Speaker: ACTA: Don't sell us down the river
526 Responses
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FFS, "raping the land" is a long-established phrase. Don't go being as stupid as Mr Holmes on us.
Sacha: As the Women's XV would say, I'll start filling in your bullshit bingo card when I've got the time and energy to do it with a modicum of civility. You'll keep.
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For a classics student you seem proudly ignorant. Good luck with that.
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Sacha:
I'm sorry someone pissed in your bedtime cocoa, but I guess putting your inner troll back under his bridge really can't wait and screw being civil.
I'm perfectly well aware what "rapine" means -- and the archaic and rather pretentious use of "rape" as a synonym.
Back on Planet Earth, the primary definition of "rape" is forced sexual intercourse and IMNSHO is a word that should be thrown into an already heated conversation with extreme caution. You know, much like "bitch" has a perfectly inoffensive denotation if you're talking about female dogs, but not so much when you're talking about female human beings.
If you want to get pissy about proud ignorance, wise up about the difference between denotation, connotation and subtexts. And save the smart-arse act for someone who will be impressed.
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@81stColumn, cheers for the links I'll take a good look through when I get the time.
@Craig, yes, you're right, the notion of independents is rather an odd one, as the majors have brought up most of the supposed 'indie' studios anyway, and yeah, for the most part it's a marketing strategy as much as anything. Never the less, there are a lot of funding bodies 'independent' of the studios that are reporting that they are suffering because of piracy.
It's all good and well to say 'adapt or die' to the freemarket system, but I don't actually understand how theft is part of the market. Where do the notions of supply/demand/competition come into the situation if someone is out there simply giving the good/service away for free? Could you not as easily say that the attempts to stop pirates via political measure an attempt to adapt anyway? Personally, I still don't understand why anyone would suggest that behavior on the internet is somehow free of the moral and ethical considerations we would have in the real world. Isn't that sort of the idea of Public Address? That we try to behave in a way that we might if we were talking face to face in a cafe, avoiding the descent into idiocy that are things like Kiwiblog?
Anyway, artists have been making attempts to adapt to the new medium, but results have been mixed. Doctor Horrible is a great example of course, but that had the power of Jess Whedon's fan base behind it. Kate Modern is interesting, but again, the margins are so difficult for them that they rely so heavily on product placement, to the point where I think most people would feel uncomfortable about it. Another recent example was Tormented by Slingshot films. I talked to the producer of this and he described how they did their own distribution and marketing through the net, built a solid fanbase, got good reviews, and then found *weirdly* that no one was downloading the film. So they checked out the torrent and... surprise, surprise it was all, almost entirely going through the pirate channels.
Anyway, on the other subject of the politics of the ACTA, may I just say that while I agree in large part with the attempts to limit piracy, I'm no great fan of the MPAA nor the way the ACTA is being enacted. Some of you may recall the battles the various Guilds had in Australia recently against the MPAA and the FTA which would strip their local content quotas etc. Ours got stripped in similar circumstances much earlier, and with scarcely a peep from anyone. Generally, it would be to the public's great benefit to understand the way these political processes happen.
Of course that would require a lot more work from the media...
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Matthew, this entire comment reads as though market=gatekeeper.
In which case I was insufficiently clear. Sorry for the confusion. I do not, and did not intend to convey that I do, equate the market with the gatekeeper. I deliberately chose the term gatekeeper to try and make it apparent that the market is something that exists beyond "the gate".
Markets exist whether or not there is a product. Products exist whether or not there is a market. When a product exists and there is a market for that product, you have lots of happy, smiley faces. In the absence of one or t'other, well, either the market goes unsatisfied or the product withers and dies on the vine. The gatekeepers have, traditionally, sought to ensure that neither side exists in the absence of the other, except that they do a really, really poor job of dealing with anything that's on the outer edges. They cope nicely with mainstream 14-year old girls and Britney Spears, but if you get too far away from that ideal they struggle.
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Sacha, Craig: time to leave the point and move on.
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The gatekeepers have, traditionally, sought to ensure that neither side exists in the absence of the other, except that they do a really, really poor job of dealing with anything that's on the outer edges. They cope nicely with mainstream 14-year old girls and Britney Spears, but if you get too far away from that ideal they struggle.
But (and there's always one of those) I'd note The Wire is seldom mentioned in these parts without close proximity to the phrase "best show on television ever". Would it be out of order to note it was not commissioned by the BBC, ABC, PBS, TVNZ or any other so-called public broadcaster, but some "gatekeeper" at a subsidiary of the largest media conglomerate on the planet. Yea, the market model sucks arse.
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Paul, you really think that the marketing teams went to the FBF and decided to create a market for works related to the vampire myth? In the words of some famous billboards: Yeah, Right!
Good marketing and product can stimulate demand, certainly, but if nobody really has a desire for your product it doesn't matter how good your marketing is. Getting people exposed to a quality product, which they then recognise as being of utility to them, is not the same as creating a new market. The market for books is not new. The market for fantasy books is not new either. The market for books based on the vampire myth is, clearly, not a new market, because the readers were very likely already reading fantasy books. Rather, there is a new interest in supplying an under-serviced market.
