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Director Attacks MPAA Piracy Claims
dipfan writes "Alex Cox, the writer/director of cult classic Repo Man and punk movie Sid And Nancy, writes today in The Guardian's media section that the movie industry's real pirates are the Hollywood studios and the MPAA - for squeezing out independents. He rejects the widespread claim that Spider-Man suffered from widespread net piracy, and asks: "Are [the MPAA's] claims of lost billions even credible?" (In a strange coincidence, Cox has another article in the same newspaper today, where he defends using 35mm film rather than digital cameras a la George Lucas, saying digital cinema gives too much power to the distributors and studios because the technology is less portable than 35mm.)"
They think that spiderman *suffered* from internet piracy? Jeezy Creezy how many box office records did it break?
Until a "sure thing" like Spider Man or Attack of the Clones sees *wide spread* piracy on the net and then flops like a Michael Bay crapfest, they have nothing to say. Maybe then they can cry foul, I have no sympathy for a movie's suffering when it was the fastest to hit $100 million (!!!!) *ever*.
Bud: Intellectual Property is a sacred trust, it's what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia?
Otto: They don't have Intellectual Property in Russia, it's all free.
Bud: All free? My ass! What are you, some kind of commie?
Otto: No, I ain't no commie.
Bud: Good. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!
Freedom: "I won't!"
And like the author said: if Spider-Man is losing lots of money to piracy, the box office numbers sure aren't showing it.
How much longer will we have duped (or more to the point, paid off) Congressmen who let these big IP holders walk all over the rights of the American people to own recording hardware?
My God, if these people had been around 100 years ago, they would have made the ball point pen illegal since it can be used to copy books.
I seriously think that this issue will not be solved until there is a Constitutional Amendment that guarantees fair use rights for all media.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
What is this washout smoking? Who in their right mind considers CDs an "inferior technology" to vinyl records? I know of a few passionate nostalgics who subjectively prefer the sound of vinyl over CDs, but even they aren't stupid enough to claim that the technology is superior. You can't put data on vinyl. You can't play vinyl in your car, or while you're jogging. With this one, ridiculous comment, the author has lost all credibility with me, and has exposed himself as just another angry outsider who is upset that the Big Boys won't let him play with them.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
From the article "Most of the rights to the book - including all US rights - had long ago fallen into the public domain. Only the British rights appeared to be privately held: by a former rock musician who hoped to turn Wells' story into a travelling stage musical along the lines of Blood Brothers or Fame."
It is amazing to me that literature as old as War of the Worlds is still unavailable for the public (at least in Britain). I mean, I used to listen to the original radio broadcast on reel-to-reel when I was a kid. The amount of quality work that has been abandoned due to continuously extended copyrights has to be non-quantifiable. Tragedy, because, although he didn't get to make his picture, the large studios bought out the rock-star and are now making it with Tom Cruise. I want to cry.Put identity in the browser.
By Sunday, it's obvious that Correlli has tanked, and that Beckham is a hit. Naturally you yank Corelli from the larger cinema and put Beckham in there. The studios hate this, but can do nothing about it. However, once the new technology is installed, Corelli will be beamed direct to screen one for the duration of its scheduled run, and will play to empty houses.
Why, exactly? The argument about this that I've always heard is that it's the other way round. With a digital projector, there's no problem with running out of reels; it is technically far easier to copy bits that replicate a reel.
Of course, DRM may prevent the cinema from doing this, but surely it's acceptable for them to pay more for showing the film to more people, seeing as it's the ticket (and food) price that pays for the film in the first instance?
And if the cinema has a shortage of digital projectors then that's irrelevant; it's just the case of the new technology maturing and becoming more widespread. Preventing progress because new technology isn't deployed widely enough is no argument at all.
The MPAA is evil alright, but this is not the kind of objection against war on piracy that anyone will take seriously. You cannot expect any industrial body not to take up a fight when they are losing money just because they are already "hugely wealthy."
I am all for MPAA-bashing, but I wouldn't expect anyone not already in the know to care about an article the stamps some entity as evil without provding any real arguments why this is so.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
> I would be more inclined to listen to these claims if he wasn't just some hack trying to break into a bigger arena.
