Posts by Matthew Poole
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New Zealand's copyright laws are much more sane
Like hell they are. Death-plus-50 is no improvement on death-plus-70 in any material sense. If ACTA passes, I doubt we'll have the choice to keep our "sane" copyright laws, either. We'll be forced to enact death-plus-70 and 95-years-for-corporates terms, just as they are in the US.
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Ah, I see what you mean about works with unknown authors. Yes, that is definitely a huge plus for NZ copyright law. Wouldn't count on that surviving past ACTA either, though.
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Same thing happened with when that other great (quasi-)piracy device burst onto the scene: television. That's when cinema started going widescreen and hypercoloured.
Exactly, though I hadn't really thought of it in those terms. Likewise the surround sound experience and the rise of the VCR, now that you mention it.
The real problem that the major labels appear to have is this entrenchment of both Hollywood accounting and also the massive cost structures. The very existence of a $20m list and a $10m list says that the entire industry is built on enormous, ridiculous costs. Good movies can be made for a lot less than we're lead to expect, as Cameron pointed out. Hell, Slumdog was produced for a relatively lean USD15m. Kevin Smith is a master of the low-cost, high-quality movie. When I go looking on Google for figures on how much various movies cost to make and see the adjective "only" prepending the figure "$28 million", I can't help but cringe. Says Kevin Smith, "We shot Chasing Amy on Super-16 film for $250000. Ultimately, with all the music and blowing up to 35mm film, the final cost was almost $800000." It is clearly possible to make good movies, on film, for quite low sums. This list of sub-USD1m-budget indies is quite interesting, too.The huge costs are not an unalterable absolute, they are a result of historical choices that have now become accepted as the normal state of affairs. That is not the consumer's fault, and should not be expected to be the consumer's problem. -
"Exposure? Popularity? Future sales..." etc.Yeah. Right.
Yes! You're not seeing any increase in sales at all? None? Not even of your older back-catalogue stuff (assuming it's still in print)? It's a bit hard to tell if there'll be any impact on sales of the book that Wikipedia says you're currently writing, obviously, but I would be very, very surprised if the free marketing you're getting will hurt.
I can't find the site now, but a bunch of SciFi authors got together and started releasing their new works digitally under a very liberal CC licence (maybe even PD, I don't remember). Uniformly they saw increased sales of their old, printed works, and I'm pretty sure that one of them had some stuff come back with a limited print run due to demand from people who suddenly found out who the author was and decided they wanted more of the same. Don't diss exposure, even if it comes from a medium that you distrust.Also, can people pay to get your works electronically through legitimate means? No, they can't, and you've pretty much said that that will only happen over your dead body. So you're actively against allowing people to get your works over the internet, but at the same time you're complaining that you get no money if they do. Do you see the inherent discord between these positions?
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I've already explained why at least 3 times now, (receiving the most patronizing replies), and then find the exact same comparisons happening again. Frustrating for me, no? Islander seems to be having the exact same issues regarding literature, and I can imagine s/he must be feeling the same way.
Peter, you keep on saying the same thing back: "Higher costs of production". That is the only reason I can see you having advanced for why movies cannot be treated the same way as music, and I happen to think that it's a crap reason. I'm not expecting movies to be sold for a buck on ITMS, which I have to concede would be a very reasonable objection on your part if I were suggesting it.
You talk of indies trying to release their product online, and failing "because of piracy". I see one example, and as trite as it sounds a single data point is not a trend. You even shot yourself in the foot by pointing to two others that had worked out, which gives a 1/3 "failure" rate. Shall we just agree that maybe there's really not enough data to conclude anything concrete?
And I'll apologise for having missed that post. Just went back and re-read all your contributions, and found the one where you mentioned Pathe (not a name with which I'm familiar). They blame "pirates", yes, but so do RIAA and the MPAA and I don't consider either of the latter two to be in the least bit credible. Why should I consider it to be any more credible just because it's coming from an indie rather than a major?Looking at your example of Tormented, it may be that the lack of a proper marketplace didn't help. That is, a site that's got lots of movies for purchase. That was one of the things that helped iTunes take off, the presence of a significant catalogue. People are used to torrenting movies, for the better or the worse, and changing that situation won't happen overnight. To supplant the likes of TPB, it needs to be more convenient to buy the "real" product than to go to a torrent tracker. That's what it took with music, for the paid services to be more convenient than the illicit ones. That has happened, and appears to be being sustained, as Simon has said. Collaboration, rather than competition, in setting up a central marketplace could be what is required. People just want it to be easy, and no disrespect to Slingshot but it's a bloody nuisance to have to hunt through multiple sites to find the movie you want. Trackers make it easy.
