Showing posts with label films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label films. Show all posts

24 July 2014

German Director Proposes 'One-Stop Shop' For Free, Instant, But Non-Exclusive Licenses To Offer Films Online

It's always heartening to come across new ideas for ways to make creations more widely available to the public while allowing artists to benefit. Here's one from the German film director Fred Breinersdorfer, probably best known for his film "Sophie Scholl". In an article that appeared recently on the newspaper site Süddeutsche.de (original in German), he complains about the fact that searching online for his film throws up plenty of unauthorized versions, but precious few authorized ones. 

On Techdirt.

29 July 2012

Sweded Movies: The Fans Talk Back

One of the defining characteristics of the digital world -- and one of the problems for copyright law, which was conceived in an analog age -- is the importance of being able to build on the work of others not just indirectly, but directly, through mashups or the re-use of existing material. Stig Rudeholm points us to a fascinating feature in the Guardian about "sweded movies": home-made tributes to Hollywood titles that adopt precisely this approach of creative re-interpretation. The name apparently comes from the film "Be Kind Rewind", where DIY imitations of studio favorites are passed off as Swedish editions. 

On Techdirt.

17 February 2011

The Economic Consequences of Piracy

I've noted elsewhere that there is a major piece of FUD being put about by content producers: that piracy causes massive damage to a country's economy. But as that post explained with regard to the BSA's claims about the harm of software piracy, here's the reality:

Reducing software piracy will not magically conjure up those hundreds of billions of dollars of economic growth that the BSA invokes, or create huge numbers of new jobs: it will simply move the money around - in fact, it will send more of it outside local economies to the US, and reduce the local employment.

The basic idea is really pretty simple to understand. When people make unauthorised copies of content or software, they save money. But that doesn't mean they put it in a bank: human nature being what it is, that money is generally spent elsewhere in the local economy.

And yet despite the simplicity of this crucial idea, report after report seems to have difficulty grasping it. Here's another [.pdf], this time on film piracy, put together by UK Ipsos MediaCT and Oxford Economics for AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft). The top-line "results":

6,100 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) jobs were forgone across the entire economy (equivalent to more than six times the number of job cuts announced by Telstra in October 2010) including nearly 2,300 forgone directly by the movie industry and retailers. These impacts of piracy on employment persist as long as piracy persists.

Allowing for effects on other industries, some A$1,370m in Gross Output (Sales) was lost across the entire Australian economy.

This was equivalent to a loss of GDP of A$551m across the Australian economy – reducing national economic growth and Australia’s ability to invest in its future.

Tax losses are A$193m, representing money that government could employ for other social uses in areas such as education and healthcare.

What's sad is that the report does try to make reasonable assumptions about piracy:

We do not assume that every pirate version equates to a lost sale.

We do allow for ‘sampling’ - those who see an authorised version subsequent to the pirate version are not treated as contributing to lost revenue. In fact, we make the very cautious assumption that no lost revenue results from piracy if any authorised version is seen subsequently.

We do allow for ‘over-claim’ – we apply a ‘downweight’ to those claiming they would have paid for an authorised version (had the pirate version not been available).

But this laudable attempt at rigour is completely undermined by the fact that nowhere in the report is there any recognition that all this "lost" money does *not* disappear, but is simply channelled elsewhere in the Australian economy, where it might actually create more jobs than it would if spent on films (because of revenue outflows to the US, and the fact that local money would be spent on more labour-intensive industries like retailing or catering.) Similarly, it *does* produce tax revenue for the Australian government, just from different sources.

It would be far more conducive to producing an honest debate about the *real* effects of unauthorised copies on national economies if these key facts were included for a change; by continuing to ignore them, these misleading and one-sided reports amount to little more than industry propaganda.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

23 July 2010

Welcome to the Troll Economy

It began, perhaps, with SCO's insane attempt to obtain money from IBM and others for alleged infringements of its code. It proceeded with the music recording industry's increasingly vicious but fruitless threats to ordinary users, expanding more recently into the film business. Now, the Troll Economy has now come to the world of words:


Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission.

Strangely, perhaps, I think this is a great development. As the world of music shows, once rights-holders start making unreasonable demands, the implicit compact with the public is broken, and people no longer respect a copyright system that does not even attempt to treat them fairly.

The Troll Economy will simply lead to more people rejecting intellectual monopolies altogether, sowing the seeds of its own destruction. Troll away, chaps....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

28 December 2009

Making Money by Giving Stuff Away

Open source software is obviously extremely interesting to companies from a utilitarian viewpoint: it means they can reduce costs and – more significantly – decrease their dependence on single suppliers. But there's another reason why businesses should be following the evolution of this field: it offers important lessons about how the economics of a certain class of products is changing.

