Who Profits from Piracy 2

In August of last year I talked about independent filmmaker Ellen Seidler, who made the film “And Then Came Lola”, and linked to her anti-piracy site, PopUp Pirates.

In March of this year Seidler spoke at Canadian Music Week’s Global Forum on the issue of piracy and has produced a new video based on that talk (embedded below).

Though much of the information is the same from Seidler’s first video, this talk is much more in depth with updated statistics and stories. Specifically, Seidler outlines who is profiting from piracy, specifically film piracy in her case, what she has done about it and what she feels needs to change.

According to her, the DMCA process, at least for her volume of piracy, is “useless” and she is calling on Google as well as other players to do more to protect the rights of artists, musicians, filmmakers, etc. She also says the notice and takedown system is “backwards” as it requires copyright holders to spot and report infringement rather than having the sites that are profiting from the piracy do their part to vet the authenticity of the content that is being uploaded.

Siedler is especially critical of Google, which she accuses of accepting a counter-notice that wasn’t even translated (and was in fact a confession) and of heel-dragging on copyright matters, a complaint I hear routinely from other content creators.

If you’re interested in piracy issues, the video is well worth a watch, even at nearly 30 minutes in length.

Who Profits from Piracy? from fastgirlfilms on Vimeo.