1) Security. If I can steal one of your backup drives, datawise, I just stole the notebook.
It is regrettable that SuperDuper doesn't support encrypted backup targets.
2) Efficiency. While I don't know SuperDuper, I assume it clones the entire drive. This seems like a waste of time for a few changed files. An incremental backup would be much faster and more efficient with maybe full backups weekly.
FYI, it does do incremental backups, but they can be a bit slower than rsync, mainly because it does a bunch of tests when copying. The main appeal of SuperDuper! is that it copies everything, including alternate data streams on files (a big deal for us OSXers sometimes), extended FS attributes, and files that OS X would otherwise not allow you to, making the backup drive fully blessable and essentially indistinguishable from the original.
I am a happy SuperDuper! user as well, my only gripe is that it lack the encryption and the ability to do "snapshots" of different versions of the filesystem -- though the latter is likely to be addressed by Time Machine.
Yeah right... most machines sound takes far less than 0.1% of the CPU time to 'push the bits'. Even if you write it in C++ or asm it "might work on some people's computers and not on other". Ooh scary.
Well it is, if you want the code to "write once, run everywhere" (by everywhere we mean NOT "all arbitrarily fast and memory capacious home computers" but "any computer, including embedded systems, from Micro-ITX Mobos to battery-powered greeting cards that speak a greeting when opened." And forgive me for being so handwavy, it's not "pushing the bits on the buss," it's more like "reading the bits off the disk driver at whatever rate it'd like to get them for you, passing these to ringbuffers, keeping track of the ringbuffers state so they don't underrun, synchronizing the threads that read the input ringbuffers so they're all pulling the precise sample for the given realtime offset, reading the samples from the ringbuffers for several streams into the CPU for summing, writing the summed stream to the summed ringbuffer (or "mix buss"), keeping a tally of how many samples you send to the DAC so you don't overrun it, and emitting the bytes to the DAC. You CAN do it all in java, but if their are performance problems on platform X, your boss will ask you "Is this code written in the fastest way possible?" and if there's anything in it pertaining to java, you know how you'll have to answer.
These methods get inlined directly by the JIT since it knows the final types so these buffers are generally equivalent to arrays in overhead.
Generally? In C or C++, you can make it compulsory.
They do check bounds though, but if you want to crash your sound app go ahead and write it in C++.
How much memory did you allocate doing that, and how many cycles did you burn jumping just to use your member calls?
If you were doing some non-realtime process, like converting an audio file, that'd probably work OK, but if you're rushing to get those samples to the DAC before its buffer underruns, it might work on some peoples computers and not on others, and it takes a hella lot longer to spin through a buffer and may or may not be copying the buffer into your scope -- with a language like java, it's impossible to tell, since they've abstracted away so much of the machine. It's not just audio; MIDI notes can get serious latency if you don't move them on time, particularly if your gear doesn't use MIDI Timestamping, and any process that generates big loads of realtime input data needs it too. In java's favor is the fact that most people don't generate big gobs of realtime data.
It's sortof a corner-case; java and python and ruby are great for most things, but you need some of those C++ features if you're squeezing audio through a buss. You can use java to wire the low-level pieces together, but the trucking of the bytes still to be done on the registers of the physical machine.
So if ever you do call customer service trying to explain your bill, keep in mind many of the industry players have legacy or poorly made billing systems (usually poorly made) and its quite difficult to read.
At what support tier do I stop being nice and and understanding to the temp, and start to bitch out the manager for having an incompetent business process?
Second, you can't say music stores don't facilitate music listening. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would listen to a lot less music if music stores weren't around. Blah blah vending- you can listen to music at music stores too.
Finally, theater screening isn't necessarily critical to the success of a film. Sure, tehy make wads of cash from it, but they make more from DVD sales and such.
Music stores facilitate music listening, but a musician can sell an album without it. This is isn't really true of theaters: it IS true that studios make a majority of their money from DVDs, but the writers, producer, director and stars make most of their money from the theatrical run (it's where they make their money, royalties from DVD are peanuts by comparison). On top of that, studios make a ton of movie on DVDs if and only if the movie was a first-run theatrical feature in the first place -- it gives the film legitimacy in the eyes of the DVD market. Films that didn't have a theatrical run end up in the $4 bin at the Walgreens, with the DVD distro getting the sale and the artists getting a flat payout for the license.
Theater exhibitors are a gatekeeper to profitable feature filmmaking, like it or not. You can get your movie out without them, using internet, DVDs, whatever, but not in a way that has the same upside potential (that 20% of the first-dollar gross that's guaranteed to return the star $20 million). Why didn't the guys who made Napoleon Dynamite or Little Miss Sunshine just put their movie up on MySpace and solicit donations for their next movie? They're ambition and goal was to get theatrical, because it was the only real way to make back their investment.
