An 8% fixed rate on a 15 year loan is "high" when the yield on a 30 year treasury and GDP growth are both 3%; remember, this is a loan that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the US student loan program itself runs a large negative subsidy (it makes the government money) at the rates it currently charges.
My parents had the foresight to scrimp and save for my college education....even for out of state fees!!
I went to an out-of-state private school and the bill for someone that didn't get grants or scholarships was $30k a year, and that was 15 years ago; today it's closer to $52k including living expenses, and in that time total household income and net worth has slightly declined. When I went to college $52k was my family's annual pre-tax income; you can't save that.
On the other had, this is just the sticker price, and the out-of-pocket costs for a lot of people are actually been much more flat, particularly for people with the highest grades -- I only paid maybe $20k a year after grants and scholarships, and I personally only owed $15k when I graduated. The real problem is that colleges have been raising their prices because they know that for the people who CAN'T reduce their out of pocket cost with grades, they can always get a loan.
It used to be that parents saved for their kids education, just like they put back for routine medical expenses, mortgages, etc.
There's a word for affordable medical care that's paid for out of consumer discretionary spending: shamanism. As long as medical care has actually worked, and wasn't just a high-margin strategy for selling tincture of laudanum, or a way of employing the ne'er-do-well third sons of the aristocracy, medical care has been subsidized through risk pools or state transfers.
The narrative of a functional pre-government private health care market is a myth -- which is not to say that it couldn't work, just don't recruit history into your argument.
I dunno how you "save" for a mortgage, I mean maybe you save for your 20% down, but they imbecile who's loaning the principle with no down payment is as much to blame as the borrower. Here you're letting the history angle affect you again, but you're anchored to the mortgage concept so you defend mortgages as "saving," when in fact, historically, people saved to buy houses, with no mortgage or with a usurious mortgage acquired in a completely uncompetitive, opaque mortgage market. You'd never win an argument in today's political climate by advocating for a return to this, of course, so you seem to have invented an alternate history universe where sober, upstanding citizens were able to buy a home for 20% down without Fannie Mae existing.
Again, you're very possibly right, just don't abuse history. The rose colored glasses and concern trolling around what things were like "when we weren't all blowing our wad on flat panels" is sickening.
"Spy on American Citizens for 90 days" != "retain footage of American Citizens for 90 days"
They can accidentally spy on you indefinitely, or rather, spontaneously whenever you might fall within the vantage of the camera. They can only keep the video for 90 days.
Looking at the actual message, it looks like the dev in question just took an "attributes" NSDictionary argument and stuck it into his NSLog() call whole hog, as in:
//print arguments NSLog(@"about to call _premountHomDir with %@", attributes);
"%@" in an OSX printf-style format string will call -(NSString *)description on whatever object in on the vararg position for that %-code, and put that string in the output. The "description" selector on a dictionary spits out the keys and values of the dictionary in a human-readable format. The "attributes" object in this case contains a lot of information that would be interesting for a human debugger, the password being an exception.
An alignment of private will with public force is a consequence of democracy. The point is that there's no magic Chinese wall separating the will of the mayor from the will of the Klan; institutionalized white racism operates on an entire continuum linking government, law enforcement, commercial interests, civic groups, religious organizations, labor unions and families by shared membership, leadership and interest in service of a singular goal.
You can blame it on the government, but this doesn't dispose of the fact that the government in question is popular and elected, and is only doing it's job, and that still doesn't absolve it from throwing "undesirables" out of public accommodations, which even a non-racist government would be compelled to do.
It's impossible to cleanly draw the line between the private and the public. The distinction was invented by pointed-headed college professor types in order to simplify their arguments. Any distinction a Von Mises might draw between the two is as arbitrary and meaningless, from a political perspective, as Marx's distinction between the private and the "personal."
Yes. If you're stupid enough to refuse to do business with someone, your competitors will get the business you refused.
And if your competitor does business with that someone, they'd be called "nigger lovers" and run out of business, with everyone from the mayor and the sheriff down to the local Jaycees cheering them on. It's all a private transaction until you call the cops to throw a "trespasser" out of your lunch counter, or the cops refuse to arrest people who assault someone who dares sit at it.
Regulating public accommodations in CRA '63 was a practical solution to the problem of collusion between the local government and private interests. It made frivolous, racial government prosecutions for "loitering" and "trespassing" impossible.
