So let's get this straight. If the court that is hearing this wiretapping laws allow for police officers, who are paid through taxpayers, have a right to privacy in public that's all well and good?
And the man is allowed to be put in jail equivalent to a felony for something that police officers have been doing since the 80s or the 90s, that's also a crime against humanity?
Steam makes money based on figuring out the problems of the customer and alleviating them. I've explained in great detail how Valve isn't like the corporate cultures of EA, Ubisoft or Activision. I could even go on about how Steam's sales has saved smaller developers and how they keep a flexible share of the revenue stream if a developer falls on hard times. Unless Valve decides to do things similar to EA with Origins, they find ways to get my money through massive discounts, free upgrades of their servers, and less transactional costs on how I spend my money on Steam.
So unless they are failing spectacularly sometime soon, I'm still a fanboy with a great idea of what makes them a great company.
Uhm... Ubisoft IS the publisher. Ubisoft Reflections is the game developer inside of the studio Ubisoft.
The confusion here probably has to do with how IP rights are given to the publisher, creating a serfdom or indebtedness to the publishers. There's quite a few problems that seem to stem from the same issues as major record or movie studios in entrapping smaller studios to push out a product and holding IP rights as a small carrot to convince studios to stay in one place. There's quite a few ways that some up and coming publishers are figuring out how to take away these artificial barriers:
1. Transparency and communication.
You, the Extra Credits community, will know everything: when we fail, when we succeed. There will be no PR spin; you’ll be involved in everything we do.
2. IP ownership
We will never ask developers to give up their intellectual property. It’s their world: no one should keep them from building it.
3. Single Game Deals
If a developer works with us more than once it should be because they want to, not because they’re contractually obligated to.
4. Straight 50-50 split of profit
The fund is not about us and them, “publisher” and “developer”, we’re in this together, we’re partners. We’ll split the profits equally on any project we work on
Personally, I don't know if this will succeed. The fact is, James Portnow, Allison Theus, and Daniel Floyd never imagined this success would occur and this thrusts them into a new limelight. I can only hope that their method of doing business gains attention and allows for much better games and more transparency to become par for the course instead of the secrecy and dagger deals of an outfit like Ubisoft or EA.
TL;DR I'm going to gush about how Valve is such a good company that people should pay attention to. You've all been warned.
For a private company that runs a digital market place, Valve is a very, very VERY good company that understands its consumer base. The company ran the Potato Sack despite complaints that missed the point. The Potato Sack brought in a lot of interest and dollars to smaller developers that might otherwise go unnoticed. As Newell said, it was meant to be fun and make Valve less of a corporate culture than what is seen at EA or Ubisoft. It worked. Greatly. I had fun with the Potato Sack (even though I only got ONE potato. :( )
Just to strengthen the argument placed here, these are the issues that Valve looks at:
PC Gamer: Do you have a good sense of piracy rates with Steam games?
Gabe Newell: They’re low enough that we don’t really spend any time [on it]. When you look at the things we sit around and talk about, as big picture cross game issues, we’re way more concerned about the stability of DirectX drivers or, you know, the erroneous banning of people. That’s way more of an issue for us than piracy.
Read that again. There are other issues that are more important than piracy. Making a stable experience and one that doesn't take away from the game as Ubisoft does should be applauded. Ensuring customer satisfaction instead of customer ire should be rewarded. And Steam is given that in spades.
Perhaps, it's the way that the companies are set up:
So, essentally you're saying that Valve needs autonomous developers.
GN: Yep. We don’t really have titles here; people decide for themselves what their role should be. People self-organise here.
...
People say they have to go work on this different problem now, because nobody else is and we need to get it done in order to get other things done. So they pack up their desks, and move to their relevant teams.
If you look at Ubisoft Montreal, or Ubisoft Toronto, these are 1,000 person-capacity studios that can knock out a game in twelve months.
GN: The only problem with that is that they’ll be able to knock out the same thing over and over again, not something that adapts to the changes in the industry.
And I haven’t seen any evidence that the rate of change in the industry is decreasing. I think it’s increasing. So what you’ll end up finding is those thousand people are the enemy of your next project. They may be able to bang out your current one, but they’ll get in the way of doing the next one.
But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, we’d hire them all. We don’t hire to specific positions, we hire to standards.
This entire interview is worth reading. From the very way that Steam is structured to how it has made its own service without worrying about copyright enforcement, Valve has done an exceptional job at showing how to run a business. If I could find the article again that I submitted a while ago, I would show how Valve seems to have learned from the "Media Piracy" book and marked down the price in Russia so more people could afford the games. But since the article already does that, there's no point in saying it again.
Again, good job Zach on showing how Ubisoft is losing ground by focusing on the wrong issues.
