It's almost like the executives at the studios and distributors who own the rights to these films don't realize that, if I can't easily, quickly and conveniently buy access to their film legally, I will just bittorrent the damn thing. And personally I don't even feel guilty about it. It's 2014, join the 21st century or suffer the consequences.
I don't mind paying for content, and - in fact - I largely prefer to do so, so there will be more new content coming. But I am not going to bend over backwards to accommodate these laggards and dinosaurs refusal to pay attention to the world we live in.
It's almost like film consumers don't realize there are transaction and frictional costs to the licensing and distribution of a film, even for streaming, and many films are not popular enough to earn back those costs in the foreseeable future.
I don't think people realize how expensive it is to manufacture a film. I don't mean in terms of hiring big-name actors or in terms of striking prints and pressing DVDs, although those can be very expensive indeed. But even if you stay digital all the way it can be very expensive. Look at this distribution contract, in particular the list of deliverables on pps 19-20: http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/2011_bui...
Every time you have a rights transfer (eg to a new licensee) there's a agreement and a bunch of deliverables along those lines, which have to be negotiated and QCed. It's not a matter of just taking what people have an uploading it to (say) Netflix's servers; if there's something wrong with the digital copy or it isn't conformant to (ever changing) standards, then dissatisfied viewers are going to blame Netflix. The absolute bare minimum to get a piece of content through a distribution pipeline is about $5000.
People will put up with bad torrents of something because, well, it's free. But if they've paid for something (even though a subscription service) and it doesn't play back properly, that becomes a PR problem.
It's almost like film consumers don't realize there are transaction and frictional costs to the licensing and distribution of a film, even for streaming, and many films are not popular enough to earn back those costs in the foreseeable future.
Gee, that sounds a lot like somebody else's problem.
>Gee, that sounds a lot like somebody else's problem.
I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer entitlement (that is shared by many). I mean, how is it not the consumer's problem?
I am far from a big industry apologist, but why do many consumers of digital content believe that the content should be delivered on their own terms at a price they set, else stealing it is justifiable?
I mean it's not like air or water where you have to consume it or else die. If the industry produces a product that is woefully expensive and delivered extraordinarily inefficiently for most consumers, then isn't the correct consumer response to do without? I am trying to see the difference between this and believing that it's OK to steal a car because the manufacturer hasn't made it "affordable enough" for you.
When have consumers ever cared if a firm makes such a costly product that it can't be profitable? Consumers will never care about that. Appeals to make them care about "manufacturing costs" are pointless.
I think it's a little disingenuous to keep calling it "stealing." It's copyright infringement, and in my experience people have never felt as badly about doing it as compared to stealing. For instance, think back before digital books became popular: if you had a truly epic book of poems and you had several friends who wanted to read it and copies of the actual book were unusually difficult to procure, I think it used to be that many people would just run a large chunk of the book through a xerox machine without thinking twice. Similarly, I know people who used to get very into making custom mixed CDs as gifts for people. Copying an artwork has never been considered a crime on the level of stealing someone else's possession.
+1. The point about stealing is really good. It is really annoying tactic of trying to frame the issue as something other than it is.
Other than that, in many countries (for example in Finland) you are allowed to copy movies and music for your own use (though according to the latest law you aren't allowed to circumvent copy protection). You can even let other people do the copying for you. This used to be really common for example in local university library where the librarians copied latest journal articles for whole bunch of people.
Well, I find myself in a funny position, as I'm not much of a corporate/big industry apologist, so I don't really have a motive to be disingenuous. These questions are earnest head-scratchers for me.
To answer your first question, consumers care about manufacturing costs every time they agree to pay the producer of a good the producer's asking price. But, this is not so much about caring about manufacturing costs as it is about respecting ownership rights.
In any case, it's really splitting hairs to say that it's copyright infringement vs. stealing. In fact, I believe that making that distinction is what is disingenuous. To the extent that a copyright has value, it's because people respect that it represents ownership of a thing and, thus, the right to capture any value that the thing produces. When we don't respect that, then we have effectively taken any value from the creator for his/her creation. Meanwhile, we enjoy value from the creation, whether we use it for ourselves, re-sell it, or otherwise. How is that not stealing?
I do get that people have always made a distinction between copyright infringement and stealing, but my question is why is that so? Actually, my original question extends further than that to ask, why is it that people additionally feel entitled to do so?
Sorry I'm like a week late here, I don't check HN very frequently.
It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction.
It's my personal opinion that traditional ownership of property and the intellectual property afforded by copyright are such different concepts that all debate tends to collapse into incoherence once the concepts are taken to be the same.
For things that I personally own, there is no idea of a "public domain," and my belongings are not temporarily granted exclusively to me for the good of the public. My macbook is my macbook, full-stop. Copyright, on the other hand, is a temporary monopoly on the distribution of a creation because, at some point in time, the state deemed it beneficial to the public to incentivize artists/creators/inventors with this kind of financial benefit.
Why do we have any concept of a public domain if copyright and traditional ownership are perfectly interchangeable as ideas? Why is there no concept of "fair use" for my macbook or my car, but there is such a thing as "fair use" for any novel I might write?
My personal take: there isn't really any analogous concept of "ownership" for most things that could be considered artworks or intellectual creations. I can be credited as the original creator, and I can attempt to control the distribution of physical manifestations of my artifact, but in what sense do I actually "own," say, the dirty limerick that I wrote? The only way I can truly own it is to simply never show it to a soul. But that's not very satisfying, is it? And yet it's perfectly satisfying to keep my macbook solely to myself ...
>It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction...
I don't mean technically or literally. I mean in spirit. The legal distinctions you're making are obvious statements of fact. There's no need to debate them. It's your conclusion that the distinction should rightly lead to people making a moral distinction when violating one law vs. the other that's odd here.
For instance, you make a distinction between owning your macbook and copyright ownership, as if the latter is only conferred by the state, whereas the former is some sort of natural right. Maybe your failure to acknowledge the sameness of the two is the problem here. That is, the protections you enjoy around ownership of anything is a societal contract that is upheld by the state. Of course, this explains why, in some cultures, there is no notion of private property ownership at all.
I just find these discussions to be intellectually dishonest and loaded with rationalizations that skirt the moral issue. All of this talk of ownership really hangs on economic questions. And, if you want to be able to own your macbook without someone making some abstract argument that, say, the origins of the source material are free products of the planet and thus your macbook belongs to everyone, then it seems you also have to acknowledge the economic value of copyrights.
I think you've latched onto the wrong thing here. Clearly both things are conferred by the state. I was not arguing that one was more worthy because it somehow wasn't granted by the state, but rather that they are granted for clearly different reasons, because the two types of "ownership" are so vastly different that they required different laws.
The fact that both of these concepts are enforced by the state doesn't change the fact that there is still no real possibility of my macbook entering the public domain after an arbitrary numbers of years. That one form of property does do this, and another doesn't, would suggest that we're talking about two extremely different things, no?
If there were a fundamental "sameness of the two", then making an exact replica of my macbook would be the same thing as stealing it from me. Clearly that's not the case though. Copyright deals with who has the permission to make legal copies of a thing. Generally it's a much stickier question than the question of who owns a physical item. Sometimes I can legally copy a thing without being the copyright holder, though rarely, I'd say, can I legally steal something.
I don't think I'm arguing that people should make a moral distinction. I've argued that largely they already do. People have never cared about copyright infringement like they do theft.
Here's something I wonder about: have people ever gone significantly out of their way to respect copyright? or have they only do so when respecting copyright was also the most convenient way?
I'm not sure the answer means too much either way ...
---
FWIW, I either get my media legally or I don't bother getting it at all(1). I'm watching Game of Thrones currently through physical video store rentals. I'm not sure this is necessary but sometimes I feel like it's worth putting out there.
1 - The only exception was some long out-of-print books I wanted to read, which I downloaded illegal pdfs of since they were not available new, or in the libraries I searched, or in the used book markets I searched. So, that's the one notable time I violated copyright.
I think the key is that you're stating that fundamentally, copyright should have value. This is not a given. I can certainly imagine a society where copyright infringement is allowed and no value is given to copyright at all. I'm not saying I would want to live in that world, but it's definitely not the same as a world that allows stealing.
Calling it stealing is wrong. The producer of an item doesn't lose the original item when someone _copies_ it, compared to e.g. stealing somebody's car.
At most, you could argue that the producer loses an opportunity for a sale, but I think you would have a difficult time proving that. It is far more likely that the potential consumer would just refrain from procuring the item if it were not available for free (as a copy).
>Calling it stealing is wrong. The producer of an item doesn't lose the original item when someone _copies_ it, compared to e.g. stealing somebody's car.
That really is a horrible rationalization. The producer of an item doesn't lose the original item? No, she simply loses all value that would have otherwise accrued to her, if not for people deciding that her right to be compensated for her creation was trumped by their right to enjoy her creation at no cost or inconvenience to themselves.
So she loses the right to capture value from the thing she owns/created, while others derive value from it (whether for personal use or resale). Please tell me again. How is that not stealing? And, from where does the consumer derive that entitlement?
It is not stealing because theres is nothing that the original owner had and now does not have.
you could try to say that the person who downloaded something represents a potential sale lost, but i think its a bigger assumption than you are recognizing that the person would have ever paid for the property.
the producer has in no way lost all the value of the property, they have simply lost 1 single potential purchase.
I fail to see a material loss. Would you file an insurance claim if I broke into your house and made a copy of a dvd you owned? [if you think this is a bad example because of ip rights, change it to a picture you drew]
by your logic, reselling an item you own is also theft, since that represents a potential lost sale to the original producer - do you agree with this or do you have some way to reconcile this?
by your logic, reselling an item you own is also theft, since that represents a potential lost sale to the original producer - do you agree with this or do you have some way to reconcile this?
No it isn't. I'm selling a used item, and after I sell it will be gone. If I decide that I shouldn't have sold it later all (which has happened me a couple of times with musical instruments) then I'll have to go buy another one.
This is important because economic value is a function of scarcity. That's why you pay nothing for the air you breathe but if you go scuba diving you will buy or rent the oxygen tanks - breathable air is dangerously scarce under water.Now, do the economic interests of creators and publishers depend upon an artificial scarcity? Of course they do. But that artificial scarcity is supported by law because it is the flip side of the (usually) significant amount of time and money that goes into creating the original work. If you can't exercise any control over the distribution then it's very hard to make your money back and eventually producers exit the market, leading to a reduction in consumer choice.
I keep waiting for this "reduction in consumer choice" to happen, but it never seems to materialize. I have more entertainment choices than ever. Maybe that's part of your problem?
The other thing that never seems to materialize is declining revenues for the industries that are supposedly being victimized. You've mentioned several times how difficult things are for those working on lower-budget productions, and intimated that piracy and consumer "entitlement" is to blame, but when's the last time you took a look at the film industry's financials? Some people are making more money in the poor, victimized film industry than ever before. Just not you.
Irrespective of your rationalizations, the fact remains that for any producer to make money, a considerable number of consumers have to play by the rules and pull out their wallets.
That's the salient point. Everything else is just noise and strawmen.
So, your "more entertainment options than ever" are being subsidized by others, if you are not pulling out your wallet.
You've still denied the original producer a potential sale. the person you sold your phone to might have bought one directly from apple instead.
