Hollywood Accounting and Average Joe
p2pnet view MPAA:- We’re finally making progress on the real criminals of entertainment piracy. The MPAA ia losing court case after court case using their infamous ‘Hollywood Accounting‘, and losing consistently, primarily because jury members are finally realizing how sleazy these members of the MPAA really are.
Honestly, how does New Line Cinema think it can gross nine Billion, that’s Billion, on the Lord of the Rings Trilogy worldwide, and then try and weasel out of paying J.R. Tolkien estate for the idea, and Peter Jackson for directing the movie, claiming it ‘lost’ 120 Million? This is probably the reason behind the delay of creating ‘The Hobbit’ movie. If I were Peter, I wouldn’t direct any movie until I got paid for the previous one.
Hollywood Accounting is where the MPAA (insert big 6 assholes here) create a corporation for each movie, ie Lord of the Rings, LLC, and then purposely use that entity to numerically absorb money, and to reflect a loss by creatively making up numbers for advertisement, distribution, additional licensing and/or copyrights for the particular movie. They illegally and grossly bloat these numbers as ‘expenses’ for the Studio to allegedly ‘pay’ from the gross of the movie itself.
After ‘New Line Cinemas’ paid expenses to ‘Lord of the Rings, LLC’, there apparently just wasn’t enough money left to pay the director, or the estate of J.R. Tolkien, who owns the copyrights on the idea, and wrote the books. This ensures that stakeholders in the movie itself get the ’steak’ of the profits, whereas the entitled entities, like the writer, producer, rights holder, etc, are left with the ‘peas’, if that. Typically they only get to lick the plate after the fatcat assholes at the MPAA get their ill-gotten gains first.
Also, it looks like we finally have a ‘precedence’ when it comes to file sharing. In the Joel Tenenbaum case, Judge Gertner reduced the unconstitutional statutory damages to 2,250/per instead of the ludicrous 150,000/per, exactly like the Jamie Thomas-Rasset case.
The MPAA is losing the ‘Hollywood Accounting’ court cases because the juries are relying on statutory damages to screw studios like Disney on not just movie accounting, but even for television shows. They take the incredibly laughable accounting practices of the studios into consideration when making Statutory Damage awards to plantiffs like Celador International, who produced ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ Statutory damages is what the RIAA is ‘demanding’, rather than actual damages, because they cannot prove any actual damage occurred. Now that Judge Gertner and Judge Davis have both agreed upon a ‘precedence’ of statutory limits for damages sought by the assholes at the RIAA, the RIAA is absolutely pissed off.
Decades of screwing the artists out of a just wage, and a decade of demonizing your customers, have finally had an effect — hardly the effect the MAFIAA wanted, but an effect nonetheless.
With Copyright so far away from reality, it’s no wonder the average person either knows nothing about copyright, or very little. And yet, the MAFIAA wants to criminalize these average ‘joes’ for something as transient as watching the FIFA World Cup on an ‘unauthorized’ stream.
How is Joe supposed to know the stream he found for the game is ‘unauthorized’? Why would Joe care? As Mike Masnick of Techdirt writes all the time, the ‘Joe’s’ of the world violate copyrights a couple dozen times a day, and doesn’t even realize it.
Do they have to be copyright lawyers every time they surf the internet?
The ever increasing incidents of copyright infringement are the MAFIAA’s fault, and nobody else’s. It’s not organized civil unrest, or methodic undermining of institutions like the EFF, CC, the ACLU, or the Harvard Law College, it’s by definition the issues with existing copyright. The laws were not created with the internet in mind, nor the business model of infinite supply. Our world is built on scarcity, artificial or otherwise, and now the internet has thrown all those business models upside down.
It was a sad day when the Monk Scribes were replaced with the printing press, and it was a shame the horse and carriage industry was replaced with the automotive industry, but both professions were eroded by technology. The same technology that is finally eroding the monopolistic bullshit that copyright has become. Instead of organized civil unrest causing uncontrolled copyright ‘infringement’, it’s one individual at a time realizing the benefits of advanced technology (the internet) and embracing it. These are not even ‘willful’ infringements, but everyday Joe’s doing what comes naturally — oh, and that happens to violate some asshat’s copyright.
Even upstanding citizens who attempt to appreciate and abide by copyright are frustrated by the ‘mandatory, unskippable, criminal commercial’ in every single movie that is sold. Or the ‘fair use’ fuck you of DRM, sure you can time-shift it, but its against the law to break DRM?
This isn’t organized militia dertermined to undermine copyright: this is the result of flawed copyright.
When the Average Joes of the world start getting cut off the internet for file sharing, when in fact they have no clue what file sharing is, then we’ve reached a point of dissent. For every ‘fuck the customer’ lawsuit that comes down the road, more and more people are informed of the ‘un-consumer-like’ actions of asshats like the RIAA/MPAA/ASCAP/PRC/PPL/BPI/IFPI etc etc ad nauseum.
And the demographic, such as myself, of ‘vicarious copyright infringer’ are only empowered by the dying spasms of the entertainment industries tactics. The only example I need to give is The Pirate Bay.
‘The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.’ Abraham Lincoln
surfer – p2pnet
stw
… and identi.ca
July, 2010
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July 12th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Excellent peice Surfer, I notice the mainstream media are not yet covering this scandal, perhaps they know that calling filesharers theives at any opportunity will just not equate in the publics mind to the real and major theivery that is taking place against those who create.
The “middleman” (a most apt name upon seeing many hollywood waistlines) has it seems become little more than a revenue sucking parasite and serious efforts to rid the industry of such vermin should be undertaken.
To any authors or artists reading this, dont let the fat cats steal our cultural heritage and more importantly your contribution.