On Open Enterprise blog.

16 December 2008

Spot the Disconnect

On the one hand, we have a bunch of people I've never heard of whingeing in the Times:


We are very concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV content. At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that this issue be taken seriously by the Government and that it devotes the resources necessary to enforce the law.

In 2007, an estimated 98 million illegal downloads and streams of films took place in the UK, while it is believed that more than six million people illegally file-share regularly. In relation to illegal downloads of TV programmes, the UK is the world leader, with up to 25 per cent of all online TV piracy taking place in the UK. Popular shows are downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times per episode.

On the other, we have this perceptive comment from TorrentFreak:

when just this year it was reported that UK commercial TV broadcasters “enjoyed a bumper April with the highest viewing figures in five years”, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and “the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic [i.e the typical file-sharer] watched 4.9% more commercial TV in April year-on-year and saw 12% more ads,” you have to wonder exactly what the problem is.

So how do we reconcile those? Well, could it be, dear Times whingers, that the Internet actually *drives* traffic to your precious films and TV programmes, whatever they are? Could it be that the Internet is actually going to keep you all employed and so fraffly well-paid?

04 March 2008

Flash of Inspiration

One of the many flashes of insight that the Asus Eee PC has provided me with is that DVDs are dead. The Eee PC has no CD/DVD drive, but lets you plug in both USB drives and flash memory of suitably capacious volumes: who needs spinning bits of plastic when you can have totally poised transistors doing the work?

It seems someone else has had the same flash of inspiration:

AN IRISH OUTFIT, PortoMedia, is to open kiosks at which people can download the latest films straight onto a flash memory card in less than a minute.

The kiosks, in shopping centres or stations, will have up to 5,000 films available for rent or sale using a PIN number.

All punters need do in order to buy or rent a flick is to plug in their memory device, a key bought from the company resembling a standard USB, enter a PIN code, and then when they arrive home, connect the device into a dock attached to their TV and hey presto! Movie madness!

Galway-based PortoMedia reckons that a standard-definition film can be transferred to the card in 8 to 60 seconds, depending on the feature's length and the chip's speed.

09 December 2007

Sell the Analogue

This is what the film industry *really* makes its money from:

new research suggests that the presence of other people may enhance our movie-watching experiences. Over the course of the film, movie-watchers influence one another and gradually synchronize their emotional responses. This mutual mimicry also affects each participant's evaluation of the overall experience -- the more in sync we are with the people around us, the more we like the movie.

Note, too, that this is not something you can download and copy....

31 July 2007

Selling (Digital) Brooklyn Bridges

In a move that seems like a great model of public and private cooperation, the National Archives and Amazon.com have reached a pact under which Amazon will sell films and video footage gathering dust in the archives’ vaults. These videos and films, which capture some of our most intriguing and important moments in history, are already available at no charge to folks who want to visit the archives’ facilities in College Park, MD, but now they’ll become available to anybody via the Internet.

So let me get this straight. Amazon makes money selling digital copies of archive material, which is freely available, back to the people who own that material: and that's a great model? When will Amazon starting selling digital Brooklyn Bridges, I wonder....

05 January 2007

London Games Academy?

If you believe, as I do, that there is a general convergence between films, virtual worlds and gaming, then it makes sense to nurture gaming talent in the same way as young filmmakers are promoted, for example at the London Film School. It seems that some in the UK Government get this too:

Woodward suggested that the industry should help to found an academy similar in function the successful London Film School. “The best way for the video games industry to have the talent and the skills it wants is to move into the hot seat itself; to come to the government and say 'we want to put some money into an - academy'”, he said.

Unfortunately, in his haste to dash any hopes of government handouts, Woodward loses the plot somewhat:

The minister appeared to dismiss hopes for tax breaks in the UK, as enjoyed by the film and other creative industries, saying that the games industry had moved beyond an early “rebel period” of “looking enviously at … tax breaks and other state incentives”.

If games are like films in deserving support - not least because they will generate jobs, revenue and tax - why not give them tax breaks just like films? What's the difference - apart from snobbery?

29 September 2006

And Now, by an Amazing Coincidence...

A little while back I pointed out at some length how flimsy was the logic found in a white paper that claimed Microsoft's Vista would bring "benefits" of $40 billion to six European countries - conveniently forgetting the fact that those $40 billion of "benefits" were actually a cost.

