What if I want to save photos posted by a friend to my device?
On later versions of Mac OS X with entitlements, when you get a "Save File" dialogue, the window itself is running in a separate process from the app that called it and communicates with the client over IPC, so the client never actually is able to see the filesystem. When the user picks a save location, the window process hands an NSURL object back to the client, but this NSURL doesn't actually contain a valid
file:///
url, it contains a persistent token allowing the recipient access to the one location, and the URL loading system (in the system's process domain) does the job of translating. The client can use the URL object as if it were an actual path to a local file or directory, but it can't actually split it into folder components, or jump up a level and walk directories, or anything else.
This is a way of doing it, it breaks other things you might want to do, like if you were writing an app that indexed files, but it works for a lot of the simple situations you describe. On iOS "photos" are a special case themselves and interacting with the photo management system is all handled with IPC over interfaces that are filesystem-ignorant; data sharing between iOS apps can only happen with predefined datatypes and through code interfaces, not the filesystem. It works, at the cost of keeping the actual filesystem sorta mysterious, but the filesystem on a cellphone should just be an implementation detail.
You can get pid grosses work-for-hire; work-for-hire doesn't necessarily mean "all up front." It just means the copyright is under the corporation's name. Almost everyone above the line is "work-for-hire," the only exception is a spec script, and even those writers will generally agree to designate their work as for-hire.
Whatever they broadcast today, they could stream over TCP/IP tomorrow.
The difference for Netflix isn't so much the Internet aspect as much as its the revenue model. They charge a flat rate for an all-you-can-eat service and this means the actual pay-through to the rights holders is a lot lower than VOD or premium cable. They want to make Netflix look like a premium cable service though, and they want to make Netflix appear relevant to people selling new content, and they want to position the Netflix brand and being for something more than just old episodes of St. Elsewhere and shitty Asylum movies, so they fund some premium content. But their premium content offerings are a potemkin village. And it's not like people like Starz haven't come to them with premium content, Netflix just won't change their model to offer premium-tier pricing, probably because it dilute their brand and would screw up their oh-so-precious user metrics.
From the perspective of a filmmaker (the evil Media Mafia), it makes sense to squeeze Netflix to the bone because they really don't bring much to the table in terms of distribution -- they might get you eyeballs but they have a lot of trouble turning this into money, and the money they do get they try to keep every penny of.
Lots of successful models of aircraft are operated at a loss based on subsidies. That tells you nothing about the success of the aircraft as a product.
It's not so much that air travel is paid for with subsidies -- car travel is paid for with subsidies. It's that the Concorde ultimately wasn't sustainable, even with subsidies.
Also, this isn't sending people to fucking Europa, this is something that we're expecting business travelers to use on a routine basis because the price makes sense and it provides a practical and useful service. It makes sense for the government to subsidize scientific exploration, and interplanetary space travel for the purpose of new technology development, or national prestige, or whatever. It absolutely does not make sense for the government to subsidize Alcoa's EVP of Personnel saving 6 hours on a flight to Dubai.
I paid $100 for a 512MB compact flash card in late 2004, or $200 per GB. I just ordered a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive for $13, or $0.41 per GB. A 500-fold decrease in cost in just 10 years.
Moore's Law does not apply to jet engines.
The affordability also hinges on income (productivity per person), which has more than doubled since the 1940s
Nominal income hasn't significantly changed in the US since 2000, and has only improved 20% since 1980 (that's less than 3% per year). Productivity has gone up but all the gains have accrued to the highest income percentiles. So you're right, somebody will be able to buy flights on the aerospike liner, but it's not going to be something that "people" do, it'll be for the rich.
I mean, I assume the Hunger Games' author's whole point is to in some way deconstruct celebrity and show how being a celebrity doesn't actually constitute social status or favor. The name Panem is itself a fucking allusion to Juvenal, who was denouncing Roman demagogues who used gladiatorial spectacles and welfare payments to pacify the masses.
On that- the Roman grain dole and gladiatorial games: yet more examples of completely uneconomical activity pursued to the hilt because of a cultural imperative. We can continue to the Eastern Roman Empire, and THEIR tradition of sport fandom, and the chariot race riots which on several occasions ransacked Byzantium and killed hundreds...
Be it that their god-king really needs that huge thing for afterlife or that the Jews must be eliminated at all cost. Not a punishment.
Unless you're a Jew. I'm not really saying these are similar phenomena, just that both are examples of things societies do despite and to the detriment of economic necessity. We were talking about the fucking Concorde, the point being that societies don't often do things that are economical or sensible, and you can't always attribute this to "religion," or "god-emperors," or mistakes made by undeveloped savages.
Ancient Egyptians were really smart! There's really no evidence that they were any stupider than we are on any kind of meaningful basis; just because we have books and digital watches and commodity futures, it doesn't necessarily follow that we, or the administrators of Panem, are capable of avoiding the same sort of philosophical mistakes.
Providing people with celebrities is NOT punishment.