Your theory works until people care more about being racist than making money, as if profits were able to buy off peoples prejudices. They don't.
Issuing "small, well intentioned commands" is how it usually works, but in this case the flight controls had been switched into their alternate control law, due to the loss of reliable airspeed data. In alternate law the columns do what a "dumb" FBW system does, and stick displacement will reflect in contro surface deflection.
From their GPS receivers, cameras, and gyroscopes, and then they correlate it with whatever information on the internet they choose, be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, OpenStreetMap, Wolfram, Yelp... The point is they decide the provider, not Google.
On the other hand, when I want a restaurant review, I want Yelp or something like Yelp. And when I ask Siri for restaurants, it gives me Yelp reviews. Google for some reason doesn't do this, and the results it does give for these kinds of searches are usually very disorganized and uncurated. I don't care if Siri is hardcoded to go to Yelp, it simply does the right thing and wins, while Google searches spit out a lot of stuff that's useful and a lot of stuff that isn't.
This is probably symptomatic of Google's monomaniacal framing of algorithms to provide all of their intelligence, instead of, you know, humans, and their deep corporate cultural bias against human decisionmaking in general.
It doesn't really have anything to do with the voice entry, that's sort of a red herring. The real issue is wether mobile device makers will be able to use the fact that they live in their customers pockets to give themselves an upper hand over search engines and Big Data.
It seems like the real question is, "Will searching the Internet become less useful in the future, when people have small personal chochkies that know all of their personal preferences, their habits, location and can give them exactly what they want, instead of 400 things that might be, interspersed with dozens of ads."
Even though Siri needs a search engine to work, it basically commoditizes Google/Yahoo/Bing-type services. I suspect this is why Goog's happy to expend astounding amounts of energy and money to keep Android on phones.
The definition of deflation is *decreasing* money supply, not stagnant money supply.
Deflation is the declining real value of money, reflected in a decline in prices. Money supply is only one variable in the equation, a fixed money supply will still be deflationary if the velocity of money decreases or the quantity of goods on the market increases.
a book that's under $3 and has the "Lend Me" sticker on it is frequently a no-brainer purchase for me.
This is sorta the perfect business model -- acquire something, essentially for no cost, and price it where it is a "no brainer," so that even if it's crap the buyer never goes back for a refund or even internalizes the lesson that maybe he shouldn't buy cheap-ass things.
Those hundreds of thousands of $0.99 e-books on Amazon can't possibly exist.
But, let's not confound the issue by pointing out that all of those eBooks are DRM'd by Amazon, and Amazon sets their price, not the authors, and Amazon couldn't care less if the author is living in a refrigerator box by the railroad tracks, as long as the title exists for Amazon to use as a loss leader to pump e-reader sales and drive circulation for items with a better margin.
They probably mean files you're invited to, not files you're hosting on your account; this is different from Dropbox, where if someone uploads a file and shares it with 10 people, everyone who accepts the invitation gets that file counted against their quota until they unshare.
A significant number of people treat them as pre-orders, not as 'goodwill'.
That's probably valid, but after it's released, why would a rational consumer pay for it? Again, it's non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
Make no mistake, those Kickstarter projects wouldn't get a dime if they all promised the kitschy stuff with no art.
Well that's in the eye of the beholder, I'm not really concerned with the whole "art" question -- copyright models don't guarantee that art will be created over vulgar amusements, and neither does Kickstarter. A big issue with Kickstarter is that it's TOO arty, and it doesn't really work for people who want to make big dumb mass entertainments, which are hugely profitable but generally require huge capital investment, and it's tough to create popular entertainment in a situation where you'd have to reveal your script or your story's hook in public in order to get funding. Maybe J. J. Abrams could go on Kickstarter today and fund his next movie, secret script and sight-unseen, but the next J. J. Abrams would have no such luck, cause he'd be a nobody. I have several friends that write scripts and develop film and TV ideas, and they know about Kickstarter and want nothing to do with it, frankly it's kinda political; at least in Hollywood you only have to make maybe a dozen rich guys happy, and you can tell them your six seasons of ideas without them spilling the beans, instead of having to please the whims of 800 fanboys.
