Actually, Jobs In Making Movies Are On The Rise, Not Falling

from the oh-look-at-that... dept

One of the key talking points that the movie industry likes to bring up concerning the reason it wants SOPA and PROTECT IP is that it has to "protect jobs." In a recent talk by the MPAA's Chris Dodd, he once again talked up how many jobs were being "lost" in the movie industry. First, he pulled out the industry's favorite 2.2 million number, which is clearly bogus. As we noted earlier in the week, new research from the Congressional Research Service shows that the movie industry actually employs 374,000, making the claim (pulled from the highly questionable Institute for Policy Innovation) that the industry is losing 373,000 jobs each year... kinda questionable.

But I wanted to get a better understanding of what was actually happening to jobs in and around the motion picture industry. Seeing as CEOs of the major studios continue to bring in record salaries, it certainly sounds like the industry isn't doing that bad. Thankfully, research firm IBISWorld digs pretty deep into different industries to separate out what's happening. After digging through the numbers, it looks like the MPAA is (yet again) being intellectually dishonest.

If you look at the jobs in actual movie production -- the kind that they always imply are most at risk -- it turns out those jobs are growing rapidly. In 2002, there were about 43,000 people employed in the actual production of movies and videos. In 2010? That number had jumped to 77,000. Not bad. So where are the few job losses coming from? Well, there are about 1,500 fewer jobs in "movie and video distribution," but that makes sense, since technology is making that area less important. Really, the only place in the industry that has seen a significant loss in jobs (and even then it's not that big) is in the movie theater business. Employment in movie theaters dropped from about 134,000 in 2002 to about 119,000 in 2010. That accounts almost entirely for the drop in total employment in the movie business from 392,000 down to 374,000 that the CRS report noted.

In other words, the only "significant" job losses that we can spot are coming from the theaters themselves -- and it's difficult to see how that's got much, if anything, to do with piracy. As was noted in the CRS report, box office revenue has continued to hit records every year. So, really, it looks like theaters may just be cutting staff to cut costs, but that revenue at the box office keeps getting higher. So, more money with fewer staff. That's not exactly a story that shows an industry decimated by piracy.

Filed Under: chris dodd, jobs, movie making, movie theaters, movies, pipa, protect ip, sopa
Companies: mpaa

Chris Dodd Resorting To Outright Lying In A Desperate Attempt To Get SOPA Passed

from the regret-the-error? dept

MPAA boss Chris Dodd has apparently resorted to out and out lying as he makes a big push to get SOPA passed. On Tuesday he spoke at an event for the Center for American Progress, in which he pulled out his usual "woe is us" story about why Congress needs to pass SOPA/PIPA. However, Dodd, once again, appears to be factually challenged. For example, during questions, Dodd claimed:

“The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone.”

James Losey thought this was odd, given that he was familiar with some films coming out of Sweden:

Sweden actually produces a number of high quality films. Released in 2008, the vampire flim Let The Right One In received critical acclaim here in the U.S. Additionally, all three best-selling books of the Millennium Trilogy are Swedish films and 2009’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was quite successful. The film made a modest $10 million in the U.S. and a respectable $104 million worldwide.

Considering the budget for the U.S. remake of the film is $100 million - as much as the original film has earned to date - perhaps Dodd meant that the film does not count until Hollywood gets a chance to remake it. Ironically, the U.S. remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was shot in Sweden.

Chris Dodd was correct to say that film is an international industry, but he was wrong to say that the Swedish film industry has disappeared and misleading to imply that all Hollywood jobs are American jobs. At least for this Hollywood production, Sweden has a lot to gain.

