If it comes down to the ability to do real work and innovation, or more $100 million dollar wank-offs with the Austrian GOP patsy, then I say to Hollywood, goodbye and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

Humans and markets are clever enough to come up with new forms of entertainment.

As for the question of whether piracy justifies Draconian restriction, I don't think that is the major issue.

Well, it wouldn't be, if the culture industry weren't explicitly using their market power to make these measures reality. I'm much more chilled by the Windows1984 future, the Broadcast Flag, and Total Information Awareness than I am by the thought of Sony losing a few thousand bucks because of unauthorized copying.

[digression]
BoingBoing is kind of like Meta-Metafilter, doing the moderation that nobody else will mess with.

According to the article, "McCallum claimed that 50 per cent of music business revenue had been lost due to file sharing in the last few years." And he went on to predict that the same thing would happen with movies.

I don't know where he got that number; it looks high to me, too. But the point is that even if it is only 5 percent today, as technology progresses the figure is bound to increase. It just stands to reason that people are going to be reluctant to pay for what they can get for free. That's common sense. And that's why the big content providers are running scared.

As for the question of whether piracy justifies Draconian restriction, I don't think that is the major issue. In fact, framing the issue in this way just polarizes things and encourages both sides to lie. Yes, I said lie. I don't see much desire for truth on either side of this debate.

My opinion is that we should face the facts squarely, and look into the future with open eyes unblinded by ideology or politics. When I try to do that, I see a world in which unauthorized sharing is going to become more common. But few people in the online community are willing to publicly agree. I think it's because they are afraid that by agreeing, they give ammunition to those who want to stifle free speech and restrict what we can do on our computers.

But lying, even for a good cause, is the wrong approach. Let's face facts and admit that there is going to be a conflict between free and unfettered sharing of content, and the ability of content creators to receive payment for the full value of what they create. That doesn't mean that we have to line up in support of the CBDTPA. But it does imply that we at least acknowledge that we're going to be facing a problem. That would be an encouraging first step for the online rights groups.

Edited by author 11-16-2002 11:53 PM
I guess my question would be: What has the movie industry (studios, theatres, etc...) done in recent years to make it more appealing for me to go to the movies?

Are the prices lower? No, they're much higher (in my area, at least) than inflation would account for.

Are there fewer advertisements? No, as the story yesterday pointed out, there are many more.

Are the movies better? Not noticably.

Is the picture quality better than at home? No.

Is the sound quality better than at home? Sometimes...it's hit and miss, and depends on where you sit in the theater.

Are there jackasses with laser pointers sitting in my bedroom hoping to fuck up my movie experience? No, not usually...and if they are, I'm allowed to beat them to death with a crowbar.

The point is, if the experience is more pleasant elsewhere, the proper course is _not_ to try and stop the consumer from enjoying that other, more pleasant experience...it's to attempt to compete accordingly.

I would be more than willing to pay $10 for a ticket, if I was guaranteed comfy seats, clear audio/video, no projector problems, no commercials, and decent snackage available. The last movie I saw in the theatres was The Fellowship of the Ring, and I expect the next will be The Two Towers, both mostly for the communal experience. Others films can wait for video...it's not worth the hassle.

cypher: I think the point here is that there IS no market failure. Music is today where movies may be in the future, and even the music industry claims only a drop of 5 percent in sales due to piracy.

Assuming we treat their words as gospel (a dubious assumption at best), a 5 percent loss fails to merit the kind of cultural apocalypse rhetoric they're spewing. Hollywood is shrieking about piracy, too, and yet more and more people are going to the movies every year. How do you pirate that?

The question isn't whether piracy occurs but whether the impact of piracy justifies the kind of draconian measures and consolidation of power the culture industry would like for itself. Even by their own measure, the answer has to be no.

When all is said and done, who are you gonna trust -- the people who pay money to support the artists and creators they like, or the industry which tells us Spiderman wasn't profitable?

Take a look at the comments on yesterday's story, http://boingboing.net/2002_11_01_archive.html#85680209, and you'll see a number of people who are giving up on going to the movies, preferring to watch them at home.

Even if there are limitations today on online movie quality and availability, technology is clearly going to continue to improve. Any argument based on the limitations of current technology is only a stopgap. In a few years we'll have more bandwidth, bigger disk drives and better P2P programs. Then movie sharing will be even easier.

With music, many people argued that the RIAA was more interested in protecting its monopoly on distribution than on keeping people from sharing songs. Their real motive, we are told, is to keep independents from releasing their own music and bypassing the "greedy" record companies. Well, that argument is a non-starter with the MPAA. They don't have the kind of monopoly that the RIAA does with radio airplay. There are some independent film makers and a small market for their work, but the big budget Hollywood blockbusters will never be possible without thousands of talented people being involved.

The MPAA's real concern is that people will prefer to download bootleg copies of movies for free than to go to the movie theaters or the video store and pay for them. I don't see why this is considered an unreasonable concern. I don't know about you, but I like getting things for free! And I think most people feel the same way.

This is a real and growing problem, the conflict between the high costs of creating top-quality entertainment, and the low costs of copying and sharing it. We are going to have a market failure, where people would be willing to pay enough to cover the costs of making a movie or album by talented performers, but where there's no market mechanism to direct funds to the creators. It will be a creative commons, where once something is created, everyone gets it for free. Sounds good, until you realize that this means there's no way for the person who did the creating to get rewarded for the full value of what he has done.

It's a hard problem and I don't know the answer. But I do know that sticking your head in the sand and pretending that there's not going to be any problem is no solution.

I like Mark Twain's quote:

"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."

"You can download a movie from Gnutella or Kazaa, sure, given several hours' download time and much searching. Having downloaded it, what you end up with is a quarter-sized, scratchy-audio version that only a liar would describe as "high quality.""

Well, sorry but that's total crap. You can download 700MB DVD rips encoded in divx or xvid that are totally acceptable in full screen, and if they're not quite DVD-like they're certainly much better than VHS, so they're certainly "high quality" for the large majority of people who don't yet own DVD players. There are even (admittedly 1GB+ sized) AC3 rips now.

It takes just moments to find many movies on eDonkey, not to speak of new release guides found on the web such as ShareReactor.

It might not be worth the trouble in the US, but here in continental Europe movies are released later, there's not really an equivalent to Netflix, and video clubs are smaller and offer less DVD choice and availability than Blockbusters. I could watch a perfectly fine rip of Insomnia the week before it was even released to French screens.

$150 gets you about 100GB of hard drive, or about 150 DVD rips, and you can always burn CDR copies. I have maybe 50 movies I've not yet seen and about 3 or 4 new ones downloading in the background. They can take days to complete for all I care.

So while I certainly don't agree at all with other MPAA claims, your rant was not only US-centric but simply misinformed as well.