Category: Piracy

The Wicked and Dissembling Glass

Photo by Yaroslav Gerzhedovich

Last week, MPAA CEO Christopher Dodd spoke in San Francisco about fostering better collaboration between the entertainment and Internet industries.  Not surprisingly, two voices from the tech industry, TechDirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation rang out with rebuttal. Mike Masnick, editor of TechDirt, called Dodd a “predictable dissembler” and proceeded to attack him personally for “lacking the vision” for his role.  The EFF posted this article, which strikes a more conciliatory tone that only makes for an even more insidious version of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

Now, I don’t have any strong feelings about the MPAA or Mr. Dodd per se.  I agree with some functions of that body, disagree with others, and am generally neutral on most of its activities.  In January, I wrote that I considered the protest against SOPA to be generally dysfunctional and that well-meaning people were being used as puppets by the Web industry, playing on a historic distrust of the media industry.  So, let’s clear one thing up right now:  as of this moment, the Web industry outspends entertainment on straight-up lobbying and on general PR, including the work of the EFF.  As an aside, I feel a little silly using the term Web industry when one company, Google, owns more than 90% of search and advertising worldwide.  Is there a U.S. company more monopolistic at this point in history?

Still, the Web folks continue to get away with portraying themselves as the underdog and also as the champions of free speech. Thus, the EFF article states, innocent of the slightest hypocrisy, “But let’s not forget that he [Dodd] serves as the chairman and CEO of one of the most influential lobbying groups in Washington, and that the actions of the industry have yet to back up his rhetoric.”  The writers of the article aim to sound open-minded while warning the reader not to trust “Dodd’s influence” despite the fact that the EFF’s Northern California friends enjoy far more influence, if lobbying dollars are the true measure.  Let’s also not forget that the Web industry has left more than its fair share of unfulfilled rhetoric on the table.

While Web-centric pundits continue to raise the specter of SOPA’s return as an emotional tug on our senses, we should remember some of the odd dissembling that came from the bill’s opponents on January 18.  Remember these slogans?  Good intention, bad law.  End Piracy, Not Liberty.  These reasonable-sounding mantras were designed for general consumption by a public that doesn’t follow these issues on a regular basis; and they imply that the Web industry agrees that online piracy is a problem but that SOPA and PIPA were not the solution.  The question remains, though, what solutions has the Web industry offered since declaring victory in the name of liberty over these bills?

So far, this industry has continued to pump out fears regarding any legislative action designed to protect copyright; it has increased its lobbying efforts and expenditures;  it has perpetuated the implication that copyright itself is anathema to free speech; and it has continued to insist that the solution to piracy is to embrace it as a business opportunity rather than to confront it as a threat.  These are not the actions of an industry looking to collaborate to solve a problem. Perhaps because it’s not their problem.

Both the EFF and TechDirt articles in response to Dodd cite a Congressional Research Service Report (see embed) that they claim makes Dodd out as a liar with regard to the importance of filmed entertainment as a component of GDP as well as the industry’s role as an employer.  But, as is often the case with data, truth is in the voice of the interpreter; and it looks to me as though TechDirt and EFF are reading what they want to see in the numbers.

Download (PDF, 274KB)

First, the entire report is based on best available information only from the major studios listed on Page 1.  Hence, the employment number is meaningless, because anyone who knows the motion picture business, knows that the lion’s share of work is done by people who never receive a paycheck from these companies.  The report does not reflect, for instance, the independent production companies who produce most of the filmed entertainment in the U.S.  A quick glance at a web page for just one company, Participant, lists 50 projects completed or in production. If we average a conservative but realistic 150 roles per project (not including actors or directors), that’s 7,500 contract jobs ranging from entry-level to high-paying through one production company since 2004.

The report also would not include a four-person, middle-income shop in NYC doing motion graphics this year for a TV network. These people most certainly are employed by the entertainment industry, and so are several hundred shops just like them around the country. Then of course, there are tens of thousands of industry professionals who support themselves, their families, and their communities by working variously on TV shows, documentaries, low-budget features, commercials, and industrials, all of which are affected by the overall health of the motion picture industry, even at the top rungs of the ladder.

In the TechDirt article, Mike Masnick uses the CRS report to simultaneously assert that the movie business is doing just fine (i.e. studio executive salaries) and, by the way, it isn’t really all that important to the economy (i.e. small contribution to GDP).  Studio CEO salaries, right or wrong, have very little to do with the overall health of the American film industry, especially in a discussion about the effect of online piracy on filmmakers of every size.

