Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 8th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

July 8th, 2023




Film Companies Demand Names of Reddit Users Who Discussed Piracy in 2011

Reddit urges US court to protect anonymity of six users who mentioned piracy.
Jon Brodkin

Reddit is fighting another attempt by film companies to unmask anonymous Reddit users who discussed piracy.

The same companies lost a previous, similar motion to identify Reddit users who wrote comments in piracy-related threads. Reddit avoided revealing the identities of eight users by arguing that the First Amendment protected their right to anonymous speech.

Reddit is seeking a similar outcome in the new case, in which the film companies' subpoena to Reddit sought "Basic account information including IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address and other account registration information" for six users who wrote comments on Reddit threads in 2011 and 2018. Reddit wrote in a court filing on Wednesday:

Plaintiffs' Motion seeks to unmask six anonymous Reddit users that Plaintiffs assume to have committed copyright infringement using Grande, an Internet service provider (ISP). If these Reddit users did engage in copyright infringement on Grande's networks, then Plaintiffs hope to learn whether the users were drawn to Grande for the ease of infringement. Weeks ago, this Court denied a nearly identical motion by these same Plaintiffs... But rather than returning with better facts capable of meeting the applicable First Amendment standard, Plaintiffs here offer worse facts–expressly acknowledging that they have no need to identify these Reddit users at all.

Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium, are behind both lawsuits. In the first case, they sued Internet provider RCN for allegedly ignoring piracy on its broadband network. They sued Grande in the second case. Both RCN and Grande are owned by Astound Broadband.

Reddit is a non-party in both copyright infringement cases filed against the Astound-owned ISPs, but was served with subpoenas demanding information on Reddit users. When Reddit refused to provide all the requested information in both cases, the film companies filed motions to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoenas in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Plaintiffs already got details on 118 users

Reddit's response to the latest motion to compel, which was previously reported by TorrentFreak today, said the film companies "have already obtained from Grande identifying information for 118 of Grande's 'top 125 pirating IP addresses.' That concession dooms the Motion; Plaintiffs cannot possibly establish that unmasking these six Reddit users is the only way for Plaintiffs to generate evidence necessary for their claims when they have already succeeded in pursuing an alternative and better way."

The evidence obtained directly from Grande is "far better than what they could obtain from Reddit," Reddit said, adding that plaintiffs can subpoena the 118 subscribers that are known to have engaged in copyright infringement instead.

Reddit said the six users whose identities are being sought "posted generally about using Grande to torrent. These six Reddit users responded to two threads in a subreddit for the city of Austin, Texas. The majority of the users posted over 12 years ago while the remaining two posted five years ago."

Reddit said that a "higher standard for unmasking a non-party witness exists than for unmasking a potential defendant because–unlike the need to identify a potential defendant—litigation can often continue without trampling a non-party witness's First Amendment right to anonymity." That's one reason why the court quashed the previous subpoena to Reddit in the RCN case, the filing said:

In RCN, this Court recognized that the ISP "is the party that (according to the plaintiffs) 'has not reasonably implemented a policy for terminating repeat infringers,' 'controls the conduct of its subscribers,' and allows its customers 'to freely pirate without consequence.'" As a result, the Court rightly ruled that the "high likelihood that this information is available from [the ISP] defeats the plaintiffs' subpoena."

Comments were in 2011 and 2018

In their motion to compel filed on June 20, film companies said the evidence requested from Reddit "is clearly relevant and proportional to the needs of the case." The Reddit user comments "establish that Defendant [Grande] has not reasonably implemented a policy for terminating repeat infringers sufficient for a safe harbor affirmative defense as required" under copyright law, and "establish that the ability to freely pirate without consequence was a draw to becoming a subscriber of Defendant and/or subscribers are motivated to use its service for pirating content efficiently," the film companies claimed.

One comment in a 2018 Reddit thread said, "I have Grande and torrent a lot. Always thought it was a pretty cool of them to not snitch." Another Reddit user in that thread "makes a comment emphasizing how much he/she wishes she/he could return to Grande because Spectrum (in comparison to Grande) turned his/her connection off in response to Notices," the film companies said.

The four other users commented in a 2011 Reddit thread titled "Anyone use Grande Communications instead of Time Warner?" All four "make comments emphatically stating that they prefer Defendant because they can use Defendant's service to pirate copyright protected content without any consequences," the film companies' motion said. "'Schadenfreude_Taco' admits to having 'downloaded about 1tb…from torrents and uploaded just under 2tb…'. Aikido states that 'I have torrented like a motherf*cker all over grande and never seen anything.'"

The user "xBROKEx even admits to pirating the movie Expendables owned by an affiliate of Plaintiff Millennium Funding, Inc.," the motion said, arguing that the comment is "relevant to establishing direct infringement of another one of the Plaintiffs' Works. Plaintiffs do not have any other reasonable way to prove that Defendant's subscriber pirated Expendables because the data provider that provided the evidence did not track this film."

The motion said plaintiffs want to "use the information requested in the subpoena to contact the commentators and authenticate her/his post to obtain admissible evidence" for the Grande case.