So by the other commenters line of reasoning, you have stolen "value"
The fact that the phone is physical has nothing to do with the line of reasoning being presented.
I am not arguing that piracy should be totally fine and theres nothing being done wrong, I'm simply disagreeing that copyright infringement is the equivalent of theft
I love these "theft" arguments. Can you imagine the shitstorm that we'd see if the concept of the public library was only just now being proposed? Librarians would be branded as rapists, or something equally ridiculous.
>It is not stealing because theres is nothing that the original owner had and now does not have
This completely ignores my point about depriving the owner of the value of the thing. If you create something and offer it for sale, yet every single person simply pirated it vs. buying it from you, then haven't they removed the value of this thing that you still own? Owning it becomes worthless to the creator, yet millions of others who did not create or pay for it are now obtaining value from it.
The argument that the creator still owns it is pedantic and facile. It's just a rationalization that ignores the real question of value. You knowingly deprive the producer of all value of owning a thing, then say "But, it's OK. We left you with the thing".
>you could try to say that the person who downloaded something represents a potential sale lost, but i think its a bigger assumption than you are recognizing that the person would have ever paid for the property.
It's not an assumption that there is demand for the product if people are willing to download it. And, economics (as well as common sense) tells us that there is some price above zero that people are willing to pay for that which they demand. Isn't that all we really need to know?
>the producer has in no way lost all the value of the property, they have simply lost 1 single potential purchase
And if no one pays and the producer thus loses all of the value of "all" of the potential purchases, then will you say the producer has been harmed? Because you really must conclude that if you carry this line of reasoning forward. So, now, at what point along the continuum of one pirated copy to all pirated copies has the producer experienced an actual theft, and how is it the consumer's right to make that determination? Also, are you saying that as long as some people are willing to pay, then others have the right not to pay? Because that's another conclusion to which your logic leads. So, those who are willing to pay should subsidize those who are not?
These arguments for piracy really run out of logic oxygen quickly and collapse on themselves.
>Would you file an insurance claim if I broke into your house and made a copy of a dvd you owned? [if you think this is a bad example because of ip rights, change it to a picture you drew]
Or, "here's a really bad example that does nothing to refute your argument. Please help me by coming up with a better example to refute your own argument".
No thanks. That's a pretty lazy "argument-style", don't you think?
>by your logic, reselling an item you own is also theft, since that represents a potential lost sale to the original producer
That's not my logic. What's so difficult to understand about compensating the producer of something you wish to consume?
Look for clues in your own question. You used the word "own". Think about that.
>If you create something and offer it for sale, yet every single person simply pirated it vs. buying it from you, then haven't they removed the value of this thing that you still own?
I think this is where the misunderstanding occurs. You feel that the creator owns all potential value immediately when the thing is created.
I dont believe that this is true, the owner owns only that value which they are able to realize, if they are unable to realize the value they expected then that is not theft.
It is however copyright infringement to make and distribute copies. I am not trying to defend piracy as a whole, i am simply saying a person downloading a piece of media is not committing theft; they are only taking part in copyright infringement, you are trying to make the argument that it is the same thing as theft.
>It's not an assumption that there is demand for the product if people are willing to download it.
Correct.
>And, economics (as well as common sense) tells us that there is some price above zero that people are willing to pay for that which they demand. Isn't that all we really need to know?
where did this come from? demand of an infinitely reproducible product does not necessitate "some price above zero" it can be exactly zero dollars that people are willing to pay.
There are any number of things at any given moment that I would like to have but would not pay for, if i were able to get those things for free, i would.
People will take free things they dont even want simply because they are free (free tshirts at sporting events), does that mean each of those tshirts represents a lost sale because all of those people clearly demanded a t shirt and would pay "some price above zero" for it?
> So, now, at what point along the continuum of one pirated copy to all pirated copies has the producer experienced an actual theft, and how is it the consumer's choice to make that determination?
Theft is never experienced, that is my point. There is a crime committed when the content is unlawfully distributed, that is copyright infringement.
>No thanks. That's a pretty lazy "argument-style", don't you think?
You missed the point i was making. Is it theft if i break into your house and copy a picture that you have drawn?
Is it theft if i distribute it?
The answer is no, it is copyright infringement and clearly not that same thing as if i had STOLEN the drawing.
>That's not my logic. What's so difficult to understand about compensating the producer of something you wish to consume?
Again you totally missed the point. By your logic, which is that the producer of a good should be compensated for every procurement of the good by an end customer.
By selling something used, lets say an iPhone, you are stealing (by your definition) from Apple. Not only are you stealing from them but you are directly profiting from that theft. You have removed Apple from the sale of the good that they produced, denying them a potential sale.
Even if you GAVE your old iPhone to a friend, by your definition, this is theft since Apple was denied a potential sale.
I think it is clear that neither of those things is actually theft, nothing was stolen.
>You feel that the creator owns all potential value immediately when the thing is created.
That is a bit simplified, but yes, it's essentially what I believe. In your estimation, who else should own that value?
>I dont believe that this is true, the owner owns only that value which they are able to realize, if they are unable to realize the value they expected then that is not theft.
That logic seems so completely and obviously circular that I'm thinking that my interpretation can't be what you actually meant. Here's what I read. Please correct where I've misunderstood you:
The owner provides a means for realizing the value of a creation (i.e. attaches a means of distribution and a price). People side-step that distribution and opt for a means not authorized by the owner, which does not compensate the owner. Then, the conclusion is, "well, the owner wasn't able to capture the value, so it's not theft".
Seems to me that the theft is the reason the owner was not able to realize the value.
>where did this come from? demand of an infinitely reproducible product does not necessitate "some price above zero" it can be exactly zero dollars that people are willing to pay.
Basic economics. Generally, the reproducibility of a product does not dictate the demand for it, only the supply. Accordingly, reproducibility may affect the price, but not the demand. People don't want something more because there are more of them, although oversupply may lower the price to one that more people are willing to pay.
The bigger point is that you are confusing demand with price elasticity. When consumers want a product (demand), there is some price that some number of those consumers will pay for it. If you couldn't download a movie for free, but could get it for $0.01 vs. $100.00, you may well choose $0.01. But, you'd pay something that represents how much you value it. You are an exception to this only if you never buy anything. Other than that, this applies to you as well, no matter how much you seem to suggest that you never pay for things you want, but stock up on free stuff you don't want.
I don't know. I can't determine why such a simple concept becomes so tedious, with all of the circular logic and red-herrings about breaking-and-entering to copy drawings, re-selling used iPhones and such.
Through all of the posts here, no one has clearly elucidated why people have a right to the value created by someone else's labor, other than by paying the price that person has set.
Pharmaceuticals: one product that's also costly to research and manufacture, and the firm that gets the magic compound first gets a couple of decades of monopoly. Plebs like us can't yet synthesize a copy of the medical product easily, so the pharmaceutical company has far fewer chokeholds to deal with to make sure no copies get out. Alas for media companies, copies are harder to manage.
As for not calling it "stealing", but "copyright infringement" instead ... no! "Copyright infringement" would be distributing the media (in whole, part, or integrated into other product) to others as if you had the rights to do so. That's not what consumers of illicitly downloaded materials are doing. They're "stealing".
If that is stealing, then stealing is a good thing. If everyone started stealing food, cars, electricity and fresh air in the same manner, all the world's food problems would be solved overnight. We'd have a practically infinite supply of everything.
Now, that is an interesting response that takes the discussion in an entirely different direction.
What you are advocating is a wholly different game with a new set of rules. I actually question the current economic system, the outsized wealth it produces for some, and artificial scarcity it creates for others, etc.
But, I think there's something between anarchy and a soulless brand of capitalism.
The fact that under a first-sale model, there are business models that are able to handle selling this kind of long-tail content perfectly well, despite the higher up-front costs for printing up a batch of disks. But since streaming allows them to sell exclusively, which allows them to strike nice deals that look good up front but then wind up squeezing everyone in the industry and being crap for consumers, they wonder why revenues are declining and they can't sell anything, but never actually have the guts to go back to a model that worked but gives them less negotiation leverage with their vendors.
> I am trying to see the difference between this and believing that it's OK to steal a car because the manufacturer hasn't made it "affordable enough" for you.
Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio. Yes, the content originally cost money to produce, but it makes absolutely no difference to them whether I watch it on a streaming site or spend the night at the local pub instead.
What they're doing is more akin to someone having an open air concert that costs $50 bucks to get in and you have to go through a metal detector and pat down to ensure you don't bring in any recording devices, and then trying to complain that some people just listen to the concert from outside the fence.
Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio.
Simply not true. The marginal cost of a streaming download are near zero. the fixed costs of making a film available for streaming are non-trivial. Also, the costs fall on producers many of whom work outside studios.
Do you think all this stuff just takes care of itself? It doesn't. Going from a completed cut that's good enough to screen at a festival to a streaming deliverable in a great deal of work, and QCing it all is extremely time-consuming. It involves weeks of work for multiple specialists. Measuring compliance can be automated to a certain extent. Repairing defects cannot. The standards are the same for the latest blockbuster and for your little low-budget feature or that cool out-of-print classic cult film you managed to acquire the rights to. If you're lucky and planned it all out in advance, you might spend only $10,000.
Excuse me if I've got a bee in my bonnet about this, but this stuff is what I do for a living a lot of people seem to think that getting a film onto a streaming service is just a matter of a quick transcode and an FTP PUT. It's actually a ton of highly skilled work.
I'm not arguing that there are no costs to delivering streaming content. What I'm arguing is that there are no per-stream costs to the studio, Netflix, or anyone else (other than the hosting site) for someone who watches a stream on a pirate streaming site, so it's not really comparable to stealing a car. It still may be unethical, but it's definitely a different ethical category than stealing something which has a per-unit cost; actually depriving someone of a valuable object that they posses is different enough that the analogy doesn't work.
If one person can rip a DVD or bluray and put it on Piratebay for others in an hour or two, then there's a perfectly acceptable free alternative.
Weeks of work for specialists really sounds over the top, as I doubt that anyone can tell the difference between a competent pirate version and a specially produced Netflix copy.
It's pretty obvious that the main thing prohibiting streaming / download releases are licensing and other legal requirements.
Because if it isn't done properly it won't play back properly, and when something doesn't play back properly the blame usually falls on the distributor, whether they're a broadcaster, streaming provider, or DVD wholesaler. The only reason the 'competent pirate version' can exist is because someone else laid the groundwork for it.
Weeks of work for specialists really sounds over the top
That attitude is why first time producers almost invariably run out of money in post-production. Every film is different and has to be QC'ed individually, and if there are problems they'll have to be addressed individually. Broadcast and streaming standards are pretty stringent and if something doesn't pass then no payments are made.
I still don't see why this entitles consumers to the content on their own terms.
>Really? A car has fixed, very high costs per item. Downloading from a streaming site has zero costs for the studio...
Well, my question was from a moral standpoint. Why is it morally different from stealing a car?
Still, it's interesting to see the responses. Some, including the comment at which my original reply was aimed) say it doesn't matter what the producers' expenses are. It's their problem.
But, here you've gone to lengths to explore the economic mechanics irrespective of the moral question. The thing is that even if your economic analysis is perfect, it still avoids the question: what in any of this gives the consumer the right to wholly disregard the producer's economic considerations, analyze them to determine whether the producer is entitled to payment, or otherwise do anything other than decide whether to obtain the product by buying it or doing without?
