It's Creativity, Stupid -- Protect It
Hugh Jackman says he is "heartbroken" his new film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, was leaked online a month before its official release. ''It's a serious crime and there's no doubt it's very disappointing - I was heartbroken by it,'' Jackman said. ''Obviously people are seeing an unfinished film. It's like a Ferrari without a paint job." And former Beatle Paul McCartney applauds the decision to send the founders of Pirate Bay (an illegal file sharing site) to prison for copyright infringement. McCartney told reporters that "artists deserved to get paid, and he felt fortunate the Beatles made it big before the popularity of file-sharing networks." McCartney says "Anyone who does something good, particularly if you get really lucky and do a great artistic thing and have a mega hit, I think you should get rewarded for that, and he adds, "particularly for young bands and they've got a young family, I don't want to see them destitute after a couple of years when they were mega. They're going to feed the children on that and if they don't get that money, if they don't see that money, I think it's a bit of a pity. So I think it's fair." (The court ordered sentence)
Jackman and McCartney have joined with millions of others who are starting to "get it"-don't steal my lifetime's work or you will go to jail. Simple concept to grasp, right? Not really. Because we have allowed a whole generation to get away with stealing and done nothing major about it except litigate, and worse, we have created a PR nightmare that makes the pirates look cool and the artists look stodgy. The current piracy issue is fraught with partisan bickering. You have the pirates and their supporters declaring "everything should be free..." and you have major studios and labels suing as their business strategy. One of the quotes that struck me as so out-of-touch was Peter Sunde's (one of the Pirate Bay founders) lawyer describing the Pirate Bay verdict as "a battle between the corporate world and a generation of young people who want to take part in new technology..." That's nonsense. Stealing is not "taking part in new technology." This generation's laissez-faire attitude toward copyright that Sunde's lawyer is referring to is our fault. We have fundamentally failed to educate an entire generation and we are working on the second. And the failure starts here in the US. Intellectual property is one of our biggest exports and yet we fail to teach our children not to steal it on the internet. U.S. intellectual property is worth approximately $5-5.5 trillion dollars per year to the economy- obviously entertainment is only a portion of that figure. I would think in a country where manufacturing has taken a huge hit (witness the auto industry) we might want to put a little effort into teaching our population why music, movies, software and games are not free just because you can find them on a website. We now live in a society where you either wash the car or design the car, but you no longer manufacture it in the US. We should start making a better effort at making sure people understand that this is about jobs and the economy. The bulk of the movie and music industry jobs are good solid middle class jobs.
The impact on middle class workers, present and future, gets lost in a sea of rhetoric. The issue has become polarized and the good guys look bad and the bad guys look cool. These guys are the 21st century version of the Sopranos. They appear to be beyond hip and cool, but the bottom line is they are ignorant, selfish criminals who make money off other peoples work. A perfect example of that is the motley crew of Pirate Bay describe themselves as "heroes" and as they say, "as in all good movies the heroes lose in the beginning, but have an epic victory in the end - that's the only thing Hollywood ever taught us..." If that is the only lesson these "bandits" have taken away from Hollywood, then they clearly have not been paying attention to this industry. It is an industry where artists get paid for creating movies people want to see, games people want to play, music people want to listen to and television people want to watch - and yes as part of this system there are giant corporate conglomerates that make much of the business possible, so they get paid as well.
While I would agree that in order to win over Pirate Bay users, content owners need to loosen up their relationship with technology and stop using litigation as a business strategy. Clearly consumers want to get their content, whether it is TV, movies, music, UGC on the internet- Comscore's Video Metrix data shows that U.S. Internet users viewed 13.1 billion online videos during the month of February alone - that is a lot of online viewing! This data proves that there is a legitimate business to be had in distributing content on the internet - the consumer is there, now we need to teach them that Pirate Bay (and sites like it) should not be their number one choice in entertainment shopping.
