MPAA Welcomes Netflix as New Member
mpaa.org
mpaa.org
I wish I could use that as a legal excuse "well nuh uh they were mean to me"
The moral calculus, I think, cuts the other way. People complain that Wall Street middle men don’t create value, just move it around, but in the same breath assign moral superiority to companies that just move around content created by other people. Odd.
Copyright is more than just a stick that many people see. Copyright is first and foremost an attribution. It's the only formal recognition of someone's unique work. Considering that we are trying to automate all manual labor in the not so distant future, copyright is more and not less important to our society.
I agree, that the tools and practices used today are crude and in many cases unfair, but once we remove the stigma associated with it, we will get more innovation in it.
I can't name many creators that would not like to be recognized for their work and even less that don't want to be paid for it.
are you sure about this?
It seems to me copyright as it is in common law countries is first and foremost about _controlling distribution_. It's literally the right to make copies.
AFAIU, there is a difference from common law countries, for example.
E.g. in Italy an author cannot ever lose the status of author of a work, even if the the distribution rights are owned by someone else.
If we look far enough in the future, copyright will mean something very different that what it means today. But I'm biased, considering that I built company in this space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Société_des_auteurs,_composite...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Modernization_Act
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
Was this ever not like that? I'm pretty sure copyright was never even meant for people to have useful enforceable rights to protect their creations, it was always meant for corporations, i.e. the usual business of them pushing legislation to have more power and protection against competition for rich to get richer and all that.
GPS was never meant to be useful for general population. ARPANET was never meant for it either. The market finds its way. I believe, that we are entering an age of attribution and copyright is just the very first step.
The number of people who derive meaningful income from their copyrighted work is and has been very small, and only a small fraction of that (e.g. Disney) derives a fortune by enforcing draconian copyright laws, so it's not clear if this will change in the future.
Also jobs like janitors and nannies won't be automated for a very long time, and it's not clear if the society benefits more from having yet another person writing a novel or making a movie rather than having the same person clean or take care of children.
Depends on how you define it. For instance more than 500k people make on average around $8k/month. I'm not saying it's a mind blowing number, but it's also not little.
>> only a small fraction of that (e.g. Disney) derives a fortune by enforcing draconian copyright laws, so it's not clear if this will change in the future.
It's true that only handful of creators, mostly large companies, earn outsized returns. That however doesn't mean that small creators don't matter nor it means that copyright can't be used for their benefits.
>> Also jobs like janitors and nannies won't be automated for a very long time, and it's not clear if the society benefits more from having yet another person writing a novel or making a movie rather than having the same person clean or take care of children.
The challenge with applying automation on today's world is that we are having hard times to see the "ripple" effect of the change. For instance, if most people don't have to "work" in the traditional sense, then they don't need nannies. Janitors' jobs is becoming fairly automated even today (autonomous vacuums, ...) and the progress will only continue.
Except when the content conglomerates corrupt our democracy by buying legislation and take away our freedoms that are incidental to protecting their profits.
Personally, protection that’s rapidly approaching 200+ years just seems ridiculous. I think a limit to 40 years would have basically zero impact on the creation of new works which seems like the entire point it was created in the first place. The only reason the current situation exists is people making money from other people’s works wanting to continue to do so. That’s got nothing to do with artists.
As to the low end, I would be fine simply abolishing the idea. Shakespeare did not need copyright and I suspect it promotes pandering in a way that’s socially harmful.
(For example, you can see the article about U. California vs Elsevier currently on the front page, or I can expand on why I say copyright has been connected to the above issues.)
I completely agree with one angle on your post, which is that people's personal ethics and desires are only pawns or incidental to the economic players in this game, but that's my explanation for why people follow the game closely and cheer for one side or the other.
Isn't that just about gaining more power over people, not really a power straggle.
The system doesn't work if we can't solve such issues.
If you can come up with a better answer, awesome. (No, I don't accept "UBI" as a better answer.)
A. No one bothers to create it because "Fuck you, pay me! I'm not your bitch."
B. No one bothers to distribute it because "Fuck you, pay me! I'm not your bitch."
We quibble a whole lot about where to draw the line, but if you outright make it impossible for the creators and the distributors to make a comfortable living themselves, then you don't have the thing at all to argue about "DRM or no DRM. That is the question."
If we want good things, we need to design a system that facilitates and rewards actions that add value to the system so people have reason to do so.
The games industry struggled with high piracy rates for decades and Steam changed that - not because of Steam's relatively lax DRM, but because Steam itself was more convenient & easier than piracy.
Ever since Origin, Epic Games store, etc.. have started to compete with Steam, piracy rates have started increasing again for the first time in decades. People want to buy things on the platforms they choose, if you don't let them do that they'll pirate content.
This increased fragmentation is starting to hurt the streaming industry too. Just look at how angry people are at Netflix's library being so lackluster nowadays.
I believe the true solution for everybody getting paid is to relax the copyright laws, so content can't be crippled and tied to one service. Not invasive solutions like DRM - those only drive people to more piracy.
