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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.
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.
TIme for IT to do the same if only we had a union!
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.
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]
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).
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.
The American VFX artists are getting the government involved because the foreign VFX artists are being subsidized by their governments up to 60%. RTFA
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?
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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).
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
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.
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.
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
I'm pretty sure you NOT know any of them either. I think the point of the post was big corps run DC and that lately party names turn out to be different marketing campaigns to appeal to market/voting segments. No matter which group/party gets into power many things remain the same regardless of what was promised during the campaign.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
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.