Movie mogul's answer to downloading: PSAs by Shia LaBeouf
Dan sez, "Thought you'd like this feature I did for Portfolio about the MediaDefender meltdown. I tracked down the hacker who broke into the company and the pirates who used the data to their advantage. But the story is largely a way to ask why Hollywood is following the music industry's footsteps in believing that that P2P is an enemy that must be stopped (no matter the cost or the unlikelihood of declaring victory). I thought this quote from Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Company summarized Hollywood's take pretty much perfectly:"
"This is not Napster," says Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul who heads the Weinstein Co., a MediaDefender client. "Online piracy has got to be stopped. The biggest spear in the neck of the pirates will be (a) being vigilant, (b) prosecuting, and (c) in a way, making fun of them, finding a way to say, 'That's not cool -- that's anything but cool.' If you had people who the young people respect in this industry -- Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Shia LaBeouf -- these guys did public service announcements that said, 'Don't steal, stealing's not cool,' I think you can go a long way toward stopping this." Weinstein says that if Democrats maintain control of Congress and gain the White House, he'll flex whatever political muscle he has acquired by being a major donor to achieve one thing: "Tougher, more stringent piracy laws." Does he see any use for P2P systems? "No."Link (Thanks, Dan!)
the latest
latest episodes
stealing is not cool. i try to be on the up and up as much as possible, but not always. Supposedly movies are so damned expensive now adays cause of pirates.
so since I had to pay 13 dollars and sit through 27 minutes (this is not an exaggeration. it was 27 solid minutes, and thats not counting what came before the official start time) of previews to see a movie recently, i'm not going to feel bad about downloading it once i get home.
If its a good enough movie I'll even buy it on dvd when it comes out. But if my movie was so expensive because of piracy than that earns me more than one viewing. especially if i'm forced to sit through advertisements during time i've paid for.
If its a TV show i'll pirate it without thinking twice. If its tv and i'm watching it, that means i like it enough to also buy it when its out on DVD.
Weinstein is such a hypocrite... yes let's get Clooney and Pitt to tell us "Stealing isn't cool"! Maybe they could air the PSA during Ocean's 14?
And if the Republicans gain control? Same thing, but call it "deregulation."
fightcopyright: not to stand up for him (Because PSA's like that would be absolutely useless), but murder isn't cool either, but we do enjoy our share of anti-heroes don't we? Sweeney Todd as a recent example? Would a Warner Bro's exec be a hypocrite for saying murder isn't cool just because they have movies that feature it?
Ah yes, PSAs to teach children what "cool" is. This should work out great.
I mean, I remember how great those anti-drug PSAs were, and everyone just stopped using drugs. That's the power of making things "not cool", y'know. One PSA and BOOM- end the drug war. It worked for them, I don't see why it can't work for the movie industry.
It's easy to ridicule something like this, but frankly, I definitely it effective when, for example, a musician speaks out against piracy. It makes copyright infringement feel a lot more like stealing when you have to face the fact that, at some level, the artists themselves are actually being hurt by it.
they tried PSAs before. a couple of years ago I went to a multiplex with a bunch of friends and between the previews but before the feature there was a nice little 1 minute PSA with a set painter who explained that pirating movies doesn't really hurt big stars or movie execs, but it does hurt guys like him. he went on to say that pirating is really bad, super uncool, and no one should ever do it.
then the feature came on and i spent two hours or so watching johnny depp being a really cool pirate.
...How Hollywood could reduce and possibly eliminate piracy:
1) Stop making shitty movies. Period. According to some estimates, as much as 80% of the films that are foisted are the result of some exec wanting to simply clear his desk of lousy spec scripts without having to throw them away after having paid a couple hundred bucks for them.
1a) At the same time, quit editing out scenes that make the movie work better for the sake of throwing them on the DVD as a selling point. Best example: Star Trek Nemesis, which is actually a far better movie with all the human elements added back in that were taken out because Stuart Baird, Rick Berman and Brandon Braga were clueless as to what makes a good Trek flick work.
2) Theaters need to reduce prices back to under $6.00 USD for prime time viewing, and all the concession stand junk food needs to be reduced in price to match the stop-n-rob convenience store pricing. The reason most people avoid the theaters and prefer DVDs and/or Pirated Rips at home is that it's TOO FUCKING EXPENSIVE to take even one person for a decent night at the movies, much less the whole family.