>...then trying to complain that some people just listen to the concert from outside the fence.
But, if the people outside the fence were trespassing or were otherwise informed that they should buy a ticket, then the complaints would be no less valid.
> Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds an awful lot like some sort of weird consumer entitlement
It doesn't matter what you want to depict it as. You can browbeat people all you want, shake your head at humanity, none of it matters. You're not going to browbeat people into not watching a movie they want to see when all it takes is just a few clicks. These companies spend tens of millions of dollars marketing a product to create demand and then are unable to satisfy the demand. I don't have any kind of physical player anymore. Nothing in my house plays DVDs, BlueRays, VHS, nothing. If I want to see a movie I check on Netflix, I check on Amazon Video, and then if I still don't see it I check out. I don't pirate, but it is frustrating even for me. I can't watch any of the Star Wars films. Sure I guess there are some kind of weird deals that prevent these companies from making these changes, but all that means to me is that I can't watch those movies any more, and for others it means they'll just pirate it, with no fucks given about what you might think about that.
>> "... why do others not only feel no remorse about it, but actually seem to feel entitled to do [piracy]?"
Because in market societies, we have all been trained since birth to find the goods and services we want at the lowest possible price in the market. I feel entitled to buying Wrigley's Doublemint gum for 75 cents instead of 2 bucks, because it's readily available at that price. In this case the price of movies is zero, so people feel entitled to that price.
How about content producer insanity and entitlement?
1) Content producers make a movie and want me to watch that movie (out of the few million other movies released so far) and expect me to play with their terms and pay whatever price they've set? Oh, how entitled are they. I'd have to live at least a few hundred years to watch everyone's movie, and I have no clue how I could afford it. The supply is greater than I could demand in a lifetime.
2) Content producers make movies but don't expect me to be able to pay for it and watch it. Via copyright threats, they also send me the very clear message that they don't want me to watch it unless I can do it on their terms. Why would anyone spend time and effort making a movie and then not wanting people to see it? Oh how insane are they.
I don't really want to disrespect authors' wishes, so if they really want to tell me to f__k off and not watch their movie, that's exactly what I do. And through that selfish, entitled and insane attitude they discourage me from even wanting to pay them when I could. I think it's their loss. I don't watch their movies.
But I can't say anyone's in the wrong for disrespecting such insanity and therefore making copies of said movies (which comes at no cost for the author).
>How about content producer insanity and entitlement?
They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled.
And you are entitled to choose not to consume it. Now, perhaps if enough people made that choice then "producer insanity" would come to an end. But, until then...
They created it and they own it. They have the right to issue insane terms for its consumption and they are, by definition, entitled.
No, they "own" limited rights to control its distribution for a limited time. This is not a natural right; it's granted to them by copyright law. Copyright is not an entitlement, but rather an explicit bargain with society.
Copyright law is brand new, as laws go. It can and has changed, usually to the consumer's detriment, and it clearly needs to change again, but in the other direction. When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
If the producer wants to "own" the content itself, the only way to do that is to lock it away in a vault, never attempting to license or sell it at all. They are of course "entitled" to do that, if they want.
>Copyright is not an entitlement, but rather an explicit bargain with society.
Of course it is. The notion that we would buy anything at all vs. outright taking what we want from others is representative of an explicit bargain with society. If you want to throw out property rights and start from scratch then, sure, we can dispense with this entire discussion posthaste.
>When the law does not respect the people, the people will not respect the law.
That sounds noble, but there's clearly a difference between advocating change and making up your own laws. But, beyond this, we're talking about an attitude of consumer entitlement, as if creators literally shouldn't have rights to their own creations. Read other comments on this thread.
>If the producer wants to "own" the content itself, the only way to do that is to lock it away in a vault, never attempting to license or sell it at all.
I earnestly can't tell what this comment is supposed to mean. Are we advocating that no one ever create anything or simply that their punishment for attempting to derive economic value from their creations is to have that value outright taken from them?
They own it for sure. But I'm not sure they should be entitled to freely set the terms under which the public may interact with copies of the work once released. And they definitely shouldn't be entitled to abuse the justice system and call the big men with guns to trample through the door and ruin the life of someone who didn't play along with these insane terms.
By definition they may indeed be entitled, but I'm not sure their entitlement to people's wallet and liberty (which the producers don't own) is morally any more sound than the "consumer entitlement" to movies (which the consumers don't own).
So you're arguing for price controls. Who's going to set them, the government? You don't want producers to price their own offerings, and presumably you recognize that if the price is set at the consumer's preference of $0 then it won't be economical to make any films.
Copyright is not a natural right. It was made up from whole cloth a relatively short time ago. The only rights the producer has are explicitly granted to them by the government. Therefore, yes, price controls are a valid point to raise. I'm not in favor of them, but I can't argue against them on indignant moral grounds.
I think this can of worms was opened when the DMCA extended copyright in directions no one had ever contemplated before. The content producers pulled all kinds of new "rights" out of their asses, such as the right to have the government act as their own private police force to back up their own private encryption and protection mechanisms, and the legislators cheerfully signed them into law. It should have been obvious to the legislators that this was equivalent to a perpetual copyright grant, but if it was, nobody cared. When the DMCA was passed, copyright became a one-sided affair. Any notion of a bargain with society involving limited rights granted for limited times flew out the window.
Is it surprising that this leaves consumers feeling "entitled," as people keep saying in this thread?
> Copyright is not a natural right. It was made up from whole cloth a relatively short time ago.
All legal rights are made up from whole cloth and consist only of what is granted by the government, the only difference between is how old the original conception and most recent revision are. Many are based on some conception of natural rights (including at least some conceptions of copyright, which are grounded in the concept of the ownership of one's own labor.)
"Natural rights" are a quasi-religious set of value statements, not facts (or even fact claims.) A statement that something is or is not a natural right is not a claim about the situation that exists in the external universe, it is a statement about one's personal values.
Agreed, but that's not how the (religiously-influenced) US government has historically worked. They've always made a distinction between rights endowed by the FSM versus rights that are enumerated by law.
There's obviously a market. By not making it available, they are throwing away whatever revenue, however small, they could have gained, and others are capturing this revenue (if not the free hoster, the advertising firms or carriers along the way in some manner do).
That the rights holders have not collectively figured this out yet is no longer the consumer's problem (for a large percentage of consumers) because consumers have just decided that they are willing to pay the small cost or illegally obtaining (that is, small when averaged across occurances based on consequences) versus figuring out if it's even possible to get a legal copy of the movie for them.
In other words, consumers will get the movie either way, that the rights-holders are not getting money for it is someone else's problem (at least, that's how I interpreted the original post).
>In other words, consumers will get the movie either way, that the rights-holders are not getting money for it is someone else's problem (at least, that's how I interpreted the original post).
Well, your overall comment is just a statement of what's happening. We all know there's a market, demand, etc. And, your interpretation of the original post is pretty much how I interpreted it as well.
But, it still begs my original question: why is it OK for "consumers to get the movie either way?" Why is it someone else's problem?
That someone else actually owns the movie. Where else do we actually believe it's OK to take something that belongs to someone else simply because we don't like their terms? Then, we turn around and blame them for our stealing it because they should have offered better terms?
It's just weird. I mean, if people want to steal something, then just steal it and be ready to pay the consequences as with anything else. But, all of this rationalization that they somehow deserve to own it because they were inconvenienced by the rightful owner is what I don't understand.
>In a liberal society, the question of "why should a citizen be allowed to do X" is wrong. The proper question is, "why not?"
The "why not" is implicit in my question, but I will rephrase if you prefer: why should content producers not be able to enjoy the economic benefit of their labor?
>Taking means "dispossess someone of (something); steal or illicitly remove". There's no "taking" involved.
This rationalization is a pretty old one and it's just wrong. The economic value of the creation is absolutely being destroyed and thus the creator is being dispossessed of that value.
The "why not" is implicit in my question, but I will rephrase if you prefer: why should content producers not be able to enjoy the economic benefit of their labor?
Your question is senseless. As a producer of Free/Libre works, I can assure you there's no impediment to enjoying such benefits (it's my whole income). But it's my job to figure out how to capture them, not society's, like in any other activity.
This rationalization is a pretty old one and it's just wrong. The economic value of the creation is absolutely being destroyed and thus the creator is being dispossessed of that value.
It's not being destroyed, it's simply remaining with the consumer instead of being transferred to the content creator.
The question is quite sensible, although as with anything, it can be rendered senseless by reducing it to a logical fallacy:
"I am an artist. This does not harm me. Therefore, this does not harm any artists".
>there's no impediment to enjoying such benefits
Surely there are, else this thread would not exist.
>it's my job to figure out how to capture them, not society's
That seems absurd on its face, but perhaps you mean something other than what can otherwise be extended to say that there should be no contract law, property rights, etc.? If so, please enlighten us as to how you capture benefits without any assistance from society/civil law.
>It's not being destroyed, it's simply remaining with the consumer instead of being transferred to the content creator
Surely you know that statement was intended to say the value is destroyed for the creator. But, if not, there it is.
Posters above feel entitled to demand the content on their own terms because if they don't agree they can easily just download it without facing any consequences, and feel for some reason that Hollywood should now cater to their demands.
If there was a 99% chance of being fined / sued the next day after torrenting the latest blockbuster, the entitlement attitude I think would change dramatically.
I think calling it "entitlement" is doing a disservice to the situation and the complex motivations and desires on all sides that have lead to and inform the future of the current situation. There's blame all around, from consumers that are willing to skirt and outright break the law, to rights-holders that have time and again resorted to morally ambiguous contracts and actions with a consumer base that's quickly coming to the conclusion they can't always expect a fair deal[1].
That said, only one of these groups has any real power to make a change in the short term. In the long term other possible solutions exist, such as through enacting new laws, but that seems to backfire as often as not given a enough time for the landscape to change yet again, so I don't hold hope that a good solution will come out of that.
I think you touch a key issue here. Changing the situation is really difficult. From consumer point of view pirating and campaigning for changing laws are pretty much the only ways that have potential to make a difference. Boycotting is not practical, because it so very rarely has any effect when the product is very desirable for many people.
True, but there is no chance of being fined/sued and there never will be. That's the reality we live with, and there are proven business models that will make a huge amount of money in that reality. Businesses that attempt to live in a separate reality will suffer. It's hardly fair, but it is fact.
Indeed. But, then, I give credit to most HNers for having the ability to read beyond the obvious and understand the real question being asked, and the real issue at hand. Those who engage in higher thinking often assume that the obvious is a given, and that the real matter must lie elsewhere. They would therefore be unlikely to commit, say, the faux pas of restating the obvious as a conclusion.
Thankfully, many HNers are able to engage in such higher thinking. There is a small percentage, however, who generally seem very nearly oblivious. But, they typically announce themselves through their misguided, yet uncannily self-assured comments.
1) If the costs of distribution are high enough that rights holders will not make a profit, they may cease distribution to avoid the loss. This is fine and fair and good.
2) Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder, so long as there is no marginal cost to the rights holder. For example, an online game may represent a continuing marginal cost to the rights holder if they are still running servers, but pirating a movie represents zero marginal cost.
