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Hollywood Unites Against Content Theft Via New Coalition
Creative America, the coalition formed by labor unions, guilds, studios and networks that launched in July, said today that it has kicked off awareness campaign as well as a redesigned website. The group also said the AFL-CIO, the Association of Talent Agents, the Copyright Alliance, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, FilmL.A., the National Association of Theatre Owners, the Producers Guild of America and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society have joined the cause since its formation. The new campaign includes a PSA on NBCUniversal networks that we just saw on CNBC. Here it is:
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What if I don’t watch that movie at all? Does she lose her job then too? It’s that sense of entitlement that dooms all obsolescent industries. Pardon me while I go and steal some content by patronizing the New York Public Library.
The book you check out of the library does not cost the millions of dollars it takes to make a movie.
No, but the movie I borrow from the library does. DVDs are readily available for loan, how is that different from when my friend or an internet friend loans me a copy? Plus whether someone sees the movie for free is really not the relevant issue to whether a movie makes money. If a movie made 100 million at the box office and a handful saw it for free from libraries or loan that is negligible. Most of those freeloaders probably wouldn’t have paid to see the movie anyway they just wouldn’t have seen it. So you remove those people from the equation and then add the people they spoke to about the film and told them it was great (free advertising) and the impact is really very small. This is all so overblown in the name of greed.
The New York Public Library also lends CDs and DVDs for free. Check out their catalog at NYPL.org.
The DVD you take on loan for free at the public library was actually purchased and paid for. That’s the big difference.
I think you need to learn a little more about how the library works. First of all, authors do get remuneration depending on the popularity of their book. Also, there is a limited quantity of copies that can be checked out at one time (even ebooks), so the more popular a book, the longer the waiting period. People who want to read the book now will end up buying it.
Illegally downloaded movies has no limit and as bandwidth becomes bigger and bigger, it’s easier to download more and more movies.
But I know all those people arguing for illegally downloading don’t like to be made to feel they’re doing anything wrong. Ignorance is bliss, isn’t it?
I currently have The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge and REAMDE by Neal Stephenson checked out of the library, and these are books which have just been published. It’s not that long a wait to get even new books.
In any case, I’m not “arguing for illegal downloading”. I’m arguing that the studios have a sense of entitlement that makes them feel that the public owes them money, even though they choose not to adapt to what the public wants. And through that sense of entitlement, they attempt to destroy and criminalize what the public does want in the vain hope that they can keep that money flowing. Copyright exists “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In the United States, creators have no moral right to profit from their works – none. They are granted a monopoly only to encourage them to create more, so that the public domain will be enriched. It is the industry which has perverted this into an entitlement program for itself, and I will shed no tears if the industry destroys itself.
This.
“What if I don’t watch that movie at all? Does she lose her job then too?”
If enough people don’t watch it, maybe. But that would be the free market at work. Piracy, like theft, is antithetical to the free market. Markets do not exist without enforceable property rights.
You seem to be implying that a sports team who loses the game because the other team was better is the same thing as a sports team who loses the game because the other team cheated. The fact that the outcome is the same in both cases is irrelevant. Your implication to the contrary is moronic.
“It’s that sense of entitlement that dooms all obsolescent industries.”
Since when does expecting your property rights to be enforced equal a sense of entitlement? Do you realize how stupid you sound?
“Pardon me while I go and steal some content by patronizing the New York Public Library.”
It’s hard to believe people are still trotting out this half-baked analogy. The differences between renting from a library and piracy are so numerous it would be a waste of time to go over them.
In any case, your entire post was logically bankrupt.
Congratulations.
I guess Time Warner has been reading my posts, because they’ve decided to embargo DVD sales to libraries too during their 28-day window!
“You’re so wrong that I can’t tell you why.” is not a cogent argument.
You say that “markets do not exist without enforceable property rights”. Too bad. In the U.S., copyrights and patents exist only for the sake of encouraging contributions to the public domain, not for creating markets or compensating creators. It is only for the sake of the public domain that creators are granted limited-time monopolies (and not property rights) on their work. Industry may have hijacked this by their expansive contributions to politicians, but that does not mean that I or anyone else feel a moral imperative to support the industry or to regret that people do not honor the unconstitutional laws that it has promulgated.
There is no difference to me between a library and an illegal download; I keep the object for the short time I need in order to read or view it, and I don’t pay for it. The library itself will have paid for the copies it has, but each copy will be used over and over again, without any money going to the creators.
