Comment Re:Cat and mouse... (Score 2) 437
Presumably, they based their decision on the issuing bank, which may or may not be the best idea.
Presumably, they based their decision on the issuing bank, which may or may not be the best idea.
If I'm a TV provider in the uk, I don't want Netflix picking and choosing the content they want, and then undercutting me. I want to lock access to game of thrones down so they can only get it via me.
The U.S. broadcast networks don't have exclusivity after the first year. Why should U.K. broadcast networks be different?
DNS trickery, proxies, VPN, etc. are all very easy to set up, technologically. Try opening a U.S. bank account tied to a U.S. address as somebody who is not a U.S. resident. Good luck.
Why can't you just:
?
Netflix is obligated to do this to maintain its licensing agreements with the Media Mafia.
Yeah, I understand that. What I don't understand is why the big media conglomerates put such baffling restrictions into their licenses in the first place. Is it to comply with licensing agreements that they made? Is it truly idiotic licensing all the way down?
As far as I'm concerned, the general public needs to keep fighting this crap. Whenever the content police tighten the screws, change to a different approach. For example, you might convince people with fast upstream and downstream connections to resell a small portion of their bandwidth for other people's Netflix streaming in a sort of peer-to-peer VPN approach so that it will be impossible for Netflix to cut off people using the VPNs without cutting off a lot of their U.S. customers. Encourage U.S. customers to use location-hiding VPNs, too. And so on.
The reality is that in this day and age, nothing short of worldwide licensing makes sense. In a world of physical media, there was at least some plausibility to the notion of export restrictions and region coding. In a world where humans have cast off the shackles of physical bodies... err... media (sorry, movie trailer authoring mode kicked in for a minute there), those limitations are archaic and silly, not to mention unenforceable. They need to go away. We need to kill the restrictions with fire. There's simply no room in a modern world for such pointlessness. It quite literally does not benefit anyone anywhere, from the far end of the content supply chain all the way to the customer. All it does is piss people off for no reason.
Dear Sony Pictures,
Bugger off.
Sincerely,
Everyone.
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for something involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless...
You mean like the Linux kernel which has thousands of contributors, a massive, shared copyright and is not a work for hire?
Now try getting all those people to agree to license the Linux kernel commercially under a non-GPL license. Go ahead. I'll wait.
I reiterate that previous statement, with a slight clarification:
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for a commercial work involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless you can quantitatively determine what percentage of the copyright every single crew member, cast member, and extra should get. Such a scheme would also effectively mean that the work in question could never be commercially exploited after the period ends anyway, because you'd never get all of those hundreds of people to agree to a new license.
where "commercial work" is defined as a work sold by a company, rather than being given away for free.
All I heard was "blah blah I'm a terrible producer who relies on actors with day jobs blah". If you hire an actor, you are their boss. Not the TGIF lunch shift manager. If you aren't paying enough for someone to stop waiting tables, then you aren't really hiring anyone.
Nobody said I hired anyone. I was talking about indie film production, which often involves unpaid cast to hit a very low budget. In short, I was describing the reality of authors who try to make movies of their own books, explaining why it isn't all that practical. Yes, if the author has money to burn, and can pay the cast $30 an hour, that author won't run into that. Then again, if an author has that kind of money, his or her books are popular enough that they'll routinely get optioned by a major studio anyway.
Everything else in there has absolutely nothing to do with the OP's comment on "short animated films".
Correct. Unlike that comment, I live in reality, where short animated films are excrement that nobody watches for more than about twenty seconds. I think I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than watch an entire book in the form of an animated film with robotic voices.
Besides, animated movies are great for children's stories, but are pretty much doomed to obscurity for most serious subjects. For example, I can only think of one animated sci-fi film, Titan AE, and its box office gross was something like half its budget. Most people see animated movies as being mainly for kids and people with kids. You won't get past that stigma easily.
Okay, the South Park movie, but that's the exception that proves the rule....
Translation: "I want stuff for free, and I don't want to have to pay for anything. Screw the authors and composers who busted their a**es to create what I'm enjoying."
Clearly you haven't thought about the consequences of your idea. Because if you thought about it for more than ten seconds, you'd realize that your proposal would make authors and composers hopelessly dependent upon large corporate backers. Without a major corporation handling the advertising and marketing of your works, an average author or composer cannot possibly hope to make enough money in the first five years on just about any work to make ends meet.
So the inevitable result of your proposal is a creative class of wage slaves, hopelessly beholden to their corporate backers, unable to take risks, unable to truly be creative. Your ideas represent the death of the creativity, and the dawn of a new dark age of humanity, bereft of any inspired works of authorship, a period where mindless drones sit mindlessly in front of a TV set that shows mindless content, the tedious, vacuous pablum of a world of monotony.
And in music, the result would be even more cacophonous. To compose large musical scores, it can take months. Imagine having to charge enough money for a musical composition that you could earn a living off of only a few large compositions per year. Figure that unless you're backed by a big corporation, you might sell only a few hundred copies in the first five years. Imagine a piece of sheet music costing fifty bucks. Imagine a band music score costing $200. Basically, you're talking about a factor of five to ten increase in the cost of sheet music unless you want composers to all die penniless.