3) Therefore, it is not immoral to pirate a work where the rights holder has made it impossible to obtain the film through legal, profit generating channels.
------- LINE OF MORAL AMBIGUITY -------
4) Where a rights holder makes it unreasonably difficult to obtain a work, either through price, geographical distribution or unnecessary technical encumberment, one may cease to be a potential profit generating customer of the rights holder.
5) Therefore, pirating (again with 0 marginal cost to the rights holder) is not immoral, as the rights holder is not losing potential profit as a result.
Distribution by others at that point by definition represents no loss to the rights holder
Oh yes it does. What if the rightsholder can't afford to legally distribute it, but hopes to be able to at a later stage eg due to lowering of technical costs? Copyright infringement substantially reduces the net present value of an IP asset. Because the marginal cost of torrenting etc. is virtually zero, it's easy for copyright infringers to permanently crowd out rights holders.
The bait-and-switch in a lot of pro-piracy arguments, which many proponents are not really conscious of, is that the rights holders are not monolithic. You're telling today's film production companies and professionals that they don't deserve to get paid because of what other firms did in the past.
A vast amount of film production is carried out by small startup-like businesses that have about as much in common with the big studios as a small-time app developer has with Apple Computer. Should I be able to download apps for free because iPhones are expensive?
Fair enough. But I would also wager that a vast, vast amount of piracy is of big studio content, and not the small startup-like businesses you are arguing for.
Well, you're not missing anything. These arguments fall apart the moment 'stealing it' becomes part of the discussion.
The correct way to protest a content offering in our society is to not consume it. That's actually true of any consumer product. If you just steal it instead, you're signaling the producer that you do want their product; you'd like to think that the proper response would be to make a product that entices you to buy instead of steal, but unless almost everyone is stealing, it's probably cheaper to lobby for the DMCA. Which is what happened.
As far as the frictional costs, etc. alluded to earlier, I actually have no idea what that means. I think it may mean there is a lot of hand-waving built-in to what media costs, making it very difficult for me as a consumer to know what I'm actually paying for and, if I'm value conscious, to determine whether it's worth the price.
> If you just steal it instead, you're signaling the producer that you do want their product; you'd like to think that the proper response would be to make a product that entices you to buy instead of steal, but unless almost everyone is stealing, it's probably cheaper to lobby for the DMCA. Which is what happened.
RIAA/MPAA and other interested parties who experience their content being copyrighted must be at least happy that people think of it as stealing. I still think of stealing as a very to describe someone taking something that belongs to someone else, and depriving the victim of the object in the process. Downloading is copyright infringement, which, also happens to be illegal, but it is not stealing.
It may be called infringement, but the process and outcome is really the same as theft. These companies have something they own, they have the right to control how it's distributed, they intend to distribute it to you under specific terms involving the exchange of currency, and instead of going along with that or choosing not to consume it, you're just stealing it.
I'm clearly not a legal scholar but I am not sure infringement is really the term for this anyway - I tend to think that applies more when you copy something and then begin to pass it off as yours for redistribution or whatever.
I think where people get hung up on this is that it's hard to say what a copy of an idea is worth. It's so trivial to copy a movie that it's easy to say it's worth nothing. But I don't think the value of something controls whether it can be stolen, only the severity of the theft.
If you are in the business of selling you are in the business of removing obstacles blocking me from exchanging my money for your goods. It is absolutely not entitlement to expect that to be an ongoing cycle of improvement.
It has been years since this business model has been proven beyond doubt yet there is still no sign of any real attempts to embrace it. In other markets that would be considered feckless but in this case we're expected to believe the reason is 'business is hard'?
Please have a look at some of my other posts in this thread, especially the ones with links to deliverables for distribution. There's a limit to the amount you automate this sort of thing because every film is different. The legal and technical problems that need to be solved for one film may be completely different for the next one.
For people who program for a living, how do you feel about managers who come and ask why it's taking so long to get the bugs out or implement a new feature, and then dismiss your explanation with 'but it's all software, can't you just debug it the same way you did that other project last year? I mean it's just code, right?'
Because that's exactly what I'm hearing from people here.
True enough, but that's no excuse for the thousands of films which have been available on Netflix and no longer are, due to whatever rolling window system seems to be in place for availability. The deliverables costs have been long since paid.
I think all that you said is true. I think people who don't have a good understanding of the industry have trouble seeing why these things are so expensive.
However, as your post outlines, a lot of these barriers are ones that the industry itself have put up. That same industry can tear them down. The fact that people are hosting a torrent, for no compensation, suggests that the minimal cost of providing the content is outweighed by the potential interest in viewing it - even at low quality.
It looks like a product with a lot of overhead that could be delivered a lot cheaper.
This would tug at my heartstrings if there wasn't so much fuzzy math in Hollywood keeping actors and workers from getting paid appropriately. I shed as many tears for the record companies that gleefully screwed musicians out of their royalties for years.
Well, as one of those workers, you are not doing a goddamn thing for my economic freedom when you pirate a movie. Are you gonna send me any portion of what you saved if you download something I worked on via Bittorrent instead of paying for it?
Because if you're not, that argument is total fucking BS.
The actual digital content issue isn't primarily contractual problems. It's more like Ford saying, "No, we won't sell you that car, you have to buy our car subscription service with a new vehicle every month that you don't want and can't use!"
Sure there are frictional costs etc, but to pretend that they--rather than stone age business models--are the primary cause of difficulty in legally accessing digital content is, well, not entirely sustained by the facts. HBO could easily make back any amount of cash by allowing download purchases of GoT etc. But they don't. They simply don't offer their content for download sale, and people stream instead (which is wrong, but entirely predictable.)
I don't really care about Game of Thrones. I do care about the fact that it's increasingly hard to raise money for smaller film projects that aren't linked to an existing successful franchise.
Unfortunately it's nearly as easy to torrent low-budget indie movies as it is flagship TV shows and blockbuster movies, so guess which projects don't manage to recoup their costs of production or make a profit?
Also, it has never been cheaper to make a movie, distribute it and fund it. On a kickstarter budget you could certainly make a film, as people have done in the past. Then, you can see if people want to watch the movie before you make it. Many people don't want to watch low budget indie documentaries, however the ones's that do are often willing to pay.
It depends what sort of film you want to make. For documentaries, that model can work quite well. If you want to make a narrative feature it's a great deal trickier. That's why the most successful Kickstarter projects in this area have been tied to existing franchises, eg the Veronica Mars film.
But suppose you have an original concept that's not a film version of a graphic novel and doesn't have a built-in fanbase: that's an awful lot harder to get interest for, and the methods you can use to get interest (eg sharing the script or key art or storyboards) can also limit your upside, ie the more you reveal to potential backers the less suspense you can create in the work itself.
It's doable and crowdfunding is definitely going to become an increasingly important business model, but it's still very far from an ideal approach. When I look at narrative projects on Kickstarter I can tell a lot just from the tagline, picture, and budget they're seeking. And for 90% of people trying to do a feature the prognosis is negative - either the quality is going to be dreadful, or the producers clearly don't know what they're doing, or everyone in front of and behind the camera is going to be working for free (with a correspondingly higher risk of non-completion). Unfortunately, the most competent ones (in terms of demonstrable ability to deliver a marketable film) are less likely to get funded, because of the amount of money they need to raise.
And if the studios are OK with that arrangement, then more power to them. I'm just tired of them whining and moaning about piracy while desperately trying to cling to an outdated distribution model.
If youtube can host an arbitrary amount of high-quality movies forever and for free, then clearly the cost of putting movies online can be very low. The only reason it costs so much to distribute a digital movie is because the movie industry has decided it must cost that much. It's up to them to fix that problem if they want to remain relevant.
YouTube won't reject your film for quality control reasons. Getting the final file onto the CDN is the easy part. Getting it to look right and play back properly takes a lot of work.
If this is the case, then it sounds like a business opportunity. Someone needs to make it easy for these people to sell and stream their content legally. Not being a film producer, I thought that Amazon Instant Video and iTunes did this already, but if not, someone needs to make a simple way to get distribution via those services. I know that there are services that can get music on iTunes for like $30....I'd be quite surprised if a similar service doesn't exist for video.
If it's too hard to buy, digital content will be stolen these days. Film producers either need to embrace this and adapt, or find a new line of work.
Really nothing infuriates me more than when CanIStream.it tells me that the movie I want to watch is unavailable to stream for purchase or subscription on any service.
I pay for Netflix, Prime, Hulu, and will gladly rent just about any film for $4.99 yet more than once per week I find films that I would need to go to a store and purchase just to see.
It would be neat if we could easily wrap these various streaming services up in one UI so that you simply search for a movie and it streams it from Netflix or hulu if possible and bittorrent if not. Its unfortunate that in today's world this would get you sued out of existence.
Tivo currently does this (albeit without a bit torrent option) for upcoming live TV, Comcast on-demand, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video and Netflix. There may be more now, but those are the ones I use. You search for a title and it will tell you where it's available and you can watch it from any of them directly from the Tivo UI.
That's a rather interesting startup/service idea. On setup you tell it what services you have accounts on, and then when you search it will tell you the options (with links to signup on new services), and always with a "BitTorrent at your own risk" fallback.
On the contrary, Netflix recently shut down their API and CanIStreamIt was one of only 8 services they allowed continued access. I think they understand the value of it.
Here's something that infuriates me more. I go to canistream.it to find that a movie is available for rental on iTunes for $2.99. I then open iTunes to find that here in Australia they will charge me $4.99 Australian, which is $4.42 USD. I'd rather rent legally, but it infuriates me to see this global discriminatory price gouging.
But the additional cost goes to flipping the closed captioning upside-down :-)
In fairness, I feel your pain. The situation in Canada is similar with all digital content, to the extent that I keep my Kindle linked to my amazon.com account because about half the books I read aren't available on amazon.ca. I've even on occasion twiddled things so I appear to be living in France so I can buy content from amazon.fr. Which is insane: I could fly to France, buy the physical book there, read it there, and come back. Or I could bring it back and pay a trivial duty/GST on it. But make it digital and suddenly it's magically impossible to sell it to me?
And the Daily Show etc frequently have next-day availability in the US but show up weeks or months later in Canada. Frustrating.
There is a fundamental disconnect between what we have come to expect of the 'Net (worldwide seamless connectivity) and what corporations and governments are increasingly dedicated to delivering (nationalist walled gardens.)
Personally, I'm betting on the 'Net to win this particular fight, although if governments and corporations behaved with economic rationality the technological solution to cross-border accessibility--including duties--would be pretty trivial. Anyone who has worked in internationalization will tell you that simply implementing a few well-defined zone-specific additional charges is trivial compared to the wacky linguistic nonsense that has to be dealt with.
"Really nothing infuriates me more than when CanIStream.it tells me that the movie I want to watch is unavailable to stream for purchase or subscription on any service."
It's probably in window for in-flight service only. Ha ha only serious.
You're missing the key fact in the piracy debate, which is that _the market value of a recorded film/music/whatever is ~zero._ It follows from the laws of supply and demand.
As a thought experiment, imagine this this: tomorrow, I invent a machine that can make unlimited free copies of soybeans, and distribute those beans instantly to almost any point on the globe, also for free. And also, for the sake of argument, imagine that nearly everyone on earth has access to my soybean copier.
