6 ms·

Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"? You can say

Are all the people, from the film crew to the VFX artists and engineers that work on the IP that is being stolen "rich people yatch (sic!) money"? You can say what you want about IP law; you wouldn't be able to enjoy many big-budget productions if it wouldn't exist. Many jobs, high-paying and low-paying, wouldn't exist. Of course, the business model for content distribution is somewhat nonsensical and the time until content gets in the public domain should be 10 years, but that doesn't mean that IP law shouldn't exist. Not to mention that the 29 billion number is probably also BS.

autosharp 6y ago
Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits.
- IdiocyInAction 6y ago
  No, but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future. If the studios get less revenue and have to pay more for enforcing IP law, they have less money for new productions and therefore less jobs and salary for the people producing the content. And I don't see why you should have a right to enjoy the fruits of their labor without paying.
  - autosharp 6y ago
    I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future.
    - IdiocyInAction 6y ago
      Without meaning to offend, that is not a good argument. If you rob a store and the employees have to quit their job, saying "I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future" would not absolve you of the responsibility that you have indirectly damaged their livelihood.
      - autosharp 6y ago
        The money/goods that I rob from a store cost a lot to reproduce, unlike movies. And I would scare people. This is more like me buying from store A than from store B. Am I robbing store B? Surely not giving to charity is worse than any other economic reallocation?
        VonGallifrey 6y ago
        If store B is actually the black market then you actually did steal from the one producing whatever you bought or possibly from store A. What do you mean by your first sentence? I am fairly sure that movies do actually cost quite a lot to produce.
        autosharp 6y ago
        On your second point I mean that there is zero marginal cost to produce a movie. To me, that makes that it cannot be compared to stealing e.g. a bag of M&M's.
        VonGallifrey 6y ago
        I would bet that the marginal cost of that movie is actually higher than the cents it costs to produce that bag of M&M's. Even if the marginal cost of movies is 0 the cost of a bag of M&M is so low it might as well be 0. Does that now justify stealing the bag of M&M? No. That does not even matter since looking at marginal cost of a movie makes no sense. Do you want to see movies? If yes then pay for them, if no then simply don't watch them. Justifying stealing isn't the way to go.
    - VonGallifrey 6y ago
      How fast would you be able to switch the industry you are working in? I would guess that a lot of the jobs that are discussed in this thread are fairly specialised ones and if that industry would disappear they would be out of work.
      - autosharp 6y ago
        The economic re-allocation doesn't have to be overnight or even in a single decade. It isn't as if the revenue suddenly goes to zero and the industry is nuked.
        VonGallifrey 6y ago
        No matter how long it will take they will have to start fresh and whatever experience, knowledge and education they had becomes useless. Much more likely they simply become unemployed and stay that way. That is an awful lot of time wasted of their lives.
        autosharp 6y ago
        It doesn't. Some people retire, some people leave the industry because they prefer something else, etc. All that needs to happen is that not all of them are being replaced.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    That suppositions might carry some weight if Hollywood Accounting didn't deny every penny possible to those same people. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
    - jefftk 6y ago
      The people we're talking about are paid in normal ways, and not via "percentage of the profits, which there will never be" etc
      - ric2b 6y ago
        So this doesn't really impact them much after all. Until we see publishers closing doors due to lack of profits this argument doesn't really work.
        jefftk 6y ago
        Something that affects profitability will change how many projects are worth doing, which will affect demand for their skills. Greater demand means greater ability to negotiate higher pay, and vice versa.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future I'm not a copyright abolitionist, but I'm curious what the second-order effects are to giving money to companies like Disney that are using that money to expand IP laws, buy up competitors, and impose one specific view of cinema on the entire market? People should obey laws because generally it's a good idea in a functioning society to obey laws. But to the extent that people can deprive companies like Disney of revenue without breaking the law, I kind of feel like they should do so. Not just by avoiding their products, but by making it harder for them to make money in general. It would be good at this point for companies like Disney to fail and for the media ecosystem to become more diverse. There are extremely negative effects that come from allowing one corporation to own so much culture. I'm not going to break the law, but I'm also not going to lose sleep over Disney the corporation losing profits, because I want Disney to lose money, and I want them to produce less content. I don't want Disney to be the biggest media producer on the market, they're crowding other people out and using their leverage to control things they shouldn't be able to control.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  "No yacht for me, no more movies for you."
- jariel 6y ago
