Hollywood's Foundations Rest on Piracy

enrico_suave writes "Wired Magazine had an interesting perspective on how Hollywood has 'pirate' roots in its history, as well as radio, cable TV, and the music industry. Is P2P any different (except for the fact that the industry being replaced has much more money and political sway than ever before)?"

Comments

Re:Piracy helps.

[srmalloy]

It seems that everyone changes sides on the "piracy" debate depending on what's better for them personally. When the US was founded, all "IP" was rigidly controlled by Europeans, so the US had fairly loose patent and copyright laws, and it was common for US publishers to "pirate" European authors.

To view some of the reasoning behind this attitude, you can look at Thomas Jefferson's letter to Isaac McPherson in 1813:

"It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when the relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is give late in the progress of society. It would be curious, then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature. When she made them like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."

Re:The Old Days...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the Pet Shop Boys' "It's a Sin" was originally an Elvis track.

you're probably thinking of "Always on My Mind," which tons of people like Willie Nelson also covered (Elvis's "It's a Sin" is an entirely different song). But Elvis didn't even write it, heck he didn't write much of anything, he was the voice to a group of song writers. Most pop groups, today and even waay back then never wrote there own songs. There were song writers, and they sold their songs to groups to perform, the groups bought the rights to the song, or were already in their Label's catalog so it was fair game to use.

Look at the liner notes and see who the Pet Shop Boys credit for (i don't have my CDs with me, but it sure ain't Tennant/Lowe).

Re:Downloading copyrighted material is theft.

[Cat_Byte]

I agree. I haven't purchased a cd in about 2 years. I have no source of hearing new material now that the majority of radio stations are owned by conglomerates like Clearwater who pick about 20 songs & tell the dj's to play them til the listeners throw up. I used to purchase about 4-6 cd's per month when I kept finding good stuff on p2p I hadn't heard before.

Re:Also interesting how Hollywood loves old storie

[geoffspear]

The copyright for the Arabian Nights did not "run out", as the stories were written long before copyright existed.

Re:Piracy helps.

[bfree]

I'll admit I've never quite figured out just how films are now finally put toghether. Is the original analog film actual used to create the final cut (either physically or be analog copying) or is the entire process digitised (forgetting the people who to me are idiots that decide to "film" in digital)? Assuming that only the digitally generated content is actually going to be digitised then no digital format can ever have the quality of the analog film! Project a dvd onto your wall and look at it, then think about cinema. Ok, project hd footage, still noticing the problem? No matter what resolution you rise to, you will always be short of analog. Reminds me of a recent visit to Amsterdam where Canon have a little building displaying photos and selling posters all seemingly to promote their digital equipment. Problem was they also had the building surrounded by about 30 of the pictures in giant format (1.5mx1m at a guess, maybe bigger) so people could walk around and look at them. From anything over about 3m the photos looked nice, but as you moved in ... Worst of all inside they had another giant picture with a caption like "Can you tell it's digital?" which had 4 of us rolling around the place laughing!

Of course add to all this the simple fact that very few digital media files are lossless copies of the original, most are re-encoded at least once which most certainly does degrade the copy!

Re:Downloading copyrighted material is theft.

[AmishSlayer]

from dictionary.com:

stealing
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.

property
[...]
c. Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.

Stealing, in short, is depriving someone goods or a service. When someone copies and album it is not stealing (but is copyright infringment) because they may not have purchased it in the first place, you cannot argue absolute property loss directly or indirectly from a situation that may never have occured (the purchase of the copyrighted work).

"You bring your car to the garage. It gets fixed and the bill comes to some amount of money. You are expected to pay the mechanic this amount."

In this case you DID get your car serviced so you DO owe money.

"Did you just steal from the city or not? You didn't take anything "physical" from them."

Again, you are misunderstanding the meaning (or perhaps citing people who have worded the point poorly). You are taking a measurable amount of electricty from the city that will directly effect their pocket book. You owe the money.

Once again, it's not "stealing"

[reptilicus]

"Theft" is a very specifc criminal offense, and it has a legal definition. And the Supreme Court has already ruled on this matter: Copying Is Theft and Other Legal Myths "But technically, file sharing is not theft. A number of years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt with a man named Dowling, who sold "pirated" Elvis Presley recordings, and was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property. The Supremes did not condone his actions, but did make it clear that it was not "theft" -- but technically "infringement" of the copyright of the Presley estate, and therefore copyright law, and not anti-theft statutes, had to be invoked. So "copying" is not "stealing" but can be "infringing." That doesn't have the same sound bite quality as Valente's position. "

Speaking of copyright...

[NiKnight3]

I think it's important to note that the article is excerpted from Lawrence Lessig's upcoming book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity . It's not entirely a stand-alone piece, though it was used instead of Lessig's monthly Wired column in the March issue.

Tarzan is not public domain.

[Anonymous Coward]

You listed Tarzan. Tarzan is not public domain. The Edgar Rice Burroughs estate has kept pretty tight control on him, and it appears that everyone who does anything with Tarzan, even Disney with their recent film, gets permission.

Please see this site

Re:Disney in particular.

[AJWM]

Nitpick: "Anastasia" was 20th Century Fox, not Disney.