In this case we could fairly say that the supply of soybeans is ~infinite, and you only need to read the first page of the Econ textbook to learn that the price must necessarily fall to zero, no matter what. It's a mathematical certainty for any finite demand.
You can pass whatever laws you want, but so long as they're practically unenforceable, you won't change the boots-on-the-ground spot prices in the market, which will hover very close to zero. (If you doubt me, ask the Argentine currency bureau if legislating prices works well.) Obviously the price will never be exactly zero, because my machine still needs electricity to run, and the market will perhaps price in a little law-enforcement risk. But in general these costs are probably going to be negligible.
And of course this has nothing to do with soybeans---the same thing will happen for corn and light sweet Saudi Crude #2 and intelligence reports about the location of Assad's WMD or any commodity you'd care to name. And digitally copyable goods are the very definition of a commodity, for while not all soybeans come off the vine created equal, a torrented .avi is a provably interchangeable item with the original. Thanks checksums. (If a film ain't on the Pirate Bay, then obviously supply != infinity, so my argument doesn't apply).
This sucks for the business models of the entertainment stakeholders, but capitalism doesn't care that you disagree with the market about the price of your product. Those stakeholders took profits for a long time, playing (approximately) by the rules of the game, and now they're pissed that those same rules have invalidated their business. Well, tough luck, MPAA. The market's invisible hand is slapping you and you'll have to adapt.
Those stakeholders took profits for a long time, playing (approximately) by the rules of the game, and now they're pissed that those same rules have invalidated their business.
Right, because the entertainment industry consists solely of monolithic studios that have been around since the beginning...not.
Do you not realize how absurd this argument is? Imagine that you had this idea for a film and you desperately wanted to make it. Well, nobody wanted to take the risk and so you learn to produce a film. It's a feature, so if you managed to get it completed and sold within 5 years of deciding you want to make movies you are doing extremely well. So you push your Little Film That Could out into the world, but since your first feature probably doesn't have any big stars or or amazing production value it gets a minimal theatrical release and you hope to recoup your costs on DVD, foreign, and streaming sales. Not really to make any money - simply breaking even on your first film and returning the investors' input is the benchmark for industry success.
Then someone comes along and tells you that the market value of your film is zero, and if you make any attempt to protect your IP you're a troglodyte who has failed to adapt, and you should feel bad about all those decades you spent fleecing the public.
That's like saying startups should give their product away for free because IBM, Microsoft, and other industry incombents have often exploited consumers in the past.
I think the key part to take away here is that the filmmaker is the one who desperately wanted to make it. The audience wasn't desperately waiting for him to make it. Just because he pours lots of effort in it, doesn't mean that the movie has intrinsic value.
But the audience does desperately want to be entertained. And while you could make a modest return on a modest investment some years ago, and iterate on larger budgets if you had a reasonable amount of skill and talent, that has become very much more difficult because the internet has disrupted things.
Good side, you can now make money on sites like Youtube, and the technical barriers to entry are low, so there is enormous upside potential. Bad side, that probably means short-form lowest-common-denominator stuff. Great if you are happy churning out episodes of Annoying Orange, a disaster if your goal is to make feature films. You end up with a 'superstar economy' where a small number of films make $$$$ and a much larger number make little or nothing. This was always the case to some extent but the internet has seriously exacerbated it.
Yes, the audience wants to be entertained. And they are being entertained, to the extend that the entertainment market is oversaturated and as such the value of entertainment goes down.
I feel like your second paragraph is just a reiteration of what it is like for someone who wants to produce something that is not valued by the majority of his apparent market. We do not really care too much about this in other markets and we should not do so in entertainment. If what he is doing is so incredibly great, he might try crowdfunding, patronship or another form of sponsorship - it has worked great for the artists of our history.
I think my point is, you can't demand to be paid for producing something you want to produce. It's a game of supply/demand.
Well, my underlying point is that you can't demand to be paid, (and never could), but that doesn't justify people infringing copyright and then using the fact of that infringement driving down the value to say that the product is worthless.
The infringement isn't driving down the value. Market saturation and lack of scarcity are driving down the value. Copyright is an artificial construction, an attempt to create scarcity where there is none.
Copyright infringement is, in most cases, the result of asking too much money for a product that has very little intrinsic value and the addition of customer-unfriendly measures to legal alternatives (read: DRM and all its woes).
(Regardless of its merits,) I don't think the argument is that the product should be free because the incumbents have exploited the public. The logic is that it should be free because supply is infinite; the exploitation is a side note.
I have to disagree that supply is infinite. The marginal cost of supply is near zero, but the fixed costs are considerable. It's almost impossible to make a saleable film for under $100k. There are little breakout movies like Primer that are famous for being cheap ($7000 in Primer's case), but that's sort of marketing BS - the low number is what it cost to make a playable copy that could be submitted to film festivals but nobody talks about all the extra work involved to get it consumer ready.
The point is that costs are fixed, but revenues are not. They don't make a product and sell it once with a win. Of course you could argue that they have a business risk and all that, but at the end of the day, you'll have to work for every extra dollar you make and they don't.
I love it when I'm being paid by the day because actual money ends up in my pocket. I have ownership interests in a number of films and the only reason I hold onto the contracts is sentimental value - none of them will ever make any money.
Only about 20% of films break even, and only a very small number of those make long-term royalty income - and that was true before the internet upended distribution models - which is why the careers of studio executives are so precarious. For indie producers, creatives, and technicians it's almost all business risk. Most projects don't pay very well (if they pay at all) and never recoup their production costs. At the indie end your goal is to win some prizes and get a film into distribution, and maybe make some of your money back if you put money into it. The win condition is that having distribution shows you can make work to commercial standard and maybe someone will like what you've done and give you a larger budget to work with.
To break even typically requires a film to spend about the same money on marketing as production costs, and of course films compete mainly against other films that are released around the same time. Unless you are exceptionally lucky and talented, there is little chance that you will make money with a production budget under $1 million. The typical 'low budget indie movie' that most people think of - quirky romance or gritty crime story - costs $5-10m.
Those are pretty high barriers to entry. It used to be that you could bootstrap yourself by doing some straight-to-video films that were not necessarily very good but were sufficiently adequate to find a small audience in between good big-budget movies, eg James Cameron's first directing job was on the Piranha 2 which was every bit as bad as the title suggests. But now that you can stream many movies you'd want to watch or download a high-quality movie if you're not happy with the streaming offerings, the fims with very small budgets are competing head-to-head with larger-budget offerings and of course the large-budget offerings win for all but the most devoted cinephiles and genre fans, of whom there are not that many.
Most people in the film industry never see any residual income worth talking about. And when they do, residuals are basically compensation for the fact that there are few regular paychecks to be had. You know the best way to make money in film? Run a food catering business. Regardless of the budget, it's an iron rule that production pays for the food and everyone gets at least one square meal a day. For short films and micro-budget projects, food is often the single biggest expense.
It's incredibly challenging to make a profit on a genuinely independent feature these days - close to impossible, in fact.
And whilst YouTube apparently offers a new hope for video, the fact is it's its own creature, and really doesn't support drama - or anything that takes more than five times as long to make as to watch - terribly well.
Oh, lastly - sound recordist also works pretty well as a paid gig in film, apparently. It's hard to get a guy to hold a boom mic for 12 hours for free. But other than that, making cash in film is... tricky.
I'm really good at it and I don't work for free, but I am always being asked to, which is how I come to have an ownership interest in some films, I'll take a percentage depending on who's involved. The sad reality (and this is true for camera and lighting people as well) is that very often you're being offered/paid rental for your equipment and nothing for your work.
GP here. You're right about the relative unimportance of the side point.
However, the main point is not a prescriptive argument that the product _should_ be free, but rather a descriptive argument that the product _is_ free. I claim the market doesn't care about the cost of production, but rather only about supply and demand, when setting prices.
Well, from a purely market point of view, why would a market actor choose possibility A (get the movie for free) over possibility B (pay for the movie)? Or why would they choose B (pay for the movie) rather than C (not care about the movie at all)?
The successful answers to these questions have always been those where people choosing B actually get something (be it a warm fuzzy feeling of supporting good movies, a nice box, or just the convenience of an interface that allows you to simply find and watch a movie).
If you want to rely purely on IP protection for that movie, good luck - people can watch other people's movies, the next YouTuber's shoestring budget entertainment, or a football game? Why wouldn't they read a book, or spend an evening knitting nice red socks.
There is no inherent law of nature that says that we need more film producers or film directors, or that they should make more money than the singer-songwriter in the bar down the street, or that guy who makes his living composing music for films and adverts once in a while. Or more than the guy who spent 5-10 years of his life trying to sell pet food over the internet and noticing that the business model is not competitive.
It's the investors betting on (a) people finding your film more attractive than knitting red socks, and (b) you being able to monetize that fact properly.
"Monetization" can come in all sorts of shapes: selling individual copies of the movie, selling licenses to distribution companies (including Netflix), putting adverts on the movie, or streaming.
Given that we have Google Play and Netflix, you should think that there is some value in allowing an app store model of people buying any film they like. That this doesn't happen is partly due to the rightsholders of these films (usually larger companies) not seeing the point of that when people could also watch new movies (= more revenue for them).
You could also make an argument about culture. It would open your eyes to the many ways that the entertainment industry - or the majority of it in terms of capitalization and revenue - is not concerned about culture at all, and to the many ways that what we have now - in terms of grassroots/pastime content creation, publically funded culture (e.g. orchestras and theaters in many places), and large projects (such as films or video games) - of creating, revising and sustaining cultural artifacts.
> You're missing the key fact in the piracy debate, which is that _the market value of a recorded film/music/whatever is ~zero._ It follows from the laws of supply and demand.
(side comment: emphasis; you are doing it wrong!)
The market value is the price point at which the supply function (mapping price to quantity producers are willing to supply) and demand function (mapping price to quantity consumers are willing to purchase intersect.)
That should be the price at where the utility to those willing to purchase at that price equals the total production costs divided by the units delivered including a financial profit equal to the opportunity cost of not putting the production costs into some other venture (this is zero economic profit).
As the fixed costs of movie production are not even close to zero (even if you assume the marginal costs were zero, which they aren't, quite), this is not even close to zero.
Now, there is an economic observation that, with perfectly interchangeable commodities with perfect competititon between suppliers, in the long term the unit cost should be driven down to the marginal cost, because the longer the term (really, the more total units, but, ceteris paribus, longer term = more total units) the fixed costs is amortized over, the closer to zero the per unit share of the amortized fixed costs is, so then the marginal costs dominate.
But that doesn't mean the fixed costs are irrelevant in supply, and thus market clearing price.
Next time, read more than one page of the Econ text.
> As a thought experiment, imagine this this: tomorrow, I invent a machine that can make unlimited free copies of soybeans
That's not really analogous to the situation with movies (even assuming that movie copying is really completely zero cost), as the soybean you are copying exists in nature without human activity, no one needs to be induced to create it before it can be copied; there is no fixed cost if the reproduction is free; well, except the fixed cost of developing the reproduction device, so maybe it is analogous, but then it doesn't support your argument, either.
And if it takes you 100M to design the soy-bean-printing-machine, you will get the necessary investment exactly how?
