Time-Machine? Yeah! - For the record, I don’t think it’s actually about piracy at all

January 19, 2012

For the record, I don’t think it’s actually about piracy at all

As a person who’s interned underneath some pretty neat TV producers who you might’ve heard of (if I wanted to name them and risk this blog and my professional reputation a bit, which I don’t), I think most people in The Biz know they aren’t really ever going to stop piracy. I think they also know that it isn’t actually cutting into their revenues that much.

I just genuinely don’t believe that’s what this is about.

I’m reminded of this quote about music piracy a couple years back

EMI’s Bjørn Rogstad told Aftenposten that the results make it seem like free downloads stimulate pay downloads, but there’s no way to know for sure. “There is one thing we are not going away, and it is the consumption of music increases, while revenue declines. It can not be explained in any way other than that the illegal downloading is over the legal sale of music,” Rogstad said.

See this guy being willfully ignorant? I think he knows better. I think he knows very well how consumption can go up while revenue goes down.

Competition.

The RIAA doesn’t count the purchase of non-RIAA-label music when they calculate their revenues. If I look at my ipod right now, I see about $15 worth of music purchased in the last month that the RIAA doesn’t count.

Let’s put this another way. TV. Good ratings used to be like 15 million viewers. Now good ratings are like 3-4 million. More people are watching TV than ever, so what’s happening?

Well, the viewers are split up more, because there are more channels. Cable happened. Choice and competition happened.

The main TV Networks? The ones that used to be the only networks? Do not like this.

Well, except for that they own most of the cable networks anyway.

But if it were up to the people in charge, no one would ever make money without them. They do not like competing for money.

And they used to not have to. Back in the “golden age” of Hollywood, a select few had complete control over the distribution of film. This meant that even if you got the money together to make your own movie, you couldn’t profit off of it, because there was nowhere to display it.

This was completely illegal and the feds, who back then had a slightly clearer picture of who they worked for, put an end to it. Indie movies started happening.

Distribution is key to making money on movies, tv and music. If you can distribute on your own for cheap, you can make money without studios, and you can compete with studios with your own little album or webseries.

They hate that.

TV and Movie and Music studios do not want to compete for money. They liked the days where they could make anything and put it on TV and it would get 8 million views because there literally wasn’t anything else.

They liked when they could factory farm a movie out, force it into a theater by bundling it with a better movie that you couldn’t get without it, and they’d make money because what choice did the consumer have? It was their movie or no movie.

They liked when the charts were mostly controlled by who they decided they liked as artists. They liked when, if you wanted to buy music, you could it buy it from them or no one, because they were the only people with the resources to get it to you.

The thing about the internet is that it’s one great big distribution platform.

And now they have to compete with that.

I mean, have you seen that classy My Drunk Kitchen show? It’s hilarious! And there’s like t-shirts and advertising and people are going around quoting it. That’s the entertainment industry being successful and healthy, but the Big Companies are not making any money there. And that’s even competition with their shows! Why would I watch their comedy show when I can watch MDK nonstop forever?

And have you heard of the Team Starkid stuff? There are kids out there making parodies and Comedy Central isn’t getting a dime. And they’re getting really popular among teen girls! The big studios wants to keep that market tied up in them. Team Starkid even have albums that have rated in the charts and DVDs for sale and merchandise that this whole demographic is fawning over and the big companies are getting zilch.

This is what the entertainment industry is actually afraid of. Competition. If they don’t get to control the internet, they don’t get to control distribution any more. And this means they actually have to come up with appealing products to compete for our money instead of getting our money by default. That’s harder for them, competing. And they don’t want to.

The fact that their interests coincide quite nicely with the interests of certain politicians, who also are not interested in competing and are happier in a world where the conversation about them can be controlled and bought? Well, that just makes things like SOPA and PIPA more appealing all around.

People who are already in power do not want to have to fight to stay there, even though it’s better for every industry and the public good if they do. Competition is good. Free and open information is good.

I genuinely believe that for the entertainment industry these bills are not about stopping piracy. They are about

1) making some extra dough in fines and returns from litigations involving conveniently over-criminalized behaviours

2) destroying every single form of art distribution on the web unless they personally have a hand in it, so that no one can make money without them.

Because it’s a convenient truth that virtually every form of distribution on the web that can be used for generating and profiting off of original content will also likely have some copyrighted content. Which will give them an excuse to take them down.

Anyway. My thoughts.

2:44pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMbepxF1opbH

(Notes: 22)