Category: Media Moguls

A fine article on how how to destroy your own industry, the RIAA way.

More on the copyright extension debate.

Owners of an about-to-expire copyright have several favorite arguments for extending it. One is that it spurs creativity by making original works more valuable. But an extension actually restricts creativity by narrowing the shared universe of works artists can build upon. Another is that they need an extension as an incentive to convert old material into new media. As Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has pointed out, digitizing films is expensive. “Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?” he asks.

The author’s answer is that the fans, the public, the folks who have been digitizing their record albums and the like will rush to do it.

I’m not sure about that, but I am sure that just looking at the evolution from VHS to DVD answers that question: it will be done by companies looking to make a buck, and it will be done by adding value.

The biggest resistance to going to DVDs on the part of the public has been “Hey, I already have this on tape.” And DVDs that merely are carbon copies (so to speak) of video tapes have not done well.

Where DVDs have been successful have been in the value added. Where DVDs have added commentary, feature tracks, cut footage, games, photo galleries, etc., they’ve attracted purchase from folks who already have the videotape.

So Movie X goes into the public domain. Companies looking to make a buck will have a choice.

They can just do a digital dub of the movie (perhaps off the tape) onto a DVD. Cheap for the consumer, low-cost for the producer, low quality. But some people want that.

Someone can try the high end route. Add value. Add a documentary. Add some commentary tracks. Add a photo gallery.

Maybe someone gets Roger Ebert to add his comments. Is that worth an extra $5 to a potential buyer? Is it worth more than getting the movie’s star to talk about life on the set? Why not two companies trying both approaches? What’s the best way to answer that question.

Simple answer: by letting consumers decide.

I can go down to the book store and find a dozen different versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the shelves. The Shakespeare play is not owned by any of the studios, thank God. How, then, do any of those book publishers make a profit? How is the play protected and brought to the public for generation after generation?

By adding value. Footnotes. Annotations. Illustrations. Introductions. Analysis. Presentation. Selling to different price points.

I can’t go and make a photocopy of a particular Random House edition of Midsummer and sell it to people. But nothing prevents me from taking the raw content by Shakespeare and publishing my own version of it — as a book, as an e-book, on the Internet, as an audiobook, whatever. And in the vast marketplace of ideas and consumers, some people may or may not decide my version, my added value, is worth paying for (assuming I even want to charge for my labor).

It becomes a consumer choice, not a producer choice. And that is what has the MPAA and the RIAA calling for their brown pants, as the old pirate joke goes. Jack Valenti would have you believe that we would be better off, have a richer, more creative atmosphere, understand and appreciate Midsummer better if only Random House decided exactly how it would be published, at what size, with what added materials, for how much.

Do you agree?

Besides which, Hollywood has done a crappy job of updating films into the digital era. Hundreds, thousands of films have been lost because they’re locked away in company vaults and the companies see no commercial return for rereleasing them, or rescuing them from their decaying state.

Turn some fanboys onto those films, or some Taiwanese entrepeneurs, or a college film school, and I’ll bet you we’d see more of the Hollywood heritage saved than Jack Valenti and his masters are interested in.

Copyright law has been extended eleven times in the last four decades. Has that made life a richer, more creative place? Have the “useful arts” been promoted?

Do we really need just one edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

(via BoingBoing)

An interesting study is out arguging that RIAA and MPAA companies need to stop exerting all their time, effort and congressional influence on fighting piracy and file-swapping, and instead just try to learn how to make a buck at it.

“What we don’t see is a real questioning of business models,” said Ashley Steel, a partner in KPMG’s Information, Communications and Entertainment practice. “They complain about the Napsters,” she said, referring to the bankrupt music-swapping site that was found to violate U.S. copyright laws. “But why do the Napsters exist? Because the marketplace wants them.”
Steel said that if the issue “is not on boardroom table…then that boardroom has problems.”

It’s ironic that such stalwarts of commerce are so quick to try and battle against market forces.