I don't like MPAA either, I think they go over the top. But you are no better than MPAA by failing to take a more nuanced point of view. If there is no copyright whatsoever, I can guarantee you that no one will make 100M hollywood movies. And yes, they do take 100M to make - they hire armies of artists and programmers for that.
You don't need 100M to make a good movie. You need 100M to make a movie that is trying to hide its own inadequacies by spending an insane amount of money on special effects and well-known actors.
That is not to say that there aren't movies that are worth spending 100M to make - but the market-driven talentless big budget movies that are coming out of Hollywood? We could well do without them.
That being said, most movies that have a 100M budget earn back their money in theatres, so I'm not convinced that with a downsized copyright system (no copyright whatsoever sounds silly, considering the term covers quite a few different bases, many of which are not impeded on by person-to-person sharing) they would run into big problems.
Even if you invented a machine to produce infinite amounts of soybeans, the supply would not be infinite, it would be whatever amount you want to produce! Property rights are just as important in Economics as costs, and illegally obtaining cheaper-than-book-value goods is older than any of these entertainment companies that you call dinosaurs.
> Well, tough luck, MPAA. The market's invisible hand is slapping you and you'll have to adapt.
How in the world did a comment like this not get downvoted into oblivion? Pirating content has nothing to do with the market's invisible hand.
Copyright works restricts property rights. I own a machine that can copy digital works, and it's my property right to use this machine for its purpose, and yet copyright restricts my property rights, banning me from using my property.
This is a very common analysis of piracy but it is wrong, and here is why.
"Supply" in the "supply and demand" equation, is what the supplier is willing to supply. Not the total supply that is technologically possible.
Put another way, economic analysis does not get to throw away the legal environment in which the market operates. You cannot disprove the utility of a legal structure like IP law by assuming it does not exist--that is called "begging the question" and is a logical fallacy.
This notion of supply works if the producer has an enforceable monopoly on production and distribution of the content. While the big studios do have a monopoly on the content they produce (i.e. movies and music are not commodities) the inherent ease of distribution and reproduction of that content means that attempts to monopolize its distribution will inevitably be circumvented.
For all practical purposes, once a work is pirated it is effectively supplied by a large number of individual actors within the market, and not the original distributor.
> For all practical purposes, once a work is pirated it is effectively supplied by a large number of individual actors within the market, and not the original distributor.
Yes but the question is not whether something is possible, but whether it should be legal, and what enforcement options should be made available to the government.
All property rights are legally granted monopolies. There is nothing inherent in the physical properties of, say, a bottle of water that creates or protects the supplier's rights. Instead, society has created a set of legal rules that govern the relationships between the supplier and its distributors and customers. Likewise, society has created rules that create the concept of copyright to govern those relationships.
In discussions of piracy, the degree and manner in which the law enforces IP rights is the very topic of discussion; assuming that such enforcement is impossible is simply a neat trick to try to win the argument before actually having it.
It is incredibly easy to pick up a bottle of water and walk out of a store without paying. The ease with which a law can be violated is not disproof that the law is needed.
In fact, it was the very ease of distribution that led to the creation of copyright in the first place. Prior to the printing press there was little need or concept of copyright; the physical difficulty of copying a book was sufficient protection. After the printing press, when authors started having their books quickly copied and sold by others--that was when the foundations of copyright were laid.
So: arguing today that because it's easy to copy, it should be legal to copy, flies in the face of history and logic. The easier it is to violate property rights, the more important (not less) legal protections become.
The cost/benefit of protection vs. innovation is a great topic for discussion! My point is just that it's not insightful or helpful to try to misuse basic economics to disprove the laws that govern economic relationships in the first place.
> For all practical purposes, once a work is pirated it is effectively supplied by a large number of individual actors within the market, and not the original distributor.
Which just means that content producers are forced to raise unit price on the first few units to amortize the fixed costs over a shorter window (and focussing appeal to that narrow audience willing to pay those higher costs over that shorter window.)
Or, why whenever there is a widely-supported in-theater feature that widely available consumer devices don't support (or at least, don't support well for pirated content) -- whether its 3D or higher frame rates or something else -- movies will tend to make heavy use of it.
I'd argue that entertainment media do provide value to consumers and that there is an observable willingness to pay for these kinds of goods.
On the cost side, even if your marginal costs are zero, you still have to recover your first copy costs -- for a blockbuster movie and your replicator.
Also consider international, same thing. Even streaming is not available in many countries. Even if you want to pay - you can't, while the pirated files are one click away.
> It's almost like the executives at the studios and distributors who own the rights to these films don't realize that, if I can't easily, quickly and conveniently buy access to their film legally, I will just bittorrent the damn thing.
They realize that, they just assume that most potential viewers don't know how to bittorrent (and they are very likely right about that).
mp3sparks "solved" exactly this problem by making content available at a low cost.
I wonder [0] if there is a modern company in russia or china offering streaming of video content without actually negotiating licenses with the relevant parties.
[0] just for the sake of speculation; I have a backlog of thousands of hours of stuff I'd like to watch on netflix, but prioritize doing other things
Speaking for myself? Sometimes, yeah. I'm kinda impulsive at times. When it's 2:00am and I'm just struck by the urge to watch some random movie; if it's on Amazon Prime Video or Netflix, or if I happen to own the DVD, great. If not, I don't feel like driving somewhere to buy a DVD or waiting for Amazon to ship it to me. So yeah, I'm probably just going to torrent it.
Nice perspective, but perhaps a bit misguided. Netflix would LOVE to have every single movie ever made by man on the service, but there is more at play than just "get the file, now stream it".
The entire mainstream film industry is doing everything they can to make sure generic streaming services like Netflix and Amazon don't become as large as they could, and our current legal framework involving distribution of content is quite hostile to these services.
This is also following the concept that storage gets cheaper as time goes on. More movies = more storage fees, but I don't think this overhead is nearly as large as some would assume.
The issue is that they no longer have classic movies available through their DVD services. There are no legal or licensing restrictions there due to the First Sale Doctrine.
It's true that first sale prevents the studios from restricting Netflix's usage but it doesn't require them to make new copies for Netflix. If they aren't selling the DVD commercially, as is the case for many classic films, there's no way to legally create a new copy to replace a damaged disc.
Yeah, this could be it. It could also be that Netflix simply isn't trying to replace titles because of reduced demand for the DVD service. Either way, too bad.
And that, in fact, seems to be the case. I haven't looked at it in depth but at least some of the examples cited by the OP do seem to be available for new purchase from Amazon even though they're not available for DVD rental from Netflix. Given that Netflix has made it quite clear that the DVD rental biz isn't strategic for them, I suspect that they're carefully managing repurchases of seldom-rented back catalog items.
Available for purchase by rental companies and purchase for retail are two different things. Netflix doesn't typically buy a bunch of DVDs from Amazon and then chuck the jewel case. There are exceptions though:
Right. But the point is they can buy from retail. (And I believe that's how they did it at first.) Today, they just generally choose not to do so primarily because it costs more.
> wouldn't that qualify as legitimate use of a backup copy?
The archival copy privilege as an exception to the usual rules that copyright excludes anyone from making copies without specific permission from the copyright holder [1] applies only to works classified as "computer programs" under the law. While DVDs do include computer programs, the main element of a DVD is an audiovisual work and likely wouldn't be included in the exception, so even if it would be a legitimate use of a backup copy, the kind of work isn't one in which there is any right under copyright law to create such a backup.
While I presume your quote is correct, I don't think you are applying it correctly. That is one exception, but there are others. Although I don't think there is clear case law, ripping audio CD's for archival backup is almost universally presumed (even by the MPAA and RIAA) to be legal in the US: https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/united-state...
And it's frequently presumed that creating backups of legally owned video DVD's would constitute fair use under US copyright, but is instead illegal because it requires breaking DRM to do so, and the DMCA offers no such exception: http://lifehacker.com/5978326/is-it-legal-to-rip-a-dvd-that-...
But if you happen to come across an unprotected commercial DVD that you legally own (I have only ever come across one, "Cane Toads: An unnatural history") I think you probably would prevail in asserting that it is fair use to create a personal backup copy for use in case the original is destroyed.
Potentially, yes. Would you want to spend the next decade fighting that lawsuit up to the Supreme Court, hoping that the case goes your way? I think the odds would be in their favor but am even more confident that the movie industry would see the threat of an expensive lawsuit as a great lever to extort higher royalties.
The situation might be more complicated. If I was a rights holder for movies that Netflix wanted to stream (and sufficiently Machiavellian), I might negotiate reduced availability of DVDs of my movies to start transitioning everything to a streaming model.
To be clear, Netflix may have the DVDs but they may be bound by a contract clause (that they agreed to) restricting them from offering the DVDs for rent.
That said, maybe it's just Netflix reducing costs by dropping obscure inventory. I don't know what the relative costs and profit are of the streaming vs. DVD businesses that they have, but the costs of that physical inventory are not negligible.
Back in the day when Best Buy opened a new store they stocked the CD and DVD sections with incredible amounts of diverse inventory and then let it sell off - restocking only the mainstream stuff. I assume the goal was to get customers with a front-end flourish. That's probably what Netflix did.
Has this ever been tested around digital goods? As long as you had some mechanism to ensure that it is only streamed by one person at a time per license purchased.
> This is also following the concept that storage gets cheaper as time goes on. More movies = more storage fees, but I don't think this overhead is nearly as large as some would assume.
For a million 2-hour movies, stored at 10 mbps, (plus another 10 mbps for other versions), you end up with 18 petabytes. That can be stored on S3 for $396k per month, or on 200 180TB backblaze storage pods for a $1.8M one-time cost, plus $30k/mo for 20 full racks somewhere cheap. I assume bandwidth costs would be manageable either way, since the vast majority of these films are going to be accessed very rarely.
Just back-of-the-envelope calculations from someone who hasn't worked at this sort of scale. If I'm off by an order of magnitude then it'd be impractical to store on S3, since the fees would be something like 1/4 of their current profits.
You also have to factor in the pods/disks failing at N$/month and making sure the data is backed up in a redundant manner (more than 200 pods?). And skilled helper monkeys to swap bad disks. And electricity.
You also probably want something that reads really, really fast, and is durable. And you don't care about writes. I'm not sure, but 45 drives on a bus sounds congested. Maybe some sort of fancy super optical situation. DVDs fit the bill but I don't know about seek time on them. (?). Anyway, the answer is laserdisc, the answer is always laserdisc.
I would assume (and hope) that a company of that scale is using something like Glacier to hold rarely accessed data, so that storage fees aren't incurred on having it in a hot cache.
Netflix could not use Glacier for rarely accessed films, unless they wanted to impose a watching schedule on their users (i.e. "Bananas is only available on weekends", or similar, and even then, that'd impose even higher fees to move things out of Glacier and onto some other kind of storage). Glacier takes minutes to hours to retrieve files (I'm guessing hours in the case or large movie files). Just because it is "rarely accessed", doesn't mean it doesn't need to be available quickly when it is accessed. And, Glacier is priced for data that is moved in and almost never moved out to other types of storage.
I read the article as the complaint being that there is not an option to get a movie that was once available for rental, however is not available currently via streaming.
> And now it seems, while still nowhere as haphazard as the streaming selection, the company’s once reliably complete DVD selection is becoming less so all the time.
Here's another one...