Reddit disputed the film companies' argument about xBROKEx, saying that plaintiffs want the user to be subjected to a "different test, designed for an anonymous potential defendant, because xBROKEx mentioned torrenting 'the expendables' twelve years ago." But that "standard applies where the target of a subpoena is 'accused of copyright infringement,'" and plaintiffs "have not accused xBROKEx of copyright infringement in any pleading," Reddit said.

Film companies seem short on evidence

Although plaintiffs received identification information from Grande for 118 IP addresses, they claimed the information sought from Reddit is "not available from another source before the discovery cut-off." Seemingly acknowledging that their claims against Grande need more evidence, the plaintiffs said they "have already propounded nearly a hundred RFPs [Requests for Production of Documents] on Defendant and have not received information from Defendant concerning their subscribers choosing its service for the ability to pirate without consequence."

Plaintiffs also said they "have sent letters to most of the subscribers of the 118 IP addresses but have had limited success establishing dialogue with most of them due to time constraints and refusals to respond to Plaintiffs' counsel's communications. It is unlikely that Plaintiffs will get substantive response from the subscribers in time to include this information in the expert reports."

One of the facts that doomed the film companies' argument in the RCN case was that some of the Reddit users didn't even mention RCN. But in the Grande case, "all the comments at issue directly refer to Defendant" and "explicitly refer to using Defendant's service for piracy," the plaintiffs argued. In the previous case, a judge magistrate found that the Reddit users' comments were irrelevant to the film companies' lawsuit against RCN and that the firms could obtain relevant information from other sources.

The film companies' copyright infringement lawsuit against Grande was filed in August 2021 in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. A jury trial is scheduled for April 2024.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...iracy-in-2011/





China Plans New Rules to Regulate File Sharing Services like Airdrop and Bluetooth

Under the proposal, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save records and report their discoveries
Rachel Cheung

China is planning to restrict and scrutinise the use of wireless filesharing services between mobile devices, such as airdrop and Bluetooth, after they were used by protesters to evade censorship and spread protest messages.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, has released draft regulations on “close-range mesh network services” and launched a month-long public consultation on Tuesday.

Under the proposed rules, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save relevant records and report their discovery to regulators.

Service providers would also have to provide data and technical assistance to the relevant authorities, including internet regulators and the police, when they conduct inspections. Users must also register with their real names.

In addition, features and technologies that have the capability to mobilise public opinion must undergo a security assessment before they could be introduced.

“The new draft regulations would bring airdrop and similar services firmly into China’s online content control apparatus,” Tom Nunlist, a senior analyst at the consulting firm Trivium China, told the Guardian.

Google’s Android and other Chinese phone manufacturers, such as Xiaomi and Oppo, also offer similar functions that are compatible among their own devices.

But Apple, in particular, came under the spotlight after some Chinese protesters used airdrop in 2022 to bypass surveillance and circulate messages critical of the regime by sending them to strangers on public transport. The tool was a relatively untraceable method for sharing files in China, where most social media and messaging platforms are tightly monitored.

Shortly later, Apple limited the use of airdrop on iPhones in China, allowing Chinese users to receive files from non-contacts for only ten minutes at a time.

The proposed rules will take control of similar functions up a notch, requiring the receiving of files and preview of thumbnails to be disabled by default.

“It is mainly about cybersecurity, and the core aim is to ensure all the information transmission can be traced in case problematic things happen,” Gao Fuping, a law professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, told the South China Morning Post.

“Apple has faced criticism in the past for its compliance practices in China,” Nunlist, the senior analyst, added. “Implementation of airdrop controls could easily lead to blowback at home in the US.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-and-bluetooth





Tech Group Sues Arkansas Over Law Requiring Parental OK for Minors Creating Social Media Accounts
Andrew DeMillo

A tech industry trade group sued Arkansas on Thursday challenging a new state law that requires parental permission for minors to create social media accounts.

NetChoice, a group whose members include Facebook parent Meta, TikTok and Twitter, filed a federal lawsuit over the measure signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in April. The law requires social media companies to contract with third-party vendors to perform age verification checks on new users. The requirement is set to go into effect on Sept. 1.

The lawsuit argues that the new requirement violates the constitutional rights of users and singles out types of speech that would be restricted.

“S.B. 396 imposes onerous obligations on ‘social media companies’ that severely burden both minors’ and adults’ First Amendment rights to speak, listen, and associate without government interference on the widely used online services that it covers,” the lawsuit said.

Arkansas’ law is similar to a first-in-the-nation restriction that was signed into law earlier this year in Utah. That law is not set to take effect until March 2024. NetChoice last year filed a lawsuit challenging a California law requiring tech companies to put kids’ safety first by barring them from profiling children or using personal information in ways that could harm children physically or mentally.

Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin, who was named as the defendant in the lawsuit, said he looked forward to “vigorously defending” the law.

The law is being challenged as social media companies have faced increasing scrutiny over their platforms’ effect on teen mental health, one of the concerns Sanders cited as she pushed for the legislation. The governor said Thursday that she was confident in Griffin’s ability to defend the law.

“For years, social media companies have gotten away with exploiting kids, and it’s proven to have a negative impact on their mental health,” Sanders said in a statement. “I promised to hold Big Tech accountable to protect kids and empower parents.”

Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that there is not enough evidence to show that social media is safe for children and teens and called on tech companies to take “immediate action to protect kids now.” Meta on Tuesday announced it was adding some new parental supervision tools and privacy features to its platforms.

The state earlier this year filed lawsuits against Meta and TikTok, claiming the social media companies misled consumers about the safety of children on their platforms and the protection of users’ private data.

Arkansas’ restrictions would only apply to social media platforms that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue. It also wouldn’t apply to certain platforms, including LinkedIn, Google and YouTube.

The lawsuit says the distinctions the measure makes between types of platforms that must adhere to the age-verification requirement and those that don’t “make no sense in theory or in practice.”

Social media companies that knowingly violate the age verification requirement could face a $2,500 fine for each violation under the new law. The law also prohibits social media companies and third-party vendors from retaining users’ identifying information after they’ve been granted access to the social media site.
https://apnews.com/article/trade-gro...052d629dc4bd5f





Denuvo wants to Convince you its DRM Isn’t “Evil”

COO says coming benchmarks will show anti-piracy tech has no performance impact.
Kyle Orland

Simply mentioning the name "Denuvo" among some gamers is pretty much guaranteed to get you an instant, strong reaction. Just look at the comment threads underneath any Ars article covering Denuvo and you'll see plenty of complaints about the DRM-enhancing anti-piracy technology.

Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in a 2018 purchase, doesn't generally make a habit of commenting at length on this reputation (or its secretive DRM schemes) in the public press. So when Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin agreed to defend his company publicly in an exclusive interview with Ars Technica, I jumped at the chance to talk to him.

As it turns out, the people who make Denuvo are keenly aware of their image in the wider gaming world. "In the pirating/cracking community, we're seen as evil because we're helping DRM exist and we're ensuring people make money out of games," Huin told Ars.

But Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. "Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher's] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game," he said. "But people typically don't think enough of that."

"Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," he continued. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger."

Trust but verify

Aside from generalized philosophical discussions over whether DRM should exist at all, by far the most substantive complaints about Denuvo's tech are about its alleged impact on game performance. Sometimes these accusations come from the crackers themselves and have to be weighed against strong denials from Denuvo and the game's developer. Other times, the accusations come from game makers, like outspoken Tekken 7 Director Katsuhiro Harada, who said in a 2018 tweet thread that the game's "anti-tamper third-party middleware" (i.e., Denuvo) was responsible for "frame rate drops" in the game.

In 2019, an Ars analysis comparing a Denuvo-free copy of Batman: Arkham Knight on the Epic Games Store to a Denuvo-laden copy from Steam found no difference in performance. But a series of analyses from YouTube channel Overlord Gaming in 2018 found significant performance differences in games measured directly before and after Denuvo protection was removed.

In our chat, Huin implied that this kind of public analysis was not very useful because "gamers [almost] never get access to the same version of [a game] protected and unprotected. There might be over the lifetime of the game a protected and unprotected version, but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse."

Huin insisted that Irdeto puts in "the effort of applying the security and validating that the performance is as it was and is not impacted... In the case of anti-tamper, I think there is a clear statement that there is no perceptible impact on gameplay because of the way we do things."

After years of public uproar over Denuvo's alleged performance impact, though, Huin said he knows much of the gaming community won't take him at his word. "Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we're not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate," he said.

To get around that mistrust, Huin said Irdeto is working on a program that would provide two nearly identical versions of a game to trusted media outlets: one with Denuvo protection and one without. After that program rolls out, hopefully sometime in the next few months, Huin hopes independent benchmarks will allow the tech press to "see for yourself that the performance is comparable, identical... and that would provide something that would hopefully be trusted by the community."

Still going strong

Despite the very public performance concerns, major game publishers have continued to support Denuvo over the years for a very simple reason: It delays the release of piracy-enabling cracks—and sometimes stops them completely.

Shortly after Denuvo's initial rollout in 2014, the anti-tamper technology developed an "uncrackable" reputation that caused something of an existential crisis in the cracking community. And while Denuvo protection has proven somewhat more crackable in the years since, the modern version of Denuvo's anti-tamper tech has proven decently resilient to crackers' best efforts.

Of the 127 Denuvo-protected games released since 2020, only half have had their DRM protection successfully cracked, according to a list maintained by the Crackwatch subreddit (this includes some games that officially removed Denuvo after being cracked). And among the half that have been cracked, the median title received a full 175 days of effective DRM before a crack was released, according to that same list. That's a lot better than the "under a week" Denuvo cracking times that were making headlines in 2017 and means the vast majority of recent Denuvo-protected titles can't be effectively pirated in their first month of two of sales, "where the bulk of the money is made for a premium game after being made available," as Huin put it.

Huin said publishers license Denuvo technology "for a certain amount of time, [maybe] six months or a year," mainly to protect that initial sales period. After that, many publishers decline to renew that lease and instead release an updated version of the game that is not protected by Denuvo. CrackWatch lists 103 titles that released Denuvo-free versions well after launching with the DRM technology, many of which dropped the protection months after being cracked.

Huin wouldn't go into detail on the "magic" of Denuvo's anti-tamper technology beyond confirming that "obfuscation" is involved in "ensuring that reverse engineering is not possible." That said, Huin added that the company is "constantly advancing the technology, and when we see people coming close or being successful at some things, we continue to raise the bar."