Pop-up ads are the bane of the Internet. Everyone hates them with an undying passion. Many people go to great lengths to install software on their PCs that will block them, even at the extent of some inconvenience or lack of functionality.

So why, in the name of all that’s holy, are TV networks beginning to look at popup ads on TV shows?

Well, money, duh.

As an “NYPD Blue” rerun unspools on Court TV, the screen shrinks and shifts. Up from the bottom rises a message: This episode of the famed cop show is brought to you by Planters’ nuts, the salty Kraft Foods Inc. snack. As a movie plays on AOL Time Warner Inc. cable-counterpart TNT, a quiz runs across the bottom of the screen, asking viewers a question about the film. It’s sponsored by United Parcel Service Inc. Earlier this year, TNT tested a tactic that had a message from an American Express Co. financial-services operation appear — just as Steve Martin faced a particularly thorny money decision during “Father of the Bride II.”

Of course, this is all evolutionary, not revolutionary. Networks have been putting “ghosts” in the lower corner of the screen for years — first, unobtrusively, to identify the channel as it was searched past, more recently to tout new or upcoming shows they want you to watch. And end-titles on TV shows have been mangled and squeezed into reduced real estate for some time now, as “what’s up next” blurbs keep you from seeing any of the production details of what you just saw.

It’s just experiments, for now, and certainly, for the present, such ads will be relatively small, relatively unobtrusive … for so long as the viewer is highly sensitive to them.

Once it becomes the norm, though — i.e., when folks stop noticing them at that level — expect that the networks will start selling bigger, more obtrusive ads.

After all, the common wisdom goes, as long as you’re getting noticed, that’s the important thing, right?

(via Blogcritics)

Yeah, the irony is killing me here, too.

The president of News Corp. has lambasted the Internet as a “moral-free zone.”

Speaking Tuesday at an annual conference organized by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Peter Chernin decried the “enormous amount” of worthless content online.

Definition of “worthless”: Not belonging, nor providinging revenue, to my company.

He also predicted that without new laws to stave off illicit copying, News Corp.’s vast library of movies may never be made available in digital form.

“Give in to my demands, or else I’ll shoot myself with this gun.”

In an interview after his speech, Chernin threw News Corp.’s support behind three controversial bills. The company backs a plan by Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., to implant copy-protection technology in software and hardware devices, as well as a bill introduced last month by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., that would authorize copyright holders to hack into and disrupt peer-to-peer networks.
News Corp. also endorses a bill by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who hopes to make it a federal felony to try to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs.

Yeah, that’s the way to advance Progress & Freedom: let Big Media hobble technology, restrict the entry of Small Media into the market, outlaw security research and fair use, and destroy the computers of anyone who gets in the way. Uh-huh.

“We support efforts to help us fight digital piracy,” Chernin said. “We applaud any of those guys in Congress who are helping to wave the flag for us.”

And their checks are in the mail.

Chernin decisively attacked sexually explicit material on the Internet. “The prevalence of pornographic Web sites and e-mails is a lot more than an insult to common decency,” Chernin said. “It’s an increasing reason to keep kids and families off the Internet. And these are only part of the virtual logjam of valueless clutter.”

Funny — that’s how a lot of people would describe Fox Television (a subsidiary of News Corp., and perpetrators of such uplifting and educational properties as American Idol and Celebrity Boxing), too.

But, of course, that’s Intellectual Property and Owned Content. And, more importantly, they own it.

I’ve never been a big fan of Davezilla. Just never floated my boat, and that’s what makes a horse race and all that.

But, c’mon, folks, let’s get real. Corporate Suits of Toho Co., Ltd., why don’t you cut the guy some slack. Slapping him with a Cease-and-Desist letter because he’s named his site “Davezilla” and you own the copyright to “Godzilla” does not pass the horse laugh test.

Please be advised that your use of the GODZILLA mark … confuses consumers and the public into believing that your “GODZILLA” character originates from Toho ….

No, it doesn’t.

