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Sony Pictures CEO Thinks the Net Wasn't Worth It
rossturk writes "Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said, 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.' Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.' It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies, but his inability to acknowledge that the Internet has changed everything makes me think he's a very confused man. Is this when we all give up hope that companies like Sony Pictures can adapt? Will we look back on this as one of the defining moments when the industrialized entertainment industry lost touch for good?"
That's right, the net has increased competition.. the customers feel "entitled" to companies catering to them by providing product to them in the form and price they want, and will find what they want through black marets should we refuse to provide it.
"the customers feel "entitled" to the product they want at the price they want, and now have a way to get it when we don't want to provide it, and we don't like that" - Sony Pictures.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Capitalism can't produce common goods. Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government. It was created in an academic environment, by passionate people that cared about the advance of technolog (indirectly: of mankind). Internet advanced quickly, different protocols appeared, once replacing the other (Gopher, SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, etc.).
Then the companies came. Those set of protocols froze, some began to fade. Companies didn't care about "what's right". They didn't care about advance the network. The HTTP/1.0 -> 1.1 transition took years, and still hasn't finished (e.g. http pipelining). IMAP mail stalled, and got replaced by webmail. Multicast was never deployed at large. Newsgroups got replaced by phpbb.
These companies hate Internet. If they praise it, it's only when they realize they can't afford to ignore it (or destroy it).
As someone who makes a living selling things online I have to think the Internet is pretty good. Of course competitors and even some manufacturers don't like the Internet because it cuts margins and makes it hard to maintain dealer areas.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No, theft has always been theft, and infringement has always been infringement. Legally they are, and for practical purposes always have been, two very different things. The fact that you did not understand copyright law does not mean anything has changed.
Your point 2 is what everybody else has been saying: If they can't adapt, they can't adapt. Other companies have. But if they are unwilling to supply what the customers want, they have no special exemption from going out of business, just like everybody else who does not keep up with the times.
I stopped buying sony about 2 or 3 years ago. around the time the rootkit stuff came out, the bad oem batteries, the sony vs sony vs the rest of the world (is sony making cd recorders AND music? which sony are we to listen to, then?)
their bd is a DRM nightmare that I won't ever fund (blanks, burners, readers, etc - I want NO part of any of it).
about 10 yrs ago, sony was 'the shit' to have. now its the shit NOT to have; or rather, its the company NOT to fund.
they don't get it, they haven't 'gotton it' for a long time. sony has chosen sides and its not the side I'm not, so I boycott them. until they change their tunes, so to speak.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I agree. I've had some other sony devices that didn't live up to their billing. They've really become the GM of the electronics industry. They were once a great company that made lots of really high-quality products, but have lost their focus and now are approaching irrelevancy.
Doh!
I know I've given up on Sony laptops at least. I purchased a Sony Vaio SZ right as it was released, hoping it would be a good lightweight laptop that also delivered some power so that I could play at least some Windows games (when I was booted into Windows and not Linux, of course, which doesn't happen very often).
As soon as we ordered it, the warranty started ticking. If they had shipped the laptop as soon as we ordered it, that would not have been that bad. But they didn't. For about a month we waited for it to ship, because one part was consistently out of stock. Please, make sure you have the parts for your laptop in stock when you release it, okay Sony?
Well. Finally, it shipped. Okay, so now I have one month less on my warranty than I should. No. This is not the end of my story. Yes, it continues. When it arrived, with its brand new Core Duo processor, I popped open the task manager in Windows because it was acting funny and laggy. Wouldn't you know it, one of the cores was constantly being consumed by some unknown process. It hadn't been shipped with a virus--rather, the motherboard was defective on arrival. Yet more time I have to go without this laptop! So we shipped it back, and they eventually got back to us with a working motherboard. All was good, right?