And while crackers have proven persistent and inventive in untangling Denuvo's various obfuscation methods over the years, Huin said he feels that the company is a step or two ahead of the piracy community these days. "It's fair to say as well that we don't wait for a successful cheat or hack to start inventing the next time," Huin said. "We have a large amount of customers, many of the AAA [publishers] are our customers, and there are a lot of games released every year, so we have to be constantly evolving so we can help everyone. Waiting for a problem is usually not the best way of looking at things from a security perspective."

More than DRM

While the Denuvo name has become practically synonymous with its "anti-tamper" DRM technology, the company now hopes it can be just as well-known for its recent anti-cheating efforts. Denuvo's anti-cheat technology works on "some of the same principles" as its anti-tamper DRM, Huin said, but is aimed at maintaining code integrity at runtime rather than just when a game is loaded. "The core is the same, but the function of what they do is different," he said.

Because of this difference, Huin allowed that, unlike Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM, the anti-cheat product could have "a very low impact" on a game's performance. "Less than one percent

Beyond confirming code integrity, in March, Denuvo announced a new "Unbotify" product that tries "to separate humans from non-humans playing in a game," as Huin put it. This involves monitoring player behavior to detect not just fully automated AI bots but also specialized controllers that can limit recoil, improve aim, or increase firing rates in many games.

Huin says that Denuvo will be "leaning more and more toward things like detecting and preventing cheating" going forward, a pivot he hopes will help the company's abysmal reputation among gamers. "When it comes to anti-cheat technologies, it's really a lot more for the players because you're there to make sure it's a fair and fun environment."

"We've seen the brand evolve more in the public domain than when it was just anti-piracy technologies," he continued. "What has changed a little bit, and I hope this is going to continue to change, is the broader public starting to see us less as a bad thing for the industry."

But even if Irdeto can conclusively and publicly prove Denuvo doesn't harm game performance, that reputational rejuvenation will probably remain a tall order.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/...drm-isnt-evil/





Grammys CEO on New AI Guidelines: Music that Contains AI-Created Elements is Eligible. ‘Period.’
Maria Sherman

Last month, the Recording Academy announced a series of changes to the Grammy Awards to better reflect an evolving music industry. Of those newly instituted guidelines, protocols involving technological advancements in machine learning sparked headlines: “Only human creators” could win the music industry’s highest honor in a decision aimed at the use of artificial intelligence in popular music.

“A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any category,” the rules read in part.

As the music industry continues to come to terms with this new technology, so too will the Grammys, says Recording Academy CEO and President Harvey Mason jr.

“Here’s the super easy, headline statement: AI, or music that contains AI-created elements is absolutely eligible for entry and for consideration for Grammy nomination. Period,” Mason told The Associated Press. “What’s not going to happen is we are not going to give a Grammy or Grammy nomination to the AI portion.”

If an AI or voice modeling program performs the lead vocal on a song, the track would be eligible in a songwriting category, for example, but not a performance category, because “what is performing is not human creation,” he explains. “Conversely, if a song was sung by an actual human in the studio, and they did all the performing, but AI wrote the lyric or the track, the song would not be eligible in a composition or a songwriting category.”

“As long as the human is contributing in a more than de minimis amount, which to us means a meaningful way, they are and will always be considered for a nomination or a win,” he continued. “We don’t want to see technology replace human creativity. We want to make sure technology is enhancing, embellishing, or additive to human creativity. So that’s why we took this particular stand in this award cycle.”

The Recording Academy has long considered setting rules related to AI following the popularity of new songs created alongside AI technology: David Guetta’s “Emin-AI-em”, the AI -compositions of TikTok user @ghostwriter977, Grimes’ voice modeling AI software.

In order to establish their AI guidelines, the Recording Academy engaged in extensive research, including holding tech summits.

“I’ve met with the copyright office. We’ve talked about the future and what that looks like on a federal level and the legislative level,” Mason said, adding that AI conversations “really came to a head in the last six months.”

The new Grammy AI protocols were announced three days after Paul McCartney shared that “the last Beatles record” had been composed using artificial intelligence to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo. Without knowing the extent of the technology, Mason couldn’t confirm or deny whether the song would be eligible for a Grammy nomination.

“We’ll see what it turns out to be,” he said. “But I would imagine from the early descriptions that I’ve heard there would be components of the creation that would be absolutely eligible.”

So, can Grammy viewers expect to see work at least partially created with AI nominated for an award as early as next year?

It’s impossible to predict what is submitted. But as Mason affirms, “people are using the technology. I’m imagining it’s going to be involved in a lot of records a lot of songs this year, so we’ll see if some of them get nominated or not, but I’m sure there’ll be some that will be submitted.”

The 2024 Grammy Awards will return to Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Sunday, Feb. 4, 2024, airing live on CBS and livestreamed on Paramount+.
https://apnews.com/article/grammys-c...719c354f31a889





Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain Its Big Spending

In the past nine months, the streaming service has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to connect with domestic audiences
Lucas Shaw

Amazon.com Inc. CEO Andy Jassy is taking a hard look at how much the company’s Hollywood studio spends on original TV programming. In recent weeks, he has asked executives for detailed budget analyses of some of their biggest shows, according to people familiar with the matter, scrutinizing the studio’s ballooning costs and mixed track record with audiences.

