Sony boss Michael Lynton, deconstructed
p2pnet news view | P2P | Movies:- In March, a workprint of the 20th Century Fux flick X-Men Origins: Wolverine turned up online. Every time something like this happens Hollywood and its henchmen, led by Dan ‘The Joker’ Glickman over at the MPAA, start screaming and shouting, claiming the major studios, which currently boast a 14 billion (that’s billion, not million) dollar surplus, are being ruined by file sharers.
However, as is frequently the case, insiders with access to Hollywood ‘product’ were responsible, not kids with cams.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that, according to Hollywood stats, Wolverine was downloaded more than 4 million times (the actual figure would be far higher) the film was a raging success.
“That kind of wide scale theft was very much on my mind when I was on a panel the other day which opened with a question about the impact of the Internet on the entertainment business, and I responded, ‘I’m a guy who sees nothing good having come from the Internet. Period’.”
So, proudly, says Sony Pictures Entertainment boss Michael Lynton in the Huffington Post.
But, “I actually welcome the Sturm und Drang I’ve stirred, because it gives me an opportunity to make a larger point (one which I also made during that panel discussion, though it was not nearly as viral as the sentence above),” he says, going on »»»
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content — music, newspapers, movies and books — have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Some of that damage has been caused by changing business models (the FTC just announced an inquiry into the impact of new media on the newspaper industry). But the primary culprit is piracy. The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.
To be clear, my concern about piracy does not obscure my understanding that the Internet has had a transformative impact on our culture and holds enormous potential to improve the prospects of humanity, and in many instances already has. I am no Luddite. I am not an analogue guy living in a digital world. I ran an Internet company and my studio actively uses the web to market and sell our movies and television shows. We create original content for new media.
And yes, new talents have emerged thanks to the democratic and viral impact of the web. Yes, the rise of new distribution platforms for existing content is exciting and rich with promise.
But at the same time, I cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I “just don’t get it,” and claim the world has so fundamentally changed because of the web that conventional practices concerning property rights no longer apply; that the Internet should be left to develop entirely unfettered and unregulated.
The answer? “Rules of the road” to “help promote the many positive attributes of Internet technology while curtailing its hugely damaging effects.
But that’s not the case, says Michael Castello in his mistypedurl.com blog, stating:
“Unfortunately, he quickly makes clear that he, along with the rest of the Big Content dinosaurs, continues to chafe at the results of his industry’s own inability to adapt to a changing world.
“While he and others are perfectly happy to use the web to ‘market and sell our movies and television shows,’ the web’s in-kind use of P2P (people-to-people) power to share that content leaves him furious. So much so that he is willing to make irrational decisions in an attempt to return himself to a place of dominance.”
Rational guidelines
“Contrast the expansion of the Internet with what happened a half century ago,” says Lynton, citing the Eisenhower administration’s 1950s creation of the Interstate Highway System.
Unlike the Net, however, “the highways were built and operated with a set of rational guidelines,” he states, going on:
“Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed. As a result, as interstates flourished, so did the economy.”
How to achieve this with the internet highway? Give copyright holders more — a lot more — power and control.
“We can replicate that kind of success with the Internet more easily if we do more to encourage the productivity of the creative engines of our society — the artists, actors, writers, directors, singers and other holders of intellectual property rights — yes, including the movie studios, which help produce and distribute entertainment to billions of people worldwide,” Lynton says.
And the world will grind to a halt without it, he declares
“How many people will be as motivated to write a book or a song, or make a movie if they know it is going to be immediately stolen from them and offered to the world with no compensation whatsoever?” – he wonders.
According to Lynton, you and I, “have become used to getting things” when we want it and how we want it and, “what has happened online is that if it is ‘beyond store hours’ and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want,” he says.
“Freedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don’t figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.”
But at home, Lynton Rulz.
