5 ms·

Film Industry => in about half the time, Sony Entertainment, by far the most aggressive company when it comes to copyrights.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon. I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back. With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue. >With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. Meh. Similar to music production, filmmaking itself has become ever more affordable on the technical and on the software side, DaVinci Resolve is available for free (and the Adobe suite for ~60€ a month), and thanks to digitalization distribution is relatively painless too (since you don't have to produce and copy literal reels of physical film, but can ship around Blu-rays or SSDs). A feature-length film however will always need many hundreds to thousands of hours worth of work for everything from planning over shoots to post-production, there isn't much that can be cut there.
      - Asooka 5y ago
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  > I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? It's worth considering there's one tech company that makes its own chips, integrated hardware, operating system, software, and is now also a media studio. As owners of the content, and the entire tech stack, they don't appear to be opposed to DRM.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Are you talking about Sony or Apple?
- alliao 5y ago
  increased vertical integration should be taken into account together with market share because ultimately it destroys competition by holding vantage points to suffocate competition in this instance, producers of distribution should not be content holders let creative be creative, let supply chains be supply chains etc etc i guess one can always add a clause, exemption applies below a certain size etc.
flyinghamster 5y ago
And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.
- lou1306 5y ago
  They were always on their own side, not the "good" one. They defended VCRs because they were a major producer of VHS home equipment, and the ability to record TV shows helped selling said equipment. The fact that they also held the moral high ground is little more than a happy accident. In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.
ticklemyelmo 5y ago
Here's a friendly reminder that Sony put a rootkit on their audio CDs to enforce copyright. They brought the term "rootkit" into public awareness.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? Ideally I'd like to see reform of copyright law to favour corporate giants a bit less, but given how much of a hand those same giants seem to have in the laws that get written I'm not hopeful of that any time soon. I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. I'm still a believer at heart that the internet can be a great democratiser of content, that it can bring down the barriers and middlemen between artists and their audience. Art on the internet should be a participatory thing too in my opinion, not the mindless content consumption that the media companies of yesteryear see it as.

mschuster91 5y ago
> I think a more realistic scenario is rather than a top-down change in the law, a bottom-up approach with a culture change in the general public towards favouring independent content creators who don't employ DRM and other harmful measures and don't stifle creativity with overzealous IP lawsuits is encouraged. In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). Which also explains why the studios insist on ridiculously bullshit in terms of DRM - the banks backing these enormous loans want their money back. With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low and so there is no incentive for studios to invest in DRM, it's simply not worth it any more. The real money for musicians is tour tickets and merch... CD/vinyl sales and streaming income isn't much.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising). I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue. >With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. Meh. Similar to music production, filmmaking itself has become ever more affordable on the technical and on the software side, DaVinci Resolve is available for free (and the Adobe suite for ~60€ a month), and thanks to digitalization distribution is relatively painless too (since you don't have to produce and copy literal reels of physical film, but can ship around Blu-rays or SSDs). A feature-length film however will always need many hundreds to thousands of hours worth of work for everything from planning over shoots to post-production, there isn't much that can be cut there.
    - Asooka 5y ago
oarsinsync 5y ago
> I wonder what can be done to reduce their negative influence on the tech world? It's worth considering there's one tech company that makes its own chips, integrated hardware, operating system, software, and is now also a media studio. As owners of the content, and the entire tech stack, they don't appear to be opposed to DRM.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Are you talking about Sony or Apple?
alliao 5y ago
increased vertical integration should be taken into account together with market share because ultimately it destroys competition by holding vantage points to suffocate competition in this instance, producers of distribution should not be content holders let creative be creative, let supply chains be supply chains etc etc i guess one can always add a clause, exemption applies below a certain size etc.

flyinghamster 5y ago

And to think that Sony was once on the good side, even going to the Supreme Court to defend the VCR. But once they bought a studio, the Hollywood goons took over.

lou1306 5y ago
They were always on their own side, not the "good" one. They defended VCRs because they were a major producer of VHS home equipment, and the ability to record TV shows helped selling said equipment. The fact that they also held the moral high ground is little more than a happy accident. In general, for corporations of then & now, "being good" only matters as long as it aligns, or at least does not interfere with, their sources of income.

ticklemyelmo 5y ago

Here's a friendly reminder that Sony put a rootkit on their audio CDs to enforce copyright. They brought the term "rootkit" into public awareness.