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Visual Effects Artists Use MPAA's Own Words Against It
beltsbear sends a story about the struggles of visual effects artists against the Motion Picture Association of America. The VFX industry in the U.S. has been slowly dying because movie studios increasingly outsource the work to save money. The visual effects industry protested and fought where they could, but had little success — until the MPAA filed a seemingly innocuous legal document to the International Trade Commission two weeks ago. In it, the MPAA argues that international trade of intellectual property is just like international trade of manufactured goods, and should be afforded the same protections. This would naturally apply to visual effects work, as well. Thus:
"[E]mboldened by the MPAA’s filing, the visual effects workers are now in a position to use the big studios’ own arguments to compel the government to slap trade tariffs on those studios’ own productions in high-subsidy countries. Those arguments will be especially powerful because the MPAA made them to the very same governmental agencies that will process the visual-effects workers’ case. Additionally, the workers can now take matters into their own hands. ... If visual effects workers can show the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission that an import is benefiting from foreign subsidies and therefore illegally undercutting a domestic industry, the federal government is obligated to automatically slap a punitive tax on that import. Such a tax would in practice erase the extra profit margins the studios are gleaning from the foreign subsidies, thereby leveling the competitive playing field for American workers and eliminating the purely economic incentive for the studios to engage in mass offshoring."
That's what you get MPAA
Visually stunning film at 11.
Grab each and every single rat bastard associated in any way with the MPAA, line 'em up against a wall, and keep shooting until they get the message.
Read the submission. It is long and the meat is at the end.
The Obama administration refused to use laws related to subsidized imports to stop off-shoring. Now the visual artists have some real legal ground to stand on to compel the administration to stop or tariff subsidized overseas work.
Huh? What does IP ownership have to do with it? The idea is to put a tariff on the outsourced work so it's more expensive, thus eliminating the financial benefit for the MPAA..
TIme for IT to do the same if only we had a union!
"an import is benefiting from foreign subsidies"
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Correction for topic:
People point out hypocrisy of major corporations, major corporations ignore the criticism and keep on trucking.
If visual effects workers can show the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission....
No, they won't be able to because the MPAA with all their money will put a kibosh on anything the workers want. They may even pull the bullshit that tech companies pull and say that they can't get qualified Americans or some such lie.
The little people have no chance in America. The middle class is disappearing. Upward mobility has disappeared and we're in a downward spiral to the bottom while the spoils go to the very top.
We're no longer told the lie that if we work hard enough, we can get to the top too. Now we're told that we should be grateful that we're not in India. Well, we're on our way to have lifestyles like theirs.
Protectionism doesn't work and we Aussies would appreciate it if the US stopped protecting is farmers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If we had a Union, we'd have to learn a thing or two about being fat and sitting around during down time! (sarcasm)
The law does not apply to the lowly masses, except when it is useful to suppress them or steal from them!
This is not TV Tropes, and you cannot turn the law against the ones who created it!
[End Of Line]
This is pure protectionism, effectively there are people elsewhere who will do the work cheaper of better. The way to compete against this is to lower your overheads rather than trying to get the government to be your friend.
The problem is that people are too busy trying to create companies which create millionares rather than actually do work. Accept that fact that a VFX company doesn't really have much net worth beyond the capabilities of its employees and adjust margins accordingly.
What ever happened to "women and children first"?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Hi your spitefulness, I think you skipped the part where the foreign workers were subsidized by their government, and the tariffs were intended to negate said subsidy.
Read the submission. It is long and the meat is at the end.
The Obama administration refused to use laws related to subsidized imports to stop off-shoring. Now the visual artists have some real legal ground to stand on to compel the administration to stop or tariff subsidized overseas work.
Read my post. It is short and the meat of it is in your face.
Those with the cash will control the flow of cash. Taxes, tariffs, laws, etc. mean nothing. If some agency or politician tries to do something about it, they're simply outspent by those with the cash.
For reference, see all the jobs the US has bled away to 3rd world nations over the past century, and where all the profits went.
"Protectionism doesn't work and we Aussies would appreciate it if the US stopped protecting is farmers."
How about AU do the same? Bananas in particular are outrageous. Y'all pay many times the market rate and the Bananas while fine are in no way superior to the far less expensive products our good friends in Peru keep trying to send you...
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Please, this is hardly about politics, as far as Democrats vs Republicans - as if the GOP would have done things differently. And if libertarians were in charge, same thing.
Everything in U.S. politics is about protecting corporate profits. The outsourcing in this story is about profits, the MPAA exists to help protect profits, the administration not doing anything about it is likely due to private lobbying (to protect profits).
