5 ms·

Dear Congress: It's time for a real fix on unlocking and the DMCA

63 points by sinak 14y ago

gscott 14y ago
Realistically once the DMCA gets in the process of being modified then the studios will get into action co-opt the process. Better to leave it as it is then open up for something worse.
- shmerl 14y ago
  Studios will always try to create all kind of insane laws. They already did. They need to be fought and repealed.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  So, just push into the same table. The studios have a legitimate interest in protecting their business model, just as tech people have a legitimate interest in more open business models. Engaging with them is likely to be far more productive than of demonizing them as incomprehensible and all-powerful alien beings. I am on first name terms with the CEO and execs of a mid-size film studio with a good number of Oscar nominations and statuettes to its credit. They have no particular love for DRM or desire to screw people, but they do want to monetize their content. I think this is reasonable considering that they sign their names to checks for tens of millions of dollar so that good films can go into production. Gripe about Hollywood not producing great films all you like, but the reality is that a) almost everyone I know still enjoys watching good movies and b) good movies typically cost quite a lot of money to make, and c) it's a very high-risk business model in that films are more likely than not to lose money. If someone were to suggest some innovative methods of monetizing content while simultaneously making it more accessible to a wider audience, that'd be very interesting. You can assume we're talking about young and tech-savvy people here, as opposed to people who spend all their time at the country club or on the golf course.
  - kefka 14y ago
    There is no equal footing here. Going head to head in a discussion forum will do nothing, as long as money trades hands in the back via lobbyists or in writing bills for politicians. Piracy, in one way, is getting shit for free. Another way, it IS the balancing factor mass media must consider. We multitudes do retain the power, but are told that we are small and cannot effect much change. Except, we have allied and defeated the voting of some pretty horrific laws regarding the Internet and technology. Do I believe that the major studios would have a honest to goodness discussion regarding copyright and piracy antagonism? No. The studios would rather pay for laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, or slip the US a SOPA.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      So lobby right alongside the. As noted (but ignored) earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg is in the process of setting up a Tech PAC. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324105204578384781088854740.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732410520457838... Do I believe that the major studios would have a honest to goodness discussion regarding copyright and piracy antagonism? No. The studios would rather pay for laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, or slip the US a SOPA. I'm offering you a communication channel to studio executives right now. I post regularly about these topics on HN. How about telling me what you think might be a better business model than the existing one? right now, film studios depend on DVD sales to make their investment back, because relatively few films break even at the box office; when you see those big numbers for weekend grosses you have to recall that over half of that revenue stays within the theater chains (film studios are forbidden by law to operate their own chains [1]), and up to half half of the cost of producing a film is in the marketing campaign, which has to be spent before knowing how the film will perform. So rare are box-office profits, in fact, that there's a saying within the film industry that a theatrical run is basically the marketing campaign for the DVD - people are much more likely to take a chance on renting or buying a movie that they know was in theaters (even if they didn't go to see it in a theater). The difficulty and expense of promoting a theatrical run is what distinguishes a film as a 'real movie' in the eyes of consumers. You could make the most awesome little film ever, but if you launch it straight to video your chances of finding an audience are pathetically low - not quite zero, but close enough that you'll have a hard time raising any money. So there's the problem: you need a strong brand to be perceived as a 'movie' and make your money back in the secondary market (DVD sales and streaming), but it's hard to get that strong brand without spending a lot of money up front on marketing or waiting years and years on the off-chance that you'll build an audience through word-of-mouth. If you finance the production of multiple films, your winners are going to subsidize the losses of the underperformers, even after all the 'Hollywood accounting' tricks. It's a pretty tough industry, which is one reason that every Oscar ceremony includes multiple speeches about never giving up no matter how long it takes. Now the problem for Hollywood is that piracy is almost all downside risk; you can offer your film for free on the torrents and use that to build an audience, but that only works if your production costs are very very low. Past a few thousand dollars, you'd better have a plan for how you're going to recoup the money. In the music industry, the