Interesting theory. I think, to the contrary, that providing people with celebrities is NOT INCONSISTENT WITH punishment. In the context of the story, it's a trope of "opiate of the people," it's not historically true or false, it's just a very common narrative interpretation of certain historical events.
Surely they didn't need coal, and yet they had a whole district dedicated to mining it.
I'm not sure the Ancient Egyptians needed pyramids, either. Europe is also dotted with stupendously huge cathedrals that basically nobody uses anymore, and even when they were built their actual utility or even ecclesiastical justifications were pretty flaky, they were built mostly by towns competing with each other.
The impression I always got from HG was that the society was driven by outright class warfare as a kind of ideology. They didn't make the districts mine coal because they needed it, they made them mine coal because coal mining is a modality of suffering. The only imperative was: the Districts must suffer.
The 20th century is full of examples of state's imposing illogical, and pointless, and wasteful punishments upon people only to demonstrate the state's power. The German Army, when it was retreating from Russia, had to constantly fight with Eichmann's department for train stock and trackage, because moving Jews to concentration camps was actually given a higher priority than troop movements. Or, when Germany made an alliance with a country like Hungary or Croatia, they made it clear that it didn't matter how many army divisions they committed to the German war effort: their loyalty would be measured strictly on the basis of how many Jews and gypsies they expatriated every day.
The whole point is to send a message to everyone: we can punish whoever we want, neither laws, nor efficiency, nor common sense will stop us, so don't cause trouble. Nothing can take a higher priority than that because that's the entire society is founded in coercion and force.
I think the thing being missed here is that people are in a hurry. If I can fly a 747 from Seattle to Japan and the flight takes 14 hours, I would pay more to be able to do it in 7.
Would you pay ten times more? That's the kind of factor you'd be looking at for that kind of speedup.
Concorde service was never very profitable, in the end it was run for prestige. Concorde service was notoriously unprofitable through the 1970s and only made it to the 1980s with heavy government subsidy of the tickets -- it was in the early 80s that BA took control of the program and you started seeing the $10,000 tickets. It made a little money in the end but it just didn't produce the kind of money that justified the other expenses and hassles. After September 11th they just couldn't justify the service on those merits, notwithstanding
Since then, jets' biggest competitors for wealthy business travel aren't each other, their biggest competitor is telecommuting and telepresence.
They're mostly work for hire or to receive a percentage of the gross (if they're smart) or the net (if they're stupid),
Or if they're very smart, they just get paid up front... Have you any idea how few people actually get "gross"? And gross still usually means gross of distributor revenue, minus exhibition fees, which is to say, after Netflix has taken their cut. Nobody who merely works on a movie gets first-dollar gross.
Of course they still want to gouge Netflix as much as they can, but it's not the same fractured landscape of rights as it used to be.
Which is good, because Netflix adds nothing to the actual value chain for new titles. It's just a subscription Video-on-Demand service, except ON THE INTERNET!
It's a great way of watching older movies and TV shows, and for the people that own the rights to those to get some revenue from the "long tail" without committing to a DVD, but if you've made a new film and the best distribution you can get is Netflix, you're screwed, you'll never make your costs back.
I'm just speaking as someone who occasionally gets paid contractual gross in deferred deals. Netflix and VOD pay-through never remotely comes close to market rate for my work. I think a lot of the "streaming" business models are sorta scams, particularly for new filmmakers, they can't come close to generating the revenue theatrical and TV distribution can, and Netflix is sorta bluffing people on wether or not they can actually generate the revenue to sustainably create new original content. Netflix keeps making stuff like House of Cards, but that show costs over $6 mil an episode, there's no way they're making their nut back on those, and if even they can't make their costs back, how on Earth is some independent filmmaker supposed to profit from streaming distribution? HoC has stars, and is a franchise title, and has a co-production company plowing tens of millions of their own money into the project, and is selling the rights to HBO in Europe and Sony in Asia.
The distribution system isn't as much about shipping physical items as much as it is about marketing the films to a certain audience, making sure people know about them and then placing them in media that are appropriate for them to find them, obtaining a price that's attractive and then collecting the money. The territories are defined by these factor and there are barriers to entry between them apart from mere shipping.
Even if this weren't the case, as a practical matter the "new" distribution model just isn't ready for prime time and simply can't offer the same deal that the traditional one does. An independent drama film with a big star that's shot well can cost $30 million, if you go to foreign distributors and offer them the rights they can get $10 million or more up front, before they've even made the film, just for the sale of the rights. Can internet distribution offer a producer $10 million in pre-sales? That's a hell of a Kickstarter.
Even the shows that Netflix produces, they don't pay for everything. They paid a $100 million fee for House of Cards for the first 26 episodes and that STILL wasn't enough to cover the costs, that's part of the reason why MRC still has to sell foreign territories. HoC's episodes easily cost more than $6 million, and that's not out of line for a HBO-level drama; the show easily costs over $50 million per 13 episode season. Orange costs slightly less but still over $40 mil a season.
