Regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Mr. Reihan Salam writes:
One gets the impression that a lucrative, politically influential industry is trying to get taxpayers to rescue it from its own incompetence and failure to offer compelling content in accessible formats. The case for bailing out Hollywood seems no more compelling to me than the case for bailing out the automotive or financial services industries.
Mr. Salam doesn’t seem to take any notice of real people in real jobs doing real work, only to see the fruits of their labor taken without compensation. Who in Hollywood is asking for a bailout? SOPA seems to be dead — but something needs to be done to address the problem of online piracy.
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As someone who has spent 40 years in the motion-picture business, I can attest to the fierce competition, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit of the American filmmaking community. Mr. Salam sees only the major motion-picture studios. I see fellow citizens, craftspeople, artists, technicians, accountants, marketing experts, distribution executives, public-relations people, entertainment lawyers, development executives, actors, writers, directors, agents, managers, and many more people I know as colleagues and friends.
There are two issues at stake — jobs and expression. Internet piracy threatens our livelihood and silences our voices.
First, jobs:
The entertainment business comprises tens of thousands of individual start-ups and the equivalent of mom-and-pop businesses: students writing screenplays, young filmmakers producing movies on their credit cards, entrepreneurs raising capital from friends, private equity backing filmmakers or slates of films, singer-songwriters working as waiters or cab drivers to pay for their recordings — the list goes on.
We rarely hear of the failures or the money lost. Occasionally we hear about the success stories. The American entertainment business is American capitalism in action — vital, dynamic, enterprising, creative, adventurous and altogether wildly successful. It’s still American movies and American music that make the world sing, laugh, dance, and cry.
If revenues aren’t returned to the producing companies (large, small, or in between), these companies cannot invest in new projects. The entertainment industry will contract; one of America’s leading exports will shrink; skilled jobs will be lost; the American dominance in global entertainment will be needlessly squandered.
Allowing Internet pirates an open field is tantamount to an attack on working professionals in the entertainment industry. It is a massive job-killer.
Glossy magazines and glitzy cable-TV shows show us images of pampered, spoiled, semi-literate movie stars barely out of their teens mouthing the most inane statements. In the real world, you can count such people on little more than the fingers on both hands. The overwhelming majority of those employed in the entertainment industry are entirely grounded, highly skilled, middle-class workers, already in a tough, competitive business with extended spells of unemployment. These people absolutely depend on their paychecks, residuals, and in some cases profit participation. If revenues cannot be collected because of piracy, these average citizens simply cannot survive. It is unfair, unjust, and counterproductive in both the short and long run.
The fact is that the most vocal anti-SOPA activists are also anti-corporate activists. They know that piracy kills jobs, but they don't care because it also kills corporations. They disagree with the very idea of capitalism, so talking about private sector job creation, competition, entrepreneurship and other capitalistic virtues is a non starter. They want an end to the American way of doing business, be it investment banks and oil companies or movie studios and record producers. There's no reasoning with these people, so don't even bother trying.
However, SOPA was a clunky piece of legislation and the entertainment industry has been very slow to adapt to the new market realities that technology has brought forward. There is indeed a purely capitalistic argument to be made against our current copyright/regulatory/enforcement structure, inasmuch as technology has changed the dynamics of the market in such a dramatic way that the value of their entertainment product is simply not as great as it used to be. There's no way around that. Bandwidth and storage is cheap and getting cheaper by the day, and individuals have tons of options for obtaining content online. The entertainment industry cannot win by trying to bend the market dynamics back into their favor through regulation. It won't work. It'll just create massive dissatisfaction and lead to more illicit content sharing.
For example, when high-speed internet became available to me, but before iTunes happened, I downloaded almost all my music illegally through tools like Napster. It wasn't that I wanted to screw the record companies, but almost overnight it became ridiculous to go to a record store and spend $30 on a CD when I could get the exact same content for free, at home, in a more flexible format. The value of that product plummeted, just like any other commodity, due to a major disruption in the market. At first the record companies tried to shut down the sharing sites and sue the pants off of people, but that was a losing battle, because the core issue really wasn't people breaking the law, it was that a disruptive technology had drastically changed the nature of their product and delivery model. They had to face reality; the era of the $30 CD was over, and no amount of legal action was going to change that.
