This article (and most of these Kill Hollywood ones) is just ridiculous. "Hollywood" (what does that even mean?) does not want to break the internet. They do not want to stifle free speech. They are not "mean".
They want to stop people from taking things that cost them a lot of money to make without paying for them.
It's that simple. They want people to either abstain from using their product (not ideal) or pay them for the use of it. This is what every business on the planet wants.
Instead, they invest billions of dollars making things that are in massive demand. They employ millions of people whose livelihoods depend on these products getting a return. They have a moral and legal obligation to protect the interests of their investors and their employees. Although 10 million illegal downloads is not 10 million legal sales lost, it is, without a doubt, some sales lost, and there are many billions of illegal downloads annually. These companies have moral and legal obligations to push for better enforcement against this illegal activity. And they do not have the answer to how to go about that effectively without causing problems in the process. It does not make them malicious people by default. Everyone on this forum knows that there is no perfect solution, and maybe it is a pointless pursuit, but it is just silly to act as if this massive industry, lead by people who feel every bit as responsible for their employees' families having food on their table as any other company's leaders, is supposed to just sit there and watch people illegally take their product without paying for it and do nothing.
Yes, we all want to make sure legislation like SOPA does not pass. But declaring a war on them is not going to help find amicable solutions. Saying you do not like their proposed solutions and then going back to business as usual, not proactively joining the conversation for how to reduce piracy, is not doing anything at all to keep the internet safe from the flawed solutions that they will continue to propose out of obligation to their shareholders and employees.
If you really want to protect the internet, the two best things you can do are stop pirating things you didn't pay for, and start contributing ideas and solutions to the issue of piracy that have as few unintended consequences as possible.
First off, we agree the creators should be paid for their work.
But I think you're missing the point. You believe the problem that needs to be solved is stopping piracy by enforcement.
Others, pg, myself included, believe piracy is not actually the problem it's a symptom.
The problem is convenience.
The studios either because they are stuck in the past or because they are contractually obligated to theaters, cable, TV, DVD stores, and foreign distributors, are not making it convenient.
There's no reason the studios individually or better yet, collectively, couldn't make all the content they represent available, on the same day it premieres, online, WORLD WIDE, for a reasonable price. There's also no reason they couldn't run world wide commercial sponsored channels of older content, online, world wide. If they did those they'd make billions.
Instead they are stuck in the past. Theaters first = incentive to pirate. Not released in my country yet = incentive to pirate. Can't play on any device I own = incentive to pirate. Can't transfer from device to device = incentive to pirate. Shitty quality streaming = incentive to pirate.
The solution is to REMOVE THE INCENTIVES TO PIRATE.
I understand the theaters would be upset. I understand the cable companies would be upset. I understand their foreign distributors would be upset. I understand DVD stores would be upset. TOO EFFING BAD! The world has changed. The studios need to face the world as it is now, not try to legislate it back into the 90s. That's not going to happen. As hard as they might try technology and the world move forward not back. They need to swallow that pill and embrace reality. Make it convenient and most people will stop pirating.
Actually, I believe that piracy needs to be stopped by education, enforcement, and innovation.
> There's no reason the studios individually or better yet, collectively, couldn't make all the content they represent available, on the same day it premieres, online, WORLD WIDE, for a reasonable price.
I understand how you could come to this conclusion but that's just false. Two years ago I started a streaming music company knowing pretty much nothing about licensing laws. Now, after working with one of the best music licensing attorneys available and reading an annoying amount on this subject, it is clear that if you intentionally set out to create an industry that was impossible to maneuver legally, you could not do as good a job as the current music industry. And, I know it's the same for the film industry, which is further complicated by the fact that nearly all films also have music in them.
Both of these industries are filled with extensive legal requirements, many of them labor laws, union regulations, licensing restrictions and more, designed to make sure that artists and other people are not exploited. For every movie you make, not only do certain players in the movie have certain rights, certain royalties owed, and so forth, but then there is music in it. That music has a copyright owner, a publisher, and so on. They all have different rights, and many have assigned those rights to others for management, and this information is not easily located all of the time.
There is no cookie cutter way to license everything you need for these films in one stroke of a pen world wide. In some countries, even the publishing rights owners themselves cannot waive or change the mandatory rates to be paid for the use of their work. And, as a company putting out a world wide film, you have to know all of these laws for all of these countries. And then to do what you've proposed you have to make the movie available in every weird new format that comes out every other week, you have to forego release schedules that actually allow you to build buzz and execute a marketing plan that maximizes the ROI for your investment, and so forth.
So, there are about a million reasons why what you described is impossible. And then, at the end there is that one last incentive to pirate that will never be gotten rid of - charging money, which they cannot avoid.