And now, what do we find, but a study from the US film industry that purports to show:

movie piracy causes a total lost output for U.S. industries of $20.5 billion per year, thwarts the creation of about 140,000 jobs and accounts for more than $800 million in lost tax revenue.

But fortunately, there's someone else on hand who isn't taken in by this Vista-like logic:

It's important to remember, however, that even though piracy prevents money from reaching the movie industry, those dollars probably stay in the economy, one intellectual property expert said.

"In other words, let's say people are forgoing paying for $6 billion in movies by downloading or consuming illegal goods but end up spending that $6 billion on iPods, computers and HDTV sets on which to watch the movies, which leads to $25 billion in job creation in the computer/software/consumer electronics field," Jason Shultz, staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in an e-mail.

Quite.

12 August 2006

Now in Pre-Production: Free Software

I wouldn't normally write about software designed for the world of film and TV industries, but this seems pretty noteworthy. Celtx (pronounced "keltix") provides

the film, TV, theatre, and new media industries with an Internet compliant tool for writing, managing and producing media content.

The film and TV industries traditionally use large binders filled with paper and taped-in Polaroid pictures to manage the production of movies and television shows. "It is incredible how little attention has been paid to the pre-production end of the business.", Celtx co-founder and company CEO Mark Kennedy stated. "Lots of time and effort have been spent introducing digital technologies to the production and post-production phases - digital cameras, digital film and sound editing, CGI software - but nothing to help those working in pre-production. Celtx is the first application to do so.

It is, of course, open source (or I wouldn't be writing about it), and is apparently based on Firefox, which is pretty amazing given the complexity of the program that has been developed as a result. It is also cross-platform and available in many localised versions. It comes from a company located in Newfoundland, about which I know nothing other than that they have laudably outrageous ambitions.

What might seem an incredibly specialised piece of code is, I think, of broader significance, for several reasons. First, it shows how the open source approach of building on what has been done before - Firefox in this case - allows even small companies to produce complex and exciting software without needing to make huge upfront investments other than that of their own ingenuity.

It also demonstrates how far free software has moved beyond both basic infrastructural programs like Linux and Apache and mainstream apps like Firefox and OpenOffice.org. As such, Celtx is a perfect example of what might be called third-generation open source - and definitely a story worth following closely. (Via NewsForge.)

24 July 2006

"Pirates" Redeeming 'Pirates'

I'm not keen on the term 'pirates' when applied to people who copy content; its one of those blatant attempts to pre-empt the debate by adopting a deliberately loaded terminology (rather like the idea of a 'war on terror'). My view is that pirates - the real ones - were a murderous and contemptible crew whose crimes are not even remotely comparable to those who transgress one-sided and disproportionate copyright laws, and therefore the two should never be associated.

But maybe I will need to re-visit my position. Although the reality behind pirates has not changed, the public perception probably has. And that's largely thanks to two films: Pirates of the Caribbean I and II. As a result of Johnny Depp's lovable rogue, equating those who infringe on copyright with pirates might actually make the former seem rather more admirable.

But there is something else interesting going on here. "Pirates", the film, is one of the most successful in recent times; and yet, as these figures show, it is also one of the most copied/'pirated' on the P2P networks. As noted by TechDirt, this goes to show in the most dramatic way possible, that

despite what movie execs say, their films can "compete with free" -- and do pretty well. Whether it's offering something more convenient, offering moviegoers a better experience, or using free content as a jumping-off point to sell people other stuff, there's lots of ways movie studios and theaters can thrive in the face of file-sharing. But to do that, they've got to own up to the obvious, and quit blaming piracy instead of changing how they do business.

20 May 2006

More Moore

There's an interesting discussion going on about the cost of film-making - and whether we are likely to see huge falls from the exorbitant $200 million level for typical blockbusters.

This is particularly relevant in the context of copyright, since one of the principal arguments for copyright - especially in its more Draconian forms - is that huge sums are at stake. Once the production costs are not so huge - as is the case with texts, and increasingly music - then it is possible to contemplate other ways of generating revenue without needing to sell the right to read/view materials as in the past.

As the example cited - the Star Wreck films - shows, the key to reducing costs is to do as much as possible using virtual sets, and ultimately virtual actors. Once the analogue film-making becomes digital, Moore's Law kicks in, and things just get cheaper and cheaper.

This is already evident in children's cartoons, many of which are computer generated. Similarly, many major films depend heavily on computer-generated special effects. Both of these just get better all the time - presumably for the same up-front costs.