> “My experience is that you end up with a bunch of things that have a very long wait and then they never come,” he said. “Things that were once available aren’t anymore.” Nine of the films at the top of his DVD queue are very long waits, he said, “sitting there forever.”
> Essentially, Netflix cannot afford to buy the rights to all the movies you want to watch.
This isn't a Netflix problem, it's a licensing problem. If the rights-holders aren't willing to sell the rights to their films at a price that the market will pay, then those people who want to see those films will find a way, legal or not, to obtain them through other channels.
I will happily pay to stream a movie online, whether as part of a subscription service or directly to the producers. However, when the producers don't provide any means to do so, I've never had a hard time finding a DVD-quality copy that I can download and watch in my home theater in less than the time it would take to drive to Blockbuster and rent it.
Well... I'm not sure "aren't willing to sell rights at a price netflix can afford with their business model" is the same as "aren't willing to sell the rights at a price that the market will pay."
Perhaps they think there is or will be a market selling pay-per-view, at which they can make more money, than selling to all-you-can-watch subscription services.
I have no idea if they're right or wrong (today or tomorrow), although certainly I know my preference as a consumer is to be able to watch anything I want for $8 a month or whatever. But my preference as a consumer is hardly the definition of "what the market will pay." I'd like restaurants to give me their food cheaper and always all-you-can-eat too, but I still pay for restaurant meals anyway. (Of course, there isn't exactly a pirating option for restaurant meals.)
> But my preference as a consumer is hardly the definition of "what the market will pay." I'd like restaurants to give me their food cheaper and always all-you-can-eat too, but I still pay for restaurant meals anyway. (Of course, there isn't exactly a pirating option for restaurant meals.)
Yeah, the analogy breaks down when you compare rivalrous goods to goods which are trivially copyable.
> Perhaps they think there is or will be a market selling pay-per-view, at which they can make more money, than selling to all-you-can-watch subscription services.
I think what he/she meant was that PPV (for example) doesn't address the whole market whereas access to Netflix is pretty ubiquitous and does address the whole market. It also creates a nearly efficient market in that the consumer gets to decide how much they are willing to pay for content - not the distributor (which is the current case of Time Warner, Comcast, etc).
It's not that simple. QC for a film is complex, and it has to be done because when someone watches something on Netflix they expect a minimum amount of technical quality even if the creativity is entirely absent.
I mean stuff like no messed up video frames, audio glitches, consistent volume levels and so on - it can be the worst film in the world but people still expect it play back properly and will blame Netflix if it does not, just as they would blame Netflix for an improperly encoded DVD that failed to play back.
Everything that gets uploaded by Netflix has to be passed by a broadcast engineer first, and while they are not paid massive amounts of money they are still paid and films have to be watched, QCed and cataloged in real time. No matter how crap it is, any film that's available for streaming on Netflix/Amazon has taken at least half a day of skilled labor.
It would be nice to think that if something gets as far as being pressed onto DVD it would meet minimum standards of technical quality but the reality is sadly different. You would not believe the appalling quality of the stuff that people try to sell.
A fee based on viewership counts is how the anime service Crunchyroll works. A portion (the other part is Crunchyroll's) of the ad revenue and subscription fees are split based on what you watch. So, if you only watched a single show for the month, the portion that goes to the license holders would go to that single company.
It seems to be working well on the whole as more companies are licensing their content to Crunchyroll (at least the ones who don't give an exclusive license to another company). Each season I see more shows on there.
Seattle's awesome local movie repository, Scarecrow Video, is reinventing itself as a non-profit to survive in the new environment. A recent Kickstarter [1] has offset operating costs for the near future.
They have four copies (2 DVD, 2 Laserdisc) of Sweet Sweetback:
I jumped on the Kickstarter as well, but I'm nervous as to whether it will work. Reclassifying as a non-profit doesn't change the fact that employees have to eat, and movies need to be purchased. I'd personally be willing to pay a membership fee or recurring donation in order to keep them in business, but I don't know how well that scales.
Their cache is in obscure movies, but their bread and butter is the new releases, just like any other video store, and the latter is being supplanted by online streaming, which fails to address the former.
Worse, the entire business model is dependent on the availability of shareable physical media, and the legal permission to rent them to customers. In the shift to digital formats, video stores will end up cut out of the equation entirely. What happens when the video store can no longer offer new movies? Will they be able to cover their expenses with just legacy content? I'm somewhat doubtful.
"...and Netflix sells off its vast supply of DVDs for drink coasters..."
Can we get off this, at long last? CDs and DVDs are terrible coasters. They're too thin and not at all spongy or porous, so the condensation will creep all the way around to the table side. I once ruined a desk by leaving a cold drink on a CD overnight. Admittedly it was a cheap, second-hand desk, but still.
been using CDs and DVD's as coasters for years. I still have a stack of Win95 OSR2 discs I bring out for special occasions, and haven't experienced a ruined desk or coffee table yet.
While we can lament the lack of legal streaming options, it's probably worth remembering that there are other perfectly legal subscription by mail DVD services in the US besides Netflix. Below are two that I know of. Are there others?
Greencine are good people. As you can tell from their about page, they are significantly less 'glitzy' than Netflix. They also pride themselves on having DVD's that Netflix doesn't, including this one.
It's hard for me to believe any Cinephile would use Netflix at all, the bitrates on their streams are painfully low and it's absolutely noticeable even on medium sized screens. And that's not even mentioning the audio quality.
I don't think that "cinephile" strongly implies anything about the technical reproduction quality of the media. To me, it connotes someone who is very passionate about the history of film, niche genres of film, and/or film criticism or theory.
A Cinephile is someone who is into movies and discussing the themes, theories, plots, philosophy of movies. They are not really concerned with bitrates as long as its watchable.
… and bitrates are more of an issue for things like HD action movies. That old French movie from the 70s which hasn't been professionally retouched is probably going to be fine.
I'm a cinephile and work in post-production. When I'm working on a feature, I'm working with an uncompressed 2k or 4k video file. But when I want to watch a movie or show at the spur of the moment, I'm fine with Netflix. I'm typically more interested in the story although on occasion I will try to find a blu-ray or see it theatrically if it is something visually arresting.
Or they can pay cinephile prices like $80+ for movies. I remember the time of paying $100 for movies on Betamax and it was amazing. But yes it's true NF selection is getting worse for DVD mail order if you are a small audience, like this or foreign films.
Outside of world cinema, Netflix is good only for the kids stuff. I find myself watching more and more stuff on Vudu recently. A good, but kinda neglected service is GoWatchIt (http://gowatchit.com/), which helps me follow upcoming titles. Another complaint: the 500 movie limit is a joke and having a single queue vs multiple queues is something that should already have been implemented over the years. At least, add the ability to filter within "My List" by genre, etc. I'm really disappointed by the dead-slow pace of development at Netflix. The lack of tools to see more movie info is also displeasing.
Netflix isn't even a good option for children's programming either, they just failed to renew their license for Sesame Street and they don't have any Viacom content licensed, so that leaves everything on Nick Jr. out.
If it weren't for the few Netflix originals (Trailer Park Boys, Orange is the New Black, House of Cards) I'd just drop Netflix and only use my Prime Instant Video because my daughter watches a LOT of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues.
House of Cards is what got me (reluctantly) to eventually re-up for streaming after Netflix carved it off. But like way too many monthly payments of mine, it's something I marginally get my money's worth from given that I am an avid Amazon Prime customer in any case and there's a lot of overlap.
I remember being in college when Netflix streaming first came out. At that time, almost everyone I knew had a mail-order Netflix subscription. It was revolutionary at the time. I remember when they suddenly started throwing in streaming as a bonus to all the DVD subscribers. I had no idea that this was where they were going to eventually pivot. Netflix lured everyone in and changed the video rental industry with it's amazing mail-order service. Any video you wanted to your door in a couple of days.
Fast forward to a decade later when there are very few physical stores that rent movies, and Netflix turned into a service of convenience. No longer is it a service where you can get any movie you want in the next few days. Rather, it's a service where you can get something you'll enjoy in the next few seconds. I've noticed that a lot of the enjoyment now comes from TV series as opposed to movies.
At the end of the day I'm glad there are other alternatives to Netflix such as Amazon Instant Video. Getting any movie has never been easier than before. I just hit my Roku and I can watch almost anything within a minute. Thing is, we are coming off having too much of a good thing. When Netflix first started, it was easy to consume what you wanted for a low price.
Now, if you want to consume exactly what you want -- it might cost you more. I've found many movies that aren't available for rent on Netflix, Itunes, or Amazon. I have to buy these titles online to watch them! The other side of the coin is that it's never been cheaper to consume such a variety of media using Netflix. It just might not be exactly what you want. As long as it's good enough for you, though, it's good for Netflix's bottom line.
> I just hit my Roku and I can watch almost anything within a minute.
Do you mean 'anything you want' or that selection seems almost comprehensive?
The article claimed that the streaming selection is poor, and substantially smaller than the Netflix DVD selection. My impression of Roku's services is that there is much I cannot find.
Ive both and it doesnt have anything close to anything I want. the selection is limited, you can get whatever you could see currently in a plane basically.
Old stuff? yes if its cheap or very popular, but 90% of the old stuff you cant access.
new stuff? nope.
a large part of both catalogs are also exactly the same movies/shows.
In my case, I have the bottom Netflix DVD option (up to 2 discs per month--1 at a time) plus I buy the occasional movie. And the occasional RedBox although that usually involves an extra trip to the store.
Generally speaking, I don't pay a la carte for streaming outside of my Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions. I could probably rent movies streaming instead of getting DVDs in a lot of cases but sometimes I like the extras and I have more flexibility not to finish immediately.
The best cinephile setup I've found is Roku + Plex + torrents. Just make sure to have a wired connection to your Plex server and to set up the Plex app on your Roku to 'Direct Stream' the video (so there's no reencoding).
I prefer Roku over Chromecast because Roku has a remote with a headphone jack. If Chromecast had an option to play the audio through the headphone jack of the device you're casting from, I would say it's just as good. In fact, I often cast from the YouTube app on my phone to my Roku, because it's easier than searching for a video using the Roku interface.
Netflix didn’t want to talk to me about their movie catalogue, leaving me to rely on the speculation of a couple of video store folks that the company’s DVD selection is shrinking most likely because it is not replacing damaged disks.
People often keep them, from a mix of greed and guilt (still haven't watched that classic film...but I really must...I'l do it next week...). Meantime, piracy has killed the market for new production runs of obscure films, so niche titles go out of print and stay out of print because no distributor wants to spend $10,000 on something that may only have a few hundred buyers.
I personally think the streaming service is great, notwithstanding the spotty coverage. It also makes a great deal more sense as a long-term revenue model than discs. I don't see a way of guaranteeing availability without compulsory licensing, though.
Distributors I know. BTW I'm not trying to make a big thing about piracy here, hence my off-the-cuff remark. But it's just basic economics - there's a fairly small but non-zero cost of doing a DVD issue even if its a rerun and some films just aren't going to earn it back.
Bear in mind that many, many films would not be profitable on their own, but are cross-subsidized by more popular films in package distribution deals, especially international ones.
DVD production for non-mainstream films was an iffy business at the best of times. Sales figures for even a company like Criterion were MUCH lower than you might expect. It didn't take much piracy to destroy what was already a marginal business.
