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MPAA: The Cloud Is A Threat To Us And The Best Response Is Censorship

75 points by Steer 14y ago

praptak 14y ago
No sympathy for business that depends so heavily on obstructing innovation that it requires special laws. The enforcement of these laws is a clear case of socialized costs with privatized profit.
- bryogenic 14y ago
  See also: Car dealerships
  - astrodust 14y ago
    At least you can haggle there. Real estate brokers get a percentage cut no matter what you do if you involve them.
  - praptak 14y ago
    At least they don't request that every transport company has to police the cargo on their behalf and remove anything that the dealers say is a car (to be later decided that maybe it was not a car after all, or maybe a car but one that does not threaten their monopoly.)
- rayiner 14y ago
  Downloading copies of "Gears of War" is not "innovation", and the laws against copying aren't any more "special" than the laws against fraud or embezzlement or any of the other ways of violating peoples' property rights that aren't in the Bible. Our whole system of existence depends fundamentally on people being able to depend on the government to protect their rights. This is true even when technology renders makes it easy to violate those rights.
  - thedufer 14y ago
    Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. We need to stop making these silly analogies. Only then will we be able to attack the real problem - that we have no historical guidance on how to tackle piracy, and have not yet come up with a way that makes sense.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      > Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. This is a ridiculous trope. Say I take a Luis Vuitton bag from a store, leaving an amount of money that precisely compensates LVMH for the cost of replacing and restocking the bag, along with the fair rental value of the bag during the time until it is restocked. No harm no foul right? LVMH has not been materially harmed, right? They are in exactly the same position they would be if I hadn't taken the bag. Since I compensated them for the marginal cost of the bag, all they have lost is the potential profit on a potential sale, and there is after all no guarantee I could have afforded the bag anyway, right? In our system, we don't measure harm in terms of the cost to put someone back to the status quo ante. We also include the expected profit. E.g. if you breach a contract with someone, which causes them to lose $200, you don't just owe them the $200, you owe them the $200 plus their expected profit on the contract. We do this because in our system, people are entitled to the benefit of the bargain. People are entitled to profit from the difference between what the market will pay for a good and the cost of producing the good, even when the marginal cost of that good approaches zero. Re: analogies, analogies are tremendously valuable. They show us how things that seem different can actually be understood in terms of familiar concepts. The harm from copying is actually a perfect scenario in which analogies are useful. The common refrain among people who are pro-piracy is that the marginal cost of a copy approaches zero, so "no harm" is done by copying. This is based on the fallacy that digital copying is somehow sui generis. Yet, analogizing to other situations shows us that in the rest of the law, we don't protect the marginal cost--we protect the sale price. We protect peoples' right to profit from the market price of their products. The fact that the marginal cost of producing a good is 35% of the sale price (iPhone) or 5% of the sale price (LVMH bag), or 1% of the sale price (textbook) or 0.1% of the sale price (an MP3) is irrelevant.
slater 14y ago
The joy of remembering I installed that cloud -> my butt extension. “My butt also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.”
joejohnson 14y ago
Whenever I hear someone use the phrase "The Cloud" I replace it with "some computers".
- shared4you 14y ago
  I replace it with "the Internet".
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I replace it with "marketing people."
    - chris_mahan 14y ago
      I replace it with "Computers I don't control that the NSA makes copies of."
  - astrodust 14y ago
    Or "Information Superhighway"?
- tyler_ball 14y ago
  https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt I automatically see it replaced with "my butt".
ericcholis 14y ago
“The cloud also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.” Sorry, am I to understand that you are upset because pirates did something for free that you could have charged for? Not that I defend piracy, but this is the same song as VCRs, DVD burners, Napster, etc... This argument is rehashed to the point where it's laughable, just like everything else that comes out of Hollywood.
- resu_nimda 14y ago
  Yeah, it's nothing new, but it continues to amuse in a rather depressing way. How long until the general public accepts disruption of the status quo as the new status quo? Are we dreaming to think that that will actually happen, are change resistance and hoarding immutable properties of human nature?
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    A related question: will we, ourselves, be unwittingly holding back the next next big thing in 30-40 years?
- douglasisshiny 14y ago
  It is ridiculous. This is endemic to the entertainment industry. And you're right, they (companies that the MPAA represents) have had a long time and plenty of great examples to create a service and charge for it. Pirates aren't costing them money -- they are costing themselves money. I'm reminded of this: "HBO co-president Eric Kessler has said he thinks the move away from traditional television to an internet-based model is just a fad that will pass – a 'temporary phenomenon' tied to the down economy" [1]. This is in reference to Game of Thrones being the most pirated show two seasons in a row. So in 2012, a major entertainment company's president thought a move to an internet delivery model is a recession induced fad... 1. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/HBO-Boss-Thinks-This-Whole-Internet-Video-Thing-is-a-Fad-119442 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/HBO-Boss-Thinks-This-Whol... (the original forbes article seems to have changed)