The only major competitor to the theaters are premium cable channels HBO, but ad revs from those miniserieses (like From the Earth to the Moon) tend to be lower and the artists don't get the same kind of cut (they don't get a percentage unless they are the show creator or EP). TV is a worse deal $$$-wise than theatrical run for the people who actually do the work, and other distribution channels are only worse.
Let me drive home a point that I've left foggy, though the other branch of this thread touches on it: Artists REALLY REALLY LIKE the deal movie studios give them, even when the film is small. They are shoveled money if the movie does good in theaters. All the little creative issues and pressures they felt while making their film melt in a wave of cash. Almost no recording artists ever got such a deal from their labels, and now instead of offering better terms or profit participation to their acts, labels are insisting on 360-degree deals with new signs, which (rightly) horrifies their business managers and agents, and drives them away from the traditional label system EVEN MORE.
This entire argument, of course, is based on the supposition that the people who make the movie want to make money. Take that away and everything is up for grabs.
musicians hate labels just like directors hate studios
Granting this point, which I don't (just in my personal experience), mutatis mutandis the end result remains. If a director hates his studio, he finds another one to get his movie into theaters, or he finances independently and sells to a distributor, who puts it in theaters. Their goal of the theatrical exhibition is unchanged.
Music stores don't facilitate music listening, they just vend. Movie theaters facilitate movie watching. The people who make movies like theaters, they consider screening in a theater critical to the success to their film. Musicians like record stores, but they don't care if you buy their disc in a shop or at amazon, since it really has no impact upon the listening experience.
You sound like Robert Rodriguez, before his checks from the Weinstein's started to clear. He STILL goes on endlessly about how you only need a few people to make a movie, and how it's such a personal experience for him and how digital technology has changed everything, while he spends his $53 million dollar budgets.
Maybe the DV cineastes are the Incas! They are quaint and provincial and riven by internal divisions; they often venerate their leaders, living and dead. They have many resources, but lack some critical innovations of the Spaniards; many among them are easily co-opted with blandishments of power and money. They have gold, all the better for the Spaniards to smelt into crucifixes! They'll change cinema for ever in the way they changed the Spanish; they got a little darker (a little).
Would you reject a system that grants such a right but reverts it to the people after a few decades?
No, 50 years or upon death of the author, whichever comes second (so his/her heirs can benefit from it), seems reasonable, with 50 years PERIOD for works for hire. This death+50, then 60, then 70 in the US is just greedy.
software that included the source code would still have a natural advantage on the market.
Linux already has this on Windows, but Windows is still dominant. People are willing to trade the freedom to modify the source if they get convenience, particularly if they're only casual computer users and don't know how to code.
License-speaking, it's like all code - GPL and otherwise - would transform to BSD overnight.
Well yeah, but in practice that only applies to people who disclose their source, which ain't everyone.
Yes it made money, I know, so did Superman Returns, but imagine how much money they would have made on it if it were good! They'd've doubled their money ten times over in DVDs for the next 20 years! That's where the real money for the studios is, since they get so little of the backend from the theatrical boxoffice (that goes to Tobey and Kirsten).
As sleazy and as fucked up as the movie business can be, I've always been consoled that at least it wasn't the sewer that is the music business.
I don't know exactly how they did it, but the people who run the business, the distributors, studio heads, and agents, have managed to keep the creative talent basically on their side; you occasionally see someone like Soderberg release Bubble to Internet the same day as theatrical, but it's always a lead balloon, and he goes back to do Ocean's 13 (why didn't he sell that piece of sh!t on the Internet?). That particular instance was more a case of Mark Kuban trying to break into the status quo, than Soderberg trying to break out.
I do travel with some privileged company, but nowhere in the culture of Hollywood is outright hostility to the exhibitors or distributors even comprehended in the visceral way it would come to the surface in the music industry. A lot of it has to do with the extreme competence of the agents, and the way they managed to get the artists a lot of the upside benfit of a movie while putting all the downside risk on the studio; there's so much money to be made if you're a successful actor or director, and the studio never comes back to collect on money they "loaned" you to make a film. You can see the interaction in the constant writers and actors strikes: the film industry is constantly hashing out the issue of how much creative people should earn, and I hope it continues to. The record labels would simply tell the creative types "Go fuck yourself" if they asked for more money.
As long as people are paying $80 for a 4 ft. Monster RCA cable, I'm dubious on this point. It just ain't the same. 50% of the acoustics is having a big room, thousands of square feet, and 50% of the visual experience is having 120 degrees of your field-of-view filled at meters distance. BTW, if you think you're getting theater resolution from HDDVD or Blu-Ray, you aren't -- that's still another generation up.
#2, well, the dinner and a movie date was never the best one for me. I don't know how many young people still do this now that it'll cost you $60+ for the 'experience'.