Huh? What does IP ownership have to do with it? The idea is to put a tariff on the outsourced work so it's more expensive, thus eliminating the financial benefit for the MPAA..
The point is they have no power.
The movie studios own the golden goose (the IP). If US VFX shops cry foul, so what? If tariffs are put in place, so what? The price of a movie ticket will simply go up to ensure movie studios get the same profits until such a time that the movie studios draft their own legislation and buy enough of their own congress critters to get the situation back under their control. The same thing has played out in every industry we've shipped over seas. Those in control kill off American jobs because American labor is too expensive. Regulations, taxes, tariffs, whatever don't do anything to stop it because once they actually become effective, the industry bribes politicians to get shit dialed back a few notches.
If trade in intelectual property is the same as trade in manufactured goods, then it must be effected by the same supply and demand relationships. This would mean that as the intelectual property is infinately reproducable at an infinitesimal cost, leading to a near infinite supply, then, as demand is finite, its value must approach zero.
They aren't arguing that they own the IP. They are arguing that if IP has the same protections as real products then there should be a tariff because the out-sourcer is being subsidized by their home country to make the work cheaper for international customers then domestic. I don't know the validity of that argument so don't flame interpreter.
The point is that they can cry all they want, they are completely dependent on the movie studios for their continued existence.
The movie studios would rather deal with paying tariffs (and fighting and bribing to get them reduced or removed) than they would deal with American VFX shops.
American VFX shops have zero leverage, just as manufacturing jobs for all American industries had zero leverage.
Where are you seeing the millionaire VFX artists?
While I have no doubt that the very top of ILM et al are living a reasonably cozy life, the bottom ranks - be that the modelers, riggers or rotoscopers - are almost all jobhopping between studios not because they enjoy it, but because the studios themselves can ill-afford to pay them. And they can't ill-afford them because they're too expensive, but because the studios themselves see very little in return for what is done.
I encourage you to check out the very recently (today) released short documentary Life After Pi. It's more of an industry look at the problems being faced, but is based on the story of the VFX studio behind the effects work in Life of Pi - the movie that so far has a gross of $609M on a $120M budget (boxofficemojo numbers) and won the Academy Award for visual effects - Rhythm and Hues, and their ultimate demise.
It is one of several documentaries being made on this subject - along with several protest actions calling attention to the issue (if you've ever seen people's profile pictures be a blank green square, odds are they're in VFX).
Note that I don't disagree with you - in the end VFX jobs can be outsourced, so they will be outsourced. But that is just shifting the problem of extremely skewed compensation between various elements behind a movie from one geographical location to another.
Payment as ratio to box office performance is something that the industry direly needs - and despite popular opinions that artists should just get paid once for their work created and not charge royalties, I think the other popular opinion that Hollywood Accounting is screwing everybody but the big wigs (the heads of production studios, distributors - the actual millionaires) over could bring some reasonable debate to the floor.
Well, it is not a union that is necessary in the field I believe. It is statistics. Detailled statistics of what gets paid here or there and for different kinds of seniority or field of application could definitely boost workers leverage during negociations.
A union will do that statistics for you, but with lots of other things that might or might not be good.
So that explains the SyFy channel movies of the week
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I fail to see how the ownership of the intellectual property in question would have any impact related to the taxation of imported goods. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it as cut and dry as "if the IP was produced outside of America, it gets taxed punitively"?
I'm going to go ahead and call Shenanigans.
American politics is theatre, a drama, a mummer's farce...total fiction. It has organically grown to keep people divided and warring over the insignificant, while matters of import are settled behind closed doors. I believe that many politicians get into the profession for benevolent reasons...wanting to make a positive difference...regardless of party affiliation. The nature of the game though is eat or be eaten; say what you have to say and do what you have to do to maintain your position. Of course, this is all fueled by money and power. There's really simply nothing else. We're all greedy. At this point in our development as a species, it is still more natural for us to want more than our neighbor than to make them our equal.
DC is little more than a circling colony of vultures, and we're all lost in the desert. Evangelize your politics if you really feel the need, but to me you'll just look like someone who is kind of simple. After paying attention to how this game has been played over the last few decades, I give up. I prefer my fiction with spaceships and aliens, probably because I want off this rock.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The Obama admin is a wholly owned subsidiary of the MPAA. What makes you think they'd ever do anything against their wishes?
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The Obama administration does what it wants, laws are no.
It took me about a full minute of staring to realize you meant "laws or no(t)." What did you do, dictate your post?
Perhaps a guild, then.
Engineers (and actors, oddly enough) typically join a guild, not a union. Unions are for unskilled laborers. Guilds are for skilled workers. The main difference is in how bargaining works.