Maybe Netflix and other cooperating services will jack their prices to $20 so I can finally unsubscribe.
95% of these Made by Netflix titles suck and haven't justified the price hikes.
Most of it is awful quality and would've died on the vine on a network channel, and their bar is pretty low. The rest of the library is getting pretty thin as well. I don't think Netflix has a very bright future and will probably be remembered like Myspace, one of the first big players in a space they will cease to be relevant in.
In short, metaphor is hard, especially when you're applying it to complex issues.
And honestly the idea of studio quality is kind of stupid—my favorite show of all time in terms of cinematic quality, The Knick, was done by Cinemax (skinemax?) and virtually nobody has heard of it. The best shows can come from anywhere, and everyone puts out shit content.
This doesn't even apply to arguably good shows like The Killing, whose later Netflix-produced season is so awful it's embarrassing, not because it appealed to a wider demographic -- it was pretty niche -- but simply because it was terrible, badly acted and worse plotted. I've no explanation in this case.
I'm surprised by what people are saying about Bright. I disliked it because it was a bland knockoff of Shadowrun and similar scifi-with-orks-and-elves settings, with weak SFX and an even weaker plot. The commentary about racism -- whether well or badly done -- didn't even factor in my dislike. Bright is indeed a by-the-numbers urban fantasy made to appeal to a wide demographic, with nothing interesting to say about scifi, fantasy or even action. It was quite accurately described by the press as "a movie done with an algorithm". So of course it will likely have a sequel!
I really hope bland shows aren't the future of Netflix, but I fear they will be because they make business sense.
* high-end accounts that allow multiple streams and 4k
* mid-tier with limited streams and max 1080p
* free-tier for password sharers, they don't go after account sharing afaik
They'd rather you watch netflix for free than anything else for free. It helps build a long-term market for their content.
If each charge $20 / mon that's close to $2,000 / year just for content to your television - a full payslip for many low-income people. Such prices might be justifiable to enthusiasts but not really for the general public.
You lost me here.
That's like tasking yourself with staying current with your Warhammer 40k or Magic The Gathering card collection and complaining that it's expensive. Yet you suggested TV as if it's some self-evident thing everyone wants to maximize.
When I initially made the switch, I didnt use an antenna (my complaint is about commercials, not (just) the cable company). I discovered that I lost the ability to participate in a lot of water cooler talk. Even now, I didnt wat bird box, or game of thrones (at least not yet) and I was missing references to them all over the place.
Socially, groups use such references to indicate belonging. This is true in communities of varying sizes. Ergo, not participating DOES have repercussions.
I'm not saying it makes sense to break the bank, but I am saying there are social and therefore economic and other consequences.
But I don't find that very convincing otherwise.
I reinvoke my comparison to deciding you need to own every Magic The Gathering card for whatever reason you want to use. This is more obviously silly because how normalized and socially-acceptable TV obsession is in our culture, but I still don't buy that it's something remotely necessary in your life. And it seems like a popular but toxic self-limiting belief.
Just like if you were to tell me you think the reason you can't make friends is because you can't talk football at the water cooler, so you study the sport every night so that you can spout trivia at work. I would suspect some sort of social disability if you did that.
Historically, people lived in little villages, knew all the same people, etc. These days, TV shows and movies get used to establish a common frame of social reference between people who really don't know each other well.
A hundred years ago, you would have commented on a mutual acquaintance or an event you both attended to bond and to facilitate communication. Now, we routinely use popular media references for the same purpose.
I mostly don't care that I'm "missing out." But, yeah, there is a real social cost involved.
This is part of why it's de facto exclusionary for "the old boys network" to engage in specific social activities that cannot readily be done by, for example, women as well in a "co-ed" fashion.
Which may not matter at all to your life, but could be the make or break for someone else's career.
You choose to find this incredulous and ridiculous. You can certainly do so. I hope you take a few minutes to actually consider why this might matter to many people - those references are made to build camaraderie and a sense of inclusion. Ergo, not following creates a sense of alienation and separation.
You can mock that or not, but that doesn't change how people feel.
Thanks Netflix for making the choice easier.
Before the MPAA made money off the creator, so for 95% of the content on netflix the companies producing the film paid into the MPAA. Sure Netflix probably had to pay the MPAA fee on their content too.
Now the MPAA will make even more money to lobby against customers because now the content distributors are paying in.
So now it give the MPAA more teeth and lobbying power.
Creators, Distributors, and the MPAA versus customers.
The way I see it ( and again I could be wrong ) Netflix was able to leverage their massive buying power to get the DVDs at less than MSRP. Netflix buys 100,000 dvds of a pupil at title and the MPAA get their cut. Netflix then rents those DVDs 1 million times. Did the MPAA lose out on a cut of those 900,000 would be sales?
Now Netflix is paying the same studios for streaming rights.