\me steps off your lawn... $60 is pretty competitive with any night out at this point -- dancing with a cover and drinks will run that out pretty fast, and you haven't even fed the girl yet! I can't even begin to describe how much funnier Knocked Up is with an audience than alone.
#3, I agree changing actors, producers, directors, etc.., will probably help get some new ideas out there and not the same old sequels and remakes we seem to be getting lately.
I'm not really criticizing the content (it might be crap but you people paid a lotta money this year to see it!) My point is that filmmakers hate the internet for their movies, and they're in the drivers seat when it comes to where things show for $$$.
I don't see how this counteracts the first two points though. If the movie looks good, I'm probably still more apt to rent it than see it in a crowded theater with sticky floors, improperly focused projectors, wimpy sound systems, peoples cell phones ringing, a mad rush to get the good seats... you get the idea.
This is an issue and some theater chains like Arclight and Pacific are catering to a higher end, doing proper QC of their sound and projection, offering better food, alcohol, etc. One of the issues the US film industry has, going forward, is that many of the exhibitors are bankrupt, and have really bad business models, mainly because they skimped on quality to maximize screen and seat count (and they get a really shitty end of the box-office split). An end-to-end digital cinema distribution system may address this, but they've only been talking about that for, what, 10 years? It costs a theater on average $100K to equip a (remember, bankrupt) theater for DLP and HiDef video, and there are no unified standards yet as to delivery formats (Sony [HDCAM-SR] and Panasonic [D-5] up to their old mischief, as always).
My friends from USC will do some stuff and put it on YouTube, but they don't count it -- they want to make money making movies, and who the hell remembers who directed "Lazy Sunday"?;)
How do you mean? If I put out some code under the GPL license, I basically force anyone that would try to add to it to make their changes public; this is why I use it. How would abolishing copyright give me the same result? Sure, THEIR additions wouldn't be under copyright, but what difference does that make if they only hand out a compiled binary?
I do appreciate the forum something like youtube provides, but it isn't a commercially viable medium; it offers no challenge to film distribution, by the way the mp3 did to music distribution, which is all I'm really trying to address.
You're right, basically, but we won't be reading about how movie studios are going bankrupt in 5 years because broadband penetration became sufficient to move high-def movies fast. The film industry is structured differently from the music biz, and the experience of watching something is different from merely listening.
movie theaters depend on concessions for their overhead. Every last penny of the box office generally goes to the distributor (this is on account of the actors and director having first-dollar gross deals). This is why the markup is a little ridiculous.
Transformers was expensive, but still cheaper than Spidey 3 and Superman Returns, two flops. I would not defend Hollywood's profligacy per se (i think it was a big pissing contest to see who could have the biggest budget). But entertaining the average American, otoh, is really expensive.
For music it's easy to imagine releasing a few tracks and saying "like this stuff? Donate so we can finish the album!" For movies they would probably use advertising, trailers, etc. All the usual stuff. Would people end up unwittingly funding crap movies? Of course. (We do nowadays, too...) Chains of trust would develop. In fact if a particular movie reviewer consistently promoted movies (after watching a special private screening) that turned out to be awful, people would turn to better reviewers. (And if not... well then that's their money to waste...)
You're rationalizing away a lot of the complexity of "producing" a movie (all of that stuff phonies call "Hollywood bullshit"). Instead of tying the money to the MOVIE, you're tying the money to the PITCH. The money, the 10%s, the fees, the whole "show business" machine would be built around selling ideas that might make good movies, and not around the making of the movies themselves. Instead of directors like Fincher and McG being attached to maybe 5 movies (to actually direct 1), they attach to 100, in the hope that their name will draw money. And once the producer/impresario/whatever gets the money, he has little incentive to actually make a good one. You could suppose that they'll get a bad reputation for making a bad movie, but the names of people who produce movies are highly malleable, very few people do the same job very long in production and representation. The director on a bad film can always blame the producer, the producer the stars, the stars the director or the writer, ad nauseum, and when you have the finished work in your hand, it's almost impossible to tell which one person screwed it up. (And a lot of time people screw they're job up and are saved by others.)
Once you announce McG is attached, is he REQUIRED to do the movie, otherwise the impresario is guilty of a bait-and-switch? What if the script changes and McG doesn't like it? What if he agrees under the condition of getting actress A, or getting final draft of the script? These rights are common bargaining chips filmmakers can use against executives, and you'd be taking them away, and putting all the power in the hands of the people who put the actors together with the director and the producer and the script, the Agents.
Among the donors, they'd all demand creative control. You can tell them no, but bigger donors would start asking, and you'll give it because they have money. So you end up making promises to rich people, while the poor syndicalize and debate every FUCKING WORD of the screenplay like a ComiCon gab session, conduct insurgencies, whisper campaigns for or against X director or star, and generally make it impossible for anybody to have a single vision for what a film is supposed to be.
