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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)?"
To some extent, piracy helps business. Do you think, for example, that MS would be where it is now was it not for piracy? Piracy is what brought Windows to +90% of all PCs.
Only one example in the article is truly piracy, and that is the movie industry violating existing patents on recording technology.
The other two involve ambiguities in the law.
Oh but wait, that would require reading the article.
In many states there is a law concerning Mechanic Leins, which means the mechanic owns the car until you pay the bill. In the example, you did steal the car.
In the case of electricity, energy is not abstract like a thought or idea.
Disney is also a major pirate (besides Pirates of the Carribean). It is ironic that Disney lobbied to have the copyright lengths lengthened. Disney themselves made a mint by plundering the public domain (Snow White, Pinnochio, etc).
Disney, the core of "Hollywood", is the greatest IP monopolist running amok in our marketplace of ideas. Meanwhile, they have built their empire on appropriating public domain "improperty". Somebody build a better mousetrap!
--
make install -not war
Metallica. Bootlegs. Need I say more?
Got mead?
OK, P2P is "piracy."
That's the first line. This comming from Wired, who I use to think was some sort of tech magazine who had some knowledge. A technology can not "be" piracy. The technology could have "been" pirated, in the sense that it was secret, someone owned it, and then someone hijacked it. p2p was never someone's dark secret technology.
California was remote enough from Edison's reach that filmmakers like Fox and Paramount could move there and, without fear of the law, pirate his inventions
Yes, ok. Who did that with p2p?
A new industry had been founded, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property
Allright, a new industry may have been founded from the use of p2p network applications to spread copyrighted materials illegally. Was p2p itself founded on illegally distributed copyrighted materials? some technical specification on how to develop p2p apps? did someone patent p2p and now that Intellectual Property is running rampant in the wild causing p2p to "be piracy"?
I must be missing something. "p2p" is not the same thing as "illegally copying copyrighted materials over a p2p network". Wired can suck it. This is written by Lessig? i just don't see the conclusions he's drawing
Another question for you. Is it theft if I record and pass around episodes of Firefly, if they're not available any other way? Does that same action become or remain theft when the Firefly DVD is released?
How about this: If you make copies and pass around the Firefly DVD, because it was being sold for $1,000,000, and you and your friends had no possiblity of ever buying it, is it still theft?
There's definitely a legal distinction between the two. You're not taking property without paying for it, you're duplicating information without paying for it. The latter does not directly result in a loss by the victim.
...the same people who made their fortune because a patent expired are trying to extend copyrights for generations!
Of course! They're closing the 'loophole' to prevent anyone else from entering the market and competing!.
Using monopoly power to maintain the monopoly.
This back and forth about piracy and morality and P2P is such bullshit.
Everyone -- yes, every goddamn one -- knows that the Hollywood/MPAA (and the RIAA music fight) boils down to one thing: money in the pockets of executives. That's it. It's only about technology insofar how that technology impacts the bottom-line. It's not about art. It's about making sure a select group of executives make sure they can keep the mortgage payments on their Bel-Air mansions and can keep memberships in their country clubs. That's it. That's where my, yours, and everyone else's dollars are going: to buy some titanium fucking Big Bertha golf club for the peabrained asshole who's been crowned king of the other peabrained assholes working beneath him.
Valenti wants to make sure the cash keeps flowing into his pocket and into the pocket of every other overpaid, dim-bulb, "I can green-light this" executive motherfucker working the valley.
You want goddamn immorality? It's the entertainment industry and the people that run it that are at the very foundations of the "immorality" of piracy. Forget Janet Jackson's nipple. Forget Powell's sudden decision to attempt to regulate *cable* television today (!). Forget the fact (and I'll digress here) that the fundamentalist assholes that have gone to see Mel Gibson's "Passion" claim that it's a fantastic movie yet in the same breath decry Janet Jackson's nipple, the state of marriage, and the violence in contemporary culture -- overlooking perhaps that the Passion is more "violent" than any number of Grand Theft Auto games strung together and more "explicit" than any svelt little nipple hiding behind a sun-shaped nipple medallion.