Yeah, my story still isn't over. Come February of the next year, my battery just stops working. It's no longer recognized by the OS. At all. Well, okay, we have an extended warranty. But it's still under warranty. Right? Wrong. The battery was under a different warranty, which had just expired. Fine, okay, this is getting absurd, but I'll buy another outrageously priced battery. I have a laptop, after all? Come 362 days later, the battery dies AGAIN. Fortunately, this time around, I had a warranty on the battery (for three more days). Well, okay. This is getting suspicious.
Wouldn't you know it. The next year (this year), the battery died again. Very little research told me that this happens to EVERYONE. Right after the warranty expires (hopefully for Sony)...
Well yeah, in the mean time, I'd bought a new laptop from Apple and had no problems with it, so I didn't bother to replace the $200 battery again. I'm never buying a Sony laptop again. I think I had more problems that I've forgotten in the 3 years since I got the laptop, so this rant may be incomplete.
Why Internet? Let's go into the era when things started really wrong.
Sony should have scrapped in first place its support for PC - the CD drivers and MOSTLY the monitors.
Why Sony sold CD drives? They were cheap, they were powerful, they gave HUNDREDS of megabytes to the nefarious, poor scum of PC users. Sony should have pushed for a complete, all-scale proprietary architecture. NO customer fingers inside the box, like the Mac.
AND THE MONITORS! In the very beginning of the PC revolution, Sony monitors were in high demand for cheap graphics, including 3D. Who gave thousands the first taste that one can do something pretty on a dumb, awkward, slummy open architecture PC? The great 3D cards came later btw. Sony should have shot the guy who thought Trinitron was good for the PC.
But Sony didn't do it. And worse, you went into the wave. Sony supported the base that scrapped X25, Frame Relay and Microsoft's proprietary network (does anyone remember it?) More, Sony started to give Internet a chance!
Why Sony introduced a Ethernet port into PS2? Why? Sony pushed over the edge even those who didn't know what a PC was. No Ethernets! Some TwistedNet with a direct port into some hardcore encryption chip. Better, NO networks at all! Just console boxes and millions would never had jump into Internet. Ten years ago, a huge mass of people still thought that PCs were thinking machines, Internet a parallel Universe and console games what the world shall be.
But Sony could not stop itself. It closed eyes to the Pirate Harbour of Linux. It even supported it. It started to use codecs to distribute clips of its ever loving blockbusters... There were lots of things Sony could have done and Internet would never be a headache.
It could have just kept us on the cassetes anyway.
And we think we're entitled to it because we are. Humans are inherently creative and all art and science is derivative. It is our human right to improve on what has gone before. It cannot be prevented regardless of what the law says.
So if they won't offer us what we want we'll take it anyway. It's not that people aren't willing to pay - it's that they're not willing to sell. But we'll have our progress whether they'll sell it or not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Not exactly true. Artists such as Ian Anderson and Cliff Richard wanted to extend copyright to 95 years in the UK.
I stopped listening to Jethro Tull when I heard Ian Anderson talk about copyright. I have quite a few albums, but I feel sick whenever I think of this millionaire crying how he's being robbed, not by pirates, but by copyright laws.
I'm happy he's made a lot of money from his talent (better than making money by fraudulent banking), but trying to extend his copyright while stealing Bach's Bourree in E minor is a bit hypocritical (and I'm sure that wasn't the only piece for which he needed some "inspiration", just like any other artist - be it a writer, a poet, a painter or a composer).
This guy should talk to his own people more often--Sony's CEO and chairman Howard Stringer said in a recent interview:
Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. I think the failure of AOL LLC of the US is good evidence of this. When the Internet was just beginning to spread, AOL boosted its subscriber base by providing special services only to its customers. After a while, though, customers began rebelling, complaining that they weren't children. Because AOL wanted to keep them locked up in a narrow portion of the immense Internet cosmos
Instead of that kind of level headed talk we get to hear from Mr. All-My-Customers-Are-Criminals.
Ride that ship to the bottom of the sea, Michael Lynton.
Previously, Lynton had worked extensively on internet related matters. He was President, AOL International, and CEO, AOL Europe starting in 2000, where he was responsible for AOL Europe as well as for AOL operations in Asia and Latin America.
