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Hollywood Studios Fuming Over Indie Studio Deal With BitTorrent
silentbrad sends this quote from TheWrap:
"'It's a deal with the devil,' one studio executive [said]. 'Cinedigm is being used as their pawn.' Cinedigm announced this weekend that it would offer the first seven minutes of the Emily Blunt-Colin Firth indie Arthur Newman exclusively to BitTorrent users, which number up to 170 million people.... Hollywood studios have spent years and many millions of dollars to protect their intellectual property and worry that by teaming up with BitTorrent, Cinedigm has embraced a company that imperils the financial underpinnings of the film business and should be kept at arm's length. 'It's great for BitTorrent and disingenuous of Cinedigm,' said the executive. 'The fact of the matter is BitTorrent is in it for themselves, they're not in it for the health of the industry.' Other executives including at Warner Brothers and Sony echoed those comments, fretting that Cinedigm had unwittingly opened a Pandora's box in a bid to get attention for its low-budget release. ... 'Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, ' Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said. 'How people use it can be positive for the industry or it can hurt the industry. We want it help us make this indie film successful.' ... 'We'll be working with all of [the studios] one day,' [Matt Mason, BitTorrent's vice president of marketing] said. 'It's really up to them how quickly they come to the table and realize we're not the villain, we're the heroes.'"
really?
* A world imprisoned screams with pain There are no leaders you can blame Your avarice destroyed your sphere And the
Honestly? A deal with the movie studios (or any of the recording studios) is a deal with the devil.
I applaud Cinedigm for giving an alternative a shot.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
What we need is to stop the delegitimization of torrenting as a file transfer method. Equating torrents with piracy is ridiculous on it's face, it's nothing more than a means of transfering ANY data that's use legally all over the place. i haven't downloaded a linux distro the normal way in years, steam uses torrents, the list goes on.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
But its cute to try and blame it on one particular ... protocol? I'm not sure what 'deal with bittorrent' means. I mean, I get the 'first 7 minutes to bittorrent users' but who is that exactly? People that use software from bittorrent inc? Anyone with a bittorrent client? Who are they actually talking about? Well thought out statement you have there.
Anyway, my point is that the big studios fear anything they don't completely control. They are afraid of people sharing things without them making a cut. They don't give damn about bittorrent, they care about sharing without them profiting.
You just sound stupid when you propagate the stereotype, anyone with a clue knows they are just as afraid of you downloading something from HTTP as they are with bit torrent. Its not like they let you get buy with it via HTTP but not BitTorrent.
From what I can tell from the actual article is that:
The studios repeated their default statements anytime anyone shares anything online when they aren't getting a cut of the profits. ... which isn't anything new, there are thousands of shitty indie movies on bittorrent already, thats like saying some indie movie is going to be uploaded to youtube. Contrary to what you may think: Indie does not imply that its worth watching.
Some indie movie is going to be put shared via bittorrent
No one has heard of or cares about this indie movie either.
Forget news for nerds, this isn't even news.
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> I can't imagine why they'd use BitTorrent, aside from the fact that BitTorrent gets
> you a few headlines.
"Hmm...this one says `7 minutes`...and this one says `116 minutes`....where to click...."
As an indie filmmaker, I understand the dilemma. Granted, I'm at the low end, and don't get to work with name actors, but the problems stay the same until you have to start worrying about territories and distribution - and this is a dispute about controlling distribution.
If I invest, say, $20,000 of my own money in a project, I need to be reasonably confident about making at least some of that money back or I don't get to make another movie. I don't have a patron or rich lover to fund what I do, so... I have to not make consistent losses.
Facing this reality, the main way I make money is through private showings in indie theaters, selling disks direct, and then when the economic potential of the production seems tapped out, sticking it somewhere accessible so at least it is seen by *people*.
That doesn't really work. I don't know what else to do. I have a couple of really fun hard sci-fi ideas I'd love to develop, but the audience is hard to reach and still get paid enough to just cover my costs... Or I can participate in the conventional distribution system and be SURE of making no money.
Unless there's some rich benefactor or wealthy single lady out there *grins* my really very specialist movies have no chance of being made or seen by a wide audience.
Bittorrent breaks the distribution problem, but doesn't help the money problem.
Why does no one ever consider the possibility that perhaps $10 million for a lead actor is a slightly over the top wage for the challenge of 'looking pretty while pretending to be someone else in front of a video camera for a few months'?
I don't give a shit if it is the worst movie I've ever seen. I'm going to buy the blu-ray edition when it comes out. I hope they sell more copies than any movie ever. With a little luck that will cause some of the movie execs to die from apoplexy.
