Slashdot Mirror
Solving DRM in the BitTorrent Age
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has a new article on DRM in the BitTorrent Age. They argue that the movie industry looking for "perfect DRM" should aim for the printed book model (people still buy books even though they can read them for free at Barnes & Noble). They argue that the missing element is that screenwriters are not marketed by Hollywood in the same way the book industry markets its authors."
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment. I don't think that the average movie-goer cares about screenwriters--and studios often subject a script to rewrites that take it far away from the screenwriter's original intent--they just want a few laughs, the proverbial roller-coaster ride of suspense, or a heartwarming love story, and why pay for that if it's on Bittorrent?
You can print out the free book from the net...but its on Printer paper, it's 250 - 400 sheets, and you have to fold and bind it.
Copying a movie or music onto a disk and playing it on your home theatre, stereo, computer, is exactly what you would be doing if you paid for it.
Interesting thought - but not a valid comparison.
DRM could be a little harder in the Bit Torrent field, although it could virtually take over P2P networks unless they have a way to block them (I can't tell the difference on P2P unless I download the file first). Personally, I use a private bittorrent tracker which affords me the ability to know that the content posted isn't DRM crippled.
Solving DRM in the BitTorrent Age
The only DRM that works is having movies that are large enough, that most people won't want to spend the time downloading them. (i.e. 24gb HD-DVDs.)
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Print Version - all on one page, less clutter
How about original, quality stuff for a change?
There are so many movies out there that I do not care about, but if it's a movie I really like, I will go out and buy the DVD.
Ditto for a book - if it's good, I will go ahead and buy it.
And people with tastes different than mine will do the same for books and movies.
The advantage of a book is that most books are quite cheap (well, unless you are looking for a specific one in a narrow area, say something by Springer Verlag or something).
Movie DVDs are getting there, but music is far, far away. That is the problem. And the signal to noise is terrible for music - so much crap out there.
And finally, I can do anything I want with my book - photocopy it, scan the pages, rip it - whatever the hell I want.
The music and movie industry is trying to stop me from doing just that - and that is the heart of the problem.
IMHO and all that.
The best screenwriter in the world can have their movie ruined by a bad director. A good director will pick good screenplays or have bad ones re-written. Plus, movie making is a much more collaborative process than novel writing. Novels need two people, generally: a writer and an editor. A movie needs actor(s), writer(s), director(s), producer(s), cameramen, lighting, and so on down to key grips and best boys.
But the media cartels will still probably need another 5 years to get it.
And the funny thing is: if they ever end up developing a really hard to break DRM or copy protection scheme it won't really succeed in most of the world. Technology in emerging economies (such as Brazil, Russia, India and China) only gets widespread usage when their copy protection is broken.
As a brazilian gamer I used to track down PlayStation 2 adoption around here. PS2 only got mainstream after pirated games were available. But that doesn't mean Sony lost revenue. It didn't. If the copy protection had never been broken, PS2 would've never succeeded around here.
In the end, DRM only hurts those that try to play by the rules (well, at least until they get tired if being abused and get their [pirated] goodies for free).
He cites the common book at the best example of a perfect form of copy protection, and looks forward when a similar state will will exist with HD media. I suspect that Moore's Law will undo him more than he realises. Thus, it may be a constant race of technology.
In some ways, the HD ecosystem is going to buy time to help DRM reach that magic steady state that we enjoy with books. With HD movies requiring huge amounts of space, there's already a barrier to casual copying if only for HDD space issues. The HD-DVD rips that have been unleashed onto the Internet still represents gigabytes and gigabytes of storage. As bandwidth and HDD space increases, technologies such as BD+ potentially will maintain sufficient copy protection to prevent casual copying while still ensuring that the optical disc is a) not counterfeit and b) can be used for managed copy (allowing you to transcode the content to portable players). Potentially being the key phrase - the industry has had rough enough start with HDCP. [...]
I'm even hopeful about Hollywood increasing the visibility of screenwriters in the industry. As movies like Fight Club and TV shows like 24 and Heroes continue to push the envelope of storytelling and captivate an increasingly sophisticated audience, writers are increasingly forced to write more sophisticated movies. A screenplay from a 1990's Van Damme movie wouldn't fly today. Would any movie which uses "it was just a dream" as a plot device work today? Only if it's told like A Beautiful Mind.