3) Continue to prosecute those *selling* pirated copies of movies, especially those scumbags who try to pass on a screener as a direct-to-DVD transfer. But leave those who are sharing low-quality rips alone. If your movie is worth a shit, then this is *FREE ADVERTISING!*. If your movie is nothing more than dog feces on film stock, then see 1) above before whining about nobody spending money on your film because they've already seen how bad it is.
4) If any of the above can also be attributed to Union Greed, then it's time for Hollywood to grow some balls and kick the Unions out once and for all. The recent Writers' Strike is yet another example of how they've exceeded their purpose and are simply trying to rape everyone's wallets and not just the execs.
In what temporal rift are Brad Pitt and George Clooney ambassadors to the youngsters?
#9 - that'd the same temporal rift in which the leader of the British Lib Dems hire Brian Eno to "advise them on youth issues".
@mhotel
The funny thing is set painters are paid up-front, and do not receive any residuals or royalties or profit-sharing from the film's release. So-called 'piracy' doesn't affect them in the least.
yes, please have george clooney tell us how much it hurts him when people pirate.
'don't take food out of george clooney's mouth. george clooney's gotta eat, too'.
So Weinstein is admitting that he will use his money and power to alter U.S. law to fit his own demands? Corruption, it's not just for Republicans anymore. What a douchebag.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt are jokes. Oceans 11, 12, 13...ad infinitum were boring in their attempts at being cool. They're all wannabe Rat Packers and Bundy Drive Boys. Clooney is an old man and Pitt is a pretentious fop.
@om
I strongly disagree with your point #4, though I'm curious about your reasoning...?
My (admittedly limited) understanding of the WGA strike situation is that the studios are:
- Paying the writers some absurdly small royalty on each DVD sale (I want to say 0.0003% but I'd have to look it up)
- Claiming that they don't yet know if this whole "internet" thing is really going to take off, and therefore they shouldn't have to give writers any royalties for digitally-distributed content
I'm sure there's more to the issue than I've stated, and I recognize there are two sides to every coin, etc, but I'm inclined to think the writers are more likely to be victimized by the studios than vice-versa.
Your thoughts?
Stealing is bad for everyone (said Robin the Hood)! I find no pleasure in stealing, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. As long as we maintain a cultural-ethical core that says tealing is wrong(unless it's to feed the poor, or something very mythological ((poor Prometheis)),we should fail to fall to the pirates. And it's up to artists to tell their fans that art only exists in --this-- culture because people can make a living at it (even to some small degree). It's just not kewl to buy illegal copies of entertainment. Political stuff is fine. A real fan would not steal an artist's work.
A Level playing field in the world of the Capitalist Whore? I think not! Steal more! Steal more! Stick it to the blotted few that control the many. Make the rich pay for everything for everyone, for they are the Kings and Queens and control 90% percent of the wealth. They are responsible for where we are and where we're going. Make them all pay(taxes, of course).
@jeff (and cpt tim #1)
It's been said many times here on BB, but I'd like to reiterate:
Stealing is not copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement is not theft.
They are two different things.
@#10,
You win. Brian Eno will be 60 this year. At 44 and 46, maybe Brad and George are youngsters.
Well, the easiest way to stop piracy would be to release movies in a DRM free format at a reasonable price.
Bit Torrent is only free if your time has no value. I'd buy stuff off of iTunes but not being able to burn it is just too unreasonable.
Accept piracy from the young as an advertising venue to keep them interested in your medium. You can't get money from them because they have no money. But you'll get it from them when they are older and too busy to deal with BT.
They can make a basket of money selling us HD versions now, and in years start selling even higher res, better sound etc...sell us the whole catalog over again.
Then of course can just create content whenever they want to, so how about increasing income by producing more, better shows...