Then Steve Jobs came along and introduced the iPod and iTunes. His model gave people the option of safely and legally buying individual tracks for a very reasonable price (around a dollar), and a full album for about nine dollars. He found the market sweet spot, and you know what happened? Pretty much everyone gladly signed up for iTunes and began to buy music again -- and in record numbers. A sensible and dynamic free market adaptation was found, and life goes on for the industry.
Yes, illegal trading still happens. And with the increase in bandwidth and storage, we're seeing not just music, but full length movies and television shows being shared. But that genie is never going back in the bottle. The technology is here to stay. Sites that flagrantly violate copyright should be shut down of course, but the laws to do that are already on the books.
The only way for the entertainment industry to keep up now will be to continue to adapt, rapidly, to the market as it continues to change. They'll have to find better and more innovative ways to fund, distribute and promote their product. They'll have to develop new pricing structures that the public finds acceptable. But most of all they need to accept the reality that they simply may not be able to make as much money as they used to, because the market has changed drastically. If this leads to a content drought, then the market will adapt once again, and the value will go up.
But artificially attempting to maintain the status quo isn't an acceptable option. It will simply stimulate the kind of black-market, illicit content trading schemes we all want to avoid, to the benefit of no one.
The ISP's already have mechanisms in place to limit download capacity, and the law already has mechanisms in place to take down copywritten content. Hollywood's just another pawn in the government's war on free speech.
YES! Save the buggy whip manufacturers! Hollywood has been reaping boom profits , it is time they move in to the accounting profits area. If the "little people" are getting hurt, maybe it is time for the "big people" to pay them .
If you guys hadn't been so greedy in the first place people wouldn't hate your industry and would stay loyal. There wouldn't be so many people happy to watch you struggle.
And instead of all acting like helpless dogs too afraid to confront Miley Cyrus, maybe you should have self regulated your industry. Then perhaps we wouldn't be stuck with so many useless, extremely wealthy celebrities.
Anyway you won't get much sympathy here. It's a bigger crime to make crap and try to charge everyone a hundred dollars to buy it three times than it is to give someone you don't know a copy of something you paid too much for once.
Instead of spending billions trying to put everyone in jail, maybe your industry should improve its products and the way it delivers them (ask Blockbuster about refusing to change!)
You think people choose to get things for free because they "hate" the industry? That if they didn't "hate" the industry, and having a choice between paying and not paying and getting the same thing, they'd choose to pay?
The rest of this is pretty much a garden-variety anti-corporate, anti-capitalist rant, so I more suspect it's you who isn't going to get much sympathy around here.
I think you misconstrued Jacob's post. It's not that people hate Hollywood and choose to steal from it, it's that they hate Hollywood and refuse to defend it. You'll admit it is at least incongruous for the industry that spends much of it's time excoriating American capitalism and values to suddenly invoke the value of private property rights when it's their property at stake. I simply can't bring myself to care about Hollywood. Cordially, Bill
Jacob R. reflects the sum total of sentiment I've heard on this issue. Hollywood film makers have a convoluted tax scheme that they use to avoid paying taxes. (I know this because I read it in a hard copy Mark Steyn article I paid for myself.) People are willing to pay for a good quality product. Unfortunately Hollywood almost never produces anything of quality. American actors and actresses are people who are paid to pretend to be someone they aren't. That's all. If they all disappeared tomorrow it would have little effect on the lives of anyone but their closest relatives. It's difficult to muster sympathy for the people who prop them up in their careers of spewing self centered, valueless smut.
The article seems to be driven by the author's feelings for the friends he's made at work. If the work these people did produced something that reflected the kind of values we would wish our children to encounter in film media we might be a bit more sympathetic. Hollywood represents a vehicle for the degeneration of the culture in this country. Personally, I don't feel sorry for your friends.
I was under the impression that historically, movie studios chose southern California (near L.A. being more developed at the time than, say, San Diego) for this reason: In that era, the big copyright holders and lawyers were in New York City. By the time that someone in NYC could get a court order to seize something near LA, the movie producers could move all their stuff over the border into Mexico.
If that is true (and I would not know), then we're simply living in an era where the stuff is delivered via Internet from China or wherever, for the same reasons as we've seen before.
