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Y Combinator Wants To Kill Hollywood
An anonymous reader writes "Y Combinator, a firm that invests in startups, has put out a call to kill Hollywood. In a post on their site, the firm said attempts at legislation similar to SOPA wouldn't stop until there is no industry left to protect. They now want to incubate ideas for new types of entertainment, so we can evolve the movie and television industries. Quoting: 'There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.'"
Dodd and the MPAA are not going to take this sort of thing sitting down. They will sue over every word that ever appeared in any movie or TV show. They will attack any technology that is used to distribute this entertainment. They will lobby for laws forbidding this sort of thing.
So, how can we help fight them?
Palm trees and 8
As video games become more complex, they could one day completely supplant films. Already we're seeing near photorealistic visuals, detailed stories, professional voice acting and grandiose soundtracks in games.
At the end of the day, all things being equal if the government has to step in and decide who it will legislatively favor, I’m hoping it is the tech industry. America is and for a long time has been losing its place in the world. We cannot compete with third world manufacturing, we have deliberately sacrificed our spot as a scientific leader by diverting funds away from a physics supercollider (The Large Hadron Collider in Europe is where future breakthroughs will occur while we now watch on the sidelines), we have given up NASA and future space exploration will be spearheaded by China and India, and we are dumbing down our science, math, and literacy education while the rest of the world ups their game.
We basically have two things left, we are leaders in information technology, and leaders in making Lady Gaga CDs and Chipmunk movie sequels. Which do you believe is doing to be the best industry to foster a friendly environment for to maintain the relevance of America in the world? The media industry exists on the whim of the US government and other governments going along with our endless copyright extensions. Should they decide to stop, there is no value in what they create. Media can be copied for free, there is no scarcity of resources in the distribution, the basic rules of economics don’t work here.
I’m not suggesting that the whole concept of intellectual property is null and void. It has its failings and certainly the way copyright is being handled is despicable (I also feel software patents are insane and detrimental to the information technology industry). But I do know that if this is to be a showdown between two industries, I want the one to win that actually produces something of economic, societal, and tangible value. If Hollywood and the music industry are simply incompatible with technology, then I think we can do without the next Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, but I don’t think we can do without the next Google, Microsoft, or IBM. Do we want to be a country of technical leaders advancing civilization along, or do we want to be the court jesters, a diversion for the Chinese and other emerging technologies to get some cheap laughs from while they surpass us in all other areas?
If you read the announcement, you'll quickly realize that Y Combinator thinks that the industry as a whole is stagnant, and that it sees opportunities for innovation in the realm of entertainment outside of the Hollywood system. Hollywood is dying on its own; Y Combinator wants to invest in the next generation of mass media.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
I think they're right. TV and movie production and distribution needs an overhaul... bad. We've been saying for years that all aspects of entertainment media are ripe for replacement. The technology has been around forever and available bandwidth to homes is only ever going up. It's time for new money to attack those markets with more rational services that make companies money by providing what the market actually wants.
;)
Also, bring back Firefly.
sounds like "I use lemonade to burn your house down"
You appear to have the same misconception expressed in point 4 of this Cracked article. Playing a video game is like watching all the takes of a single scene: you have to rewind to the beginning of the scene every time someone screws up. This completely destroys the pacing.
Two shining examples of capitalist middlemen, the investor and the distributor, each fight for a state of affairs which makes them richer. Each pretends they're doing it for the good of the wider planet.
Objecting to SOPA is one thing, but this is just wanting to "kill" a competitor. You'd instead that people provided different ideas for circenses which feature the sort of thing you have experience investing in so you get even more wealthy.
Why dont the top 100 odd tech firms just get their boards together and buy out the entertainment industry, Fire all the old chaff, then figure out what do do with whats left. Even if they end up writing off the entire investment, the savings in reduced interference from a dying industry(Lawsuits, Trusted Computing, SOPA/PIPA etc.) will justify the few hundred billion. Plus, the innovation it will unleash when all those rent-seeking collaboration-killing laws become irrelevant will bring soo much new life into the dying(yes DYING!!) economies of the developed world.
Sadly, i dont have any hope that such a scenario will ever come to pass, especially when most tech firms behaving more like a pot of lobsters...
(sigh...)
Distributors used to be need to sponsor copying films and publicity. They are no longer needed the cinema house can handle all of that directly.
The current process for independents (anyone not in house to a production-distribution conglomerate) is to make a movie, then spend time showing it at festivals looking for a distributor to pick it up so that the film can be copied and promoted. That is no longer needed.
With digital projection there is no need for making expensive copies of films and cinema houses are capable of doing their own advertising (see all the pre-show stuff). There should a path directly from the festivals to the cinema houses.
Cinema houses could do this easily. The problem would be that the next "in house" production blockbuster by a distributor would not be available to the cinema house.
What makes them think that new media won't want to protect their copyrights just as much as current media?
People will always want laws benefiting themselves. The problem is that the government is too open to corporate bribery. If politicians couldn't take money from industry, and had to sign non-competes upon taking office, then laws like SOPA wouldn't even get started.
People:
1) hate advertisements
2) like renting
3) don't want to spend money on garbage
4) don't want to spend more than $5 on on good content
Thus: ... LESS than $5 ($0.25 to $3) -- if it isn't on par with price of any other renter service out there it won't work. This way people can get their money back if they really don't like a movie. If they rent (and pay) the same thing multiple times (two or three for instance) they should automatically OWN a drm-free version of the movie (they've proven they aren't pirates so don't be bitches about it)
Online streaming rental service (2 day rental) of content where the user can watch the first half of whatever program for free (eg. an hour of a two hour movie) and then ~half-way through at a strategic place the movie will pause and allow the person to continue watching it at a nominal fee
There is no dog like a dog in a manger, snarling and barking to defend it's cushy little spot while denying the artists and writers and staff who DESERVE the food their due.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
How does anything get produced these days, shows or movies or games? Someone has to come up with the money, then the movie gets made, then it gets distributed.
Now, ultimately that money is coming from individual people voting with their wallets. If people weren't watching Trek, there wouldn't be Trek. If kids weren't buying Pokemon cards and games, it wouldn't be made.
So, the question isn't a matter of straight economics. It's not like any of this stuff is subsidized. Entertainment is enormously popular, enormously profitable, and gatekeepers are making bank.
Distribution used to be the sticking point. You need theaters to show movies in, television networks to put tv shows on, and physical media to sell into homes. This all is very capital-intensive, costs a lot of money, and there are many barriers to entry.
The internet is fucking the traditional distribution model sideways. Video stores are as dead as Kodak, we're just watching the corpses twitching. Video game stores are in a similar bind.
So, where's the last barrier to entry? Capital. Even if you strip out the inflated salaries, graft, and Hollywood accounting in entertainment, this stuff is expensive to make. While you can shoot a Kevin Smith movie for $20k or make an Angry Birds for $250k (maybe it was $500k), you can't make a GTAIV or the Matrix for that kind of scratch. It takes money.
The technology is pretty much in place for fans to take ownership of their own IP, it's just a matter of setting the precedent. This is the next step that the gatekeepers don't want to see happen. Right now things are basically made on spec -- capital is put up and then profits are made after the product is produced.
So you get a producer who puts out a prospectus for a movie. Here's the plot, here's some storyboards. Target is $x to begin production. It's an investment with no guarantee of return. You kick in $5, you get your name in the credits. If the movie is profitable, you'll get points off it. But more likely the only payback is seeing the film made.
Once the film is released, it can be distributed on Netflix, direct download, physical media, and the books for the project will be left open for public audit. If it makes a profit, the investors can see a return.
If the movie is successful, the producer can pitch his next project and start raising money.
The internet is making the distribution costs cheap, can remove barriers of entry put up by rent seekers and other assholes who are trying to get a cut for not doing a goddamn thing but it still takes a pile of cash to make something. GTAIV was $100m but the typical AAA title on this generation is at least $30m. Even if 75% of the cost is bloat and waste and could be saved with an efficient, targeted effort, that's still a giant pile of cash.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Seriously. Apple has 76B sitting in the bank, Microsoft has 55B. Time Warner has a market cap of 37B, hell even the media giant that is Disney/Pixar has a market cap of only 70B. A lot of the music companies are a fair bit smaller.
The distribution channels (Apple, Google, etc) are bending over backwards on deals with companies that they could acquire in a hostile takeover tomorrow if they wanted to. It's crazy.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Kill Hollywood ?!? I thought a wooden stake was all that was needed...
in the case of books and music? [Publishers] serve no purpose whatsoever anymore
In the case of books, not everybody has yet bought an e-book reader. Even if you hire a book printer, self-published books aren't as citable and aren't as easy to get onto the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries.
In the case of music, you can't listen to Internet radio in the car or bus without cellular Internet service. So record labels offer the key service of promoting music to people who still aren't willing to pay $50+ per month for a smartphone.
There is all this raging against "the music industry" and the "film industry." Meanwhile the people doing all the raging are soaking or craving up the products of those industries like mad. Isn't that hypocritical?
I have no problem with the music and film industries vigorously protecting their rights. But I am extremely pissed off that those rights extend for so damn long.
I don't care too much about the parasites who want their movies and music for free. I care a lot about the creative people who want to be able to draw from music and movies from the thirties, forties, and fifties. They should be free to copy and mash and improve on those earlier works. That would make our artistic world a much richer place.