File sharing won't go away, and frankly, it shouldn't. Consumers want it and demand it and should have it. The entertainment industry needs to address it in a committed fashion. But does the imprisonment of the Pirate Bay owners accomplish anything? Absolutely. Does it decrease piracy, encourage inventors and entrepreneurs not to promote stealing as a business model or does it just increase the partisan sound-bite war? It does a little of both, it educates and reminds everyone it is illegal to steal. And that education ultimately protects jobs in the intellectual property field. I happen to know it has an impact first hand - While I was the VP of Intellectual Property Enforcement at MGM Studios, I found Randy Guthrie illegally selling MGM's prized franchise, boxed sets of James Bond movies online. As a result of my efforts to track him down with law enforcement, Guthrie, an American citizen, spent years in a Chinese prison (that cannot be pleasant) and was extradited to the US to continue a long sentence in a Mississippi prison and pay a huge fine. This story got a tremendous amount of press around the world. And it reminds people that stealing movies is a crime and when you get caught, the penalty is steep. What's the lesson here? It is important to protect creativity - and that just doesn't mean actors and directors. It means struggling writers, make up artists, set designers and assistants. We need to actively pursue these bottom feeders that sell America's creativity for their own benefit while simultaneously educating our young people and challenging them to come up with new business models to match today's technology. That would be heroic.
Our children should understand the relationship between technology and entertainment-they have always been intertwined - (what industry first embraced technology, motion pictures, it is called the camera) and cannot live without each other. While the relationship has been tense at times: the player piano, the television, the VCR - all predicted to "end the business..." and none did, what they did do was create new revenue streams and grow the business like never before. And then along came Napster - and unfortunately the music business' reaction was to ignore and then once the technology was firmly in place, sue the consumer and the creators of the technology. And we all know how that has worked out.
History shows that major innovations create major opportunities. The visionaries benefit, the fearful resist and languish. The key has always been seeing the change and adapting. Something that music has failed to do, and something that the studios need to hasten. There are so many legitimate video and music sites that compensate artists and the studios and labels that support them, using the very same technology that the pirate's use - our job is to make sure the population knows the difference.
Evolve and educate.
Laura Tunberg is a Digital Content Strategist at We Get It Consulting and Former VP of Intellectual Property Enforcement, MGM Studios.
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Having worked with Laura on a few projects and knowing of her work, it's great to see her here on The Huffington Post. She offers very deep and logical insights into the on-going piracy battle.
Piracy is always a hot-button issue because it delves directly into social mores and ethics. I feel that the entertainment industry's largest problem is their reactive approach. Litigation, for example, will drain their assets and do little to actually stop piracy. If they truly wish to eliminate piracy, they must embrace proactive measures (i.e. increased encryption technologies, secured direct streaming distribution, etc.). I wrote about all of this on my blog when the X-Men leak was first announced: http://dreamstream.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=9. check it out and let me know what you think.
Here is an interesting alternative vision to that of the entertainment industry spokespeople printed above. Please note that many artists support sharing of their work, and the immense majority of artists do not profit from copyright.
But this aside, here is an interesting fact ignored in the above article: the majors are actually fighting their very best customers:
“In the past we’ve documented studies that showed how the majority of artists sell more music thanks to piracy and that those who download (more) also buy more. Last week another study was added to this ever growing list, arguing that pirates are 10 times more likely to buy music than those who don’t.
So why do pirates buy more music? The simplest explanation for this finding might be that people who are not interested in music don’t have the need to pirate or buy it. I have to agree that it’s not the the sexiest, most controversial or inspiring answer, but it does tell us something about the core of the piracy ‘problem’.
The real reason is in fact very simple. The true music enthusiasts simply want to consume, sample and discover as much new music as they possibly can, and the most straightforward and convenient way to do this is through file-sharing networks. Music pirates are just regular consumers really, and they love music just as much as anyone else.”
