Photo: mdr.de
The five-part MDR podcast “Kino.to – The Forbidden Streaming Revolution” by investigative journalist Maxie Römhild takes us to Saxony in the noughties. These were years in which mass unemployment and the effects of the so-called Hartz reforms shaped the East. Römhild reconstructs the history of the first significant streaming platform for cinema films in Germany. It is a true crime story. The crime in this case consists in the mass violation of the film industry’s copyrights by making films available free of charge to ordinary Internet users.
The story of Kino.to – to is the domain extension of the South Sea archipelago of Tonga, a place where German criminal authorities had certain problems with identification – is, in short, this: The unemployed craftsman Dirk B. spends a lot of time in front of the computer and initially exchanges music and later also films on platforms. The exchanged content is illegally compiled with sporting ambitions, for example by being filmed in cinemas. At some point he comes up with the idea of turning it into a business. So in 2008 he built a website, full of advertising and subscription traps, through which users could easily stream films for free without any prior technical knowledge – whenever they wanted. This is common practice today, but back then it was still a technical revolution. Before Netflix, Amazon Prime and all the other streaming services came to Germany, this option existed because it was provided by cybercriminals like Kino.to and similar websites. In 2007, Netflix first tried to establish the video-on-demand service, i.e. the offer that allows anyone to watch films on the Internet at any time. By the time the company succeeded seven years later, the group around the founder of Kino.to had already been sentenced to several years in prison by the Leipzig district court and their website was shut down.
Unfortunately, the MDR podcast remains on the surface when it comes to the question of intellectual property in the Internet age. A former computer-savvy police officer and current lobbyist for the film industry has his say, but no further investigation is carried out. The author of these lines therefore asked the expert Sabine Nuss whether there is any difference between intellectual property and material property. Her answer: »Yes, of course. Intellectual property refers to intangible things, more precisely: to all forms of intellectual and creative creation, while material property refers to “objective things”. In the case of intangible goods, usage rights are granted for use. For example, anyone who streams a song by The Cure for a fee has only acquired the right to hear The Cure. But the song doesn’t belong to the person. In the case of material goods, there is usually a change of ownership. “When I buy a bicycle, I am usually the new owner,” says Nuss.
Ownership is made clear by the fact that there is the possibility of it
To exclude other people’s property, for example in order to make even more money through artificial scarcity. Anyone who does not submit to the exclusion option is committing theft. “Regardless of the material nature, from the perspective of civil law, in both cases it is a property crime,” explains the political scientist. So it doesn’t matter if I steal a bike or watch a movie in the cinema and then upload it to the Internet.
But is the story of Kino.to perhaps a Robin Hood story? An unemployed craftsman from Leipzig who lets us all take part in his raids against the billion-dollar film industry? That’s how many people saw it at the time, and the podcast maker Maxie Römhild is not entirely free from sympathy for Dirk B. Sabine Nuss, on the other hand, has a clear position on the question of whether B’s actions were subversive or even pointed beyond capitalism: »Neither. It was a business model designed to make money, only it was illegal. That’s not subversive per se.”
Podcast “Kino.to – The Forbidden Streaming Revolution”, MDR