For unions, bargaining agreements cover everyone and provide a fixed scale based on "time served" (for lack of a better term), not on actual skill or even experience. And at a certain point, you max out and could potentially do better without the union.
Guilds bargain for minimums and scales, but then allow individuals to build their own pay grade from there. As an apprentice, you get base pay. You can try to negotiate more, but it's unlikely. As a journeyman, you'll easily get base-plus-scale for your experience and skillset. As a master, it's up to you to demand compensation beyond that level. If you're worth it and they need it (whatever "it" is), they'll pay. Put your people skills to work and make more money. Or sit back, relax, and rake in high-experience, high-skill "scale" (which puts to shame just about anything a labor union ever bargained for).
Be honest, blogs have less influence and lower journalistic standards than a dead-tree journal like the NY Times.
A real publication:
a) Wouldn't have been so partisan in favor of VFX companies
b) Wouldn't have overstated the importance of this revelation.
Frankly, this news article isn't even news. It's like somebody took a particularly idiotic anti-MPAA post from Slashdot and made it longer.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
If the Chinese government is subsidizing solar panels, they are tarriffed and talks start about blocking them completely. If Ewe Boll is subsidized by the German government or Peter Jackson is subsidized by the NZ government, why is the US failing to enforce its stated import rules against those works?
What, are we dispensing with all pleasentries now and just fighing a war with our "most favored" trading partner, China?
Learn to love Alaska
And Bush before him, and Clinton before him and Bush before him, etc etc. Lets get real, corporate ownership of government is a wholly bi-partisan endeavor.
When the Aussies play fair with their imports, they'll have a leg to stand on when dealing with others. NZ fruit, South American fruit, if Australia makes it, they over-tax the import. The US should do the same, but an Aussie asking for it is rich.
Learn to love Alaska
I wonder if this might give birth to another "United Artists"? There's enough talent out there to start another artist-owned studio or production company.
The VFX shops don't own the IP of the shit they work on any more than American factories own the brand/design/etc. to whatever they build. Work will be farmed out as usual, and only those with $BIGBUCKS$ will control the flow of work.
The issue on the table is the current (surprisingly large, for something with no obvious benefit to the host nation) pools of 'incentives', tax-breaks, and subsidies that you can score by handling parts of your movie in various countries that are suckers like that(and even by the standards of cynics, it's a trifle surprising how much you can wring out of an allegedly competent nation state...)
If the argument being made here holds, those subsidies suddenly stop hiding in magic-cultural-product-land, and start facing the same anti-dumping rules that apply to boring stuff like steel and cars(and the rules, they are numerous and taken very, very seriously).
Doesn't mean that the VFX peons won't still be recruited from the cheapest and most desperate outfits the global economy has to offer; but they won't get all that and a tax break from whatever place they end up sourcing them.
The MPAA doesn't care about right or wrong or looking stupid. They will stand in front of the exact same judge and argue the exact opposite of what they argued last time and do it with a straight face. There are no beliefs or moral guidance. No mission statement describing good things they want to do. The bottom line is making more money. They will campaign for laws that hurt competition or reduce their own taxes. They will destroy lives and anything that stands in their way to make more money.
Given the money in politics these days, that's not just a fun turn of phrase, it's the truth.
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
With any luck it will mean they start spending money on storyline instead of VFX.
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As someone from BC, I would like to indicate my displeasure that the film industry here is heavily subsidized. That means that I'm paying, through my taxes, to keep someone employed. And I'm not sure if that's better than paying them welfare, through my taxes.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
Read the submission. It is long and the meat is at the end.
The Obama administration refused to use laws related to subsidized imports to stop off-shoring. Now the visual artists have some real legal ground to stand on to compel the administration to stop or tariff subsidized overseas work.
Look, a casual filing with the FTC on a low-level unrelated matter does not change the law.
It doesn't constitute "Legal Ground".
Its just a letter of opinion on a specific issue.
Nothing compels the MPAA to hold a consistent opinion in other (tangentially related) matters.
The letter under discussion involved importation of movies/music for sale to the public.
That's a far cry from Work for hire, which is what Visual Effects work is.
Mountain, Mole Hill.
Straws grasped at.
Its not the same thing.
And, no, I'm not an MPAA shill, hate the bastards as much as the next guy.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The VFX workers may eventually have to come to grips with the idea that if you can't do it better you can't charge more for it. And thus they will probably have to cut their rates to compete.
