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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
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
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.
Video games really just shift the problem. The ESA (which until very recently supported SOPA, against many of its largest members' public whims) could very well be the MAFIAA of the future.
The problem isn't Hollywood, the problem isn't even industry groups... The problem is publishers. Music labels, in particular, need to die a quick death.
Kill the book publishers. Kill the music labels. Kill the movie studios. Kill the video game publishers. The latter two, I realize, might not quite be feasible yet, as the economics are such that it's really not possible for an unknown group to fund themselves for a large movie or game project, but in the case of books and music? They serve no purpose whatsoever anymore, and are just parasites sucking money out of those they represent, putting impediments in front of those they sell to, and slowing down the pace of technology and innovation.
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...)
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
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
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.
Funny. My favourite movies, CDs, and TV shows are not made by big budgets, but by B-movie houses and home editing/recording equipment. While some of the big budget blockbusters are worth the money, for the most part they SUCK because they spend all their time worrying about F/X and gadgetry instead of telling a good story.
The whole "capital" issue is a red herring in my books, an excuse for the status quo.
The MPAA and it's ilk should be reduced to advertising management firms, paid a percentage or flat fee by the movie producers, and have all their current "power" revoked and taken back by the artists.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I think of the current MPAA and RIAA structure as the "banking industry of art". They contribute nothing. They add nothing. All they do is arrange financing, for which they expect OBSCENE payments and distribution control.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
RTFA
They explicitly make the point that all this legal bullshit is a result of the dying business model:
"If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn't stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it's only when he's beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten."
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.
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 ----
Disney has 40 billion in revenue. They own Pixar, ABC, ESPN, Marvel comics, theme parks, and a long list of other companies. They have 70 billion in assets, and made 5 billion last year (1/2 what google made).
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.
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.
(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.
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
oh yeah ? and then where is that self-perpetuating, end-of-hollywood idea ? it has been more than a decade since internet has entered living rooms. where is that idea ?
apple does not have the means to catalogue all spendings of almost every western citizen on the planet, and link those spending directly to their identity. if they had it, maybe they could do it.
There's apparently more truth than I realized to the saying "never argue with an idiot, they'll only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience". Rather than acknowledge any of the actual trends that are occurring around you, you instead shoot from the hip of your wonderfully insightful gut and instead respond with "oh yeah? prove it!" ?
Well, after this post I guess it's up to the mods, because I'm done with this bullshit you're trying to perpetuate.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/9/2693228/ubuntu-tv-has-unity-inspired-ui-will-ship-on-televisions-by-end-of
Unity, on TV sets, by the end of this very year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV#Second_generation
Apple TV second generation sales (Good thing SOPA blackout is over)
http://reviews.cnet.com/apple-tv-review
Apple TV Reviews
http://www.google.com/tv/
http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/01/samsung-and-google-tv.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/from_ces_a_few_hints_about_the_future_of_tv.php
CES 2010: Apps on smart TV's, "The Future of TV"
You're on the fucking internet for god sake, use it to get learned.
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.
"standing on the shoulders of giants"
Not only those old folks; also, Disney: many of their movies are retellings of Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tales -- often with a happier ending, so not only are they not being true to the original, they're creating derivative works -- which they now want to prevent the rest of the world from being able to do, all to protect "a stupid mouse."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Well, if we "kill" them, the radio is still going to play music, the difference will be in how it chooses which music to play. I do not think that there is a law that says radio has to only play music that is approved by the traditional publishers. How about someone providing just the advertising service for the artist? Recording and distribution can be done by the artist himself or someone else.