More at http://torrentfreak.com/why-pirates-buy-more-music-and-music-labels-fail-090428/
Couldn't have said it better myself. Art has value only if people believe it does. First we treat it as expendable in schools and then we treat aspiring and professional artists as not worthy of being paid.
www.audio-engineer.net/music-biz-blog.htm
The like long-running GOP attack against the National Endowment for the Arts?
The PIrate Bay founders are heroes. Matter of fact they're my favorite artists. The art of free is so beautiful.
I am truly shocked and disappointed America.
Movies, songs, video game and software programs are all products that took significant amounts of a company's and/or individual's capital (money, time and/or talent) to produce and distribute, which the company and/or individual has the right to re-coup the investment and potentially make a profit...Of course, this requires a demand for the product...and by all the file sharing and copying happening, there appears to be a significant demand. This is the basis for supply and demand economics ..you Nimrods.
MOVIES, SONGS and SOFTWARE are like any other consumer product and service you buy to survive in today's world ... like the CAR you drive to work .. like the CLOTHES you wear to work ... like the MOBILE PHONE you use to make a sale and then call a friend. You don't blink an eye when required to pay for these products and services, because without them, you wouldn't have a job, an income ... or the pathetic life you currently live.
If you don't want to pay, then don't expect to get. Who is holding a gun to your head anyway? And if you don't pay and steal, then don't expect the artists or programmer to continue to make it without being compensated... Theft and piracy will only drive prices up, and eventually the people buying won't willingly share without being compensated themselves. It's a tailspin just starting to happen.
"MOVIES, SONGS and SOFTWARE are like any other consumer product and service you buy ..."
This is a false premise. Intellectual property is NOT like the above. It's very different. Trust me, if you could reproduce a car with the click of a button nobody would pay for those either. When people can easily gain access to something, telling them it's wrong to take it is not an effective tool, especially when the 'morality' is debatable. An equal argument could be made about how unethical the record companies have been for the last 30 years. It literally costs pennies to make a cd. Even after you figure for studio time and composition expenses you still have $19.50 profit from a $20 piece of plastic. Movies cost more, but studies have shown that most of the people who download movies on line either also pay to see them in theatre (and buy dvds for the special features) or were never going to pay to see them anyway.
Thank you!
To quote someone else from another comment section: It's hard to envision file-sharing as "theft" because in actual fact nothing is *missing*. The original buyer hasn't lost anything.
The market is reorganizing right now. The days of artists/creators/actors making money from labels and studios on the back end is over.
For musicians, money will be made from touring and performing live. Any recorded music will be PR to develop recognition and following, not as a money maker for the artist. This is already essentially how it is. Under the current setup, unless you're a multi-platinum selling artist, you're not actually making any substantial amount of money from cd sales.
As far as movies, nothing much will change from the current setup. The conventional wisdom everyone follows in the industry: get what you can UPFRONT. This has been the rule for decades. Agents worth their salary will work to get you as much as they can at the onset. This is especially true if you're not a "name". Everyday actors and writers without clout often get SCREWED on the residual end by the studios. Remember the writer's strike last year? An element of that was a demand by the writers to increase their payment on each dvd sold by a COUPLE CENTS per dvd. Actors who opt for money on the back end from dvd or online sales will get screwed, and writers are ALREADY getting screwed.
Corporations who own the "copyrights" are the ones making money off the backs of the creative talent; if people keep stealing their work, it won't affect the talent nearly as much as it will the corporations.
A voice of reason.
This lady has obviously forgotten that the music industry had some of its best years on record while Napster was booming. People used Napster to get hard-to-find recordings and sample music and then they went out and BOUGHT THE CD. It wasn't until the music industry got heavy-handed with Napster that people decided to start really stealing music. That was a reaction to the music industry failing to deliver a Napster-like interface that allowed people to quickly find and buy not only the crap so-called "hits" the music industry wants to shove down everyone's throats but older music that stores simply don't carry. Try to find "Strawberry Letter" by the Brothers Johnson at Wal-Mart... good luck. The piracy faced by the music industry is a beast of its own creation. I have no sympathy for them.
