Quick quiz — Who said this?
I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.”
Any guesses? No, it’s not some septuagenarian in the mid-90s concerned about all the youngsters firing up their 9600-baud modems with piercing shrieks and seeing if They Have Mail® in their AOL and Prodigy accounts. It was said just a couple of weeks ago, on May 15, by Michael Lynton, the CEO of Sony Pictures.
Now that’s a hugely sweeping statement by someone who really should know better. Mr. Lynton is no doubt concerned about the hugely negative impact that the Internet has had on his poor, tiny, defenseless movie industry.
Just look at the devastating effects: last year (2008) according to The Hollywood Reporter, Hollywood’s revenue was up 2% for the year to a record $9.76 billion.
Wait. Up? Record? But aren’t we in a global recession? … Hang on a minute, here it is:
This tally was generated on 1.36 billion tickets sold across the USA and Canada compared to the 1.40 billion tickets sold the previous year.
See?! That’s, like … (gimme a sec, Wolfram Alpha is working on it) … 40 million tickets less! Good non-existent god! How do they even manage to eat!?
Strange that revenues are up when attendance is down. How is that possible?
The average price of a ticket hit $7.20, or 4.7% higher than the previous year.
Ah. That explains it.
So, according to Mr. Lynton, Internet piracy is responsible for the drop of 40 million. Just think, his company could be annual trillionaires by now, instead of billionaires.
But wait, here comes Mr. Lynton to explain himself. We’re sure he’ll just tell us it’s all a big misunderstanding, the Internet is a wonderful place and we should all keep coming to the movies … let’s see what he said in an article on the Huffington Post.
Wait. What? He’s standing behind his statement? The Internet is little more than a channel for piracy?!
In March, an unfinished copy of 20th Century Fox’s film X-Men Origins: Wolverine was stolen from a film lab and uploaded to the Internet, more than a month before its theatrical release. The studio investigated the crime, and efforts were made to limit its availability online. Still, it was illegally downloaded more than four million times.
Is that the same X-Men Origins: Wolverine piece of shit movie that has made more than US$166 million just in domestic box-office by May 27? The number one movie in American on it’s opening weekend? Yes, it is.
And it’s not as if Hollywood has had such a stringent stance against piracy during its history. How many writers, producers, actors have had the sweat of their brow used to line the pockets of studio executives who did little creative work of their own? Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks are probably rolling in their grave (though hopefully not together). Getting complaints from a movie studio executive on copyright is like getting suggestions for postal packaging from Ted Kaczynski. Talk about the moral low ground.
Wait, My. Lynton has more to say:
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). 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.
OK. We’ve had just about enough of this drivel. For years now, we’ve put up with the movie industry telling us how it’s wrong to steal and how we should never download copyrighter content. “You wouldn’t steal a car, would you?” they ask if their inane DVD pre-roll ouvres. A movie is not a fucking car. But you know what? If we could steal your car we would, because you have annoyed us beyond the point of reason.
The moans and groans from movie studio moguls, publishing magnates, music recording industry executives and TV producers all point to the Internet as the beginning of the end. All due to piracy destroying their hallowed content protection mechanisms.
The arguments against piracy smash themselves against a wall of reality. The fact is that the media industries are doing better than ever. Publishing and radio may not be able to say that at this point, but they are two industries who were in dire need of redevelopment anyway. They are now doing so via the Internet to the general gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes that accompanies every newspaper closing or radio station shutdown.
Piracy cannot be blamed for that. Enhanced competition is the problem there. Radio cannot compete against my iPod. Printed newspapers cannot compete with getting all my news all day each day on my assorted devices. People are still listening and reading, they are just doing it elsewhere. You need to go out and find your audience again, because it’s clear that what you were doing before was not good enough for them.
As for the movies and TV and music sales. Records continue to be broken. You’re doing great. People still want your product. Adapt a little to the new mechanisms for distribution and you will be just fine and, in fact, better than ever.
But there’s another thing that bothers me about Mr. Lynton’s comments. Either willingly or unwillingly, they ignore the core concept of content distribution in this “New Media” age. You do not define content. We do not define content. Content is not a definite object which is ever finished.
It used to be that a journalist went out, talked to a few people, wrote some of them down, created a wider concept around it, packaged it as a story, passed it on to a copy editor who checked for grammar, style, facts, readability and legibility (yes, they are two different things), put a headline on it, passed it to a section editor (and possibly others) who reviewed it, tweaked the headline and possiblity text and passed it to a printer or a digital printing system which all resulted in the story being put on a piece of paper that eventually made its way to you either via delivery or point of sale. And that was it. When the story got there, that was it. That was the story. You could write another tomorrow, but that was, literally, another story.
Is that really true? Is that the finished version of a story? Certainly not anymore. Now, those stories not only get printed on paper, they are distributed digitally over multiple channels and devices, and appear on computers, phones, and other devices. And from there, you can add to them. Users make comments, or rate stories. Stories are linked from other sites and packaged with other content. They are added by users to the browser favourites.
All of these things fundamentally change the nature of the content. A user comment is also part of the story whether we like it or not, because someone else consumes it with the story. These stories have lives far beyond the section editor’s last tweak.
The same is true for movies. A movie is not just the 100-minute opus that the director has decided to (and studio producers have agreed to) release. It is also all of its marketing, all of the reporting about it, all of the reviews, all of the audience reactions. This is the meta-movie, the overall shared experience of the content as well as the content itself. With the advent of the Internet, these two things cannot become separated.
But that’s not a bad thing. Why do people still go to the movies when they can downloaded them illegally for free? There are several reason, but one reason will always be true, people are still seeking a type of experience. Which is why greedy bastards movie studio executives can get away with increasing prices and still generating a massive audience in even lean economic times.
Mass Media must embrace meta-content, not pretend it just provides the base and complain when it is appropriated by its consumers. Consumers consume, that’s what they do, and you can’t tell them how to do that. Readers read, viewers watch, but when you determine how someone reads or how someone watches and what their minds choose to do with that is run a slippery slope. Our lives and our experiences are fully intertwined, and that includes the content we consume. When we read a story, or watch a movie. It becomes our experience, and we have the ability and, yes, even the unalienable right, to share it.
So take your millions and billions and leave us, the little people (a term you movie-millionaires love to use, because it makes you big in comparison) with our richness of experience. Because that is our only wealth, and because to take it away, truly is to take away who we are.
