

MPAA: The Cloud Is A Threat To Us And The Best Response Is Censorship - Steer
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130320/16033322402/motion-picture-association-cloud-is-threat-to-us-best-response-is-censorship.shtml

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csallen
Among other things, people are driven by incentives. This includes the fine
folks at the MPAA and RIAA. Given that their primary goal is making money, and
that rampant piracy causes them to lose money (or so they believe), they
clearly have a strong incentive to keep piracy in check, as well as any forms
of innovation that make piracy easier. If you account for a few other
universal psychological factors (cognitive dissonance, fear of loss, human
short-sightedness, desire for consistency) as well as situational factors
(lots of money with which to hire lawyers and lobbyists), their actions are
unsurprising. Expected, even.

Does this make them right? Of course not. But that's irrelevant.

What matters is that we as human beings comprehend our nature and strive to
create systems that account for all of its idiosyncrasies. We can spend all
day complaining about the immoral and illogical bad guys, but at the end of
the day, human nature is human nature. If a system exists that allows for and
incentives bad behavior, people will engage in bad behavior. Period.

In this particular conflict, we should be spending our effort fighting for a
government that: (a) Understands that no industry has a guaranteed "right" to
continued profit in the face of technological/market changes. (b) Affirms and
upholds the true purposes of copyright and patent law as originally intended:
to protect and encourage innovation for the good of the people, not to make
certain people rich. (c) Limits the influence of money on political process.
(most importantly imo)

Of course, this is all easier said than done. But it's good to at least focus
our efforts in the right direction.

~~~
Gormo
> (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly
> imo)

I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the particular problem at hand
here, or how it's necessarily consistent with the otherwise clear and valid
argument you're making about the nature of incentives and the functioning of
institutions as systems. What does "the influence of money on political
process" consist of in the status quo, by what means could it be limited, and
what new equilibrium do you expect to emerge if and when it is limited?

~~~
bo1024
CISPA

PIPA

SOPA

DMCA takedown abuse

Foreign raid on Megaupload

Mickey-Mouse copyright extensions

huge fines for filesharing

I think the list could go on. These are all outside-of-market solutions to the
content industry's competition problem. The hope is that if these avenues are
no longer available to the MPAA/RIAA, they will be forced to consider
collaborating with modern technology solutions that give consumers more
freedom, more choices, and more control (because the competitor, piracy, gives
people these things already).

~~~
rayiner
> I think the list could go on. These are all outside-of-market solutions to
> the content industry's competition problem.

In a way they are, but so are the laws against theft, fraud, embezzlement,
tortious interference with a contract, you name it. You can argue about what
the scope of the "right" here should be, and that is a separate argument, but
once a right is established, people should have the protection of the
government, within reason, in securing that right.

You probably don't oppose the fact that we don't leave protection of more
traditional property rights to "market solutions." That would of course be
ridiculous because you can't have markets without property rights.

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praptak
No sympathy for business that depends so heavily on obstructing innovation
that it requires special laws. The enforcement of these laws is a clear case
of socialized costs with privatized profit.

~~~
rayiner
Downloading copies of "Gears of War" is not "innovation", and the laws against
copying aren't any more "special" than the laws against fraud or embezzlement
or any of the other ways of violating peoples' property rights that aren't in
the Bible. Our whole system of existence depends fundamentally on people being
able to depend on the government to protect their rights. This is true even
when technology renders makes it easy to violate those rights.

~~~
thedufer
Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone
pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on
what might have been a sale.

We need to stop making these silly analogies. Only then will we be able to
attack the real problem - that we have no historical guidance on how to tackle
piracy, and have not yet come up with a way that makes sense.

~~~
rayiner
> Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone
> pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out
> on what might have been a sale.

This is a ridiculous trope. Say I take a Luis Vuitton bag from a store,
leaving an amount of money that precisely compensates LVMH for the cost of
replacing and restocking the bag, along with the fair rental value of the bag
during the time until it is restocked. No harm no foul right? LVMH has not
been materially harmed, right? They are in exactly the same position they
would be if I hadn't taken the bag. Since I compensated them for the marginal
cost of the bag, all they have lost is the potential profit on a potential
sale, and there is after all no guarantee I could have afforded the bag
anyway, right?

In our system, we don't measure harm in terms of the cost to put someone back
to the status quo ante. We also include the expected profit. E.g. if you
breach a contract with someone, which causes them to lose $200, you don't just
owe them the $200, you owe them the $200 _plus_ their expected profit on the
contract. We do this because in our system, people are entitled to the benefit
of the bargain. People are entitled to profit from the difference between what
the market will pay for a good and the cost of producing the good, even when
the marginal cost of that good approaches zero.

Re: analogies, analogies are tremendously valuable. They show us how things
that seem different can actually be understood in terms of familiar concepts.
The harm from copying is actually a perfect scenario in which analogies are
useful. The common refrain among people who are pro-piracy is that the
marginal cost of a copy approaches zero, so "no harm" is done by copying. This
is based on the fallacy that digital copying is somehow sui generis. Yet,
analogizing to other situations shows us that in the rest of the law, we don't
protect the marginal cost--we protect the sale price. We protect peoples'
right to profit from the market price of their products. The fact that the
marginal cost of producing a good is 35% of the sale price (iPhone) or 5% of
the sale price (LVMH bag), or 1% of the sale price (textbook) or 0.1% of the
sale price (an MP3) is irrelevant.