The Shuggie Otis version is better, anyway...
Well, part of that is also probably the rise of broadband. It was a different matter when people went to Napster to download a grainy 128k mp3 as a preview.
Still, with the lack of quality music in the industry caused by such factors as the current emphasis on 1950s-style overproduced corporate dreck (and superficial American Idol style definition), clipping mastering and ear-fatiguing remastering (see "noise wars"), the less compelling nature of watered-down compressed (lossy) audio that's removed from the physical product (including real artwork) represented by downloads, and the increased competition for time from the Internet/cell phones/video games/satellite TV --- all of these things are involved.
The business model for many business is changing. Look at the suffering newspapers. The music industry needs to adapt and should not expect that its profits of the past will be around forever. There is increasing competition from many forms of entertainment.
I was waiting a long time for a new format to improve sound quality over CD, and yet even CD sound quality has decreased dramatically due to the noise wars and today's generation is going the iTunes route. How anyone can really enjoy lossy audio is beyond me. Even 16-bit 44k audio, the CD format, is considerable worse than higher bit and sample rates. The DVD Audio format and similar formats try to shove DRM on the consumer, and use a bizarre combination of lossy encoding and an extremely high sample rate.
"Creativity"? Is this how it really works: "In the beginning the world was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the waters. Artist said, 'Let there be art." And there was art." Or is it more like an eternally-evolving noosphere in which timeless themes are repeated with each generation's particular variation?
Suppose there are two groups of people, and in each group a hundred people make up a hundred stories. In one group, each person is put in solitary confinement until they've written one story. The stories are sold to an immortal corporation, and no story may be reproduced in whole or in part except for the benefit of the corporation's bottom line, until seventy years after the death of the corporation (which never happens, of course).
In the other group, people tell each other stories, then re-tell the stories, embellish them to be more pleasing, modify them to illustrate a point, simplify them to reveal their essence, extend them to develop a character, and so on. None of the people own any ideas: when one person has an idea, that enhances rather than restricts other people's ability to have related ideas. No one gets sued for plagiarizing themselves by telling a story too similar to one they told and sold, because ideas are not sold.
In a hundred generations, which group will have better stories?
(This posting is hereby placed in the public domain. You may copy it freely.)
Half of those people in the locked rooms will probably end up getting sued for subconscious plagiarism.
Furthermore, whereas I wouldn't call these pirates 'heroes' there is a certain level of grass roots movement to their actions. Can you say goodbye DRM?
I'm not trying to justify breaking the law (and just to be clear I spend enough money at Amoeba records and the iTunes store that I feel justified promoting my favorite artists by sharing CDs w/ my friends and family) but I think the industry should get most of the blame for failing to keep up with the technology.
And for all you artists who think that every time someone listens to your song that a cash register should ring or who think that a $10,000 fine for a mouse click is an ethical response to file-sharing, try to remember back when you were just starting out and it was a pleasure just to get people to listen to you.
Check out this great John Mellancamp piece from HuffPo in March
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-mellencamp/on-my-mind-the-state-of-t_b_177836.html
Current copyright terms are also offensive and criminal, even though they're legal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
"The Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier."
Stifling innovation ("creativity") with excessively long copyright terms is a big social problem. Having politicians like Sonny Bono make this type of theft legal doesn't mean it's a good thing.
Having huge corporate conglomerates own everything, and own everything for much longer than they should, makes it difficult to create and enrich culture. The simplistic "create something and it's a money tree for the artists' life and for their children and grandchildren" rationale fails, not only because most of the profits go to the industry, but also -- and most importantly, because the more things are owned under copyright, the more restrictions they are on creativity.