The elite group of screenwriters who are capable of writing such movies is relatively small, and that is good news because it means Hollywood only needs to spend a lot of money on a few number of people. So if anyone you know is a creative executive at a studio, debate with them why stories like Thank You For Smoking, Good Will Hunting, Napoleon Dynamite, Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Nemo or God forbid, Titanic were more successful than Stealth, Lady in the Water, Basic Instinct 2, Poseidon, and Flushed Away...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Haven't you heard the joke? "Did you hear about the Polish starlet? She was so dumb, she slept with the writer."
Hollywood pays writers very well compared to non-film jobs, but also treats them like dirt and screws them over at the drop of a hat. They're well below actors, directors, and producers on the Talent Totem Pole. Here's an easy way to confirm for yourself how little heed Hollywood pays writers: Without looking at the IMDB, name any writer who has won an Academy Award (other than Peter Jackson) for best original or Adapted Screenplay. Get one and you're probably doing better than 99% of the movie-viewing public.
Or to put it another way: We'll see Hollywood start promoting writers right after they stop making films based on TV shows or video games.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
F'ing problem solved.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This makes no sense. I don't read books online because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Movies and TV shows are shown on a projected screen with no pause button (unless you have special equipment) and, in the case of TV, interruptions of advertising.
Online books don't take over physical books because physical books have more value.
BT takes over TV and movie theaters because movies/episodes downloaded over BT have more value than their original equivalents.
The librarians of the world would like to teach the submitter something.
This article ignores the detail that the people who get their hands on cracking tools, or get their hands on drm-free versions of movies are enjoying a higher quality user experience than those people using legally purchased movies/music. I've heard several accounts of having to fiddle with the connections, or turning the power off and back on again just to get the player to handshake correctly with the TV or to reset the correct in-memory keys. There are also frequent issues with players/tv downsampling video even if everything should be working at the highest possible quality. The article really misses the point that DRM is becoming a cause for piracy rather than a side effect of it.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
The reason why people still buy books because that is the most convenient format for reading and can't easily be copied. Your alternatives essentially come down to reading everything on a screen or printing everything out on your home printer, neither of which is very comfortable for most people. Plus, illegal copies of books are hard to come by because they aren't easy to make if you don't have access to the original source. It takes a lot of scanning and/or copywriting, e.g. a lot of work.
Hollywood not marketing its screenwriters like book authors has nothing to do with it. And the only way this realisation that books are "perfect DRM" could be applied to, say, music or movies would be by... going back to vinyl records and film reels. Yay.
Basilisk Digital
In about 10 years, everyone will have cameras on them that document EVERYTHING they see and put it in an easily retrievable form. Flip through a book and B&N, go home, and read it to your hearts content. We are headed into an infomational age nothing like you have ever seen or dreamed of...
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
The first post may be offtopic or a troll, but by it's very definition is never redundant. If you're going to waste your mod points, please do so with more discernment.
Fags.
1. Screenplays are fundamentally different animals than novels. They're written to be the blueprint for a movie, not something to be enjoyed in their own right. This isn't to say that a screenplay can't be enjoyable to read, but you're never* going to read a screenplay for enjoyment unless you've already seen the movie it was made into -- because if a screenplay was good enough to sell copies of it to the public, then it was more or less by definition already made into a movie.
2. Screenwriters can't be marketed by Hollywood the same way novel authors are marketed -- for one thing, the screenwriter is one of dozens, maybe hundreds of people involved in the movie's production. Even if you just consider the 10 or 15 most important people -- director, a few stars, a producer or two, writer, DP -- the money is going to focus on promoting the biggest names, and that's the stars (and maybe the director). Stars are always the most well-known people involved with a movie, and that's not just because that's who the studio markets; it's because you stare at their faces for 2 hours.
An author, by contrast, is one of only a very few people involved with the creative aspects of a novel -- even if you take an editor or two into account, the author is still responsible for 99% of what you read. So there's a single, obvious focus for the marketing effort.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Solution to DRM in the bittorrent age?
Get rid of it.