This is basically the end game of the guild system Hollywood uses. You can keep people from undercutting you within the country by requiring guild membership and declaring union shops (or productions), but then the production just moves overseas. How many films are produced overseas nowadays to mitigate labor costs?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Those with the cash will control the flow of cash. Taxes, tariffs, laws, etc. mean nothing. If some agency or politician tries to do something about it, they're simply outspent by those with the cash.
When you're done with your fatalistic douchebag routine, look up Standard Oil.
These **AA agencies truly have no shame, hopefully this little "oversight" lands a boot so far up the MPAA's rear that they'll think twice about their brazen and often completely false/misleading statements for decades to come. Sadly I'm not betting on it, they'll probably use some circular reasoning to "justify" why they can take advantage of off-shoring but others shouldn't, but one can always hope. At a bare minimum they've given the actual artists ammunition to use against them.
If the MPAA loses here, they'll just appeal to the WTO to override US law. If the US doesn't comply, the WTO will slap even bigger penalties at the US.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Such a tax would in practice erase the extra profit margins the studios are gleaning from the foreign subsidies, thereby leveling the competitive playing field for American workers and eliminating the purely economic incentive for the studios to engage in mass offshoring
or ... to move entire companies abroad. Given that more and more movie content is CGI, it would be cheaper to fly movie stars to the set somewhere in Asia.
Corporate profits reflect individual spending, or collective spending by the government.
Are Chevron, Mobile, Exxon, GM, and Ford evil because consumers spend money on them? Walmart is, clearly. Is Apple? Maybe there is room in the "corporation" epithet for good guys and bad guys?
Whether the Administration is doing anything is irrelevant. This is a case where the MPAA, who obviously employs visual effects artists (indirectly), can make legal arguments in one case that undercut arguments that will either be made in another case, or will try to make conflicting arguments. That is the entire point here. There is no consistent argument the MPAA, or its members, can make, without sounding completely idiotic. Or, more seriously, without setting some sort of legal precedent for the other case.
The legal strategy is the topic, not corporate profits.
There is a good possibility that all this is a moot point in the end thanks to "hollywood accounting".
take a look at the end credits of any movie. They are ALWAYS initially "owned" by a shell corporation, usually using the name of the movie + LLC or something.
There is a reason for this.
Once the movie is made it is promptly sold for a loss (or very small profit) to the "parent" company or any number of other companies in between before it gets to the top. It could also be sold (on paper) for a massive amount of money so that the "costs" are never actually recouped.
I can't really say with any authority because that is an area kept secret from the likes of me.
The point of this is obfuscation of actual ownership, costs, and rights for tax advantages at the very least.
I like microcars
Please, this is hardly about politics, as far as Democrats vs Republicans - as if the GOP would have done things differently.
In any other industry, I would agree.
In the case of Hollywood/Democrats, there is a clear link and it simply does not exist with Republicans in the same way.
And if libertarians were in charge, same thing.
Brother, you do NOT know libertarians. Or Rand Paul in particular...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are only so many basic plots. If you're starting to see rehashing it simply means you've been around long enough to notice. Stories always get rehashed and always will.
Here's the basic hero-story plot:
- Hero now realizes he's in big trouble and has no choice but to attempt a drastic solution with catastrophic consequences if it fails
- Finally, some other character declares the problem solved. This is the "He's dead, Jim" line. Even though we all know its over, it's incomplete without this.
How many stories and movies fit this model? Hundreds? Thousands?
"You may be right about bananas, but our protection has a large component of "disease-free" driving it. "
That's one of the scare-tactics used to drum up political support for it.
In reality while I cant discount this entirely I am very skeptical that the diligence of your customs service would delay the onset of a new Panama Disease by more than a year or two at most. When and if that happens, there might be a small benefit. Every day until it happens your people are paying truly staggering amounts of money to keep a handful of banana planters who would otherwise have liquidated and reinvested in something profitable years ago right where they are.
The irony of someone mentioning they were aussie and criticizing the us for protectionist farm policy was too thick to ignore.
"Major importers are all "it's fine, we check it all and fumigate blah, blah, blah" but it only takes one shipment of diseased fruit and we're stuffed. "
Exactly my point. It wouldnt even take a commercial shipment. A ship full of iPods could bring it just the same. Unless you are ready to wall yourself off to all importers and tourists the idea that you can physically prevent the entry of a disease like that is dangerous illusion.
I know how diligent aussie customs are. They confiscated my almonds of all things!
Yet they and I both missed a bag of banana chips. Go figure.
How many tourists pass through Oz each year? And forget that, let's assume we have complete control there and nothing will ever get through. Let's talk about commercial shipping, dockyards, sailors, fishermen.... yeah.