SP: Why would corporations hang onto all these old copyrights if they are going to make it so hard to use them?
NP: Well, there's a good answer to that. The corporations that hold these copyrights are media companies that also control most of the new media that comes out. Estimates vary, but it's said that 98 percent of all culture is unavailable right now because of copyrights. So the reason they hold the copyrights isn't because they want to get paid, it's because they don't want all the old stuff competing with the media stream that they control now.
Isn't this the crux of the problem? Hell, Lomax died in 2002 as per the wiki. So who did Jay-Z clear the rights to? And who got paid?
What may happen is he goes international afterwards. I would think that he wants to go to Europe with the proceeds and do the exact same thing there. If not, then it may make sense to rely on Twitter for the international audience and set up streams for international questions.
He's not trying to change the world completely, just to prove one assumption (that $20 million of advertising is unnecessary to sell a $4 million movie
"Which is rather scary and unlikely to yield anything positive, but that's been the subject of every criticism of the MPAA/RIAA's legal efforts on this site for at least the last 5 years. There's nothing new here, and it's an ongoing case."
Small nitpick... The last five years? The MPAA has been having problems since the 90s. When it's not indie that they're crushing under their heel, it's the consumers in trying to find the best way to maximize their profits, rather than giving customers what they want.
"It would be nice if such a thing happened as the evidence would be tested in a court with reasonable standards, but it hasn't happened yet."
These are the same people that run with the RIAA... Do we really want to trust a private business with so much information?
Michael Kellogg, the carriers’ attorney, argued the immunity legislation was the right thing for the nation’s carriers, which could go bankrupt under the weight of defending the accusations in court.
Hold the phone...
AT&T has a revenue stream of $124B. Verizon? $106B. Just to be fair, let's look at Comcast who has $38B and Time Warner ($18B). All of this has been taken from wikipedia on 9/1.
Now let's look at how much they spend lobbying to Congress with their revenue...
"...because it goes against existing rulings, as well as common sense."
So it goes against Fort Wayne Books v Indiana? Fascinating...
" Secondly, courts have ruled in the past that some protected speech may be affected when illegal speech is stopped, and that to a certain degree, this is acceptable."
"Why do you think that a Spanish website can be immune from prosecution in the US for any of it's piracy, but somehow able to benefit from US law in the matters of free speech? "
Because a Spanish website should be able to express itself without the US government interfering. The government should not be able to take away *any* property before finding evidence of wrongdoing. The government has already admitted that this case is flimsy and not against Puerto 80, but what it's *users* put on the website. It has links to places that could be charged with direct download infringement.
Further, our government has a very strong tendency to go after websites using "American consumers" as an excuse. Or have you not heard about the poker raids committed by small towns that add up to huge amounts of money for police officials?
"An average (Hollywood model) film derives 75% of it's total revenue from downstream sources (other than N. American box office). It's just a matter of time his film is stolen and monetized by people who don't have to worry about recouping the initial $4 million investment and have no on-going obligation to pay residuals"
You're not getting it... He's already made the $4 million back. He's already paid it off. The rest is pure profit and gravy. The tickets sell for MORE when Smith is there in the theater. Kevin Smith is touring with the movie. He does QA with it. He twitters and answers questions. People can post that up on Youtube.
He is not limiting what people can do at all. They talk about the movie, more people want to see it. Why are you deliberately being shady about your ignorance of what he's accomplishing?
Doesn't this open implications to Google and other ISP/Service providers being liable to giving police officers personal information without notifying the customer?
I know everyone's answered including myself, but here's the Sundance speech, where he details the problems of Clerks (as described by PaulT) and a few ideas on how he wanted to fund and promote the movie.
I'd like to also submit the fact that the MPAA organizations spend hugely on advertisements. Advertising for people that won't want to watch the movie. Mike has talked about this at length in other articles.
...discussing how the major studios "buy" an opening weekend gross number, knowing that if you just spend $x million on TV advertising, you can pretty much guarantee a certain level of turnout for a film. However, in many cases, it's really a waste of money, because the money spent on the TV advertising can actually outweigh the value of the people they bring to the theaters (Smith has a funny story about studios advertising some of his movies on Lifetime, the "women-focused" TV station, whose demographics don't match at all with Smith's standard audience).
So essentially, all the advertisements that go into this movie are someone else's idea of what the movie is. *THIS* is the problem with the movie industry. It's so large and so bureaucratic, it can't change to a system that works for individual artists or movie makers. It works to protect the ideas of those entrenched in the system. It's what's so frustrating about going to the MPAA website or affiliates who use this entirely huge propaganda campaign. It's never been about artists. The conventional model is only to sustain the studios. The big Four don't push out creativity. They push out the same product making enough money to sustain itself.
