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Links for April 1st 2008
Interesting links for March 31st 2008 through April 1st 2008:
- Police take a tip from YouTube [Australian IT] – “Call it BlueTube. Citizen-supplied video evidence of crimes appears set to take off with police forces around Australia.”
- Embracing the torrent of online video [BBC NEWS | Technology] – Very positive piece from Michael Geist on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s decision to make one of their shows available for free, without DRM, via peer to peer Bittorrent networks.
- Decline Of US Newspapers Accelerating [Tech Crunch] – “Figures released by the Newspaper Association of America show that the decline of newspapers is more rapid than previously thought, with total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunging 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006…”
Australia’s Peer-to-Peer TV Underbelly
While Australians have long been noted as some of the most voracious downloaders of television, using bittorrent-based peer-to-peer sources has generally been focused on accessing UK and US shows which don’t screen in Australia until some time (from weeks to years) after the original airdates. However, the recent case of the Australian production Underbelly is a little bit different.
Underbelly dramatises the infamous events in Melbourne, Victoria between 1995 and 2004 which encompassed a gangland war and a series of murders. However, at least one criminal trial from these events is still underway, and so just prior to the screening of the first episode of Underbelly, a court injunction prevented the Nine Network from screening the tv series in Melbourne, on the grounds it could prejudice any potential Victorian jury. So, on February 13, every other Australian state except Victoria could view the show, while Victorians could not. Also, as it’s pretty much impossible to limit websites on a state-by-state basis, the ban also prevents promotional material, trailers and episodes of Underbelly being hosted online. Thus, the official website currently sports a great many “This functionality is not available due to current legal restrictions” (screenshot) signs and not that much else.
Yet in the era of bittorent and peer-to-peer networks, that’s far from the end of the story. As soon as the ban was issued, media reports appeared highlighting the fact that Underbelly was sure to be available as a download in Victoria within hours of its screening in every other state. As the Herald Sun reported:
… the explosion of video on the internet, through websites and through file sharing, may allow Victorians to see the drama within hours of its broadcast interstate. A scan of one site today revealed several copies of the promotional clips from the series on the website, despite their removal from Nine’s site. “This is a great problem on the internet,” University of NSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre executive director David Vaile said. “Legal jurisdiction is typically limited by geography, and by its nature the internet doesn’t place much regard to geography.”
Mr Vaile believed the judge may have taken into consideration the possibility that copies of the drama would appear on the internet, but that it would have limited impact on potential jurors. “(The judge) may well have decided that something that is not the official publisher’s website will not have the same sort of impact,” he said. However watching illegal versions of the underworld drama will not be without risk. Mr Vaile said people caught uploading clips from Underbelly could face copyright and contempt of court charges.
Subsequent reports noted that it took less than half an hour for Underbelly to hit bittorrent networks and a quick search on isohunt this morning revealed more than a dozen active bittorrent sources for the first two episodes of Underbelly still available almost a week later. Vaile’s comments do note a new potential avenue for prosecuting uploaders in this case, namely contempt of court, but as Alex Malik notes, it seems unlikely that option will be pursued:
While it is probably illegal for viewers to upload Underbelly to these [peer-to-peer] services, it is unlikely that the Nine Network and other rights owners will undertake any enforcement activity to stop them. They may be too busy enjoying the viral marketing buzz associated with internet TV show access. Or they may be thinking about DVD sales down the road. In short, this ban by the Supreme Court may result in Underbelly being one of the internet events of the year. And of course once the TV show hits the internet, it’s fame can then become international fame.
Strangely enough, the only mainstream article which suggests that Australian filesharers are in any way worried about potential court action is on the NineMSN website (co-owned by Microsoft and the Nine Network), while most other reports simply note that a lot of Victorians were accessing peer-to-peer networks in the past week!
Underbelly has certainly focused the spotlight on the wide use of peer-to-peer networks in Australia. The hype and attention that the banned show has received may very well work in the producers’ favour in the long run, ensuring that the people who do see the show in Victoria keep the buzz alive, even if the ban does last the entire 13 episodes. Such buzz should make any DVD sales which are eventually allowed a huge success.
Overall, though, the attempt to ban any sort of digital media on a state by state basis in Australia is clearly impossible, and the attempt to restrict this series in Australia may very well have led a number of Victorians to avail themselves of bittorrent files for the first time. It seems unlikely that once Pandora’s peer-to-peer networks are opened that Victorians will simply put this newfound resource back in the box.
Update (26 March 08): Despite an appeal by Channel 9, the ban on Underbelly screening in Victoria has been upheld. In at least once Victorian town, though, unusual weather conditions have allowed Victorians to watch an episode that was being broadcast in Tasmania!
