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

Piracy helps.

[lofoforabr]

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.

Re:Piracy helps.

[garcia]

Piracy helped in that instance. Do you really think that piracy of movies is going to help the MPAA? A good majority of movies aren't seen more than once. You don't watch the same movie for 12+ hours a day every day...

So if they are pirated and the possibility of revenue is lost the MPAA can't get that back from that particular movie at a later date by enforcing piracy controls...

It's not the same.

Re:Piracy helps.

[laird]

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. And the companies that are now the media giants all got their starts retelling existing stories (e.g. Disney's retellings of every fable ever). Now that the US has lots of "IP" we believe in strong IP laws, completely contrary to those laid out when the country was founded, and the media companies advocate laws that would have made it impossible for them to have gotten their start.

So when people say that they believe in "strong IP protection" I take it with a huge grain of salt, and append the phrase "because that makes me money." Not that making money is bad, but perhaps too cynically, I believe that if the same person who is attacking piracy in the US was in business in China instead, they'd be advocating piracy just as strongly.

Re:Piracy helps.

[the_duke_of_hazzard]

Absolutely. It's not the same. The article is a little tendentious too. I suspect from the vague wording that California had different laws (the article suggests that law enforcers could not get out there, which is simply ludicrous) to the rest of the US. In which case, they were within the law, which P2P in the US users are plainly not.

Re:Piracy helps.

[Manax]

It was called the "Wild West" for a reason. There were periods of time where it was difficult and/or dangerous and time-consuming to get from the East coast to the West coast. This isn't talking about 10 years ago...

Re:Piracy helps.

[Draknor]

How could California have different laws? We're talking about federal law here - Edison had patents on his invention and had a trust company to enforce it on the east coast. So the pirates moved to California (still under federal jurisdiction, but thousands of miles away from Edison) to operate, and by the time the "law" got there, the 17 year life on the patent had expired. Given that technology has come so far since them, it seems crazy to think such a thing would have worked, but communications was a little slower back then.

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:Piracy helps.

[Jim_Maryland]

The hardware required to support UNIX wasn't cheaply available until competition from MS drove prices down. Sure, you could copy a Solaris, AIX, etc... CD (or 8mm tape) but what would you do with it? UNIX vendors controlled the hardware and wrote their OS's to that hardware. MS on the other hand wrote to a larger hardware base (that was much cheaper).

Re:Piracy helps.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the whole piracy angle for a second: nobody except the most viruent free loading scum is doing this because of the money, given that a DVD rents for about three or four bucks, and, as you point out, a good majority of movies aren't seen more than once. People with the wherewithal (fast computer, broadband, etc) to download 700+ megabytes have got four bucks to spend on their saturday night entertainment.

It's about convenience: selecting a movie from the comfort of your own home and not having to worry about returning it afterwards. Give people a legal way to do this that fits into their price-sensitivity zone and they will eat out of your hand (DVD rental via mail is a good step, but you need to plan in advance, so points off). The irony is that once the framework to do this is in place, all this talk of piracy will just disappear, brushed under the carpet and replaced with adds for whatever solution gains approval.

The MPAA will do just fine in the digital future. Blockbuster, on the other hand...

Re:Piracy helps.

[jamshid42]

I think that a lot of this "piracy" business that the MPAA and RIAA is a load of crap. For example, one of the loudest voices against Napster (before the became "legit") was Metallica. In one of the tape inserts for one of their albums (I forget which one), they claim outright that they used to trade tapes back and forth and copy them all the time before they made it big. So, it is OK when they commited piracy, but it isn't now when they are a target of it?

I'm glad their last album sucked....

Re:Piracy helps.

[StrongAxe]

You don't watch the same movie for 12+ hours a day every day...

You obviously don't have young children.

Re:Piracy helps.

[WorkEmail]

I like the commercials that show all of the guys who build the sets and the props, and paint and saw, and then Ben Afleck and Steven Speilberg come on the screen telling me how bad it is to pirate movies, and how it hurts those working people...and I think...how likely is it that this scenario will happen. (studio executive talking to construction worker on set) "Hey Bob, we busted some kid in North Dakota making copies of the Hulk DVD, so there's a little something extra in your check this week." lmao.

Re:Piracy helps.

[Dirtside]

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, and sending out a phalanx of federal marshals to enforce copyright and patent law was not the government's highest priority, nor as trivially easy as it is today -- there was no cheap commercial air travel nor cheap transcontinental communication.

Re:Piracy helps.

[IncohereD]

I believe the editing is usually done with digital scans now, and then the actual analog film is put together when they know what bits they want to use.

It's worth nothing that when the story about the digital vs. analog Episode II screenings came up last year on slashdot, there was a very different story. I wish I had the link.

Basically they showed the two pictures side by side. The one picture shook a little at the beginning, and everyone was like "ahh, that's analog". And most of them said it looked better.