Netflix doesn't talk much about this because the fact is nobody can figure out if they're actually making money on it, it's a huge bet going forward that they can make it work. The Interview distribution was a freak thing but it really didn't make as much money as that film should have the first week, the producers and distributors aren't going to torch the system they have if the system they have makes them more money, and this situation will probably persist for at least another 5 years.
We know there's definitely some money getting made in new distribution modes, from Netflix to file sharing, Kim Dotcom is fucking rich! But very little of this money seems to find its way back to the people that actually pay to make a product, the people that run aggregating sites and ISPs slurp up all the revenue. Think about it: you pay $20-$40 or more a month for Internet service, and exactly 0% of that goes to pay for the things you actually read or see on the Internet.
So what is the issue with someone in Pakistan paying full US price for Netflix?
That would probably be okay, but the companies that license content to Netflix often don't own the rights to stream films to Pakistan, so Netflix's library for Pakistan will end up being too small to be attractive to potential subscribers.
The secondary market for movies in the BRIC countries is usually pay-per-view or VOD exclusives. The cable company in Pakistan probably demands exclusive content, or else they simply drop all of the distributor's movies, so streaming is off the table. Worse, the VOD/cable company in Pakistan is probably state-owned and the government can make the distributor's life miserable in the theatrical market if they refuse to play ball with the cable company.
Just speculation but these are some of the issues involved. Cable and sat broadcasters are just a much easier and more profitable way for distributors to sell their movies in the third world, and they aren't going to risk pissing off their best customers.
Actually, scratch that, Netflix doesn't even produce Orange is the New Black, it's made by Lionsgate -- Netflix just owns an exclusive American distribution deal. House of Cards is similar: it's produced by Kevin Spacey's company, Trigger Street, and Media Rights Capital, an entertainment hedge fund.
Yeah, I understand that. What I don't understand is why the big media conglomerates put such baffling restrictions into their licenses in the first place.
The Big Media Conglomerates buy and sell the distribution rights for individual properties between each other, they will often sell foreign right for a film to a different company, and as a part of that they give up the right to sell the film in that territory.
The important thing to understand is that "studios" do not own the rights to distribute the shows they make, these are owned by distributors. Many distributors are owned by studios, and many other distributors don't make movies or TV shows at all, they just buy independent films and market them.
Distributors do not generally own the titles they sell outright. They usually only own the rights for a certain territory -- a standard example is a film that is funded by two different studios (many are), with one studio distributing the film in the US, and the other, in exchange for fronting some of the budget, getting the right to distribute the film in foreign territories. Netflix's own shows are perfect examples of this -- "Orange is the New Black" is produced by them, and they distribute it in the US, but they sell the foreign rights to HBO and Sony because they know they'll make more money in the UK and France on HBO than they would if they streamed it. As a condition of taking this deal, HBO required Netflix to not compete with them in their territory.
And this is only "big" products -- most of the true independent films you see are produced by someone with cash up front, and then the rights are sold piecemeal at film markets. The rights to Japan go to company X, the rights to Germany go to company Y. This is much more efficient because each company can then decide exactly how the property should be marketed, if it is appropriate for theaters, or pay TV, or cable, what the posters should look like, will the stars matter, are there cultural factors that make the film/TV show particularly attractive (or not). All of these decisions are decided on a country by country basis, and the only way a distributor in a market can "own" the rights is by keeping other distributors from competing with the same film. That's what the right is.
It's not stupid or evil -- the problem is people think "studios" "own" "movies", and they completely control how they're exploited commercially, and it's not true at all. It never worked that way, the business has always been about licensing of libraries of titles.
Exactly, it's a tech site, not a science site. Techies are usually logically-minded and rationalist but they're also raging dilettantes who assume that they can run any dataset they want through a shell script and make better sense of it than the so-called "experts." They are quick to yell "conspiracy!" and suspicious of anyone with advanced qualifications.
Techies of the Internet age are also steeped in libertarian ideological and moral values and disdain any sort of consensus or political process, let alone any conversation about morality or values.
These are people that think they can download any movie or TV show and nobody deserves to be paid for it; these are people that trade PGP keys so they can email each other about their lunch order in perfect secrecy; these are people that assume they know more than their boss because they know how to unblock port 20 on his laptop. How do you think such people will react if you tell them that driving their car is slowly destroying the planet, and a massive regulatory and social revolution is necessary to stop it?
The music situation is always really fluid, it's not uncommon to have a particular song in the film but a different song on the DVDs and VOD for rights reasons. Also it's not unheard of for the studio to replace a song after the film's released, they used to ship new reels to the theater but now they just upload a new DCP to the theatre chain headquarters, they all program it from their via satellite.
It's the music supervisor's job to clear all the music, he'll give the picture editor music that he thinks he can clear and then he'll start negotiation if it takes. By the time the final mix is happening he'll usually at least have all the music in negotiation and there won't be any music that's flat off-limits. It sounds like here he started to clear the song and he probably had the number in his spreadsheet (I'm not up on my rates but a $50k-$100k buyout for this usage in all media would kinda be standard). They just didn't do the paperwork -- add to this the artist might have gotten cold feet after the hack when it was alleged that North Korea was involved.