new model is that you give away the music or sell it very cheaply, and make the money back on live performance, because people will pay a lot of money to see their idols perform in person. (This kinda sucks if you are the sort of musician who doesn't want to or can't easily play live, but that's who arts grants are for.) Unfortunately, that model doesn't work for movies because the vast majority of films do not translate well to stage performance; and it is also true that very few people will pay to buy a movie theater ticket or purchase a DVD of a film they've already seen for free. Within the industry, this is a particular problem for actors: an actor who does to many TV shows stats to see a decline in his/her bookability for film roles, because many years' worth or aggregated data suggests that people are reluctant to buy tickets for actors that they're used to seeing for nothing on TV - Tina Fey is the latest victim of this phenomenon. To quote an entertainment writer [2] 'Hollywood Boulevard is littered with the corpses of TV actor careers that almost were.' TV is a ghetto, and I promise you that the Internet is even more of a ghetto. Because the barriers to entry are so low on the Internet, the residual income prospects for film producers are also very low - much worse than for musicians, because the cost of producing a film is much higher than the cost of producing a music recording. The most expensive album ever produced was Guns'n'Roses Chinese Democracy, which took 15 years and the breakup of the band before making it to store shelves in 2008 [3]. Total cost? $13 million. That's the worst fiscal trainwreck in music industry history, but by Hollywood standards that's a typical budget for an Indie hit with a famous lead and two character actors. Big Hollywood projects routinely risk 10 times that amount. Now when you consider that even conservative estimates of industry income lost to piracy are measured in billions, there's a lot of pressure on the MPAA from producers to stem those losses. Now I hate Disney's copyright lobbying just as much as you do, if not more, but that is not the fault of the individual movie producers whose movies fail to break even. But tech people don't like legislative approaches, don't like DRM, and frequently refuse to give the film industry the time of day when invited to do so. If you won't even attempt to engage, why should they? If you could get over your disbelief that the industry would like to discover a solution that works for both producers and consumers, then what would you suggest? 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict.... 2. http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/9-tv-actors-who-could-go-from-small-screen-players-to-big-screen-stars-in-2013.php http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/9-tv-actors-who... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Democracy 4. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php You should take inflation into account here as well; a discount rate of about 5%/year is a good rule of thumb.
  - shmerl 14y ago
    There is no need to "demonize" those who created DMCA 1201 - it's clear that they did it in bad faith, to protect unethical business practices such as DRM which is used to restrain the innovation in a whole range of areas (and which doesn't prevent any piracy). All this pile of garbage needs to be strongly opposed by the public. And primarily on ethical basis, which is commonly ignored in the context of DRM.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >If someone were to suggest some innovative methods of monetizing content while simultaneously making it more accessible to a wider audience, that'd be very interesting. You're talking about business models rather than the DMCA, but let's go with it. Maybe there's something there. Here's Paul Graham: "[T]he record labels, [] are effectively a rogue state with nuclear weapons. There is nothing we or anyone else can do to protect you from them, except warn you not to start startups that touch label music."[1] [1]http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html Hollywood pretty much falls into the same category. You do something novel, they sue you. That's a problem. Asking for new business models on a message board... is not very likely to be fruitful. Thinking up that stuff is work. A lot of times you don't even know whether it'll be effective until you spend six months implementing and testing it. And people want to get paid, right? Well, hackers are people. And we get paid when we make something that succeeds, not when we try to implement something ridiculously cool but go out of business because of a lawsuit before anyone can even try it. So big surprise, there are thousands of start-ups not working on anything that could help Hollywood, because they don't want to get lawyered into the dirt. You understand that we don't have a budget for that; the possibility of a lawsuit means nobody is going to touch it with a pole, because there are a million other things with a much lower risk of that. So this is a "let us help you" kind of a situation. Hackers love to make things. A lot of us watch movies. We aren't the bad guys; we get paid, remember? We buy stuff. You don't see a lot of epic shit happening in that space though, do you? Because we're not allowed to do it. That's what the DMCA does. It gives the veto to the guys who would have vetoed the VCR. Nobody can tell you what people will invent before they invent it. That's not how it works. You have to let it happen first.