- anigbrowl 14y ago
maligree 14y ago
I misread the title as "we don't understand this shit so clearly we gotta fight it".
sabat 14y ago
Business model. You need a new one. Bits are not physical property.
jeremiep 14y ago
I'm waiting for the reply article "We The People: The MPAA is a threat to us all and the best response is to make it illegal".
- largesse 14y ago
  Go for it.
csallen 14y ago
Among other things, people are driven by incentives. This includes the fine folks at the MPAA and RIAA. Given that their primary goal is making money, and that rampant piracy causes them to lose money (or so they believe), they clearly have a strong incentive to keep piracy in check, as well as any forms of innovation that make piracy easier. If you account for a few other universal psychological factors (cognitive dissonance, fear of loss, human short-sightedness, desire for consistency) as well as situational factors (lots of money with which to hire lawyers and lobbyists), their actions are unsurprising. Expected, even. Does this make them right? Of course not. But that's irrelevant. What matters is that we as human beings comprehend our nature and strive to create systems that account for all of its idiosyncrasies. We can spend all day complaining about the immoral and illogical bad guys, but at the end of the day, human nature is human nature. If a system exists that allows for and incentives bad behavior, people will engage in bad behavior. Period. In this particular conflict, we should be spending our effort fighting for a government that: (a) Understands that no industry has a guaranteed "right" to continued profit in the face of technological/market changes. (b) Affirms and upholds the true purposes of copyright and patent law as originally intended: to protect and encourage innovation for the good of the people, not to make certain people rich. (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo) Of course, this is all easier said than done. But it's good to at least focus our efforts in the right direction.
- Gormo 14y ago
  > (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo) I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the particular problem at hand here, or how it's necessarily consistent with the otherwise clear and valid argument you're making about the nature of incentives and the functioning of institutions as systems. What does "the influence of money on political process" consist of in the status quo, by what means could it be limited, and what new equilibrium do you expect to emerge if and when it is limited?
  - csallen 14y ago
    Having lots of money gives you significant advantage in dealing with our government in its current incarnation. This is especially true with the judicial branch (hiring better attorneys, surviving longer trials, etc) and the legislative as well (lobbyists, etc). I think it's pretty obvious that a contest of law should never be decided or even influenced by which party is financially better off. The fact that it can be means the system can be gamed, more or less, by those with spare money to spend. Hence, you see big organizations like the RIAA and MPAA funding massive efforts to get alleged piracy perpetrators "settle or be sued". Should not recipients of these threats feel they have a fair chance to win should the case go to court? And would the RIAA and MPAA engage in such a strategy of their money afforded them no significant advantage? I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what the fix is. But I would challenge anyone who says it's impossible to design a governmental system that limits/erases the influence of money.
segmondy 14y ago
MPAA is threat to tech industry and freedom. Tech is worth more than movie industry. When will we stand up and stomp them down?
farmdawgnation 14y ago
I have difficulty reconciling the community of creative professionals who are skilled enough to create the environment that amazing works of cinema emerge from and the individuals who make comments like this. Are they really so unimaginative that their solution is "filter anything that remotely resembles sketchy"? That philosophy applied to a city like New York would prevent people from entering the city solely on the accusation that someone at one time maybe broke the law. On what planet would someone think that the value gained by implementing a policy like this would outweigh the potential for abuse and for beautiful content (read: potential inspiration for new movies) to be blacked out by a censorship screen? This doesn't even speak to the massive PR debacle that always erupts from comments like this, be it about a VCR or "the cloud." While we're on this topic, what's the definition of insanity again?
- Spooky23 14y ago
  The money men in Hollywood aren't creative people. They are managers and attorneys. When they don't want things to happen, they can draw upon the resources of the unions who are stakeholders ensuring that congress gets the message.
heili 14y ago
If at the turn of the 20th century there had been an organization, say the BWAA (Buggy Whip Association of America), I'm sure that organization would've been lobbying for the exact same kind of anti-progress laws regarding the development of automobile technology. The shame of it is that technological innovation could actually be used by the MPAA to produce things that people want to pay money for. Instead what we have is a bunch of soon-to-be fossils thinking that they will be the first people ever in the history of humans to successfully stand in the way of progress and not be steamrolled into oblivion.
RTigger 14y ago
My favourite comment on the original post - "Old Man Yells At Cloud" http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008...
meric 14y ago
Oh, so it was them! Hong Kong was trying to pass a draconian copyright law which meant that satire of existing copyrighted works became illegal, as well as giving the option for the government to pursue offenders on behalf of copyright holders - effectively meaning the government can pursue citizens producing political satirical works. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-foul-over-copyright-bill http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-fo...