> " 'Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, ' Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said"
I like Bittorrent, but this is a bit disingenuous. It's more like blaming a freeway with with drive-thru bars every 100 feet because zoning doesn't forbid it, for having drunk drivers.
Seriously? You HONESTLY believe what you wrote?
...
I don't often bite back on such OBVIOUS BULLSHIT but you, sir are a complete ASSHAT.
The PRIMARY reason there is blatant and comprehensive copyright violation is because THE INDUSTRY HEAVYWEIGHTS (RIAA/MPAA,and friends) have a ridiculous stranglehold on distribution. And by RIDICULOUS I mean literally impossible for some customers (eg outside the USofA) to legally purchase some content.
LITERALLY impossible to purchase. In some cases literally FOR EVER, in most cases "what the hell do you mean I have to wait YEARS before I can legally purchase this content". And NO, for the record, I'm NOT only talking about "purchasing online", some content you CANNOT purchase even on "original media" (DVD or whatever) outside the US; for NO REASON other than "I control the distribution and I could not be bothered distributing THAT".
The Music/Movie distribution industry constantly sends a big FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU ALL to literally millions of customers - but STILL insists they have a right to cry UNFAIR.
Seriously folks, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY.
Let me say this again, there is ABSOLUTELY NO VALID MORAL ARGUMENT IN DEFENSE OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE MUSIC AND MOVIE INDUSTRY.
They have literally gone out of their way, time and time again, to make it actually impossible to purchase content (either at all, or online, or they simply restrict it to some obscure almost unused format, or they excessively compress it so it's ONY worth watching on the postage-stamp that is a 10 yr old phone).
To be fair (and even handed) lets be clear, the MPAA/RIAA "claim" to be "the industry body" but IN PRACTICE they act in the interests of existing distribution channels (and NOT "the movie/music industry" as a whole).
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The economic reality is that motion pictures are a star-delivery system -- people pay to see faces and people they are familiar with, more than story and any other "quality" metric. A $10 million salary is justified if the movie will make $100 million, when the reality is that if it didn't have the star in the first place, it would have only barely made its cost back. Most of being an "star" actor isn't in the acting, it's the intentional ruining of your life in order to maintain a brand or image that audiences will seek out again and again.
This is why lead actors don't generally get "$10 million," but in fact get $5 million or $10 million "against" some percentage of the producer's gross take of the box office. Their celebrity is the primary equity contribution they make to the film. Sad, and not a very nice thing to say about the intelligence of the median moviegoer, but it's the truth, particularly when the move is sold to foreign markets, where movies make the majority of their money nowadays.
The alternative would be to pay the actors flat and let the producers keep the $100 million -- this is how it generally worked before the Free Agency revolution in Hollywood the 1950s, and the system was universally derided as exploitive and biased in favor of the studios over working artists.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It's like owning matches makes you an arsonist in the *AA's eyes. If you have bittorrent on your computer, you're a pirate, plain and simple.
A 7 minute trailer distributed by bittorrent (After all, that's about all it will be equivilent to) gets the *AA up inside themselves? Good deal.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
> The fact of the matter is BitTorrent is in it for themselves, they're
> not in it for the health of the industry.
The fact of the matter is the studios are in it for themselves, they're not in it for the health of anyone but themselves. And that's fine, but why should the rest of us give a shit about their health? So Cinedigm's innovative move might cause movies to become less expensive and owning a studio less profitable. So what? That's competition.
In fact, if the studios have some sort of agreement not to make any of their "properties" available via BitTorrent they should be sued for engaging in a restraint of trade.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Champions of "indie" cinema take note: Cinedigm is simply a production/distribution division of Technicolor, (yes that Technicolor), a multi-billion dollar Hollywood production service company that operates as a vendor to all the Hollywood studios. Several of the producers have ongoing relationships with Technicolor and Focus Features, a division of NBCUniversal, which is handling distribution of the film in several foreign territories. Cinedigm is the US film and animation industries.
This entire thing is just Technicolor putting up a tiny film, probably entirely produced with UK Lottery Fund money and North Carolina tax credits, as a stalking horse/advertising experiment. The film has no stars to speak of, it was probably going to die an unlamented death on pay-per-view before they upgraded their marketing campaign to full Viral mode.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
someone should stick the 7 minute clip at the start of a pirated copy of the latest hollywood flick and then spread that throughout the torrent world... that would help with marketing for the indie film and really piss the mpaa off... two birds, one stone :)
How long before a talented bunch of individuals are capable of making high quality movies without the industries backing.
What? You haven't seen Star Wreck? Hilarious and better than half the dreck from hollywood. And it's a free download! DUDE!!!!
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