Everyone knows DRM doesn't stop the "pirates"- it blocks legitimate use. The "pirates" will crack it anyway.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Magic? Enjoy? The books should have been digitized like 30 years ago, and e-books are at least 5 years overdue. Thanks to copyright being infinity minus one day, some books are almost impossible to find. My personal grudge is that many great old textbooks are prohibitively expensive simply because they are rare. No one is printing them anymore, and no one is allowed to digitize them either. Enjoy? I don't think so.
And for the love of me, I have no idea how to comment on his screenwriter theme. Yeah, there are other people working behind the curtains. But if movie people themselves think that the most important and creative part is done by the actors and the director, are they going to lie to the rest of us? That makes no sense at all.
"Let's make movies hard to copy like books are hard to copy, because you don't see much piracy in books, do ya?"
One day, hopefully soon, this whole concept of scarcity of information will just vanish.
It's hilarious to see the DRM technology break after every iteration that it goes through. While very amusing, it shows that DRM will lose in the end. Once a movie/album/software/ebook/etc is de-DRMed, then... well, you know.
On a side note but relevant, I was trying to explain DRM to my dad, who is actually someone who doesn't know ads from results on Google. After I was done explaing, he said, "So, it just keeps honest people honest." My dad hit the nail on the head. The crackers will still figure out a way to disassemble DRM. The law-abiding goodie-two-shoes will not.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
If they insist on having DRM (already a bad idea). The Movie studios need to start distributing movies in an Open DRM format. Otherwise what will happen is that whoever wins the portable video war (how hard's it to guess who it'll be ;) ) will become the only place people go to download movies. This one company will charge a massive overhead for each movie they sell. If the the movie companies used an Open DRM format and did not sell their movies under any other DRM scheme, they would benefit from 3rd parties being able to market their movies. Right now what's happening is that iTunes benefits from radio and other advertising. So this way a person who promotes a particular movie can make money off it by being able to sell it on their website (say directly off a movie reviewer's blog site). And this way people who buy crappy movies have someone directly responsible for selling them on it they can choose to trust mistrust in the future.
Music companies made a huge mistake allowing their music to be sold with DRM. And the second biggest mistake the studios made was allowing Apple to prevent fans who bought the studios' music from other sources being able to play it on the iPod. It should have been part of the deal with Apple to allow third party sold music to be able to be playable on the iPod without inconvenient DRM stripping steps. I believe the studios wanted short term benefits and totally disregarded long term consequences to themselves and the industry. I'm not surprised they're seeing a decline in music sales (caused by crappy music since musicians and people who help chart new musical direction aren't being rewarded like they should be)
Although Itunes does some promotion of songs, there is little chance for independent promoters of music to make money.
I'm sure a huge majority of people prefer a real book but I know at least a small minority would sure like to have the ability to log in and just buy it and download it. I can't count how many times I got the urge to read something late at night when the store was closed or even worse a book that sounds good is out of print and has to be ordered used.
Really what it comes down to though is that these industries have been price fixing for years. They always put pretty window dressing on it like making you buy a whole album when you want one song or some such but that's the real reason people are pirating music left and right. Any attempt to serve the customers needs properly will put that price fixing in jeopardy.
A nice fat book will keep you company on the commute for a week or more, and if it's any good, keep you thinking long after that.
A DVD will give you two hours of mindless entertainment then merely take up shelf space.
A book costs about the same, or less than a DVD.
No contest.
Software patents delenda est.
For one, the fact that you can read a book at Barnes and Noble for free is more of a marketing strategy than just a convenience. Unless you intend to come back every day for X days to keep reading the book, you're most likely going to buy it. I doubt anyone could read an entire book during a visit to a bookstore like Barnes and Noble.
However, when it comes to movies, you're talking about a solid one to two hour viewing. If Blockbuster worked like Barnes and Noble, they'd have little to no rentals or purchases - people would watch a movie and leave.
But anyway, back to the topic. It's doubtful that any DRM will work swimmingly with BitTorrent, simply because the method with which you activate the DRM/authenticate the movie would most likely be transferred in the torrent. (Like Windows XP, you can just hand off the CD key with the ISO.)
I can see an effective DRM being an IP-based solution. For instance, a client would have the movie file downloaded and the player for that file would contact a central server for a one-time key. If the client's IP doesn't match, then no key is issued. But this has its downside as well (Dial-up and dynamic IPs... although if you're downloading at those speeds, just buy the damn DVD.)