It also sets up this weird dynamic where movies are made to the specifications of a few high-brow types who put their money in, because the whole project is tailored to appeal to a passionate niche, instead of the whole of everyone. Kickstarter is very elitist, just as its fore-runner, PBS is. The basic message of the Kickstarter economy is: entertainment is only for people that spend an hour on Kickstarter every day paying for their favorite stop-motion animation.
The model of fan participation is actually a more profitable model for artists.
I know, it's a machine that turns formerly-respectable artists into Facebooking, Twittering C-list celebrity sellouts, because the only way they can hope to get any funding or attention is by "engaging" their "fans." Now I'm the elitist, but at least I think the artists are rightly the elite, and not their Pale Fire-basking patrons. Patrons have been trying to buy their way into artists' lives for centuries, and this is only the most efficient iteration, a perfect machine for throwing money at flash-in-the-pan shock artists, media whores and phonies.
Come to think of it, there are actually situations where someone could start getting net proceeds even when the studio is losing money -- particularly if the studio screwed up and sold distribution rights to territories or pay TV for a bargain-basement liquidation rate, and the film in question was some sort of sleeper hit and suddenly started making tons of money on those channels.
Just try to focus on the fact that net points are not a share of profit, they're something else. Go through the Order of the Phoenix statement, a lot of that stuff aren't legitimate costs, and a lot of the top-line numbers aren't realized revenue by the studio, they're actually a bit more inclusive, but if the guy who got this had a contract anything like the ones I've seen, everything there is on the deal he signed.
OTOH, I've never heard of a studio using a document like this to claim that "movies are losing money" when they go into a labor negotiation, or when they go to Congress to ask for tax credits, that's just not what this form is for.
I don't know why you don't understand simple facts: Both Paramount and Groom agree he gets 3%.
You gotta understand, he's entitled to a percentage of contractually-defined proceeds. Paramount never conceded he was due any percentage of their profit, only that he was a "net participant" and that net deals weren't paying off yet. "Net participation" isn't "profit participation." Where do they say otherwise?
Paramount however hides the profits with accounting tricks so that they don't have to pay him anything.
You can't make filmmaking as a business conform to your prior moral commitments just because it's easier for you to understand. In the early days of the film industry people tried to do "profit" deals and they got screwed every time because they quickly discovered it was impossible to create profit/loss accounting for films, on a film-by-film basis, that didn't create incentives for producers to mismanage. Any claim on Paramount for their "profits" could easily be discharged by Paramount selling the film to a distribution service company for a fixed sum and a sale-leaseback, or by producing the film through a shell company that's folded once the film finishes shooting; films use "grosses" and "proceeds" specifically to prevent studios from playing these games, because they're defined in terms that clearly delineate how the recipients claims survive when the film is sold to new distributors, which you couldn't do if you were trying to compute GAAP profit.
Nothing I said above is speculation, every film we make goes through this process. Do you even know a professional screenwriter, or are you just forming your opinion from Wikipedia, Slashfilm, and Fatal Subtraction? The idea that movies never profit according to GAAP accounting rules, or that studios routinely claim that movies "never profit," is truthyness of the first order.
I mean, there's no question in my mind that Free content can succeed as a business, when it can monetize. OSS does it, music does it, TV has always done it, and film is beginning to do it.
The question before us is can it succeed if it does not monetize, as Louis CK did not, or as Radiohead did not with In Rainbows -- notice Radiohead hasn't repeated that particular experiment.
This has nothing to do with copyright enforcement. This is about monetization. Webcomic authors have AdSense, they monetize; open source projects use ads and licensing, they monetize. If Louis CK stuck ads all over his movies, it wouldn't matter how many people made copies, because every impression would in effect be more income to him. He did people a favor by not.
Radiohead and Trent Reznor can pretty much do whatever they please, their pay-what-you-want deals keep their pools clean, and they're remix-how-you-wish arrangements keep them on the tips of a thousand hipster tongues, and fill YouTube with dozens of awful remixes of "Reckoner," and since awful remixes are this generations music video, their enhanced notoriety and fame all benefit them when they go to negotiate their iTunes and film placement deals.
And Kickstarter projects (as an example) are certainly not wholly goodwill based
All of the ones based on digitally-distributed recorded media are, until they complete and then they're able to monetize through ad-supported channels.