“We’re sorry, but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location:” Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance
I just submitted an abstract for the Media International Australia special issue ‘Beyond Broadcasting: TV for the Twenty-first Century’. Here it is:
“We’re sorry, but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location:” Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance
[Figure 1. Screen-capture from http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/, 11 September 2006]
In the late 1960s, conservative Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey coined the term “the tyranny of distance” to describe how the geographic gap between Australia and the centres of the Western world (US, UK) played a fundamental role is shaping the Australian psyche and character (Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Sun Books: Melbourne, 1966). Thirty something years later and the world is far more widely considered a global village; the world wide web, email and a million other applications have made real-time information-heavy communication and commerce the norm. However, while information transfers have made ‘distance’ much less of a concern in a number of ways, many policies, practices and systems of commerce still operate as though they are centred on goods moving at the speed of physical shipping, not allowing for information moving at the speed of light down a copper or optical wire. In an era when ‘the tyranny of distance’ means so much less in many contexts, this paper will argue that in the multimedia markets of contemporary society there is, rather, a prevailing tyranny of digital distance which marks out those areas of communication and commerce in which the potential and, indeed, expectation of synchronous global culture (at least for English-speaking countries) leads to constant state of confusion and annoyance – on both personal and legal levels – when those expectations are not met.
The North American-produced television series Battlestar Galactica, re-imagined for the twenty-first century (from an original 1970s series), has consistently been at the cutting edge of television and cross-media. Executive producer Ronald D. Moore and the Battlestar team utilise not just blogs and production-side video-blogs, but also create episodic commentary podcasts, make deleted scenes available online, and have even put two full episodes online for free for viewing. Likewise, Battlestar was one of the first shows available via Apple’s online iTunes Store. Given the amount of extra online content, and the show’s science fiction genre, Battlestar has a large and very active fan community who consume both the television show itself and the officially produced extra material, as well as actively creating and discussing their own derivative ‘fannish’ works ranging from blog commentaries to fan-created videos. Thus, when the show’s producers launched a series of 3 to 4 minutes ‘webisodes’ to re-build interest in the show prior to the launch of its third season, fans across the (wired) globe were understandably excited. However, when citizens of Australia, the UK, Canada or any other country outside the US tried to view these webisodes, they were met with a notice saying: “We’re sorry, but the clip you selected isn’t available from your location.” The owners of Battlestar (NBC) elected to restrict these webisodes to residents of the US only. This decision upset fans across the global Battlestar audience, with US fans quickly circumventing the restrictions and passing copies of the webisodes to their international fellows. In this paper, I will contend that this moment typifies the tyranny of digital distance, exemplifying the legal, ethical and practical issues raised when a globally-promoted television series ‘centres’ on a single national audience. I outline the difficulties of ‘watching’ Battlestar from Australia, and argue for distribution modes which are more in keeping with the technological (and fan-led) potential of digital distribution.
As you might imagine, this paper will draw together my previous thinking about the tyranny of digital distance which you can read about here and here. I’m also finishing off another Battlestar-related paper that stopped being written for a year, but is now being finished off for a new collection. It’s going to be a busy month, but I’m hopeful both of these will be well polished before Emily and I get married on June 9th (presuming this abstract is accepted). Wish me luck!
Update (8 May 2007): The abstract has been accepted! Thankfully, though, full papers aren’t needed until August 1st so I’ll be writing this after Emily and I return from our honeymoon (in Venice!!) :).
Update 2 (21 September 2007): The full version of this paper has been accepted after peer review, and will appear in Media International Australia issue 126, which is scheduled to be released in February 2008.
Update 3 (26 March, 2008): You final version of this paper has appeared, and you can read it following the link from this post.
Alex Malik on TV downloading in Australia
The Age has a revealing article on work done by Alex Malik which concludes that the delay between the US/UK and Australia release dates for television are one of the primary reasons what people turn to bittorrent:
Huge delays in airing overseas TV shows locally are turning Australians into pirates, says a study conducted by technology lawyer and researcher Alex Malik. It took an average of 17 months for programs to be shown in Australia after first airing overseas, a gap that has only increased over the past two years, the study found. The findings were based on a “representative sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series or specials”, said Malik, who is in the final stages of a PhD in law at the University of Technology Sydney. […]
Malik admitted there had been some signs of progress recently – programs such as The O.C. air within days of being shown in the US – but he insisted the overall delays had become longer. “Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.6 to 16.7 months,” the study reads. Malik also studied comments by TV viewers on various internet forums, and concluded: “These delays are one of the major factors driving Australians to use BitTorrent and other internet-based peer-to-peer programs to download programs illegally from overseas, prior to their local broadcast.”
Malik’s findings are perfectly in line with the idea of the tyranny of digital distance which I’ve written about before (see “The Tyranny of Digital Distance” and “The Battlestar Galactica Webisodes & The Tyranny of Digital Distance“). Malik’s study is further evidence that as long as media distributors continue to enforce ridiculous national/geographic-based release dates in an era of global information (and promotion, and fan actvitity), then bittorrent will continue to be a major source of TV for Australians. However, if we could legally download episodes at the same times as our US and UK neighbours, then media companies may very well discover that they could make more money, not less, by giving Australian consumers the choices we want!
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