The world’s largest online retailer is engaged in a companywide cost-cutting program, with plans to eliminate at least 27,000 jobs. Across Amazon, Jassy has also jettisoned 37 different projects deemed unnecessary.

The Hollywood studio, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on original programming over the last decade, is an obvious place to look for savings. Last year, Amazon spent $7 billion on original shows, licensed programs and sports, up from $5 billion the year before. Only Netflix and Disney spend more on streaming.

In the past nine months, Amazon has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to deliver huge audiences. Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral all cost more than $100 million to produce but failed to crack Nielsen’s list of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US. Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience, failed to hold on to most of its viewers over the course of the season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

No show illustrates Amazon’s liberal spending better than Citadel, a global spy thriller that cost more than $250 million for one season. Despite being one of the most expensive series in TV history, Citadel has failed to chart as one of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US in any week since it debuted, according to Nielsen. It did hit the top 10 among streaming originals for a week, coming in just behind Netflix Inc.’s Barbecue Showdown.

Amazon has trumpeted the show’s success, and has voiced support by commissioning a second season and continuing work on local spinoffs. It has also boasted of the popularity abroad, especially in India, though it provided no data to prove as much.

Yet streaming services want shows made in English to connect with viewers in their biggest market. Odetta Watkins, the company’s head of drama series, said Citadel “needs time” to grow its audience at home.

Amazon has long escaped the scrutiny that other entertainment companies attract because it doesn’t report detailed financial results for its studio or the Prime video-streaming service. What’s $7 billion in annual costs for TV programming at a company that generates more than $500 billion in sales?

But Jassy is now trying to get a better handle on why specific shows cost what they do, based on conversations with more than a dozen different people who either work at Amazon or have worked with the company on projects. They all asked not to be identified because show budgets and discussions with top executives are confidential. Amazon declined to comment on the record.

The studio is led by Jen Salke, who joined Amazon in 2018, bringing experience and talent relationships the company had never had before. A longtime TV executive, Salke had been president of NBC Entertainment, where she worked on shows such as This Is Us and Chicago Fire.

She joined Amazon as founder Jeff Bezos was pushing the studio to overhaul its strategy. Salke’s predecessor, Roy Price, had commissioned the critically praised series Transparent and Mozart in the Jungle and won awards with the film festival darlings Manchester by the Sea and The Big Sick. Yet Bezos desired a culture-defining hit like Game of Thrones. We covered this shift in a Bloomberg podcast released last year.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s biggest competitor in streaming, Netflix, was churning out new hits every month and had started to pilfer traditional Hollywood studios for top talent like producers Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. While Price had a couple of mass hits in the pipeline with Jack Ryan and The Boys, he was pushed out before they debuted, following allegations of sexual harassment.

With Bezos’ blessing, Salke went on a spending spree that she hoped would shift the studio in a more commercial direction. She spent almost $50 million on three films in one year at the Sundance Film Festival and signed overall deals with Get Out director Jordan Peele, Atlanta creator Donald Glover and Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, among others. They all agreed to bring Amazon their best TV ideas in exchange for funding.

Many of these deals yielded no projects or duds, as chronicled in a THR story by Kim Masters. The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series. Her report prompted Amazon to limit what viewership data its own employees can see.

Salke’s supporters dismiss criticism of her reign as a mix of sexism and elitism. Most of her biggest hits, including The Terminal List and Jack Ryan, just don’t appeal to coastal elites like HBO’s Succession. While the company has commissioned many shows that look like prestigious HBO fare, the average Amazon customer craves crime shows and sitcoms, like those seen on CBS. Under Salke, the company has shifted toward the latter.

Based on viewership data from Nielsen and demand metrics from Parrot Analytics, Amazon produces the second highest number of original hits. But the gap between Netflix at No. 1 and everyone else looks like this.

Even Salke’s biggest supporters acknowledge Citadel hasn’t panned out as intended. The show started not with a creative idea but as a business premise. Salke wanted a global series that could take place in multiple locations and lead to country-specific spinoffs.

She approached Joe Russo and his brother Anthony, with whom she had worked on the TV series Community, about producing the show. The Russos have directed some of the highest-grossing movies of all time, including several Marvel films, and parlayed that success into deals with Netflix, Apple and NBCUniversal. If you wanted to produce a big-budget action franchise, their company AGBO was one of your first calls.

One of AGBO’s creative partners, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol screenwriter Josh Appelbaum, was developing a spy show with veteran TV writer Bryan Oh that fit Salke’s mandate. The show was about two dueling spy rings, one good and one evil.

The first season of Citadel was supposed to cost around $20 million per episode. But it didn’t take long for the budget to balloon, thanks in part to the pandemic. The Russos disagreed with Appelbaum and Oh about the vision for the project. They wanted to eliminate the love story between characters played by Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and didn’t like other plot elements.

The Russos began to play around with a different version of the show in post-production, which is when completed scenes get edited into an actual program. While the main post-production office was in London, the Russos set up a second editing group in Los Angeles and cut an alternate version of the series. They submitted it to Amazon without showing it to the full team. The folks in London then rushed to get their cut of the show to Amazon.