Of course, there's also plenty of actual data on the film industries around the world, so I figured that perhaps I'd dig into the numbers a bit more than James' excellent debunking, just to see if there was any truth to Dodd's bizarre claims. Thankfully, the folks at the UN actually track this data. On top of that, the awesome chartsbin has laid out how many films every country produces in a neat interactive map:
via chartsbin.com Let's start with Sweden. I think the chart above is a bit out of date. Looking through the UN data, it shows that Sweden produced 41 feature films in 2009 -- actually a significant increase from 2007 and 2008. No sign that the industry is "gone" there. But perhaps it used to be much bigger? Back to the UN we go... to learn that in 1995, Sweden made 17 feature films. Gone? Sorry, the facts say Dodd is lying.

Okay. Let's look at Egypt. The latest UN data shows Egypt produced 46 films in 2009. Not bad. But perhaps it used to be much bigger? Oh, whoops. 1996 (the earliest data available) shows that Egypt produced 24 films that year. So it looks like the industry has about doubled. Gone? Oops. Dodd is lying.

Finally, let's check out Spain. Spain has been a favorite target of both the MPAA and the RIAA lately. They like to claim that "lax" copyright laws there have decimated the entertainment industry in that country. Once again, the facts show a totally different story. If you look at the map above, you can see that Spain is actually a movie making powerhouse in Europe, and the data shows that it just keeps making more and more movies. In 2009 it produced 186 movies, and the trend has been directly up. In 2008 it was 173. Go back to 2005 and it was 142. Go back to 1999? 82 films. Back to '95? 59 films. Yeah, film production has more than tripled in the last fifteen years.

Sorry, but Chris Dodd is flat out lying.

Why do the public and politicians let him get away with blatant falsehoods as he seeks to push a law that will set up an American censorship system? The facts say that he's full of it... and yet we're supposed to trust him that this bill is needed?

Filed Under: chris dodd, egypt, movies, pipa, protect ip, sopa, spain, sweden
Companies: mpaa

Congressional Research Service Shows Hollywood Is Thriving

from the shouldn't-congress-wonder-why-they-need-sopa/pipa? dept

The Congressional Research Service is the research arm of Congress that is widely respected as presenting (non-partisan) high quality, extremely credible research for folks in Congress. In fact, the quality is so good, that many are annoyed that the output of their research, despite being public domain, is rarely made available to the public. The only way that information is released is if the elected official who requested it decides to release it. Thankfully, some of our elected officials do just that.

Recently, Senator Ron Wyden asked CRS if it could explore the state of the movie industry today as compared to 1995 on a variety of different criteria. You can read the full report embedded below, but here are a few key points. First off, despite the industry's regular attempt to play up its contribution to GDP and employment, the report found that the combined GDP contribution of both the "motion picture and sound recording" industries was a whopping 0.4% in 2009. Back in 1995... it was also 0.4%. As for employment, Hollywood loves to claim that it employs millions of people. One popular number is that 19 million people have jobs in "IP-intensive industries." Of course, we've discussed how misleading a term that is, as they lump in all sorts of jobs that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with copyright. So, how many people are actually employed in the movie industry? Not that many. 374,000 in 2010 -- and that includes both full and part time workers. And that's really not much different from the 392,000 in 1998. So it's not like the industry has been losing employees in droves as they imply. Furthermore, that's only slightly more than the number of jobs that Facebook's app platform alone is estimated to have created. Hell, we've seen reports that have said eBay alone created 750,000 small business jobs. Perhaps Hollywood isn't as big a part of the economy as it likes to claim.

Similarly exaggerated? Its dire straits. Let's take a look at box office revenue: Also interesting is the look at CEO pay at the major movie studios, then and now. It seems that Disney's CEO (Robert Iger) made $29,617,964 in 2010, compared to Michael Eisner's mere $10 million back in 1994. Time Warner? CEO Jeffrey Bewkes made $26,303,071 in 2010, while his predecessor Gerald Levin made $5 million in 1994. CRS apparently couldn't find past data on the other studios, but in the present, it looks like their execs are all cashing in. News Corps' Rupert Murdoch made $33,292,753. Viacom's Chairman, Sumner Redstone, made $15,033,630, while its CEO Philippe Dauman famously made $84,515,308. NBC Universal was still under GE in 2010, whose CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, brought in $21,428,765. Then there's Sony, whose CEO was the pauper of the bunch, having his salary and bonus cut to a mere $4.3 million due to "financial problems stemming from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami."