DRM is a useless trend, just like SOA and 'Web x.0' and all the other buzzwords (People put DRM on podcasts, for Christ's sake). Give it time and it will die.
there's a simple way for movie studio's to distribute their content and make money from it without it being tied to "nasty" drm. simply release their own BT client which will allow you to 2 options - buy the movie outright and allow 10 copies of it to be burnt ( you can't call that unfair, who the fuck needs more then 10 copies ) OR you can view the movie for free after you have seeded 2x the size of the movie. that way they are assured there will be plenty of freeloaders out there to support the network, they won't need to invest tons in inferstructure and no one can accuse them of heavy handed drm.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Has anyone noticed that they require email verification? With that kind of verification, I bet one of you could add 600,000 signatures to any petition using a botnet.
In order movies to be of the same quality, I'd need some way to make cheap, reasonably-good quality videos easily available, highly portable, and very power-effective. What we need is a decent-sized, fairly tough, fairly high-capacity video player and I'd have the book equivalent of a movie. Then, we'd need stores where I could go, plug in, and transfer an entire movie to my personal player in seconds.
IAALS.
Humor is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy.
You should also read Irony, Sarcasm and maybe Droll Humor.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Well it's obvious where these people come from because they see this as a marketing problem, and not a design problem.
Books are easy to carry everywhere and readability is better: print resolution is still better than most screens. Books are very usable. You can just flip pages back and forth, and everyone knows the "user interface". You don't need to buy a display device, hardware, OS, bundeled with some crappy DRM scheme.
Books are also beautiful objects to have in your bookshelf.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Firstly, as far as I can tell the PS2 were not stolen, were not copied with cheap tawainess ship, they were bought from Sony. So.... This revenue WOULD NOT HAVE existed at all without the piracy boom in Brazil.
What they lost is a POTENTIAL sale of game. If people pirate 20 games, buy 3, it is still 3 bought AND NOT 20 LOSS. If people were going in supermarket and hammering/stealing/crushing those 20 PS2 game this would be a loss. But what you describe isn't that. There has been NO REAL LOSS FOR SONY. Hammer that in your head. A copyright infringement is at best a POTENTIAL LOSS, but not a real. CAse in point, if everybody on earth was copying FFIX and sony would still have done the same sale in the past, then they would STILL BE WRITING THE SAME NUMBER AT THE END OF THEIR FISCAL Q.
I do not condone copyright infrigement, but NEITHER DO I CONDONE BAD RETHORIC ON "FANTASY LOSSES".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think the author failed to take into account the lack of concern for quality scripts in movies...
:)
Notice how crappy movies are consistently in the top 10 at the box office.
People who read books have higher standards... (slightly?)
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
All of this is true for plays, and playwrights have no problem getting recognition.
Visit the
I, for one, welcome our new 9-year-old content producing overlords.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
I agree. And also published authors of books usually do not become insanely rich. Actors, writers, producers on the other hand all got their share of the profit (sometimes hundreds of millions) when the movie was shown in the theaters. And it is much less expensive to produce DVDs than it is to print books both because of technology and because of volume.
For me giving a few [local currency unit] to the small publishing company and the author of the book is much more reasonable than throwing even more at the huge Hollywood empires.
I thought bittorrent WAS the solution to DRM.
This space available.
Stop using the language of the enemy. It hands them an unfair advantage.
Hyperic Community Manager
but, why is it when anyone mentions free reading, it's never about libraries anymore? It's all about Borders/Barnes & Noble/etc.
Break out of the marketing and go to a library where, for once, you can't buy anything.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
Comparing authors to screenwriters isn't the best comparison. Actors ands directors are the ones who make the largest difference in the end result of a movie and often won't sign on to a poorly written screenplay.
The quality of movies is similar to the quality of books: the discount book section is as large as the discount movie section and there are mas many derivative sci-fi/fantasy books as there are poorly done movies. People buy books for the quality of the printing, the prestige of a book shelf and the ease of carrying and reading. The same could be said of DVDs/CDs. If these media weren't being crippled and (in the case of CDs) watered down with sub-par content, companies would see a boost in profits.
I read a lot of books on my smartphone. The screen is bright & crisp, even in daylight, the text is well-defined, and I can read for hours with no hint of headaches or eye fatigue. The "page" is small, but flipping pages is effortless with the scrollwheel under my thumb.