"new types of entertainment" Duh, they're called apps.
Don't stop where the ink does.
After WWII, to pay down the war debt, the Feds imposed a 20% excise tax on movies. The tax was collected at the ticket booth, by the theaters. Now, I'm usually opposed to taxes, but everyone should pay their fair share.
Impose a 20% tax on the gate receipts for all products from Hollywood.
Alternative media and distribution already exists, and the main goal of the legislations Hollywood is lobbying for is exactly to stop them. It wil be hard to kill Hollywood using technology when they can outlaw any technology that competes with them.
Hollywood is dying on its own; Y Combinator wants to invest in the next generation of mass media.
And Hollywood (both the RIAA and the MPAA) probably wants to invest in lawsuits that make flimsy accusations of plagiarism. Because people create cultural works by "standing on the shoulders of giants", as philosophers from Bernard of Chartres to Sir Isaac Newton put it, anything made by hobbyists must be an infringing copy of something created after 1922, even if only through cryptomnesia.
Video game publishers are merely a subset of software publishers. It is evident in the race for patents and subsequent lawsuits that both Microsoft and Apple are becoming irrelevant. Other signs are UEFI keys and significant IP revenue reports from these corporations. As I sit here using free software on a machine that has a Microsoft sticker on the bottom, I consider Windows refund day.
This is all just part of the larger war against general purpose computing ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg ). The Internet threatens to change the balance of CONTROL for governments as well as businesses. This disruptive technology has changed the world's paradigm and those in power everywhere are afraid of it. The will of the masses is the movement that they fear the most, and they will stop at nothing to stop it.
http://signon.org/sign/fixing-copyright
A long time ago in a reality far far away... TV broadcasters had series shot to sell advertisements. Why can't web sites do it? Slashdot does. Taking that a step further, why not integrate advertisements into a video. With P2P technology, any company can have a series produced, insert advertisements for their products, and let file sharing do the rest. Would you, the average /.'r, have greater knowledge about a company and its products if they provided good intertainment for daily download? I would.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
You know what would be a great place to start a replacement for MegaUpload? Venezuela or Bolivia. They hate the US, they hate American companies, and they'd be willing to do anything to screw over American interests. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales would be willing to have their governments directly fund such a project if it was pitched to them as something specifically aimed at fucking over American multinationals (and let's face it: the MAFIAA are all multinationals).
Here's the problem with Corporate Citizenship...
They claim all of the rights and privileges without any of the responsibilities.
Taxes? Avoided by placing shell companies outside the borders and funneling sales through them.
Draft? Who to draft? They claim they are LLCs or INCs which no one individual can be held responsible for. No one individual to lay the blame or responsibilities on.
Jury duty? Employees as individual citizens certainly, but the corporate citizen can't be brought in to sit through jury duty.
Criminal offenses? Again, no one or group of individuals to be held accountable unless it's done by the mobs and so publicly that the government has no choice *but* to intercede and do something. Otherwise, they get a little fine of maybe 1/100th of their profit from the illegal action and it's back to business as usual.
So how do we fix it?
Remove the ability to avoid taxes. If you sell products to US citizens, you pay US taxes off that sale - stop income tax, make national sales tax.
Draft? Additional taxes on the corporation equivalent to pulling the bread-winner from a family of 4 to go to war. Essentially, yank 80% of their income if their number is drawn.
Jury Duty? Sorry, but most officers of companies are so narrow minded and focused that we really don't want them on juries.
Criminal Offenses... All officers of the company held responsible based on their salary/bonuses/perks/golden parachutes/etc. If the company does X, all officers get the full punishment allowable by law.
Political Donations: Cut off 100% Any corporation trying to donate to a political campaign gets fined 2 Billion dollars for every dollar donated, no bankruptcy loophole, officers held accountable.
Lobbying: No lobbyists can hold prior or after positions in corporations that benefit from the lobbyist's efforts. All lobbying must be for the good of the people, not corporations.
Outsourcing: Made illegal. Fines 1 billion per outsourced employee, per day.
Wall Street: Shut down. Speculation: Ended Futures: No longer sold, or if sold, person buying must pay all associated fees for growing, harvesting, storing, shipping said products until they are sold. Make the costs of ownership be true.
Intellectual Property: Call it what it really is. Imitation Property. Imagined Property. Pseudo Property. It's not real, it doesn't exist. Ideas once shared belong to whomever they were shared with.
Software patents: Ended. Gone. Never allowed again.
MPAA / RIAA - Shutdown / Gone / Forbidden from ever existing again. Get the money made to the people who make the works they're claiming ownership of.
I'm all for it for a variety of reasons not even listed, the first thing you have to do is get people to stop watching TV.
See what you're up against? Not Hollywood, Hollywood wouldn't even exist except for the masses that need to be endlessly entertained and at this point the last 2 generations were raised by TV so that's what you're really up against, a fundamental aspect of everyones lives.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Why dont the top 100 odd tech firms just get their boards together and buy out the entertainment industry
I see three problems with that.
First, watch out. Sony (SNE) was the good guy up until around the time it bought Columbia Pictures from Coke (KO).
Second, some of the entertainment industry is privately held (notably Access Industries, parent of Warner Music, and National Amusements, parent of CBS and Paramount) and not subject to a hostile takeover. Some of the rest (e.g. GE's stake in NBCUniversal) is currently owned by companies with a market capitalization over $200 billion.
Third, hostile takeovers of all the publicly traded members of the MAFIAA (CMCSA, DIS, NWS, SNE, TWX, and VIV) might result in investigations from national competition regulators.
What makes them think that new media won't want to protect their copyrights just as much as current media?
Include in the financing conditions that the resulting film must be made available under Founders' Copyright, a time-delayed all-permissive license.
Unless you have an alternative way to raise money to finance movies and TV shows, you can't compete with Hollywood. It's all about money.
If Google wants to get in the business, they will finance movies using advertising, which copies the 60 year old business model of broadcast television. It will just be more of the same.
Another way of looking at the copyright licensing problem is the continuing assumption that every single copyrighted item must be sold for a specific price under the terms of a custom sales contract that is unique to every item sold.
OK, I am stating the copyright goods sales assumption in an overly dramatic form.
The first problem that the Internet has created is the electronic distribution of any kind of copyrightable object costs less than a penny. A file that costs 1/10 of a cent to transmit over the Internet is overwhelmed by the 45 cent credit card transaction fee.
The second problem that the Internet has created is there is so much copyrighted material available that every person in the developed world has more copyrighted content available than that person can possibly attend to. As a perceptive analyst has pointed out: The Internet has created a state of information saturation.
A single human being can only absorb x hours of movies, books or research material transmitted over the Internet in a single month. That means, a fair payment for copyrighted material is limited to Y dollars for x hours per month per person.
So what this would point to is a mandatory automatic quitclaim copyrighted material payment system. No matter what the content is, the total payment price should be somewhere around 1 penny per hour of file transfer time. It should be so cheap that a user's personal storage would simply be full and only a relative few items stored.
The internet is fucking the traditional distribution model sideways. Video stores are as dead as Kodak, we're just watching the corpses twitching. Video game stores are in a similar bind.
How will Internet distribution cope with the monthly transfer caps that have become common on home Internet access, which in some areas are as low as 5 to 9 GB per month?
So, where's the last barrier to entry? Capital.
That and a digital signature from the manufacturer of a home-user device so that a work will play on the device, especially if the work is a video game in a genre unpopular on PCs. And a search to make sure someone else hasn't already copyrighted the concept of the work. Otherwise, you could end up with a case like The Da Vinci Code (compare The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) or "My Sweet Lord" (compare "He's So Fine").
In support of the comments that this industry can be brought out; I refer you to this interesting comparison on what entertainment is worth, even if it is both UK specific and music specific. From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3343543/Country-roses-A-cut-above.html. The value of retail cut flowers (e.g. roses for your mother when she is in hospital) in the UK is about the same as that for music. It puts it all in perspective, especially when you consider that flower growers do not lobby governments to prevent us from giving our home grown roses to our friends.
What's wrong with today's copyright laws? Almost everything. Copyrights don't serve the creators/inventors by having limited duration to encourage progress. They don't benefit end users since censorship and threats don't encourage progress. Copyrights are wrongly held by distributors, moneyed interestes and heirs, not creators, and don't encourage progress.
Article I Section 8 Clause 8: "...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;..."
All copyright laws need to be void. Start over and protect authors and inventors with EXCLUSIVE right to their writings and discoveries. All other permutation of copyright law are detrimental to progress.
Nintendo (etc) have all shown that inexpensive, easy-to-use, reliable, on-demand content delivery to customers televisions isn't just entirely workable, but popular.
But Nintendo and the other console makers still insist that a producer of works make its name on another platform before being allowed to distribute on the console.
Not to mention, changing the system of electing officials requires the approval of said officials.
If it gets bad enough, conventions held in three-fourths of the several states can change anything about U.S. federal law.
It's exciting to take down the old tyrant, but once the 'new' industry obtains power and wealth, they will become the new tyrants for the same reasons the old ones did: Many people will have a lot of money, their careers, and status invested in their enterprise, and being people, will do whatever they can to protect it.
