Another Sign of the End Times (yawn)
Jan. 18th, 2006 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoLaw professors talking shit about things they don't know a damn thing about. Oh, wait, that's the normal state of affairs in America these days, isn't it? Anyway, Stanford lawprof Lawrence Lessig is three months late to the party with his discovery that his fellow leeches at Wind Up Records have set our friends at AMV.org up the C&D order, which he sees as the troubling dawn of "the read-only Web", where noone will be allowed to do mashups or AMVs or fanfic or Anything Fun At All. Oh noes! Truly the dark night of fascism has come to Amerikkka!
Talk about making a mountain out of a fscking molehill. It's worth noting that while 3000 AMVs got their links severed, there's no realistic way to keep people from distributing those AMVs on CDs or DVDs, as was done before the C&D order and will no doubt be done after the C&D order. It's also worth noting that no other label has bothered following the example of Wind Up Records, probably because those labels are headed by people who recognize the value of free (if usually crappy, IAW Sturgeon's Law) publicity. I mean, if Linkin Park hasn't sued to get all the unspeakably vile, stupid, and technically inept Linkinball Z and Naruto Park AMVs taken down, isn't that pretty strong support for the notion that Lessig's whole premise is bogus and his essay amounts to crying wolf?
You hear this kind of panicky talk brought up every time somebody gets smacked for downloading a few gigs' worth of MP3s without paying for them or M$FT thinks out loud about preinstalling DRM software as part of Vista (formerly Longhorn), and nobody stops to ask if all this stuff is actually going to happen. Has everyone magically forgotten about the epic PR disaster of Sony's craptastic DRM/rootkit music CDs? Has everyone forgotten that for every magic technobullet Hollywood comes up with, 1337 h4x0rz develop better armor, bullet splitters, remote anti-bullet vaporizing systems, and other baroque countermeasures? In the political realm, the smell of Hollywood money is going to be far less sweet in the neo-Puritan ethical climate where all contributions from just about every form of lobbyist and PAC will be seen as toxic and corrupting. There's an army of Davids out there with a huge installed base of Win2K, WinXP and Mac boxes to play with, and they're paying more attention to this sort of thing than they used to. I'm pretty optimistic about the future, myself. 1984 came and went, and Big Brother is standing in line somewhere in what used to be the USSR waiting for his pension. I don't think his covetous relatives in the NYDCLA axis are going to do much better.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn. (Props to Public Enemy and especially to Chuck D, first prophet of the New Media.)
Originally provoked by Good Morning Silicon Valley.
UPDATE Tim Park of Doki Doki Productions comments in e-mail that he'd rather have Lessig on-side than not. I agree, but the guy's Chicken Little attitude drives me nuts and strikes me as being very likely to alienate people who don't have any personal investment in the issue.
Talk about making a mountain out of a fscking molehill. It's worth noting that while 3000 AMVs got their links severed, there's no realistic way to keep people from distributing those AMVs on CDs or DVDs, as was done before the C&D order and will no doubt be done after the C&D order. It's also worth noting that no other label has bothered following the example of Wind Up Records, probably because those labels are headed by people who recognize the value of free (if usually crappy, IAW Sturgeon's Law) publicity. I mean, if Linkin Park hasn't sued to get all the unspeakably vile, stupid, and technically inept Linkinball Z and Naruto Park AMVs taken down, isn't that pretty strong support for the notion that Lessig's whole premise is bogus and his essay amounts to crying wolf?
You hear this kind of panicky talk brought up every time somebody gets smacked for downloading a few gigs' worth of MP3s without paying for them or M$FT thinks out loud about preinstalling DRM software as part of Vista (formerly Longhorn), and nobody stops to ask if all this stuff is actually going to happen. Has everyone magically forgotten about the epic PR disaster of Sony's craptastic DRM/rootkit music CDs? Has everyone forgotten that for every magic technobullet Hollywood comes up with, 1337 h4x0rz develop better armor, bullet splitters, remote anti-bullet vaporizing systems, and other baroque countermeasures? In the political realm, the smell of Hollywood money is going to be far less sweet in the neo-Puritan ethical climate where all contributions from just about every form of lobbyist and PAC will be seen as toxic and corrupting. There's an army of Davids out there with a huge installed base of Win2K, WinXP and Mac boxes to play with, and they're paying more attention to this sort of thing than they used to. I'm pretty optimistic about the future, myself. 1984 came and went, and Big Brother is standing in line somewhere in what used to be the USSR waiting for his pension. I don't think his covetous relatives in the NYDCLA axis are going to do much better.
Burn, Hollywood, Burn. (Props to Public Enemy and especially to Chuck D, first prophet of the New Media.)
Originally provoked by Good Morning Silicon Valley.
UPDATE Tim Park of Doki Doki Productions comments in e-mail that he'd rather have Lessig on-side than not. I agree, but the guy's Chicken Little attitude drives me nuts and strikes me as being very likely to alienate people who don't have any personal investment in the issue.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-19 01:53 am (UTC)See, I find it hard to believe that this is exactly what Hollywood is trying its damndest to do. Studio filmmakers are forever chasing their audience, which is exactly why Narnia landed a shitload of financing after the Lord of the Rings films took off. "Hey, people like fantasy movies now! Anyone want to make a fantasy movie?" "How about Narnia? They tap into the Passion of the Christ crowd, too!" "Cool! Here's a zillion dollars."
Nah, studios totally follow the dollar. The fact that there are also "critically acclaimed" movies that are also being put out by the studios is because they're cheaper to make, and they pull bucks out of the wallets of the cineasts in the larger cities. Release a small budget flick with a good script in a few choice screens, and you have a moneymaker. It's not making buhzillions, but it's making a profit.
And the fact that the DVD and cable markets is red hot shows that taste in newer films hasn't flagged... the yen to go to the theater has.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-19 02:25 am (UTC)Oh, yeah - I thought I saw this article (http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18591/article_detail.asp) in the Wall Street Journal ("Stupid Hollywood", third item down) but I found a link. In 2004 the 113 G/PG-rated movies grossed $1.3 billion while the 540 R-rated films pulled in $622 million...and only 4 of the top 25 grossing films were R-rated. Top movie among those, of course, was Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. So if Hollywood is all about the money, they have a really odd way of showing it.
On a somewhat related topic, Serenity (http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=serenity.htm) appears to have done well enough overseas that with DVD sales, it'll have made money - which I hope means that Universal will pony up for a sequel, and maybe do a decent job of promoting it this time around.