I think my real problem with your idea is that it sounds like focus group filmmaking, and focus groups are, without exception, where films go to die. I've seen it over and over.
copyright law (a government-granted monopoly)
That's name calling. Monopolies are tolerable institutions if regulated, and as I pointed out in another thread, nobody around here complains about Linus Torvalds having "monopolist" copyright law on his side.
We already have commissioned art. It's commissioned, distributed, and controlled by the powers-that-be in the entrenched media cartel.
Politics aside, entrenched media cartels have to make money, and the amount they make is tied directly to the number of people that buy tickets. Commissioners don't give a damn, because it is to please an audience of one. That's really a defining difference.
I don't know for sure that a copyright-free world would "work"... but I think it's an option that is dismissed outright far too easily.
Any system that deprives an author of a right to control how a work is copied I would reject out of hand. In the age of the printing press, it's what defines authorship.
The "source material" definition gets more and more complicated with the medium, and it seems like it would be too elastic. Isn't merely the script the "source" of the movie, and the photography just compilation? Or is it principle photography, but it could take someone a month to rebuild the original cut of a film from the footage (it's a lot like reverse-engineering). But then you can't add a scene, so maybe you need access to the actors!
Entrenched interests would prevent such a law from ever being created.
Among those entrenched interests are the writers of the Constitution, not to argue from authority, but just to give an indication of how ingrained the idea of copyright is in western culture, and not just rich book publishers. People don't think much of copying a DVD, but if you ask them, in principle, "Should anyone be able to copy any work at any time?" most people would disagree, since THEY wouldn't want THEIR creative works to be treated in that way.
Quite simply, I can oppose the notion of "absolute control over creative works by the originators of said works" while still supporting the notion of "requiring those who build upon other's work to also allow any other party to do the same."
When you're talking about a film, almost no one's seriously "building" on a film, they're just copying it; there is no novel process, no art, no nothing. I don't support studios suing people for doing remixes, as this isn't really a right of copyright holder - they're only allowed to stop derivative works if they take money away from the original, which remixes don't.
If you can't own intellectual property, than you risk having a tragedy of the intellectual commons, where nobody contributes works in the public, and novel arts, ideas and creations are either distributed ad-hoc under the radar among trusting groups, as this is the only way authors can get money for their work, or not distributed at all, since without money, people can't devote their time to writing. I don't think you're arguing for the abolition of intellectual property, but if anyone can copy anything and modify it in any way, particularly interfering with things like attribution, what would it mean to "own"?
So how would this play out in an actual free market? You'd probably have commissioned works. You'd have companies setting up "donation-based content release" (e.g. "Did you like Spiderman 2? Well once we receive $X in donations, we'll release Spiderman 3 for the world to enjoy! Donate today!").
I have friends that have tried this, and a big issue is marketing your donation scheme in such a way that you can find enough interested people to put up the money. If you were subjected to the Spiderman 3 ad campaign, except soliciting donations, you might find yourself aware enough of the film that you might put up $10, but the ad campaign for Spidey 3 cost $300 million! How do you raise the money to publicize the donation scheme?
As well, it's almost impossible to get people to separate with their money without showing them a script, which would kinda ruin a lot of movies.
In the end, you really wouldn't be putting the audience first, you'd be putting media personalities like Roger Ebert and Harry Knowles in the chairs now occupied by movie executives; the studios already heavily curry their favor to get good reviews, such types would just turn into mouthpieces for the actor's and director's agents, who would finally be the people who were packaging the actors/directors/scripts for the people who'd be hawking the donations.
You might have single donors, but what economic incentive do they have to "donate" the money, since they'll never see a dime off it, aside from the AdWords on the download page. And commissioned art is a really dirty business; maybe the Medici's or Pope Urban got art for their money, but most people who commission works want to see their second hot wife try to act; they don't care about reaching an audience or entertaining.
It's a total sellout for the government to give away my freedom to them. If this was to mean that these movies weren't made, then boo fuckin' hoo. I'd rather there be less Hollywood movies and more freedom to copy than the situation we have today.
Do you oppose copyright as a general principle? Without copyright, there could be no GPL.
Bill Gates: It's a total sellout for the government to give away my freedom to copy the Linux kernel to Linus Torvalds. If this means nobody writes free software anymore, than boo fuckin' hoo. I'd rather there'd be less free software and more freedom for me to sell it to people, preferably with a cute little animated assistant to help configuration.
Not MANY people would upload their copy to TPB, but it only takes ONE.
Something movie distributors have in their favor is their exhibition system. Showing movies on a big, bright screen in a large room with a great sound system is significant added value. If you want to defeat movies as they are, you must defeat the movie theater, and if you want to do that, you have to:
Make home systems provide an equivalent technical experience on a common basis, in other words not a niche trade for cinephiles and AV hobbyists.
