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Actually, I believe that piracy needs to be stopped by education, enforcement, and innovation. > There's no reason the studios individually or better yet, coll
by earbitscom 15y ago
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.
- tux1968 15y agoThanks 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.
- earbitscom 15y agoLouis 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.
- jonhendry 15y ago