
Copyfight: EFF co-founder enters e-G8 "lion's den," rips into lions - grellas
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/eff-co-founder-enters-copyright-lions-den-rips-into-lions.ars
======
schrototo
The thing that strikes me whenever I hear those crusty old old-media guys
talking is that the reality of the generations growing up today is so entirely
different. Nobody I know in my generation, regardless of where they stand on
the political spectrum, gives a _shit_ about copyright. _Nobody_. Everyone
downloads music, movies and TV shows freely and without thinking about it.

That's not to say they don't ever pay for stuff, just look at the success of
iTunes or the record-breaking opening weekends of popular movies. But the
young generations fundamentally do no have any respect for copyright,
especially if it restricts their abilities to enjoy consumption of content.

The times, they are a-changin', whether "the industry" likes it or not.

~~~
edanm
You're right about the times changing. But "the industry" has good reason to
be concerned - in a world where people don't pay for their product (or certain
aspects of it), they won't keep making that product. And I share their concern
- I love movies/music/television/etc., and I'd really hate to live in a world
without them.

~~~
rmc
It's 10 years since Metallica sued Napster. We just had a major motion picture
(The Social Network), set in the past, where this event is in the past in the
film.

If piracy could kill the music industry, it would have killed it by now. The
music industry is not dead. Ergo piracy will not kill it.

~~~
Natsu
The MPAA famously predicted that it would die due to home taping because of
the VCR, only to go on and make billions from it.

The industry has always been short-sighted.

------
T-R
> _"When someone comes to you and says I need a few hundred million dollars to
> make a movie about 10 foot tall blue people on another planet, that's not an
> easy decision to make. But if you do make that decision and it does turn out
> to be Avatar, then you'd like to be compensated."_

This seems to imply that 20th Century Fox feels _entitled_ to making the kind
of profits that would support such exorbitant investments. I liked Avatar as
much as the next guy, but the concept of making that much money off of
something like music or film is a relatively recent phenomenon, dependent upon
the combination of wide distribution with artificial scarcity. Even if Avatar
couldn't be made without the kinds of conditions that allow for those kinds of
profits, I'm pretty sure I'd trade it for all of the direct and indirect
casualties of the recording and film industries; but really, I'm just
thoroughly unconvinced that high quality work can't be motivated by more
reasonable profits and other less tangible benefits.

~~~
junklight
the decision to invest the $100M is a business decision. Wanting the laws
changed to favour your business decision is understandable I guess but if you
extend that line of thinking - why aren't they lobbying for, oh I don't know,
people _have_ to go to the cinema once a month? or that there should be a
cinema tax. Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry.

see how far you get with any investor if your plan involves changing the law
to create more favourable conditions for your profit.

these business models will all eventually die and be replaced by younger
people who grew up in this copy and copy alike world and will find new ways of
making money but there might be a hell of a lot of collateral damage to the
law as they go down.

~~~
sesqu
_Everyone has to pay $10 a month to the film industry._

We already have the IP tax. In my country, it's essentially a value added tax
on all digital mass media, regardless of use. The money from that is lumped in
with the money from concerts and from playing radio in public, and goes to an
entertainment organization that then distributes it to its members and
partners as it sees fit.

------
nickolai
The metionned 'HADOPI' group has been very productive as an entertainement
provider lately. In particular, the specifications for 'netwotrk security
softawre' (that should help one prove his innocence in a piracy trial) are a
great read :

* compliant software must implement reversible hashing (my favorite)

* use of compliant software may not be used as an argument to prove one's innocence in court

* cloud computing is actually a 'network protocol'

etc.etc.etc.

(a short analysis (in french) [http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-
analyse-speci...](http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/63264-hadopi-analyse-
specifications-fonctionnelles-moyens-securisation.htm))

------
dotBen
The whole idea of the "eG8" is offensive both on the one hand to the concept
of the real G8, and on the other hand to the accordance by which matters
pertaining to the politics of the Internet should be debated.

The G8 is a group of elected officials who represent their respective
countries based on democratic process.

The eG8 is a bunch of industry folks who represent no one but their own self-
interests.

If the 'real G8' was the heads of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Toyota,
ConocoPhillips, Samsung, Berkshire Hathaway, Ford, etc we'd all horrified and
out raged.

If the eG8 was a private meeting of industry folks to shoot the shit on
whatever, go in right ahead. But if they're going to debate policy it's a
total red flag.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more outcry frankly.

------
edanm
From the article: "Expression is not like that. The notion that expression is
like that is entirely a consequence of taking a system of expression and
transporting it around, which was necessary before there was the Internet,
which has the capacity to do this infinitely at almost no cost."

Is that accurate? I thought copyright was invented specifically to give a
monopoly to creators, in order to encourage innovation/creation.

I think that statement is conflating two separate issues in order to confuse
people (the logic being, we needed copyright before mass distribution was
possible; it's possible now; therefore, we don't need copyright).