We need to make changes to our legal structure, etc, now that will prevent it and keep competition open.
OK, if we are going to have another inevitable round of the "creative destruction" business model... can it be done without killing the jobs of people who had nothing to do with SOPA and the entire rights problem? lighting, grip, electical, camera and other technicians are just working people. Don't penalize them by killing their jobs to achieve this objective.
Mod parent up.
From where i'm sitting, right's are not only being extended, old rights seem
to bring precedent for completely new rights, spidering throughout systems
which no "industry" should be involved in. Excuse the run-on sentences, i do that
when i get excited; I keep reading about the "Entertainment Industry" and find
myself thoroughly un-entertained.
Something that strikes me as sort of odd is how much bitching is going on about how painful this recession is, compared to reality.
Starting with the moniker being thrown around. I mean, come on, "The Great Recession"? Is it really necessary to make it out to be more than it is, are the current living generations such coddled masses that they need to be stroked and told how gee tough it must be living through The Great Recession?
And where is this fucking Great Recession?
Because last I noticed, the entertainment industries were just as rolling in it this year as any other. The gaming, movie, television, sports conglomerates have raked in huuuuuge amounts of dough. That's supposedly dough we don't have because ohhhhh fuuuuck there's this whoooole Greeeaatt Recession going onnnnn, maaannn!
Well, wtfe. But anyways, this leads to my subject-heading question:
Who's going to pony up against Hollywood? I mean, pony up the non-cash, the negative expenditures. Who's going to throw their wallet down, stomp on it, and say "damnit, that's right, no more money for those fucking kooks and poisoners for me!"
Imagine what you'd be downgrading from. Well, it's not a huge leap of imagination, for me. I haven't been a regular TV watcher in years. I haven't sat in a movie theatre and watched a movie in years. I haven't gone out and rented a new movie to watch in years. So, for me, *I* have to imagine what you'd be downgrading from, if you, say, depended entirely on YouTube for your viewing entertainment from now-on.
You'd be going from Transformers to MikeDiva. From Saturday Night Live back to Second City, and from Mad TV to the Bath Boys. From Martin Scorcese to Sam Macaroni. From underwear advertisements to cleavage whores.
I already live this lifestyle. It's easy for me to not give Hollywood or network congloms my money because, well, I don't have any money to give them really, but also because I've already been getting nearly 100% of my entertainment from YouTube for several years. Before that, I really wasn't exactly a regular customer to begin with, so it wasn't a huge transition.
But Americans who are hitting the theatres twice a month, renting the latest flicks once a week, and subscribing to cable or satellite TV, are going to have some trouble getting behind any movement to squash "Hollywood", which is really, really, way bigger than just a little suburb in California or a bunch of warehouses, agencies and execs.
It's practically our entire culture, sadly enough.
You're actually talking about making American culture do a 180.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The indie film movement in the 1990s was a great start at creating a system where filmmakers could get movies made outside of the Hollywood studios and we could hear stories and viewpoints from all over the country, not just one town in southern California. Unfortunately, while many films managed to get made, they never came up with a distribution system. They ultimately had to bow down to Hollywood to get their films into movie theatres.
However, some of these movies made lots of money and got Academy Awards (like Pulp Fiction) so all the Hollywood studios started their own independent film arms, invested just enough money into it to attract all the indie filmmakers (also because distribution was guaranteed), and totally usurped the indie film business. Once the indie film business was decimated, they shut down all their indie film arms and went back to making comic book movies. Now we have a lot of good, creative directors making crappy, generic Hollywood fluff instead of lending their unique voices to the world.
Robert Redford was to be the king of indie movies, and he still is, but his power over the market is minimal. He got films made, but they never made money, or even got seen outside of film festivals. The only guy who ever made Hollywood eat their lunch was Harvey Weinstein, and even his studio got bought by Disney and, as expected, bit the dust. Harvey is still indie and still getting award nominations, but mostly for stuff he imports from Europe (looks like this year will be "The Artist")
So coming up with a fantastic new movie distribution system is a great idea, but there's few movies outside of Hollywood to distribute, and the only thing that will get Hollywood interested is if they can make MORE money than they're making with their current methods - methods which may be old fashioned, but they have been proven to work and they know how to control every step of the process. So go ahead and find a way to make more money than Hollywood does, and you'll have it made.
I think it would be easier to just buy them than to fight them.
Who says so, really? I mean, think about it. What does Disney have? Rights to Mickey Mouse, a bunch of cartoon movies.
Kids love junk with Mickey Mouse logo on it, of course. But 70 billion? No way. Maybe 2 billion, tops.
Its not hypocritical to call out when one side is abusing their part of the SOCIAL BARGAIN. No one is denying they make products we want, what we are saying is we are continuously getting the short end of the BARGAIN we struck. Copyright isnt intended to be a free pass to print money, its meant to incentivize the creation process for a LIMITED time. Its hypocritical of you to say you hate the laws these industries have gotten passed, yet you support their right to rigorously defend wholly immoral extensions of their rights and diminishing of The People's right to free culture.
Good-bye
I maybe watch a move once a year at the cinema, and use the redbox about the same, but for every person like me, there are 3 people like my co-worker who shuffles down to best buy every week and gets like 5 blu-rays of shit he has never even seen cause he is going to get bonus reward points to purchase more shit that he has never even seen.
I had a roommate like that to, piss away 100 bucks on just utter garbage dvd's to get a 25$ reward from media play, and as long as people are actually dumb enough to buy a ben stiller movie not once, but fucking twice cause they cant even remember whats in their 3 bookshelves of crap, then hollywood will thrive.
But if you copy an artist's work without compensating the artist, you have stolen from them, it is theft of service. There is nothing idealistic about the pirate economy.
This is excellent news! I sincerely hope they succeed. We all know that one of the fundamental issues (and basis for all this bad copyright legislation) is "Hollywood's" failure to innovate... Their failure to adapt their business model to the internet. Other companies have been successful, so can Hollywood and the Music Industry. I say, if Hollywood and the Recording Industry can't adapt, let someone else do it for them!
Its really not about protecting the music/movie/etc industries. That is just the excuse to get it passed with ( some ) citizen support. Its really about the restriction of freedoms and a increase in government control over our lives. The entire 'anti piracy' angle is just a 'shiny smokescreen' if you like.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's nowhere near the amount required to reclaim the costs of creating the content in the first place. Many of us are not bothered by the idea of companies merely profiting from copyrighted material - we are bothered by the industry's attempts to strangle the rest of us with shoddy regulation. Also, although I'm not exactly a Neoclassical economist, the economic value is not defined in terms of how much the distribution costs, but more along the lines of how much you would be willing to pay for it. That isn't always more than what costs to make, but such is the tale of Supply and Demand.
Apparently, you're willing to pay a penny, because you don't know what you're talking about. I don't think you're in the audience I create content for, because you clearly don't understand that my time costs money.
> But if you copy an artist's work without compensating the artist, you have stolen from them, it is theft of service.
Not everyone (artists included) agree with this, it isn't a safe "given" to use in this discussion.
IBM was left with an operating system but no applications. No one felt sorry for IBM at the time, they were just coming out of a very abusive anti-trust action. However, that's no reason for the article summary to try to whitewash M$
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The best way to bring down Hollywood is to shrink their business by consuming less and less of their product. We're seeing this happen already - the hit TV shows of the past decade have included many cable series produced on a shoestring (compared to network TV) budget - Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Weeds, The Wire, etc. etc. Hollywood is already on the way down not because of filesharing but because of their own lack of creativity and aversion to risk. They would rather crank out a Cars 2 or a Transformers 3 than come up with compelling new ideas. We're already moving away from Hollywood - first to the current hit cable series and eventually to web based shows that let us leave cable TV behind altogether. The days of a mass audience are passing quickly, together with the big-budget (expensive production values and very higly paid actors) Hollywood system providing entertainment to that audience. Will the sitcom of the future be populated with computer-generated characters? We're not there yet (crossing the "Uncanny Valley"), but we will be soon. We can best hurry the process along by making a conscous decision to consume less mass market movies and more indie movies, or less network TV and more cable channel TV, less TV altogether and more web video and gaming, less Metallica and more indie music of all kinds - much of it produced and self-distributed by acts who don't have a record label deal and probably never will have. We're doing all this already, so we just have to consciously do a little more of it.
The author's got a cute idea and all, completely bypassing all forms of the traditional and incumbent media... but it's completely idiotic and ignores the fact that the market has already realized this (but better) long ago and is still working out the tweaks. Case(s) in point:
Google TV, Apple TV, and now Ubuntu (with their shit desktop-ruining Unity sidebar and all) have been vying for attention (and feasibility) for when the combination of entertainment, interactivity, and gadgetry finally triforce together to create the ultimate couch-potato farm (second only to the Matrix breeding pods).
What TFA doesn't acknowledge is that not only is the market paradigm shifting away from the traditionally simply-consumed media and towards a more immersive crap-fo-tainment hub, but that people still want quality in all of the touchable surfaces so to speak. That is to say, people want production value (to be generated efficiently by the incumbents still), a reliable and familiar infrastructure for content delivery (ATT, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) and finally a yummy physical object to view it on (TheOnion's iMat, anyone?).