Amazon faced a choice between the lesser-known creators of the show and the Russos — and chose the Russos. They also tested both versions with focus groups, and the Russos’ version tested better. But the Russos’ vision required substantial reshoots. They brought in a new writer, David Weil, to overhaul the script and ended up reshooting more than half of the show. This added at least $80 million to the budget.

For the second season of Citadel, Joe Russo will direct every episode. He will receive about $25 million for his work.

In the end, Amazon supported the Russos’ vision, which is why many in Hollywood have Salke’s back. Cost overruns have been a feature of the streaming boom and aren’t limited to Amazon. Netflix and HBO have released an expensive bomb every year (often more than once a year).

The biggest challenge in assessing the performance of Amazon’s studio is that the company’s goals are different than those of most entertainment companies. While Amazon executives do measure the number of people who watch their shows, the video business exists to attract customers to the company’s Prime shipping service. The company often tries to determine if a show has increased the number of people who pay for Prime or take some other “highly valued action.” The metrics to prove this are imprecise.

Amazon has seen enough, however, to increase the video programming budget from year to year. While executives and agents used to wonder if tech giants Amazon and Apple would wake up one day and decide to give up on entertainment, that’s not going to happen. Amazon is investing more money in original movies and has committed to show football into the next decade.

But the tolerance for mistakes isn’t what it used to be at any company, not even Amazon or Apple.

The first indication Amazon was going to pay closer attention to costs came in 2020, when the company brought in Mike Hopkins to oversee its video business, including the studio. The former CEO of Hulu, Hopkins is a veteran media executive who cut his teeth at Fox.

Though he has little experience on the creative side, Hopkins is very familiar with an income statement. He has tried to rein in production costs, leading to occasional disputes with Salke. He also pushed for the company’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM, a price that shocked many in Hollywood.

After a recent trip to Seattle, where Amazon is based, Salke told her staff that her bosses had raved about the performance of the studio’s team. Yet even as Jassy voices his support, he wants to know where all the money is going.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsl...s-big-spending





Money No Enough, Passion Needed Too: Restoring Classic Singaporean Films

Money No Enough, Forever Fever and The Teenage Textbook Movie kickstarted a new era in Singaporean cinema, making them prime candidates for restoration.
Chew Tee Pao

Film restoration is often thought of as a process that is necessary for older films, perhaps like those produced in the 1950s and 1960s by Cathay-Keris Films and the Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions. When films such as Patah Hati (1952) and Seniman Bujang Lapok (1961) were made, they were regarded simply as commercial entertainment and little effort was made to store them well. Today, they are considered classics and much time and effort has been spent to restore these prints and preserve them for posterity.

However, even films of a more recent vintage are candidates for restoration. Often, a movie is seen as a commercial enterprise, made with an eye towards ensuring relatively quick returns for investors. It is only with the passage of time that some of these movies become classics and end up as candidates for restoration.

Mee Pok Man

When it first hit local screens in 1995, few people probably recognised the importance of Mee Pok Man, the seminal debut feature of Singaporean director Eric Khoo. The film stars Joe Ng who runs a fishball noodle stall, and Michelle Goh, who plays Bunny, a prostitute. Among the many notable things about the film are its scenes of necrophilia. Significantly, Mee Pok Man helped local filmmakers believe that it was possible to make movies.

In 2015, the Asian Film Archive (AFA), with support from the Singapore Film Commission, carried out the restoration of Mee Pok Man. As the film elements were originally processed in a laboratory in Australia, the camera and sound negatives were kept there. These were subsequently brought back to Singapore, and Mee Pok Man became AFA’s first restored local film from the 1990s revival era.

The restored work was screened at the 26th Singapore International Film Festival in 2015, during the film’s 20th anniversary, in the presence of many cast and crew members. The restoration of Mee Pok Man became the catalyst for the AFA to search for the film elements of other Singaporean works made in the 1990s.

The Iconic 90s Trio

In 2017, the AFA embarked on the hunt for surviving film elements of three other iconic Singaporean films – Money No Enough (Tay Teck Lock, 1998), Forever Fever (Glen Goei, 1998) and The Teenage Textbook Movie (Phillip Lim, 1998) – that were released in local theatres in 1998. These films were instrumental to the revival of Singapore cinema in the late 1990s.

Written by comedian and film director Jack Neo, Money No Enough is about three friends with financial problems who start a car polishing business together. In Mandarin, English and Hokkien, it was the all-time highest-grossing Singaporean film for more than a decade until the record was broken by Neo’s own directorial work, Ah Boys to Men, in 2012.1

Forever Fever is significant because it was the first Singaporean film to be bought for worldwide commercial release by film distributor Miramax. The musical comedy stars Adrian Pang as supermarket employee Ah Hock, who becomes interested in disco after he watches Saturday Night Fever (the 1977 film starring John Travolta). He enters a dance contest to raise money for a new motorbike. Forever Fever is notable for featuring iconic tunes by international group the Bee Gees, and American band KC and the Sunshine Band, which were performed by local artistes like John Klass and Najip Ali.