Figure out a better low-impact date for two people on a friday night than dinner and a night at the movies. A courtship date of watching movies at home just isn't the same. This is just a small example of a bigger point: going to the movies is a "lifestyle" thing, it provides an experience on top of the content. Selling a first-run movie over the internet would never compare, it'd be like buying a night at the club over the internet.
Change the directors and producers. I have many director friends, all young and trying to break in, but none of them are even remotely interested in making a film and putting on YouTube to tell their stories. Recording artists, musicians, etc. famously have always hated their labels, complaining about the quite abusive deal they get. Directors, Producers, actors and everyone involved in movies LOVES theaters, in marked contrast to how musicians feel about labels.
Just an opinion, but most people actively engaged in making commercial movies in Hollywood love the internet for promotion and secondary distro, but no business people, and crucially no artists, are talking about chucking the whole movie theater idea. Working in the status quo's favor as well, is the strong separation between commercial cinema, the clearly expensive star-studded vehicles that can be good or bad, but will generally be at least entertaining, and independent cinema, which can be more profound but often isn't, and is generally actively hostile to the idea of "entertaining" people (they regard mass entertainment in the way FOSS people regard configuration wizards).
In the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge "Stanley", Stanford University's entry, a Volkswagen Touareg wagon, won, beating several other entrants that completed the course. The team was led by Sebastian Thune; Stanley was remarkable for having a relatively simple LIDAR/GPS sensor array, unlike many of the other entries, but had extremely sophisticated software and machine learning and high autonomy, whereas it's main competition, CMUs "H1ander", had extremely involved sensing and was programmed with an extremely detailed course route, but its complex directional LIDAR array failed early in the race, and though it could compensate, it completed the course slow.
Find the NOVA episode if you can, truly fascinating. I hate how NOVA ScienceNow is so attention-span limited.
Slashdot Mirror
It is regrettable that SuperDuper doesn't support encrypted backup targets.
2) Efficiency. While I don't know SuperDuper, I assume it clones the entire drive. This seems like a waste of time for a few changed files. An incremental backup would be much faster and more efficient with maybe full backups weekly.FYI, it does do incremental backups, but they can be a bit slower than rsync, mainly because it does a bunch of tests when copying. The main appeal of SuperDuper! is that it copies everything, including alternate data streams on files (a big deal for us OSXers sometimes), extended FS attributes, and files that OS X would otherwise not allow you to, making the backup drive fully blessable and essentially indistinguishable from the original.
I am a happy SuperDuper! user as well, my only gripe is that it lack the encryption and the ability to do "snapshots" of different versions of the filesystem -- though the latter is likely to be addressed by Time Machine.
Well it is, if you want the code to "write once, run everywhere" (by everywhere we mean NOT "all arbitrarily fast and memory capacious home computers" but "any computer, including embedded systems, from Micro-ITX Mobos to battery-powered greeting cards that speak a greeting when opened." And forgive me for being so handwavy, it's not "pushing the bits on the buss," it's more like "reading the bits off the disk driver at whatever rate it'd like to get them for you, passing these to ringbuffers, keeping track of the ringbuffers state so they don't underrun, synchronizing the threads that read the input ringbuffers so they're all pulling the precise sample for the given realtime offset, reading the samples from the ringbuffers for several streams into the CPU for summing, writing the summed stream to the summed ringbuffer (or "mix buss"), keeping a tally of how many samples you send to the DAC so you don't overrun it, and emitting the bytes to the DAC. You CAN do it all in java, but if their are performance problems on platform X, your boss will ask you "Is this code written in the fastest way possible?" and if there's anything in it pertaining to java, you know how you'll have to answer.
Generally? In C or C++, you can make it compulsory.
You mean like these guys?
How much memory did you allocate doing that, and how many cycles did you burn jumping just to use your member calls?
If you were doing some non-realtime process, like converting an audio file, that'd probably work OK, but if you're rushing to get those samples to the DAC before its buffer underruns, it might work on some peoples computers and not on others, and it takes a hella lot longer to spin through a buffer and may or may not be copying the buffer into your scope -- with a language like java, it's impossible to tell, since they've abstracted away so much of the machine. It's not just audio; MIDI notes can get serious latency if you don't move them on time, particularly if your gear doesn't use MIDI Timestamping, and any process that generates big loads of realtime input data needs it too. In java's favor is the fact that most people don't generate big gobs of realtime data.
It's sortof a corner-case; java and python and ruby are great for most things, but you need some of those C++ features if you're squeezing audio through a buss. You can use java to wire the low-level pieces together, but the trucking of the bytes still to be done on the registers of the physical machine.
At what support tier do I stop being nice and and understanding to the temp, and start to bitch out the manager for having an incompetent business process?