~~~
Ryanmf
Try again.

The argument is not that copyright is unnecessary. The argument is that
"honoring copyright" and "taking legal action and attempting to secure
government oversight to prop up an obsolete, commodity-based business model"
are nowhere close to being the same thing.

To assert that Barlow is attempting to confuse is totally disingenuous. The
two issues _are_ conflated. They're conflated because the rights-holders have
conflated them. He's not sitting on that stage debating a panel of artists and
philosophers; the majority of them aren't even proper economists. They're just
the guys who have the most to lose if things change, and they're attempting (I
would argue illegally/unconstitutionally, but until we can get a handle on
lobbyism, 1st and 4th amendment rights violations, and continuing trends
towards oligarchy in this country... que será, será) to leverage as much
influence as they can muster to legislate their poor business model into
continued existence in a world which no longer supports it.

Let's take the honorable Mr. Gianopulos' example: when someone asks you for a
couple hundred million dollars to make a movie about some blue aliens, you'd
like to be compensated.

First of all, "some blue people on another planet"? Now, I'll be the first to
say that I felt _Avatar_ was mostly _Pocahontas_ with better visual effects.
But come on. Gianopulos was a poor Greek kid from New York City, he attended
college and law school, then immediately went to work in Hollywood. This is
his entire life. He's on a stage insisting that the sanctity of these (his?)
arts must be protected by any means (currently legal or not) necessary. And he
_still_ can't get six words out of his mouth without being completely
dismissive of the art he professes a desire to protect. This is one of the two
biggest successes of the man's professional career. I wonder if he refers to
_Titanic_ as "some fucking thing about a sinking boat."

(The attitude illustrated in the preceding paragraph is the foremost reason
many of us consider these people to be pig-fuckers, incidentally. I'm going to
step outside the bounds of rational discourse for a moment and risk some
downvotes to make an audacious assertion: If you (not you, edanm, who I'm
replying to, but you, the reader) believe that these multi-billion dollar
media conglomerates actually concern themselves with art or the livelihoods of
artists, or that they intend to protect anything but their own bottom lines,
_or_ that they are somehow entitled to the role of sole, perpetual rights
holders and distributors of any media created by anyone, anywhere, ever (as
their comments indicate that they believe they are), you need to please see
your way right the hell out of this discussion—maybe do some light reading,
I'd recommend starting with Lessig's _Free Culture_ — because you clearly
don't understand what the fuck is going on here. Yeah, there was a lot of
hyperbole in there. I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to sort out whether
or not I'm full of shit.)

Now, down to brass tacks. What Mr. Gianopulos is really concerned with is
_Avatar_ as a vehicle for his well-deserved compensation. So let's take a
look, shall we?