It doesn't sound like things are that bad these days in Hollywood. So why do we need massive legal changes again?

Filed Under: business, congressional research service, copyright, data, hollywood, movies, pipa, protect ip, sopa, thriving

Copyright Office Once Again Preparing To Throw Citizens A Fair Use Bone

from the please-sir,-may-I-have-some-rights dept

A few weeks ago, I was talking with one of my friends about copyright law and just what is legal for us and consumers to do with the movies, games, music and software we own. In that conversation, the topic of copying a movie from a DVD to her computer for use on her family's computers and tablets came up. I had the pleasure, or more accurately the displeasure, of trying to explain the nuances of copyright law and why making a copy of a DVD may not be legal. While it is generally accepted that copying a CD for home use is considered a fair use, the ability to do the same with a DVD has not been legally tested. For the most part, it remains illegal because the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause makes bypassing DRM, whether that DRM is effective or not, illegal. With the DMCA in place, it doesn't matter is you are copying that DVD for personal use, it is still illegal.

In response to public concerns over this portion of the DMCA, Congress added a process to the DMCA that allows citizens to petition the Copyright Office to seek an exemption. Every three years the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office team up to request, review and grant exemptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause. Every three years, the American citizens get the chance to beg the government to re-grant rights they should have if it had not been for that clause in the DMCA. Every three years the Copyright Office gets to tell American citizens just what rights they are allowed to exercise and which they can't. We have already expressed why we think this process is completely bogus. So this year isn't really any different. But it is important to take a look at just what exemptions are being requested this year.

One of the most active consumer groups in this process is the EFF. They have requested exemptions all but one year in the process. The year it didn't submit a request was spent in protest over the insanity of the process. However, it has since won some important exemptions, specifically the right to jailbreak a legally purchased iPhone. This year, the EFF has decided to take it up a notch and request an exemption to jailbreak not only the iPhone, but also other smartphones, tablet computers and game consoles. It also seeks to have exemptions made for the breaking of DVD's CSS encryption for the purpose of extracting clips to be used in non-commercial videos.

Following suit on the idea of bypassing CSS encryption, we have both Public Knowledge requesting an exemption for space shifting of DVDs for home use and the Association of Research Libraries requesting an exemption for educational use of copied DVDs. Three requests for bypassing CSS encryption. Perhaps there is something there. The ability to bypass CSS encryption and copy DVDs to computers has existed for pretty much the entire life of DVDs, yet it is still illegal to do so.

Now remember, just because these requests are being made, it does not mean we are guaranteed to get these exceptions. Companies interested in blocking these requests can still add their own submissions in response. We can certainly expect the MPAA to object to any kind of exemption for bypassing CSS encryption that doesn't involve a video camera recording the TV. We can also expect objections from Sony and Nintendo who both hate the idea of people jailbreaking their consoles even for fair uses.

Regardless of what happens in the next few months (or two years if the last process was anything to go by), US citizens will be thrown a bone and given the semblance of fair use rights again, at least for the following three years when this whole process starts over. That is the biggest problem with this whole process. If something is worth making a temporary exemption, is it not also worth making that exemption permanent?

Filed Under: copyright, css, dmca, exemptions, fair use, movies

SOPA Gives Me Powers That I Don't Want

from the not-in-my-name dept

I've had the privilege of working in two completely different worlds. I worked in technology, employed by Google for six years where I started and led Google Apps for Businesses. Then, I shifted into the movie business by leaving Google and producing a full length movie, Dead Inside, in LA. Our movie hits the market this week -- at a very interesting time with the copyright bill SOPA being debated in Congress.