The author's suggestion that we are at some sort of precipice where the next jump is to be made by some grass-roots or novel concept is completely silly. For the last decade we've been witnessing the convergence of TV's, video games (i.e. consoles effectively becoming computers with better DRM), the internet (tablets, Google/Apple/Ubuntu TV) to create a giant glob of brain-melting mush. The fact is we aren't at some turning-point where we are about to re-define media and take it to a new direction, we are instead about to witness the complete convergence of every form of media possible in an attempt to make a buck. And with such big names (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Linux, every Viacom and ATT et al.) already trying to cover every single square foot of this, unless this guy's got big plans for the newly freed up white-spaces he's just wasting his breath.
Killing the music labels is quite feasible. They don't do much. They don't manufacture records - that's outsourced, and anybody can have a CD manufactured. They don't run the download systems - Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do that. They don't run recording studios - those are mostly independent, and anybody can book studio time. Their relationships with record stores (what record stores?) hardly matter any more.
The music labels have two remaining functions, one of which is attackable under antitrust law. They pay payola to radio stations for airplay and make deals with concert venues. Both have been the subject of antitrust investigations. They also do promotion. That's their real function.
The one remaining function of record labels is venture capital. They "sign" bands and put in startup capital. Others can do that. YCombinator could do that. Venture capital firms might fund a company to do that. Myspace briefly did that. That's where the labels are vulnerable.
"Own your own stuff" - Joan Jett, to new musicians.
Am I the only one who thought the headline was supposed to be a question? "COMBINATOR, Y U WANTS TO KILL HOLLYWOOD?"
>YCombinator wants to kill Hollywood.
Yeah, get in line...
My entertainment falls into two categories based on the pizza test. Assume that you can't stand a greasy remote / controller / anything for the duration of this test.
Can you eat a deep dish pizza and still be entertained? You can substitute wings and popcorn as well.
I will turn on the TV if I'm eating something that is hard to put down and do other things. Sometimes I'll put on a movie. Video games are not on while the pizza is out, shuffle play music is not an option if it might play that one song I hate on that one album I have in there.
A concept album where the tracks go together, like Dark Side of the Moon (which is why Pink Floyd did not want to sell individual MP3s for the longest time) is passive, pizza entertainment, or Shostakovich symphony.
Slashdot is not pizza entertainment, because I have to tell people the many ways in which they have not thought their agrument through, even if I agree with them. News aggregators are not passive because it takes maybe 30 seconds to get the idea of a story, and then either scroll or click.
Movies have been around since ever, in the form of plays or similar theater, and that form of entertainment will never go away. The only change you can make is the presentation - plays to silent movies to talkies to Michael Bay-riffic explosive barf-fests.
There is only one way to take all the Hollywood money and that is by making all the needed movie sales income at the theatre and ask everyone to only go to theatre movies when the movie will be released as free to share between individual persons on their privately owned and privately used home equipement.
Humble Theatre Bundle Contract
This movie will be opensourced via bittorent in jan 2014 if you go watch it now. If more then 1 million tickets are sold then we will opensource it jan 1013. Yes you will be able to download it, recut it share it among friends, you can post the link on your site, but you may not upload it to youtube for the coming 20 years. You can buy the Bluray or DVD with DVD or HD quality film, rip it and share share it, but you may not sell copies yourself or broadcast it on your streaming service or TV channel without a payed licence but feel free to host a torrent and spread your link anywhere on the web. Yes, you are allowed to stream the torrent if your torrentclient setup is fast enough. No you may not integrate a torrent function into a web page or web browser and effectivly stream it advert supported. If the torrent client has integrated search and / or movie viewing then it may not involve any advertisements, commercial exploitation is limited to the copyright holders and those licenced to do so by the copyright holders.
Please support our humble theatre release by only going to movies which will be, by de facto, public domain in 20 years and which you may share pretty soon for your convenience. Support only movies with the Bearded Golden Statue logo.
Millions of consumers have already started tackling, now a 300 million pound defensive lineman jumps on the pile. The official keeps blowing the whistle and nobody cares. It'll be interesting to see who has the ball when the pull everybody off. Go 49ers!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I am going to post once again on this same topic.
Abolish copyrights and patents.
Government is out to destroy everything, it has to be stopped.
You can't handle the truth.
I didnt think that this realization would materialize to action in tech industry this fast. this shines hope in that, people apparently actually understand where the real problem and the blame lies, and ready to take it on.
This should be doubled with lobby attack by funding of major tech companies like google, amazon et al, so that the derelict 'entertainment' industry wont be able to buy any laws in the meantime they are removed from existence.
Read radical news here
and the reason is below :
The author's got a cute idea and all, completely bypassing all forms of the traditional and incumbent media... but it's completely idiotic and ignores the fact that the market has already realized this (but better) long ago and is still working out the tweaks. Case(s) in point:
Google TV, Apple TV, and now Ubuntu (with their shit desktop-ruining Unity sidebar and all) have been vying for attention (and feasibility)
if google tv, apple tv, ubuntu tv were actual alternatives, they would be already established by now and would not need to 'vie' for attention.
the idea they are looking for needs to be an idea that perpetuates itself. without needing immense effort to do it.
not to mention all of what you name are just taking the entertainment from a group of major monopoly holders, and give it to new monopoly holders.
Read radical news here
i mean, your viewpoint. it is totally stupid. maybe naive to the extent of self-destruction, instead of stupid. here is why :
Bring in more direct democracy, so that lawmaking becomes more independent of the few bribeable, single points of failure (politicians)
so you are going to take out money from politics eh. im not even getting into the talk of 'good luck with that', but will simply tell you this :
if there was no money going around in politics, the rich would still be able to get what they want by assuring any bureaucrat/politician a lucrative employment after their term, if they passed their law.
they are already doing that. they cant bribe bureaucrats now. cant even give gifts. but what happened with fcc ? the woman totally screwed over net neutrality, despite promises of her administration, quit, and was employed in a good position in one of the corporations holding her leash.
it is simple as that.
as long as some are much more richer than the majority, they will be able to influence politics.
Read radical news here
(As a commercial artist, I don't know many professional artists/artisans/creative professionals who feel this way, unless they've already made a mound of money on TV and film and now use that popularity as a platform to market stuff on the Internet, but let's just roll with what you're saying for the moment.)
Most artists who support copying generally are satisfied to do so as long as no one else is selling their work for profit.
Thus, we'd better have better solutions than torrents and trackers:
Megaupload made at least a hundred million dollars distributing other people's stuff -- it was really just about taking money that would have gone to filmmakers and Big Media and shifting the revenue to people who owned servers and sold ads.
People would like to pretend that the "pirate economy," as such, is just some people that run a box somewhere that are just connecting people together, when in fact it's billions of dollars a year that are flying around, not one dime of it going back to people that actually made the stuff. Megaupload ran entire server farms in Virginia at a cost of millions of dollars year just to make sure its ads and premium subscription reach was sufficient in North America. Filesharing is absolutely not free of a Big Corporate aspect.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
True, but a Groundhog Day style loop is still the exception and not the rule in cinema. Would the pattern work for every movie out there? Because if video games were to "completely supplant films" as AC claims, it would have to.
The time has come for reasonable measures to be taken to discourage this theft.
That video is outdated. We're already in the extremely unreasonable measures.
Dilbert RSS feed
change copyright law to make everything creative open source public domain after 12 months. This makes it so poor creatives looking for inspiration have access to it after a reasonable amount of time, and the rich folk have enough time to make a cursory but not outlandish profit from their work. It's true that many people will wait the 12 month period to consume, but they likely can't afford to buy the crap anyways.
Megaupload (like Youtube) also responded to any DMCA takedown notices and was used by plenty of legitimate services as well. Bad example.
MMOs allow thousands of people to experience a game simultaneously.
But not people under 13, due to laws like COPPA that limit the forms of unsupervised communication that children can have with the public to as to limit the damage that spreading PII can cause. And even with the 13 to 17 crowd, most MMOs that I know of require a separate computer and monitor per player, as opposed to DVD and BD that let the whole household share the living room disc player and TV.
Without some kind of copyright and patent protection, there is less incentive to create something intangible
this is TOTAL bullshit. it was totally to the contrary.
most lively and active period in music was in between 1700-1850. this is the era exclusively almost ALL great composers born and died, and a number of them totally shaped what 'music' is and how is done. (even bach is enough himself, and he died a bimbo)
the most active and lively period in science and engineering happens to be within a similar period, 1750-1850. and this is also the era in which patents et al had the lowest weight in how science was done. most of the scientists lacked funds and support, and yet, many of the biggest scientists came among these people. DESPITE there were already patent offices circa 1800, scientists were totally behaving like the free software movement of our contemporary times - freely sharing everything.
starting 1850, moneyed interests and newly materializing megacorporations spanning nations have started to come into play. and from this point on, innovation and discoveries subsided. the only reason the period starting from that point seems more 'scientific' is, what was discovered in the earlier period being put into practice in daily life. a period of application than discovery.
and we are still in that direction today. we are just feeding on what the pioneers DISCOVERED in their time of free science in 18th century. if you look at the stuff we do today, its application and reapplication of already known principles - mostly refinement, than discovery.
its not like we are having gravity capable vehicles and flying around in cities, or even able to use quantum computing in applications. we are THAT slowed down.
if you look at life and knowledge circa 1700 and life and knowledge circa 1850, you will notice that it looks like a superhero comic - life was SO out of reality compared to the start of that period.
and look at 1850 and now, and you will not see the same drastic difference. almost all our technology is similar and some almost the same, but more refined.
i will leave you to ponder the words of the first chairman and founder of u.s. patent office :
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 other 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. Thomas Jefferson, 13 August 1813
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html
Read radical news here
This is a substantially different position from "let's kill Hollywood because SOPA wouldn't let us put a Mad Men episode on Tumblr." The "piracy," such as it is, is heavily tilted toward new content, stuff made in the last few years. Most people are in favor of reducing copyright lengths, even most artists, because they generally never see the benefit themselves, personally -- but equating this position with being against SOPA/PIPA/DMCA/whatever is specious.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
i really mean it, and if you look at it you will find that the most innovative and groundbreaking period is that one. compare the 'rock' period that starts from the early 50s to this date, and you will find the same pattern repeating itself over and over albeit with different tones. not to mention that music has left the 'art' room and entered the 'accounting' room since 1920s.