However, what convinced me to prefer it over paper are the things books can't match:
Sure it's not for everyone. There are disadvantages as well of course (expensive, relatively fragile, gotta keep it charged), but since I'm copping all that for the smartphone anyway, it's no extra inconvenience.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Yes, you can read a book at some stores rather than purchasing it and taking it home, which is not true of DVD movies. But you can get a book at the library and take it home and read it, for free. And now, MANY, MANY libraries also lend DVDs, meaning you can take movies home and watch them, for free. The biggest library system in NE Ohio, at least, is usually pretty good about getting new releases (there may be a little bit of lag time) and has a fairly large catalog, though you may have to wait in line. So how long will it be until the big-money movie folks start really looking at some of our greatest national resources as their enemies? Will they include licensing restrictions that somehow prevent libraries from buying their products?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
My 2 LCD TVs don't do HDCP although they have HDMI. But I don't care. I dont buy many DVDs anyway. And going down their DRM hell is not worth it IMHO.
"is akin to having a Star Trek replicator"
Exactly, and that is what is so cool about it! We don't have full replicators yet, but as soon as we had one that worked for some things-WHAM, the industry and government are doing all they can to make it illegal and to cripple it on purpose! What complete fucking assholes, what complete greedy pigs!
You think they won't do it with any major super energy advances? That would threaten last century's energy business model! Damn straight they will surpress it, criple it, make it more or less illegal except for a few large entenched industries and people that are already rich as snot.
You think they won't do it when we have tangible objects replicators, those rapid prototypers once they really *do* work well and they are cheap enough most anyone could have one?? That will threaten another set of industries-so we as a society should cripple it on purpose, and outlaw it for most purposes, to keep their "profits" locked in forever?
Why don't we embrace technology, realise when we have made profound breakthroughs, and just maybe help the now redundant and archaic industries adapt better without restricting the technology? Is it really *that* hard when you are already a millionaire to go find something else to do with your time? That's what all the music distributors in the RIAA are saying, that they will be paupers on the street unless they make the government force restrictions on cool tech advances.
With digital copying, we beat one aspect of the star trek timeline by centuries! And they want to establish the precedent that this is a bad thing! If we can't squash their neoluddism now, we are just royally screwed.
What makes DRM so worthless isn't some technical, legal, or user experience problem. The problem with DRM is that it addresses the wrong issue altogether. DRM tries to answer the question, "how can I stop LOSING money because of copying?" The right question should be, "how can I start MAKING money using copying?"
People are going to be making digital copies of stuff with the Internet because that is what the Internet is: a vast digitial distribution machine. Copying and hyperlinking aren't "problems" to be solved, they are facts of online life. How can artists and distributors and publishers use these facts to their advantage?
Google has certainly shown one way to make money from the web. And no, it's not by advertising. That's merely one way of making money. The real mother lode is in LINKING. Google makes money by bringing buyers together with sellers right at the point where the buyer has pre-qualified themselves. Any time you can do that, you can make money -- lots of it.
Things to note here:
1. It is in Google's interest to provide real value to the customer in clear exchange for the right to lead them to a commercial link.
2. It is in Google's interest to be completely up-front about which links are commercial and which ones are not.
3. It is in Google's interest to only offer commercial links that are as closely-related as possible to what the customer appears to be looking for.
Let's apply these lessons to the music industry. Imagine a large copyright holder having every song in its catalog available on a web site. Visitors can listen to samples of each and every track -- good samples that give a true feel for the music, not just some arbitrary clip such as the first 30 seconds. A search engine helps people find not just the big, popular numbers, but other interesting pieces that are related. "If you like this artist, have you tried these three others? People who have listened to this track have listened to these 10 others. Here is a list of every track of every album that features this drummer."
Every opportunity to share information about music, artists, and compilations is an opportunity to offer a tangible product or service to sell. The web site has clearly marked commercial links to buy physical media, purchase the track, add the track to a mix CD, purchase concert tickets, get a t-shirt, subscribe to a download service. It also has non-commercial links to share what the user has discovered with others. "Hey, listen to this track. It's awesome."
There is a lot of money to be made here. DRM is a distraction. It's leaving money on the table, and one of these days some smart music exec is going to wake up and leave the rest of the competition in the dust.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Only my father buys books(and rarely).