Can't decide if this is hilarious or depressing :)
You can't take the sky from me...
Hulu is an excellent example of a proper solution
Wrong. Go on a holiday to Canada or France and try to use Hulu - Then let me know how "excellent" you think this "proper" solution is...
Yes. What's really come to an end is the format treadmill.
People already have works legally in their position that are of sufficient
quality. Those works can be transformed into any new format by the end user.
The media industry is no longer required for this.
Sure, there might still be some things you want to get on Bluray but there
is hardly the compelling need there.
Sony's sh*tting their pants not over the fact that I can copy their movie
and give it to my friends but that I can copy their movie and own a copy
of it in perpetuity and play that on my 60" TV.
Soon, you will be able to have multiple copies of hundreds of DVD's scattered
about the house as casually as you might for a similar sized Music collection.
You will have built in redundancy. Even if your house burns down, you will
very likely never need to buy your stuff over again.
Paul McCartney will never make any money from me ever again not because I am
a pirate but because I am a paying customer with a really big RAID array.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I like 300 million dollar movies. Even if they're crappy, usually, they're at least visually interesting. The recent Star trek for instance was a dog of a film, but the excellent special effects afforded by it's hundred+ million dollar budget really glosses over all that.
While a lot of$300e6 movies might not be worth making (ahem... Michael Bay...), I would be sad to live in a world where they never got made.
Also, the film doesn't have to be 300x more entertaining to be 300x more benefit to society. It could be just 20x more entertaining and have 15x the audience as a result.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Ditto almost exactly. It was when they put Lik-Sang out of business that was the final straw for me. Since then I've avoided all Sony products, and sucessfully convinced a few other family members and close friends to do the same.
I am sorry are you advocating a system where corporate entities have access to police powers and can reliable count on jailing their customers when they violate copyright or some other TOS?
I would rather live in a world without movies, tv, and recorded music. Live music and visual arts predate the idea of LAW itself are intrinsic to humanity we could give up those three specific forms and lose little as culture, at least in comparison to the total lack of freedom you seem to advocate.
The big problem here is an economic one at the root. Our society over produces and over consumes this type of art. There are finite good s and labor that go into these productions. Those have a cost and must be recouped. The producers have a price point that is to high, as evidenced by the vast black market distribution of these materials. The consumers are using to much because the price many of them pay is often little or nothing. The correct answer is to charge a little less and produce much less. People won't want to consume as much if they actually have to pay, they will be "satisfied", few will illegally distribute or go looking for and deal with illegal distribution because their simply won't be enough material out there to make the efforts of doing all that worth while.
Computer geeks aside you think joe public would bother learning about torrents and if there were only five movies or so a year he cared to see anyway? You think the geeks would take the trouble to make it easy to do something we would be doing much more infrequently. I don't think so.
Society is dumping to many resources into this particular kind of art. Because reproduction is so cheap and easy the economics around it are being tossed out of whack. The market is doing what it always does and correcting. The black market exists because there are artificial legal barriers to reproduction even if there were non the "free" reproduction would just happen sooner. Studios like MGM are on the verge of bankruptcy and will likely fail. Its a good thing thing actually. Eventually equilibrium will be reached and when it is there will be less waste.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Until 15th century, until an invention of printing press, books were extremely expensive. One book cost more than several cows. A book was written by hand then, pictures in a book were drawn also by hand.
Printing press made books dirt cheap. But not all was good about it. The first bestselling author was Martin Luther.
Printing press appeared in 1440, the Martin Luther's first bestseller appeared in 1517, 77 years after.
The result was reformation and religious wars. Internet is only about 15 years old. What will happen 77 years after its invention?
But something will happen for sure, as the change in the base does cause changes in the social and economical relations. Sony and the likes' problems are the smallest part of it. The whole thing will change, as the invention is so fundamental. Hopefully there will be no analogs of reformation wars though, which, as I wrote already, were also caused by an invention and its widespread adoption.