News That's Fit To Punt 28/Mar/2012

Please Explain, Rupert

It's been an ugly few months for the Murdoch media empire, but this might be the moment when they finally take one on the chin without being able to duck. Of course, earlier in the day it was revealed that News Corporation had basically paid hackers to crack their opponents security and then made the hack available to people on pirate sites in order to cripple their competitors. I think Stephen Conroy is right. It's time to call the police. This isn't some regular bit of dastardly act that passes for corporate cunning to get ahead. This is a publicly listed company instigating and promoting piracy in order to destroy their competition so as to establish a monopoly.

The main news item can be surveyed here from the AFR who have made it available to the wider public. A really interesting tidbit is in this article:

The Panorama program aired emails that apparently showed that the codes of ONdigital were first cracked by a hacker named Oliver Koermmerling. He told the program he had been hired by NDS's head of UK security, Ray Adams.

Panorama alleged the codes were publicised by the world's biggest pirate website, the House of Ill Compute (THOIC).

Lee Gibling, who ran THOIC, said Mr Adams sent him the ONdigital codes so other pirates could use them to make thousands of counterfeit smartcards.
He said he was being paid £60,000 a year by Mr Adams and was given thousands more to buy computer equipment. The site had sent people update codes: ''We wanted them to stay and keep on with ONdigital, flogging it until it broke.''

ONdigital, later renamed ITV Digital, lost more than a £1 billion, and 1500 staff lost their jobs when it collapsed in 2002.

Mr Gibling said he and another employee later destroyed much of the computer evidence by smashing hard drives with a sledgehammer.

News Corp's lawyers, Allen & Overy, denied the claims even before the program was aired. They told media organisations that the claims NDS ''has been involved in illegal activities designed to cause the collapse of a business rival'' would be false and libellous and demanded they not be repeated.

NDS also issued emphatic denials: ''It is simply not true that NDS used the THOIC website to sabotage the commercial interests of ONdigital/ITV digital or, indeed, any rival.''

The company admitted Mr Gibling was in its pay but says it was using THOIC as a legitimate undercover device: ''NDS paid Lee Gibling for his expertise so information from THOIC could be used to trap and catch hackers and pirates.''

Uh, yeah, right. isn't it schoolyard logic that "He who denied it supplied it"? These denials are looking pretty daft. Let's say for the moment we let it stand that NDS paid Gibling for his expertise and information. Just what expertise and information would Lee Gibling be offering NDS but hacking information? And what were NDS going to do with this hacking information they paid Lee Gibling for?

The funniest thing today might have been News.com.au which didn't have a single article on this explosive scandal now embroiling the Murdoch media empire.

This leads me to this item sent to me from Pleiades, penned by Stephen Mayne.

 While there have always been plenty of competitors and journalists who take pot-shots at News Corp, the key to its power has been an ability to keep compliant regulators and politicians on side. That all changed in the UK when everyone turned on News Corp over phone hacking. News of the World was closed, scores of employees have been arrested, the BSkyB mop-up takeover was abandoned and there are now serious prospects the company will be kicked out of Britain in disgrace.

Amazingly, News Corp’s share price has soared ever higher in recent months and jumped another 10c to $19.48 this morning, valuing the company at $US51 billion. The Murdoch family has a debt-free $6.5 billion stake in News Corp and appear to be financially unscathed from the British scandal.

But the family’s biggest single earner over the years has been US programming pumped out through the world’s most lucrative global pay-TV distribution channels. Thanks to Chenoweth’s revelations, there are now serious questions being asked as to whether these have been ill-gotten gains.

As for what happens now, I reckon Chenoweth’s package — there’s more to come — will pick up the Gold Walkley in 2012. The Murdochs will be kicked out of Britain, Foxtel won’t be allowed to buy Austar and Sir Rod Eddington, lead independent director of News Corp, will finally develop some spine and intervene to reduce this notorious family’s control over its unethical media empire.

This stuff makes the hacking scandal look like child's play. Charges should be laid. They need to arrest these people.

