Peter Serafinowicz, of which I must admit I had never heard:
Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I’m also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars. [..]
“Ownership” is starting to change its meaning. If you buy a movie from iTunes you “own” the right to watch it on certain devices within certain constraints. When you “own” a DVD, you have the right to watch it whenever and wherever you want. However: you must watch ten minutes of promos, trailers and anti-piracy threats. I’ll take the download, please.
But often you can’t do it legally: I recently wanted to show my son Disney’s classic Jungle Book and intended to get it on iTunes. Unfortunately, it is currently incarcerated within The Disney Vault. So I’m afraid I simply DL’ed a pixel-clear pirate copy which arrived in seconds. My moral justification for this? I once bought the VHS. It’s your own vault, Disney! [..]
With the help of some sympathetic Twitter followers I then spent around ten futile hours installing Xcode and obscure Python scripts (not the funny ones) on two different computers in what seems to be the only method one can use to illegally decrypt Adobe ebooks. My moral justification for this? I’ve paid for the book twice. [..]
I recently directed the music video for Hot Chip’s “I Feel Better.” Contractually, the video had to be hosted on EMI’s official YouTube channel, which disabled non-UK users from viewing it, limiting its audience by around 80%. Frustrated, I put it up on my own YouTube channel with no region restrictions, and at time of writing is just shy of a million views. EMI then remotely disabled embedding on my version, thereby limiting its audience again. If you’re in the business of promoting a band, why would you want to stop people watching their promotional video? [..]
In the meantime, I’ll be suing myself for pirating my own show. And I’m pretty scared, because I have an amazing lawyer.
I have a feeling he knows this already, but for those that need it written on their foreheads:
- Stop fighting “piracy”. Just drop it right now. Fire all those people. Keep the lawyers on standby — we’ll come to them in a second.
- Spend some of that money you just freed up in the budget on asking people what they’d like to be able to do to view or listen to the media you’re offering. Implement that to perfection, without involving a line of purposeful DRM. Charge for it. If you don’t provide the product people want, they will see no qualms about getting it from elsewhere — especially if the item is the same but the packaging is different, or if it went from ink and paper to bits and light.
- TV, books or movies especially: Sit down with the huge yarn of licensing deals, hire some lawyers and untangle it. Don’t stop until there are no regional or cultural limitations. Renegotiate, renegotiate, renegotiate, and don’t be afraid to launch something without the opined stragglers; it’ll be their loss. When something is available, it’s available everywhere, instantly. (Not necessarily subtitled or dubbed; that’s okay to do in the fullness of time.) If you don’t do this, the Internet will do it for you. Limiting this has never been realistic, nor necessary.
- Music especially: Stop paying radio stations for playing your songs. That’s not marketing, that’s confessing that you have an inferior product. I’d be livid. I’d want to be played because my music was good, not because my label chose to empty their coffers over some shock jock morning show instead of me and then complain about declining profits.
I promise you it’ll be worth it, because you’d have a product that the market wants. And please don’t tell me how hard this is; go fucking do it instead, or at least get as close as you possibly can, because I for one also appreciate effort and determination instead of laurel-resting interspersed with bitching.
Or, to put it briefly, the correct answer to “our users are somehow evading us” isn’t “let’s sue those fuckers”.
Serafinowicz’s first series of ‘Look Around You’ is one of my favourite shows – it may not translate well outside the UK, as it’s so specifically recreates 1970s BBC educational programs.
Agree with most of what you’re saying – on the other hand, as with books and music, it is rarely the creators or even the lower level staff who set these policies – Charles Stross has an excellent series of posts on his blog discussing this – how individual imprints within a large publisher are affected by pro-DRM decisions conducted even further up – at the corporate level.
Secondly, on the idea of ‘no cultural or regional limitations’. The US refused to ratify copyright until long after Europe (it didn’t benefit them as a net importer of culture. Now that they are a net exporter of culture they want to extend it. At a certain level, the history of international copyright is economic). Even now US and EU copyright law is not harmonised – and I would rather we kept BAD law, like software patents, out of the UK.
Harmonising that doesn’t just involve companies and lawyers getting together, but politicians and parliaments passing laws- so democracy gets in there too (well, to the degree that democracy has any impact on decisions made by the WTO).
Creators can’t force the hand of the companies they work for. They can choose to move to publishers, etc, that sell DRM-free content – but most of those are evidently far worse at doing their job – investing in, and selling things – than the big companies. If they were not worse, they would have repeat success stories.
There is one other small matter about flattening licensing deals – it turns every deal into a global deal. A common pattern for authors and in music publishing is to only sell your local rights, first – when you have no track record – and hold back on international rights. That means that if you have a minor UK hit book, it’s then a book with a track record, and you can negotiate a lot more for the US rights.
By JulesLt · 2010.05.18 08:05
JulesLt: Having a smattering of local deals may also hamper them from cashing in even more. But you make a very good point. Very few things anyone ever writes is as simple as they’d like to claim, and my point was simply that I think they’ve never even attempted it because it’s much easier to get mad at people when your business model stops working as well as it used to.
I didn’t tell the creator to go do all this; it was explicitly pointed towards the label/distributor/big honkin’ production company type people. (You know, the ones that don’t read this anyway, and don’t take me seriously even when they do.) However, I think that the creator that does choose to moan about “not getting paid” (or what have you) also has an obligation to try to seek out a better deal for both parts.
I am aware that the culture in those companies actively encourages being hostile to customers, which is why we should let the markets have a go at them, without watch-my-back legislation that corrodes civil rights going back to the Roman empire. It’s an explanation of the status quo, never an excuse for not improving.
By Jesper · 2010.05.18 20:35
A.
Men.
By Christopher Ashworth · 2010.05.25 02:34