75 points by Steer 14y ago

No sympathy for business that depends so heavily on obstructing innovation that it requires special laws. The enforcement of these laws is a clear case of socialized costs with privatized profit.

bryogenic 14y ago
See also: Car dealerships
- astrodust 14y ago
  At least you can haggle there. Real estate brokers get a percentage cut no matter what you do if you involve them.
- praptak 14y ago
  At least they don't request that every transport company has to police the cargo on their behalf and remove anything that the dealers say is a car (to be later decided that maybe it was not a car after all, or maybe a car but one that does not threaten their monopoly.)
rayiner 14y ago
Downloading copies of "Gears of War" is not "innovation", and the laws against copying aren't any more "special" than the laws against fraud or embezzlement or any of the other ways of violating peoples' property rights that aren't in the Bible. Our whole system of existence depends fundamentally on people being able to depend on the government to protect their rights. This is true even when technology renders makes it easy to violate those rights.
- thedufer 14y ago
  Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. We need to stop making these silly analogies. Only then will we be able to attack the real problem - that we have no historical guidance on how to tackle piracy, and have not yet come up with a way that makes sense.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    > Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale. This is a ridiculous trope. Say I take a Luis Vuitton bag from a store, leaving an amount of money that precisely compensates LVMH for the cost of replacing and restocking the bag, along with the fair rental value of the bag during the time until it is restocked. No harm no foul right? LVMH has not been materially harmed, right? They are in exactly the same position they would be if I hadn't taken the bag. Since I compensated them for the marginal cost of the bag, all they have lost is the potential profit on a potential sale, and there is after all no guarantee I could have afforded the bag anyway, right? In our system, we don't measure harm in terms of the cost to put someone back to the status quo ante. We also include the expected profit. E.g. if you breach a contract with someone, which causes them to lose $200, you don't just owe them the $200, you owe them the $200 plus their expected profit on the contract. We do this because in our system, people are entitled to the benefit of the bargain. People are entitled to profit from the difference between what the market will pay for a good and the cost of producing the good, even when the marginal cost of that good approaches zero. Re: analogies, analogies are tremendously valuable. They show us how things that seem different can actually be understood in terms of familiar concepts. The harm from copying is actually a perfect scenario in which analogies are useful. The common refrain among people who are pro-piracy is that the marginal cost of a copy approaches zero, so "no harm" is done by copying. This is based on the fallacy that digital copying is somehow sui generis. Yet, analogizing to other situations shows us that in the rest of the law, we don't protect the marginal cost--we protect the sale price. We protect peoples' right to profit from the market price of their products. The fact that the marginal cost of producing a good is 35% of the sale price (iPhone) or 5% of the sale price (LVMH bag), or 1% of the sale price (textbook) or 0.1% of the sale price (an MP3) is irrelevant.

slater 14y ago

The joy of remembering I installed that cloud -> my butt extension. “My butt also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.”

joejohnson 14y ago

Whenever I hear someone use the phrase "The Cloud" I replace it with "some computers".

shared4you 14y ago
I replace it with "the Internet".
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I replace it with "marketing people."
  - chris_mahan 14y ago
    I replace it with "Computers I don't control that the NSA makes copies of."
- astrodust 14y ago
  Or "Information Superhighway"?
tyler_ball 14y ago
https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt I automatically see it replaced with "my butt".

ericcholis 14y ago

“The cloud also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.” Sorry, am I to understand that you are upset because pirates did something for free that you could have charged for? Not that I defend piracy, but this is the same song as VCRs, DVD burners, Napster, etc... This argument is rehashed to the point where it's laughable, just like everything else that comes out of Hollywood.

resu_nimda 14y ago
Yeah, it's nothing new, but it continues to amuse in a rather depressing way. How long until the general public accepts disruption of the status quo as the new status quo? Are we dreaming to think that that will actually happen, are change resistance and hoarding immutable properties of human nature?
- nitrogen 14y ago
  A related question: will we, ourselves, be unwittingly holding back the next next big thing in 30-40 years?
douglasisshiny 14y ago
It is ridiculous. This is endemic to the entertainment industry. And you're right, they (companies that the MPAA represents) have had a long time and plenty of great examples to create a service and charge for it. Pirates aren't costing them money -- they are costing themselves money. I'm reminded of this: "HBO co-president Eric Kessler has said he thinks the move away from traditional television to an internet-based model is just a fad that will pass – a 'temporary phenomenon' tied to the down economy" [1]. This is in reference to Game of Thrones being the most pirated show two seasons in a row. So in 2012, a major entertainment company's president thought a move to an internet delivery model is a recession induced fad... 1. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/HBO-Boss-Thinks-This-Whole-Internet-Video-Thing-is-a-Fad-119442 http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/HBO-Boss-Thinks-This-Whol... (the original forbes article seems to have changed)
anigbrowl 14y ago

maligree 14y ago

I misread the title as "we don't understand this shit so clearly we gotta fight it".