Well there’s some overly simplistic and misleading propaganda for you. I would rather they had showed a millionaire Hollywood producer in danger of losing his job. There would be a run on the free movies.
Yeah, if it were Harvey Weinstein or Gwen Paltrow, instead of a boom operator, I suspect the results would be different.
What if we didn’t have 5 more producers on a film (you know, the ones that don’t do anything), we didn’t pay an extra million for one actor or the film didn’t cost $25 to see it in a ‘nice’ theaters?
Can the actor who is playing a boom mic operator still keep her job now?
downloading a movie has zero impact on whether a unionized boom operator (or any “blue collar” employee on a film set) gets paid.
What a crock of shit.
i assume you’re referring to the PSA? if not, explain
With all due respect, what an ignorant statement.
But it does have an impact on whether that unionized boom operator can book more jobs. When movies are pirated, studios and financiers lose potential revenue. When they lose revenue, they have to make bottom line decisions on how many movies they will finance. When their pockets are full, they tend to make more movies. When their pockets are less full, they make less movies. Less movies means less potential jobs for writers, directors, actors, crew, and a slew of other people who make movies happen (and the vast majority of them are not rich people with mansions in the Hollywood Hills).
Just like with most industries, it’s the people on the bottom who suffer the most when the purse strings tighten. So while some might justify their theft (let’s call piracy what it is…theft) by saying that a producer or star gets one less private jet, the ones who really get screwed are the people who can afford it the least.
But that’s just the problem, this idea of “potential revenue”. That’s an amount that’s impossible to determine and yet their whole argument rests on the fact that the “potential” revenue loss is huge. Others say it is not huge, because most who see a movie for free say they never would have paid for it anyway (so no loss of potential revenue), and the rest might pay for it anyway by still buying the DVD (so a gain of revenue). They are assuming that everyone who downloads it would have gone to see it in the movies and there’s no proof of that and no way to prove it.
So, “Creative” America can’t come up with something more creative?
Okay the depiction of the sensitive urban girl who declines the bootlegs and the Wall Streetish guy who takes 3 aside (could it be any less subtle?) how many times in the industry has there been a pitch meeting, the discussion of a book option, a spec script or treatment that represents the intellectual property of some creator or writer and then the studio or production party to the pitch politely declines and then scrapes together the ideas and concepts they liked and hands them off to one of their pet writers to repackage? Is it ‘dont steal ideas, pay for them’ or is it just ‘dont YOU steal OUR ideas’. Ask a writer who was cheated out of pay because his intellectual property was swiped.
PSA = Patronizing Service Announcement… The villain is the “white guy in a suit” and the “brown Latina” “gets educated” and then “does the right thing.”
PUH-LEEZE!
Hey – the boom operator was Paid. The actors were Paid. The entire crew was Paid. You know who really suffers – it’s those Overpaid studio execs who are engaged in “Job Justification” with doing nothing and “Notes” to rewrite & rewrite. Believe me, there’s enough “waste” on every shoot that’s put into the Miscellaneous budget category – that it would make up for the pirates share. The ONLY time I see piracy as a bad thing is when it’s done to low budget independents – because it literally means that these films will lose a significant part of the already small audience they have.
The crews do not suffer – it’s the overpaid execs who cry & bitch.
Seems like the rich guy wouldn’t mind shelling out a couple bucks for DVDs, it should be a bunch of tech geeks telling the guy he should make better movies if they want him to pay. Also, in this weird world where audio people lose their jobs over pirating will movies have no sound? Stupid, shitty ad.
As content migrates online, the piracy problem will accellerate, not abate. PSA’s like this one won’t help. Nothing will stop it. It’s easy for pirates to rationalize that they are stealing from a soulless corporation that doesn’t give a shit about the boom mike operator anyway (and of course, they’re right about that).
All content industries need to follow the lead of the music business, which (to some degree) has finally accepted that the old business model of being paid for content is dying, and they need to build a new business model based on un-piratable services. Nothing lasts forever.
I torrented this PSA last week, it wasn’t worth the bandwidth. Can we look forward to 50 more of these like Justine Bateman’s series of ‘Speechless’ videos?
Oh my, that was awful. Big Media still needs to rethink its business plan, rather than try to scary or guild people.
It amazes me how many people in this industry support piracy, or at least don’t have a problem with it. You’re screwing yourselves over, folks.
I work at a media company and I think this is great. The Protect IP act they talk about is aimed at for profit sites outside the U.S. that deal almost exclusively in stolen goods. It is not right for them to illegally profit off of our work. It’s that simple.