@radioguy
...unless the impact of piracy is that studios decide to produce less movies per year, in which case there are less overall jobs available for that guy (and other laborers that the industry needs). i see the validity of the argument, and i really don't think watching a movie you didn't pay for is a particularily moral thing to do.
i'm about 5/7th of the way through TFA and it highlights several good points. the primary one for me is that, as the movie/music industries begrudgingly accept online distribution as viable, they do it in the most ham-handed, least convenient way and then spend time complaining that people would rather steal than have a legitimate way of purchasing and consuming media.
which is silly. we all know it. i like downloading stuff. if i want to watch the futurama movie i don't want to go to a store or wait for amazon (et al) to ship a dvd to me. i want to find it, pay a respectable $10-15 for it (no physical product should mean no overhead for shipping, packaging, etc), and bang the download button and wait for a night (or less if there's lots of people seeding). then it's mine and if i want to convert an AVI to QT to watch on my portable device, i can do that. if i want to watch it a hundred times in a week i can do that. if i want to put it on my backup harddrive and find it during my annual cleanup and watch it and still think it's awesome i can do that.
i have this freedom with all the stuff i grab off of the internet, and that's where it supercedes the moral ickiness of stealing.
hey studios: don't tell me stealing's bad. make legitimacy easy.
We don't download because we want to steal it. We download because we want to see it. I'm stuck down here in Australia, and it is nothing at all for us to be months (and sometimes, years) behind overseas TV and movie releases. We are supposed to sit there like good little consumers and wait our turn. Is it any wonder a great many of us took to downloading so quickly? I don't bother with terrestrial TV anymore, and it is terrestrial TV's own fault.
The TV networks, run as they are by monkeys, have only just realised where their audiences were disappearing to and recently, as in least year, started offering a few shows in a timely manner.
Movies - bit different, but same basic principle: STOP MAKING US WAIT and you might notice a reducton in piracy levels.
I'm not sure that the problem is that piracy is considered cool, so I'm not sure how making it "uncool" would work. In general I don't think it's considered "cool" to watch movies alone, and I'm positive it's not considered "cool" to be too cheap to rent a dvd and make people watch a crappy downloaded or streaming version if you have people over. On the other hand it might well be considered "cool" to have a massive party financed by all the money you saved not buying or renting movies. So the problem they need to address is that a good enough version of their product is available for free and given a choice between paying for the real version and buying something else people would rather buy something else.
I understand the argument for how the record industry will make money with piracy, people like concerts. But given that people are already whining about how expensive movie theater tickets are, how do you propose movies will continue to make money if dvd sales and rentals were to collapse? I may not want every movie to be Spiderman 3, but I happen to enjoy my share of big budget spectacle movies and would be dissappointed if the business model that supports them were to disappear.
So, Harvey needs the money for that fourth chin he's working on?
My suggestion to get to the kidz: Bring back the 'fried egg' psa:
This Is Your Brain On File Sharing!
People download movies to see if it is something they want to spend an exhorbatant amount of money on at a theater. So yeah, you want to take someone out to dinner and a movie, but you don't want to drop $40 for tickets and snacks on a movie that sucks ass. So you download a couple that look promising, and pick from what you've seen.
Why don't they get in on it, rather than try to stomp it out? If I could download a certified studio lower res version at home and view it, then if I liked it well enough, I would definitely go pay to see it in a theater. They don't do this because then they would have to come up with you know, quality.
Don't make me pay $10 to see a half hour of commercials while sitting in a chair with a sticky floor, only to follow it with 98 minutes of drivel, then tell me that in 6 months I can PURCHASE the same movie I already paid $10 to watch once, but with all the parts they took out intact!
And they claim they don't understand why people pirate movies. They know perfectly well what they are doing.
@ #13 Svenski
Hey, at least he up front about trying to be corrupt. Or...put another way...at least he's honest about being dishonest.
#20 "STOP MAKING US WAIT and you might notice a reducton in piracy levels."
Exactly!
And when big media companies find out that lots of people in other countries are 'movie pirates', their reaction is to threaten to delay the release of new movies! Brilliant strategy.
It's like they think that their movies are important. It's just entertainment... do I really need to see "American Pie X"? I'll survive, somehow.
@8 -yeah, except for what #14 says about the WGA.
According to my most recent wiki read, it was .3% per for home video (which was enacted in the 1988 Strike, when the companies said home video was not a viable market and was too expensive to pursue).
@18,19,20,23 Exactly.