sabat 14y ago

Business model. You need a new one. Bits are not physical property.

jeremiep 14y ago

I'm waiting for the reply article "We The People: The MPAA is a threat to us all and the best response is to make it illegal".

largesse 14y ago
Go for it.

csallen 14y ago

Among other things, people are driven by incentives. This includes the fine folks at the MPAA and RIAA. Given that their primary goal is making money, and that rampant piracy causes them to lose money (or so they believe), they clearly have a strong incentive to keep piracy in check, as well as any forms of innovation that make piracy easier. If you account for a few other universal psychological factors (cognitive dissonance, fear of loss, human short-sightedness, desire for consistency) as well as situational factors (lots of money with which to hire lawyers and lobbyists), their actions are unsurprising. Expected, even. Does this make them right? Of course not. But that's irrelevant. What matters is that we as human beings comprehend our nature and strive to create systems that account for all of its idiosyncrasies. We can spend all day complaining about the immoral and illogical bad guys, but at the end of the day, human nature is human nature. If a system exists that allows for and incentives bad behavior, people will engage in bad behavior. Period. In this particular conflict, we should be spending our effort fighting for a government that: (a) Understands that no industry has a guaranteed "right" to continued profit in the face of technological/market changes. (b) Affirms and upholds the true purposes of copyright and patent law as originally intended: to protect and encourage innovation for the good of the people, not to make certain people rich. (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo) Of course, this is all easier said than done. But it's good to at least focus our efforts in the right direction.

Gormo 14y ago
> (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo) I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the particular problem at hand here, or how it's necessarily consistent with the otherwise clear and valid argument you're making about the nature of incentives and the functioning of institutions as systems. What does "the influence of money on political process" consist of in the status quo, by what means could it be limited, and what new equilibrium do you expect to emerge if and when it is limited?
- csallen 14y ago
  Having lots of money gives you significant advantage in dealing with our government in its current incarnation. This is especially true with the judicial branch (hiring better attorneys, surviving longer trials, etc) and the legislative as well (lobbyists, etc). I think it's pretty obvious that a contest of law should never be decided or even influenced by which party is financially better off. The fact that it can be means the system can be gamed, more or less, by those with spare money to spend. Hence, you see big organizations like the RIAA and MPAA funding massive efforts to get alleged piracy perpetrators "settle or be sued". Should not recipients of these threats feel they have a fair chance to win should the case go to court? And would the RIAA and MPAA engage in such a strategy of their money afforded them no significant advantage? I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what the fix is. But I would challenge anyone who says it's impossible to design a governmental system that limits/erases the influence of money.

segmondy 14y ago

MPAA is threat to tech industry and freedom. Tech is worth more than movie industry. When will we stand up and stomp them down?

farmdawgnation 14y ago

I have difficulty reconciling the community of creative professionals who are skilled enough to create the environment that amazing works of cinema emerge from and the individuals who make comments like this. Are they really so unimaginative that their solution is "filter anything that remotely resembles sketchy"? That philosophy applied to a city like New York would prevent people from entering the city solely on the accusation that someone at one time maybe broke the law. On what planet would someone think that the value gained by implementing a policy like this would outweigh the potential for abuse and for beautiful content (read: potential inspiration for new movies) to be blacked out by a censorship screen? This doesn't even speak to the massive PR debacle that always erupts from comments like this, be it about a VCR or "the cloud." While we're on this topic, what's the definition of insanity again?

Spooky23 14y ago
The money men in Hollywood aren't creative people. They are managers and attorneys. When they don't want things to happen, they can draw upon the resources of the unions who are stakeholders ensuring that congress gets the message.

heili 14y ago

If at the turn of the 20th century there had been an organization, say the BWAA (Buggy Whip Association of America), I'm sure that organization would've been lobbying for the exact same kind of anti-progress laws regarding the development of automobile technology. The shame of it is that technological innovation could actually be used by the MPAA to produce things that people want to pay money for. Instead what we have is a bunch of soon-to-be fossils thinking that they will be the first people ever in the history of humans to successfully stand in the way of progress and not be steamrolled into oblivion.

RTigger 14y ago

My favourite comment on the original post - "Old Man Yells At Cloud" http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008...

meric 14y ago

Oh, so it was them! Hong Kong was trying to pass a draconian copyright law which meant that satire of existing copyrighted works became illegal, as well as giving the option for the government to pursue offenders on behalf of copyright holders - effectively meaning the government can pursue citizens producing political satirical works. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-foul-over-copyright-bill http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-fo...