what Hollywood pays the MPAA and, perhaps, a more philosophical discussion of how this has become quite similar to the war on drugs -- how we need to rethink our policies in a much broader setting instead of seeking out punishment for minor infringement.

MPAA still costs much less than Hollywood profits? Then the MPAA works.

If piracy were costing Hollywood a lot more than the MPAA, it would be a failed entity.

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