I was amazed when I learned about the details of SOPA. This bill gives powers to content owners to easily and freely hurt many tech companies and could even go so far as to shut them down completely. Reading this from an entrepreneur's standpoint I immediately go on the defensive and hate it. After reading through the full bill, I finally realized "Wait wait wait...I'm a content owner, I could use this law." This is when I got truly scared.

As a content owner I would have power to send a simple letter to a payment processor accusing a client of theirs of copyright infringement. If the payment processor doesn't cut off a business relationship with my target within five days, they could be dragged into a convoluted legal process. I don't need to consult with a lawyer to do this, which is great because I don't even have one. I certainly can send simple letters out in my free time between takes on the set though. This is too much power for a single movie producer to have and it's way too much for any one else to have. A large tech company could defend itself in court, but small startups don't stand a chance.

The fact that many tech companies are very small and overly susceptible to the impact a simple accusation could have under SOPA is lost on many folks. While I was in LA, people on our set asked me what I did in addition to working the movie. I told them that "some of my time is spent advising tech startups." While a typical response in the Valley would be "Oh wow, which startups?" I was surprised to hear back "Oh, what's a startup?" After discussing this, many people on our set did not understand that most large tech companies start as two guys in a garage with an idea. Their concept of tech companies only included large firms of the world like Google and Apple. Now I understood that when people look at these laws, the concerns of small companies might be ignored because in some minds its obvious that tech companies have large legal arms to defend themselves.

In reality though, most of the large tech companies that exist today were once very small and very fragile. If SOPA was in place, those companies would have never grown up, since the two guys in a garage would have required four lawyers to survive. Dropbox is a perfect example. Created by some college students, the company provides shared online storage space for a fee. Under SOPA, the company would have been cut off from its revenues as soon as a single accusation was made that it was hosting copyrighted material. As a small company this could have been crippling. Today though, I know that Dropbox is one of the most popular tools in the movie industry, since it allows easy sharing of new daily shots, music cues, draft movie posters and more. The innovative tech companies of the future will be extinguished before they have a chance to even get out the door.

With our movie finished and coming onto the market, I'm looking forward to using technology to get our movie out to the world. I want to work with startups that are coming up with new distribution methods. I want to see new abilities to connect with our future fanbase. I want to see more methods of movies getting crowdfunded so viewers get to have more of a say over which movies they want made. Any company that might start solving these problems though would be at risk under SOPA of getting squashed. While my movie could be the one which shows up on those new sites, I already have tools at my disposal (like the DMCA) to deal with it. SOPA allows me to have an easier time protecting my copyrighted material, but the cost is too great.

Filed Under: copyright, movies, power, protect ip, sopa

Warner Bros. Wants You To 'Buy' Movies Instead Of Rent... And By 'Buy' It Means Spend More To Still 'Rent'

from the that's-not-buying dept

We pointed out that the early reviews of Hollywood's new UltraViolet DRM aren't particularly good, but the industry is still pushing forward with the idea. Leading the way is Warner Bros., who is trying to turn the movie-based "social network" it bought a few months ago, Flixster, into the central hub for your movies. The NY Times has an article about it, where it repeatedly claims that the strategy is all about trying to get people to "buy" movies again, rather than just rent them via Netflix of Redbox. Of course, I find this pretty funny, because nothing about UltraViolet is about actually "buying" anything. You're still renting -- and if things ever went to court over, say, your first sale rights to resell a movie you "purchased" using UltraViolet, you can bet that Warner Bros. would be first in line to claim that the license shows you're merely renting the movie, and not buying it. It's just that you're renting it on an open-ended timeline, basically until the studios bail on UltraViolet and shut down the servers.