    
    
       Avatar budget: ~$237,000,000
       Avatar worldwide gross as of Jan 2011: $2,039,472,387+
    

According to News Corp's 2000 Annual Report [1], 20th Century Fox grossed
roughly $1 Bn worldwide for all films released in FY 2000, and nearly half of
that (~$494 M) was a result of them duping viewers worldwide into watching
_Star Wars: Episode 1_ (including me, on opening day, the bastards). I was a
freshman in high school by the end of FY 2000, which means Napster was in it's
last throes, but Opennap networks were as numerous as they'd ever been and
more configurable clients like WinMX were widely distributed, Newsgroups and
IRC Warez/Scene channels had been hot for years, and the Kazaa's of the world
were coming soon, with Torrents and an infinity of blogs posting an infinity
of Rapidshare links on the horizon. I "knew" (on the internet) a guy at the
time who had over a terabyte of music available for download, when a terabyte
was an unfathomable amount of data. He had a cushy job where he could more or
less take home as many hard drives as he wished, whenever he wished, and he
filled them up largely with multi-hour trance and techno DJ sets, at quality
levels way above the average back then.

All of this is to say, in FY 2000, if you knew how to work the internet and
were so inclined, you could get anything you wanted, for free. Maybe you had
to wait a few days for it to download on your dial-up connection, and it may
have occupied 20% of the remaining free space on your 20 Gb hard drive, but
you could get it. All those people who paid repeatedly to see "The Phantom
Menace" multiple times in theatres? They _definitely_ knew how to download a
copy of it well before it was released on DVD. And yet they still paid. Weird,
right?

Flash forward a decade, when broadband is prevalent, storage is cheap, and the
tools and understanding required to download any given copyrighted work are
not merely the domain of geeks and organized crime, but are in fact readily
available to your dentist, my mom, an increasing percentage of the elderly,
and everyone on earth under 25 years old. Also, probably dogs. Yet 20th
Century Fox managed to nearly _double_ FY 2000s yearly gross with _a single
film_. But Mr. Gianopulos is concerned about compensation. Better call the
lawyers. Actually, better just get international heads of state to issue
mandates that henceforth Sony/BMG, Time Warner, CBS, NewsCorp, Viaporn...I
apologize, Viacom, NBC/Universal/GE?/Comcast??/Whatthefuck and the weeping
ghost of Walt Disney are the sole arbiters and proprietors of any creation
which may be construed as "media," and furthermore will act as government
contractors wherein they will be responsible to define and enforce the
meanings of the words "art," "artist," "music," "culture," "innovation," and
most importantly, "deserve."

None of this even begins to address the astronomical budget of a film like
_Avatar_ in an age when a $200 cell phone can record higher quality video for
a longer period of time than a $15,000 professional camera and $40,000 worth
of film could 15 years ago, nor the fact that marketing ANYTHING to a
worldwide potential customer base has gone from "complicated and expensive" to
"marginally free, and the easiest shit ever." My passion, music, also suffers
great tribulation resulting from the decisions of the aforementioned pig-
fuckers, and as you'd imagine I have quite a lot to say on the topic, but I've
already written a ton here, best to let some of you tell me why I'm doing it
wrong before I carry on.

[1] <http://newscorp.com/report2000/filmed_ent.html>

(edit: changed caps to ital, removed superfluous characters)

~~~
yuhong
Yea, many of this I am well aware of already. In fact, I have a series on
artificial scarcity and it's problems. The problem is how to get the media
companies to finally change and fix the problem completely. Doing the
debugging to find out exactly what is happening internally would be a good
idea.

