Rodriguez on why Cringely is wrong

Another Cringely quote:
Forgetting for the moment that some of these media people are greedy pond dwellers, let's ask the important question -- how are peer-to-peer file sharing systems going to replace $100 million movies? Peer-to-peer systems can share such movies, but since there is no real peer-to-peer business model that can generate enough zeroes, such systems are unlikely to finance any epic films.

Well, right there we have a problem. People LIKE epic films, but even with the best editing and animation software, there is no way some kid with a hopped-up Mac or PC is going to make "Terminator 4." One can only guess, then, that people will continue to go to movies and eat popcorn and watch on the big screen despite how many copies of Divx there are in the world.

Jonathan points us to this Robert Rodriguez interview where he explains how he made Spy Kids 2:
When movies started, —go back to the Buster Keaton age, when they were still making great movies—there were five people behind the cameras. It's just gotten out of control to where it's become unwieldy, and the process has gotten so complicated. That's why you see a filmmaker make one movie every three or four years—because it's such a hassle. It's such a drag to make a movie. And when something creative becomes a hassle, there's something seriously wrong with the process. George Lucas told me, "Because you live outside of Hollywood, you're going to come up with ways to do things and ideas that they don't think of there." When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change. And when you're outside, you look and you say, "This doesn't work at all. Who thought of this system?" And then once you abandon needing film, you question everything. You question the whole process, like "Why are we doing this like that? Couldn't we do the whole sound mix in my garage?" And we did. We did the whole sound mix of the movie in my garage, we mixed it all there. I edited it in my garage, shot at home, made it much more a home movie, which I wanted to do intentionally, because I wanted the movie to feel more animated, it being a family film. It has a strike against it because it has a "2" on it. The only way to make it feel not like product, not like it's just fallen off a franchise line, is by making it a movie, making it even more personal than the first one. And by doing all that work, keeping the budget low, you're forced to put everything in your person into it.

Posted 11:41 PM by Kevin Marks

Cringely Prognosticates

His column notes the 'darknet' paper and is an interesting (if pessimistic) read.
Back to music and text publishing. Expect both industries to offer peer-to-peer systems that won't work very well, and will cost us something instead of nothing. In the long run, though, these systems will probably die, too, at which point, the music and the print folks will have to find another way to make their livings. This will not be because of piracy, but because of the origination of material within the peer-to-peer culture, itself. We're not that far from a time when artists and writers can distribute their own work and make a living doing so, which makes the current literary and music establishments a lot less necessary.

Posted 11:08 PM by Kevin Marks

Holiday reading

The great micropayments debate, as portrayed by Scott McCloud and Sean Barrett in comic form.

'Yet another micropayment schem'e is one of the things mediAgora gets accused of. One distinction is that with mediAgora, payments flow both ways; another is that it is assumed that the payments aren't micro, and in return customers get a permanant copy of the work.

Posted 10:37 AM by Kevin Marks

Joho the Blog: Fox in the Henhouse

David Weinberger weighs in, quoting Chernin

The trumpeters of the Big Bully Theory may also be startled to learn that we have absolutely no problem with viewers shifting our content from their television to their PC, from their living room to their bedroom and to their bathroom and back again as many times and ways as they'd like.

First, "shifting" does not necessarily include copying. Second - and this is what makes my blood boil - he's granting us permission to shift "our content" where "our" refers to the entertainment company? It's not their content. When I buy a DVD, the DVD is mine and I can use it any way I want so long as I'm not reselling it or broadcasting it. The disk is mine. I can make a copy for my upstairs TV. I can mold it into a pretty little ashtray. I can roll it in a tube and sell it to Peter Chernin as a home colonoscopy kit.

Keep your hands of my property, you goddamn burglar!

Actually, you can resell the DVD - the doctrine fo first sale appleis here. You can't sell copies of it.

Posted 11:58 PM by Kevin Marks

Breaking down Peter Chernin's Comdex Keynote

Peter Chernin's Comdex Keynote speech (referred to below by Charles Witgen), while a really well written speech was so full of errors, omissions and outright lies that I spent much of the weekend breaking it down. I have taken a full transcript of the keynote and put in links to Big Content's long history of attacking individual copyrights and every new medium of expression that the technology industry has developed, as well as the more recent history of attacking the general purpose utility of the PC though both legal and technical means.

Posted 7:14 AM by jonathan

Microsoft sees the light

Microsoft's 'Darknet' paper is remarkably level-headed on the subject of content distribution and the futility of DRM.
There is evidence that the darknet will continue to exist and provide low cost, high-quality service to a large group of consumers. This means that in many markets, the darknet will be a competitor to legal commerce. From the point of view of economic theory, this has profound implications for business strategy: for example, increased security (e.g. stronger DRM systems) may act as a disincentive to legal commerce. Consider an MP3 file sold on a web site: this costs money, but the purchased object is as useful as a version acquired from the darknet. However, a securely DRM-wrapped song is strictly less attractive: although the industry is striving for flexible licensing rules, customers will be restricted in their actions if the system is to provide meaningful security. This means that a vendor will probably make more money by selling unprotected objects than protected objects. In short, if you are competing with the darknet, you must compete on the darknet's own terms: that is convenience and low cost rather than additional security.
Certain industries have faced this (to a greater or lesser extent) in the past. Dongle-protected computer programs lost sales to unprotected programs, or hacked versions of the program. Users have also refused to upgrade to newer software versions that are copy protected.
That link allows comments on it.

Posted 8:58 AM by Kevin Marks

Retail churning with Chernin

Charles Wiltgen takes Peter Chernin to task over his poor analogies:
According to the 2001 National Retail Security Survey, U.S. retailers lost 1.75% of their total annual sales -- over $32 million in the U.S. alone -- to shrinkage. The music industry has, of course, lost $0 million since they've only been denied potential CD sales.

So, if the retail industry accepts shrinkage (i.e. the stealing of real goods that cost the industry real money) as a part of doing business, and the computer software industry accepts piracy (i.e. the loss of potential software sales by people that you probably don?t want as customers anyway) as a part of doing business, maybe it's time that the media industry wakes up, smells the coffee, and starts treating consumers like an opportunity instead of a threat.

Posted 2:28 PM by Kevin Marks

LawMeme on the right to edit

Ernest Miller writes: When you buy a book you can highlight portions or rearrange pages. A friend can recommend that you rip out the boring chapters and read only the climax, and neither the author nor the publisher has a right to stop you. Why should movies on DVD be any different?
When a DVD is legitimately purchased or rented, consumers should have the right to play it with software that enhances their personal viewing experience. Parents should have the right to skip a second or two of gratuitous nudity in an otherwise family-friendly film. Film buffs should have the right to watch a film with an alternative audio commentary by an expert such as Roger Ebert, without permanently altering the disc.

This is the nub of the derivative works argument on mediAgora - I can make a work based on yours, as long as my customers buy your work too.

Posted 3:36 PM by Kevin Marks