Turns out someone just bumped the digital projector. And that the digital projection looked better, not least of which because it didn't darken towards the edges, like analog projection.

Also digital cameras (in the 20 megapixel range) are now officially surpassing analog 35 mm quality. Ask a photo geek. They'll tell you the same thing.

Analog has resolution problems too. It's not like it's vector based or something. It's a chemical processed with resolution limits. Take a look at your average newspaper photo...it's analog, but low-res.

Everything is stolen

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached.

Piracy? I can take care of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll need three ships and fifty stout men. We'll sail around the Horn
and return with spices and silks, the likes of which, ye have never seen!

Also interesting how Hollywood loves old stories

[unassimilatible]

whose copyright has run out, like Aladdin.

Don't have to pay for the stories if no longer copyrighted.

Quandry...

[DarkBlackFox]

From the article:

But because patents granted their holders a truly "limited" monopoly of just 17 years (at that time), the patents had expired by the time enough federal marshals appeared. A new industry had been founded, in part from the piracy of Edison's creative property.

In the words of the article, is there a distinction between Copyright and Patent? I was under the impression patents were for ideas of inventions, and copyrights a wann-be patent for creative works. In any case, it's interesting in a sad way how the movie industry took off initially by infringing on Edison's patent, then grew more when the patent expired after a reasonable period of 17 years. Yet in the past couple of decades, the same people who made their fortune because a patent expired are trying to extend copyrights for generations!

Re:Quandry...

[wings]

...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.

Very intersting viewpoint

[Gr8Apes]

So, P2P networks, according to this, will cause another round of copyright law to be written and P2P networks will have to pay some set fee as dictated by congress for those "publishing" works. That seems to be the pattern over time for content broadcasting.

No wonder the RIAA wants to prosecute under existing laws, the pattern of new copyright law for disruptive technologies appears to favor the new technologies over the existing system. This would mean the end for the RIAA

So, someone, somewhere (gee, didn't this already occur in Russia) should set up a "for pay" P2P network with some nominal fee, and start paying to the RIAA. Send them checks. Similar to the broadcast license now charged for any restaurant etc to replay music publicly. The RIAA will surely come down on them, but if the population is large enough, new copyright laws will be written, and viola - effectively no more RIAA.

Re:Very intersting viewpoint

[turnstyle]

"So, P2P networks, according to this, will cause another round of copyright law to be written and P2P networks will have to pay some set fee as dictated by congress for those "publishing" works. That seems to be the pattern over time for content broadcasting."

That's essentially what EFF et. al. are pushing for, but nobody ever pays enough attention to the details of how it would be implemented.

The main questions are where does the money come from, how do you decide to split it up, and who's in power.

For all the RIAA hatered, the details of these hypothetical laws can get downright scary if you think about them from a netural space.

It's weird that EFF wants to create some quasi-governmental organization to track what people listen to. Remember Carnivore?

Piracy...

[night_flyer]

as the term for copyright theft was coined a long time ago...
1930s Newspaper advertisement

Re:Piracy...

[krlynch]

It was much further back than that. The OED provides the following:

2. fig. The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one's own profit, without authority; infringement of the rights conferred by a patent or copyright.

1771 LUCKOMBE Hist. Print. 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition.

The Cable Industry?

[kevx45]

"Cable TV, too: When entrepreneurs first started installing cable in 1948, most refused to pay the networks for the content that they hijacked and delivered to their customers - even though they were basically selling access to otherwise free television broadcasts. Cable companies were thus Napsterizing broadcasters' content, but more egregiously than anything Napster ever did - Napster never charged for the content it enabled others to give away."

I know this a bit offtopic, but does anyone know a good site that could sort of present the whole history of the cable industry. I thought it didn't start up until the 1970's, but maybe I'm wrong. Have been before, will be again.

Thanks In Advance...
Kev

Hollywood's Criminal Past

[fm6]

There's this pair of Brit film historians, David Gill and Kenneth Brownlow, who have done a lot of first-rate documentaries. One of which is a history of the early days of Hollywood. Intriguing fact: the U.S. film industry started out in New Jersey, before moving to Southern California (better natural lighting, lots of cheap locations). Competition between production companies was fierce, even to the point of physical violence. Producers soon hooked up with the local Mafia, who were happy to provide thugs for both defensive and offensive purposes. These guys also made ideal extras for, yes, crime movies.

Free association time: my favorite crime movie is The Long Good Friday. Which also employed real gangsters as extras. One of whom saw Bob Hoskins (playing the crime lord) yelling at a subordinate. He took Hoskins aside, and told him, "You don't need to yell. He knows who you are."

Disney Pirates

[MojoRilla]

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).

Re:Downloading copyrighted material is theft.

[pete-classic]

There is a failure in your analogy.