~~~
yuhong
For example, has someone investigated the exact history of "Hollywood
accounting"?

~~~
Ryanmf
I, for one, would _love_ to know where those hundreds of millions to produce
_Avatar_ went, for instance. I wonder what slice of that pie was attributed to
"Marketing Expense." Turns out it's free to upload a video (like, a trailer,
let's say) to YouTube and link to it elsewhere. Go figure.

But insofar as media conglomerates addressing this matter internally, why
would they? It's not a problem for _them_.

Their revenues have been on a steady climb since ever. They know god damn well
how little overlap exists in the groups "definitely going to pay for it" and
"would consider downloading it for free." But they would have you believe that
every "illegal" download represents a lost conversion.

Now there's blood in the water, because "Hollywood" is one of the few
industries left in America which still makes any money, and as belts continue
to tighten, highly compensated lobbyists (including the _most_ highly
compensated, Cary Sherman [1]) will be more and more successful in convincing
conservative politicians that they need to vote to protect entrepreneurship
and (not really) free market capitalism, and liberal politicians that they
need to lend their support to secure the livelihoods of our poor struggling
artists. The more sinister elements in all of our governing bodies will jump
at any opportunity to introduce legislation which further erodes liberty but
allows them to monitor/control that damn Internet thing. All the while, most
artists still get fucked by the system, ClearChannel/LiveNation/GoldenVoice
are still shitty, evil monopolies, and the executives of major media firms
laugh uproariously all the way to the bank.

I sincerely doubt that the change will come from within. Not that there aren't
people who work for those organizations who care passionately about the arts,
who understand technology and its implications in significant and meaningful
ways, who generally have their hearts in the right places. There will be a
place for them in the arts economy of the future, but somebody new will be
signing their cheques (or bitcoins).

The decision-makers at the top are the ones who give off the impression that
they'd prefer to hide in their opulent executive chambers, doing their
damndest to legislate their competitors out of existence, and ultimately bleed
to death, gripping stacks of money, gold bullion spilling from their pockets,
then actually compete on the free market, and perhaps die an honorable death.

The Guardian conducted an interview with electronic music pioneer, brilliant
composer, omni-talented artist and all-around genius Brian Eno last year,
wherein he stated the following:

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a
living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should
have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right
for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It
couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is
and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a
bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be
used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were
the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your
whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along."

Two important points here:

1\. This was going to happen no matter what. These firms rose to prominence
during an odd period in the ongoing history of our world civilization when
ideas, emotions, and artistic expressions could be recorded, duplicated, and
feasibly distributed to consumers around the world. They happened to exist at
an exact moment on the timeline when it was just cheap enough that it could be
accomplished, but just expensive enough that a large firm was required to
organize workers, consolidate (what was, at the time, very expensive)
equipment, and coordinate distribution to drive marginal costs down. That
moment in time is passing. Marginal costs to produce and distribute media are
rapidly approaching zero.

2\. The inevitability of these changes in market conditions is no reason to
vilify media conglomerates. They did just spend about 60 years betting on
_all_ the wrong horses, but no one could _know_ that the Internet (and all it
entails) was coming. The reason to vilify these organizations lies in their
reactions to these changes. I'm not going to go down the list, suffice it to
say that much resentment towards labels/studios/production groups/etc. has
built up, not just on behalf of artists and others with a dog in the fight,
but in average consumers. That resentment just didn't exist a decade or two
ago. The "rights-holders" fought the inevitable, and now not only are they
going to lose, but they've so antagonized their customers—the only people who
may have been able to prop them up long-term if only due to sympathy—that
people who previously wouldn't have given a shit are now positively giddy at
the idea of someone like Jim Gianopulos standing, defeated and alone, with
nothing but a stupid look on his face and all his fucking whale blubber.

I assert that in no way is the continued existence of these lumbering,
bumbling, crumbling dinosaurs a requisite condition for humans to have the
opportunity to create, distribute, access or enjoy art, in any of its forms,
anywhere.

I'll be happy to watch them suffer, and eventually die. And that's on them.
100%.

[1]
[http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/05/21/a...](http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/05/21/another-
member-of-the-overpaid/)

(edit: quote formatting)

~~~
yuhong
"I, for one, would love to know where those hundreds of millions to produce
Avatar went, for instance."

Not what I mean. I mean things like exactly when and why they started doing
it.