They might update the mix with a different song and just settle with the label. This is what Errors & Omissions insurance is for.
Ironically I think the film's a lot harder on American celebtriy culture than North Korea. I mean Kim Jong-un's a bad guy, but the North Korean people are portrayed as sympathetic and the real butt of all the jokes is invariably James Franco's character. The idea that the movie is actually "anti" North Korea is sorta overblown.
I don't think they're related, the film was almost ready to release when the hack occurred meaning they had a final or very nearly final cut.
I am a sound editor on features, I worked about 9 months at Sony this year (on Fury and 22 Jump Street mostly, not Interview). They can replace music days before the movie is released, particularly now because most shows are distributed almost exclusively on DCP. It's not unusual to printmaster the movie (finalize all the sound) and still not have all the music deals in place. Music is an independent process from the "final cut".
All of the PCs at Sony were still down in mid-December, nobody in any of the administrative departments could access any of the work they'd left on their machines or on servers prior to the hack, everybody had to lug in their Macbooks to get any work done -- Macs were unaffected by the hack. I can't imagine how they could have dotted all their i's for the delivery with one days notice and no corporate PC infrastructure.
"The point is nobody ever "has" dollars in the first place"
Note that I only made this point in the course of granting your position that only "substantial" things are truly property. Your argument is internally inconsistent.
This is why I really have no pity for media pirates. It's not that they make copies for themselves, or even that they give them to their friends or a million strangers. Hell I've done that every now and then.
It's that they do this, and then they insist on writing thousand-word screeds about how it's their sacred natural right to do this, and how it has absolutely no negative consequences, and anybody that actually tries to make sense of their ideological hash by working through the entailments is an "idiot." They don't know what they're talking about, they know just enough political science to be dangerous, and their underlying justifications are constantly shifting in order to serve their overarching commitment: "If the Internet makes something possible, it must be permitted, and anybody who gets hurt in the process deserves it."
You don't even address the consequences I've clearly pointed out, and you haven't even tried to work through how it's different to sell something as opposed to merely copy it, you just want to have your argument both ways depending on the circumstances, and you haven't contradicted me in the slightest, you just play dumbass comment thread games to weasel out of explaining yourself.
Whoosh. If I take a dollar from you, be it physical or an electronic debit, you no longer have it.
You were making an argument for copyright not being a "natural right" because it doesn't protect some "substance." The point is nobody ever "has" dollars in the first place, they're a convention -- when someone debits dollars from your account they're not actually "taking" anything from you, they're just moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. Somebody made a law that said dollars are worth something, and that their debits and credits have to match, just as somebody made a law that said you can't copy other people's recordings without permission. The two laws have equal merit and standing.
If I copy a work (not copy and then sell/distribute, but merely copy), it takes nothing away from the creator.
But why make that exception? You can sell the copy and that doesn't take anything away from the creator, does it? He still has his copy. Selling the copies for money is no different than giving them away from the perspective of "natural" excludable property, unless you accept that creators have a right to sales -- a right which, in any case, is moot if free copies are permitted, as free copies fully supplement paid ones. If people are allowed to make and distribute free copies than the "right" of copyright becomes little more than the right to beg for charity.
What's the limits of 'selling' exactly? Does it include attaching advertising space to the "free" copy, advertising space which you sell to a third party for money? That'd definitely be profiting off of the original work, even if it's not "selling," and would include your Kim Dotcom types...
Almost certainly this was just some production screwup. Someone at Sony thought the the license was taken care, because of that they stopped calling back and the music never got licensed.
What probably happened was the music supervisor was working on getting the clearance right up until the day of the hack, and he hasn't been able to get onto his computer since -- all of the PCs at Sony have been down ever since the Day because they're doing a huge forensic audit. And then a week went by and Sony announced they weren't going to release the movie, and the music sup just forgot about locking down the last licensing deal since it seemed like a dead letter.
And then Sony announced they were going to screen the movie with one days notice and they rushed the due-diligence.
it is copying, and nothing of substance has been taken.
Just because something has no substance, it does not follow that it has no value. The money in your checking account has no material substance -- in fact the vast majority of US dollars in existence occupy exactly zero volume and have no physical manifestation. Taking a dollar is theft, though; the value of a dollar is a creation of law and custom, and it's as far from natural as you can get. Like copyright.
But there is no natural right to "own" a thought, and "intellectual property" laws are merely a privilege which society grants in exchange for value.
How do you come by this? Copyright doesn't protect "thoughts," it protects writings and recordings. The value society obtains is in the mere creation, which would no occur if creators could not be paid for copies of their work. If the law makes people pay for copies of works, the creators are compelled to create good works.
We don't need to imagine what the alternative looks like, the music industry already lives in a world where people don't have to pay for music, and the consequences are clear. We have Justin Bieber and Katy Perry: this is the sort of music you get when no one pays for music -- it's not made to be good, but to serve as an inoffensive substrate for commercials, and to market the "musician" as a star or brand that can be extended into more profitable models.