Does Groom get a percentage of Paramount's profits off the film? They put some money into making the film, in exchange for a distribution agreement with the film's producer, the owner of the original property. They put up some of the money, not all, and for that they get a certain amount off the top of the money from the box office, some percentage that's really high the first few weeks and tapers off. They also have to split off gross revenue to pay the actors, without regard to their distribution charge. They'll definitely make a profit from this, but it won't be the "profit" of the movie, because they don't put up all the costs and they aren't entitled to all the revenues -- television, cable and DVD can be handled by them but just as often they are not, they can license or assign these rights to different parties. Does someone who's entitled to "profits" have a claim that survives reassignment?
So Paramount produced Forrest Gump and distributed it, but this arrangement isn't very common, usually an independent production company, like Imagine Entertainment or Legendary Forces or Happy Madison or whatever will own the property and get some money to make the film through distribution agreements. Is Groom entitled to a share of these production company's profits? They only get money after the distributor's fee and gross participation, and they sell their film to many distributors and get a ton of money back from them to fund the picture, along with equity and loans from private investors, tax credits, film funds etc. Is the money they get from their distributors, minus the money they get to produce it, profit? The producers use the money they're advanced, often, to pay for other projects, or to pay themselves, they're often producing several movies at once and sharing their capital among all of them -- just because a production company pays a company to make X means they're bound to spend that money on X, they'll spend money they're paid to develop other scripts, pay the rent on their offices, whatever.
The producers, when they do a distribution agreement with a studio, will often, as a condition of their distribution money, be required to produce the film using the studio's service divisions, their studio lot, their lab, their editorial services and sound house, etc. Are these costs "costs" for the purpose of determining profit? Technically they're revenue to the studio, contingent and derived from making the film, but they are taken from the pool of money the producer holds. These aren't really "costs" against the film, not wholly, so you'd have to figure out how much of these costs are pure and caused only by the production of the film, and these service divisions also take money from some contracts and spend them on others, and maintain capital that is shared across several movies at once...
Producers often hire members of their own family and pay them to work on films. We'd have to forbid people from doing that if we wanted a clean accounting of the production company's profit, wouldn't we? In fact, everyone that has "profit" claims against the movie would have to be involved in approving the company's ongoing expenses promoting and maintaining the business of the film, wouldn't they?
Distributors usually end up "owning" the master rights to a film when production companies go out of business, do they still have to pay "profits" after this happens? And are the profits reckoned with regard to the price they paid for the film, or the amount the movie was made for, given all the other complications involved in that?
Essentially any commonsense definition of "profits" that you try to apply to movies turns into a sort of ultra-complicated mortmain rent.
Slashdot Mirror
An 8% fixed rate on a 15 year loan is "high" when the yield on a 30 year treasury and GDP growth are both 3%; remember, this is a loan that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the US student loan program itself runs a large negative subsidy (it makes the government money) at the rates it currently charges.
I went to an out-of-state private school and the bill for someone that didn't get grants or scholarships was $30k a year, and that was 15 years ago; today it's closer to $52k including living expenses, and in that time total household income and net worth has slightly declined. When I went to college $52k was my family's annual pre-tax income; you can't save that.
On the other had, this is just the sticker price, and the out-of-pocket costs for a lot of people are actually been much more flat, particularly for people with the highest grades -- I only paid maybe $20k a year after grants and scholarships, and I personally only owed $15k when I graduated. The real problem is that colleges have been raising their prices because they know that for the people who CAN'T reduce their out of pocket cost with grades, they can always get a loan.
There's a word for affordable medical care that's paid for out of consumer discretionary spending: shamanism. As long as medical care has actually worked, and wasn't just a high-margin strategy for selling tincture of laudanum, or a way of employing the ne'er-do-well third sons of the aristocracy, medical care has been subsidized through risk pools or state transfers.
The narrative of a functional pre-government private health care market is a myth -- which is not to say that it couldn't work, just don't recruit history into your argument.
I dunno how you "save" for a mortgage, I mean maybe you save for your 20% down, but they imbecile who's loaning the principle with no down payment is as much to blame as the borrower. Here you're letting the history angle affect you again, but you're anchored to the mortgage concept so you defend mortgages as "saving," when in fact, historically, people saved to buy houses, with no mortgage or with a usurious mortgage acquired in a completely uncompetitive, opaque mortgage market. You'd never win an argument in today's political climate by advocating for a return to this, of course, so you seem to have invented an alternate history universe where sober, upstanding citizens were able to buy a home for 20% down without Fannie Mae existing.