I just happen to know that because my kids watched it umpteen times last weekend, having borrowed the DVD from the library.

Re:It still ain't cheap.

[Jim_Maryland]

Home systems aren't really that cheap yet, but I put together a configuration of a Dell and a Sun system that should give a rough comparison:

Dell:

Dell PowerEdge 1750

Dual Intel Xeon 3.06 w/ 1MB Cache, 533 MHZ FSB

2GB DDR 266MHz (4x512)

Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition w/ 25 Client Licenses

2x36GB 10K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI hard disk

4 Gigabit Ethernet adapters (2xdual ports)

8x DVD ROM

3 yr GOLD Support

Sun:

Sun Fire V240 Server

Dual 1.28GHz UltraSPARC IIIi Cu Processors

2GB Memory (4x512) * sorry, didn't get speed

Solaris 8/9

2x36GB 10K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI hard disk

4 Gigabit Ethernet adapters (2xdual ports)

DVD-ROM Drive * sorry, speed not listed

3 year Gold Support

Prices:

Dell: $9,313

Sun: $10,587

The cost difference really isn't much in a business setting, especially when you consider what your purchasing. As I said before, this is a rough comparison and I could probably find a situation where the prices are even closer.

Guess it all comes down to the TCO when looking at the purchase. In a company with an abundance of UNIX admins/developers, we find UNIX much friendlier than dealing with MS.

Re:Piracy helps.

[Ironica]

(DVD rental via mail is a good step, but you need to plan in advance, so points off).

That's what I thought too, but then my husband subscribed to Netflix, and it turns out we don't have to plan anything. He spent a bit of time setting up our queue, and now movies we want to see just automatically arrive, and sit next to our DVD player until we feel like watching them. We didn't *plan* to watch "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" last night, but since it was there, we did. It would have been a lot more hassle to say "Hey, we'd like to see Butch Cassidy..." and then spend a couple hours downloading it (over DSL).

actually, copyrights came from censorship...

[slew]

Prior to the wide spread deployment of the printing press, there was quite a bit of value in hardcopy itself (hard to make), so there wasn't much business in pirate copying (although, there was some form of copyright registration in early chinese history after the development of paper, it wasn't widely used).

The widespread availiablity of the printing press in 15th century europe essentially made hardcopy "cheap" and widely available. It also threatened the government's earlier ability to censor and control information. At the same time, the printers started to form local guilds to protect themselves from competition (basically they would agree distribute the titles among the member printers so they wouldn't be in direct competition with other guild members).

This turned out to be a fortuitious situation for the both parties. The government decided to take advantage of this situation to grant exclusive rights to print a title to a specific printing guild (so they didn't have to compete with other guilds) and if they didn't give a right to print, you couldn't print it (hence copy-right). This basically allowed the royalty to censor titles by giving the rights to a guild that agreed not to print it in exchange for the "juicy" exclusive rights to print another hot title (increasing the printer's profits since they didn't have to compete with other printers). It also gave the government a good single point to collect taxes. Sort of a quid-pro-quo arangement.

Notice that the original author had no say in the original "copy-right" scheme. It was basically the government desire for censorship leading the government to grant specific businesses monopoly powers to achieve their goals. The authors were basically at the whim of the printing guilds and government for payment (usually a statutory fixed fee per book). Because of the copyright monopoly, the customers ended up paying a higher price, none of which went to the author.

It was only later (around the time of the American Revolution), that this system really started to crumble. With increasing trade, the printing monopolies found that they couldn't keep out the "pirate" copies of books from other countries (sometimes copies even authorized by other governments as favors to local printing monopolies) and with increasing communication, governments realized censorship by copyright was a losing cause. About this time the idea that the author was the natural owner of the copyright (instead of the government) started to take hold and the modern form of copyright came about...

One wonders what system would have evolved had governments not used the then fledgling printing guilds to try to enforce monopolies. Printing monopolies may never have evolved. Authors may have even gotten less than their statutory "fees" or even work for free. Who knows it might have evolved to be like the opensource stuff? ;^)

Re:Piracy helps.

[DerekLyons]

the article suggests that law enforcers could not get out there, which is simply ludicrous

No it isn't. This was the 1910s and 1920s. Much of the West was still sparsely developed,

True of much of the West, like Montana and the interior portions of Washington. Emphatically *not* true for almost all of the coastal cities. (Like Los Angeles.)

and sending out a phalanx of federal marshals to enforce copyright and patent law was not the government's highest priority,

It wasn't then, and it isn't today. Patent and copyright law are not like criminal law, in which the State is both the plaintiff and the enforcement agent. Patents and copyright law depends on the owners of the same to bring a complaint before the courts. The only thing that's really changed is a tiny segment of the populations now believes themselves above those laws, and use forums like Slashdot to spread word of suspected 'threats'.

nor as trivially easy as it is today -- there was no cheap commercial air travel nor cheap transcontinental communication.

I suppose you've heard of the Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal and the telegraph? There was both cheap and routine travel, acess, and communication between California and the remainder of the nation. Or do you really think that movie makers would move to a place where they couldn't distribute their product? Ask a railroad buff about 'fruit blocks' sometimes.