Somehow, I don't particularly care for your "utopia". Just saying. Suck it up and pay for what you consume.
Sorry, but you're doing it wrong. If you've started your novel in 2001, and you've decided to write two more over a total period of 14 years before even considering publishing it, then you're not operating a business, you're playing a hobby.
If by "hobby", you mean "side business", you're correct. While writing those books, I was working for a computer company as a paid staff writer. They paid my bills while I worked on those books. In effect, I worked under a patronage system, and these three works were the ones that had no patron backing them, hence one reason that they took so long to finish..
The other reason it took so long to publish the trilogy is that the books's timelines are tied together in parallel, which means that I couldn't safely publish the first book until I finished writing the third. Were it not for that, the first book would have been published in about 2004, give or take. If I were not having to create my own publishing toolchain, and having to do all the copyediting myself, and doing the cover design, and doing custom font design, the third book would have been published in 2011, give or take.
What you should be doing (or should have done before) is publish your first novel quickly, or even publish a few short stories first to get real feedback from customers.
That's great advice if your goal is to create more of the same pablum that is typical of today's book market. It's terrible advice if your goal is to find your own voice, because creativity seldom occurs by committee.
That is what copyright is intended for: to accelerate the creation and dissemination process.
Copyright is to encourage the creation of new works, period. If its purpose were to accelerate the dissemination process, it would not apply to many classes of creative work, such as art, which almost by definition have only one copy. If its purpose were dissemination, then the historical 14-year copyright term would have begun at the date of creation, rather than the date of publication. So clearly that has never been the primary purpose of copyright.
Hobbyists don't need the incentives of copyright as they're quite happy to spend years writing at their own pace, even if it costs them opportunities, readership, and their own money.
Again, you couldn't be more wrong. Would I write if my works weren't protected by copyright? Probably not. It's one thing to create things without any guaranteed payoff. It's quite another to create things with a guarantee of no payoff. And that's what you're missing.
I don't buy the "studios would wait until the copyright expires." Once the term expires every studio would make a movie of a popular work to capitalize and they'd all cannibalize each other. It would be way more profitable to secure the exclusive rights and profit now rather than wait 20 years and compete.
Well, maybe, but there are a lot more books than could ever readily be made into movies, and most movies aren't based on books, so I'd expect it to come down to probability. The highly popular books (e.g. your Harry Potter example) would, of course, be licensed, but that's because there's a lot more money to be made by making those movies quickly than delaying them (with the exclusivity being an added bonus). However, lots of other books that get licensed today (e.g. my Princess Bride example) probably wouldn't get licensed under a 20-year limit.
Not being facetious, but so what? If the film studio is willing to wait, then your story just isn't that valuable. If it is, then another studio would pick it up to beat them to market.
You're starting from a bad assumption—the assumption that the book is extremely popular. Those are the uninteresting cases, because those authors already made a crapton of money on the book. I'm talking about the adaptations of less well-known books. These often take many, many years, simply because it takes time to even discover that the books exist. If you discover a book after fifteen years, and if the copyright term is only twenty years, you won't have to wait long.
To give you an example, The Princess Bride was released in 1973. The movie based on that book came out in 1987. That's 14 years. Given that nobody had adapted it in 14 years, the odds of somebody else adapting it and releasing it over the following 6 years would have been low. So under the proposed 20-year duration, Goldman would probably have gotten shafted by the studio. Worse, as I understand it, that book made most of its money after the movie came out, so he also wouldn't have made much money on the book.
According to your logic, The Princess Bride should never have been made, because the book was still under copyright. Yet it was made, and the resulting movie is so popular that it gets quoted in about every other Slashdot article, so clearly it was valuable. Based on that counterexample alone, I find your argument inconceivable.
The original term was 14 years, are you saying that in a time where the market is insanely bigger, the cost of creation is insanely smaller, and worldwide distribution is almost free you believe you should have a longer license to control your creation? That's insane.
The original term (or at least the first nationwide term in the U.S.) was 14 years, with the ability to renew for 14 more years if you were still alive at the end of the first term, for a total of 28 years, which is considerably longer than the 20 years proposed, even in purely absolute terms. Further, that original 28-year term (14+14) was essentially the rest of your life in that era, even if you were young. The proposed twenty-year period would be about a fourth of the rest of your life these days.
The cost of creation is not significantly smaller than it was then. It still takes a long time to write a book. Yes, mechanically, it takes less time to type than to write by hand, but that's a minuscule fraction of the time spent creating a compelling story. If anything, the cost of creation is much higher now on average, because a much higher percentage of modern stories are written in a distant future, or in an alternative fantasy world that does not actually exist. Today, the author has to create the universe in addition to creating the characters and the plot. And modern readers are more demanding when it comes to self-consistency in that universe.