Music stores facilitate music listening, but a musician can sell an album without it. This is isn't really true of theaters: it IS true that studios make a majority of their money from DVDs, but the writers, producer, director and stars make most of their money from the theatrical run (it's where they make their money, royalties from DVD are peanuts by comparison). On top of that, studios make a ton of movie on DVDs if and only if the movie was a first-run theatrical feature in the first place -- it gives the film legitimacy in the eyes of the DVD market. Films that didn't have a theatrical run end up in the $4 bin at the Walgreens, with the DVD distro getting the sale and the artists getting a flat payout for the license.
Theater exhibitors are a gatekeeper to profitable feature filmmaking, like it or not. You can get your movie out without them, using internet, DVDs, whatever, but not in a way that has the same upside potential (that 20% of the first-dollar gross that's guaranteed to return the star $20 million). Why didn't the guys who made Napoleon Dynamite or Little Miss Sunshine just put their movie up on MySpace and solicit donations for their next movie? They're ambition and goal was to get theatrical, because it was the only real way to make back their investment.
The only major competitor to the theaters are premium cable channels HBO, but ad revs from those miniserieses (like From the Earth to the Moon) tend to be lower and the artists don't get the same kind of cut (they don't get a percentage unless they are the show creator or EP). TV is a worse deal $$$-wise than theatrical run for the people who actually do the work, and other distribution channels are only worse.
Let me drive home a point that I've left foggy, though the other branch of this thread touches on it: Artists REALLY REALLY LIKE the deal movie studios give them, even when the film is small. They are shoveled money if the movie does good in theaters. All the little creative issues and pressures they felt while making their film melt in a wave of cash. Almost no recording artists ever got such a deal from their labels, and now instead of offering better terms or profit participation to their acts, labels are insisting on 360-degree deals with new signs, which (rightly) horrifies their business managers and agents, and drives them away from the traditional label system EVEN MORE.
This entire argument, of course, is based on the supposition that the people who make the movie want to make money. Take that away and everything is up for grabs.
Granting this point, which I don't (just in my personal experience), mutatis mutandis the end result remains. If a director hates his studio, he finds another one to get his movie into theaters, or he finances independently and sells to a distributor, who puts it in theaters. Their goal of the theatrical exhibition is unchanged.
Music stores don't facilitate music listening, they just vend. Movie theaters facilitate movie watching. The people who make movies like theaters, they consider screening in a theater critical to the success to their film. Musicians like record stores, but they don't care if you buy their disc in a shop or at amazon, since it really has no impact upon the listening experience.
You sound like Robert Rodriguez, before his checks from the Weinstein's started to clear. He STILL goes on endlessly about how you only need a few people to make a movie, and how it's such a personal experience for him and how digital technology has changed everything, while he spends his $53 million dollar budgets.
Maybe the DV cineastes are the Incas! They are quaint and provincial and riven by internal divisions; they often venerate their leaders, living and dead. They have many resources, but lack some critical innovations of the Spaniards; many among them are easily co-opted with blandishments of power and money. They have gold, all the better for the Spaniards to smelt into crucifixes! They'll change cinema for ever in the way they changed the Spanish; they got a little darker (a little).
No, 50 years or upon death of the author, whichever comes second (so his/her heirs can benefit from it), seems reasonable, with 50 years PERIOD for works for hire. This death+50, then 60, then 70 in the US is just greedy.
Linux already has this on Windows, but Windows is still dominant. People are willing to trade the freedom to modify the source if they get convenience, particularly if they're only casual computer users and don't know how to code.
Well yeah, but in practice that only applies to people who disclose their source, which ain't everyone.
It was bad; I know, I worked on it :P
Yes it made money, I know, so did Superman Returns, but imagine how much money they would have made on it if it were good! They'd've doubled their money ten times over in DVDs for the next 20 years! That's where the real money for the studios is, since they get so little of the backend from the theatrical boxoffice (that goes to Tobey and Kirsten).
For further reading on the fascinating issue, Google "Lew Wasserman"
by that standard, HPU/X, Solaris and SunOS,Irix and all the DEC Unixes weren't operating systems either.
The provision of "general use" is unecessary. A platform is a platform.
I don't know exactly how they did it, but the people who run the business, the distributors, studio heads, and agents, have managed to keep the creative talent basically on their side; you occasionally see someone like Soderberg release Bubble to Internet the same day as theatrical, but it's always a lead balloon, and he goes back to do Ocean's 13 (why didn't he sell that piece of sh!t on the Internet?). That particular instance was more a case of Mark Kuban trying to break into the status quo, than Soderberg trying to break out.
I do travel with some privileged company, but nowhere in the culture of Hollywood is outright hostility to the exhibitors or distributors even comprehended in the visceral way it would come to the surface in the music industry. A lot of it has to do with the extreme competence of the agents, and the way they managed to get the artists a lot of the upside benfit of a movie while putting all the downside risk on the studio; there's so much money to be made if you're a successful actor or director, and the studio never comes back to collect on money they "loaned" you to make a film. You can see the interaction in the constant writers and actors strikes: the film industry is constantly hashing out the issue of how much creative people should earn, and I hope it continues to. The record labels would simply tell the creative types "Go fuck yourself" if they asked for more money.