  "Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits" The byzantine logic here on a supposedly 'smart site' really goes sideways on ideological issues were people have a) some ideology and b) they want it for free. The failure of your comment is really quite evident: basically 'every purchaser' could make the same statement about 'marginal revenue' in which case, if nobody bought the content, then, there would be no content and no yachts.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    And if everyone sold their stocks the economy would crumble and millions of people would be out in the streets and lose their retirement money, should we make selling stocks a crime?
- rhino369 6y ago
  On one single movie, no, but the expected revenue for a movie informs their negotiations (and the demand for their services). The reason high tens of millions of dollars are spend on VX for blockbusters is because they make a lot of revenue.
  - ViViDboarder 6y ago
    If what you’re saying so strictly true, yearly movie budgets would have been dropping year over year. With the obvious exception on the pandemic, is this what is happening? Pay of individuals working on set, which the exception of huge name actors, is not really impacted by total movie revenue and they don’t often get dividends. Once the fixed cost is covered, which for most big movies it easily is, the rest is the gravy train for the investors.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Minimum wagers aren't who's buying ever-racheting copyright laws, via campaign funds.
- IdiocyInAction 6y ago
  They may not be buying them, but I've done some research on this in the past and IP law is widely supported by content creators, even those who make little money. I personally also think that copyright laws as they exist right now are not optimal, but I think that pretending that "rich people yacht money" is all they are good for is also not a good thing.
woofie11 6y ago
I already don't enjoy many big-budget productions. I find niche Youtubers catering to my interests to be a better use of my time -- recently, we've been binging on 3Blue1Brown. I'm also finding very little relation between production budget (which mostly goes into things like SFX) and my enjoyment. Some of my favorite films were very low budget, from Dr. Horrible to some Bruce Campbell flicks. Good writing makes a huge difference. Decent acting and performance makes a bit of difference. Replacing all the SFX with sixties-era Star Trek SFX wouldn't make a wit of difference to my enjoyment. There is a correlation between finding good writers and having big budgets -- if you're dropping $300 million to make a film you might as well hire good writers -- but it's not a super-strong correlation.
- IdiocyInAction 6y ago
  Then don't watch those movies. The fact is, many people enjoy these things - there's market research on that - and you are not the target audience. The sum amount of enjoyment from a big budget production is much higher than what 3B1B produces (who I also like!). And that enjoyment would not exist if not for IP law.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    I could live with that if you didn't try to impose their values on me. I want to be free to write whatever code I want in the privacy of my own bedroom. I want to be free to understand my democratic government institutions. I want to be able to reverse-engineer things I own. I want to understand the world around me fully, and completely, to within the limits of my intellect. I want to build school systems where kids learn to understand their world. If your enjoyment of big-budget movies doesn't infringe on that, go ahead and enjoy them. Since it does, I'll fight every step of the way. Perhaps I'll lose, but I'll fight.
    - smhenderson 6y ago
      Sorry if I'm missing something here, but how does my enjoyment of a big budget movie correlate with I want to build school systems where kids learn to understand their world. What harm am I causing these kids that I am apparently unaware of?
mumblemumble 6y ago
Do VFX artists and engineers get residuals?
OscarTheGrinch 6y ago
The film & recorded music industries were built in an era of information scarcity, maintained by tightly controlled distribution. We now live in an era where information is infinite and everywhere. Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change.
- IdiocyInAction 6y ago
  Information is infinite, but creating it is still not free. Creating the media that people consume via these streaming services costs millions of dollars and manhours. You are right that media companies have to adapt to the changing times, but simply saying that it should all be freely available is not a solution. I can imagine a future where this may be a feasible solution, but we are not there yet. What is also a problem is that prosecuting copyright infringement presents a nasty threat to privacy protections.
- jariel 6y ago
  "Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change" - Making private information available as a common activity is not inevitable. - Staling private information is a crime by any account. - The underlying economics are against your logic: it takes many workers, doing real work, to make those things. If they don't get paid, it doesn't get made. - The 'yacht' analogy wrong - the entertainment industry is full of money losing projects, and zillions of people working really hard on stuff because they care and not earning a lot of money. There surely probably more arbitrarily rich people in tech than in entertainment.
joshbetz 6y ago
Luckily the industry is highly unionized, so the losses likely aren’t coming out of the pockets of the crew.
znpy 6y ago
> IdiocyInAction Username checks out.
Technically 6y ago
Engineers get residuals?

autosharp 6y ago

Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits.