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Craig, how does that detract in any way from what I've said about the existence of markets and gatekeepers? I didn't even say that gatekeepers cannot have good product, did I? I simply said that they struggle with the fringes, and that was more particularly aimed at music than at TV - hence the reference to Britney and her target audience.
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there would actually be some benefits in being presented with de facto US copyright law, with its relatively generous approach to "fair use".
Yes and no. We'd probably lose moral rights, and from things that Islander and others have said in "that thread", I think the moral rights parts of NZ (and pretty much every party to ACTA except the US) copyright law actually matter far more to creators than anything that might happen about copyright terms and fair use.
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By "probably lose moral rights" I mean that if ACTA just supplanted existing copyright law, which is what would be required for US-style fair use to be on the table, I don't see moral rights surviving. The US doesn't have them, and it seems that ACTA is really just the wettest dreams of US-centric big media codified into a treaty.
</edit>Also, ACTA is something of an attempt to end-run around fair use. DRM is explicitly about restricting fair use rights, and the DMCA has proven to be a very, very big bat, studded with nails, when it comes to stomping on fair use for things like parody, satire, and criticism. NZ does have a "fair dealing" doctrine, sadly one not codified and also less-liberal than that of the US, but we could fix that without needing ACTA.
Plus, I don't think that fair use would be part of ACTA. That's a dirty phrase in the eyes of big media, and the last thing they want is for other countries to extend their existing consumer rights. Look at the fight that RIANZ put up about allowing consumers to *shock horror gasp* format-shift recorded music. -
Hey, Russell, any chance of a preview button on the edit window? It's very disconcerting to not be able to preview changes.
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I'm guessing that what happened with vampire fiction was less "OK, it is decreed that Vampires are going to be the Next Big Thing!" and more along the lines of "This new Twilight series is going to be the next Harry Potter - quick, we need knock-offs! Lots of knock-offs!"
I forget where, but I once read someone talking about the success of March of the Penguins, and how it should of resulted in movie people saying "wow, a simple nature documentary making big bucks - maybe endless blockbusters aren't the only option, maybe we should be looking in new and untravelled directions," but would instead almost certainly result in movie people saying "quick - we need more penguin movies!"
And lo and behold, along came Happy Feet and that other one about the surfing penguins...
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Craig, how does that detract in any way from what I've said about the existence of markets and gatekeepers?
It doesn't, but I thought it would be worth throwing out there for the benefit of those fuming about the eeevil free market. :) I'm a believer in Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crud, and we're inevitably going to have "gatekeepers" when not everything is doable with a ball of string and a wad of chewing gum. I read recently that the average cost of a commercial hour of drama on US television (good, bad or indifferent) is somewhere north of US$2 million. I can't see how that gets done outside a corporate model, but of course that's not the only model out there.
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For anyone interested in US copyright, here's an article by Scott Martin, VP Intellectual property at Paramount on "the myth of the public domain". Interesting stuff.
The primary factor behind Congress’s decision to extend the
term of protection for copyrights was the implementation by the
European Union of a Directive harmonizing the term of copyright
protection for all E.U. Member States at life of the author plus seventy years, and requiring all E.U. Member States to deny copyright
protection to works of U.S. origin and works originating in other
non-E.U. countries that entered the public domain in their country of
origin, even though similar works of E.U. origin would still enjoy
years of copyright protection. -
Ah, so it was support for the market. Excellent. I like the market :P
Going back to the funding of things through NZoA and MCH:
RNZ Ballet, NZSO/NZPO and others are, as much as anything, exercises in branding. They're a sponsorship opportunity for NZ Inc. It's no different from the NBR NZ Opera, or the Vodafone Warriors for that matter. That's not state protectionism, that's state sponsorship. People don't talk about Vodafone engaging in protectionist behaviour with the Warriors.
NZoA is looking for winners. It's no less a gatekeeper than ABC or the BBC, it just has slightly different funding criteria. And if something it funds turns out to be a dud, well, there goes the funding. It's still the market and the commercial model, except done with state dollars. I don't have an issue with that, because I know that there are things that are too risky to attract money from the main players. If NZoA were to keep throwing money at projects that weren't successful, though, then I'd be rather hacked off. That extends to tossing Russell's TVNZ7 show on the scrap heap if it's not getting eyeballs, non-commercial or not. We would be the poorer for it, certainly, but NZoA is a gatekeeper and should behave like one in making rational, dispassionate decisions about funding. -
Er, it is the state creating a market. It may be that the market decides certain things are worthless, but it is quite meaningful to say that by creating a right that can be bought and sold the state creates a market*.
Keir, copyright still ain't creating a market for the end works. To accept that copyright creates the market is to accept that the Twilight genre only sells because of copyright. That's bollocks. The books may only be published by major houses because they can get copyright, but that's not the same thing at all. The market would exist with or without copyright, and if the books were being released under public domain or a liberal Creative Commons licence it would in no way diminish the market's existence or desire for the works.