The potential audience might be larger, but the number of writers increased proportionally to the number of people on Earth, so the market is effectively the same. The only difference is that now you have to compete using more than just word-of-mouth, because that same-sized potential number of readers is spread across a larger area.
The cost of production and distribution is lower. Unfortunately, because more people can afford to publish their works, on average, each writer makes less money.
But the biggest reason that copyright should be a reasonable percentage of the author's is as a partial defense against the growing inequality between individual authors and the corporate world. Even with the current copyright durations, we see authors getting locked into extended contracts, and publishers dragging their heels on reprints, hurting the author's ability to profit off of their creations. Imagine if they could drag their heels just a few more years, and then reprint those works for free. They would do so. At every possible opportunity. The publishers would get everything, and the actual authors would get screwed.
Basically, in an era where lots of works are still highly popular after forty or fifty years, in a world where corporations have the ability to trivially outlive the authors and out-wait them, the copyright for works of individual authorship needs to be long enough to at least partially restore the balance.
It reduces the motivation to become an author.
Answer this: Would the knowledge that no movie studio would pay you millions to license your novels have stopped you from writing them? You can argue that that possibility factored into your thinking, but that's not the point. The point is: If that possibility, and that alone, were completely removed, would you have chosen not to write?
No, but only because writing is not my core profession. But the correct question is not whether any particular person would choose not to write, but whether the number and calibre of people who choose to write would decrease (in aggregate). I'm fairly certain that both metrics would decrease.
You see, writing books is in some ways like playing the lottery. Yes, you can write great books and you might find a following, but the vast majority of authors eke out a fairly meager living even if they do find a following. There are pretty much two ways that you can do substantially better than that: sell a lot more books than average or get discovered and have your book optioned for a movie. Cutting out one of those options significantly reduces your chances of not dying penniless.
But unlike playing the lottery, writing involves a lot of skill, and requires you to devote a lot of time and energy. In a way, choosing to write is a bit like choosing a major in college. A few people choose majors based solely on what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but far more people choose majors in part based on whether the major will land them a job that pays a decent salary. As careers in specific fields pay less money over time, the calibre of students progressively declines. So as you reduce the odds of a potential payoff, you'll get fewer skilled writers choosing it as a career, and the writers who do choose it as a career will also decline in quality, on average.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the quality of TV news in the past couple of decades. That's what happens when salaries start out bad and then fail to keep up with inflation.
Your notion of basing it on gross revenue is interesting, but I think it would be too easy for big studios to game.
It's easy to game the net, but it shouldn't be possible to game the gross receipts. After all, people either paid money to see the film or they didn't. I mean, maybe if everyone went to a subscription model....
I couldn't help but read that in the synthesized tone of "MongoDB is web scale" made with XtraNormal. Anyone who has a computer and can write a screenplay can produce an animated short film that no one will watch. And tools to mark up a screenplay for conversion to an animated film will only get better, so you can make even better animated shorts that no one will watch.
FTFY.
Just in case anybody reads your comment and assumes that you're being serious (I'm pretty sure you aren't), here's an idea of the magnitude of effort involved....
I once created a feature-length movie from script to finished product. Writing the script was maybe 5% of the effort. When I finished with that, I began location scouting and casting. Fortunately, I had ready access to a number of shooting locations that met most of my needs, so that part was relatively tame.
After shooting began, I had to find times when all of the cast members for each scene were available, and the location was also available. The more people involved in a scene, the crazier that got. Add in a few horses, or a scene at a hospital ER (shot at something like 2 in the morning), or police officers doing a drive-by and arresting one of the cast members (for a scene, not for real), and even a relatively straightforward production with minimal effects gets complicated pretty quickly.
But it gets better when you find yourself having to adapt to changing schedules, as cast members' bosses change their work schedule from week to week. Been there, done that.
When shooting is done, then you get to spend time editing, adding special effects, composing a film score, and recording the music. If you don't have the skills to do all of these things yourself, you'll probably have to pay other people to do them. On an author's income, that's not easy.
The bottom line is that if you already have extensive TV production experience, and if you and at least two other people can devote a minimum of two months full-time to the project (through the end of principal photography), and if you have a dozen friends who can act and don't have full-time jobs that limit your shooting schedule and don't want a huge chunk of money in exchange for acting, then it is marginally feasible to make a movie version of a book that doesn't involve any special effects.
So although I can think of (a few) authors who could pull off turning their books into feature films, not many of them are crazy enough to make the attempt.
However, the law would need to specify a maximum contract duration beyond which those limits kick in so that companies wouldn't license it for [lifetime of copyright minus one day].
Or the director could just avoid doubt by exclusively licensing the motion picture to the studio for 20 years. This would be long enough for the theatrical release, the current home video format, and the next home video format, after which point the copyright reverts to the director.
The problem with that idea is that there's no feasible way for something involving hundreds of people to not be a work for hire unless you can quantitatively determine what percentage of the copyright every single crew member, cast member, and extra should get. Such a scheme would also effectively mean that the work in question could never be commercially exploited after the period ends anyway, because you'd never get all of those hundreds of people to agree to a new license.
Byte your tongue.