Maybe the movie industry needs to, as has been suggested already, go back to treating the box office as the holy grail. No matter how good and big TVs get, only a small number of very rich people can afford to get close to the cinema experience. Even the availability of projectors hasn't done much to decrease theatre consumption of movies. Treat online distribution as jam, not as bread. I know this is a ridiculous idea, but it's the best I've got.
I'll also point out that, in any other industry, if you released a product that garnered hundreds-of-millions of dollars in revenue but didn't make a net profit you would be looking for a new job. In another industry. -
I really don't see why. The Kindle does a pretty good job of replicating the appearance of a book page already, who cares that pages scroll on the one display instead of you having to turn them? It's a very intuitive system. And a ton of people who are not generally early adopters - such as the aged - will appreciate some of the advantages, such as being able to increase the legibility at will.
I'll take your word for what Kindle has going for it. It's hard to tell from pictures on a 2D screen. If you're right about how much it will appease purists, however, then I definitely won't try and call you as wrong on how long it's going to take before these devices start to really take off.
As for the format thing, all that they need to do is to be able to import from formats like PDF. That's the game changer.
It's not the import that's the issue. It's getting the e-books from the proprietary format into something that can be easily distributed. That will happen, regardless of how much Amazon tries to lock down the Kindle and other players try and lock down their respective devices.
Protecting digital works is a losing battle. Blu-Ray holds the record for resisting attacks, as far as I know, and at some point it will succumb to the collective onslaught that is aimed at breaking its encryption. All the time and money spent on developing better locks would be far better invested in the user experience. A good experience at a reasonable price will do far more to encourage people to spend their money with you than any amount of expensive protective engineering. -
Gio, when one side is calling the other thieves, it's a bit rich for them to then want to claim the moral high ground. Especially since the entire picture is so murky.
Use of pejorative labels isn't helpful, from either side. Yes, fine, I'm rather sneery about big media, but I try and keep it more seemly than calling them craven money-grubbers, which is roughly at par with calling downloaders thieves.
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All the more so when being called a thief implies criminal behaviour, which downloading is not, whereas being cravenly money-hungry is merely ethically dubious when one complains about how those evil downloaders are hurting the artists.
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Pirates/thieves may be buying
At which point the pejorative terms cease to apply because they are now paying customers.
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I wish people would stop treating pro-copyright/anti-filestealing advocates as idiots. We understand your arguments, we just don't agree with them.
And, conversely, we would really appreciate not being viewed as thieving toe-rags who want to see artists starving in the gutter. Because that's the tone that comes across from that side of the debate.
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Oh, and Gio, to your Fat Tony comment, I'll raise you a Ray Kroc and say "The customer is always right." Which appears to be something that has been forgotten in the corporate skyscraper dwellings of big media.
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Anybody who is included in the exchange must be recognised. But that's of course immensely problematic of course. I'm talking principles here - because I think it's important to.
You appear to be, as I am, for what amounts to a fundamental reorganisation, opening it up right from the top to expose far more artists to the opportunity to make reasonable incomes from their work. This will, however, come at the expense of those who currently live lifestyles based around snorting cocaine from the armrests of the seats in their private jets.
As for the book thing, my personal feeling of person who's generally wrong about these things is that it's going to explode in the next couple of years, tops. And a library is one thing - it has limited reach and each library shelves a limited number of titles as (very importantly) a limited number of copies of each. A global digital library of the kind that the Napster clones are for music or film is a whole nother thing.
No, I wouldn't call you as wrong on that prediction. But to really take off with people who are disinclined to use technology, the devices need to become much, much more book-like. Open like a book, appearance of having pages, etc.
For the moment, there is no risk of a Napster for books because there is no unified e-book format. MP3 is universal, playable on any platform for which you can get a decoder. Likewise the common formats for ripped DVDs or digitised TV shows. E-book readers have no common format or operating system. That limits the portability of their proprietary media, in much the same way as you cannot play an iTunes file directly on any portable media player that isn't from Apple. The lack of a standard will limit the spread, unless one device takes off in the same way as the iPod dominates the MP3 player market.
Rather than competing to see who can come up with the "best" (read most limited and restrictive) format, it would be better if publishers got in behind an effort to come up with a format that will allow people to share a "book" with friends, allow libraries to loan "books", and deal with issues of pagination and font sizing. Right now there is time for such a project to be successful, because the market has not reached a point where any particular customer expectation has arrived. People will be pissed if they cannot share e-books in the same way as they share real ones, and it'll be a sad, sad day if libraries cannot lend e-books for a limited time in the manner that they operate at present. These are not hard hurdles to cover, in fact they're already solved problems, provided that the publishers can accept that they will fail, in the same way that the music and movie industries have failed, if they insist on trying to achieve perfect security before they will offer these products.