The hypocrisy of Valenti and his immoral executive motherfuckers is astounding. It boggles the mind.
Editing costs.
Nope.
Advertising costs.
Nope.
Employee wages.
Nope.
Script costs.
Nope.
However, can you imagine if this was remotely true? People who downloaded gigs of music would be instant millionaries because of all the editing, advertising, payroll, and script costs that they've stolen right out of the hands of the MPAA. Oh what a fantasy you're entertaining.
Copyright infringment, regardless of how you feel about it, is not theft in any form. Perhaps people wouldn't be so tempted to download a movie off of a P2P network instead of paying $5-$10 a head to see it at a theater if Hollywood would come out with more than 3 decent movies in an entire damn year! It's evident with the iTunes success that many people would rather follow the law and pay money if the demands of the consumer are held above the greed of the companies.
i don't recall there being a third jurassic park novel. could be a clue.
> What's wrong with that?
What's "wrong" with it is that they are willing to use the public domain to further their interests, but are not willing to release their productions into the public domain, and in fact lobby heavily for legislation that will allow them to keep it from happening.
It's a double standard. They should be willing to play by the same rules that made them the success they are today.
What's wrong with that?
Except that it's hypocritical for them to lobby for retro-active copyright extensions so that they content doesn't become public domain when so much of their content wouldn't have been possible under they laws they lobby for.
If, for example, they were offering to send a fat check to Rudyard Kipling's descendants as an acknowledgement that the copyright laws at the time weren't sufficient and they feel that, as the copyright owner for "The Jungle Book", he should have been compensated in some fashion for his work, things would be different. But given their past history of making extensive use of the public domain, their stubborness when it comes to contributing to the public domain becomes all the more odious.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
So yes, in your sad attempt to make a point, you *did* steal something.
It also takes resources to push the electrons to you ( the amperage ) , so you not only stole a object, but also the effort to get it to you.
In the case of pure content, you stole nothing.. you only relocated information when you download it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's really starting to bug me how everyone says 'Fine I admit it! I'm stealing from the internet!'
What? How can you steal from the internet? Are you stealing electricity? Are you suggesting that downloading copyprotected information is stealing??
Funny that, the law doesn't consider copyright infringment as stealing.
How about we all stop using the media companies propaganda for a little while. Lets call downloading songs from the internet what it really is (or rather uploading, if downloading is actually legal where you are), copyright violations.
I don't think that the problem is that Disney is doing it; the problem is that they want to reap the benefits of a public domain while not ever having to contribute to it. The best example is Disney's The Jungle Book, based on a book whose copyright had expired a mere eleven years earlier. If Kipling (and his heirs) had enjoyed the copyright that Disney is demanding now, Disney would have had to wait 39 more years to make the movie. Instead of a 1967 release that is already a classic movie Disney's The Jungle Book would be a relatively recent movie from 1994. Conversely, if Disney's The Jungle Book enjoyed the same copyright that the original book did I could look forward to seeing it enter the public domain in my lifetime (2023) instead of 12 years after my (statistically estimated) death in 2062. I was born years after the movie came out and can expect to die years before it will enter the public domain. That seems a bit broken.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Here's a few that I can think of off the top of my head --
- Cinderella
- Sleeping Beauty
- Beauty and the Beast
- Alladin
- Snow White
- Tarzan
- Alice in Wonderland
- 20000 Leagues under the Sea
That doesn't include derivitive works, such as Anastasia, Swiss Family Robinson or The Jungle Book, or 'historical' work, such as Pocahantus or Davy Crockett.However, it's my understand that they're the ones who keep lobbying for the extension of copyright length, and it seems to get extended right when Mickey's almost in the public domain.
That's not to say that there are other companies out there who don't base their movies off of other people's content whom they haven't compensated for doing so, but that Disney in particular seems interested in preserving the status quo, and making sure that other people can't make a profit off of the work they've done, even though that's how they made it in the first place. (Alice came before Mickey)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
That's actually not ironic.. it's just hypocritical, or a double-standard.
Irony is when the effect is counter to the intention. In other words, a backfire.