To put it another way, people still buy the Bible, and collected works of Shakespeare, even though the underlying text of both is free of copyright. According to you, there should be no market for these things because there is no copyright in the text. That is, obviously, incorrect.If you want to argue that there's a market for the copyrights themselves, then I would agree with you. But that's not a market for the ideas and their expression it is only a market for the rights to reproduce. That is what copyright is - a right to copy.
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NZoA is looking for winners. It's no less a gatekeeper than ABC or the BBC, it just has slightly different funding criteria. And if something it funds turns out to be a dud, well, there goes the funding.
Certainly -- Rome comes to mind which was a very big ticket co-production between HBO (an entirely commercial producer) and the BBC (which is something else). The budget was seriously cut for season two -- and it showed -- at the end of which both parties decided they couldn't make the numbers stack up and called it off.
Even the BBC's trademark costume dramas -- like the famous Pride and Prejudice or Bleak House -- just don't get made any more without substantial American co-financing.
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Interesting, Craig. I didn't know that, though I am admittedly not exactly an avid fan of that sort of TV. It does show, though, that the market is already very, very heavily involved in what gets made. Possibly too heavily, in fact, when one considers how hard these gatekeepers are fighting to maintain the status quo and thus make it harder for others to try and compete.
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Going back to the funding of things through NZoA and MCH:
RNZ Ballet, NZSO/NZPO and others are, as much as anything, exercises in branding. They're a sponsorship opportunity for NZ Inc. It's no different from the NBR NZ Opera, or the Vodafone Warriors for that matter. That's not state protectionism, that's state sponsorship. People don't talk about Vodafone engaging in protectionist behaviour with the Warriors.It's really not. The government doesn't sponsor the ballet as a branding exercise for NZ Govt Inc. It's a cultural subsidy because the government has decided that having a professional ballet and orchestra is something that NZ should have, and the market doesn't support it. The MCH web site indicates that:
The Royal New Zealand Ballet has been directly funded by government since 1998 in recognition of its role as the national provider of a major performing art.
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Kyle, fair enough. I still don't view it as analogous to the state decreeing that certain technological improvements are not to be used in some particular fashion. I also don't consider it to be protectionism. It's state recognition that some things should be funded even if they're not valuable in a strictly commercial sense. Culture is not like manufacturing or commercial services, and terms like protectionism don't apply very well. I don't have a problem with the preeminent performers in some very niche areas being given state funding to ensure that those particular entities continue to exist. As it is RNZ Ballet took more from commercial sponsorship, donations and box office than it did from MCH, according to their 2008 annual report. That says that there is a market, and they could probably service the market without government funding but in a greatly-reduced capacity.
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Yes, copyright is the state creating a market. The state creates a bundle of rights that may be bought and sold. It may not in fact be creating the market you are assuming me to mean, but that is not really my problem.
The state doesn't create an audience, which is what I think you are using `market' to mean.
Also, you really have the most ridiculous idea about arts funding.
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Yes, copyright is the state creating a market. The state creates a bundle of rights that may be bought and sold. It may not in fact be creating the market you are assuming me to mean, but that is not really my problem.
I get that the state creates a market in rights than can be bought and sold.
But the state (in NZ anyway) once created a market in tradeable import licences, which allowed the holder to import (say) consumer electronics. That wasn't the same as creating a market for consumer electronics.
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That wasn't the same as creating a market for consumer electronics.
No. (Here I am going to do nasty things to some innocent economics, so I do apologise.) But the fixed expression of an idea has certain characteristics: it is non-excludable (if I have it I can't really fence it off and stop you getting it, short of physical fencing it off, which makes distributing it impossible) and it is non-rival (my having it doesn't make it any less valuable to you).
And in that case markets don't exist without state intervention to make the good take on certain characteristics of a rivalrous/excludable good. And if the state doesn't intervene*, they generally won't be provided. And that would be economically inefficient.
So there really is a sense in which markets in IP & related markets in CDs and such are creatures of the state, in a different way from that in which markets in hammers are creatures of the state.
* Not needfully by creating a market, but by subsidy or whatever even.
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I still don't view it as analogous to the state decreeing that certain technological improvements are not to be used in some particular fashion.
Which I've never said.
But the blacksmith/cars comparison remains pretty useless. Culture and horse modes of transport don't really match up. It's a line for the media but it doesn't really become useful at second glance.
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Keir, your definition of "the market" is very clearly different to the one I have in mind, and you've demonstrated that you are perfectly aware of this discrepancy. When I talk of "the market" I am not talking about the market of gatekeepers, I am talking about the market of consumers. Consumers don't give a fig about copyright, and will demand the creative works even in the absence of copyright. Witness various online-only literary works that appear to be quite popular, if their authors are to be believed, and are distributed either as public domain or under the most-liberal of Creative Commons licences. It is only the gatekeepers who care about copyright in your market, and then only because it allows them control. Remove copyright and your market would cease to exist. My market, however, would remain, possibly less-satisfied than it is at present, but exist all the same.
Will you now stop arguing a distortion of what you knew I was meaning?
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