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joejohnson
Whenever I hear someone use the phrase "The Cloud" I replace it with "some
computers".

~~~
shared4you
I replace it with "the Internet".

~~~
ChuckMcM
I replace it with "marketing people."

~~~
chris_mahan
I replace it with "Computers I don't control that the NSA makes copies of."

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jeremiep
I'm waiting for the reply article "We The People: The MPAA is a threat to us
all and the best response is to make it illegal".

~~~
largesse
Go for it.

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slater
The joy of remembering I installed that cloud -> my butt extension.

“My butt also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the
pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.”

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ericcholis
“The cloud also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the
pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.”

Sorry, am I to understand that you are upset because pirates did something for
free that you could have charged for? Not that I defend piracy, but this is
the same song as VCRs, DVD burners, Napster, etc...

This argument is rehashed to the point where it's laughable, just like
everything else that comes out of Hollywood.

~~~
anigbrowl
OK, so where is the revenue stream for filmmakers? Filmmaking has been my day
job for a decade, and they're not that cheap to make, even with every
technological shortcut and agile technique that there is. So how can a
producer recover the cost of making a film, and ideally make enough to cover
the rent, bills and so on? Even the cheapest no-budget feature represents
about a man-year of cumulative effort.

~~~
biff
One possibility is to bundle your work with others and create your own stream-
on-demand network. A walled garden where you publish trailers and maybe one or
two free-to-access programs to YouTube with your branding on them, charge a
nominal fee for access to all content and comment privileges on site, and a
larger fee for site supporters who get some extra perk, signed stuff, or
whatever. Stream live events on the site from time to time, allow users to
interview talent, etc.

If you only have one or two things you're selling, and somebody has already
downloaded and watched them, you're out of luck. But if you're bundling with
other content serving diverse interests, offering the promise of new content
down the road, and giving your audience something for paying that they can't
get for pirating, you can set a better hook. Suddenly, when content from you
or your partners is pirated, it becomes a loss-leader advertisement for your
venture, and the cost of that (and benefit from it) is shared across your
group. There's a site that just got featured on Reddit not too long ago,
<http://www.swearnet.com>, that really captured my interest in this regard, if
you want to see an example of how this type of thing could work in action.

Piracy always struck me as something only the biggest interests could gain
anything from worrying about; an efficiency problem where so much product is
being moved that getting 1-2% more of it paid for could make more sense than
trying to reach 1-2% more audience, perhaps because they've already saturated
their target market.

~~~
anigbrowl
This is sort-of how the distribution industry works right now, and I agree
that over the long term technology should allow us to exploit long-tail
effects to do more with less, just as technology has made the movie production
process much more affordable and accessible. The problem at present is that
between a fall in (some) costs and the disruption of existing and long-
established distribution networks (accompanied by an apparent fall in
revenue), finding the investment capital is ironically tougher than ever.

[http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/18/film-school-
roger-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/18/film-school-roger-corman-
explains-why-b-movies-vanished-from-theaters/)

and
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1803469?uid=3739560...](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1803469?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101905540981)
are very much worth a read to understand why the film industry views piracy
with such trepidation.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
I don't see anything in the WSJ article about piracy. The JSTOR article is
behind a paywall, but from the preview it looks to be discussing much the same
thing: The major studios are destroying the independents as a result of more
control over distribution channels, greater economies of scale, larger budgets
to make better movies and their ability to spread risk over a larger number of
productions.

If anything that makes the argument _for_ new distribution technologies that
could allow the independents to reach greater audiences without using the
distribution channels under the control of the major studios.

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segmondy
MPAA is threat to tech industry and freedom. Tech is worth more than movie
industry. When will we stand up and stomp them down?

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farmdawgnation
I have difficulty reconciling the community of creative professionals who are
skilled enough to create the environment that amazing works of cinema emerge
from and the individuals who make comments like this. Are they really so
unimaginative that their solution is "filter anything that remotely resembles
sketchy"?

That philosophy applied to a city like New York would prevent people from
entering the city solely on the accusation that someone at one time maybe
broke the law. On what planet would someone think that the value gained by
implementing a policy like this would outweigh the potential for abuse and for
beautiful content (read: potential inspiration for new movies) to be blacked
out by a censorship screen? This doesn't even speak to the massive PR debacle
that always erupts from comments like this, be it about a VCR or "the cloud."

While we're on this topic, what's the definition of insanity again?

~~~
Spooky23
The money men in Hollywood aren't creative people. They are managers and
attorneys. When they don't want things to happen, they can draw upon the
resources of the unions who are stakeholders ensuring that congress gets the
message.

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RTigger
My favourite comment on the original post - "Old Man Yells At Cloud"

[http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2008...](http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg)

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maligree
I misread the title as "we don't understand this shit so clearly we gotta
fight it".

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meric
Oh, so it was them! Hong Kong was trying to pass a draconian copyright law
which meant that satire of existing copyrighted works became illegal, as well
as giving the option for the government to pursue offenders on behalf of
copyright holders - effectively meaning the government can pursue citizens
producing political satirical works.

[http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-
fo...](http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-foul-over-
copyright-bill)