Basically, if you remove copyright from the creative process, all for-pay artwork simply becomes commercials, and you end up with movies like Transformers (or for that matter The Interview) -- 5-second memes attached to brand marketing, strung together for two hours. In the future, this is will be the only way people can make money creating movies, it's the equilibrium state. Piracy isn't necessary now because movies suck, movies suck now because piracy is rotting for-profit filmmaking from the inside out. And in the end all we'll have are two-hour commercials and a ton of $50,000 mumblecore movies shot in someones apartment and screened on Vimeo, made by dilettantes and rich men's wives.
(We will set aside your even more contentious notion that such a thing as natural rights exist or are a legitimate basis for law or policy.)
Why should MS-DOS still be under copyright? Lotus 1-2-3? SVR4?
We're talking about a movie that came out 5 days ago.
Slashdot Mirror
On later versions of Mac OS X with entitlements, when you get a "Save File" dialogue, the window itself is running in a separate process from the app that called it and communicates with the client over IPC, so the client never actually is able to see the filesystem. When the user picks a save location, the window process hands an NSURL object back to the client, but this NSURL doesn't actually contain a valid
url, it contains a persistent token allowing the recipient access to the one location, and the URL loading system (in the system's process domain) does the job of translating. The client can use the URL object as if it were an actual path to a local file or directory, but it can't actually split it into folder components, or jump up a level and walk directories, or anything else.
This is a way of doing it, it breaks other things you might want to do, like if you were writing an app that indexed files, but it works for a lot of the simple situations you describe. On iOS "photos" are a special case themselves and interacting with the photo management system is all handled with IPC over interfaces that are filesystem-ignorant; data sharing between iOS apps can only happen with predefined datatypes and through code interfaces, not the filesystem. It works, at the cost of keeping the actual filesystem sorta mysterious, but the filesystem on a cellphone should just be an implementation detail.
How are they going to authenticate to modify my cloud backup services, without my passwords?
I mean, in theory, once Cryptowall hits my machine, they could send 100 ninjas to destroy all of my DLTs...
You can get pid grosses work-for-hire; work-for-hire doesn't necessarily mean "all up front." It just means the copyright is under the corporation's name. Almost everyone above the line is "work-for-hire," the only exception is a spec script, and even those writers will generally agree to designate their work as for-hire.
The difference for Netflix isn't so much the Internet aspect as much as its the revenue model. They charge a flat rate for an all-you-can-eat service and this means the actual pay-through to the rights holders is a lot lower than VOD or premium cable. They want to make Netflix look like a premium cable service though, and they want to make Netflix appear relevant to people selling new content, and they want to position the Netflix brand and being for something more than just old episodes of St. Elsewhere and shitty Asylum movies, so they fund some premium content. But their premium content offerings are a potemkin village. And it's not like people like Starz haven't come to them with premium content, Netflix just won't change their model to offer premium-tier pricing, probably because it dilute their brand and would screw up their oh-so-precious user metrics.
From the perspective of a filmmaker (the evil Media Mafia), it makes sense to squeeze Netflix to the bone because they really don't bring much to the table in terms of distribution -- they might get you eyeballs but they have a lot of trouble turning this into money, and the money they do get they try to keep every penny of.
It's not so much that air travel is paid for with subsidies -- car travel is paid for with subsidies. It's that the Concorde ultimately wasn't sustainable, even with subsidies.
Also, this isn't sending people to fucking Europa, this is something that we're expecting business travelers to use on a routine basis because the price makes sense and it provides a practical and useful service. It makes sense for the government to subsidize scientific exploration, and interplanetary space travel for the purpose of new technology development, or national prestige, or whatever. It absolutely does not make sense for the government to subsidize Alcoa's EVP of Personnel saving 6 hours on a flight to Dubai.
Moore's Law does not apply to jet engines.
Nominal income hasn't significantly changed in the US since 2000, and has only improved 20% since 1980 (that's less than 3% per year). Productivity has gone up but all the gains have accrued to the highest income percentiles. So you're right, somebody will be able to buy flights on the aerospike liner, but it's not going to be something that "people" do, it'll be for the rich.
I mean, I assume the Hunger Games' author's whole point is to in some way deconstruct celebrity and show how being a celebrity doesn't actually constitute social status or favor. The name Panem is itself a fucking allusion to Juvenal, who was denouncing Roman demagogues who used gladiatorial spectacles and welfare payments to pacify the masses.
On that- the Roman grain dole and gladiatorial games: yet more examples of completely uneconomical activity pursued to the hilt because of a cultural imperative. We can continue to the Eastern Roman Empire, and THEIR tradition of sport fandom, and the chariot race riots which on several occasions ransacked Byzantium and killed hundreds...
Unless you're a Jew. I'm not really saying these are similar phenomena, just that both are examples of things societies do despite and to the detriment of economic necessity. We were talking about the fucking Concorde, the point being that societies don't often do things that are economical or sensible, and you can't always attribute this to "religion," or "god-emperors," or mistakes made by undeveloped savages.