Read radical news here
First rule of Call-to-Kill-Hollywood -- do not talk about Call-to-Kill-Hollywood.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
There already is a place for people to easily release small independent movies & tv shows, and that's youtube. It's a great place to release time wasters that last 30 seconds, it's a complete failure for releasing quality alternatives to TV shoes & movies, in particular the high-budget sci-fi/fantasy/comic-book epics that Slashdot enjoys.
Be honest. These sorts of movies require high budgets. And if the economy of movies is given over to everybody freely downloading the movies over piratebay, there is no way to finance movies. I'd love to hear somebody point out legitimate alternative. Maybe a donation based system? Or everybody deciding they'd rather watch independent home-made films instead?
And fuck you if you just want to watch independent home-made films instead. Hollywood movies can afford the best actors, the best cameramen, the best soundmen, etc., and the end result is a product that's reliably better than anything you'll find on youtube. Y Combinator doesn't even have anything new to offer and obviously absolutely nothing will come of it, Slashdot just picks up on their anti-Hollywood stance because it helps them to rationalize piracy.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Um, Megaupload is the exact opposite of torrents and trackers. Megaupload takes money and uses it to support reliability and consistency, much like how filmmakers and Big Media do with their services; that's where the money is at. Meanwhile, torrents and trackers are so distributed and unreliably (torrenters and trackers can disappear overnight while Megaupload had reports of many files up for years) that its hard to make money (you can host a website to direct people to torrents and place ads on that website, but torrents can be shared P2P like anything else which removes even that although that ads another layer of unreliability). Of course, torrenters are legally attacked much more easily since all IPs are known* vs something like Megaupload which may or may not keep logs of who downloads what; and that's been the story that's pushed people towards Megaupload and ilk.
So, while I'd agree that filesharing isn't free of Big Corporation, that's at least in part due to the legal situation. And the rest is that Megaupload provides a better distribution system than Big Media. That was the story of Napster as well. I mean, a lot of people are clearly willing to pay monthly buffet rates as Megaupload shows, so the real story in some ways is how Big Media failed to be Megaupload and provide that buffet.
*"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Napster then Bittorrent then Megaupload. Maybe next will be one of tor, freenet, or gnunet being the popular piracy platform and then it will be even more obvious how all these measures are blocking liberty. As much as I feel for artist and want to show my appreciation for the artists' works I enjoy, I fear that the attempts to raise the stakes in this way is only going to make the situation worse. The issue, as has been repeated many times, is figuring out the market solution to the problem if there is one. Yes, there will always be the unrepentant pirate who will never spend a dime no matter how much you court him; there is no perfect solution. But Megaupload shows there's tens of millions to made from people who *will* spend a dime or more. It's pointless to them obsess at the end of the day that you could have made a few million more, except to think of a new way to entice people and market yourself and your work. :/
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
And again going about it the. wrong. way. There's already lots of content released under Creative Commons, which often allows much of the same Public Domain would. This didn't kill RIAA/MPAA and it won't. It's a niche market.
You also can't make a dent by "stop consuming" - you'd have to totally go dark. I have a personal distaste for Uwe Boll, and guess what, his garbage is on Netflix so part of my money goes to Uwe. I don't intend to stop using Netflix as there is a lot I do enjoy. As well, eventually it will appear on regular broadcast TV so you would also have to stop consuming all products by companies that advertise on broadcast TV.
The ONLY way to kill RIAA/MPAA is to take away the ONLY source of their power: the Great Wall of Copyright which surrounds nearly 100% of all content released since World War 2 (in Europe) ended. Think about that. The end of WW2E was in 1945. How many records, books, movies, computer software, was released and how much of that entered the Public Domain?
Suppose there would be a Jamendo.com but that would have everything ever released from 1991 or before? A 20-year copyright term (same duration of protection granted to Inventors) would make that possible. Is there a legal case to be made? Sure:
The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Is there any difference made between Authors and Inventors? No, they are treated the same. So why should Authors enjoy a term that is 500-800% longer? Food for thought.
Nothing will bring these scum to their knees faster than
when their products don't sell. Note that I am not advocating
anything illegal. I am advocating a boycott, pure and simple.
Don't go to the movies. Don't rent a movie. Don't even get a movie
from a torrent, even if you think it's cool to rip off "the man". Just QUIT.
Go outside and enjoy the real world instead, or read a book.
The movie and recording industry is a cabal of greed heads who will stop at nothing
to get their pound of flesh, and the only way to defeat them is to bankrupt them.
If enough people quit spending money to support their activities, it can be done.
It's not that video content is fundamentally bad and must die off for a more benevelont industry to take hold, it's that the organizations that *currently* have a stranglehold on the industry does that. Every industry had some presence trying to prop up SOPA (ESA was for it until it was clear they needed to throw it under the bus after it showed no chance of making it). So 'games' aren't the answer because those 'publishers' did the exact same thing as the movies. Independent game developers do make it further than independent filmmakers I suppose...
It's not the medium, it's the topheavy publishing and producing organizations. Organizations that derive their power from resources required to make movies formerly being scarce. It's not the the writers, the actors, or really anyone putting in tangible contributions the consumer sees. It's the financiers, the ones who take the opportunity to suck profits from the consumers and try to cheat the talent as much as they can. They were and still are needed because they had the resource to begin with to fund production and deal with the logistics of getting it in the world. The barrier to entry has lowered quite a bit for some very notable independent video content to make it to the masses at relatively low cost, and this scares the crap out of people who see their leverage one day evaporating. There certainly is still a large gap between low-budget stuff posted to youtube and a high-production value movie on blu-ray, but there will come a day where the gap diminishes enough to not matter. That is, unless they gut the internet. It doesn't matter if the media is game, video, or music, either way it's all in how it's managed.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's a great example. Their nominal adherence to DMCA was an sham; you can only claim safe harbor from DMCA if and only if you do not profit from the sharing. The fact that they were able to profit from infringing content, despite abiding by the letter of the DMCA, indicates the fundamental weakness of the DMCA enforcement provisions.
They made money, shitloads of money, literally a small studio's annual profit worth of money, off of other people's stuff, period. If they follow all the rules and are still able to do this, the rules are bad rules and must be changed.
I got no problem with people copying stuff to each other for free -- I don't think it's something people should do, but I realize this happens and there isn't really anything you can do about this. But I have serious problems with people turning that sort of thing into an industry, where they're making tens of millions of dollars a year by doing nothing more than provisioning servers. It's pretty clear these guys were just rentiers in the worst sense of the word.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
How was their adherence to DMCA a sham? They adhered to it.
> you can only claim safe harbor from DMCA if and only if you do not profit from the sharing. The fact that they were able to profit from infringing content, despite abiding by the letter of the DMCA, indicates the fundamental weakness of the DMCA enforcement provisions.
Please tell me how this is in any way different from youtube?
> They made money, shitloads of money, literally a small studio's annual profit worth of money, off of other people's stuff, period.
Please tell me how this is in any way different from youtube?
Put their ass in court for patent and copyright violations dating back since their inception. Break them 100% financially.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The only way to kill Hollywood: stop buying the product. Money feeds this beast. Take away the revenue and the whole thing falls down.
It really is that simple.
-ted
$60 for a game is really pushing the budget for a lot of people
Hence the $5 to $10 price points for games on the Wii, DSi, and 3DS download stores.
compared to a $2 movie rental.
Or a $2 Wii game rental from the likes of Redbox. Compare rentals to rentals.
I'd like to believe that as games get more popular they will get less expensive as the scale will still allow massive profits on a smaller MSRP. But thinking back (movies, albums, concert/sports tickets, etc) when has that really happened?
When home video started with VHS, movies cost $100. By the end, they cost roughly $20, and this $20 price point carried over to DVD and eventually BD. In addition, for all studios except Disney, DVDs of older movies sold in Walmart generally see price cuts to $15, $13, $10, $7.50, and eventually $5.
But you're right about concert or sports tickets, though; those are labor-intensive, and the cost of anything labor-intensive tends to follow inflation. Salaries of professional athletes rise in order to keep talent from defecting to other teams. Big-name musicians' concerts rely on special effects that become more elaborate over time to draw in audiences already jaded by music videos, and I think AAA games have been staying expensive despite the growing audience for the same reason: more elaborate graphics.