As long as people are paying $80 for a 4 ft. Monster RCA cable, I'm dubious on this point. It just ain't the same. 50% of the acoustics is having a big room, thousands of square feet, and 50% of the visual experience is having 120 degrees of your field-of-view filled at meters distance. BTW, if you think you're getting theater resolution from HDDVD or Blu-Ray, you aren't -- that's still another generation up.
\me steps off your lawn... $60 is pretty competitive with any night out at this point -- dancing with a cover and drinks will run that out pretty fast, and you haven't even fed the girl yet! I can't even begin to describe how much funnier Knocked Up is with an audience than alone.
I'm not really criticizing the content (it might be crap but you people paid a lotta money this year to see it!) My point is that filmmakers hate the internet for their movies, and they're in the drivers seat when it comes to where things show for $$$.
This is an issue and some theater chains like Arclight and Pacific are catering to a higher end, doing proper QC of their sound and projection, offering better food, alcohol, etc. One of the issues the US film industry has, going forward, is that many of the exhibitors are bankrupt, and have really bad business models, mainly because they skimped on quality to maximize screen and seat count (and they get a really shitty end of the box-office split). An end-to-end digital cinema distribution system may address this, but they've only been talking about that for, what, 10 years? It costs a theater on average $100K to equip a (remember, bankrupt) theater for DLP and HiDef video, and there are no unified standards yet as to delivery formats (Sony [HDCAM-SR] and Panasonic [D-5] up to their old mischief, as always).
My friends from USC will do some stuff and put it on YouTube, but they don't count it -- they want to make money making movies, and who the hell remembers who directed "Lazy Sunday"? ;)
How do you mean? If I put out some code under the GPL license, I basically force anyone that would try to add to it to make their changes public; this is why I use it. How would abolishing copyright give me the same result? Sure, THEIR additions wouldn't be under copyright, but what difference does that make if they only hand out a compiled binary?
I do appreciate the forum something like youtube provides, but it isn't a commercially viable medium; it offers no challenge to film distribution, by the way the mp3 did to music distribution, which is all I'm really trying to address. You're right, basically, but we won't be reading about how movie studios are going bankrupt in 5 years because broadband penetration became sufficient to move high-def movies fast. The film industry is structured differently from the music biz, and the experience of watching something is different from merely listening.
movie theaters depend on concessions for their overhead. Every last penny of the box office generally goes to the distributor (this is on account of the actors and director having first-dollar gross deals). This is why the markup is a little ridiculous.
Transformers was expensive, but still cheaper than Spidey 3 and Superman Returns, two flops. I would not defend Hollywood's profligacy per se (i think it was a big pissing contest to see who could have the biggest budget). But entertaining the average American, otoh, is really expensive.
You're rationalizing away a lot of the complexity of "producing" a movie (all of that stuff phonies call "Hollywood bullshit"). Instead of tying the money to the MOVIE, you're tying the money to the PITCH. The money, the 10%s, the fees, the whole "show business" machine would be built around selling ideas that might make good movies, and not around the making of the movies themselves. Instead of directors like Fincher and McG being attached to maybe 5 movies (to actually direct 1), they attach to 100, in the hope that their name will draw money. And once the producer/impresario/whatever gets the money, he has little incentive to actually make a good one. You could suppose that they'll get a bad reputation for making a bad movie, but the names of people who produce movies are highly malleable, very few people do the same job very long in production and representation. The director on a bad film can always blame the producer, the producer the stars, the stars the director or the writer, ad nauseum, and when you have the finished work in your hand, it's almost impossible to tell which one person screwed it up. (And a lot of time people screw they're job up and are saved by others.)
Once you announce McG is attached, is he REQUIRED to do the movie, otherwise the impresario is guilty of a bait-and-switch? What if the script changes and McG doesn't like it? What if he agrees under the condition of getting actress A, or getting final draft of the script? These rights are common bargaining chips filmmakers can use against executives, and you'd be taking them away, and putting all the power in the hands of the people who put the actors together with the director and the producer and the script, the Agents.
Among the donors, they'd all demand creative control. You can tell them no, but bigger donors would start asking, and you'll give it because they have money. So you end up making promises to rich people, while the poor syndicalize and debate every FUCKING WORD of the screenplay like a ComiCon gab session, conduct insurgencies, whisper campaigns for or against X director or star, and generally make it impossible for anybody to have a single vision for what a film is supposed to be.
I think my real problem with your idea is that it sounds like focus group filmmaking, and focus groups are, without exception, where films go to die. I've seen it over and over.