Ancient Egyptians were really smart! There's really no evidence that they were any stupider than we are on any kind of meaningful basis; just because we have books and digital watches and commodity futures, it doesn't necessarily follow that we, or the administrators of Panem, are capable of avoiding the same sort of philosophical mistakes.
Interesting theory. I think, to the contrary, that providing people with celebrities is NOT INCONSISTENT WITH punishment. In the context of the story, it's a trope of "opiate of the people," it's not historically true or false, it's just a very common narrative interpretation of certain historical events.
I'm not sure the Ancient Egyptians needed pyramids, either. Europe is also dotted with stupendously huge cathedrals that basically nobody uses anymore, and even when they were built their actual utility or even ecclesiastical justifications were pretty flaky, they were built mostly by towns competing with each other.
The impression I always got from HG was that the society was driven by outright class warfare as a kind of ideology. They didn't make the districts mine coal because they needed it, they made them mine coal because coal mining is a modality of suffering. The only imperative was: the Districts must suffer.
The 20th century is full of examples of state's imposing illogical, and pointless, and wasteful punishments upon people only to demonstrate the state's power. The German Army, when it was retreating from Russia, had to constantly fight with Eichmann's department for train stock and trackage, because moving Jews to concentration camps was actually given a higher priority than troop movements. Or, when Germany made an alliance with a country like Hungary or Croatia, they made it clear that it didn't matter how many army divisions they committed to the German war effort: their loyalty would be measured strictly on the basis of how many Jews and gypsies they expatriated every day.
The whole point is to send a message to everyone: we can punish whoever we want, neither laws, nor efficiency, nor common sense will stop us, so don't cause trouble. Nothing can take a higher priority than that because that's the entire society is founded in coercion and force.
Would you pay ten times more? That's the kind of factor you'd be looking at for that kind of speedup.
Concorde service was never very profitable, in the end it was run for prestige. Concorde service was notoriously unprofitable through the 1970s and only made it to the 1980s with heavy government subsidy of the tickets -- it was in the early 80s that BA took control of the program and you started seeing the $10,000 tickets. It made a little money in the end but it just didn't produce the kind of money that justified the other expenses and hassles. After September 11th they just couldn't justify the service on those merits, notwithstanding
Since then, jets' biggest competitors for wealthy business travel aren't each other, their biggest competitor is telecommuting and telepresence.
Or if they're very smart, they just get paid up front... Have you any idea how few people actually get "gross"? And gross still usually means gross of distributor revenue, minus exhibition fees, which is to say, after Netflix has taken their cut. Nobody who merely works on a movie gets first-dollar gross.
Which is good, because Netflix adds nothing to the actual value chain for new titles. It's just a subscription Video-on-Demand service, except ON THE INTERNET!
It's a great way of watching older movies and TV shows, and for the people that own the rights to those to get some revenue from the "long tail" without committing to a DVD, but if you've made a new film and the best distribution you can get is Netflix, you're screwed, you'll never make your costs back.
I'm just speaking as someone who occasionally gets paid contractual gross in deferred deals. Netflix and VOD pay-through never remotely comes close to market rate for my work. I think a lot of the "streaming" business models are sorta scams, particularly for new filmmakers, they can't come close to generating the revenue theatrical and TV distribution can, and Netflix is sorta bluffing people on wether or not they can actually generate the revenue to sustainably create new original content. Netflix keeps making stuff like House of Cards, but that show costs over $6 mil an episode, there's no way they're making their nut back on those, and if even they can't make their costs back, how on Earth is some independent filmmaker supposed to profit from streaming distribution? HoC has stars, and is a franchise title, and has a co-production company plowing tens of millions of their own money into the project, and is selling the rights to HBO in Europe and Sony in Asia.
The distribution system isn't as much about shipping physical items as much as it is about marketing the films to a certain audience, making sure people know about them and then placing them in media that are appropriate for them to find them, obtaining a price that's attractive and then collecting the money. The territories are defined by these factor and there are barriers to entry between them apart from mere shipping.
Even if this weren't the case, as a practical matter the "new" distribution model just isn't ready for prime time and simply can't offer the same deal that the traditional one does. An independent drama film with a big star that's shot well can cost $30 million, if you go to foreign distributors and offer them the rights they can get $10 million or more up front, before they've even made the film, just for the sale of the rights. Can internet distribution offer a producer $10 million in pre-sales? That's a hell of a Kickstarter.
Even the shows that Netflix produces, they don't pay for everything. They paid a $100 million fee for House of Cards for the first 26 episodes and that STILL wasn't enough to cover the costs, that's part of the reason why MRC still has to sell foreign territories. HoC's episodes easily cost more than $6 million, and that's not out of line for a HBO-level drama; the show easily costs over $50 million per 13 episode season. Orange costs slightly less but still over $40 mil a season.
Netflix doesn't talk much about this because the fact is nobody can figure out if they're actually making money on it, it's a huge bet going forward that they can make it work. The Interview distribution was a freak thing but it really didn't make as much money as that film should have the first week, the producers and distributors aren't going to torch the system they have if the system they have makes them more money, and this situation will probably persist for at least another 5 years.