All things being equal, you don't think these people want to make their product more convenient to have? I know a ton of people in the industry who try to put their content anywhere they possible can. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how hard they try, it's never going to compete with free, and these people deserve to be paid for their work.
Thanks for taking the time to present some information not often heard in these debates.
But in my opinion the big content distributors should be fighting to change the agreements and laws that shackle them -- not crippling the internet to accommodate them.
Louis C.K. has already made the case for us. You do not need to change _anything_ to get people to pay a reasonable amount for quality content. They will pay even when they can get it for free. He has already made a few million charging $5 for a non-DRM, easily pirated copy of his comedy special.
It shows the way forward: make it convenient, make it good value for money... and we will come.
Louis CK only barely innovated on what many artists already do. The reason he was successful and they are usually not is because he already has millions of fans and has friends on television talk shows who brought him on to promote the product. He also painted a picture that this was the new way to distribute content, which "pandered" (not meant to imply something negative) to the community who wants to prove that there is a way to make money by doing things differently. I personally paid for the product as a result, and still have yet to get around to watching it.
Many thousands of great bands are on Bandcamp with name your own price music for sale that is super easy to download, and most make next to nothing on the service. It was mostly the marketing that Louis CK did well that made him successful, and he has resources that 99% of people don't have.
To address the point of distributors changing the laws that shackle them, if you've ever tried to make changes against a union, let alone half a dozen unions, you'll know why that's not possible. They can make almost no headway against unions as powerful as the Screen Actor's Guild, and they cannot hire A List actors without using SAG workers.
In fact, maybe the best approach to killing the problems with Hollywood (not the industry itself), is to create a platform for studios to hire non-union film professionals, to source music fully owned by the original artist, which comes with boiler plate licensing and employment agreements that are designed for the digital world, with proper 21st century royalties, etc, and that provides a turnkey distribution platform that can put your movie on nearly any country's most popular movie viewing website on the same day.
Louis CK's video is pretty much the simplest possible case. A guy telling his own jokes is very simple, legally.
But that kind of production only takes you so far. It tells us nothing about the feasibility of using the same model for a film noir, or a special effects blockbuster with recognizable stars.
There is no cookie cutter way to license everything you need for these films in one stroke of a pen world wide. In some countries, even the publishing rights owners themselves cannot waive or change the mandatory rates to be paid for the use of their work. And, as a company putting out a world wide film, you have to know all of these laws for all of these countries.
From an outsider's perspective it looks like the major distributors are getting exactly what they deserve. Thanks to regulatory capture, they (the MPAA/RIAA/etc.) are the ones responsible for the tangled web of international regulations. If they really wanted a streamlined international system, they'd be arguing against things like ACTA, SOPA, the diplomatic browbeating of Spain into passing Internet censorship laws, etc.
It is not those lobbying organizations who created the crippling regulations, it is unions designed to protect the rights of the workers in the industry, which include guarantees for certain types of payments and royalties, which are legacy agreements that do not account for a digital world as well as they should. I understand that the goal should be to change these rules, but if you've ever read about any union negotiation in the paper, and consider that the film industry has several unions that make up its lifeline, you'll know why the industry struggles to adapt.
See my comment above for what a true disruption in film might be based on this issue.
The licensing issues may be a problem but the solution is not piracy enforcement. You will never win that war, EVER.
The studios job is to make money for their shareholders and artists. The best way for them to make that money is to work to get rid of these restrictions they are under so they can distribute these products without these problems you mentioned.
To me this is practically a horse and buggy (the studios) vs the automobile (the internet) type issue. I'm sure some people complained "you can't go supporting cars! I'm livery will go out of business". Well too bad for you. Make a change or be left behind. The world doesn't care about your union agreements or any others.
I also don't agree you can't compete with free. You can! How else do you think iTunes Music Store has been kicking butt even though all the music can be had for free? It's unlikely piracy sites will ever get to the level of convenience that is something like iTMS. The studios have the opportunity to do the same with movies. If their past agreements shackle them to failure boohoo to them. They're not going to get people to stop pirating as long as they continue to keep adding more and more incentives to do so by making legit ways of accessing content painful, frustrating and limited.
You're assuming that Hollywood promotes legislation that threatens to break the internet because they want to stop piracy. This is a generous assumption, and in most cases the best one, but we can't rule out the possibility they consider the internet a competing source of entertainment and just want to break it.
The problem exists with trying to sell non-rival digital goods as if the ability to freely copy and share them doesn't exist. This can't really be done without alienating legitimate users or draconian government measures. Making free exact copies and instant distribution is one of the best parts of digital goods, but it clashes with the current system.
Rather than try and legislate their relevance, I think the entertainment industry needs to find alternate sources of income and adapt to the system. Whether this means becoming more service oriented (with convenient streaming based subscriptions) or focusing on theaters and merchandise, but something needs to change.
