Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.