A closer one would be if I watch the mechanic fix my car, then fix other people's cars with that information, depriving the mechanic of the opportunity to fix their cars for a fee.

This one fails as well, but it illustrates that the problem is in the fact that digital music can be copied without incurring manufacturing costs, which wrecks the music industry's business model.

I don't know what the answer is, but draconian copy controls seem to be failing. (Witness; I watch my DVDs on my GNU/Linux system without a "legal" CSS key.)

-Peter

Monopoly Mouse

[Doc Ruby]

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!

To defeat them we must focus on basic rights

[ShatteredDream]

For a while I have been arguing that the debate should not be framed in the "innovator versus freeloader" view but in a "constitutional rights and individual property rights versus expansive intellectual property" view.

Most Americans do not accept the idea that you have a right to give away a copy of a song to anyone who wants it. While we hear constantly about those numbers that "40% of internet users said they saw nothing wrong with pirating music" we cannot go by that. Americans are just like any other people; when we think we can get away with something that doesn't seem to directly hurt someone we do it. Downloading bootlegs doesn't seem to hurt anyone, but it can.

If I had bootlegged the entire new Android Lust album instead of buying it on iTunes I would have not sent the chick behind AL any money. iTunes allowed me to send her maybe $2 for the album which I paid $10, probably a good $5 less than what I would have paid for a CD copy.

We need to stress to the government that iTunes, not more legislation, is the key to getting the system working. We need to show them that bands like Metallica refuse to do their part because they want an all or nothing. Buy 20-30 songs on iTunes and you give Apple more ammo to counter the claims that piracy has no solution. They can just shrug in front of Congress and say "it's not our side, the legal downloading side, that has dropped the ball. They refuse to let people buy their tracks one by one because they want them to buy them all or nothing."

There will always be politicians who will rail against piracy and ignore iTunes and other legal services, but many politicians will just look at these industries and say "the mechanisms are in place, why aren't you being a team player, why are you coming to us for help when there are companies dying to make the market work for you?" Politicans tend to be lazy, just look at how many Senate votes that John Kerry has missed in the past 12 years. Something like 1000 or more a year according to Fox News.

We can appeal to the public by pointing out the supremacy of the 1st amendment over Article I, Section 8, Clause 3. The first amendment was ratified later so it supercedes everything in the original constitution, just as all parts of the constitution must be read in the context of the Bill of Rights.

We should also point out how anti-backup provisions and attitudes like Jack Valenti's "if you want a backup, buy another copy" are against common sense, American tradition and capitalist principles. I have yet to read of a prominent capitalist theorist who would support the DMCA. Rand, Ricardo, Hayek and Smith are probably spinning in their graves over the DMCA and similar "seller protection legislation."

The hollywood position is built on pure, unprincipled greed. Defeating it only means that we need to be consistant and show the public where the law is going to start biting them in the ass if they don't care now.

The Old Days...

[valence]

One thing that this article doesn't touch on is that early Hollywood (and radio) was filled with people copying each other's works, and in a lot of cases the result of copying and reworking old material resulted in a richer cultural landscape than would have otherwise occurred.

Look at how many classic songs of the 30s, 40s and 50s there are whose canonical popular version wasn't the original, or even created with the approval of the original artist. Similarly, what a loss to cinema it would have been if Stoker's estate had been able to crush Nosferatu with lawsuits... if nothing else, we would never have had Shadow of the Vampire. Most people don't listen to Fred Astaire's old singing, but everyone knows Taco. And the Pet Shop Boys' "It's a Sin" was originally an Elvis track. That's not saying that Taco and the Pet Shop Boys didn't get the rights first (I have no idea), but that it's that kind of thing that has resulted in a richer world.

Re:you steal when you download copyrighted materia

[C10H14N2]

Aww... I was there with you until Family Guy. They're coming up with a new 3-year contract based on their phenomenal DVD sales.

That'a also part of the equation. If there are no sales, there's no way to tell if a franchise is worth bothering with. Family Guy was cancelled and then proved itself on the shelf, so it's coming back, no thanks to you...

Message to all the mediums...

[Shirov]

Change with the times! Hollywood must find a way to use technology to make money. Otherwise, they will spend more than ever lost on piracy try to protect their outdated business models. Same for the music industry... Digital formats are here to stay, so find a way to alter the model and keep on making your money!

I guess the problem with the above suggestion is that there are a few people at the top that may lose a fraction of their power... Too bad they are will to risk millions, and piss of the customer base over a pride issue...

--Ryan

Copyright infringement != Theft

[b00m3rang]

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.

Such Utter Bullshit - My Rant

[Didion Sprague]

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.

Re:What's wrong with that? Nothing

[Xzzy]

> 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.

Re:What's wrong with that? Nothing

[curunir]

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.

Disney in particular.

[oneiros27]

Much of Disney's works were based on existing stories that never had, or no longer fell under copyright laws.

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)

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? ;^)