@21 The music industry doesn't realize what's going on. Look at Radiohead. Artists with no following need someone to do PR for them, but those who already have a following could take the reins themselves and actually make a living. I spent some time managing a few small bands and I know first hand, most record deals amount to jack $^$^ for the artists. The industry model has to change all around. Look at Madonna's new LiveNation deal. Look at the new record deal model, now the major companies are asking new contracts to sign over not just large percentage album sales, tour, and merchandising, but they are taking % of name use, sometimes owning the name rights, and making these "hands in every pot" contracts. If you were an artist, does it sound like a good deal to sign over the large share of EVERYTHING you do to the label? I saw some contracts that made it so if an artist so much as says "Yeah I kinda like Starbucks" the label gets a cut. See the Rolling Stone article - http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/15137581/the_record_industrys_decline/print
We need more GPL and CC stuff out there, as well as a new industry model. I hope this sort of things affects other business models as well, I'm sick of paying $3+ a gallon for gasoline when I drive by the storage tanks where a local refinery has been literally stockpiling. (Can you say price fixing? I knew you could.)
On a complete rant note, who else is sick of poor products and poor service for large amounts of money? I personally haven't bought snacks at the theatre in 15 years, I'm not paying $5 for a bottled water when the water at home is free. Why does the drive thru have a screen to display my order when they don't even use it? Who in their right mind buys this false ripe produce at places like Walmart?
end rant
Though I agree with several people's arguments against the rising theater ticket and snack price, it isn't the major film companies who are to be blamed. The theater decides on its own what they will charge for each individual thing. Still bad, but somewhat offtopic.
"This internet thing you keep talking about. It'll never catch on. And if it does, we'll bury it."
That entire quote sounds like yet another cocaine decision. After all, what's happening to EMI could never happen to us...
"Gee Mr Weinstein, I thought you donated all that money to me because YOU support MY policies."
Oh yeah... I wish I could've been a fly on the wall in that meeting...
"Ok, so who do the kids these days respect? Somebody they think is cool? Who's on the cover of all those teen magazines?"
"Brad Pitt?"
"George Clooney?"
"No, you idiots, somebody young, and hip!"
"Shia LaBeouf?"
"Brilliant!"
I mean... I guess if they're trying to get 13 year old girls to stop pirating... Shia's a good choice. Somehow, I don't think it's going to really impact the rest of the pirating demographic.
@#8/OM:
Get rid of "greedy unions"? Are you joking, or really a horrible human being? "Greedy Unions" gave us minimum wage, weekends, the 40-hour work week, paid vacation time, benefits, etc. Their work is HARDLY done considering how LITTLE vacation time, benefits, etc., Americans have relative to the rest of the "free world."
Those GREEDY unions are striking for a reasonable cut. The writers = the show. If I churned out art all day on a canvas, working my butt off, and got a .00003% cut from the profits of those paintings, it sure wouldn't make sense to me! It wouldn't matter if I was making twenty million per painting -- the point remains that someone ELSE is making 99.9999% of the money I AM creating.
I really wish that I could send you back to the Industrial Revolution in a time machine and show you pre-union working conditions....
who needs a time machine when you have WalMart?
I agree with the substance of the message that "stealing isn't cool."
So what does this have to do with copyright infringement? According to SCOTUS, nothing. Copyright infringement does not satisfy the legal criteria of theft.
The very fact that the intellectually bankrupt accountants of Hollywood use the overblown term "piracy" to describe copyright infringement helps to illustrate just how desperate they are. Pirates murdered people and seized property. I download 30 minutes of tv that I missed watching last week. If you see even a vague parallel between a pirate and me, ask the orderlies to up your medication and take away your pointy scissors.
@ #13 Svenski:
Excellent point, my good sir/madam!
Who in their right mind buys this false ripe produce at places like Walmart?
Um... me? (Gimme a break, Walmart's one of the better importers of produce here in Puerto Rico.)
@31
Your ancient examples of the necessity of unions is meaningless in current day Hollywood. There are far too many people willing to do what are essentially no skill jobs. Most SAG members can't make a living by acting, so unions are hardly preserving their jobs. As for the WGA, why should a talentless writer get anything more than the market is willing to pay? If the show can't go on without you, you are obviously valuable and will be compensated thusly. If you can be replaced by the next hack off the street, how can you demand excess returns?
Hollywood is massively inefficient and controlled by a small number of tyrants. I love the fact that people like Weinstein fundamentally can't understand how the Internet affects their industry. It just means that Hollywood will collapse sooner rather than later. Like in the music industry, independent producers are taking over, and they are bringing quality with them.
Man I hate Hollywood. Does it show?