63 points by sinak 14y ago

Realistically once the DMCA gets in the process of being modified then the studios will get into action co-opt the process. Better to leave it as it is then open up for something worse.

shmerl 14y ago
Studios will always try to create all kind of insane laws. They already did. They need to be fought and repealed.
anigbrowl 14y ago
So, just push into the same table. The studios have a legitimate interest in protecting their business model, just as tech people have a legitimate interest in more open business models. Engaging with them is likely to be far more productive than of demonizing them as incomprehensible and all-powerful alien beings. I am on first name terms with the CEO and execs of a mid-size film studio with a good number of Oscar nominations and statuettes to its credit. They have no particular love for DRM or desire to screw people, but they do want to monetize their content. I think this is reasonable considering that they sign their names to checks for tens of millions of dollar so that good films can go into production. Gripe about Hollywood not producing great films all you like, but the reality is that a) almost everyone I know still enjoys watching good movies and b) good movies typically cost quite a lot of money to make, and c) it's a very high-risk business model in that films are more likely than not to lose money. If someone were to suggest some innovative methods of monetizing content while simultaneously making it more accessible to a wider audience, that'd be very interesting. You can assume we're talking about young and tech-savvy people here, as opposed to people who spend all their time at the country club or on the golf course.
- kefka 14y ago
  There is no equal footing here. Going head to head in a discussion forum will do nothing, as long as money trades hands in the back via lobbyists or in writing bills for politicians. Piracy, in one way, is getting shit for free. Another way, it IS the balancing factor mass media must consider. We multitudes do retain the power, but are told that we are small and cannot effect much change. Except, we have allied and defeated the voting of some pretty horrific laws regarding the Internet and technology. Do I believe that the major studios would have a honest to goodness discussion regarding copyright and piracy antagonism? No. The studios would rather pay for laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, or slip the US a SOPA.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    So lobby right alongside the. As noted (but ignored) earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg is in the process of setting up a Tech PAC. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324105204578384781088854740.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732410520457838... Do I believe that the major studios would have a honest to goodness discussion regarding copyright and piracy antagonism? No. The studios would rather pay for laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, or slip the US a SOPA. I'm offering you a communication channel to studio executives right now. I post regularly about these topics on HN. How about telling me what you think might be a better business model than the existing one? right now, film studios depend on DVD sales to make their investment back, because relatively few films break even at the box office; when you see those big numbers for weekend grosses you have to recall that over half of that revenue stays within the theater chains (film studios are forbidden by law to operate their own chains [1]), and up to half half of the cost of producing a film is in the marketing campaign, which has to be spent before knowing how the film will perform. So rare are box-office profits, in fact, that there's a saying within the film industry that a theatrical run is basically the marketing campaign for the DVD - people are much more likely to take a chance on renting or buying a movie that they know was in theaters (even if they didn't go to see it in a theater). The difficulty and expense of promoting a theatrical run is what distinguishes a film as a 'real movie' in the eyes of consumers. You could make the most awesome little film ever, but if you launch it straight to video your chances of finding an audience are pathetically low - not quite zero, but close enough that you'll have a hard time raising any money. So there's the problem: you need a strong brand to be perceived as a 'movie' and make your money back in the secondary market (DVD sales and streaming), but it's hard to get that strong brand without spending a lot of money up front on marketing or waiting years and years on the off-chance that you'll build an audience through word-of-mouth. If you finance the production of multiple films, your winners are going to subsidize the losses of the underperformers, even after all the 'Hollywood accounting' tricks. It's a pretty tough industry, which is one reason that every Oscar ceremony includes multiple speeches about never giving up no matter how long it takes. Now the problem for Hollywood is that piracy is almost all downside risk; you can offer your film for free on the torrents and use that to build an audience, but that only works if your production costs are very very low. Past a few thousand dollars, you'd better have a plan for how you're going to recoup the money. In the music industry, the new model is that you give away the music or sell it very cheaply, and