Meanwhile, The Teenage Textbook Movie is a lighthearted look at the lives and loves of a group of students from the fictitious Paya Lebar Junior College in Singapore. It was adapted from The Teenage Textbook and its sequel, The Teenage Workbook, two bestselling local books by Singaporean lawyer Adrian Tan. The movie topped the Singapore box office for weeks and was the first English-language local film to feature an all-Singaporean written soundtrack.

The AFA already had the 35 mm exhibition prints of these films in its collection and the intention was to restore the films using the original negatives. The original negative is of great value since it is the earliest generation of the finished film and contains the image in the highest quality. The challenge was that many local films that used 35 mm film stock and were theatrically screened in the 1990s had their negatives processed and printed in overseas film laboratories in Australia, India or Thailand. Filmmakers and production companies neglected to retrieve these negatives from the laboratories; over time, the original negatives and prints were either discarded or lost.

Despite being merely 25 years old, the picture and sound negatives of Money No Enough could no longer be found, and the restoration had to be carried out using two 35 mm release prints from the AFA’s collection. Both sets of prints that were donated to the AFA in 2008 were affected by physical wear such as scratches and torn frames, and had contaminants like dirt and dust. The restorer inspected both prints and utilised the copy that was in a relatively better condition for the digitisation. Some 215 hours were spent on digital restoration that included scratch removal, image stabilising, deflickering and colour correction.

With Forever Fever, the issues were different. The film laboratory that had processed the film had been bought over and all the original film, video and audio elements of the film were stored in multiple locations around Australia. The verification, consolidation and coordination of sending all these materials to Singapore took more than a year. The original film negatives exhibited physical wear and contained emulsion defects, glue marks and light scratches, but were overall in reasonably fair condition as they had been kept in a proper storage facility. More than 200 hours were spent on digital restoration, including stabilisation and de-warping.

The film that presented the biggest challenge was The Teenage Textbook Movie. The film negatives had been stored in less-than-ideal conditions. As a result, they accumulated a considerable amount of moisture, and the emulsion of every reel was stuck to the next wound base, creating stains and marks. Broken perforations and scratches were exhibited throughout the print, which had to be repaired before the scanning process. Of the three, The Teenage Textbook Movie took the longest to restore: over 1,000 hours were spent on digital restoration, including scratch removal, stabilising, deflickering and colour correction.

All three films – Money No Enough, Forever Fever and The Teenage Textbook Movie – were restored in tandem by different film restoration laboratories. After months of hard work, the films were presented in November 2018 at the Cathay Cineplex in partnership, and with support from, the Singapore Film Commission at “Singapore Classics Reignited”, as part of the Singapore Media Festival.2 The films were screened in their intended aspect ratio of 1.85:1 through digital cinematic projection for the first time, 20 years after their releases in 1998.

The restoration process allows audiences today to experience the films as they were first shown. But there are other benefits as well. Jack Neo told the Straits Times in 2018 that he was moved to tears while watching the restored version of Money No Enough. “Some of my good friends who were featured in the movie have since passed on,” he said. “But I also cried because it brought back so many memories. Just look at all those huge mobile phones that we used in the movie – I would call this a period film.”3

Sometimes, in the midst of getting the different film elements together, other treasures are uncovered as well. While restoring The Teenage Textbook Movie, the AFA came across a collection of paraphernalia and production-related materials that provided insights into the making of the film. This included the Nokia 5110 advertisement that featured the stars of the film posing snazzily. There was also a limited-edition original movie soundtrack on CD, which fans at the time could buy for just $7.90 with any purchase at Burger King.

The Forgotten Femme Fatale

These films from the 1990s are vital milestones in Singapore’s filmmaking history as they represent a new era in moviemaking here after the Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions and Cathay-Keris Films ceased operations in the late 1960s and early 1970s respectively. For close to 30 years, the local film industry had been largely dormant until Mee Pok Man showed the way forward.

The industry did display minor flickers of life in the decades between these two eras though. There was at least one important film that was partly made in Singapore: a 91-minute movie by BAS Film Productions in 1978 titled They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong.

Inspired by the films of Bruce Lee, They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong incorporated elements from both Western spy and Asian martial arts genres. The film was directed by the late Bobby A. Suarez (1942–2010), a Filipino filmmaker who went by the pseudonym George Richardson. It was a multinational production involving producers from Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines.

The film stars a then 18-year-old Singaporean, Doris Young – who went by the stage name Marrie Lee – in the titular role as a sexy Interpol secret agent, who did many of her own stunts.4 (Marrie Lee was created to capitalise on the fame of the late Bruce Lee; some people even thought she was Bruce Lee’s younger sister.5) Dubbed a “female James Bond” by the Asian press, Cleopatra Wong teams up with her Filipino counterpart to bust a counterfeit currency syndicate.6

In a 2003 Straits Times interview with Quentin Tarantino, the Oscar-winning Hollywood filmmaker revealed that the film had been a major influence for him, especially for the Kill Bill series (2003–04). “One of the movies that was made in Singapore in the 1970s that I loved was Cleopatra Wong. Cleopatra Wong was a gigantic inspiration,” said Tarantino. He loved the movie so much that he got a friend to paint for him a huge canvas of Wong in her nun outfit and toting a quadruple-barrelled shotgun; the painting graced the foyer of his living room. “So as you walk through the door, you’re facing a gun barrel by Cleopatra Wong,” he said. “There was even one time when I was writing Kill Bill that I was thinking of putting a character in a nun’s outfit.”7

In 2008, the AFA planned to collect and preserve the film’s materials but were told by the filmmaker and Young herself that the original film negatives and prints of the film had been discarded as they had deteriorated and had become unsalvageable. Only video copies of the film on digital betacam tapes survived.