Right, cause the only ones we can trust are the ones who've already attained financial success. It's a sure mark of intelligence, business accumen, ethics, and most importantly of all, righeousness and correctness.
It's pretty funny - on the one hand you have a huge monopoly that attempts to keep the lid on independant artists' noise level, and on the other hand, you have a generation thats been born and bred not to believe anything unless the production values are high. Talk about your catch-22s.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Furthermore, he gets that one pirated copy != one lost sale.
Still, I wouldn't expect Sony to allow copying anytime soon. Or even to rollback their laughingstock copy protection, for that matter. But it's nice to see somebody high profile talking sense once in a while.
I have seen Sid and Nancy also. Possibly the only kind of role where Courtney Love is well cast.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
If I produced any non-essential in such an environment, I would expect sales to be somewhat depressed. Sorry guys, Cinema isn't an essential. Produce a good movie, such as Spidey then we will probably go and see it. Unfortunate the industry distrubutes a lot of rubbish. I say distributes advisedly because some good stuff is produced (even ocassionally inside the studio system). However, it often doesn't get out unless it fits the business model of the season.
I want more creatives like this guy to stand up and say where the MPAA is getting things wrong when it tries for ever more content protection.
Some people may have heard about the much trumpeted Spidey raid in the UK. What was being (expensively) copied onto DVD? The only version I have seen listed would fit into a small part of a CD and as someone else commented who has seen it, the quality was barely worth the effort of watching. Maybe the industry itself has problems with higher quality masters escaping?
Last point in this ramble, the Gruniad article made the very good point that having a secure digital chain between distributor and projector is a great way of locking other content producers out of the theatre.
Thank you, Alex Cox. We'll be forever in your debt for "Repo Man" but that's another story altogether. It's a shame this appeared in the Guardian rather than in the LA Times or some other place where it will do some good.
I know I have made a big deal about "Dogtown And ZBoyz" and Sony Classics' being the distributor, but damn, man...could it have only seen the light of day if one of the distributors owned by MPAA signatories had released it? I mean, probably "Revolution OS" didn't have that kind of backing, but it didn't go into fairly wide release like "Dogtown" did.
If the movie theatres are 0wned by the MPAA, then where do the truly independent filmmakers go to show their work? I am hoping that somehow or another technology will come to the rescue as it has several times in the past. The RIAA had DAT neutered and the DAT portastudio killed because it feared indie musicians with the ability to create really good sounding independent recordings. Guess what? Thanks to cheap, huge hard drives and computer technology getting cheaper and cheaper, you can go to Sam Ash and get a portastudio with a HD capable of storing hours of 16-track audio for $500 or so.
OK, so digital filmmaking on a massive, Episode 2 kind of scale is out of reach of indie filmmakers. You can still get Digital Video cameras for a grand, a Mac "Quicksilver" minitower for 2 grand and Final Cut Pro for another large bill and have the ability to make a movie, then send it to DVD-R for distribution. I still am talking Large Bucks but it's certainly not as expensive as it used to be to make movies on film. And if you opt instead for a big-ass Athlon MP system with a firewire card and a Pioneer Superdrive, Windows 2K and Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 3, you can bring the price of the computer down a fair amount and shave a few bills off the price of software. If it is not practical now to do this, it will become practical in a few years. Right now CD-RW drives and DVD-ROM drives are selling for only $10 or $20 more for the increasingly hard to find CD-ROM only units. I can see a day coming in four or five years where CD-RW and DVD-ROM will be universally replaced with DVD-R/RW (or DVD+R/RW depending on which standard wins) and you only save a pittance by going with DVD-ROM and/or CD-RW.
Of course, if the Senator From Disney, Don Valenti's Made Man himself, Sen. Hollings can get one of his horrible bills passed, this all might be moot. If all computers have to have an RIAA/MPAA-approved DRM OS running and hardware copy neutering, you won't be able to do much with that newly cheap DVD recordable drive. I kinda hope that technology will figure a way to get around it, just like the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it; and instead of DAT Tascam and Fostex used hard drives to create a digital multitrack recording device. But when computer technology itself is chained...I shudder to think of the consequences.