We know there's definitely some money getting made in new distribution modes, from Netflix to file sharing, Kim Dotcom is fucking rich! But very little of this money seems to find its way back to the people that actually pay to make a product, the people that run aggregating sites and ISPs slurp up all the revenue. Think about it: you pay $20-$40 or more a month for Internet service, and exactly 0% of that goes to pay for the things you actually read or see on the Internet.
That would probably be okay, but the companies that license content to Netflix often don't own the rights to stream films to Pakistan, so Netflix's library for Pakistan will end up being too small to be attractive to potential subscribers.
The secondary market for movies in the BRIC countries is usually pay-per-view or VOD exclusives. The cable company in Pakistan probably demands exclusive content, or else they simply drop all of the distributor's movies, so streaming is off the table. Worse, the VOD/cable company in Pakistan is probably state-owned and the government can make the distributor's life miserable in the theatrical market if they refuse to play ball with the cable company.
Just speculation but these are some of the issues involved. Cable and sat broadcasters are just a much easier and more profitable way for distributors to sell their movies in the third world, and they aren't going to risk pissing off their best customers.
Actually, scratch that, Netflix doesn't even produce Orange is the New Black, it's made by Lionsgate -- Netflix just owns an exclusive American distribution deal. House of Cards is similar: it's produced by Kevin Spacey's company, Trigger Street, and Media Rights Capital, an entertainment hedge fund.
The Big Media Conglomerates buy and sell the distribution rights for individual properties between each other, they will often sell foreign right for a film to a different company, and as a part of that they give up the right to sell the film in that territory.
The important thing to understand is that "studios" do not own the rights to distribute the shows they make, these are owned by distributors. Many distributors are owned by studios, and many other distributors don't make movies or TV shows at all, they just buy independent films and market them.
Distributors do not generally own the titles they sell outright. They usually only own the rights for a certain territory -- a standard example is a film that is funded by two different studios (many are), with one studio distributing the film in the US, and the other, in exchange for fronting some of the budget, getting the right to distribute the film in foreign territories. Netflix's own shows are perfect examples of this -- "Orange is the New Black" is produced by them, and they distribute it in the US, but they sell the foreign rights to HBO and Sony because they know they'll make more money in the UK and France on HBO than they would if they streamed it. As a condition of taking this deal, HBO required Netflix to not compete with them in their territory.
And this is only "big" products -- most of the true independent films you see are produced by someone with cash up front, and then the rights are sold piecemeal at film markets. The rights to Japan go to company X, the rights to Germany go to company Y. This is much more efficient because each company can then decide exactly how the property should be marketed, if it is appropriate for theaters, or pay TV, or cable, what the posters should look like, will the stars matter, are there cultural factors that make the film/TV show particularly attractive (or not). All of these decisions are decided on a country by country basis, and the only way a distributor in a market can "own" the rights is by keeping other distributors from competing with the same film. That's what the right is.
It's not stupid or evil -- the problem is people think "studios" "own" "movies", and they completely control how they're exploited commercially, and it's not true at all. It never worked that way, the business has always been about licensing of libraries of titles.
QED
A lot of the "Dr." titles that appear on anti-evolution petitions are MDs, the general phenomenon is called the Salem Hypothesis.
Exactly, it's a tech site, not a science site. Techies are usually logically-minded and rationalist but they're also raging dilettantes who assume that they can run any dataset they want through a shell script and make better sense of it than the so-called "experts." They are quick to yell "conspiracy!" and suspicious of anyone with advanced qualifications.
Techies of the Internet age are also steeped in libertarian ideological and moral values and disdain any sort of consensus or political process, let alone any conversation about morality or values.
These are people that think they can download any movie or TV show and nobody deserves to be paid for it; these are people that trade PGP keys so they can email each other about their lunch order in perfect secrecy; these are people that assume they know more than their boss because they know how to unblock port 20 on his laptop. How do you think such people will react if you tell them that driving their car is slowly destroying the planet, and a massive regulatory and social revolution is necessary to stop it?
The music situation is always really fluid, it's not uncommon to have a particular song in the film but a different song on the DVDs and VOD for rights reasons. Also it's not unheard of for the studio to replace a song after the film's released, they used to ship new reels to the theater but now they just upload a new DCP to the theatre chain headquarters, they all program it from their via satellite.
It's the music supervisor's job to clear all the music, he'll give the picture editor music that he thinks he can clear and then he'll start negotiation if it takes. By the time the final mix is happening he'll usually at least have all the music in negotiation and there won't be any music that's flat off-limits. It sounds like here he started to clear the song and he probably had the number in his spreadsheet (I'm not up on my rates but a $50k-$100k buyout for this usage in all media would kinda be standard). They just didn't do the paperwork -- add to this the artist might have gotten cold feet after the hack when it was alleged that North Korea was involved.
They might update the mix with a different song and just settle with the label. This is what Errors & Omissions insurance is for.
