Dan's shared items

According to TorrentFreak, last summer's Star Trek movie was the "most pirated movie of 2009." So it seems that Paramount Pictures was prescient when it gave testimony before the FCC that used Star Trek as an illustrative example of how "Internet piracy" is poised to devastate Hollywood and (though the nexus here is less than clear) undermine residential broadband in America.

Funny thing is, Star Trek is on course to make more than $100 million in profits.

Here's the financial breakdown, courtesy of The Numbers.com, which gathers financial data for movie industry analysts:

Production costs: $140m
Promotion costs: ~$100m
Global box office revenues: $385m
U.S. TV syndication rights: $30m
DVD & Bluray revenues (anticipated, based on sales and rentals since Nov. 2009): >$100m

Based on these figures, film industry analyst Bruce Nash at The Numbers predicts a net profit to Paramount of more than $100m on the movie. Not bad for the "most pirated movie of 2009," which was camcorded and widely released on the Internet within days of theatrical release.

This is just one data point suggesting that Hollywood's hue and cry about "Internet piracy" should be taken with a grain of salt. Other data points include Hollywood's record breaking box office results for 2009 (in the midst of a recession!). And the fact that twice as many movies were released in 2009, as compared to 2004. (There is also far more new music being released today than 10 years ago, thanks to new digital technologies.)

The goal of copyright is to encourage creativity. As 2009 comes to a close, there is no evidence out there that "Internet piracy" is leaving us with fewer creators or fewer copyrighted works, even if you limit yourself to considering works being created by "professionals" employed by movie studios. And once you factor in all the new, noncommercial or semi-pro creators who have been empowered by the very same Internet technologies that Hollywood is blaming for "piracy," well, it seems clear that creativity is alive and well, and that Hollywood's demands for drastic overhauls of copyright law and broadband policy are disconnected from reality.

And, importantly, some of what Hollywood calls "piracy" is actually the result of its stubborn refusal to give legitimate customers what they want, whether it's home media servers for their DVDs, the right to rip DVDs to make noncommercial remixes, or new options to rent DVDs. (Or new video-on-demand offerings unless the FCC first approves "selectable output control" DRM restrictions for our TVs.)

Yes, there are lots of unauthorized copies being made out there. But despite what Hollywood's spokesmen would have us believe, the sky is not falling. In fact, as we ring in 2010, many industries would happily trade places with the major Hollywood movie studios.

Check this article (click on the image) about the oldest record of computer music with "A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood."

People who spend the most time online are in fact the most educated claims a recent report from Eurostat.

The study, that covered households containing at least one person aged 16-74 across Europe, shows that nearly 90 % of the EU population with high formal education used the internet regularly, more than twice as much as the share of the population with low formal education.

The figures remained similar irrelevant of age group although the relatively uneducated 16-24’s did seem the most active online in comparison with their older and younger counterparts.

There are clearly a number of possibilities as to why this might be the case. The most immediate being the IT education you receive at school plays a significant role in your desire (and confidence) to explore computers and the web. Additionally, if you’ve had little or no formal education, it’s highly likely you aren’t in financially able to own a computer or subscribe to Internet access – and therefore access to any form of Internet connect is limited.

The web clearly playing an increasingly more significant role in our daily lives, and it seems the importance of education, at least by these findings, is as important as ever.

It's been a little over a week since Facebook debuted a massive revamp of its privacy settings. EFF immediately followed that release with a detailed critique, concluding that the changes were "clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before [and] will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data."

Since then, EFF's criticisms — and those of other vocal privacy advocates like ACLU, CDT, and EPIC — have been echoed throughout the mainstream press and across the web. As a Boston Globe editorial titled "Facebook's Privacy Downgrade" correctly pointed out, "Most people who join Facebook do so because they want to share photos and messages with friends and family, not to expose their lives to the entire world."

Notably, in a testament to the even-handedness of EFF's critique, The Atlantic cited our blog post both in a story collecting negative reactions and in another story collecting positive reactions to the Facebook privacy revamp.

Not to be outdone by the media, Facebook users themselves were also immediately up in arms over the new changes. Negative comments flooded the Facebook Blog and the Facebook Site Governance page. Several of those comments were collected by the San Francisco Chronicle in a story titled "Facebook users speak out against new privacy settings". Meanwhile, unhappy users used Facebook itself to organize opposition to the changes, with new groups being formed to protest the privacy revamp and older groups seeing renewed activity.

The past week's privacy backlash culminated today with the filing of a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), joined by several other consumer and privacy groups. In the complaint, EPIC alleges that Facebook's latest privacy changes are deceptive and unfair and asks that the FTC open an investigation and order Facebook to restore to its users the control over their privacy that has been lost in the transition. Considering the many tens of millions of American consumers who use Facebook, we hope and expect that the FTC will seriously consider the important questions raised by today's complaint.

This trollcat submitted by Bruno Bernardino.