Here We Go Again

You Can't Judge Film by Its Audiences

But you can sure judge a flop by its dismal figures.

It proved to be a disastrous weekend at the box office as three Australian films - Griff the Invisible, The Reef and A Heartbeat Away - failed dismally to connect with local audiences.

Of the three, Griff the Invisible did best, taking a modest $66,344 on 20 screens, its so-so per-screen score of $3317 suggesting it will drop out of the top 20 by next week. That is, of course, unless a miracle occurs and the film becomes an unexpected word-of-mouth hit.

The Reef did poorly with its $58,196 take on 36 screens, its per-screen figure of $1617 indicating very little interest.

Worst of all, though, was A Heartbeat Away. The $7 million film directed by first-time film director Gale Edwards took a dire $44,204 on 77 screens, its abysmal screen average of $574 being among the worst of any Australian film in recent memory. The film's unqualified failure conjured the spectre of The Tender Hook, the 2008 Australian film that also cost $7 million and which took less than $60,000.

The combined take of all three films - $168,744 - was less than what the Liam Neeson actioner Unknown took across its fifth weekend. ($187,255 on 102 screens).

The figures speak for themselves, but just to be sure, none of them are on track to make any money back. The bottom of the article reads like this:

So the last thing the enterprise needs is catastrophic, clueless weekends like the one we've just had.

Sad enough that the films themselves reflected common shortcomings in so many local films. Just as sad was the lack of marketplace nous that has often seen good Australian films die at the box office. Three local films coming out the same weekend as two tent-pole Hollywood studio films? It's almost as if the films didn't want audiences.

If the weekend has any upside it's of being symbolic of the type of event we thought was behind us. Certainly the spectacle of an all-but-unwatchable $7 million Australian film playing to virtually no audience is something that should have been consigned to the past - and something Australian cinema can ill afford to indulge or repeat.

So just some general points:

* The issue of marketing remains key. Many people say they've never even heard of these films.

* How a debut film director can be allowed to helm a $7 million production has angered many, and with good cause. You could have made four Wolf Creeks for that. What happened to the idea of earning that kind of budget with a proven track record of successful smaller films?

* Quality script development continues to draw focus. People are clearly tired of industry rhetoric about how "the story is all", especially when those stories simply don't play.

* The hope is that this dreadful weekend might be the tail end of an era where these long-standing problems ruled. With a new audience-orientated mindset apparently governing production now, this weekend might be the final death throe of an old way of doing things. That's the prayer, anyway.

* Critics going "soft" on local films has again come up. CineTopia states again, for the record, that we NEVER go soft on a film, for whatever reason. The notion of giving Australian films a two-star tariff to encourage "support" for it is worse than useless, it's counter-productive. For what is to be gained by encouraging people to see films you think stink?

Goodness. Aren't they words of wisdom? But it keeps repeating. I'm sick of blogging about how AWFUL the whole venture of 'Australian Film Industry' has become. Yesterday I spent some time talking to my contact out at a funding body and they're just looking for good story ideas as much as the next studio. But screenwriting in this country is so weak, and the scripts out there are actually really mundane or terrible or worse, nonsensical. There's been 2 decades of neglect and the whole population of writers are in deprivation shock.But here are some problem areas that come from the neglect:

• Nobody knows what to write about because of budget reasons.


• Nobody knows who to write for, because most have never thought about the demographic of film viewers.


• Nobody knows how to deliver the craft. I'm sorry but that's the assessment.


• Nobody wants to see Australian films just because they're Australian.


• Nobody in the private sector wants to *invest* in such a losing venture. Nobody in their right mind anyway.

The bottom lines is that it's still early to see if anything can come back; but these kinds of weekends are not encouraging. I could say more but I don't have the energy any more. It's too frustrating.

Piracy Isn't Killing The Industry

On the same day in the SMH, we get this article. The interesting bit is here:

In February last year, the anti-piracy arm of the music industry, Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), put out a thunderous press release claiming it had helped police "shut down one of Australia's largest illegal music burning operations" in Melbourne.