Ironically I think the film's a lot harder on American celebtriy culture than North Korea. I mean Kim Jong-un's a bad guy, but the North Korean people are portrayed as sympathetic and the real butt of all the jokes is invariably James Franco's character. The idea that the movie is actually "anti" North Korea is sorta overblown.
I am a sound editor on features, I worked about 9 months at Sony this year (on Fury and 22 Jump Street mostly, not Interview). They can replace music days before the movie is released, particularly now because most shows are distributed almost exclusively on DCP. It's not unusual to printmaster the movie (finalize all the sound) and still not have all the music deals in place. Music is an independent process from the "final cut".
All of the PCs at Sony were still down in mid-December, nobody in any of the administrative departments could access any of the work they'd left on their machines or on servers prior to the hack, everybody had to lug in their Macbooks to get any work done -- Macs were unaffected by the hack. I can't imagine how they could have dotted all their i's for the delivery with one days notice and no corporate PC infrastructure.
Note that I only made this point in the course of granting your position that only "substantial" things are truly property. Your argument is internally inconsistent.
This is why I really have no pity for media pirates. It's not that they make copies for themselves, or even that they give them to their friends or a million strangers. Hell I've done that every now and then.
It's that they do this, and then they insist on writing thousand-word screeds about how it's their sacred natural right to do this, and how it has absolutely no negative consequences, and anybody that actually tries to make sense of their ideological hash by working through the entailments is an "idiot." They don't know what they're talking about, they know just enough political science to be dangerous, and their underlying justifications are constantly shifting in order to serve their overarching commitment: "If the Internet makes something possible, it must be permitted, and anybody who gets hurt in the process deserves it."
You don't even address the consequences I've clearly pointed out, and you haven't even tried to work through how it's different to sell something as opposed to merely copy it, you just want to have your argument both ways depending on the circumstances, and you haven't contradicted me in the slightest, you just play dumbass comment thread games to weasel out of explaining yourself.
You were making an argument for copyright not being a "natural right" because it doesn't protect some "substance." The point is nobody ever "has" dollars in the first place, they're a convention -- when someone debits dollars from your account they're not actually "taking" anything from you, they're just moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. Somebody made a law that said dollars are worth something, and that their debits and credits have to match, just as somebody made a law that said you can't copy other people's recordings without permission. The two laws have equal merit and standing.
But why make that exception? You can sell the copy and that doesn't take anything away from the creator, does it? He still has his copy. Selling the copies for money is no different than giving them away from the perspective of "natural" excludable property, unless you accept that creators have a right to sales -- a right which, in any case, is moot if free copies are permitted, as free copies fully supplement paid ones. If people are allowed to make and distribute free copies than the "right" of copyright becomes little more than the right to beg for charity.
What's the limits of 'selling' exactly? Does it include attaching advertising space to the "free" copy, advertising space which you sell to a third party for money? That'd definitely be profiting off of the original work, even if it's not "selling," and would include your Kim Dotcom types...
What probably happened was the music supervisor was working on getting the clearance right up until the day of the hack, and he hasn't been able to get onto his computer since -- all of the PCs at Sony have been down ever since the Day because they're doing a huge forensic audit. And then a week went by and Sony announced they weren't going to release the movie, and the music sup just forgot about locking down the last licensing deal since it seemed like a dead letter.
And then Sony announced they were going to screen the movie with one days notice and they rushed the due-diligence.
Just because something has no substance, it does not follow that it has no value. The money in your checking account has no material substance -- in fact the vast majority of US dollars in existence occupy exactly zero volume and have no physical manifestation. Taking a dollar is theft, though; the value of a dollar is a creation of law and custom, and it's as far from natural as you can get. Like copyright.
How do you come by this? Copyright doesn't protect "thoughts," it protects writings and recordings. The value society obtains is in the mere creation, which would no occur if creators could not be paid for copies of their work. If the law makes people pay for copies of works, the creators are compelled to create good works.
We don't need to imagine what the alternative looks like, the music industry already lives in a world where people don't have to pay for music, and the consequences are clear. We have Justin Bieber and Katy Perry: this is the sort of music you get when no one pays for music -- it's not made to be good, but to serve as an inoffensive substrate for commercials, and to market the "musician" as a star or brand that can be extended into more profitable models.
Basically, if you remove copyright from the creative process, all for-pay artwork simply becomes commercials, and you end up with movies like Transformers (or for that matter The Interview) -- 5-second memes attached to brand marketing, strung together for two hours. In the future, this is will be the only way people can make money creating movies, it's the equilibrium state. Piracy isn't necessary now because movies suck, movies suck now because piracy is rotting for-profit filmmaking from the inside out. And in the end all we'll have are two-hour commercials and a ton of $50,000 mumblecore movies shot in someones apartment and screened on Vimeo, made by dilettantes and rich men's wives.
(We will set aside your even more contentious notion that such a thing as natural rights exist or are a legitimate basis for law or policy.)
We're talking about a movie that came out 5 days ago.