COPPA does not prevent children under 13 from playing online games or participating in anything online. It merely outlines a privacy policy that the US government wants site operators to conform to.
A privacy policy that ends up not letting users associate an e-mail address to a user account because an e-mail address is PII. A privacy policy that ends up not letting users under 13 communicate with anyone else because the underage user might be enticed into giving up PII. Or has the industry agreed on efficient ways to obtain "verifiable parental consent" yet?
Also, being a US law, it does not apply to anyone outside of the US.
Slashdot's parent Geeknet is headquartered in Virginia, and Y Combinator is in California.
The requirement of a separate PC and monitor hasn't prevented people from playing MMOs.
I was under the impression that the MMO demographic tended to trend richer, more single, and more adult than the demographic for "retro style 'all gather round' multiplayer games". Or should the market of people unwilling to buy a separate computer and a separate copy of each game for each member of the household remain unserved?
Paying program directors to play their crap 24 times a day is not a service.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
One of the big differences was evidence that megaupload payed people to upload infringing content, one particular person, an American, made hundreds dollars doing this. It's also alleged that the people who ran megaupload intentionally and knowingly put copyrighted material on their servers.
Megaupload also had paid subscriptions, that were offered expressly for the purpose of making copyrighted works available.
OTOH, I think you're right, it's pretty clear that Youtube makes money off of infringing content on a regular basis and the government would be within its rights to prosecute them; however, it's not at all clear Youtube infringes works intentionally to the extent that Megaupload did. Intention and malice are really what separate the two.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Easy.
They will cope with it by having people go back to Blockbuster and charge extra VOD. Wahoo more money!
Less internet is good too as it is a threat to their business model.
http://saveie6.com/
Punish them where we can. Does anybody on this list still buy Sony products?
We may not be able to kill them as a species, but a few choice boycotts and outings might help to keep the wasps down a bit.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Intent is what needs to be proven, and all we have so far are accusations (most of which involve how much money was made rather than how and with what intent). I'm reserving judgement on this until facts come out but it certainly sounds ANY network community involving user contributed content would fall under the same axe.
I'm not convinced the way we are handling copyright these days is beneficial to society at all, I suspect a backlash is coming.
The reliability and consistency of what? Other people's movies? Having other people's stuff to offer was the necessary condition of their business, not the reliability.
A company that clears millions of dollars a year selling other people's movies is somehow the equivalent of the peace-loving Alderaan?
(Whatever you do, don't ask the guy who wrote that line what he thinks about file sharing. )
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Lots of musicians are apparently raising funds for their albums, tours, etc. on Kickstarter now too.
The tech industry kills off competition with a stock pile of shitty patents and then claims hollywood is stifling innovation with copyrights. I think copyright is getting out of hand but this reeks of hypocrisy to me. All I suspect that would come out of Silicon Valley killing Hollywood is that Silicon Valley just becomes worse than Hollywood.
...it's most likely putting the cart before the horse. Upstarts aren't successful for political reasons. They're successful because they have a unique niche that makes them profitable. And when that happens, they become part of Hollywood. The question is 1. Can a small upstart make movies that everyone wants to pay money to see and 2. how big can it get without adopting a policy of suing everybody in sight?
MU didn't pre-emptily pay people to upload infringing content, they paid people who upload popular content. If a particular upload causes a lot of page views(ad views), they pay the person. Completely automated process.
Claiming that megaupload didn't intend to profit from copyrighted works is the new "Goldman Sachs didn't intend to profit from the failure of its mortgage-backed securities." Everybody knew exactly what it was for, to claim otherwise is tendentious bull.
Millenarian exhortations of the revolution to come are millenarian. But yes, I'm sure the people will rise up and violently defend the rights of a Hong Kong server farm operator to sell you other people's movies, as long as they lies they're told are sufficient to the purpose.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
One of the biggest problem for professional content creators in the porn industry in recent years has been private individuals willing to share acceptably high quality content for free.
What's needed is a sort of "Free Content Foundation" for entertainment-purpose content creation that helps people provide copyright unencumberable content of acceptably high quality. I imagine that one way Y Combinator could help is by funding the improvement of existing free collaboration and content editing software tools.
What were you smoking when you heard "Let's kill Hollywood, there is plenty of money on their market that they are incapable of getting, and we can get it." and "SOPA is a threat to any legitimate site on the Internet, and a threat to political speech", mix the two, and came out with that phrase above?
Rethinking email
> Millenarian exhortations of the revolution to come are millenarian. But yes, I'm sure the people will rise up and violently defend the rights of a Hong Kong server farm operator to sell you other people's movies, as long as they lies they're told are sufficient to the purpose.
Who said anything about violent? You seem to be doing some weird projection or something here. I'm talking about reversing the trend of adjusting laws constantly to benefit media conglomerates. It serves no purpose for society and and it is getting insane. 17+17 years for copyright is fine, this "forever" crap is partially what is leading to the universal lack of respect for copyrights.
I eat pizza with knife and fork, you insensitive clod. So, I can eat pizza while playing a video game and I sometimes do it.
Anyway, I understand your argument and the example. If I want passive entertainment (usually while I am doing something else, for example repairing some device or soldering a new one), I watch a movie or a TV show episode (usually one I have seen before, so I would not need to concentrate on it) or listen to music. I do not like "shuffle" so I usually play a tape or a record from start to end - if the album is overall good but has one song I hate so much I want to skip, I record a tape or a CD without that song. However, usually there are no such songs in the recordings I have.
I still think that games can be more like movies. Or rather - instead of watching a movie while you are eating pizza, how about watching a Let's Play? I do it if I like the story of the game (from reading reviews, descriptions etc) but it is either not available for the PC or I do not like the gameplay. When I start playing some game, in the middle of it I sometimes with I recorded me playing it - but no point in connecting the VCR in the middle of the game... Edit out the parts where I get stuck and, I think, some adventure game would make an OK movie.
Not sure what Y Combinator will find, but the smartphone is just starting to take root ...
How? It is not like the artist is not not able to service a paying customer. I'll give you and example:
a) I get my hair cut and not pay the barber. This is theft of service because:
1. I specifically asked him to cut my hair (I initiated the service).
2. While doing so, I implied that I was going to pay (OTOH, if I asked him to cut my hair for free and he did it, it would not be theft of service).
3. While he was cutting my hair, he could have either serviced another (paying) customer or just have free time.
All these must be true for it to be theft of service. For example, while I am waiting for a green light, a guy runs to the street and cleans my windshield. If I do not pay him, it is not theft of service, since I did not ask for the service. Even though #3 is still true.
Now, music piracy: .flac or listening to pirated music, the artist is still free to sell the song to other people or do nothing - just if I did not exist.
1. I did not ask for the service (in many cases I was not even born when the song was recorded).
2. While I am copying that tape, downloading that
I think that the Soviet version of copyright was better - the artist got money for actual work, for example, recording a song (you recorded a song, you got paid some money at the time, that's it) or performing in a concert. (payment for limited resource - artists time and effort for performing, whether in a studio or a concert hall. Also payment for another limited resource - a seat in the concert hall.)
You can stretch it to movies too - there are a limited number of seats in the cinema, so paying for the ticket is OK and part of that money should go to the creators. (payment for limited resource - a seat in the cinema)
The only problem with that version is that it would not work with software. But, say, game creators could sell collectors editions and a lot of people would still buy them. (payment for a limited resource - that special edition box, additional items, discs)
Their output is (IMHO) aimed pretty well 100% at the 18-25 age group.
They want lots of Flash Bang Wallop and a bit of rumpy-pumpy on the side.
Where are the gutsy films that they used to make?
Would many of the classic films of the past ever get a penny of funding these days?
Films like Cat on a Hot Tim Roof? There are many more but seriously would that ever get made these days?
There used to be a lot of 'gritty' and thought provoking films coming out of hollywood.
These days? Nah.
Perhaps that is why some non hollywood films actually make it despite Hollywood and its frankly corrupt accounting practices.
Take 'The Kings Speech'. If it got made in Hollywood then they would probably make sure that some Hollywood 'A' lister got the lead instead of casting someone who could actually do the role justice.
I once met Stanley Kubrick at Pinewood. I watched him in action on the set of Eyes Wide Shut. He wanted perfection and frankly 'Sod' Hollywoods pressure to get the film out. His attention to detail was ledgendary.
Ken Russell was the same. Want to make a film that has a sex scene between two men? Then he's your man.
Visconti's Death in Venice is in the same category IMHO.
Unconventional films? Yep.
Do they follow the Hollywood Formula? Not a chance.
Thought provoking? You bet.
There is a great opportunity to make Hollywood irrellevant. In the light of SOPA and PIPA we should take it.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
In principle they're right. Hollywood with all its tentacles IS a problem and getting rid of it would be a game changer. In practice we live in a corporate state what won't let that happen. You see, our corporate media is a great tool of mass propaganda and control ("public relations"). We see it over and over again - from Creel commission that pushed Americans into World War One to 2003 US agression on Iraq, to 2011 Libya, to upcoming war in Iran (we already see constant war drum beat on Murdoch media). Corporate media and Hollywood (with jewels like "Black Hawk Down" and other pieces of shit propaganda) are instrumental in this process and will be protected from any meaningful competition and our lovely corporate elite won't pass control over media to anyone.