IdiocyInAction 6y ago
No, but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future. If the studios get less revenue and have to pay more for enforcing IP law, they have less money for new productions and therefore less jobs and salary for the people producing the content. And I don't see why you should have a right to enjoy the fruits of their labor without paying.
- autosharp 6y ago
  I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future.
  - IdiocyInAction 6y ago
    Without meaning to offend, that is not a good argument. If you rob a store and the employees have to quit their job, saying "I will spend the money somewhere else and that is where they will be working in the future" would not absolve you of the responsibility that you have indirectly damaged their livelihood.
    - autosharp 6y ago
      The money/goods that I rob from a store cost a lot to reproduce, unlike movies. And I would scare people. This is more like me buying from store A than from store B. Am I robbing store B? Surely not giving to charity is worse than any other economic reallocation?
      - VonGallifrey 6y ago
        If store B is actually the black market then you actually did steal from the one producing whatever you bought or possibly from store A. What do you mean by your first sentence? I am fairly sure that movies do actually cost quite a lot to produce.
        autosharp 6y ago
        On your second point I mean that there is zero marginal cost to produce a movie. To me, that makes that it cannot be compared to stealing e.g. a bag of M&M's.
        VonGallifrey 6y ago
        I would bet that the marginal cost of that movie is actually higher than the cents it costs to produce that bag of M&M's. Even if the marginal cost of movies is 0 the cost of a bag of M&M is so low it might as well be 0. Does that now justify stealing the bag of M&M? No. That does not even matter since looking at marginal cost of a movie makes no sense. Do you want to see movies? If yes then pay for them, if no then simply don't watch them. Justifying stealing isn't the way to go.
  - VonGallifrey 6y ago
    How fast would you be able to switch the industry you are working in? I would guess that a lot of the jobs that are discussed in this thread are fairly specialised ones and if that industry would disappear they would be out of work.
    - autosharp 6y ago
      The economic re-allocation doesn't have to be overnight or even in a single decade. It isn't as if the revenue suddenly goes to zero and the industry is nuked.
      - VonGallifrey 6y ago
        No matter how long it will take they will have to start fresh and whatever experience, knowledge and education they had becomes useless. Much more likely they simply become unemployed and stay that way. That is an awful lot of time wasted of their lives.
        autosharp 6y ago
        It doesn't. Some people retire, some people leave the industry because they prefer something else, etc. All that needs to happen is that not all of them are being replaced.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  That suppositions might carry some weight if Hollywood Accounting didn't deny every penny possible to those same people. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
  - jefftk 6y ago
    The people we're talking about are paid in normal ways, and not via "percentage of the profits, which there will never be" etc
    - ric2b 6y ago
      So this doesn't really impact them much after all. Until we see publishers closing doors due to lack of profits this argument doesn't really work.
      - jefftk 6y ago
        Something that affects profitability will change how many projects are worth doing, which will affect demand for their skills. Greater demand means greater ability to negotiate higher pay, and vice versa.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- danShumway 6y ago
  > but the second-order effects of you not paying may very well affect them in the future I'm not a copyright abolitionist, but I'm curious what the second-order effects are to giving money to companies like Disney that are using that money to expand IP laws, buy up competitors, and impose one specific view of cinema on the entire market? People should obey laws because generally it's a good idea in a functioning society to obey laws. But to the extent that people can deprive companies like Disney of revenue without breaking the law, I kind of feel like they should do so. Not just by avoiding their products, but by making it harder for them to make money in general. It would be good at this point for companies like Disney to fail and for the media ecosystem to become more diverse. There are extremely negative effects that come from allowing one corporation to own so much culture. I'm not going to break the law, but I'm also not going to lose sleep over Disney the corporation losing profits, because I want Disney to lose money, and I want them to produce less content. I don't want Disney to be the biggest media producer on the market, they're crowding other people out and using their leverage to control things they shouldn't be able to control.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
"No yacht for me, no more movies for you."
jariel 6y ago
"Those people are not making less if I don't pay for a movie. The marginal revenue is all yacht money profits" The byzantine logic here on a supposedly 'smart site' really goes sideways on ideological issues were people have a) some ideology and b) they want it for free. The failure of your comment is really quite evident: basically 'every purchaser' could make the same statement about 'marginal revenue' in which case, if nobody bought the content, then, there would be no content and no yachts.
- ric2b 6y ago
  And if everyone sold their stocks the economy would crumble and millions of people would be out in the streets and lose their retirement money, should we make selling stocks a crime?
rhino369 6y ago
On one single movie, no, but the expected revenue for a movie informs their negotiations (and the demand for their services). The reason high tens of millions of dollars are spend on VX for blockbusters is because they make a lot of revenue.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  If what you’re saying so strictly true, yearly movie budgets would have been dropping year over year. With the obvious exception on the pandemic, is this what is happening? Pay of individuals working on set, which the exception of huge name actors, is not really impacted by total movie revenue and they don’t often get dividends. Once the fixed cost is covered, which for most big movies it easily is, the rest is the gravy train for the investors.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