Again, you're very possibly right, just don't abuse history. The rose colored glasses and concern trolling around what things were like "when we weren't all blowing our wad on flat panels" is sickening.
"Spy on American Citizens for 90 days" != "retain footage of American Citizens for 90 days"
They can accidentally spy on you indefinitely, or rather, spontaneously whenever you might fall within the vantage of the camera. They can only keep the video for 90 days.
Looking at the actual message, it looks like the dev in question just took an "attributes" NSDictionary argument and stuck it into his NSLog() call whole hog, as in:
NSLog(@"about to call _premountHomDir with %@", attributes);
"%@" in an OSX printf-style format string will call -(NSString *)description on whatever object in on the vararg position for that %-code, and put that string in the output. The "description" selector on a dictionary spits out the keys and values of the dictionary in a human-readable format. The "attributes" object in this case contains a lot of information that would be interesting for a human debugger, the password being an exception.
An alignment of private will with public force is a consequence of democracy. The point is that there's no magic Chinese wall separating the will of the mayor from the will of the Klan; institutionalized white racism operates on an entire continuum linking government, law enforcement, commercial interests, civic groups, religious organizations, labor unions and families by shared membership, leadership and interest in service of a singular goal.
You can blame it on the government, but this doesn't dispose of the fact that the government in question is popular and elected, and is only doing it's job, and that still doesn't absolve it from throwing "undesirables" out of public accommodations, which even a non-racist government would be compelled to do.
It's impossible to cleanly draw the line between the private and the public. The distinction was invented by pointed-headed college professor types in order to simplify their arguments. Any distinction a Von Mises might draw between the two is as arbitrary and meaningless, from a political perspective, as Marx's distinction between the private and the "personal."
And if your competitor does business with that someone, they'd be called "nigger lovers" and run out of business, with everyone from the mayor and the sheriff down to the local Jaycees cheering them on. It's all a private transaction until you call the cops to throw a "trespasser" out of your lunch counter, or the cops refuse to arrest people who assault someone who dares sit at it.
Regulating public accommodations in CRA '63 was a practical solution to the problem of collusion between the local government and private interests. It made frivolous, racial government prosecutions for "loitering" and "trespassing" impossible.
Your theory works until people care more about being racist than making money, as if profits were able to buy off peoples prejudices. They don't.
[randPaul isKindOf:ronPaul] == YES
Issuing "small, well intentioned commands" is how it usually works, but in this case the flight controls had been switched into their alternate control law, due to the loss of reliable airspeed data. In alternate law the columns do what a "dumb" FBW system does, and stick displacement will reflect in contro surface deflection.
From their GPS receivers, cameras, and gyroscopes, and then they correlate it with whatever information on the internet they choose, be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, OpenStreetMap, Wolfram, Yelp... The point is they decide the provider, not Google.
On the other hand, when I want a restaurant review, I want Yelp or something like Yelp. And when I ask Siri for restaurants, it gives me Yelp reviews. Google for some reason doesn't do this, and the results it does give for these kinds of searches are usually very disorganized and uncurated. I don't care if Siri is hardcoded to go to Yelp, it simply does the right thing and wins, while Google searches spit out a lot of stuff that's useful and a lot of stuff that isn't.
This is probably symptomatic of Google's monomaniacal framing of algorithms to provide all of their intelligence, instead of, you know, humans, and their deep corporate cultural bias against human decisionmaking in general.
It doesn't really have anything to do with the voice entry, that's sort of a red herring. The real issue is wether mobile device makers will be able to use the fact that they live in their customers pockets to give themselves an upper hand over search engines and Big Data.
Or a Yahoo search, whatever your settings may be.
It seems like the real question is, "Will searching the Internet become less useful in the future, when people have small personal chochkies that know all of their personal preferences, their habits, location and can give them exactly what they want, instead of 400 things that might be, interspersed with dozens of ads."
Even though Siri needs a search engine to work, it basically commoditizes Google/Yahoo/Bing-type services. I suspect this is why Goog's happy to expend astounding amounts of energy and money to keep Android on phones.
Make that first "declining" into an "increasing."
Deflation is the declining real value of money, reflected in a decline in prices. Money supply is only one variable in the equation, a fixed money supply will still be deflationary if the velocity of money decreases or the quantity of goods on the market increases.