Rob Pegoraro, in commenting on the article, notes that oddly, the article doesn't even mention DRM in talking about why people don't want to buy from the studios or the fact that it's still much more convenient to get the content by unauthorized means. But that concept still hasn't reached the brain trust at Warner Bros., who seems to insist that as long as you can access the movies you "bought" from anywhere, people will prefer that to file sharing. While it's great that they're at least trying to add benefits, to make it more valuable and worth paying for, the whole thing smacks of someone's father trying to "act cool" for his kids' friends. Warner Bros. still doesn't seem to understand why people like things like Netflix: the convenience. Everything about Ultraviolet sounds inconvenient, and that hardly makes anyone want to "buy."

Filed Under: copyright, dvds, flixster, licenses, movies, purchases, rentals, ultraviolet
Companies: flixster, warner bros.

The Many Killers Of The Film Industry Vol. 3: Post-Ellipsis And Beyond Television

from the vhs:the-metallic-killer/new-revenue-stream dept

[If you're just joining us, be sure to check out Volume 1 and Volume 2 in this series, which tells the true story of how the movie industry was killed over and over by each new advancement in eyeball-oriented entertainment. Volume 3 is the exciting followup to the breathtaking "..." that ended Volume 2. What lies beyond? Words. A lot of them.]

Post-Ellipsis
The movie industry, flush with success, strutted away from the battle that never was, having successfully fended off its new drinking buddy, television. Up to its collective ears in record-breaking movie receipts, the film industry (yet again) kicked back on its gold-plated laurels and lazily watched the money roll in.

The cinema was enjoying a new Golden Age, ushered in by the advent of the multiplex, the still-viable drive-in industry and some of the finest movie-making ever, in the form of Airport, Airport '75, Airport '77 and Airport '79: New Moon.

But as was foretold by the harrowing ellipsis at the end of the last volume, a new enemy would rise (mostly from the East). This new invention would kill the film industry harder that it had ever been killed before.

The VCR
Japanese electronics company JVC kicked Old Man Movie right in the throat with its VHS (Video Home System) player that promised a new era of TV and movie-dependent independence. Now people could watch television and movies in the comfort of their own home, on their own schedules. No more standing in line at the box office or endless waiting for their favorite programs to hit syndication. The public was now in command of its mostly pre-recorded destiny, leading to skyrocketing VCR sales and new highs in box office receipts.

Quite obviously, home taping was once again killing an industry.

An apoplectic Jack Valenti (representing the MPAA) stormed a listless Congress, demanding that they get off their overstuffed asses and do something, goddammit. During his Oscar-worthy performance, Valenti compared the theoretical damage done by home taping to a combination of the Holocaust, My Lai Massacre and that time when he got beat up in grade school.

The television industry fought back, claiming that the public had no right to watch their favorite shows and movies whenever and wherever the hell they wanted to. "What of our precious and highly annoying advertising?" it pleaded. "They'll be able to skip past it, thus rendering our efforts useless. Not to mention blockbuster lineups like ‘Must See Thursday,' which will now become ‘Can See Whenever the Hell We Want, Possibly Even Next Week.'"

The Positive Negatives of the VCR Invasion
Fortunately, the film and TV industries greatly overestimated the public's willingness and ability to program their VCRs, meaning that most viewing was still prerecorded movies or "live" TV. In fact, the general inscrutability of the VCR usually meant that it was regarded as a minor household diety whose mood swings and impenetrable manual were tolerated in exchange for nearly "on-demand" viewing.

Much like any diety, the VCR would periodically demand a sacrifice, devouring random tapes like "Child's First Birthday" (priceless) or a New Release rental from Blockbuster (considerably more expensive).

Not only that, but the VCR's entropic delivery system caused videotapes to degrade steadily in a short period of time, soon reducing the act of re-watching an "old favorite" to a tedious hour or two of dicking around with the tracking in a futile attempt to make the movie look like something other than scrambled Cinemax porn featuring dialogue recorded underwater.