“I know it is my responsibility, along with my wife, to monitor how my family uses the Internet for school work and enjoyment,” he says, adding, “I’m a guy who wants to see lots of good things come from the Internet. But it’s not going to happen the way it should if we do not act now to safeguard the fruit of our world’s most imaginative and talented minds. Period.”
Is that it? Rules of the road?
Lynton cites South Korea as, “one of the most highly developed broadband networks in the world” but where “piracy has also become so highly developed there that we and virtually every other studio has recently had to curtail or close down our home entertainment businesses.”
It’s hard to sell a legal DVD, “when it can be stolen without any repercussions,” he states in his Huffingtoin Post item.
But he and the, “rest of his outdated industry contemporaries fail to grasp is that they have now eliminated any hope of receiving legitimate sales from their South Korean customers while doing nothing to combat piracy,” says Castello, continuing
Does anybody honestly believe that because Sony Pictures refuses to sell DVDs in a country, its citizens will simply do without Sony Pictures content? They’ve gone from having a small legitimate market in a country to having no legitimate market, creating an environment where pirates are now a primary source of entertainment content.
In an earlier paragraph, Mr. Lynton says that he’s “not talking about censorship,” yet further along in his piece he talks about replicating the success of highway regulation on the internet. Yet we’ve seen the kinds of attempts to achieve this that his company and its surrogate, the MPAA, have tried to implement. What Mr. Lynton wants is for taxpayer-funded government institutions, private internet service providers, essentially the whole world to take on the role of “Corporate Copyright Cops,” constantly monitoring the interpersonal communications of We The People to ensure that content remains firmly under their control.
They have made it very clear that they want to make sure that popular songs don’t appear in your YouTube video and that you pay to see a new movie in the theater, then pay a second time to get it on DVD. If you chose to defy those rules, they want to see you disconnected from the internet, forced to pay millions of dollars in fines, or spending years of your life in jail. Sounds an awful lot like censorship to me.
Finally, Mr. Lyton grasps at a tired old straw with the pleading question, “How many people will be as motivated to write a book or a song, or make a movie if they know it is going to be immediately stolen from them and offered to the world with no compensation whatsoever?”
The answer is that content creation isn’t a fast track to wealth any more. If you are being creative because you expect to be “compensated,” prepare to be disappointed. The people who are going to succeed in this brave new digital world are the people who want as many people as possible to enjoy what they create. Imagine that, creativity for its own sake! The truth is that creative work has existed long before corporations like Sony Pictures set themselves up as middlemen, and it will continue to exist long after they have collapsed.
It’s these middlemen who stand to lose from the global shift the internet set in motion years ago. They make their billions not by encouraging the best artists they can find to share their talents with the world, but by mass producing exactly what they have decided audiences want to see and strictly controlling its distribution. The news for people like Mr. Lynton is that the lid’s been blown off the whole operation for years. Anybody, anywhere with a computer and an internet connection has access to pretty much anything that can be digitized. There’s no money in that kind of access.
Instead, what people will continue to pay for is a unique and quality experience. They’ll go to a theater with their friends to see an excellent movie, perhaps even paying extra for the IMAX experience. They’ll go to a concert and spend hundreds of dollars buying consumables and merchandice. But they’ll do these things because they already know it’s worth spending money for.
No more singers who give terrible concerts raking in the bucks on album sales. No more awful sequels with direct-to-DVD release.
The internet has given, “”We The People the unrestricted power to connect directly to each other and to share what we love,” says Castello, adding:
“Everybody who understands this stands to win big, either by sampling the creative works of people around the world or by building popularity through direct communication with fans. It’s the people like Michael Lynton who are still waiting for somebody to install ‘guardrails’ who, unless they change, have already lost.
(Thanks, Michael)
raging success – X-Men Origins record earnings! May 5, 2009
Huffington Post – Guardrails for the Internet: Preserving Creativity Online, May 26, 2009
mistypedurl.com – Deconstructing Michael Lynton, May 27, 2009
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May 28th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Please give credit to TechDirt on this one…
May 28th, 2009 at 11:57 am
A few month ago I wrote a blog about IFPI in my country and my conclusion was:
“If the majors win this war, the Internet will look like a german highway: Straight, clean and nice but oh… so boring…”
I wasnt quite wrong it seems…
May 28th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
“According to Lynton, you and I, “have become used to getting things” when we want it and how we want it and, “what has happened online is that if it is ‘beyond store hours’ and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want,” he says.”