This is sorta the perfect business model -- acquire something, essentially for no cost, and price it where it is a "no brainer," so that even if it's crap the buyer never goes back for a refund or even internalizes the lesson that maybe he shouldn't buy cheap-ass things.
An endorsement that rings across the ages.
But, let's not confound the issue by pointing out that all of those eBooks are DRM'd by Amazon, and Amazon sets their price, not the authors, and Amazon couldn't care less if the author is living in a refrigerator box by the railroad tracks, as long as the title exists for Amazon to use as a loss leader to pump e-reader sales and drive circulation for items with a better margin.
MTA limits, account quotas, the average mail client's terrible management of attachment uploading, a little thing called The Real World...
1) Create sockpuppet 2nd google account.
2) ???
3) Profit!
They probably mean files you're invited to, not files you're hosting on your account; this is different from Dropbox, where if someone uploads a file and shares it with 10 people, everyone who accepts the invitation gets that file counted against their quota until they unshare.
That's probably valid, but after it's released, why would a rational consumer pay for it? Again, it's non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
Well that's in the eye of the beholder, I'm not really concerned with the whole "art" question -- copyright models don't guarantee that art will be created over vulgar amusements, and neither does Kickstarter. A big issue with Kickstarter is that it's TOO arty, and it doesn't really work for people who want to make big dumb mass entertainments, which are hugely profitable but generally require huge capital investment, and it's tough to create popular entertainment in a situation where you'd have to reveal your script or your story's hook in public in order to get funding. Maybe J. J. Abrams could go on Kickstarter today and fund his next movie, secret script and sight-unseen, but the next J. J. Abrams would have no such luck, cause he'd be a nobody. I have several friends that write scripts and develop film and TV ideas, and they know about Kickstarter and want nothing to do with it, frankly it's kinda political; at least in Hollywood you only have to make maybe a dozen rich guys happy, and you can tell them your six seasons of ideas without them spilling the beans, instead of having to please the whims of 800 fanboys.
It also sets up this weird dynamic where movies are made to the specifications of a few high-brow types who put their money in, because the whole project is tailored to appeal to a passionate niche, instead of the whole of everyone. Kickstarter is very elitist, just as its fore-runner, PBS is. The basic message of the Kickstarter economy is: entertainment is only for people that spend an hour on Kickstarter every day paying for their favorite stop-motion animation.
I know, it's a machine that turns formerly-respectable artists into Facebooking, Twittering C-list celebrity sellouts, because the only way they can hope to get any funding or attention is by "engaging" their "fans." Now I'm the elitist, but at least I think the artists are rightly the elite, and not their Pale Fire-basking patrons. Patrons have been trying to buy their way into artists' lives for centuries, and this is only the most efficient iteration, a perfect machine for throwing money at flash-in-the-pan shock artists, media whores and phonies.
Come to think of it, there are actually situations where someone could start getting net proceeds even when the studio is losing money -- particularly if the studio screwed up and sold distribution rights to territories or pay TV for a bargain-basement liquidation rate, and the film in question was some sort of sleeper hit and suddenly started making tons of money on those channels.
Just try to focus on the fact that net points are not a share of profit, they're something else. Go through the Order of the Phoenix statement, a lot of that stuff aren't legitimate costs, and a lot of the top-line numbers aren't realized revenue by the studio, they're actually a bit more inclusive, but if the guy who got this had a contract anything like the ones I've seen, everything there is on the deal he signed.
OTOH, I've never heard of a studio using a document like this to claim that "movies are losing money" when they go into a labor negotiation, or when they go to Congress to ask for tax credits, that's just not what this form is for.
You gotta understand, he's entitled to a percentage of contractually-defined proceeds. Paramount never conceded he was due any percentage of their profit, only that he was a "net participant" and that net deals weren't paying off yet. "Net participation" isn't "profit participation." Where do they say otherwise?
You can't make filmmaking as a business conform to your prior moral commitments just because it's easier for you to understand. In the early days of the film industry people tried to do "profit" deals and they got screwed every time because they quickly discovered it was impossible to create profit/loss accounting for films, on a film-by-film basis, that didn't create incentives for producers to mismanage. Any claim on Paramount for their "profits" could easily be discharged by Paramount selling the film to a distribution service company for a fixed sum and a sale-leaseback, or by producing the film through a shell company that's folded once the film finishes shooting; films use "grosses" and "proceeds" specifically to prevent studios from playing these games, because they're defined in terms that clearly delineate how the recipients claims survive when the film is sold to new distributors, which you couldn't do if you were trying to compute GAAP profit.