Moveover, your use of the “ZILLA” formative along with imagery assocated with GODZILLA is likely to cause the users of your site to believe that the “DAVEZILLA.COM” website is either assocated with, authorized by, or sponsored by our client ….

Only if those users are dunderheads. And Toho should know better.

Dave declines to back down. Good for him.

Doubtless we will soon see efforts to extend Toho’s copyright another 50 years, too. (Mutter mutter mutter …)

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting column on the real reasons Big Media is out for technical copyright protections.

What they’re trying to do is to create a system that’s not so much proof against copying – a mostly impossible task anyway – as a system that’s very unfriendly to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers. It’s not about copying. It’s about competition.

Which makes why folks like Biden and Hollings are busy doing everything they can to support these efforts even less justifiable.

Earlier this week, I loaned Doyce a tape I’d made of the two most recent eps of Farscape. He watched them, then brought them back last night.

Under Fair Use Doctrine, in law and confirmed by the Supreme Court (back when Hollywood was convinced that VCRs would drive them out of business, instead of making them even more wildly profitable), that’s okay. I taped the show for my personal use, and it’s okay for me to loan the tape to Doyce, too.

But according to the significant restrictions on Fair Use in a new proposed law, that loan would become illegal.

And you think the biggest threat to Amerians comes from John Ashcroft?

In a bizarre twist, the folks who are sponsoring the bill say they don’t really support it. Huh?

Humming is theft, record bosses claim.

“For years people have gone about humming their favourite songs whenever it took their fancy. Normally this would be a source of pleasure. But this pleasure came at the expense of lots of hard work from the musicians who are clearly not getting any compensation for this,” screamed an indignant Rilary Hosen of the Recording Industry Association of America.

To further prove that the RIAA’s motivation is not selfish, she flourished statistics which prove that artists only get about 2.3 per cent of all money that their work generates. “So they really need every penny they can get,” sniffled Ms. Hosen through a cascade of tears.

(Via BoingBoing)

Some excerpts from the 1982 congressional testimony of Jack Valenti, MPAA President, on the evils of the VCR:

But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.

Of course it turned out to be no such a threat. Indeed, the studios make huge amounts of money from videotapes, TV companies track “time shifting” of their shows on video, and copyright holders monitor the (small but real) bootleg industry of material out of print in order to determine what the public might like to see.

Because unless the Congress recognizes the rights of creative property owners as owners of private property, that this property that we exhibit in theaters, once it leaves the post-theatrical markets, it is going to be so eroded in value by the use of these unlicensed machines, that the whole valuable asset is going to be blighted. In the opinion of many of the people in this room and outside of this room, blighted, beyond all recognition. It is a piece of sardonic irony that this asset, which unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds — a piece of sardonic irony that while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by a flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.

Valenti repeatedly brings up the specter of the Yellow Peril during his testimony, painting the issue as one of patriotic Americans (exemplified by Clint Eastwood, the one star he keeps naming over and over) vs. those sinister (yet uncreative) Japanese types. The testimony was in regards to a court decision against Sony, of course.

Now, I don’t have to tell anybody in politics — I have spent most of my adult life in politics and you learn one thing. Nothing of value is free. It is very easy, Mr. Chairman, to convince people that it is in their best interest to give away somebody else’s property for nothing, but even the most guileless among us know that this is a cave of illusion where commonsense is lured and then quietly strangled. That is what it is all about.

Well, I guess this puts this free blog (as well as most of the Internet) into its place. “Free” = “worthless.” Huh.

Now, the question comes, well, all right, what is wrong with the VCR. One of the Japanese lobbyists, Mr. Ferris, has said that the VCR — well, if I am saying something wrong, forgive me. I don’t know. He certainly is not MGM’s lobbyist. That is for sure. He has said that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had.

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

Which is why, of course, we need Clint Eastwood to protect the helpless-woman-who-is-the-American-public-and-Hollywood from the sinister Japanese rapist-murderer.