My sentiment is that if a content producer cannot make enough money in the first 20 years to fund more via capital accumulation, then step aside and let someone else do it without fear of lawsuits.
Uhhh . . . they chose it because it hardly ever rains, the climate is consistent throughout the year, and land was cheap. These are three very attractive qualities in a place when you take pictures for a living.
They didn't want to pay royalties to Edison who owned the Motion Picture Camera. The entire movie industry began in Los Angles as a way to avoid paying the deserving party patent fees.
I have so many issues with this article, but most of them sparks a fuse and turns my reply in to an angry rant, so instead I will go with... You obviously don't have a grasp on IT development if you think laws can stop piracy. Short-sighted invasion by the government is not the answer (it never is). Besides, Hollywood, at least lately, seems to promote corrupt, unmoral behavior, so now they get to suffer their own creation. Deal with it.
Many of us who rely on the internet for our livelihood as well as for information and entertainment can sympathize with Maxwell's positions. Piracy is indeed a form of theft, and its victims belong mostly to the anonymous, industrious middle class. They certainly should profit from their work, whether creative or technical. As always, the difficulty is finding ways to achieve that goal. Anti-piracy laws are already on the books, but there is no non-intrusive way to enforce them. I am totally opposed to the SOPA and IPP proposals because they put too much of a law-enforcement burden on servers that serve as pathways for digital content. It seems absurd to require servers to check the legitimacy of every piece of content. In addition, once it is pirated, the content can be distributed through thousands of servers, few of which are large companies with the resources to erect and sustain viable security protocols.
I don't have an answer. Neither, at this point, does Congress. It seems to me that this is an ideal opportunity for international cooperation of some kind. The fact that some of the most egregious violators may be located in places like Malaysia or Singapore or Bali or god knows where is an obstacle. But I'm confident that advances in technology will help.
I dont disagree with your cause but you are going after the wrong targets. First of all none of Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Twitter profit from piracy, unless you define piracy as the sharing of images or aggregated short video clips, in which case this website and virtually every other website on the web is guilty of the same thing.
In fact, Microsoft probably knows more pain from the piracy of its software than Hollywood does of its movies.
Also those video clips hosted on Youtube or linked to by Facebook, Google, Twitter, NRO etc, are more likely to reach people who otherwise would never have heard of your content.
The sites you are after that allow whole downloads or streaming of movies, TV shows etc, are mainly hosted offshore and they are not affiliated in any way with the Silicon Valley companies. The way you deal with those is limited targeted legislation like what Darrell Issa introduced in the OPEN act but more importantly, Hollywood and the content industry need to learn to embrace the internet. There are all kinds of mediums for artists to make money over the internet whether it be through direct payment for files or with ad revenues. Make your content easier to access legally, and the piracy will become irrelevant.
1) Re: making money over the Internet -- explain exactly how they do this, and "easily," in ways they're not already doing it.
2) The content industry doesn't give a whoop about that. No one will pay for that all that YouTube garbage. What they pay for is what Hollywood makes.
If they wanted to keep the barriers to entry up -- indeed, if that's what they're "primarily" worried about, then they'd like piracy. Because piracy means it's harder to make money at it, and when it's harder to make money at it, fewer people can make a living doing it. Thus, the "barriers to entry" are quite firm.
But hey, good to know you've got all their conference rooms bugged so you've heard exactly what they're concerned with, first hand, and are not making this up out of thin air in any way.
An argument based on a lie:
Most of the technical crew - wardrobe, props, lighting, sound, etc. - do not receive a % of the profits from a film. That is reserved for the big shots: the producers, director, the stars, etc. So, to claim that the "middle class workers" on a movie will be hurt in their wallets because of online piracy is simply false. They are paid to do a job, and when it's done, they move onto the next one if they're lucky.
Simple stuff: It's hard to feel sorry for the Oliver Stones, Peter Jacksons, and Brad Pitts of Hollywood when they flaunt their wealth while spitting on the values of fly-over country.
You don't understand your own argument. Yes, we (the "little shots") don't get profit points from a film. However, we depend on the "big shots" to receive the profits so that they can fund more projects that we can work on. So, yes, piracy -- just like any other economic injustice or crime -- ultimately hurts the little guys more BECAUSE we don't get the profit points and therefore need to keep working from production to production. These productions won't happen if people don't pay to see the previous one.