Non-commercial, non-profit file sharing should be legal (having it be a felony is just ridiculous) and it doesn't make sense to try and control the web to restrict what a technology is good at. Unfortunately this issue starts with fixing copyright - which at the moment seems to be impossible.
Those first two sentences of yours capture the essence of the trouble we're in. That idea -- that trying to control information in the same way that we control physical things is fraught with ethical and legal peril -- needs to be said over and over again in these discussions.
Effectively only professionals would be allowed to create any content on the internet. It is fare to say that the internet would be broken if Hollywood gets what it wants.
One thing I've learned about HN, through the school of hard knocks is that the word "moral" is probably the most reviled word on this forum, in any context, except maybe customer service (see: AirBnB).
So, which that very sympathetic entry, let me say that I very seriously doubt they have either moral or legal obligations to fight piracy. The studios, distributors, et al, have fiduciary obligations.
Their desires may be valid. But legitimate ends do not justify destructive means.
If a bully starts punching kids on the playground, regardless of whether he was hit first, the first priority of society is to take him down. At risk of hyperbole, many insurgents have legitimate points - they just express them like retards.
This isn't saying fire everyone employed by "Hollywood". It means re-structure the institutions so they work with modern society instead of regularly attempting to counter-act human progress.
> They want people to either abstain from using their product (not ideal) or pay them for the use of it. This is what every business on the planet wants.
I'm pretty sure a content business does not see the first scenario as an option at all, not just "not ideal".
> the two best things you can do are stop pirating things you didn't pay for, and start contributing ideas and solutions to the issue of piracy that have as few unintended consequences as possible.
Make it more convenient for somebody to purchase your product at a saleable price than to steal it. Torrenting et al are far from frictionless, see Netflix for example. If you cannot produce and sell your product for a price that the market will bear, you will (and arguably should) fail.
As an aside, I see no evidence quality film production will cease to exist with the current studios, so it's not like this is an all or nothing thing.
I think, on one hand, that this movement is doing itself a major disservice by naming its enemy "Hollywood". I think that institutions like the MPAA are very clear in their support of ruthless enforcement like SOPA and PIPA, as press release and social media response after another have underscored. Particular writers' associations have also voiced what, to me, look like sentiments that agree with MPAA's approach.
But "Hollywood" is a misnomers that will inevitably throw innocent people under the bus in the crusade against the abstract concept of the entertainment industry. I also think it would help the campaign tremendously from a PR stand point not to be so abstract as to inculpate a vast industry - imagine the reaction here, if they made as broad generalizations against the tech industry.
The only solution that I can imagine is some sort of DRM like what Apple uses in the App store allowing Users to have lifetime access to the content that they purchased. The DRM acts as a replacement for Regional restrictions allowing world-wide usage with the authentication of purchase handled by computers. Unfortunately the tech community is so fanatically adverse to DRM that they fail see how it can benefit the studio/customer relationship and a large company will have to just implement it and take the risk it gets accepted in the marketplace.
As far as I understand, that is the game and this is the lens we through which we see the solution or ignore there is a problem.
What they want is not the problem, what they're doing is. A boycott and all out war on their existence is a perfectly rational response with respect to what they're doing.
They want to stop people from taking things that cost them a lot of money to make without paying for them.
It's that simple. They want people to either abstain from using their product (not ideal) or pay them for the use of it. This is what every business on the planet wants.
Instead, they invest billions of dollars making things that are in massive demand. They employ millions of people whose livelihoods depend on these products getting a return. They have a moral and legal obligation to protect the interests of their investors and their employees. Although 10 million illegal downloads is not 10 million legal sales lost, it is, without a doubt, some sales lost, and there are many billions of illegal downloads annually. These companies have moral and legal obligations to push for better enforcement against this illegal activity. And they do not have the answer to how to go about that effectively without causing problems in the process. It does not make them malicious people by default. Everyone on this forum knows that there is no perfect solution, and maybe it is a pointless pursuit, but it is just silly to act as if this massive industry, lead by people who feel every bit as responsible for their employees' families having food on their table as any other company's leaders, is supposed to just sit there and watch people illegally take their product without paying for it and do nothing.
Yes, we all want to make sure legislation like SOPA does not pass. But declaring a war on them is not going to help find amicable solutions. Saying you do not like their proposed solutions and then going back to business as usual, not proactively joining the conversation for how to reduce piracy, is not doing anything at all to keep the internet safe from the flawed solutions that they will continue to propose out of obligation to their shareholders and employees.
If you really want to protect the internet, the two best things you can do are stop pirating things you didn't pay for, and start contributing ideas and solutions to the issue of piracy that have as few unintended consequences as possible.