Minimum wagers aren't who's buying ever-racheting copyright laws, via campaign funds.

IdiocyInAction 6y ago
They may not be buying them, but I've done some research on this in the past and IP law is widely supported by content creators, even those who make little money. I personally also think that copyright laws as they exist right now are not optimal, but I think that pretending that "rich people yacht money" is all they are good for is also not a good thing.

woofie11 6y ago

I already don't enjoy many big-budget productions. I find niche Youtubers catering to my interests to be a better use of my time -- recently, we've been binging on 3Blue1Brown. I'm also finding very little relation between production budget (which mostly goes into things like SFX) and my enjoyment. Some of my favorite films were very low budget, from Dr. Horrible to some Bruce Campbell flicks. Good writing makes a huge difference. Decent acting and performance makes a bit of difference. Replacing all the SFX with sixties-era Star Trek SFX wouldn't make a wit of difference to my enjoyment. There is a correlation between finding good writers and having big budgets -- if you're dropping $300 million to make a film you might as well hire good writers -- but it's not a super-strong correlation.

IdiocyInAction 6y ago
Then don't watch those movies. The fact is, many people enjoy these things - there's market research on that - and you are not the target audience. The sum amount of enjoyment from a big budget production is much higher than what 3B1B produces (who I also like!). And that enjoyment would not exist if not for IP law.
- woofie11 6y ago
  I could live with that if you didn't try to impose their values on me. I want to be free to write whatever code I want in the privacy of my own bedroom. I want to be free to understand my democratic government institutions. I want to be able to reverse-engineer things I own. I want to understand the world around me fully, and completely, to within the limits of my intellect. I want to build school systems where kids learn to understand their world. If your enjoyment of big-budget movies doesn't infringe on that, go ahead and enjoy them. Since it does, I'll fight every step of the way. Perhaps I'll lose, but I'll fight.
  - smhenderson 6y ago
    Sorry if I'm missing something here, but how does my enjoyment of a big budget movie correlate with I want to build school systems where kids learn to understand their world. What harm am I causing these kids that I am apparently unaware of?

mumblemumble 6y ago

Do VFX artists and engineers get residuals?

OscarTheGrinch 6y ago

The film & recorded music industries were built in an era of information scarcity, maintained by tightly controlled distribution. We now live in an era where information is infinite and everywhere. Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change.

IdiocyInAction 6y ago
Information is infinite, but creating it is still not free. Creating the media that people consume via these streaming services costs millions of dollars and manhours. You are right that media companies have to adapt to the changing times, but simply saying that it should all be freely available is not a solution. I can imagine a future where this may be a feasible solution, but we are not there yet. What is also a problem is that prosecuting copyright infringement presents a nasty threat to privacy protections.
jariel 6y ago
"Criminalising people isn't going to turn back this fundamental sea change" - Making private information available as a common activity is not inevitable. - Staling private information is a crime by any account. - The underlying economics are against your logic: it takes many workers, doing real work, to make those things. If they don't get paid, it doesn't get made. - The 'yacht' analogy wrong - the entertainment industry is full of money losing projects, and zillions of people working really hard on stuff because they care and not earning a lot of money. There surely probably more arbitrarily rich people in tech than in entertainment.

joshbetz 6y ago

Luckily the industry is highly unionized, so the losses likely aren’t coming out of the pockets of the crew.

znpy 6y ago

> IdiocyInAction Username checks out.

Technically 6y ago

Engineers get residuals?