Like, if Disney got such strict copyright laws passed that they could no longer "pirate" old works (or somehow made their existing works illegal, or liable for royalties to the original author's estate).. THAT would be ironic.
It would also be ironic if new creative works became non-existant because of rampant IP hoarding. (Which is *supposed* to stimulate creativity, not strangle it)
Yes, because nobody cares about a 17-year old program; they often care about 17-year old technologies. Patents have a much broader scope than copyrights. A 1980s vintage image editor that could write GIFs is of little consequence today, but the GIF patent was a big burden on entire segment of the computer industry until just recently.
(Of course, this assumes that SCO doesn't succeed in expanding the concept of copyright to include header constants and API interfaces. That would not be a good thing.)
"Sharing copy-right materials is illegal. So get over it."
But its not. Its perfectly legal to do it in most instances. I can loan copyrighted material to my wife.
The library has no problems sharing copyrighted material, either. Although I'll bet you think its a communist plot.
Just because you're ill-informed about the world around you doesn't mean you have the right to inflict the rest of the world with your "wisdom". Stop it. I just got a call from Common Sense and she said she was going to hang herself if you ever posted publically again. You're making her barf.
Why do people infringe copyrights, particularly on music?
/. do is that the music industry has spent fifty years screwing its customers in a variety of ways, while most other business have not. Most businesses actually try to benefit their customers and employees, not hurt them - thus most people want not to screw them. Those businesses have spent their time trying to find something that other people need and trying to do it well. Most businesses haven't spent years tailoring copyright to their benefit and their customers' detriment as the music industry (and the movie industry as well) has.
One, they can't use their product in the ways that they would like (and in most cases are legally entitled to). Copy protection and "trusted computing" are designed to protect content by controlling the ways in which people can use it, even though that control is explicitly given to their customers. These "protections" don't stop major copiers (they are copying and selling bootlegs by the carton in Georgia, China, etc.) or people on Kazaa - they do, however, restrict those who buy CDs. Copy protection doesn't hurt copiers, only customers - that isn't a targeting consistent with protecting their rights. It is consistent, however, with taking customers' fair-use rights and selling them back. I guess theft only works one way though.
Two, the music industry has attempted to monopolize access to radio and marketing, and to use that muscle to charge consumers for the privilege of listening to music. Radio is a medium bought and paid for by music companies - thus to get publicity you will likely end up making the music that music companies think sells, or you will end up on college radio somewhere. If that's what you want, fine, but in most things people are expected to strive for the best - the marketing put in place only selects for artists willing to perform sexual acts on music executives. Meanwhile, the leverage of radio allows music companies to drive their market - to create, rather than respond to, demand. You hear what we tell you, and you buy from us, or nowhere. The music industry wants to tell its customers what they will listen to, rather than responding to their customers' desires.
The difference between copying music and copying the output of others on
The music industry's collusion and attempts to monopolize market hurt their customers and their own employees, and depend implicitly on their ability to change copyright law at their will and on the inability of their customers to get their product any other way. Napster and bandwidth killed that, and gave their begrudged customers the ability to get what they wanted on their terms (and without payment). This means exists for other goods as well, but in most cases it is not used - some because bandwidth isn't big enough, and in other because people are willing to pay for what they get and unwilling to disobey conscience. When the copyrights of most businesses are infringed, people find them deserving of protection and undeserving of having their product copied without permission because the people who copied the output could have gotten it justly and legally by other means (like paying for it), and that the terms of the exchange they could have made were fair, and so the copier is being unfair by exacting his own. The music industry has imposed (by its manipulation of copyrights and its collusion in pricing) terms its customers don't want - they want the music, just not at the terms given. Most businesses respond to the market, because they must compete with others - because of collusion the music industry has been able to ignore its customers. Copyright infringement on the scale the music industry has instigated is a response to the lack of market accountability of the industry. It's a bad response, but a response that cannot be ignored.
Nobody is refusing the knowledge that others deserve to be paid for their work - it's the idea that others deserve to be paid for my rights and while colluding on the terms and