"Boon:" Not Actually a Dirty Word
Not every industry felt threatened, however. The new videotape proved to be a boon to the porn industry, which was thrilled to have another delivery system. Porn theater staffers were thrilled to see their semen cleanup time drop by over 50%. Porn aficionados were thrilled to be able to "privatize" their perversions, without fear of being accosted by women's right groups, soft news journalists or the Sarasota, FL Sheriff's Department.

Unfortunately, a related industry fell victim to this new portable, rentable menace. The suddenly embattled trench coat industry fought this turn of events with "Home Masturbation is Killing the Trench Coat Industry" pickets. This movement never really took off however, mainly due to the fact that few people were willing to wear t-shirts or hoist signs with the word "masturbation" prominently featured.

As the years went on and prices dropped, the movie industry began to embrace this "threat" as a powerful ally in its constant struggle to make even more money. They were delighted to discover that the public was more than willing to purchase something they had most likely already paid to watch in a theater. They were made positively giddy with the realization that the public would buy the same movie twice, provided one version was slapped with a "Special Edition" label and contained a cursory 5-minute "Making Of" featurette cobbled together from second unit footage and "found sound" recordings.

The movie rental business was thrilled as well, what with it suddenly having a reason to exist, along with the opportunity to charge $3.99/night for "New Releases" that had been on the "Just In" wall for nearly half a decade.

Coming up next:
A veritable rogue's gallery of industry killers, each more diabolically deadly than the last.

Filed Under: disruption, fear, innovation, internet, movies, television

'British Cinema's Golden Age Is Now': So Where's The 'Serious Problem' Of Copyright Infringement?

from the inconvenient-facts dept

Last week we learned the UK government has precisely no evidence to support its plans for stricter copyright enforcement, which include disconnection upon repeated accusation. Instead, the best it could come up with was:

The creative industries are an important part of the UK’s economy, and they regularly report copyright infringement as a serious problem.

They certainly do, and their periodic cries of woe are dutifully and uncritically echoed by the mainstream press. The problem is that the industry-funded studies that are supposed to back up these claims are, almost without exception, lacking in credibility. As the UK government's own team of experts put it in their "independent review of how the Intellectual Property framework supports growth and innovation":

we have not found either a figure for the prevalence and impact of piracy worldwide or for the UK in which we can place our confidence.

For such a "serious problem", the harm caused by copyright infringement is proving remarkably hard to demonstrate. For example, a couple of years ago, Techdirt reported on the fact that the UK music industry is actually growing, not shrinking; and now the Guardian's film editor has surveyed the UK film industry, and concluded "British cinema's golden age is now":

History will decide whether we really are living through a golden age, but in terms of ferment, excitement and dazzling variety, there has been nothing like it in Britain for decades.

The article concentrates on the health of the artistic side of film production, not of the bottom lines. But the capital-intensive nature of cinema means that you can't have one without the other, or at least, not for very long: if films fail to pay their way, investment will soon dry up.

As the Guardian piece makes clear, investment isn't a problem, which suggests that payback isn't either. That's hard to square with an industry on its last legs, ravaged by piracy.

In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, and against a background of broad growth in the creative industries, the simplest explanation for this situation is that copyright infringement isn't a "serious problem" in the UK - which means there is no justification whatsoever for rolling out measures that will weaken civil liberties yet further.

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Filed Under: copyright, culture, golden age, movies, uk

No One Wanted To Pay $30 For In-Home Movie Rentals... So Now Universal Will Try $60?

from the is-this-a-joke? dept

There are times when I wonder just what various entertainment industry execs are thinking (or drinking or smoking, as the case may be). Back in April we laughed at the idea that people would be interested in paying $30 for video on demand for a movie, just because they could get it a little bit before it came out on DVD. The $30 price point was just too high. And, of course, it didn't take long for the news to come out that... $30 was just too high and almost no one bought.