And actually Alex has a point...watching a movie in a theatre is way different than watching a movie on a computer monitor, on your TV, or on cable. If the MPAA has that all locked up, we are that much poorer culturally. So even if we win technologically, we lose an unique experience to the multinationals and their slaves in public office.
Millione di grazie, Don Valenti. Pardon me if I don't kiss your fsckn ring.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
In the case of Attack of the Clones, quality may not matter much since (a) almost all the shots are special effects shots done mainly by computer, and (b) the film is shite.
But try to imagine Citizen Kane shot on digital video (in colour, naturally), or Amelie, or Moulin Rouge. If its promoters are serious about the quality of their technology, let them put it to the test against the best work of contemporary and classic cinematographers - not against the worst.
My only regret is that we don't have the medical technology to give me a womb so that I can bear this man's children. I have never read such clear, plain spoken and informed articles about the MPAA agenda in a mainstream forum before. It makes me begin - begin - to hope that it's not too late to turn the tide of distributors controlling the very copyright laws that were originally and explicitely written to limit their ability to screw both creators and consumers. Alen Cox, I salute you.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
RMS for attorney general!!! Imagine how the M$ trial would have gone down if George "Oil" Bush and John "I am the worst terrorist of all" Ashcroft hadn't been around. Maybe this is idealistic but picture this one:
K&R - president and vice prez
Stevens - sec of state (if he werent dead)
RMS - attorney general
Jordan Hubbard - dir. of central intelligence
Alan Cox - technology special advisor
*pardon my shameless namedropping*
MaxiVision48 can switch on the fly between 24 and 48 frames-per-sec and uses a new film advance mechanism to eliminate jitter. The result is a super clear rock-solid picture. I wonder what became of it.
I used to know such a person and among the ideas he had picked up from Hi-Fi mags were that it mattered which way up the mains lead went into his amp and that placing small pieces of paper (just a cornder torn off a single sheet of normal paper) under each corner of his amp would inprove the quality of the sound.
Naturally enough, it worked for him and no one else; hearing is easily swayed by what the listener expects to hear.
My brother has a large collection of vinyl LP's and singles and it takes about 10 minutes to realise that the format is inferior in almost every aspect to CDs; that's the ten minutes of listening to the care they need to be treated in just to minimise the damage caused to them by actually using them!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
More realistically, I expect movies to be downloaded from dvd/cable/satellite and cached on some uber server installed at the cinema. This server can then be programmed to dump out the movie to one or more projectors at the appropriate times through a local network.
With so many 10+ screen cinemas cropping up, this sort of arrangement is inevitable, even though digital projection still sucks. Give it a few more years and hopefully the resolution will be enough that it will become acceptable.
Read. Become less ignorant.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Staggered releases around the globe are simply, in this day and age, stupid. There is no reason not to release everywhere at once now. If the studios can't handle it, tough shit! The market (legal or illegal) will make up for their errors.
sulli
RTFJ.
Ah, children these days, they don't remember the computer magazines of the 1980s that had computer games on free flexidiscs. This was a bit before CDs became popular.
is it just me who read this wrong the first time ???
Cox isn't saying the MPAA is evil, he never uses the word.
He's merely putting the claims of lost millions in perspective.
His argument in a nutshell
- the studios are crying wolf over money lost to piracy
- they already make millions whilst independent film-makers struggle to get finances to get movies made
- the measures they want to put in place to counter piracy will hurt the independents even more. In effect they'll be barriers to entry in the market.
I thought it was a well-written thoughtful article.
I watched a pirated copy of Episode 1 subtitled in Thai on a VCD from Bangkok well before the official version was in the theaters here in Tokyo, so I guess your second assumption might be more true. (The titling was pretty crappy, too.)
The studios can't very well release a badly-subtitled movie, or release in English-only first, followed by the subtitled version later.
Plus, before the internet, it didn't matter - the movies (and all of the hype) just followed a few months behind.
Living here for a few years, I really have little idea about what movies are playing in the US - when they finally show up at my video store is usually when hear of them - since I'm usually disappointed with the movies, I don't feel particularly deprived.
Of course, the big movies you do hear about - AOTC, LOTR, Spider-man, but they get pushed through the dubbing/titling process faster, so the lag time is less.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Pissed in your _own_ cornflakes this morning?