Everything of value is from internet or stored on CDs.(Including 10k books in text form)
Yeah I totally agree with the summary. I think every movie should come with it's own specialized tv set.
Just make movies cheaper so that people can't be bothered to pirate them. This works especially well with HD films which take days/weeks to download.
If I could buy the film I want in HD for £3-£5 ($6-$10) and get it the next day, I'm hardly likely to bother downloading a 20GB torrent link am I?
Unfortunately even SD DVDs cost a ridiculous amount of money here in the UK and I don't see why I should spend £15 ($30) on a DVD when I can rent it for £3 in a few months time. I rarely watch the same film several times before it's shown anyway on sat/cable.
TFA is trying to say that the "Intellectual Property" (I hate that term more every time I see it) in a movie is the work of the screenwriter.
It's interesting what this (and the parent) says about the changing way films are made. In many of my favorite movies, the screenplay is one of the least important and unique parts of the entire work. Think about Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now and you realize that the screenplay was very nearly unnecessary to the creation of the film. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if in Apocalypse Now, Coppola accidentally dropped the screenplay off the side of a boat two weeks before shooting started and never looked back.
This issue is important to the discussion at hand because of what it says about what is actually being "protected" when DRM is used on a work of art. I think it's fair to say we can put aside any further pretending that DRM and other forms of copy protection have anything to do with "protecting the artist" or the "integrity of the work of art" or any other such shit.
I'm tired, you fill in the blanks.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nothing can replace the book -- you can devise something more efficient, perhaps, but you can't duplicate the aesthetic part of the experience. The look, the feel of a book, even the smell of a new book when you crack it open (or for that matter, the mustiness of a quaint old well-read volume), the physical act of turning the pages -- it's all very comforting. I think electronic means of delivering text are fine, even superior for reference and technical tomes, especially having a search function and so on. But for sheer pleasure reading, low tech will always be best.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
One popular excuse for the very early stages of piracy with digital media, in particular, Audio CDs, was to rationalize it by pointing out how much it costs the company to make the CD itself, in relation to how much they are charging for it. Another, and one of my favorites is, how utterly ridiculous the amount of money the artists themselves get from the CD sales, or more accurately, the lack thereof.
I point this out, because not only does this way of thinking hold steady today, but it will tomorrow too.
The ease of access to pirated media, in conjunction with the "evil" force that the RIAA has made itself out to be in the eyes of pretty much the populous at large, makes it all too easy to not care that you're stealing music.
Companies like Adobe don't care if I make wallpapers, banners, buttons, stick figures, or professional/commercial works of art... The price is the same, unless I'm lucky enough to be a student somewhere affiliated with Adobe. Which makes me highly skeptical of the price they charge, and in the end for my low end non-commercial uses for Photoshop, I can't justify paying for it. So I don't.
I'm sharing with you the mindset of the average person, assuming that I am indeed somewhere close to average, in agreeance with the quoted portion of the article.
Basically;
The temptation is there, and it's easy to justify. The RIAA, just as the article says, makes it very hard to look at them in a light where we care...
In the end, the only thing that matters is how much fun you had.
I fail to see how promoting the screenwriter is similar to promoting an author. A book is the work of (usually) one person, so it makes sense for those who stand to make money off that work to go out and talk him/her up to the public. A film is not the work of any one person, but rather a collaborative effort by hundreds of people, all performing vital roles. Even a screenplay by one person is usually modified to the point of being something different by other writers before it ever sees the set. This seems like a terrible idea for fighting piracy. No one is going spit their coffee on the monitor, shout, "Holy shit! Lawrence Kasdan? I feel guilty, I'd better pay for this!" and stop downloading Empire immediately.
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
If you don't condone bad rhetoric, then don't use it.
"CAse in point, if everybody on earth was copying FFIX and sony would still have done the same sale in the past, then they would STILL BE WRITING THE SAME NUMBER AT THE END OF THEIR FISCAL Q."
See? Twisted logic.
If everybody was copying FFIX, then Sony would be entering a zero on their fiscal qtr from that point on for that product. And, to further your own example, if everybody copied, Sony would have sold one, count 'em, one copy, which would have then been broadcast to everyone else.