Acting on information from MIPI, police seized "close to 100 CD burners and approximately 25,000 discs containing pirate music housed in a suburban CD store".

MIPI's general manager, Sabiene Heindl, said at the time: "This is one of the largest and most blatant illegal music burning labs that we have seen for some time."

It was only this year that the case finally ground its way through the courts and further details were released.

Of the 25,000 "pirate" CDs that MIPI claimed it seized, 14,600 were blanks, while the remaining discs were mostly of Asian artists which the store, Lucky Bubble, had a licence to reproduce.

Less than 100 of the discs were proven to be pirated copies and the charges were dropped to the lowest possible level. The manager of the store, who claims the handful of pirated discs were placed in his shop by staff, in the end was let go with a $1500 fine.

It's a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties and years in jail that MIPI warned about in its press release.

So, no, there is no big piracy operation going on out there. Just the old internet bit torrent thing that MIPI can't do anything about. So it's really a laugh when you see that REALLY LOUD announcement that goes "you wouldn't steal, so you shouldn't pirate" that kicks off half the DVDs out there, wherein they mount that argument that piracy is destroying the future of the Australian Film Industry.

Ah, no.

It's crappy films and crappy development and crappy government development agencies and government funding as corporate welfare that keeps Australian film genuinely uncompetitive, that is killing the future of this industry. If you want my opinion, 20 years of this stuff has already made it comatose.

Hey Look, Russell's Still Doing OK

He's just bought a $10m house in Rose Bay. He's doing great. He could have bought a almost one and a half Australian movie flops with that money.

Film Industry Swings And Misses

iiNet Court Case

The other news of the day of course it how iiNet beat the rap and won their case against them alleging that they were responsible for their clients' piratical downloading behaviour.

The Australian film and television industry has lost a case against a major internet service provider whose customers downloaded pirated movies and television programs.

The case against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court by a number of applicants including Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network.

The legal action followed a five-month investigation by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The companies claimed iiNet infringed copyright by failing to stop users engaging in illegal file sharing.

But today the Federal Court in Sydney ruled in the internet service provider's favour.

Justice Dennis Cowdroy said it was "impossible" to find against iiNet for what its users did.

"It is impossible to conclude that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement ... (it) did not have relevant power to prevent infringements occurring," he said.

The judge ordered the studios to pay the court costs.

Bummer. To be perfectly honest, I can't really make a case that illegal downloaders are hurting Australian film makers per se because the films that have been made are such also-rans that it's hard to justify they charge the same sort of moneys as say Hollywood fodder. That being the case, this was a suit brought by distributors of one media against the apparent alternative distributor that is breaking their monopoly of distribution for allowing these pirated films to flow freely.

You can see that the distributors had a case on the basis of the copyrights infringed, but once again they've failed to couch the issue in a way that would stop the piracy.

It's been this blog's contention for awhile that the Cinema ticket itself has become overpriced and that this has changed the priority the public places on the cinema experience, as opposed to say, the gaming arcade experience or the music experience or even the console game experience.

Put another way, the disposable income of the market can only be split in a limited number of ways. By insisting on a high price, the Movie industry is insisting on a greater share of the disposable income pie. If the audience agrees with it, then you have 'Avatar' Box Office receipts. If they don't it's bit-torrent downloads of such dog movies as 'All About Steve'.

To be brutally honest, not everything made for the screens deserves a marquee price at the exhibitor's end. The audience is saying "no, we don't think 'All About Steve' or 'Funny People' or anything with Ricky Gervais in it, is an equivalent experience of joy/pleasure/fun when compared to 'Avatar'."

The quick answer is it's not iiNet's problem that the market thinks your product is worth only a pirate download. You should make much more of 'Avatar' and much, much, much fewer of 'All About Steve' et al. The bottom line is that Hollywood, like the Music business before it has been disrespecting the audience/consumer for a long time and is now paying the price for it, by getting disrespected right back.