That's name calling. Monopolies are tolerable institutions if regulated, and as I pointed out in another thread, nobody around here complains about Linus Torvalds having "monopolist" copyright law on his side.
Politics aside, entrenched media cartels have to make money, and the amount they make is tied directly to the number of people that buy tickets. Commissioners don't give a damn, because it is to please an audience of one. That's really a defining difference.
Any system that deprives an author of a right to control how a work is copied I would reject out of hand. In the age of the printing press, it's what defines authorship.
The "source material" definition gets more and more complicated with the medium, and it seems like it would be too elastic. Isn't merely the script the "source" of the movie, and the photography just compilation? Or is it principle photography, but it could take someone a month to rebuild the original cut of a film from the footage (it's a lot like reverse-engineering). But then you can't add a scene, so maybe you need access to the actors!
Among those entrenched interests are the writers of the Constitution, not to argue from authority, but just to give an indication of how ingrained the idea of copyright is in western culture, and not just rich book publishers. People don't think much of copying a DVD, but if you ask them, in principle, "Should anyone be able to copy any work at any time?" most people would disagree, since THEY wouldn't want THEIR creative works to be treated in that way.
When you're talking about a film, almost no one's seriously "building" on a film, they're just copying it; there is no novel process, no art, no nothing. I don't support studios suing people for doing remixes, as this isn't really a right of copyright holder - they're only allowed to stop derivative works if they take money away from the original, which remixes don't.
If you can't own intellectual property, than you risk having a tragedy of the intellectual commons, where nobody contributes works in the public, and novel arts, ideas and creations are either distributed ad-hoc under the radar among trusting groups, as this is the only way authors can get money for their work, or not distributed at all, since without money, people can't devote their time to writing. I don't think you're arguing for the abolition of intellectual property, but if anyone can copy anything and modify it in any way, particularly interfering with things like attribution, what would it mean to "own"?
I have friends that have tried this, and a big issue is marketing your donation scheme in such a way that you can find enough interested people to put up the money. If you were subjected to the Spiderman 3 ad campaign, except soliciting donations, you might find yourself aware enough of the film that you might put up $10, but the ad campaign for Spidey 3 cost $300 million! How do you raise the money to publicize the donation scheme?
As well, it's almost impossible to get people to separate with their money without showing them a script, which would kinda ruin a lot of movies.
In the end, you really wouldn't be putting the audience first, you'd be putting media personalities like Roger Ebert and Harry Knowles in the chairs now occupied by movie executives; the studios already heavily curry their favor to get good reviews, such types would just turn into mouthpieces for the actor's and director's agents, who would finally be the people who were packaging the actors/directors/scripts for the people who'd be hawking the donations.
You might have single donors, but what economic incentive do they have to "donate" the money, since they'll never see a dime off it, aside from the AdWords on the download page. And commissioned art is a really dirty business; maybe the Medici's or Pope Urban got art for their money, but most people who commission works want to see their second hot wife try to act; they don't care about reaching an audience or entertaining.
Do you oppose copyright as a general principle? Without copyright, there could be no GPL.
Bill Gates: It's a total sellout for the government to give away my freedom to copy the Linux kernel to Linus Torvalds. If this means nobody writes free software anymore, than boo fuckin' hoo. I'd rather there'd be less free software and more freedom for me to sell it to people, preferably with a cute little animated assistant to help configuration.
Not MANY people would upload their copy to TPB, but it only takes ONE.
Something movie distributors have in their favor is their exhibition system. Showing movies on a big, bright screen in a large room with a great sound system is significant added value. If you want to defeat movies as they are, you must defeat the movie theater, and if you want to do that, you have to:
Just an opinion, but most people actively engaged in making commercial movies in Hollywood love the internet for promotion and secondary distro, but no business people, and crucially no artists, are talking about chucking the whole movie theater idea. Working in the status quo's favor as well, is the strong separation between commercial cinema, the clearly expensive star-studded vehicles that can be good or bad, but will generally be at least entertaining, and independent cinema, which can be more profound but often isn't, and is generally actively hostile to the idea of "entertaining" people (they regard mass entertainment in the way FOSS people regard configuration wizards).
Here's the NOVA. And it's "Thrun", not Thune.
In the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge "Stanley", Stanford University's entry, a Volkswagen Touareg wagon, won, beating several other entrants that completed the course. The team was led by Sebastian Thune; Stanley was remarkable for having a relatively simple LIDAR/GPS sensor array, unlike many of the other entries, but had extremely sophisticated software and machine learning and high autonomy, whereas it's main competition, CMUs "H1ander", had extremely involved sensing and was programmed with an extremely detailed course route, but its complex directional LIDAR array failed early in the race, and though it could compensate, it completed the course slow.
Find the NOVA episode if you can, truly fascinating. I hate how NOVA ScienceNow is so attention-span limited.