copyright infringement as a social issue (project plan)

Live forum: http://forum.freeipodguide.com/viewtopic.php?t=61570

unknown uchiha

07-05-2007 02:43:45

Hey, so I'm doing a project for my Technology Targeted @ Social Issues class and the goal is to create a plan for a new social enterprise, which can address these issues
-What social good it will do in the world
-How it will make money to support itself
-How it makes use of technology

An ideal plan would be one I could hand to a foundation or venture capitalist and have them be interested.

The idea I came up with was barely approved, but I was told that I'd have to expand much more than what I have and prove that I'm addressing a social issue in my concept.

My concept is a new way to watch and download TV shows and movies over the internet for college campuses in order to reduce copyright infringement and piracy that plagues the film industry. Being a film major with emphasis on directing and writing, I would hate to have people download my stuff (and then bitch about the person who records the stuff for having "horrible camera work" -.-).

What I have is this

I want to provide a program which allows you to stream movies and TV shows that are STILL IN THEATERS to your computer for free. The cost of each viewing will be paid by commercial advertisements (Like NBC.com). Additionally, users can pay about $5-10 to download a copy of the movie or TV show to their computer.

Also, users can subscribe to this service like Napster where they pay $10+ a month to get a certain number of downloads (the movies are yours to keep, there's no "rental" that expires after a certain number of views or if you cancel the service).

However there's a problem with this which is that a lot of people I talk to don't want to pay for movies, which is why they download them off torrent sites (I know I do, so this is sort of a project to make a plan that I would approve of as well). So then I thought What about having them complete offers, like the ones from freebie sites?

For the low low cost of doing True.com ($1), you get a movie download (or a month's worth of downloads?). If you refer a friend who does an offer, you get another free download.

I'm throwing around a lot of stuff here, since the project is in its early stages. I'd love to get your guys' input on this since we ARE a freebie community =]

gmario

07-05-2007 02:50:57

Sounds interesting my boy kind of has the same idea just in a different twist...

moviemadnessman

07-05-2007 02:54:38

An interesting concept. However, I see it as inherently flawed. Piracy will remain no matter what the measures taken to prevent it. I agree that having a site where you could watch movies and TV shows online for free would be nice. It is a little what Netflix now offers. However, allowing users to pay a small amount to download the movie and not have a limit on it, however, will not eradicate piracy. It will only allow better copies of new-in-theater movies to be circulated around the net.

In addition, while completing offers might seem like a good way to do it, I'm afraid people will either not be interested, or the cases of fraud would skyrocket to unimaginable levels, causing huge amounts of backlash and, in all honesty, would probably cause most of the people to pull their offers, quickly killing the sites (and out freebie world as well).

Plus, as the government tries to limit piracy with new programming tricks and implementations, it prompts other people to increase efforts to break those measures. There was a time not too long ago where sites had streaming video that you could view, but you couldn't pirate. Now, you can use a program to download it (videos from Google, YouTube, and others ...). So it would only be a matter of time before a pay site would be able to be broken, especially if it doesn't lock the files in some way, such as Microsoft does with its DRM-protected music files.

Those are just my thoughts, though. I think that you have a great idea, I just don't think it would work in the real world.

tracemhunter

07-05-2007 14:48:33

it is possible (think of mark cuban and broadcast.com!) but i do not think that people will respond very well to it. would you rather pay 9.99/mo (i am assuming that that is the most that people will pay each month) to see all of the movies in theaters on your computer or just fork out 9.75 for each movie that you want to see at the actual theater and get the full experience? There are usually only 1-2 good movies that warrant going to the theater each month.

manOFice

07-05-2007 14:50:57

my college had a program called "Ruckus" or "Ruckas" it was a huge program that let us download movies and music and crap 100% legal.

gafdpc

07-05-2007 15:13:35

Ruckus...they have pretty much all popular music (with the exception of a couple of things, such as the Beatles, etc)

Its now free to everyone with a .eduurl==http://=http:///url address

www.ruckus.com[]www.ruckus.com to sign up.

unknown uchiha

07-05-2007 15:42:10

The problem I have with Ruckus is that it's not compatible with Mac OS X (

Thanks for pointing out Ruckus, it gave me an idea to do something similar for the movie downloading service

-Available only to college students
-Files are DRM encoded but only to prevent burning the movies and transferring to other portable media players
-Free for everyone (ad-supported)
-Students get one download per day (30-31 per month)
-Students can pay $1 to get an extra download per day
-You are given the option to complete a sponsored offer in order to receive a DRM-free version of the movie
-I'm not sure which format to make this available in. My initial thought is WMA/WMV.
-You can watch movies and TV shows streamed to your computer instead of downloading them
-Compatible with both Windows and Mac platforms (with Linux "coming soon"!)

TFOAF

07-05-2007 16:23:38

Does Ruckus let you download MP3 files?

manOFice

07-05-2007 16:52:03

[quote10baf60f80="TFOAF"]Does Ruckus let you download MP3 files?[/quote10baf60f80]

Yes but you can not burn them.

unknown uchiha

07-05-2007 21:22:45

Ruckus has WMA/WMV files, not MP3 (at least that's what I read)