Nothing I said above is speculation, every film we make goes through this process. Do you even know a professional screenwriter, or are you just forming your opinion from Wikipedia, Slashfilm, and Fatal Subtraction? The idea that movies never profit according to GAAP accounting rules, or that studios routinely claim that movies "never profit," is truthyness of the first order.
That why I concede she deserved it. But she's the exception; everyone here seems to think she should be the rule.
I mean, there's no question in my mind that Free content can succeed as a business, when it can monetize. OSS does it, music does it, TV has always done it, and film is beginning to do it.
The question before us is can it succeed if it does not monetize, as Louis CK did not, or as Radiohead did not with In Rainbows -- notice Radiohead hasn't repeated that particular experiment.
This has nothing to do with copyright enforcement. This is about monetization. Webcomic authors have AdSense, they monetize; open source projects use ads and licensing, they monetize. If Louis CK stuck ads all over his movies, it wouldn't matter how many people made copies, because every impression would in effect be more income to him. He did people a favor by not.
Radiohead and Trent Reznor can pretty much do whatever they please, their pay-what-you-want deals keep their pools clean, and they're remix-how-you-wish arrangements keep them on the tips of a thousand hipster tongues, and fill YouTube with dozens of awful remixes of "Reckoner," and since awful remixes are this generations music video, their enhanced notoriety and fame all benefit them when they go to negotiate their iTunes and film placement deals.
All of the ones based on digitally-distributed recorded media are, until they complete and then they're able to monetize through ad-supported channels.
I guess it boils down to this:
Does Groom get a percentage of Paramount's profits off the film? They put some money into making the film, in exchange for a distribution agreement with the film's producer, the owner of the original property. They put up some of the money, not all, and for that they get a certain amount off the top of the money from the box office, some percentage that's really high the first few weeks and tapers off. They also have to split off gross revenue to pay the actors, without regard to their distribution charge. They'll definitely make a profit from this, but it won't be the "profit" of the movie, because they don't put up all the costs and they aren't entitled to all the revenues -- television, cable and DVD can be handled by them but just as often they are not, they can license or assign these rights to different parties. Does someone who's entitled to "profits" have a claim that survives reassignment?
So Paramount produced Forrest Gump and distributed it, but this arrangement isn't very common, usually an independent production company, like Imagine Entertainment or Legendary Forces or Happy Madison or whatever will own the property and get some money to make the film through distribution agreements. Is Groom entitled to a share of these production company's profits? They only get money after the distributor's fee and gross participation, and they sell their film to many distributors and get a ton of money back from them to fund the picture, along with equity and loans from private investors, tax credits, film funds etc. Is the money they get from their distributors, minus the money they get to produce it, profit? The producers use the money they're advanced, often, to pay for other projects, or to pay themselves, they're often producing several movies at once and sharing their capital among all of them -- just because a production company pays a company to make X means they're bound to spend that money on X, they'll spend money they're paid to develop other scripts, pay the rent on their offices, whatever.
The producers, when they do a distribution agreement with a studio, will often, as a condition of their distribution money, be required to produce the film using the studio's service divisions, their studio lot, their lab, their editorial services and sound house, etc. Are these costs "costs" for the purpose of determining profit? Technically they're revenue to the studio, contingent and derived from making the film, but they are taken from the pool of money the producer holds. These aren't really "costs" against the film, not wholly, so you'd have to figure out how much of these costs are pure and caused only by the production of the film, and these service divisions also take money from some contracts and spend them on others, and maintain capital that is shared across several movies at once...
Producers often hire members of their own family and pay them to work on films. We'd have to forbid people from doing that if we wanted a clean accounting of the production company's profit, wouldn't we? In fact, everyone that has "profit" claims against the movie would have to be involved in approving the company's ongoing expenses promoting and maintaining the business of the film, wouldn't they?
Distributors usually end up "owning" the master rights to a film when production companies go out of business, do they still have to pay "profits" after this happens? And are the profits reckoned with regard to the price they paid for the film, or the amount the movie was made for, given all the other complications involved in that?
Essentially any commonsense definition of "profits" that you try to apply to movies turns into a sort of ultra-complicated mortmain rent.