Hurt Locker producer: criticizing our lawsuits makes you a moron and a thief

[Matorbogl]

Whoa, I didn't know that producers and distributors who work in Hollywood represent all people who work there! What a crazy cult they must all live in, thinking homogeneously.

I wasn't generalizing the people who work in the industry, at least that was not my intention, rather I was pointing out that just because they are an entertainment industry doesn't preclude them (the CEOs and managers of production studios) from behaving in a similar fashion from what would be considered more cut throat forms of business (ie. banking, insurance, etc).

 

[Sulkdodds]

What is it lately with people in high positions, who should have the material security and the personal confidence to know better, acting like children? I mean good god, if you're the CEO of Apple or the producer of an oscar-winning film, what on earth do you have to prove?

Apparently something that links Wall Street to the business side of Hollywood. It is, I think, a sense of entitlement. In the similar case of the music industry, there's little empirical evidence that piracy actually harms sales, yet the execs are going crazy. Why? A powerful sense of ownership. Movie and music dons who launch punitive lawsuits against individuals to make an example of them are the modern-day equivalent of early modern kings. No pre-modern monarch could never hope to exert the absolute control over their subjects that their absolute conviction of authority and ownership demanded, and the contradiction caused their to stage horrific demonstrations of their own power by visiting public dismemberment on the bodies of their enemies. Excessive barbarity against isolated examples is a natural product of a system where a ruler's power can't match his desire. When you can't prevent crimes you must avenge them thousandfold on the ones you catch. These lawsuits are intended to be public hangings.

What this demonstrates among the industry bigwigs is an emotional attachment to their historical ownership of distribution channels. When bankers blackmail the country they are bankrupting and hand out huge bonuses to people who helped crash the economy, they are proving that capitalism is not about rational self-interest. In this limited sphere (I'm not qualified to talk generally in this case) the idea that bonuses are linked to performances is revealed as a fiction. These people think they have a right to the money, because they always have.

Now it is possible to pirate almost everything more easily and cheaply than ever before. As Krynn said, it's not hard to catch people, but there are just so many of them. Whether or not this is actually a threat to traditional channels - I suspect, in the long term, it is - the execs get scared. They have a right to their control of the market and if it is threatened they start sending petty emails and filing petty lawsuits. Harlan Ellison spent his youth banging out stories for a few cents a word; we all think that when we've worked hard we deserve to screw other people, so no wonder he mouths off so often about creative control. The recent controversies over internet neutrality should be seen in this light: nobody with hard power is ever eager to swap it for soft.

If you think all these comparisons to Charles I and Louis Capet are fanciful, remember that we are talking about capitalism here - a system whose adaptability and responsiveness to change is supposed to be unmatched. Yet what we're seeing is a comprehensive failure to deal with the world. When an old market dies you need to create a new one, yet the industries are committed to defending their ancien regime with whatever cruelty is deemed necessary. It is in the nature of capitalism that new groups will arise to fill niches or exploit new situations - just look at Valve's expert manipulation of public sympathy and consumer respect, and compare it to Ubisoft's full-scale cavalry charge. But it is also in the nature of capitalism that the old guard will have wormed their way into the state apparatus, and that they will use every resource at their command to prop up their share. It is not in the nature of anything that new groups seizing new chances will necessarily be organised upon capitalist lines - we can all imagine insurgents with collective or voluntary/charitable leanings.

So imagine if you could just copy physical objects. Cars, tables and houses might all be fair game. What would it mean for the industries that these objects sustain? Ultimately it may simply be the case that the business model is inadequate and that the system needs to change. The alternative is ignoring reality at great cost to every citizen involved. I think we can all agree that this is the pattern on which most nations' policies against drugs and terrorism are founded. I imagine that if suddenly power elites could no longer control the world through scarcity, they would try to do it by naked force. Perhaps that already happens.

I worry that the new markets might force a change, but not for the better. Western governments solved the problem of unenforceable authority by gaining beureacratic omniscience. The theatre became a panopticon. Since the middle of the 19th century (in Britain) we have started to imagine that offenders really can be tracked, identified and constrained - instead of a hue and cry, detectives and an archive; instead of the gibbet, a controlled environment for housing bad bodies. Governments are still enchanted by the possibility of genuinely enforcing their ownership over citizens, and we are now accelerating towards awareness and regulation at the level of atoms. Media may try to go the same way. We can rank the ongoing changes on a spectrum of petty to serious. At one end of it is the advance from letters to facebook; at the other, murder to the holocaust.

 

[PvtRyan]

Them be fancy words Sulks. I don't really see a problem though, either the industries adapt to the change, or they will go down and others will take their place. They really have no power at all, they're not the massive power-houses you make them out to be, if consumers stop buying their products, they will die. The fact that they don't have any actual control over consumers in these changing times, makes them desperate. But eventually, they will adapt, but big things change slowly. Conservation of momentum, and that sort of thing.

Freedom of the individual yes.

Guess what? Business are made up out of people. Big businesses are made out of more people.

But what the hell is a copreration, when you pirate a film that's the legal body you're depriving of money: a corperation.

Wait, so you are depriving them of money? On the very same page you stated that downloading something you wouldn't have bought anyway, didn't have any effect. So which one is it?