- Wow another comparision to physical things to explain digital stuff, they still don’t get it. Ok if you want to use the store scenario to explain the interent fine, but the store should never be closed, its the interenet. And IT WAS NOT THE STORE BEING CLOSED THAT WAS THE PROBLEM! It was the fact that the store did not exist, and the content industry refused to build the store. As a matter of fact not only did they not want to open a store, they did not want anyone else to open a store. And if anyone thought of opening a store, goddammit they were going to close it down. And by gods they were corporations so it was their right to close it down. The intenet is after all evil just like the audio recorders and the VCR.
It’s all about the content industry wanted to control how I used my stuff, when I used it, on what I used it, etc. They want the illusion that you do not own what you paid for, they still own it. For the longest time they liked to say you only paid for the right to listen/view the ‘product’. Now they are getting away from those statments cause they want more control (well more money), they want it to be you paid to listen/view the ‘product’ on a specific device for a specific time period, etc. and if you want to hear/see it on a differnt device or outside of the limited time we gave you then pay again and again and again….. After all why should the corporations have to work for money, they spent lots of time and money to mangled the concept of IP so they don’t have to anymore.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
“I am no Luddite. I am not an analogue guy living in a digital world.”
Yes you are. You’re both, Lynton. Your opinion is both irrelevant and laughably out-of-touch. Especially the comparison of copying to “stealing.” No one is taking anything from you, apart from theoretical profits predicated upon two false premises:
1: That “pirates” do not pay for much of the media they consume, regardless of the results of numerous studies showing they’re MORE likely to pay.
2: That all of those (or even a sizable number of those) who download your material on the internet would actually pay money for it if denied the opportunity to torrent/p2p it.
Castello’s rebuttal was pretty much spot-on, except for the last bit about artists “raking in the bucks on album sales.” RIAA musicians making money on album sales? That’s a laugh.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
I’m a musician. Here are my points:
1.
The music industry does not give a crap about artists. They treat them like shit, telling them they’ll be stars, then making loans to the artist so he/she can afford time in the studio, which the industry owns. If the industry doesn’t do a good job promoting the album, the artist is then in debt to the music studio.
The studio will do this to 99 people before they find ONE that actually makes them a profit unrelated to loan sharking.
They are loan sharks and gamblers with n0 talent and now that they’ve lost control over duplication and distribution, their power is greatly reduced, and it’s terrifying for them because they have no actual skills that anyone needs.
Fuckem.
oh and if you don’t believe me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA#The_.22Work_Made_for_Hire.22_controversy
2.
As a musician I am glad that people make copies. If I charged for my stuff only 1000 people would buy it. If I let people copy, and 10 million people eventually listen, that is a HUGE amount of advertising. If only 10% of those 10 million give me donations, or wind up buying a different tune at some point, then I suddenly have a million customers.
So just because it is illegal to make copies of my music does NOT mean that I am losing money when people do.
3.
As a musician if someone is poor and can’t afford my music, I want them to be able to listen to it anyway. Why would I want to deprive someone of something that costs me nothing to give them? What kind of asshole would I be to do that?
4.
Would you steal a CAR?!!
Would you steal a PURSE?!!
No. Not if I could copy it.
5.
Why have the RIAA corporations lost business?
A. Because for decades they could force people to pay $13 for a whole album even thought the buyer only wanted one song. Well what did they think would happen when we can now pay 99c for the song we want? GUESS! They lost 90% of their profits. Well duh.
B. Because the internet allows buyers to be MUCH more discerning in their purchases. This affects the movie industry. With rottentomatoes people simply abstain from watching crappy movies.