"I sincerely doubt that the change will come from within. "

Yea, but someone else could do the debugging and maybe fix the root cause.

~~~
Ryanmf
My apologies.

If I've assumed at least one thing correctly and by "it" you mean producers
and studio heads artificially inflating budgets in order to ultimately line
their own pockets and the pockets of their friends, I would find it hard to
believe that there has been any point in the entertainment industry's history
when that _hasn't_ been prevalent.

As to the "why," what, you don't like money? Here, have some more money, now
now do you like it? Rinse, repeat.

I'll venture that we're doing the debugging right now, as we discuss this
matter. The debugging occurs every time a 14 year old reads about these issues
and wonders how the hell it could be possible, let alone legal, for these
entities to behave so miserably.

I'll indicate once more that I believe the root cause of this excess lies in
these unsustainable institutions and the selfish people who lead them. Leave
art to the artists, we'll/they'll figure out how to make money doing it, I'm
sure. If you're a failed lawyer or a failed artist or just a plain-vanilla
opportunist and you want to run a commodity business, sell canned peaches. Or
literally anything else in the world where there's an economic incentive tied
to an actual physical object, anywhere but your own mind.

~~~
yuhong
"and the selfish people who lead them. " I believe "legacy MBA" are the key
words. The old MBA courses taught a lot of horrible stuff, including self-
interest and control which are probably big factors.

------
kahawe
When I see all this talk about regulating the internet over the last years, I
cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these
gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going
on there...

~~~
nickolai
>I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these
gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going
on there...

That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is
that now they try to mess with it anyway.

~~~
kahawe
Yes, but that does not keep those same people from claiming the authority to
"regulate" and "change" it. Though I am wondering how they are actually going
to enforce all that on something as vast and international as "the internet".

And, let's be honest, all this was and is about absolutely nothing but the
music and movie industry crying over allegedly lost sales. Only the wordings
used to describe it have changed. (now it was "a more civilized internet"...
that sheer smug-ness is hard to miss.)

How can two expendable industries have that much influence on politics??? Even
with all their lobbying and "donations". It is not like we would suddenly lose
our western culture without them.

~~~
pyre
Governments have their own non-industry agendas too (i.e. WikiLeaks).

------
bluedanieru
I'm glad he went I guess, but I think Cory Doctorow had the right idea. All
this will serve to accomplish is give the summit an air of legitimacy and
they'll just make the invite list more exclusive next time. Meanwhile none of
these pig-fuckers are interested their arguments being challenged on their
merits. They know what they are about, and it is decidedly not the best
interests of society, or even creative expression.

 _"Speech has to be free but movies cost money."_

I doubt he even meant this to be a double entendre. He is literally trying to
be reasonable by suggesting that people should not have to pay blood money to
20th Century Fox in order to post something to their blog. He is seriously
trying to illustrate benevolence here.

So I doubt that trying to reason with these people serves a purpose.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Is it a form of censorship to not go to a powerful forum about censorship and
give your ideas against censorship?

If all those against, lets say "censorship", are silent when a major debate is
being heard on it, then who do you think will get all the PR, and win in the
end?

I think for Cory it is a privilege that he was invited and it would have been
a privilege to take part in the debate. It is an important debate, whatever
their motives may be. We are at a turning point, and all voices ought to be
heard, lest we, our society, makes an irrational decision because of the
silence of some.

Speak louder. That is, after all, what needs to be protected.

~~~
bluedanieru
I am torn on that because I'm not sure that choosing not to attend was a wise
decision.

But anyone who didn't back the interests of mass media going into that forum
had to know that the deck was stacked against them. That is, that they would
be regarded as a sideshow - a token representative from outside the sphere of
consensus. That's all John Barlow is here. Let's have EFF put together a
similar event and see how many representatives from the copyright regime show
up. Let's see if they get Jim Gianopulos from 20th Century Fox.

Let's not pretend this entire conference was anything other than a PR stunt.
These are the same assholes behind ACTA.