And here I was just starting to feel satisfied paying $5 for a DVD that came out 20 years ago. A copy of "Spaceballs" shouldn't cost more than that. And it doesn't. There is a bargain bin at most stores.. which as the average consumer, is all I can afford to buy. RIAA hasn't seen my money for a long time. $15 for a CD that's 20 years old? The movie cost a lot more to make. Why would I pay more for a cd? I had the tape cassette once. Long since lost. And now this. A potentially degraded/unuseable "locked down" version of DVD's? I will go out and search about these "pirate" methods. I will google for the word "torrent" and find this thing known as a "client" ... I will learn about my "router" and how to "enable ports" .. along the way I will undoubtedly learn what this "spyware" issue is. Then I will come here at this place called "slashdot" ...
*I* am the average consumer. And *I* am here. And *I* am not paying for these ridiculous new movie formats.
Which corporate salesman will get fired over these ideas when they don't work?
I agree that reading books are a lot easier than reading on the screen and bound books have a tangible and practical quality that you just don't get from ebooks.
That being said, electronic ink had made quite a number of advances and flash memory and electronics continues to get smaller and smaller.
I'd be surprised if, within a decade, we didn't have some form of electronic book that resembled a physical book except that you could download any contents you wanted to on the pages. This would give you the convenience and lightness of a regular book but provide you with the ability to carry a whole library in your pocket.
The entire reason why Barnes and Noble can let their customers read the books and put them back up on the shelf is because the average human being would rather do the reading at home. Most books are reasonably priced and allows the customer to take it home and read in the comfort of their own home.
On the other hand, if Hollywood gives consumers 'free' downloads and previews of movies, there will be no incentive to buy it because the consumer is already at home and comfortable. As the article said, Hollywood needs to make it so that consumers WANT to buy the movie. Bring the screenwriters out from behind the veil and give them more reward because they are the original concept artists in the movie industry. Since the quality coming out of Hollywood these days is pretty low (in my opinion), there is less satisfaction from forking out the $20 for a DVD. Why support crap? I am personally all for supporting the industry (buying DVDs and going to the theater) when there is awesome content on the screen (Pixar movies anyone?). But I refuse to buy garbage (Stranded - worst movie I've ever seen).
-
My 10 cents (2 pennies worth $0.05 each)...
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Do you think maybe the fact that a book takes quite a while to read has something to do with why people still buy them rather than spending all their time reading them for free in the book store?
And convenience is why people buy a book instead of going to the library.
I just don't understand how someone could lack the common sense to see such a blatantly obvious fact. Its not the marketing that that is DRM in books. Its the time it takes to read it, and the difficulty with which someone would copy a 400 page book. If someone made a device that you could drop a book in and copy it in 4-5 minutes, then guess what? The book industry would be in big trouble. Why do you think they're not exactly jumping on the eBook bandwagon??
...the film producers just have to create one single copy of the movie, and sell it to the highest bidder.
Starting bid: whatever it takes to recover the investment.
I love bittorrent for the simple reason that I can just browse through random collections of music or books and download new and different things just to see if I like it. I'll grab a torrent like "Blues from the 70's" or "Jazz Collection" and now I'm into blues and jazz (which indirectly leads to many actual purchases since I've just discovered 15 artists). DRM actively prevents this from happening. With DRM, I have to know in advance exactly what I want and where I want to listen to it. But since I rarely know either of these, I have no purchase option.
Additionally, I share my newfound music interests with friends who are usually just as into it as I am.
Music doesn't have to be about trying not to break the law.
In the 1960s, auteurs like Bergman and Antonioni created films with a highly personal stamp, but while their films had some measure of popular success at the time, people today are no longer interested and films mainly function as simple mindless entertainment. I don't think that the average movie-goer cares about screenwriters--and studios often subject a script to rewrites that take it far away from the screenwriter's original intent--they just want a few laughs, the proverbial roller-coaster ride of suspense, or a heartwarming love story, and why pay for that if it's on Bittorrent?
I disagree. I think you're over-romanticizing the past. It's a common mistake, and has been for some time (c.f. the Ancient Greeks constantly bitching about the same stuff). The movies of the 50s and 60s weren't any better than those made today, and I can guarantee you that if you looked, you could probably find sources in the 60s lamenting the apparent decline of films in that era, compared to the "golden years" of the 30s, or even from Vaudeville or silent pictures.