Slashdot is not pizza entertainment, because I have to tell people the many ways in which they have not thought their agrument through, even if I agree with them.
Then make a slashdot bot. Also, your mum's a pizza entertainment.
P.S. Slashdot is stagnated
APKristopiet
I have been saying this for a while. I call it "starving the big fish." It basically amounts to creating an alternative economy where we entirely ignore/boycott the big corporations as much as possible. Who really needs to listen to any music or watch any movies put out by the current movie and music industry? Just stop even downloading stuff put out by them. Ignore them completely. The only way to starve the big fish is to help all the little fish get out of their way. Things like this go a long way toward that end by providing all us little fish something else to watch or listen to. Now we just have to be willing to pay the creators what they are worth for keeping us entertained or no one will want to produce new stuff at all.
Look at the Business Software Alliance Members
Why would Microsoft and Apple buy Hollywood companies to kill those bills when when they agree with SOPA and PIPA? I don't see them on any of the "companies that oppose SOPA and PIPA" lists. Copyright is even more important for Microsoft and Apple (and the other members of the Business Software Alliance).
I sort-of agree with the article, but unfortunately the game producers (which IMHO are the successors to Hollywood entertainment complex) tend to support those bills! Electronic Arts supports it directly (instead of hiding in the Business Software Alliance, and pretending that they don't support it).
The real problem here is the open floodgates of money (and corruption) since the "Citizens United" Supreme Court ruling that Corporations can contribute unlimited quantities of money to any politician. Congress or these people need to update the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform law to limit corporate donations to those of an individual. As an individual, I cannot contribute unlimited quantities of money to a politician, so why should a corporation be able to? I don't expect congress to act on this, since they are the recipients of this new orgy of cash.
We need to lobby congress ourselves, or at least donate to these people to lobby on our behalf, in opposition of these bills.
DMCA is an abomination, and these bills take it to the next level of absurdity. There are no technical or legislative measures that can ever prevent all piracy! These MegaCorporations have already eroded our fair use rights with DMCA. They are already censoring free speech and shutting down fair use, with unwarranted DMCA takedown notices. There are no checks and balances to their power, and now they want to turn every citizen of this country into a felon. Enough is enough!
We could kill these bills with two amendments. The first one would be to require a different copyright symbol to apply the new law to a copyrighted work (or a company could go "all in" with all of their copyrighted works). This would be an opt-in arrangement. The second amendment would be to make any copyrighted works subject to these laws have an expiration time of one year from the copyright date. This would kill or neuter the bills. No copyright holder in their right mind would permit their works to expire in one year, even if they had one year of guaranteed "no piracy."
The next thing we need to do is to repeal the CTEA that will effectively make copyright permanent. In its place, the government could put in place a law where copyright extensions are possible, but with a fee that doubles every year, starting at USD $1M per year (from the original pre-CTEA copyright expiration dates). Given the small number of copyrights that this would apply to, a government-run website could easily disseminate a list of works that have had their copyrights extended, such as the original Mickey Mouse Cartoon that caused the CTEA to be enacted. Our government could certainly use the money! All other works not on that list (that have expired due to the original time limits) would then become part of the Public Domain! Copyrights were never intended to be "forever."
We need to repeal the CTEA that will effectively make copyright permanent. In its place, the government could put in place a law where copyright extensions are possible, but with a fee that doubles every year, starting at USD $1M per year (from the original pre-CTEA copyright expiration dates). Given the small number of copyrights that this would apply to, a government-run website could easily disseminate a list of works that have had their copyrights extended, such as the original Mickey Mouse Cartoon that caused the CTEA to be enacted. Our government could certainly use the money! All other works not on that list (that have expired due to the original time limits) would then become part of the Public Domain! Copyrights were never intended to be "forever."
What? Are you some kind of communist or something?
Actually it's both. The reliability is in having urls that point to files that are retained for years. In comparison, trackers can go dark in months, days, or possibly hours. Similarly, copyright holders who value their product make available regularly that product on discs or websites and make sure it's available for sale for years. As for consistency, that's the issue of quality in part in that you're less likely to get spam on a service like Megaupload rather than a P2P network, just from the sheer point that one is more anonymous than the other.
Not quite. If anything, Napster or Bittorrent were Alderaan. Megaupload would be more like if Tatooine were blown up next.
I'm not sure I care. :) After all, the point is the message, not the messanger.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I don't think so, I just do not like it when my hands are greasy - the grease may get into any device I touch shortening the mean time between repairs.
So, I eat the pizza just like I do when I am eating pizza in a pizza place - with knife and fork. I may eat pizza without knife and fork at home but that is only if I ordered a 45cm pizza (which is enough for me for almost the whole day) and it is a few hours later and the grease has dried out.
If I am not at a table, I just put the plate on my lap.
So, buy the .mp3 or .flac from the artist
How do you discover the artist first? A lot of people aren't willing to sit at a computer just to discover new music; they multitask that with driving or with riding the bus.
90% of what is produced is crap, the last 10% is worth it. and this is true of any industry, not just hollywood.
Basically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law right there, same general statement, he just got to it via sci-fi writing instead of Hollywood. "10% good" is the flip side of 90% bad, but an interesting rephrasing
Cultural imperialism and stupid artificial regional restrictions are both another issue.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
If you copy an artists work, it is the sincerest form of flattery. Where haaave you been, daaahling?
Seriously, if you copy an artist's work, without compensating the system, you have stolen fromt the system, which includes the artist, who has chosen to take the safe route, and side with the system. That is their choice. My choice on whether or not to combat the system, and penalize it by copying only involves the artist because they have chosen the opposite side as I have. This is what happens in every war, and is what is happening now.
That so called Pirate Economy does not exists as a conspiracy to make you poorer. The companies that it cites, Youtube, Google, have legitimate relationships with the big media companies to protect their copyrighted works. The issues raised are a by product of the free speech, of which you are a benefactor. (After all, if I was a company that was out to get you, that video would not stay up there.)
Life is not Black and White. This issue isn't either. You can continue to support the status quo. As for me, I wil continue to fight those that support the status quo. See you on the battlefield.
I disagree - I feel we NEED a Massive Project, funded by a devastatingly deep pocket, that can turn all this stuff right around. The government is showing that they can take out any little operation with ease any time they want.
Right now Anonymous is giving them a golden serving dish to jam through SOPA-2 under the Terrorism Meme. Try this on for mood:
You know how we keep saying that the content industry "isn't that big"? What would happen if Mr. Big Pocket just marched in, bought up the Music, Movie, Book, News, radio, and TV industries all at once, for 20 billion or whatever it is, then released EVERYTHING forever with something like CC Attribution-ShareAlike. (Aka don't plagarize, but otherwise do anything you like with it, and everyone can then continue with what you made.) Boom. All content ever created through 2010. (I'll let them have a Copyright starting on 2011 content.) Then pay for it by firing all the lobbyists. They're just employees.
It would be the Reset Scene in the Matrix. "Ya want Innovation? I'll give ya innovation! Here, start playing with 100 years worth of previously locked content."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Aren't you skipping a few boxes there? Remember: soap, ballot, jury, and then ammo. Wednesday's PROTECTIP strike showed the power of the soap box to light up the switchboards of the U.S. Senate.
Or rather - instead of watching a movie while you are eating pizza, how about watching a Let's Play?
Provided that video hosts can afford to continue to host Let's Plays, which tend to be bandwidth-heavy, and provided that video game publishers don't fall into a pattern of sending OCILLA takedown notices to video hosts that host Let's Plays. Vimeo got out of the gaming videos business for both reasons.
You can build any game for the PC, or any other console
I was under the impression that XBLA and PSN were just as selective as Nintendo.
It's not like it has to be the same exact genre
So if a small developer intends to eventually make a comical fighting game or a party game, and none of the people who work there are fans of M-rated first-person shooters or Warcraft-clone real-time strategy games, what kind of PC game should it make first?
I understand their point of view too after having watched reviews of Action 52. But the policy appears to lead to a Catch-22 situation. If all platforms required developers to have experience, no developer would be able to enter the market for the first time. So on which platform commonly used with multiple gamepads should a developer gain experience?
Remember every time:
When you put on shoe in left foot: I will vote.
When you put on shoe in right foot: I will vote for some one who is more honest than me.
These are useless ideas from the 18 century and it's time to get rid of them. The basic idea of IP is that someone else owns you and your property because they have a government monopoly. If you own your computer you should be allowed to copy whatever you want. It is just arranging the bits on your hard drive. How does anyone have any right to tell you what to do with your property? If a movie studio wants to make money with movies they have to keep control over their product. Make the money in the theaters. If you release it to the public in a digital format you have lost control over it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Switzerland, independent since 1291 uses referenda(stimmung) to assent to new law,
and to mandate Executive Action.
The convention associated with new lays is if they fail the stimmung by say 45 for, 55against
the revised question can be re-asked, as a new law after 2 years, if they fail again they are, by
convention not re-asked for at least 25 years else they are force-failed 8-92 by a cross electorate.
This happened when the pols wanted Switzerland to join the EU.
The so called 'Mosque verbot' which prevents the building of new Mosques, with Minarette/Loudspeaker
was recently mandated 85-15 and is now law.