But, and here is an explosive political fact, Mr. Chairman, two-thirds of U.S. households will not own VCR’s, Mr. Chairman. One-third of VCR households will not be on cable or won’t have access to cable. Now, if there is a scarcity of film and television entertainment, it won’t be the well-groomed and the well-heeled that will suffer. It is going to be, as always it is, Mr. Chairman, the less-affluent, the disadvantaged people pressed against the wall, out of work, who can’t afford these expensive machines, and free television to the sick and the old and the poor will remain the primary source of home entertainment.

See? It isn’t about the profits of the fabulously wealthy film and music industries. Jack’s just interested in the poor, working slob who couldn’t afford cable or a VCR.

Now, when a producer takes in less from these other markets, he is going to invest less. When your profit potential shrinks, you pull back. You produce less and you stay as long as you can in markets where you think you can make some money without having a VCR lay waste to your profit.

The loser will be your public because they don’t have these expensive machines. And that is what I am saying, sir. The public is the loser when creative property is taken and here is the reason why. The investment of hundreds of millions of dollars each year to produce quality programs to theaters and television will surely decline.

Right. We’ve seen investments in movies and TV drop precipitously since 1982, right?

Now, read those bits again, and read the testimony in full. Now read the things that Mr Valenti and the movie/music industries are saying about digital rights management and the Evils of the Internet (the Home of Hackers and Terrorist and Godless, Un-American Pirates).

Like all good Hollywood types, Mr Valenti knows when it’s cost-effective to recycle a script.

(Via BoingBoing)

The Authors Guild is lambasting Amazon for promoting the sale of used books. Amazon has been offering this service for about a year, and evidently (though I’ve not gotten any such note) been suggesting to folks who recently purchased new books there that they can also sell them.

It’s this latest offer that has the Authors Guild all a-twitter, since its members only get royalties from the intial sale.

Well, sorry, guys and gals. If I have a choice between buying a new paperback book for $8 and a used copy for $3, guess which one I’m going to buy.

Not that authors are necessarily behind the cost of paperbacks, but, frankly, if a book didn’t hold my interest enough to make me want to reread it, or keep it to share with Margie, or loan to a friend (the horror!), I don’t feel any great moral obligation force someone to buy another new copy.

The legal beagles at the firms who hold all the rights to the Bond series of movies, have gotten a cease-and-desist order from a film industry panel against the producers of the Austin Powers film for their use of the title Goldmember, a take-off on the Bond title Goldfinger. As a result, the Powers crew are scrambling for a new name — and scrambling to snatch up any Goldmember promotional materials (here’s your chance for a collector’s item, kids).

Mixed feelings here. Frankly, I thought the first AP film was humorous, and the second overkill. The third …?

On the other hand, this is satire, folks. The MGM/Danjaq folks didn’t object to The Spy Who Shagged Me (vs the Bond The Spy Who Loved Me), even though that one ran into legal troubles in countries where “shag” is a much more improper term. I’m curious that the plaintiffs went to the MPAA board, rather than to court, too — is that traditional with these sorts of disputes, or did they think they’d face less of a burden in their case against New Line there?

MGM and Danjaq have every right to protect the value of their property. On the other hand, I think maybe this can also be thought of as overkill.

(Via NextDraft)

Hoody-frickin-hoo. Amazon posts its first quarter in the black. One of my biggest fears in the dot-com impolosion was that Amazon — with such a wealth of resources and customer customization — would die a horrible, money-bleeding death. I now feel a bit better.

I know there are a lot of folks who despise Amazon. In some cases it’s been because of an instance of poor service (I’ve had a couple of them, but by and large I’ve found their service to be solid). In other cases it’s been because of an aesthetic rejection of big business and the threat that Amazon holds toward small, independent bookstores (I’d worry about B&N succeeding in its on-line business, in that case).

Amazon has made me happy. In return, I feel like I’ve been personally responsible for a big chunk of its profitability ….

You also find the most amazing things there. In my case, it was a book title forwarded me by my friend, Marina, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. I mean, that’s not exactly a paperback you’d find at the check-out stand at the Piggly-Wiggly.