make the money back on live performance, because people will pay a lot of money to see their idols perform in person. (This kinda sucks if you are the sort of musician who doesn't want to or can't easily play live, but that's who arts grants are for.) Unfortunately, that model doesn't work for movies because the vast majority of films do not translate well to stage performance; and it is also true that very few people will pay to buy a movie theater ticket or purchase a DVD of a film they've already seen for free. Within the industry, this is a particular problem for actors: an actor who does to many TV shows stats to see a decline in his/her bookability for film roles, because many years' worth or aggregated data suggests that people are reluctant to buy tickets for actors that they're used to seeing for nothing on TV - Tina Fey is the latest victim of this phenomenon. To quote an entertainment writer [2] 'Hollywood Boulevard is littered with the corpses of TV actor careers that almost were.' TV is a ghetto, and I promise you that the Internet is even more of a ghetto. Because the barriers to entry are so low on the Internet, the residual income prospects for film producers are also very low - much worse than for musicians, because the cost of producing a film is much higher than the cost of producing a music recording. The most expensive album ever produced was Guns'n'Roses Chinese Democracy, which took 15 years and the breakup of the band before making it to store shelves in 2008 [3]. Total cost? $13 million. That's the worst fiscal trainwreck in music industry history, but by Hollywood standards that's a typical budget for an Indie hit with a famous lead and two character actors. Big Hollywood projects routinely risk 10 times that amount. Now when you consider that even conservative estimates of industry income lost to piracy are measured in billions, there's a lot of pressure on the MPAA from producers to stem those losses. Now I hate Disney's copyright lobbying just as much as you do, if not more, but that is not the fault of the individual movie producers whose movies fail to break even. But tech people don't like legislative approaches, don't like DRM, and frequently refuse to give the film industry the time of day when invited to do so. If you won't even attempt to engage, why should they? If you could get over your disbelief that the industry would like to discover a solution that works for both producers and consumers, then what would you suggest? 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict.... 2. http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/9-tv-actors-who-could-go-from-small-screen-players-to-big-screen-stars-in-2013.php http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/9-tv-actors-who... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Democracy 4. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/allbudgets.php You should take inflation into account here as well; a discount rate of about 5%/year is a good rule of thumb.
- shmerl 14y ago
  There is no need to "demonize" those who created DMCA 1201 - it's clear that they did it in bad faith, to protect unethical business practices such as DRM which is used to restrain the innovation in a whole range of areas (and which doesn't prevent any piracy). All this pile of garbage needs to be strongly opposed by the public. And primarily on ethical basis, which is commonly ignored in the context of DRM.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >If someone were to suggest some innovative methods of monetizing content while simultaneously making it more accessible to a wider audience, that'd be very interesting. You're talking about business models rather than the DMCA, but let's go with it. Maybe there's something there. Here's Paul Graham: "[T]he record labels, [] are effectively a rogue state with nuclear weapons. There is nothing we or anyone else can do to protect you from them, except warn you not to start startups that touch label music."[1] [1]http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html Hollywood pretty much falls into the same category. You do something novel, they sue you. That's a problem. Asking for new business models on a message board... is not very likely to be fruitful. Thinking up that stuff is work. A lot of times you don't even know whether it'll be effective until you spend six months implementing and testing it. And people want to get paid, right? Well, hackers are people. And we get paid when we make something that succeeds, not when we try to implement something ridiculously cool but go out of business because of a lawsuit before anyone can even try it. So big surprise, there are thousands of start-ups not working on anything that could help Hollywood, because they don't want to get lawyered into the dirt. You understand that we don't have a budget for that; the possibility of a lawsuit means nobody is going to touch it with a pole, because there are a million other things with a much lower risk of that. So this is a "let us help you" kind of a situation. Hackers love to make things. A lot of us watch movies. We aren't the bad guys; we get paid, remember? We buy stuff. You don't see a lot of epic shit happening in that space though, do you? Because we're not allowed to do it. That's what the DMCA does. It gives the veto to the guys who would have vetoed the VCR. Nobody can tell you what people will invent before they invent it. That's not how it works. You have to let it happen first.