If another Panama Disease hits Australia will have to deal with it right along with the rest of the world. You might gain a season or two but it wont last long.
"Sure there are cheaper products to be had from overseas (although I don't agree that they're just as good, given given the lead time of getting them to my supermarket - fresh fruit and vegetables start to deteriorate the moment they're picked, and bananas from Peru just aren't going to stack up against bananas from Nth Qld)"
If you want super-super fresh you always want to go farmers market anyway, of course. But the standard grocery store bananas in SE Qld were not dramatically better than what I am used to, they just come with astronomical price tags. It's my understanding in either case they are mass produced, picked green, transported in a controlled environment, then ripened in a controlled environment before sale, so it's hard to see how there could be too much difference.
Fresh tree-ripened fruit are a different matter of course but that is a market that does not require protectionist laws to protect it. It would fetch similar or even better prices here if it were available for purchase.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Given all the warring, bias and divisiveness it's more like "pro-wrestling". The audience keep supporting either Team A or Team B. And then some stupidly wonder why the show doesn't really change that much.
Very true. I was told by a Holywood producer that a Holywood movie should have the following structure or forget it -
The hero must try to overcome their 'problem' three times. The first two times he must fail, but the failures allow him to learn and grow as a character. Thus he succeeds in the last desperate attempt.
So thats Gravity, Harry Potter, Star Wars, James Bond, and many other films which are filmed or worked on in the UK blocked due to subsidies as they get UK tax breaks if they do enough work in the UK.
All the Lord of the Rings - they got tax breaks in New Zealand - so they'd be blocked.
This is the Hollywood VFX people realising that they've not developed and innovated to new techniques and technologies and other countries VFX capabilities far outweigh the Hollywood efforts. But then thats always been the case - even back in the 70's the original Star Wars special effects were done in the UK.
Very few "Hollywood" movies are actually done in Hollywood anymore. Live action is done i
Ah good old Nth Qld, land of the elves and shoggy beasts in the cold, cold North. I wonder how King Shqrxx and his lovely daughter Mngfgtrx are doing these days ?
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
I wonder if we could get I.T. work designated as a manufacturing product also. Have Government slap a tax on outsourced IT work.... I'd like that alot.
Again, a little research on the individuals part will let you know what's being paid what in different parts of the country.
There are several places on the web now that gather and distribute this info, and if you're doing federal contracting, there's the GSA info that is pretty public.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Engineering jobs are offshored (and subsidized) much more extensively than visual effects artists. The number of engineers in the world dwarfs the number of visual effects artists by at least 1000x to 1. Offshore STEM work is subsidized by foreign governments. I wonder if this can lead to tariffs on works thus derived overseas. iPad tariff, anyone?
How soon you forget Bush and the 107th Congress, Republican majority in the house, and the fact that the unconstitutional Patriot Act was written by a Republican. Yes, Obama extended it, but it should be noted that Democrats only held a majority of Congress from 2007-2011 since 1995, and Republicans also held a majority of the Senate from 1995-2007, with a few short exceptions. So then the question becomes who's responsible for the greatest economic downturn ever, after being handed the greatest economic upswing in history (FYI - that would be the upswing started around 92/93 and ended in 2001) Not that I'm a Democrat, but Republicans seem incapable of avoiding recessions no matter what they're handed.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I think the point of the post was big corps run DC
Which I agreed with - EXCEPT for Hollywood, which just run Democrats. Deny the truth of that, I dare you. Hollywood is primarily Democrats, and exerts vast influence over them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I mean, why can't *we* use the same arguments in the US, that use of the H1-B visa is, in effect, dumping cheap labor on us, and demand more taxes on all employers who use them...?
mark
Not really, no. Hollywood rarely lobbies in favor of republicans, and the few it does aren't ever in the white house.
Chris Dodd (former US Senator and now MPAA lobbyist) once openly threatened to switch sides if he didn't get his way.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
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It's how unions work in the USA, too. GP is an idiot, and has obviously learned everything he "knows" about unions from Libertarian ideologues.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Then at the end of TFS, they've slipped to discussing a completely different thing : offshoring.
Why are they conflating two different things? Sloppy thinking? Or is it just common racism, not wanting to have those smelly foreigners here with their strange foods, different ideas and wrongly coloured skins.
Are the authors "Native American" "First Nation" people? Or some sort of second-rate immigrant?
I can't say that I'm terribly happy to be doing my job on one continent, with people looking over my shoulders from three different continents. If you ask me, they should be sitting out here and putting their own lives at risk. But I don't particularly care which other continents they're on. Just that they're on a different continent from the one that I'm working on this week, while criticising my action choices.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"