The Pirate Bay Press Release On SOPA: We Are The New Hollywood

Given its general contempt for the repeated attempts to close it down, you wouldn't expect The Pirate Bay to be particularly worried by SOPA. But in its very own press release on the subject, it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood. 

On Techdirt.

Hollywood's Post-theatrical Problem, Isn't

There's a great piece in the Washington Post with the headline "The MPAA says the movie business is great. Unless it's lousy." This rightly points out that there is something funny going on in the film industry's view of itself.

On the one hand:

global box office receipts reached an all time high of $29.9 billion, an increase of 7.6% over 2008 and almost 30% from 2005. The U.S./Canada market reached $10.6 billion, an increase of more than 10%, and International receipts increased 6.3% to $19.3 billion in 2009 .... Ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada rose more than 5.5% from 2008, the first admissions increase in two years. Per capita ticket purchases in the U.S. and Canada also increased 4.6% to 4.3 tickets per person, the first significant increase since 2002.

On the other:

you wouldn't know that the movie business was doing so well from other MPAA announcements. Take, for instance, the December press release (PDF) in which MPAA chairman Dan Glickman suggested that unauthorized copies of movies were running the industry into the ground:

"Yet our industry faces the relentless challenge of the theft of its creative content, a challenge extracting an increasingly unbearable cost."

The writer then has the following key explanation:

Asked to clarify, MPAA spokesman Howard Gantman said the industry suffers the greatest damage from fraudulent copies (he said "piracy," but I disagree with that usage) in the post-theatrical markets -- video-on-demand, downloads, DVD and Blu-ray.

I love that "post-theatrical markets" phrase, but what I like even more is this amazingly clear illustration of what is happening in the film industry.

That is, the analogue side - ticket sales in the cinemas - is soaring, while the digital part - those "post-theatrical markets" - are on the way down. And that's absolutely inevitable, of course, because the scarcity is all on the analogue side, while the digital artefacts - downloads, DVDs and Blu-ray - have close to zero marginal cost (not so true for DVDs and Blu-ray, but close enough), so you'd expect their prices and profits to diminish.

In other words, the industry's own figures are a perfect confirmation that it needs to concentrate on the analogue side, and to regard the digital side as an incredibly efficient way to boost it. But somehow I don't think that's the message it's going to be taking home in the near future, more's the pity. (Via @rlancefield.)

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Embarrassed by DRM

Here's a telling comment:

The point behind all this is, of course, to conceal the very existence of DRM from the user – Microsoft is so keen on this that it won't use the term itself at all. The vast majority of iTunes users have no idea their content is being "protected" through Apple's FairPlay DRM, and while a vocal minority seem to be driving the music world away from DRM'd music, it's hard to imagine Hollywood (or Bollywood) being so keen on sharing their labours.

Ergo, we need to shout about the presence of DRM from the rooftops: the more people know about it, the more they will dislike it, as Microsoft well understands....

Nokia: Hollywood's Lapdog, and People's Enemy

Somewhat naively I thought that Nokia was a savvy company on the side of light - maybe because it's Finnish; but I was wrong, it seems:

Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because "from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."

...

Nokia intervention here is nothing short of bizarre. Ogg is not proprietary, DRM is, and DRM-free may be a "non-starter" for Hollywood today, but that was true of music two years ago and today, most of the labels are lining up to release their catalogs without DRM. The Web, and Web-based video, are bigger than Hollywood. The Web is not a place for proprietary technology or systems that take over your computer. For Nokia (and Apple, who also lobbied hard for DRM inclusion) to get the Web this badly wrong, this many years into the game, is really sad: if you haven't figured out that the Web is open by 2007, you just haven't been paying attention.

Time to cross Nokia off the Christmas card list, then.

The Deeper View on Vista

Once more, Brucie tells it like it is:

Microsoft is reaching for a much bigger prize than Apple: not just Hollywood, but also peripheral hardware vendors. Vista's DRM will require driver developers to comply with all kinds of rules and be certified; otherwise, they won't work. And Microsoft talks about expanding this to independent software vendors as well. It's another war for control of the computer market.

A must-read.

All the World's a Stage/Film/MMORPG/Virtual World

More signs of the times:

Disney CEO Bob Iger showed off the revamped Disney.com during his CES keynote yesterday, but there was little "hard news" on offer—except for the announcement that Disney is bringing its hottest properties into the virtual realm. Iger announced that the company would launch a massively multiplayer Pirates of the Caribbean later this year.

And

James Cameron, the director whose “Titanic” set a record for ticket sales around the world, will join 20th Century Fox in tackling a similarly ambitious and costly film, “Avatar,” which will test new technologies on a scale unseen before in Hollywood, the studio and the filmmaker said on Monday.

...

The film, with a budget of about $200 million, is an original science fiction story that will be shown in 3D even in conventional theaters. The plot pits a human army against an alien army on a distant planet, bringing live actors and digital technology together to make a large cast of virtual creatures who convey emotion as authentically as humans.

Not So Lonely

Geek that I am, the only thing that really interests me about Lonelygirl15 is the technology behind the follow-on Web site:

On a shoestring budget themselves, the trio supports the Web site with open-source technologies like MySQL databases. "Our entire backend that supports the Web site is free because we use WordPress," Beckett said. "Five years ago, you would have had to buy UNIX boxes and build a custom content management system."

That is, a LAMP stack like just about every other Web 2.0 startup - not so lonely. In this respect, it feeds off the same forces that made the original videos possible:

The Lonelygirl15 episodes cost virtually nothing to create. All are shot with a $130 Web camera. The sound is recorded from the internal microphone. Two desk lamps provide the lighting. Beckett's laptop is the computer required to record the segment.

No wonder Hollywood is in trouble.

A Straw in the Californian Wind?

Newspapers tend to keep their constituencies firmly in mind when they are writing. So you might expect the Los Angeles Times to be beating the drum for Hollywood fairly unthinkingly. And then up pops this editorial on various US proposals to give entertainment industries even more of a stranglehold over content, which concludes:

As they weigh the entertainment industry's pleas, lawmakers shouldn't assume all consumers are bootleggers and every digital device is a hand grenade aimed at Hollywood.

Very interesting: if Hollywood's local newspaper is daring to write this, maybe a few other people in the vicinity are starting to think this way too. (Via TechDirt.)

BloodSpell - For Openness' Sake

Another film released under a Creative Commons licence - but this one with a twist. It's made using the Machinima framework - a kind of virtual world production. It's dead clunky now (think old videogames), but it's not hard to see where this is going: completely realistic virtual worlds that unfold according to scripts with actors capable of independent action, all filmed with free camerawork. Hollywood won't know what hits it.

All it needs now is a fully open-source platform. Unless one already exists - my ignorance of this fascinating world is such that it might well do, but I couldn't find one. (Via OpenBusiness.)