UltraViolet ‘Going Well,’ MPAA Chairman Dodd Says
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- UltraViolet is “going well” for the film industry despite Disney’s lack of support for the digital rights system, MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd told us at the Content Protection Summit Thursday. Disney is the only major studio that doesn’t yet support UltraViolet, going instead with its own Keychest technology, but Dodd said it’s still possible Disney could end up backing UltraViolet. Dodd is “optimistic” that the new Copyright Alert System (CAS) framework supported by MPAA, RIAA and major Internet service providers will help reduce copyright infringement, he told the summit.
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Another positive is Walmart supporting UltraViolet and offering consumers the ability to convert their discs into a digital format so they can play their content on any platform, Dodd said. This is “the kind of innovation we need more of,” he said. MPAA will be involved in promoting UltraViolet and is putting information about the technology on its new website TheCredits.org, he said in October. There were more than 5 million registered UltraViolet users as of October, Mitch Singer, Sony Pictures Entertainment chief digital strategy officer, said at the time.
CAS can help curtail piracy because when people are notified that they are doing something illegal, many of them stop doing it, Dodd told the summit Thursday. Many people who access pirated content don’t realize they are doing something wrong, he said. CAS will alert users of copyright infringing content that is being shared through peer-to-peer networks at their IP address and provide educational material about what infringement is and how to avoid it. Content owners will send notices to ISPs, who will then forward them on to subscribers via up to six copyright alerts, Marianne Grant, MPAA senior vice president, told the summit. Initial alerts are educational, but “mitigation measures” will be levied for “persistent infringers,” she said. The five largest ISPs are on board and MPAA hopes that more ISPs will support CAS, she said.
The CAS launch was planned for Q4 this year, but has been delayed due to issues related to Superstorm Sandy, which held up testing, said Grant. MPAA is “finishing things off” now with regards to testing and a full launch will come in January, she said.
Dodd hopes the entertainment and technology industries can work more closely together to reach solutions that benefit both industries, and avoid the kind of battle that happened between them last year over the Stop Online Piracy Act, he said. Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot in common, he said. A free Internet and the protection of copyrighted content are both important, he said. Google’s recently implemented policy in which it’s lowering the search rankings for piracy sites is a “good move” and “a step in the right direction” that should yield “positive results,” he said. But it’s “not a silver bullet” for the problem of online piracy, and “much more needs to be done,” he said. The film and TV industry must also learn to do a better job of communicating the threat of piracy to consumers and educate the public on the important economic impact that the industry has on the U.S., he said. “I don’t think we want to be in the business of arresting 15-year-olds,” he said, calling that a “losing proposition."
Counterfeit content has long been the main “threat” to content providers, but the “new threat” is the “redistribution” of content, Alex Kochis, conference chair, said earlier at the summit. It’s also “more difficult to talk to young people,” including college students, than other consumers about copyright infringement, he said.
There were about 55 million illegal activations of Photoshop CS2-CS6 in the past 12 months and there’s 2 million peer-to-peer pirated downloads of the software a month, said Richard Atkinson, Adobe corporate director-worldwide anti-piracy. The largest “myths” about piracy include that the problem is eliminated with the shift to the cloud and subscriptions, that software makers are solely competing against other software vendors, and that there are only two types of consumers -- those who pay and those who access pirated content, he said. Piracy will be reduced by the shift to the cloud, but only slightly, and will also “evolve,” he said. Software companies are also competing against pirated versions of their own old and current software, he said. And 74 percent of software consumers are “dual” consumers who pay for some software, but use pirated versions of other software, he said. It takes an average of 13 seconds to find a live download link to pirated software, he said. Efforts to make that take much longer will lead to many consumers getting frustrated and giving up on searches for such content, he said.