When Clear Channel can own all the local radio stations and broadcast to them from a tape, richness is lost. There is so much policy that favors monopolies and consolidation and the result is less choice for consumers and inferior choices. How many people can afford to set up a radio station so they can have some better choices? There was a scandal over internet radio because excessive fees were set to force most broadcasters off the air.
(the rest of my post)
Compact discs, video games on optical discs, DVD, and Blu-Ray. What do they have in common? They don't have a protective shell to keep the disc safe from scratches, fingerprints, and dirt. Why is this? Because the industry wants people to re-buy things and forces them to either buy a purposefully shoddy product or give up. Protective shells are not difficult at all to use. 3 1/2" floppy disks have them. DVD-RAM discs used to have them. Artwork could have even been placed on the top. 8-track tapes were horribly shoddily designed, and analog cassettes were also shoddy products.
The simplistic "consumers are uneducated thieves and corporations are angelic victims" rhetoric is silly. The industry, as it was glossed over here, said VCRs represented THE END..! When an industry tries to reduce the choices consumers have it shouldn't think litigation is the ideal solution to rebellion. When an industry only offers shoddy products or products with artificially inflated prices, the same point is applicable.
While I think it's bad that many don't feel that they should pay for music, there are a lot of things the industry has done wrong -- things that can't be ignored by focusing exclusively on The Pirate Bay. The 120 year copyright term is a prison sentence for our culture and the jailer is the industry.
I forgot to mention movies on disc that force people to sit through previews, too. How can anyone think that a consumer wants to pay for a movie and thinks being force-fed ads is ideal?
Every time I use a player that won't let me use the Menu button to get to the disc's main menu, and every time I try to fast-forward and the player won't let me do it, I curse the industry. I am not alone.
It's one thing for consumers to be able to easily choose between buying a product with the ads and buying a product without them. It's quite another to force-feed people.
The industry needs to understand that its job is to sell what people want, not to sell to people what it wants.
Selling copies of movies on line is stealing. Downloading music is a capitalistic response and a good one - to an industry that offers nothing in a format I want to buy. I am forced to buy whole sets of music in order to listen to see if I like, and then when I do like it, I am forced to buy it over and over again (first vinyl, then 8-track, then cd). Something to make the industry wake up and offer products worth buying.
(cont'd)
When a bank buys a piece of art (say a Picasso) they don't have to pay a fee every month to display it even though they're using it to help promote their business, they bought it and it belongs to them. If I buy a record I feel that I have bought the right to listen to that music and play it wherever and however I like. If I want to burn a copy for my nephew or my co-worker I believe with a moral certainty that it is my right. It is the responsibility of the record industry to provide a product that people want to buy.Take, for example. Joss Whedon's Dr Horrible which was free on the internet but the DVD still sells well because it's a product people want, despite it's easy online availability. Or take the Radiohead model, it's not perfect but it's a step in the right direction. Even more to the point take Wolverine; despite the fact that it's leakage broke Jackman's heart, it was still a huge grosser at the box office I agree with you about evolve and educate, but you're never going to convince people like me that file-sharing is stealing. Don't get me wrong; artists should be compensated for their work, but they don't need to be multi-millionaires.
"Don't get me wrong; artists should be compensated for their work, but they don't need to be multi-millionaires."
This is a specious point. First of all, we have people in other professions who make such salaries for doing things like hitting a yellow tennis ball over a net and catching a white ball in a glove.
What we don't need is a monolithic corporate conglomerate that reduces consumer choice while making a small number of artists very rich.
I was being overly general to keep my word count in check. And you're right about the suits propping up the SoundScan/BDS approved few at the expense of many more gifted artists, but I just finished reading Hotel California about the LA music scene in 60's & 70's and I think the industry yearns for a time when everyone had limos and hot tubs and mountains of cocaine. We live in a very different economic reality right now, however, and paradigms are undergoing major shifting and there is no going back to the mega successes of the Beatles and CSNY & The Eagles. That was all part of the last millennium.