Netflix paid Disney $300 million for the streaming rights to Disney IP (https://www.vox.com/2019/4/12/18307539/disney-streaming-laun...) that doesn’t count all of the money it pays NBC/Universal, CBS/Viacom, and Warner.
Go outside. Read a book. Spend quality time with your family.
We take our culture of hyper-consumption for granted so much that people scoff when you suggest "well, why not consume less? What's the big deal?"
It's not like we need more posts of people vocalizing how begrudgingly they subscribe to Netflix in every Netflix thread. As if unsubscribing is never an option. It's a bit exhausting to scroll through.
(preferably indie ones, the "AAA" game industry is about as bad as hollywood)
There are things that don't work right: I have constant buffering on a couple of my devices, even at (say) 720p just serving up files with no transcoding, when Netflix et al have no problem serving me 4K to the same device without buffering. (My guess is its a problem with the client app, but I haven't really looked into it.)
There are things that are weird: If you have more than one version of the same movie or show, it lets you select between them not by (say) file name or runtime, but by video quality. So, for instance, I recently ripped a TV series and several of the episodes have extended editions. There's no way to tell which version is which until I start playing one of them.
There are things missing: Hardware acceleration on my i9 is the big one right now for me.
There seem to be regular updates, but they're often things that don't affect me as well. So it feels like updates are slow. (Like a fix for DVR service, which I don't use; or say an update to an XBox client.)
All that said... I'm not saying this to discourage anyone. Like I said, it's serviceable.
I think about the library I could have in ten years spending the money on Blu-Ray discs (on sale of course) instead of shelling out money to Comcast/Netflix/Amazon/HBO/Hulu/etc every month. And the best part is, I know it'll still be there when I'm ready to watch it or rewatch it.
Apples and geo-redundant and highly-available by design oranges, isn't it? Netflix has invested millions in their infrastructure, seems only logical they'd have the edge in content delivery especially to remote devices. Plex on the other hand, if it's just you on your residential copper line connection, well...there you have it.
Netflix can get me 4K content from the internet, through my ethernet, to my device. Plex can get me 4K content from my internal server, through my ethernet, to several of my devices.
Certain Plex client apps choke on any quality coming from the same Plex server over the same ethernet.
I can only assume a residential internet connection, which typically packet filters and shapes for uploading content? It's only a guess though, you might have much better options for residential ISP than I do.
Plex can get me 4K content from my internal server, through my ethernet, to several of my devices.
Across the internet as well or when you're on your local network? My experience has been (and like with all things YMMV) infinitely better watching at home than connecting to my VPN and trying to tunnel back, but I fully expected that because the local ISP places a pretty well enforced limit on uploads from residential lines.
Comparatively though, I don't think either of our connections for streaming content from our respective home media servers holds a candle to the infrastructure of Netflix, which is why my expectations are rather measured regarding the capabilities of Plex.
That said, I love it for what it is.
I'm measuring Plex on my LAN against Plex on my LAN. Some of my clients accept 4K streams with no problems. Other clients buffer an unwatchable amount even on 480p from the same server.
My purpose of bringing up Netflix was only to show that the client devices that are choking on 480p from Plex are capable of handling 4K streams.
Sampling all the way down to 480p is definitely odd behavior on a LAN--can't say I've run into that. Have you had much help from the usual spots? I'd be curious to help troubleshoot this sometime, sounds like an interesting nut to try cracking, or is it something inherent to the clients with the way they're decoding?
Since encoding is one of the things the PLEX team gets from open-source, hardware encoding is a frustrating feature to pay-walled in their premium subscription.
It does seem like we're due for a new open-source media server.
This has influenced what we get to see in theaters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated
Perhaps the new specter is YouTube and its recent banning of security videos?
The MPAA has a chilling effect which I think is harmful to creativity. I think the human mind is a lot tougher than the vocal few lead us to believe.
Do they still do this? I thought they finally realized it wasn’t worth the trouble.
https://act.eff.org/action/prevent-copyright-trolling-tell-t...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190711/00001742562/congr...
Do you think Netflix could be disrupted if content became cheap to produce (through new technology)?
Do you think we could lobby to get copyright terms greatly reduced? How would we go about doing so?
I'm really interested in your thoughts.
(I'm pursuing a startup to answer the second question, but I'm worried the incumbents will simply copy us if the technology works out as well as we hope.)
2) No. Netflix is doing quite good against youtube. Netflix are also doing quite good in animation, which is a genre that has become much cheaper to produce in the last 20-30 years thanks to technology.
3) I don't know. Maybe. Disney has apparently given up extending copyright, so at least things are moving in the right direction.
(Honest question)
You only get to win so many times until you aren't the underdog anymore.
- Harvey Dent
This seems to back that claim: http://soldiersystems.net/tag/patagonia/
In an ideal world Netflix would not produce content and Sony would not own a movie studio.
I find that a great example is Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD where the later did not have region restrictions but the first belonged to Sony who also owned a movie studio allowing large portion of the content to be never released on HD-DVD.