Posts by Matthew Poole
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One of the problems with the "can't make money selling movies on the internet" line is that is seems to assume that the internet is the only way to sell movies
Pretty sure no one ever claimed anything of the sort.
In which case I've drawn a wrong inference. Sorry. It was the only way that I could make sense of the "impending doom" suggestion that has been attached to the internet and movies. If other ways of making money haven't gone away, then the doom is in no way impending and there's actually time to make an orderly transition. Take the time to figure out things that work, etc.
And before you say that nobody's said "impending doom" or similar, consider the hasty action that is being urged, both in this thread and out there in the real world. Those of us who're saying "We don't have anywhere near enough data on this" are being called any manner of things. -
Simon, that is simply staggering.
Except that, sadly, it's really not. One can't help but suspect that the Americans are so busy trying to get the rest of the world to toe their line that they don't have time to figure out that, actually, there are other ways of doing things and that those things, scarily enough, are good for players beyond the realm of big content.
I guess that's what happens when big content are the entire sum of audible voices in the discussions about the form that measures will take. -
Interesting opinion piece from ComputerWorld on ACTA, including why it's such an affront to the sovereignty of national legislative processes.
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Most credit card companies proactively monitor for this sort of thing and suspend your card until you say it's OK to proceed.
I had the experience a few months ago of making a very substantial purchase from the US, over the phone, and before the phone call to place the order had even been completed I already had my bank's security team calling my cellphone to confirm that the transaction was legit. Their systems are very quick at flagging abnormal transactions.
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If they're being cagey, I would suspect that there's a big data-matching exercise going on within and between all the main banks. The only reason to keep people in the dark is when you're still hunting. Once the hunt is over, it's safe to let the world know that something like this happened, especially since it makes the banks look good, rather than bad, that they detected it internally and it wasn't their systems that were compromised.
I doubt we've heard the end of this, either. -
I think Peter's caveats on that are well made -- it's much easier to get an ROI from music. But that doesn't mean it can't happen.
Oh, I totally accept his caveats. But I also think that in the case of indies they're far less of an issue. When a movie costs $10m to make, if you can get a million people to buy it at $10 you've recouped all your costs. $10 is not outside the realms of reasonable for something that's convenient to watch and easy to find. Of course, a million people is unlikely, but how do indies make their money now? Why will that avenue suddenly disappear?
One of the problems with the "can't make money selling movies on the internet" line is that is seems to assume that the internet is the only way to sell movies. Maybe in a decade's time it will be how indies do their thing, sure, but Hollywood ain't leaving the big screen in a hurry, and that means that there will remain a venue for indies. I was at Rialto Newmarket last night, and it was packed.
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One needs to have seen just one Pixar movie in the last decade to be less scathing of the costs of the movie industry, surely? Those things have no stars yet still cost a fortune to make. And they are fucking brilliant, I think most people here would agree.
They have voice actors, who are mostly "real" stars. From what I've heard, voice acting can pay pretty damn well, too, though it is certainly far from the rates one garners as an in-the-flesh A-lister.
CG is definitely expensive, but Pixar's movies often cost less than similar-length movies that feature meat-space actors. There's something odd about that.The other thing is that these big-budget Hollywood movies are going to be played in cinemas. They will have box office revenue. The internet will be a secondary revenue stream for these productions for a long time into the future.
For indies, the structural costs should be much, much lower. Fewer A-list stars, less CG, less studio overhead. Consequently, an indie movie should have to recoup far less to be a "success". This makes using the internet as primary distribution a viable choice, if someone can crack the sales modality in the way that Apple and eMusic cracked it for music. -
One thing I recall quite precisely, though, and it's a friend in Canada telling me a few years ago that when the ISPs got rid of data caps over there, after they had been creaming him for his downloading habits for a couple of years, 'coincidentally' they also started a campaign against p2p.
That doesn't particularly surprise me. Lose the data caps and suddenly the income from heavy downloaders goes away. That, in fact, fits precisely with what has been said here: heavy downloaders are a net cost, not a net profit, because they consume more of a scarce (though in Canada it's far less scarce than here) resource for approximately the same income. Also, Canada goes through fits of anti-P2P "awareness" training. They're still the only country that has a "piracy tax" on all blank media, and as a result Canadians feel (and justly so, IMO) that they have every right to download copyrighted media. After all, they're paying a tax to the media industry.
I don't doubt that the ISP increased anti-P2P advertising in concert with removing data caps, but I would be rather surprised if there was no base level of anti-P2P being orchestrated nationally. Canada's history with copyright and the internet is quite interesting. -
Either way, they profit from the perception of downloading as easy and risk free, and will be averse to making it not risk free
There are two parts to the "making it not risk free" discussion, though.
Part one is that whatever the crime, the punishment must be appropriate. Telephone-number fines for casual infringement is utterly ridiculous in the eyes of most people, both for the fact that the money can never possibly be collected (100% of a person's lifetime income from birth to death and still only 50% of the total owed? Yeah, like that's going to happen!) and also for the fact that it makes a mockery of the entire system. When the punishment is so far away from anything vaguely like reasonable and just, the only way many people can react is "The law's an ass. Why should I follow it?" Anything that causes disrespect for the entirety of a body of law is "a bad thing"[tm], and if you don't think that people are disinclined to respect the law as a result of the likes of the Jammie Thomas case I would suggest that you extract your head from your world of economic theory and get out into reality.
A fine of a few hundred dollars is reasonable, provided that there's the avenue of judicial review. One of the most objectionable aspects of s92A was that there was no higher authority to which one could appeal. That is the realm of a police state, and made all the worse for the fact that it was vested business interests that were gunning for the easiest access to the disconnection regime.Part two is the technical. Whether or not you can find any point of agreement with me on economics, based on your education, I really would love to know any basis you might have for disagreeing with me on the ins and outs of IP engineering. And for this one, "I read it on the internet" doesn't cut it.
I have summarised why it's distinctly non-trivial to implement a monitoring solution. That is technical reality, and will remain so for sufficiently far into the future that some other solution needs to be found. -
This thread has made me more tentative in my judgments on all of these issues.
I will certainly be a little less scathing of the costs of the movie industry, based partly on what Peter has said and also on what I've read in researching to contribute.
On the other hand I will be no less inclined to take the word of anyone who screams "the sky is falling" without solid evidence - such as, say, the sky landing on my head - to support their position. It was - and still is, quite incredibly - the position of big music at the start of the decade that digital music was never going to fly, nobody would buy because they could get it off Napster for free, and that the industry would disappear unless their wet dreams for legislation were granted immediately. We are well aware of how that turned out.
Now it's the turn of the movie industry to cry that the sky is falling, that nobody will buy movies online when they can download them for free, and that the only solution is immediate statutory relief in the form of stiff penalties and maybe compulsory monitoring/enforcement by ISPs of their customers' online activities.Those of us who are arguing against ACTA and s92A and all the other things as an unnecessary imposition aren't necessarily careless about the fate of the arts. However, those of us who have been paying attention to these issues since before Napster was a household name are inclined to be very leery of the doomsayers because reaction from the content industries to disruptive technologies is kinda like being in Ground Hog Day: they scream and cry, they rush to the legislators for protection, the sky fails to fall, they find a way to make money from the new technology. This cycle is almost a natural law, probably at least in part because it's predicated on ordinary human responses, and it has happened every single time a new technology has come along that challenges existing purveyors of copyrighted material in at least the last century. The phonograph, the wireless, the VCR. Now it's the turn of the internet. So far the sky has not fallen, despite all the dire predictions, which makes it hard to take the latest predictions as anything other than more of the same.