As for the significance of filmed entertainment to the economy, again, the GDP part of the report is narrowly focused on box office sales in the U.S. and Canada for the major studios listed.  This leaves out huge segments of economic value in the for-profit, industry as a whole.   (It should be noted that this not a flaw in the report itself, only in how the limited data is being used in this context.)

Strangely enough, Masnick sees no irony in the fact that he says, on the one hand, that the film business doesn’t amount to much economically and yet somehow, Hollywood manages to wield tremendous lobbying power.  In fact, were we to take this report as the only relevant data, it shows clearly that Disney, News Corp, Viacom, Sony, and Time Warner combined don’t make as much as Google all by itself.  So, ask yourself who’s likely throwing whose weight around in Washington?

SOPA and PIPA may well be dead, even in revised forms; but currently on life support, I believe, is the Web industry’s ability to keep playing David to media’s Goliath, all  the while crying, “freedom” in order to effect policy in its favor.  It won’t take too much longer for the general public to figure out that the members of the newly announced Internet Association are no more deserving of our blind trust than any other wealthy, vested interest. This is just business and politics as usual; and I would ask what wicked and dissembling glass makes the the wizards of Silicon Valley believe they’re always the good guys?

“Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.” by Masnick

Okay, this video is three years old, but it’s still relevant because it represents a persistent, underlying faith in an “economic model” that enables even well-meaning people to think they’re doing the world a favor by pimping for the Web industry.  What Mike Masnick, editor of TechDirt, says in this video is that if your business makes a product that can be converted into a digital file — a movie, an album, a TV show — that the natural price for that product is zero.  Moreover, if you fail to understand why this a good thing, it’s because you’re “unwilling to embrace new opportunities.”  In other words, the basic premise of Investor + Producer = ROI may still apply to making iPads, but it no longer applies to the music or motion pictures that might play on them.

I know I’m not the economic futurist Masnick is, and maybe I just have a knee-jerk reaction to white boards, but if I saw this same video fifteen years ago, I’d assume it was satire.  Sadly, no. Masnick actually believes what he’s saying here, and he reflects either the belief, or at least the PR talking points, of the tech industry he represents. And when you engage a firmly-held belief in a debate on policy (let’s say regarding the digital exploitation of creators), your opponent is only pretending to talk about the details.  In a nutshell, you can’t have a debate about how to solve a problem with someone who believes the problem doesn’t exist.

UPDATE:  As if on cue, read this article by Adam Lipsius from the Huffington Post.

Why isn’t the Internet breaking?

During the squabble over SOPA and PIPA, one of the underlying (and possibly just lying) PR bullets coming out of Silicon Valley was that the actions called for in the bills would “break the Internet.”  And when that wasn’t the claim, the most consistent complaint was that the bills would chill free speech.  But in the wake of violent protests to an online video that may be related to the deaths of American diplomats, it turns out there is suddenly room for discussion about both speech and algorithmic solutions to thorny problems in an otherwise “free and open Internet.”

According to this piece by Somini Sengupta in yesterday’s New York Times, there is not only room for discussion, but it seems we’ll be having this discussion for quite some time and hearing from many parties. If nothing else, this article makes plain that the concept of free speech is no more universal inside the conference rooms at Google and Facebook than it is among nations.  So, if speech is relative, and algorithms can theoretically be written to correspond to definitions of “hate speech,” what was all that flap about SOPA and PIPA? I know the mechanisms requested by those anti-piracy bills are different from those required to address the issues cited here, and I don’t know anything about writing code; but it seems to me that the math problem in the case of analyzing hate speech worldwide is a hell of a lot harder than cutting off funding sources to a finite number of torrent sites.

The irony, of course, is that the makers of The Innocence of Muslims are fully protected by the First Amendment, even though what they chose to do with that right is irresponsible and loathsome.  And even if someone did manage to come up with a universal definition for hate speech, and a programmer managed to write code to seek it out on the Web, it’s possible this film that started all the trouble might not even meet the narrow criteria that would need to be written.

By contrast, the transactions made possible through torrent sites are not protected by the First Amendment, are comparatively easy to define, and extremely easy to locate.  Yet, we were led to believe that neither law nor technology could possibly have stopped or even mitigated piracy.  I don’t know.  As I say, I don’t write code, but it sounds a little bit like the masters of the Internet are clearly capable of flying F-18s when they need to but suddenly incapable of driving golf carts when they don’t want to.