So what do you do if that plan fails? Well, if you're smart, you look at more reasonable price points. If you're not... you raise the price. Yes, that's right. Universal, with the assistance of parent company Comcast, is now going to test the preposterous $60 video on demand offering. The reason for the jacked up price? Because it'll come out on VOD three weeks after being released in the theaters -- at which point the film will still be in the theaters. The test is also going to be done on what the studio hopes is going to be a blockbuster: Tower Heist, starring Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller and Matthew Broderick.

Here's what's wrong with this: the studio is thinking about this from the studio's perspective and not the consumer's perspective (at all). Of course, this is NBC Universal we're talking about, so that's not particularly shocking. In the studio world, release "windows" are everything. And each later release window is less and less of a big deal. So it's totally natural to them to think "gee, if we move up the release window, that's more valuable, so let's jack up the price." But a consumer isn't thinking about release windows. A consumer is thinking "I want to watch a movie. I could go out to the theater, or I could watch it at home." And then they look at the option at home... and if they can, say, watch a film at no additional cost from Netflix... or if they can grab a movie at Redbox for $1... and they compare that to $60 for video on demand, who's actually going to do that? The pricing is insanity.

Even funnier, however, was watching how the theaters totally freaked out over the original $30 plan, as they do with any plan to shrink the precious "window" between the theatrical release and any other kind of release. This is because theater owners don't know what business they're in. They think that they're in the content business, when they're really in the business of selling their seats. The fact that theater owners thought they couldn't compete with an insane $30 rental suggests that they don't know how to provide a good experience.

And, of course, now that there's an even more ridiculous $60 price point, you would think that the theater folks would chuckle and say "hey, we can compete with that, no problem." But it appears theater owners may be even more unable to comprehend the mind of the consumer than the execs at NBC Universal. Thus, Cinemark is already warning that it will boycott the movie if Universal goes forward with this plan.

In the meantime, it's also worth noting that the theaters convinced a bunch of big name Hollywood directors to sign an open letter to the studios protesting these kinds of "early" VOD releases. One of the names on that letter, by the way? Brett Ratner. The director of Tower Heist. Embarrassing... He is, of course, trying to distance himself from this trial, noting that he wasn't informed of it until the day before it was announced and had nothing to do with it. Of course, that's part of what happens when you do a deal like this. The studio owns the project, and they can do whatever they want with it.

Either way, don't expect too many people to pay up for this experiment. It almost makes you wonder if the idea is to make it fail on purpose.

Filed Under: $30, $60, movies, studios, video on demand
Companies: cinemark, comcast, nbc universal

Movie Producers Ask Chinese Video Game Pirates If They Can Make An Official Version Of The Game

from the embracing-the-infringers dept

Sheri Candler points us to this fascinating story, where the Finnish producers of a "sci-fi Nazis-on-the-moon spoof" movie called Iron Sky have decided to try to work with a Chinese company who turned the movie into an unauthorized "pirate" video game for the iPad, to see if they could turn it into the official version of the game.

Rather than sue the company, "Iron Sky" creators are now in talks with Ziiso to make a legitimate iPad game.

"The people at Ziiso apologized to the 'Iron Sky' team in an interview conducted by the largest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat," said "Iron Sky" director Timo Vuorensola.

"The apology and Ziiso's willingness to correct their error convinced me that we could co-operate with them on the game project. We are currently negotiating with Ziiso about revamping the game and publishing it as part of the official 'Iron Sky' merchandise."

Of course, we've talked about the Iron Sky producers in the past, and their history suggests that they're really open to embracing such things, rather than freaking out about them. They're the same folks who created the amazing Star Wreck film years ago for free. They then turned the massive success of that into Iron Sky, which was funded with $10 million in a hybrid funding model that combined some traditional financing along with a ton of fan support by allowing fans to buy "War Bonds" to crowdfund part of the movie.

These are clearly folks who always look to embrace what people out there want... rather than freak out and try to block others.

Filed Under: business models, china, embrace, iron sky, movies, video games