A non-physical legal entity designed and obliged by law to make as much money as possible for it's share holders. I don't owe them anything.

Who's talking about owing them?

And is that supposed to be a justification for anything? Even though I don't think piracy is necessarily wrong, that's a pretty lousy rationalization. The big, bad corporation has invested money into their products, you haven't, so why should what they make be public property? I think their businessmodel is wrong in many areas, but there's nothing wrong with them asking money for their products and you have no right to consider them part of the public domain. Why do you think you do?

 

[Sulkdodds]

Them be fancy words Sulks. I don't really see a problem though, either the industries adapt to the change, or they will go down and others will take their place. They really have no power at all, they're not the massive power-houses you make them out to be, if consumers stop buying their products, they will die. The fact that they don't have any actual control over consumers in these changing times, makes them desperate. But eventually, they will adapt, but big things change slowly. Conservation of momentum, and that sort of thing.

Well, I didn't mean to paint them as 'powerhouses'. My comparison to early modern monarchs was a a bit ironical and I intended more to muse on the current situation and its possibilities than to deliver invective. In case it wasn't clear, I view their vicious behaviour, their 'public hangings', as demonstrating the lack of the very power they're supposed to maintain. Such a flagrant exercise of power implies powerlessness. Monarchs weren't powerful either, and had to make examples of traitors and criminals precisely because of the difficulty they had with maintaining standing armies and working bureaucracies.

Nevertheless, many of them survived in some form or another. It's not a simple matter for consumers to "stop buying their products". Firstly, companies are experts in manipulating consumer desire, and even just consumer boredom. If Facebook, the iPod and DRM teach us anything it is that most people, myself often included, are perfectly willing to sacrifice a measure of personal security and privacy for convenience and ubiquity. That's soft control. But secondly, they can assert hard control through influence in government and regulation; just look at the situation in the US where many people don't have a choice of ISP. Thirdly and finally, they definitely have a strong sway over the state and its coercive capacities. The UK's Digital Economy Bill gives an unelected official the arbitrary capacity to legally compell ISPs to restrict people's internet access on the merest suspicion of piracy, among other bizarre powers. Meanwhile, President Obama has pledged to aggressively pursue IP criminals. Capitalism, like communism, never quite works like it should in theory. In theory, the old guard should as you say simply be forced to adapt, or otherwise perish. But they don't want to die, but they don't want to change, either, and they have the capacity to make a fight of it. This is a "problem" as long as any individuals are crushed by the battle.

But hey, in all honesty, I don't think they're going to have much luck. They're big dumb animals and they're in trouble and things are going to change. Why else would I reference Louis Capet? Most of my post was just an extended riff on their position, and what it tells us about capitalism, authority and their psychologies. But where I get genuinely worried is just here: what if adaptation isn't necessarily good? What if they do not change to match the market but change the market to create a new business model? This is what Apple are up to these days. Their stores for apps and music are swiftly becoming their main business; the stores and the hardware that you access them through are attempts to create a closed system impervious to piracy, impervious to the problems of the old model. Steam is undeniably the same kind of thing, but it's tempered by a measure of charity and goodwill which actually makes good on promises of convenience (eg they actually let you have infinite downloads on multiple machines). The king/media corp comparison started as slightly humourous, but since it's accurate, you can follow it through, towards the kind of bogeyman that the internet neutrality movement keeps scaring us with - a governmental fantasy of total observation and total control of the distribution channel.

I don't think that's likely without subversion, diversion or resistance. But such alternatives could easily end up like linux - the preserve of geeks and purists, safely confined. Then again, there are so many smart methods of making money outside of traditional models. We'll see. It's exciting, anyway.

 

[Stigmata]

I could see closed distribution channels like the Apple store simply being good enough, and thereby existing solely on its ubiquity (which is somewhat like Facebook, currently). The better alternatives nothing more than self-enclosed islands of free information, as their members come and go according to their distaste with the mainstream. That seems to be the way things work, after all. Mercantilism wasn't great, but it was good enough to start ushering society out of the era of serfs and barons. The Apple Store isn't great, but it's good enough for people to use it without much trouble and get what they (think they) want. There's room for other systems, as there always has been, but (as always) you do have to cross borders to get there; nothing in the Apple Store will take you to Steam.

 

[Top Secret]

I would love to clone that guys daughter, and then **** the clone right in front of him.

 

[63]

Yes, there are alternatives. I won't say what, and its equally trackable, but the files are stored on, and downloaded from, servers hosted in other countries. This is as opposed to the torrent method in which files are stored on, and downloaded from user's computers. When you download with bitorrent you are distributing the files (which gets you in A LOT more trouble if the RIAA or whoever decides to **** you), and the other method you simply download. So if you get "caught" (I use that word lightly, because anyone who pirates leaves an easily trackable trail unless they use proxies) then all you can possibly be charged with is theft, rather than being a distributor of the illegal copies.

Like... Rapidshare and similar?

 

[Top Secret]

NEWS GROUPS

 

[Doomination]

I don't think it's possible to get people to stop pirating. When you close down one pirating source (e.g. thepiratebay) more will pop up in it's place. It's just too easy to pirate something, and there are tons of sources. Legislation has a long way to go before it catches up with current technology.

I'm just glad I never pirated that movie -- I couldn't afford a lawsuit if I had to.