Source- Friends who went out of business as the market died. And industry sales report data that showed the small size of the market to start with.
I understand why Netflix can't license new material, but why don't they have a comprehensive back catalogue? I'm sure they could easily license those b&w movies that play all day on TCM without commercials.
Their movie selection is actually pretty dire, there's no new movies, very few classic movies, so you are left mostly with regrettable B-movies from the 90s.
> I'm sure they could easily license those b&w movies that play all day on TCM without commercials.
Why are you sure that the movie studios aren't demanding excessive amounts or strategically avoiding any one service getting all of the movies to ensure nobody gets a dominant position? They're determined to avoid Netflix being able to do what Apple did to the music cartel and I'm sure that's a factor in every negotiation.
As far as I'm concerned, Netflix streaming is for television. When a movie I want to watch is available, I just consider that a bonus. Someone I know who used to work for Netflix once told me that people come to streaming "for the movies and they stay for the TV."
I've realized and accepted this for some time now.
Netflix and similar are really good for satisfying "I just want to watch some movie and be entertained" needs, but really not great (and likely getting worse), sadly, for "I have a very specific movie in mind and I want to see it" needs.
It's a sacrifice I've learned to be okay with, but it is a little sad. I have a few movies on physical media that I had to give up due to them taking up space, and I knew that while they're currently available on Netflix, that may no longer be the case in the future. :(
I can't speak to the DVD side of the equation, I suspect that is merely due to the fact that not enough people want to see relatively obscure old movies (on classic DVDs) enough to waste inventory space on them, especially as more and more people move over to Bluray (if only because their console supports it so why not) and online VOD/streaming more and more. But on the streaming side, it is the studios blocking Netflix out, not Netflix being oblivious to how bad their movie selection is.
I temporarily worked for a company in the VOD/Streaming space that was run by Hollywood-insider types when they sort-of-aquihired most of the employees of Chumby. Based on my limited time of seeing it from the 'inside', my impression is that Hollywood studio executives have a seething, furious hatred of Netflix and their business model, which they see as devaluing their content. (And I'm not saying they are wrong to think this -- at the very least the Netflix model certainly upsets all the applecarts of the way Hollywood has done business for nearly a century).
These people would basically instinctively scowl animated-villain-style when Netflix was brought up, even if it was in other contexts.
eg. Software architect explaining to business guys why default sharing on social media was not a good idea (at the time): "We shouldn't automatically share what movies a customer has watched because Netflix (studio-business-guys scowl, hiss, unhinge their jaws) recently got into legal trouble for that".
Originally the studios were OK with making some dough from Netflix on old long-tailed-out movie catalogs that would otherwise not be earning anything (because they sure do love money) but a few years ago they hit the brakes on that because they would rather earn less on the old catalog stuff than do anything to further validate the Netflix model, which they see as an existential threat to their business.
This is bothersome although I'd note that at least some of the Woody Allen movies listed are available streaming on Amazon (for a fee) and for purchase. But it's reasonable to ask whether we hit a point where at least DVD reissues (once initial inventory is used up) don't make financial sense any longer.
For the past decade or so, we've been living in a world where we could obtain the vast majority of movies as DVDs through some channel pretty inexpensively and painlessly. At the moment, it looks as if that process will become much more fractured and less reliable.
Netflix made the argument some years ago that the world and their user base was switching to streaming. To the point of proposing to split disk and streaming into separate businesses (not just separate subscriptions).
I was dubious given the comparatively poor quality and degree of choice on their streaming service at that time.
Since then, instead of improving, I've seen that choice -- on balance -- get worse. A few TV shows I'm interested in have shown up -- and a whole bunch I'm not at all interested in; while many I might be interested in remain absent. At the same time, the movie selection has grown notably worse, with many titles I dug out of the mess and queued up disappearing before I got to them.
Now I read that the DVD service is indeed in decline, as well.
The most telling bit of the OP story for me seems to be this quote:
Check out this 2013 Netflix PR video communicating that the company should no longer be looked upon as a massive movie library. What it really is, it says, is the “Internet’s largest television network.”
Well, I'm not interested in remaining a customer of what is increasingly some sort of Netflix "television channel".
As with all the other "streaming", "rental" online services I've tried. I'm coming to the conclusion that they are not worth the investment nor the fees, for me. I'm being driving back to maintaining a personal library. And perhaps to reinforcement my support for my public library, where the membership's interests are still primary.
People have talked about the zero marginal cost issue with trivially copiable goods, and I simply don't think this is a surmountable obstacle for the film business as a business. Already, when people say "I prefer to pay for a film to support filmmakers, actors etc" the implied subclause is that "I could choose otherwise."
And that's where I see it going, really. Look at classical music, the visual arts, theatre (outside of big Broadway/West End musicals) - these continue to exist overwhelmingly on the basis of patronage from the state and philanthropists.
This is not exactly an apples-for-apples comparison (a symphonic or theatrical performance is not copiable in the same way as digital video; still less are prints of paintings substitutable for the real thing); but the underlying issue is similar: it costs more to put these things on than can be made back in gate receipts.
And so, when people choose to pay for films in a situation where it is just as easy to pirate (it often isn't actually), they are being philanthropic and paying a non-market price for the film.
I don't see how a $10 monthly subscription model is going to sustain the entire film industry, although maybe someone can do better maths than me on the back of their napkin.
netflix has clearly said they are not an archival service / library (in so many words) that they are a 'whats popular now'.
This is the real opportunity for a disrupt-er. sure its hard / expensive to get the content, but that's also opportunity, and clearly netflix is out of touch with what their customers actually want from their press releases.
And even though they say they buy only the content 'people want to see currently', it seems like they do a poor job. netflix defenders will spout 'if you cant find something to watch on netflix well ...' thats completely misguided, you shouldnt have to search netflix for something to watch, you should find what you are looking for.
as the running joke goes, people spend more time searching netflix for something to watch than actually watching
I wonder if there's a sufficient market for peer-to-peer lending of movies and games, backed by a floating deposit. Uber for discs-by-mail, as it were.
(S)he's talking about people physically mailing DVDs, not the digital locker thing. I can't imagine that would be illegal, but never underestimate the entertainment industries ability to buy judges.
You mean like Tribler? [http://www.tribler.org/] Its a decentralized torrent client with built in video player.
Form what their site says they are planning to have proxying freenet like system where no one other than you can know both what you are downloading and where you are or who is seeding what where. If that works it could be a netflix/thepiratebay killer.
Architect on multiple Hollywood/digital projects for major device manufacturers here, also have interviewed to head SmartTV department for the world's largest TV manufacturer (TCL, in China).
I finished working in this area in 2010 (left it for the digital currency space) but have seen no suggestion of change. In any case, you heard it here last: the problem is definitely the studios and their insistance on completely outmoded, unfair, obstructive regional licensing.
Digital licensing operates as follows. First, digital releases are not a first-class citizen in the Hollywood world. The 'DVD street relase date' for the consumer country in question is the date that everything is calculated from for billing purposes. Multiple periods are then calculated using blocks of days thereafter, during which the wholesale rate offered for a particular item is progressively discounted. Finally, after some period (eg. 90 or 180 days subsequent to DVD street release in that market) the wholesale drops to a base rate 'back catalog' price unique to that item. Netflix and other services basically prefer these titles as they are cheaper to offer.
In my experience, significant ingestion overhead is present for digital service agencies on every single title. This is because they are more often than not supplied in weird formats, under strange licensing restrictions, with restrictive rules on reformatting (eg. crop requirements) and re-encoding though they're not able to be played on most devices up front, and certainly not in the higher-resolution digital formats studio supplied. Very frequently, audio tracks for non-original languages are supplied as non time-synched files separate to the original, as are subtitles.
So to offer an item, not only do you need to front up to the studio, effectively downpay some cash, figure out a revenue share deal, convince them your DRM is adequate, go through this whole process on a per-market basis, figure out the logistics of moving huge files, put up with delays and their frequent insistence to use weird file transfer mechanisms, but you also need to get any edits accredited, manage your own database of client device capabilities (this is more complex than it sounds, resolution is only a minor components versus various codec support (audio/video/subtitles), non-subtitle support (ie. need to rewrite entire video stream with burnt in subtitles in each language), etc. but also get the results approved, uploaded to an adequately wide range of data centers in a DRM-capable distribution network (what? build my own? yeah...), your studio-approved frequently expensive DRM integration sorted, and manage the changing prices on an ongoing basis as delimited in USD but against a revenue share model with constantly fluctuating exchange rates.
Sound like fun? No, it isn't. And you are competing with higher quality torrents people download for free, on or before DVD street release date, in the very first market to ever have the title. That's why nobody does it.
The industry could reap immense additional profits if they'd only drop the control-freak old-school management, normalize and prioritize their digital output, and allow all media consumption to become a low price flat-rate experience at some reasonable post-cinema release date, like +30-45 days. Oh, and drop the DRM and the military police style back-channel raids on New Zealand residents who choose to make a point of their untenable and laughably outmoded outlook.
Yes, that's exactly what they probably think. It's a very conservative way of doing business, the classic approach of the established interest. As they twiddle their collective thumbs, the world demonstrably changes around them.
Yes, I agree with you. But here is the bigger point: unless your job is working with technology (and sometimes even in this case), you don't disrupt a business that is working for you. While this seems strange for people who are trying to disrupt existing business models, this is exactly the right thing to do if you are in a traditional company...
" would have run down to my local video store, but I don’t have a local video store. I struck out at the San Francisco Public Library..."
So why didn't he go to Le Video? He even mentions it later in the article. Sounds like the author was intentionally constraining himself to make a point.
Isn't a large part of this problem with the content producers and the contracts Netflix has to sign with them? I would think that if Netflix could have any movie or TV show in their streaming library they would but there are other interested parties that prevent that.
This problem is even worse when you're outside of the US, and the Netflix selection is even smaller. On the upside, I don't think we ever had the Netflix DVD service, so we don't miss it.
Maybe this is an opportunity for a startup -- steal Netflix's DVD rent by mail business and offer a very extensive catalog. Seems like Netflix would be happy to cede that market.
Or more likely it isn't or Netflix wouldn't be backing away from it even though they already have the infrastructure. I suspect that there's a real squeeze between the current hits (which Red Box covers pretty well and others purchase off Amazon/Walmart/etc.) and the default behavior of watching whatever is on streaming that just doesn't leave a lot of business on the table for the balance.
Netflix has already built out great infrastructure for this but clearly didn't find it profitable enough to focus on it. I'd be very hesitant assuming that you've seen a market which they haven't.
I was going to throw away my DVD collection. Guess I'll keep it, because when Netflix kills the DVD service, I can sell my DVDs for actual money again.
Wanting to watch one particular film doesn't define or capture cinephiles. The title is an exaggeration to say the least, especially if the movie isn't even available for rent at the many paid movie streaming service options available.
That being said, someone should make an aggregate search engine of legally available content through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Max Go, etc. Although I'm not sure the interface exists for all of them.
> That being said, someone should make an aggregate search engine of legally available content through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, Max Go, etc
I don't mind paying for content, and - in fact - I largely prefer to do so, so there will be more new content coming. But I am not going to bend over backwards to accommodate these laggards and dinosaurs refusal to pay attention to the world we live in.