In 2017, the AFA decided to see if other prints could be found. The film had travelled extensively to parts of the Middle East, Europe and North America as evidenced by variations of the film’s promotional posters in different languages. Knowing this, the AFA put out a call to members of the International Federation of Film Archives around the globe in search of surviving film elements.

The call uncovered the existence of several prints residing in the film archives of Austria, Denmark, Italy and Switzerland. In consultation with the organisations caring for these materials, the AFA decided to digitise a 16 mm print with burnt-in Danish subtitles with the original English soundtrack loaned from the Danish Film Institute, and a German-dubbed 35 mm release print loaned from Filmarchiv Austria.

The restoration was laborious as the colour for both sets of prints had faded greatly and were also affected by shrinkage and heavy scratches. But the greatest challenge was discovered when the prints were compared with the existing video copy of the film. The AFA realised that there were frames missing from the 35 mm print that it had planned to use. Fortunately, the 16 mm print came in handy for recreating the missing frames and shots.

The restoration of They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong took two years and was completed in 2019. However, due to the Covid-19 restrictions for theatres in Singapore, the AFA was only able to present the restored work in September 2021.8 It was finally screened at the Oldham Theatre in the National Archives of Singapore, with Doris Young in attendance. (There was also a second run in July 2022.9) The multiple runs saw sold-out screenings and a renewed interest in the actress and the character she played.

They Call Her…Cleopatra Wong serves as an interesting restoration case study for the AFA in how variants of the same film obtained from different sources can be pieced together to culminate in a meaningful result. It is also interesting to look at why these variants existed, and why the film was edited and distributed differently. These could be for a combination of reasons – like the accidental loss of frames from re-splicing and re-editing the film to suit a specific market or, possibly, censorship.

The process of recovering original film elements of supposedly lost or forgotten works is a long-drawn out one and frequently involves serendipity. And this would not be possible without the persevering work of film archives around the world.
https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-19...aporean-films/





Piracy Is Coming Back, Baby!
Tessa Kaur

Streaming has ruined media preservation for an entire generation, and older games aren’t faring so well either. Piracy is the only way to save them
digital piracy

This week, Disney removed a film called Crater from Disney Plus, which had been released on May 12, 2023. This means it was on the streaming platform for just 48 days, or about seven weeks. Disney hasn’t said why, but it seems most likely that it didn’t perform well enough and the company decided to remove it to write down the value of its “content assets”, therefore lowering their taxes. It’s all about the money, and always has been, and there are unfortunate consequences that come with this.

Disney isn’t the only streamer that’s guilty of this – every streaming service, including Netflix and HBO Max (now just Max), has taken shows and movies off their platforms without warning. Willow was cancelled and removed from Disney, as was the well-loved Single Drunk Female from Hulu. HBO pulled Westworld and Snowpiercer. Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies was cancelled and pulled from Paramount Plus just last month. It seems like anything could be pulled at any time, and that sucks.

It’s bad enough that streaming services are cancelling shows left and right because they don’t meet arbitrary sales targets, but when they are pulled from these platforms, many of them disappear forever. A lot of these shows are made for streaming, never aired on cable, and were never physically released. Bigger prestige shows like Westworld and Snowpiercer appeared on cable originally and are more likely to have Blu-ray releases, but those Disney shows are gone. There is no legal way to watch them anymore, and these companies are not interested in even selling you access.

This all brings to mind what my colleague Eric Switzer wrote when the 3DS and Wii U eShop were put to rest. You can’t buy digital games from either of those platforms anymore, which means it’s not possible to access them legally anymore. Since the eShop Exclusives, in particular, are not being sold in any physical form, there is no ethical boundary stopping you from just downloading them and emulating them. It’s not like you’re stealing money out of Nintendo’s pocket, since they’re not going to sell them anymore.

What, exactly, makes this different from streaming a ripped mp4 of a show that’s no longer available anywhere? If I want to watch Willow, it doesn’t seem wrong to just watch it on some random site or torrent it – there is quite literally no other way to watch it. It seems silly for companies to be so anti-piracy when their own business practices are necessitating it. You wouldn’t pirate a car? I would if it wasn’t getting sold anywhere and it didn’t hurt anybody. I’d pirate a show if Disney removed it from its platform for no reason. And I’d pirate a game too, if it wasn’t available in any other way.

As a side note, games do tend to be made available over and over again. While I’m not a fan of nostalgia-mining or the constant remastering and remaking of games, companies are still keeping some popular older games accessible by relaunching them with better graphics, fine-tuned gameplay, and even added scenes. I wish instead of continually making the same games over and over again, companies would just welcome game preservationists with open arms, allowing what they’ve made to be playable for all time. But again, it’s all about money. I wish things were just allowed to exist as they are, accessible as long as people want them. But that wouldn’t maximise profits, would it?
https://www.thegamer.com/piracy-is-c...y-plus-crater/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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