4 ms·

Anti-copying legislation won't work - I grant you that - but this is hardly the extent of all legislative possibility. What the media industries need is a box

by alexqgb 14y ago

Anti-copying legislation won't work - I grant you that - but this is hardly the extent of all legislative possibility. What the media industries need is a box office. A point where people pay up front, then get the show delivered. And if everything is available everywhere all the time, then there needs to be a tax on life that covers the costs of what they do. Essentially , it's about creating a giant pool of money and a giant pool of media. People can stream, copy, play, or have, whatever they like for free. Corporations, on the other hand, must pay. If you're a store, and advertiser, a movie theater, a school, a business, a church - any entity that exists by virtue of a corporate charter must risk loosing that charter if they don't stream everything they touch through an auditable system that is used to distribute the pool of money according to the levels of interest that different things within it attract. Corporate entities, unlike humans, don't (or shouldn't) have 1st or 4th Amendment rights. We should be able to treat them the same way we treat robots: artificial things designed specifically to serve. And corporate entities also operate in the tangible world, and are in a position to collect money to fill the pool through the course of their activities. Essentially, this is a special tax. If a company wants the benefits of operating in a thriving culture (of which there are many) they can do their part to support it by serving as de-facto box offices. This is a rough idea, I know, and one that raises more questions than it answers. And it's not post-copyright in the sense that copyright would still function at the corporate level. What it shows is a way to think about paying for work in a Constitutionally permissible fashion while avoiding the nightmare scenario of total surveillance at the individual level.

ynniv 14y ago
This doesn't seem like a good deal for any involved. As sort of an NEA for movies with a popularity based disbursement instead of money up front. Not only will people complain about additional taxes or special interests (regardless of the long history of public art funding), but the customer (entity responsible for allocating funds) ends up being corporations and institutions. I doubt they will nurture the kind of art that you're looking to protect. What about a voluntary optional pricing system, a la Reznor's Ghosts[1]? Lucas also made a substantial amount of money from merchandising, which is far easier to regulate[2]. Also, box office revenues are still high[3]. That only helps about a hundred films a year, but it still generates healthy revenue for major studios. [1 http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/reznors-one-wee.html http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/re... ] [2 http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-revenue/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-reve...] [3 http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-box-office-record-121231/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-bo...]
- alexqgb 14y ago
  What you're describing is a world with major leagues only. The farm leagues are what drops away, and over time, the whole thing weakens. People at the top right now got their starts in the 1990's Indy boom. What you're seeing now is like the light from a distant galaxy. My point is that the commensurate runway for the here and now is caving in on itself. "But Merchandising" is the worst argument ever, since the range of material that can work in this paradigm is astonishingly narrow. Also, you're not getting reliable information from TorrentFreak. I'm sorry, but these people just aren't going to give you straight story. If they had any integrity, they'd account for inflation (adjusting for that, and the peak Box Office year was actually 2002). Also, they wouldn't cherry-pick by limiting their analysis to box office revenues while ignoring the declines from every other sales channel. Here's a much more realistic look at what life is really like: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/business/la-fi-ct-film-pirate-20100928 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/business/la-fi-ct-fi.... Again, this is the future you're looking at. The starvation that's setting in at this level is what people who care about the future of these mediums should be focused on. What's really awful about this is that vector for piracy isn't people swapping stuff among themselves. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. That's like playing music at parties. It's part of human life. The issue is sites that aggregate pirated content to make money selling advertising. Those are the people I want to see thrown in jail. And I want to fine the living shit out of the advertisers who appear there. Not that they chose the outlets - that's the work of their ad buyers who are invariably third parties. The point is to drive those fuckers out of business too by making sure advertisers suffer enough pain to ensure that their ads aren't being served on illegitimate sites. Once they start having to pay serious fines, they'll stop doing business with people who can't guarantee that their ads won't show up in shitty places. Again, this isn't some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law. This is people building building layers of commercial enterprise around the amazing "free" resource that is pirated IP. I'm sorry, but no fucking way. And this doesn't require an Orwellian police state to deal with. People making money in this scenario all have corporate offices and return addresses (e.g. Grooveshark). All that's needed is an arrest warrant and a hearing.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

by alexqgb 14y ago

ynniv 14y ago

This doesn't seem like a good deal for any involved. As sort of an NEA for movies with a popularity based disbursement instead of money up front. Not only will people complain about additional taxes or special interests (regardless of the long history of public art funding), but the customer (entity responsible for allocating funds) ends up being corporations and institutions. I doubt they will nurture the kind of art that you're looking to protect. What about a voluntary optional pricing system, a la Reznor's Ghosts[1]? Lucas also made a substantial amount of money from merchandising, which is far easier to regulate[2]. Also, box office revenues are still high[3]. That only helps about a hundred films a year, but it still generates healthy revenue for major studios. [1 http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/reznors-one-wee.html http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/re... ] [2 http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-revenue/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-reve...] [3 http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-box-office-record-121231/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-bo...]

alexqgb 14y ago
What you're describing is a world with major leagues only. The farm leagues are what drops away, and over time, the whole thing weakens. People at the top right now got their starts in the 1990's Indy boom. What you're seeing now is like the light from a distant galaxy. My point is that the commensurate runway for the here and now is caving in on itself. "But Merchandising" is the worst argument ever, since the range of material that can work in this paradigm is astonishingly narrow. Also, you're not getting reliable information from TorrentFreak. I'm sorry, but these people just aren't going to give you straight story. If they had any integrity, they'd account for inflation (adjusting for that, and the peak Box Office year was actually 2002). Also, they wouldn't cherry-pick by limiting their analysis to box office revenues while ignoring the declines from every other sales channel. Here's a much more realistic look at what life is really like: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/business/la-fi-ct-film-pirate-20100928 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/business/la-fi-ct-fi.... Again, this is the future you're looking at. The starvation that's setting in at this level is what people who care about the future of these mediums should be focused on. What's really awful about this is that vector for piracy isn't people swapping stuff among themselves. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. That's like playing music at parties. It's part of human life. The issue is sites that aggregate pirated content to make money selling advertising. Those are the people I want to see thrown in jail. And I want to fine the living shit out of the advertisers who appear there. Not that they chose the outlets - that's the work of their ad buyers who are invariably third parties. The point is to drive those fuckers out of business too by making sure advertisers suffer enough pain to ensure that their ads aren't being served on illegitimate sites. Once they start having to pay serious fines, they'll stop doing business with people who can't guarantee that their ads won't show up in shitty places. Again, this isn't some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law. This is people building building layers of commercial enterprise around the amazing "free" resource that is pirated IP. I'm sorry, but no fucking way. And this doesn't require an Orwellian police state to deal with. People making money in this scenario all have corporate offices and return addresses (e.g. Grooveshark). All that's needed is an arrest warrant and a hearing.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]