Reread the article. Read a few others. The MPAA is agressively attempting to control the upcoming technology in such a way that without the backing of a major studio, a filmmaker won't be able to make films. They're also trying to control all forms of playback technology, so that ultimately no one will be able to watch a movie without the knowledge and consent of their organisation.
Alex Cox is capable of making movies that sell well enough and have enough of a following to support him, and allow him to make more movies. If the MPAA has their way, this won't be possible.
That's what is being objected to here. If that's a "Euro-Leftist" attitude, then the US is a pretty damned socialist country.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Yet, by law, in Canada, films must come out dubbed in french AT THE SAME TIME as they come out in english.
And, despite that "delaying" factor, movies come out at the same time as they do in the US.
So the argument that it is the subtitling/dubbing that retards the release elsewhere in the world (especially that the delayed releases are often in english) is simply not true.
Let's talk about "THE BIG LIE". The big lie is a lie so big that gets repeated so often that people start to believe it. If you're talking about how piracy won't be stopped by these laws or how the movie companies are making lots of money despite the piracy, you've bought into the big lie.
:)
The truth: It isn't about piracy. It's about competition.
These giant companies have had a long run of huge profits because it is so expensive to make a movie or a record. Technology can change that.
Cheap high-quality digital recording equipment can eventually be made, and massive bandwidth will mean that those things that are recorded can be sent all over at very little cost. It can happen.
However, if this happens, the movie studios and record companies can lose out, because people might be willing to pay less for good indie things. It could end up like the open-source movement where eventually an entire industry of hobbyists starts making extremely high quality movies and songs. (Although it would also create al ot of crap...also like the OS movement.)
Therefore, they have to stop the introduction of high-quality recording and editing and distribution equipment (unless it's under their control).
Fortunately, The same equipment you can use to copy the content of the current regime is the equipment you will eventually be able to use to make cheap high-quality alternatives to the products the current companies.
That means they can attack their real enemy: "competition" by setting up a straw man: "piracy".
You might be wondering why they don't just go after the "competition" angle directly and state that they're scared of the possiblity of people making high-quality movies and distributing them without the blessing of the big studios. They're scared that there might be too many choices out there that are good enough that people aren't willing to give money to the mega companies anymore.
To understand this, you have to ask yourself a question:
If we eventully live in a world where it is possible for creative people to make and distribute high-quality movies and record cheaply, this technology (hinder/not affect/promote) the progress of the useful arts?
Pick one of those three. I say it will promote the arts. I admit, although the vast majority of things that get created will be crap, there will be more gems than there would be if the reation and distribution channels were still tightly controlled by the studios and record companies. So, I say
allowing technologies to come into existence that let people create and distribute high-quality art cheaply will promote the progress of the useful arts.
That may be an odd way to look at things, but it's actually the only way that counts. You see, there is no moral right of authors or companies to benefit from their works. Copyright only exists to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
That means taht you can't use copyright to hinder the progress of the useful arts.
Therefore, you can't use copyright to prevent new technologies that will promote the arts from coming into existence.
But, as I said before, fortunately for the big media companies, the technology that you could use to make illegal copies of their content is the same technology that could be used to promote the progess of the useful arts by giving cheap easy access to creation tools to more people.
So, that is the problem: The thing they fear is something that they can't attack directly. They cannot use copyright to hinder the progress of the arts. But, fortunately for them, they can attack the technology for being used to pirate their works and get the same effect without going against the Constitution and the only reason that copyright even exists.
So, please in your discussions of the various laws and **AA's don't mention piracy anymore and how these laws won't stop it. If you do that, you got suckered into believing THE BIG LIE and you're fighting on their turf.
Instead focus on the loss of creativity and expression that will occur if they don't allow the technology to exist. The key is to expose the big lie for what it is and repeat the truth enough times so that other people can see through the big lie.
PS: All they care about is money, so please stop going to the movies/renting/buying movies and CDs and tapes. If you're giving them your money, you're helping them.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
It sounded like an interesting idea that would have been fun to go to, but my friend couldn't make it. Still, it was an intriguing way out of the problem you're describing.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."