I'm a songwriter/musician/artist/author and as such I have a stake in intellectual property. I was born in 1966 and my heroes were rock musicians. I watched as their talent and the technology of the time (vinyl discs had improved in sonic quality but the format had remained relatively the same for 40+ years) brought them to levels of conspicuous consumption usually reserved for French Kings & Russian Tsars right before revolutions. I watched the record companies charge whatever they wanted because they could; they had a unique product. It was no easy task to press your own vinyl, and distribution was too much for most artists to handle by themselves. I watched as the "Home taping is killing music" RIAA short-sightedly bet all their money on the CD. They rushed the format when digital mastering was still primitive and, for all intents and purposes, discontinued vinyl. They put all their eggs in a basket because they greedily thought everyone would have to re-buy their record collections in this new format. But it turns out that digital recordings are as easy to reproduce as vinyl was difficult.
(Cont'd)
These so called laize-faire youth are culture-ized to believe they 'should have what they want, when they want it ' - the unethical modeling and influence of a gluttonous society. The file sharing explosion onto the Internet caught on like wildfire with youth. Ignoring the ethical and legal aspects of the kids had a heyday sharing tunes with friends.” Then they had a wake-up-call that was stealing and there were legal ramifications. The new rage replaced the file-sharing habit with I-Tunes and cool I-Pods.
Hugh Jackson's ' heartbroken discovery of the Internet piracy of his new film has been rampant for years. In the 80's visiting Singapore I discovered a film I had executive produced selling at a street-fair for $1, weeks before its international launch- a shocking revelation. Copyrights are abused daily. Outright piracy is punishable by law, catching the culprit is another challenge.
Merrie Way gives 2--Thumbs-Up to Laura advocating ethical education for youth and to Paul McCartney for standing up for and modeling ethics. Our society-at-large needs to model what it preaches.
When record companies start to pay artists their fair share of royalties for their work, get back to me. When movie companies start making more than $150 million dollar "blockbusters" with the same tired faces, get back to me. For every "Slumdog Millionaire" there is a blockbuster dog of a movie that just makes the Weinstein brothers richer. For that matter, why hasn't the movie industry adopted a method for digitally distributing movies to theatres that would drop admission prices across the board? People pay $30 dollars for a popcorn and small soda because theatres can hardly afford to actually show movies. Where's the innovation that will actually REDUCE the price of the movie going experience? I give you 2 thumbs WAY DOWN for being a tool and not championing innovation as a way of combating piracy.
They have found a way to digitally distribute movies and keep costs down -- it's called digital distribution. The problem is that many (face it, most) theatres have equipment that doesn't handle digital. The upgrade is very expensive. Mark Cuban got in on digital theatres years ago -- and he funded the changeover from film to digital. However, the Mivie Studios, as a collective, aren't doing that and aren't offering an incentive to do it.
The reason theatres are charging so much for popcorn has little to do with movie prices and a heck of a lot to do with profit. It only costs about 5 cents to make a large soda (most of that's the cup, lid, and straw) -- it's all about maximizing profit. You might as well ask McDonalds to lower their prices to 6 cents a soda (still 20% profit) --- but they never will. That's why they started free refills -- its an incentive to buy a soda. The reality of it is, you could drink a hundred re-fills and still not get your money's worth from a large soda. As a matter of fact, the entire reason fast food has food is to encourage you to buy a drink.
The movie industry ahs a lot of evils, but the price of popcorn is purely from the theatre.
I fail to see the difference between downloading a movie someone bought as a DVD then uploaded and "renting" a movie bought by Netflix or Blockbuster. I also oppose the filming and uploading of camcorder versions of new movies - if you are that desperate or whatever to see a movie the weekend it's released, then fork over the cash and see it in the theater.
According to the second-hand report of a study done, file sharers spend more on music than do non-file sharers. So, at least with music, the people that "steal" it are the same people doing much of the buying of it.
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