Media Reports

London Calling
By Barry Fox

If you are in London, and go to see a movie at a cinema, watch out for a “bold new approach” to piracy.

“We know that lecturing and hectoring people can make them switch off so we hope to engage and involve them instead,” says Liz Bales, Director General of the Industry Trust for IP Awareness, an alliance of 22 film and TV distributors, cinemas, DVD retailers, and home entertainment rental companies. “There will be no finger-wagging. The Knock-Off Nigel concept uses humor to get a very serious message across in a lighthearted way that British people can relate to. We want to create a social stigma.”

Instead of finger-wagging the Trust will spend £3m over the next 12 months on trying to shame people who buy pirate DVDs or download illegal copies from the Internet.

The campaign uses TV and cinema ads that poke fun at a character called Knock-Off Nigel who buys dodgy videos and is then shunned by friends in the pub. Poster campaigns will “encourage respect for the industry” and warn of penalties.

Since forming in 2004 the Trust has spent a total of £7.5 million on trying to get the anti-piracy message across. But there is still an estimated loss of £300 million a year, which is 14% of the video retail market. With £102m cinema and £28m rental losses, the total loss per year is near half a billion pounds.

“Last year 2006 was a watershed year,” says Bales. “There is a shift to digital piracy online. Broadband speeds are increasing and there is more computer literacy.”

The Trust’s market research shows that 44% are not downloading because they don’t know how to, but this is changing fast, in tandem with increased broadband speeds.

“So the biggest barrier to copyright theft is currently lack of knowledge,” she admits. “We want to make right behavior more aspirational than wrong behavior.”

Says Johnny Fewings, Joint Managing Director of Universal Pictures: “We are not talking about “piracy” now. We want to make people feel grubby and talk about “knock-offs.” We are shaping behavior. It’s been done before. With drinking and driving, not smoking at football matches and picking up dog mess.”

Says Matt Brown, executive vice president of Sony Pictures Europe, “The campaign starts June 1, wide and broad. 30% of the population is involved in some form of piracy—it’s declining slightly but online is increasing. We want to get the message across not to be part of a shabby business.”

Says Liz Bales, “We want to make Knock-Off Nigel a catch phrase. We are not saying don’t do it. We are saying it’s shabby to do it. It will be a one- to three-year campaign. We plan to link with the music industry.”

However the Trust appears to have little interest in learning from the mistakes now admitted by the music industry in being late in offering legal MP3 downloads and agreeing on a common standard for DRM. The Trust has no plans to link the music industry into the Nigel campaign and no plans for the high-profile legal actions against persistent music downloaders, which scared parents into checking what their children were doing with their computers on the family phone line.

“We have spoken to the BPI. FACT has worked with the BPI,” says Bales. “But we have no plans to work with the music industry on this campaign. Initially it’s the AV sector. We feel there are differences between music and video. Video is not as easy to download. It’s a different business model. Most pirate videos are camcorder quality.”

Whether the IP Awareness Trust is able to shame people who have no shame and will soon be downloading at home and out of sight of anyone who might brand them shabby, remains to be seen. The Trust says it will “measure, measure, and measure” results.

For the record, I go to public cinema performances at least once a week and have never yet seen a single one of the Knock-Off Nigel ads!

QUIET?
Another thing to do if you are in London is visit the British Library. The BL’s collection of sound recordings finally has a permanent home. It’s in the new Centre for Conservation, alongside the library’s main building in the Kings Cross area of North London—a stone’s throw from the new Channel Tunnel rail terminal.

The 2,600m2 Centre cost £13.25m and took two years to build. It has three floors, two for book restoration and one for sound. The complex of 11 sound studios will now be used for recording and transfer of old recordings to the BL’s preferred format for long-term archiving—24 bit, 96kHz computer files, using BWAV, the EBU’s broadcast WAV standard that allows PCM to store metadata as well as audio.

Significantly the BL has abandoned its previous policy of copying to CD-Rs, and is now transferring its CD-R transfers to BWAV and hard disc.

“Converting to 24-bit 96kHz is in many cases overkill” says Richard Ranft, Head of Technical Services at the Sound Archive. “Often there is no useful audio over 15kHz, so we are just preserving noise. But in the future there may be algorithms that can extract useful information from the noise. We don’t want then to wish we had used a better archiving standard.”

Five different train lines run directly under or past the building, generating loud bursts of ground-borne noise at least once a minute. So all the studios sit on a sandwich of concrete and thick neoprene rubber beds for soundproofing. The studios are named after audio pioneers such as Alan Blumlein.

There is no statutory deposit for sound recordings in the UK; whereas book publishers are obliged to provide a copy of everything they print, the Sound Archive must rely on voluntary donations.

The BL reckons it can play any type of recorded material, from cylinders to modern formats. After transfer to BWAV, with mirrored copies stored at three or sometimes four several secret locations around the country, the originals are put into deep storage. Record covers are digitized, and the originals stored, too.

The main challenge has been to build up a reserve of obsolete format hardware and spare parts so that old and obsolete audio systems—such as Betamax PCM recorders—can be kept working for long enough to play and transfer everything recorded in those formats.

“We put out a call for Betamax recorders and were able to cannibalize a lot of old machines for spares,” says Ranft. “We just have to hope they work if and when we need them again. We are now starting to transfer all our Mini Disc recordings because the format is moribund.”

The BL is working with Southampton University to develop a system which reads grooved recordings optically, similar in concept to the old Finial laser turntable. The problem with optical readout is that whereas a stylus physically shovels groove dirt to one side, a laser beam just reads the dirt as signal.

The Finial—and later re-incarnations—relied on meticulous cleaning of all discs before play. The BL is taking a different tack. The disc is cleaned, but not aggressively. After play-readout the decoded audio signal is computer-processed to identify and remove the background noise. Similar techniques can be used to remove impulse noise caused by damage. If necessary the best samples from several—differently damaged—copies of the same recording are stitched together, like parts of a picture. This should allow full recovery from broken discs or cylinders.

An underestimated advantage of optical play, says Richard Ranft, is that although a mechanical stylus physically moves muck as it plays, it is also bounced slightly by any solid dirt object or blemish in the groove. This produces tiny gaps in the sound. But optical playback is continuous.

The Archive currently has 3.5 million recordings, with 0.5 million hours playing time. It would take 65 years to listen to it all, but for every minute of sound in the archive another 3 minutes is acquired every day. So at the current rate of acquisition it would take 200 years from today to listen to it all.

Visitors to the library need only photo ID to gain access to the Centre, and can then have free “walk-in” access to 13 headphone terminals dotted around the BL which play 128 kbps MP3 copies of 35,000 archived recordings. Anyone can ask the BL to make any other material in the BWAV archive accessible to order. The server has capacity for 200,000 recordings so once a track has been converted from BWAV to MP3 and put on the server, it stays on the server for permanent public access.

A few recordings are available online, but because the BL does not have rights to most of the recordings archived, full online access is impossible. (www.collectbritain.co.uk/, www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/listen.html, http://sounds.bl.uk/).

Whereas “fair use” clauses in copyright law let websites that sell CDs offer short excerpts for would-be customers to listen to before buying, the BL cannot do this because it is not selling.

I was intrigued by one sci-fi touch. All newly acquired recordings—and books—are temporarily stored in a quarantine room to ensure that no dangerous molds contaminate existing material—much as early astronauts were quarantined after returning from space. M3

Barry Fox reports on the audio industry as columnist for the British publication Hi-Fi News. His commentary appears in every issue of Multi Media Manufacturer.

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