The reason is because, put simply, we don't remember crappy films. It's easy to look back across the past, and think that everything was brilliant and wonderful, but that's only because so many remarkably shitty films have either been forgotten about, or consciously removed from our cultural mythology.
I have no doubt that in 30 years, people will look back on the 80s and 90s with nostalgia, but when they do so, they'll only consider the small number of films that history has seen fit to remember. (And there were some films that were decent, in both decades; Schindler's List in 1987, E.T. in '82, Silence of the Lambs in '92, Pulp Fiction in '94, and Fargo in '96 are all on AFI's list of 100 Best Movies, just for starters.)
We do the same thing with literature and music; because we only choose to remember and savor what we perceive to be good and worth the effort, our memories (and the physical records) of the past are biased to what's likely to be thought of as good, later on. So the further back you go, the "better" things seem like they were.
I doubt very much that if you walked into a neighborhood movie theater any weekend in 1965, that the overall average quality of movies would have been any higher than in a similar theater in 1995; your chances of walking in on Doctor Zhivago were probably just about as likely as walking in on The Little Nuns or something similarly stupid.
People in 1965, or for that matter, 1955, 1935, or 1655, wanted cheap, forgettable entertainment in the same way we do today. They got it in different forms depending on the available technology, but people haven't fundamentally changed. It's just that the further back you look, the less trash we still have around to remind us of 'everyday' entertainment.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That effects other things too. You wouldn't be all that terribly upset if you dropped a paperback in the tub, or spilled some coffee on it, or left it on the bus. Further, you can manhandle books all you like without having to worry about them.
There's also the ego aspect. A large bookshelf looks much nicer than a folder of ebooks on your harddrive.
Is there any reason people has 50Mbps conections other than piracy? I mean, yes, there are legitimate things to do with a conection like that, but how many songs does iTunes sell compared with downloads on emule? And movies? How about HD size? Is there any way to fill an 80gb ipod with itunes bought songs? 20,000 songs, that's about 20,000$, does any buyer of a 5G ipod plan to spend twenty thousand dollars in music? Technology changed music in the early 20th century when the first recordings arrived, and now it's time to change again. DRM is like swimming the waterfall of the internet upwards, and trying to stop others to put it to use towards other ends.
DON'T PANIC
Microsoft lock-in just owned your ass. Now sit back and enjoy paying through the nose for it. MS has how many billions sitting in the bank again? That's all money they've made by locking suckers like you in.
What? Get ot of lock-in free card? Sorry, no such thing. The magic of lock-in is that the deeper you're fucked, the more you've gotta pay in time and sweat to get out. But it is a fixed amount of time and sweat, unlike the option which lasts FOREVER
HTH. HAND.
You feel obliged to be more careful with it. There's a cost to having to be careful with something that people just don't want to pay.
There are other cost issues, as well. A $10 book provides more entertainment hours per dollar than a $20 DVD, and further you can buy it on a whim and use it immediately, without any other devices.
When content is purchased online, integrate the purchasers id in the file in a matter removal renders the file unusable. Like a digital serial number.
For torrented content do the same except with the IP of the uploader.
Then, when a file is found in the wild, you know who to punish. Then you dont have to enable hardware or software with DRM "readers."
The article posed the right question, "How to make movies and music more like books?". Promoting screenwriters, however, is NOT the right answer. Trying to make music and movies as inconvenient to copy as books is also NOT the right answer.
Literature is to Books
as Music is to Concerts
as Movies are to Theaters
In the information age you can't expect to have control over Literature, Music, and Movies without removing many of our personal freedoms (ie Trusted Computing, DRM, internet surveillance, etc). However, the industry still has control over access to Books, Concerts, and Theaters without infringing on any of my personal freedoms. Its just too bad that the industry is not content to have control over Books, Concerts, and Theaters. They want absolute control over the intangible as well as the tangible.
I've been reading books on my cell phone for about a year. I love it, so do my friends. We download them by the thousands off bit torrent. I can't see any reason why that isn't the future for books just like the currently more popular methods for video. IMO the only delays in ebook reading are ignorance and anachronism, which are both guaranteed to fade. Not that anyone asked me, but the only real solution to media->profit is for the original work to be a cheap and high quality download on the owner's website. If songs and books cost $0.25 it wouldn't be worth anyone's time to pirate, and the authors would make more money than they do now.