MFG, omb
Intellectual property laws came about as a way to balance public interest with private interest.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 -- To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Copyright_Clause
So I'd phrase it differently. In the US, unlike Europe, intellectual property laws were intended solely to serve the public interest. They might transiently help private interests, but that was not to be their objective. So "balance" is the wrong concept. If a probabalistic "you have a 20% chance of getting exclusive right on any one work" had good properties for the public interest, then that would be fine. It's effect on private interest isn't supposted to matter except indirectly.
Of course, that was then. When "limited Times" meant 14 (+ optional 14) years. Before Pooh merchandizing netted a billion dollars a year. So "limited" is now a century and a half, and MPAA/Disney/etal speak of property rights.
And one of those billion last year was Pooh merchandising fees.
Since it's clear there isn't a long tail, instead of buying Disney, how about just granting Pooh and the mouse a "national treasure perpetual copyright". With the distorting incentives removed, perhaps we could move back towards sane copyright durations.
This is an ancient entertainment form that goes back to the camp fires of pre history. You're not going to replace them with interactive media.
If you want to kill hollywood, then take over their distribution and funding mechanism. Everyone loves to hate hollywood but they spend millions on movies. IT's something a lot of people feed their family participating in... is it becoming outmoded? MAYBE. But if it is then you have to take over the development, advertising, publishing, and distribution costs. Can you do any of that?
Because so far all the internet movies I've seen have costed nothing... because everyone worked for free. THat isn't an industry... that's a charity.
Find out how to finance all this stuff without hollywood twisting the knife to get people to pay and you've got yourself a replacement. Fail... and hollywood reigns supreme.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
High-heeled pizza delivery. I don't even want to dissect that.....some things Freud should leave alone.
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
I like this idea but before any other step is taken, can we just make sure that a patent is applied for this and none of the corporations who are with SOPA or PIPA can use this idea till its out of patent blackhole
99% of stuff those industries produce is complete and utter crap, which makes it very easy to completely boycott their products without missing anything of value. So no soaking or craving takes place. It is time for the dinasaurs to die, they are long past due.
By far most of the multiplayer these days on a console happens just like it does on PCs: one gamer with one console connecting to other players through the internet.
So nowadays, do most families with more than one gamer buy a set of Xbox 360 consoles, one for each player?
And for that, the PC is superior to the console in every way, except ease-of-use.
I want to help fix PCs' ease of use. What needs to be done for this other than what I've already listed in the second half of my article?
Nothing works in every situation. As we have just seen, even the emoticon fails in some situations. ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
While it is cute to say "let's kill Hollywood", there isn't really much there anymore except for the banks, movie financiers, and a whole lot of pornography being made in the San Fernando Valley behind the Hollywood Hills. A whole lot of production has moved to places like Vancouver or even to other continents like Bollywood or the production facilities Peter Jackson has built up in New Zealand.
In spite of being a double negative, you can't say that there is no traditional filmmaking in Hollywood. There is some stuff that is happening due to sheer inertia of having all of the infrastructure in place to make stuff there, including costume shops, props, sound stages, post-production suites, and special effects shops of various kinds as well as a concentration of talented actors, directors, and producers. This said, Hollywood is dying anyway and it is not nearly the center of the entertainment business that it once was say 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. Music production is even less significant, and forms of entertainment like video games really aren't being done at all in the Los Angeles region.
More to the point, if you want to make a major feature film, have world-wide distribution, and get it considered a major block-buster film with a significant cultural impact.... you no longer need to even stop in Hollywood at all any more to get it done or even to screen the film in the first place. About the only reason you would need to have a theater in Los Angeles County show your film (much less do any other business in LA County) is both because the audience is big enough that you don't want to ignore it as well as the fact you need a screening there simply to get an Academy Award (as if that means anything either).
If the goal is to kill Hollywood, you are stabbing something on life-support as it is taking its last gasp of air in the first place. Some group of hactivists are more likely to revive this comatose industry than to simply walk away and just hope it dies a peaceful death due to sheer neglect.
If anything, the reason why the Hollywood lobbyists are so busy in Washington DC is mainly because they have nothing better to do as the companies they are working for no longer are doing anything productive, as if making movies in the first place was considered productive. With no product to make and dropping revenue streams due to a lack of making anything new, it is no wonder that they are trying to grasp at straws trying to hang onto whatever other source of revenue they could have missed and skipped over in the past.
I never got Netflix because I didn't like its subscription and don't watch many movies, TV/television shows/series, miniseries, documentaries, etc. However, I do like Amazon's on demand videos whenever I want to. I wished there were more services like this. Also, I wished there was downloadable videos that didn't cost more and limited time periods.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
[Caps imposed by the ISP] apply to streaming too
But not to DVDs by mail. Major studios' films at least 12 months old are available in this format with very few exceptions, but Let's Plays tend not to be.
I sometimes forget that other ISPs are worse.
Yeah, like single digit GB per month on satellite if cable doesn't serve your block and you're too far from the DSLAM. I'm just glad I have 250 GB per month to play with and the option to remove the cap entirely by upgrading to business-class service.
This is so ironic... Hollywood itself started by rebelling against the MPPC and the Edison monopoly. A great example of how history is cyclical.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company#Backlash_and_Decline
http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/edison_trust.htm
"you're an idiot.." - by MichaelKristopeit490 (2549324) on 2012-01-21 18:01 (#38777097)
CA's disreputable - See their "ethics" in accounting practices which they got busted for:
PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:
"Customers know Computer Associates - and, these days, for all the wrong reasons. Just as the company was beginning to shed its reputation as a home for legacy software products that carried an inflated price tag, it was rocked by a series of accounting scandals. An on-going FBI fraud inquiry and investigations by the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have left it reeling, with a power vacuum at the top as over a dozen senior executives have left or been sacked. The allegations centre on internal accounting and sales activities in the years around the turn of the century, and involve the movement of revenues between quarters and product areas, and consequently, the mis-statement of financial results."
FROM -> http://www.information-age.com/articles/290656/the-information-age-interview.thtml [information-age.com]
APK
P.S.=> CA also listed a freeware of mine as a "malware" which was written to help out a fellow forums person I knew at NTCompatible years ago, because he had an OLD version of Apache server on Windows which would not run as a tooltray icon while minimized & it was not implemented as a service he told me (that was so it was not visible onscreen and ran "in the background transparently" which most webservers now, do).
So, in good faith/being a "good neighbor", I wrote it up for he (it's NOT commandline argv/argc parameterizeable either, so it's NOT scriptable) in GUI form (only 2-3 lines of code & works via C/C++ type invisible "spawn" type parameterizations).
Next thing I know? It's out online being classed as a "malware" (1 of around 40 freeware apps I've done over time that did VERY well & were featured in respected publications in good reviews in reputable & respected publications like "Windows IT Pro" Magazine (it was Windows NT Mag back then in the 1990's - early 21st century) & others of like ilk).
Apps that can be used "both ways" get 'victimized' this way (which is like PING via "ping of death", or tools from NIRSOFT (good stuff) &/or SysInternals even (yes, even Dr. Mark Russinovich has had this happen to he (e.g. pstools) as it has myself & Nir Sofer of NIRSOFT) have tools that can be used "for the good" or "the bad", depending on WHO is using them & what they're up to (like a gun, guns don't murder people - other people do).
So, then I took CA's 21 point removal test & passed EVERY SINGLE QUESTION without fail no less, & they would not remove it (but, they had to put it down to "Zero Threat Levels")... I did that on the advice of an attorney (John Lowe of Hiscock & Barclay).
Afterwards when I told the attorney these results, he told me "Yes, you have a WINNING CASE for libel/defamation of character" etc. "and it's worth approx. $150,000 U.S. Dollars", so I said "Well, let's do it then on a 33.3% of the take for you as payment" (keeps attorneys 'motivated' doing it that way, plus, it's no init. money down for retainers etc./et al).
Then, he replied "I can't do this case!" I was like "WHY?!?" & he said "Because larger companies have fleets of attorneys that will 'drag it out' for over a decade and by the time you collect, which you would? The overall COST of doing this would exceed your reward!"...
This is how the REAL world works, if you're not a "Financial Goliath" in other words - there is NO "justice", only money (and if you've got enough to take on the likes of these companies, then, & ONLY THEN, do you get real justice)... makes me ill, because the likes of CA know this, & abuse it! apk
I can record to LTO2 tapes and have 200GB on a tape that takes less space than a couple of DVDs (in the big boxes).
So when you want to watch a movie that you've archived to tape, what do you do? Is it like VHS, where you tell your backup software to essentially fast-forward to the movie you want to watch? ;-)
Y Combinator should look at themselves. I've read their "about us" and some more - do they even notice that they are Hollywood, in their own way? Their philosophy has a big chunk that is a verbatim copy - they reside in the Bay Area and want you to move there. Just like Hollywood, they believe that getting everyone together in one place is the right thing to do - which it certainly was in a time when communication was slow and distances were huge.
Silicon Valley is the modern day Hollywood. I fear the day that it turns into the modern day MPAA.
Making sure our industry doesn't repeat the same mistakes would be a very worthwhile investment of your time, if you don't feel like fighting the MPAA/RIAA, etc.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I want to do what now?