Paramount Pictures COO Frederick Huntsberry says that “cyberlockers now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content,” and that disconnecting file-sharers vis a vis a “three-strikes” regime won’t be able to identify those that do.
As copyright holders lament that their business models are outdated and wholly unsuited to a digital world, the world of P2P marches onward, developing ever new methods to distribute content in ways that evades their best detection capabilities. Paramount Pictures COO Fredrick Huntsberry seems to have acknowledged this fact recently at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam this past week, telling an audience that Cyberlockers are the new threat, and that “three-strikes” regimes can’t target those that use them.
“Cyberlockers now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content,” he said.
P2P has always been a constantly evolving creature with the best and brightest always developing new ways to share content with one another. It’s not so much a fascination with “getting stuff for free,” as copyright holders put it, but rather about making stuff available in places and at times that copyright holders either refuse to or charge prices for that make it virtually inaccessible.
Cyberlockers like MegaUpload and the more popular Rapidshare allow users to host copyrighted material until it’s identified by copyright holders who then ask that the links be removed. It’s a game of cat and mouse with the law so far having been on the side of Cyberlockers.
Why? Because as a German court ruled last month, sites like Rapidshare cannot be held liable for the copyright infringement committed by third parties using the service, and that the site itself doesn’t make copyrighted material “publicly available.”
More recently, a US judge refused to grant an injunction against the site using similar reasoning.
As copyright holders lament that their business models are outdated and wholly unsuited to a digital world, the world of P2P marches onward, developing ever new methods to distribute content in ways that evades their best detection capabilities. Paramount Pictures COO Fredrick Huntsberry seems to have acknowledged this fact recently at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam this past week, telling an audience that Cyberlockers are the new threat, and that “three-strikes” regimes can’t target those that use them.
“Cyberlockers now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content,” he said.
P2P has always been a constantly evolving creature with the best and brightest always developing new ways to share content with one another. It’s not so much a fascination with “getting stuff for free,” as copyright holders put it, but rather about making stuff available in places and at times that copyright holders either refuse to or charge prices for that make it virtually inaccessible.
Cyberlockers like MegaUpload and the more popular Rapidshare allow users to host copyrighted material until it’s identified by copyright holders who then ask that the links be removed. It’s a game of cat and mouse with the law so far having been on the side of Cyberlockers.
Why? Because as a German court ruled last month, sites like Rapidshare cannot be held liable for the copyright infringement committed by third parties using the service, and that the site itself doesn’t make copyrighted material “publicly available.”
More recently, a US judge refused to grant an injunction against the site using similar reasoning.