How can any business continue to push out the same thing, hoping for larger profits, if they never try anything new?
On the post: Man Facing 75 Years In Jail For Recording The Police; Illinois Assistant AG Says No Right To Record Police
Re: Re: Re:
And the man is allowed to be put in jail equivalent to a felony for something that police officers have been doing since the 80s or the 90s, that's also a crime against humanity?
Is this seriously your argument?
On the post: Debate Time: Ubisoft Says DRM Is Needed, Valve Says No It Isn't.
Re: Re: Valve Fanboy
Steam makes money based on figuring out the problems of the customer and alleviating them. I've explained in great detail how Valve isn't like the corporate cultures of EA, Ubisoft or Activision. I could even go on about how Steam's sales has saved smaller developers and how they keep a flexible share of the revenue stream if a developer falls on hard times. Unless Valve decides to do things similar to EA with Origins, they find ways to get my money through massive discounts, free upgrades of their servers, and less transactional costs on how I spend my money on Steam.
So unless they are failing spectacularly sometime soon, I'm still a fanboy with a great idea of what makes them a great company.
On the post: Debate Time: Ubisoft Says DRM Is Needed, Valve Says No It Isn't.
Re: Is Ubisoft the puiblisher?
The confusion here probably has to do with how IP rights are given to the publisher, creating a serfdom or indebtedness to the publishers. There's quite a few problems that seem to stem from the same issues as major record or movie studios in entrapping smaller studios to push out a product and holding IP rights as a small carrot to convince studios to stay in one place. There's quite a few ways that some up and coming publishers are figuring out how to take away these artificial barriers:
1. Transparency and communication.
You, the Extra Credits community, will know everything: when we fail, when we succeed. There will be no PR spin; you’ll be involved in everything we do.
2. IP ownership
We will never ask developers to give up their intellectual property. It’s their world: no one should keep them from building it.
3. Single Game Deals
If a developer works with us more than once it should be because they want to, not because they’re contractually obligated to.
4. Straight 50-50 split of profit
The fund is not about us and them, “publisher” and “developer”, we’re in this together, we’re partners. We’ll split the profits equally on any project we work on
Personally, I don't know if this will succeed. The fact is, James Portnow, Allison Theus, and Daniel Floyd never imagined this success would occur and this thrusts them into a new limelight. I can only hope that their method of doing business gains attention and allows for much better games and more transparency to become par for the course instead of the secrecy and dagger deals of an outfit like Ubisoft or EA.
On the post: Gibson CEO: US Government Won't Even Tell Us What Law They Think We've Violated
Re: Re: Hard to feel sorry for Gibson....
On the post: Debate Time: Ubisoft Says DRM Is Needed, Valve Says No It Isn't.
Valve Fanboy
For a private company that runs a digital market place, Valve is a very, very VERY good company that understands its consumer base. The company ran the Potato Sack despite complaints that missed the point. The Potato Sack brought in a lot of interest and dollars to smaller developers that might otherwise go unnoticed. As Newell said, it was meant to be fun and make Valve less of a corporate culture than what is seen at EA or Ubisoft. It worked. Greatly. I had fun with the Potato Sack (even though I only got ONE potato. :( )
Just to strengthen the argument placed here, these are the issues that Valve looks at:
PC Gamer: Do you have a good sense of piracy rates with Steam games?
Gabe Newell: They’re low enough that we don’t really spend any time [on it]. When you look at the things we sit around and talk about, as big picture cross game issues, we’re way more concerned about the stability of DirectX drivers or, you know, the erroneous banning of people. That’s way more of an issue for us than piracy.
Read that again. There are other issues that are more important than piracy. Making a stable experience and one that doesn't take away from the game as Ubisoft does should be applauded. Ensuring customer satisfaction instead of customer ire should be rewarded. And Steam is given that in spades.
Perhaps, it's the way that the companies are set up:
So, essentally you're saying that Valve needs autonomous developers.
GN: Yep. We don’t really have titles here; people decide for themselves what their role should be. People self-organise here.
...
People say they have to go work on this different problem now, because nobody else is and we need to get it done in order to get other things done. So they pack up their desks, and move to their relevant teams.
If you look at Ubisoft Montreal, or Ubisoft Toronto, these are 1,000 person-capacity studios that can knock out a game in twelve months.
GN: The only problem with that is that they’ll be able to knock out the same thing over and over again, not something that adapts to the changes in the industry.
And I haven’t seen any evidence that the rate of change in the industry is decreasing. I think it’s increasing. So what you’ll end up finding is those thousand people are the enemy of your next project. They may be able to bang out your current one, but they’ll get in the way of doing the next one.
But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, we’d hire them all. We don’t hire to specific positions, we hire to standards.
This entire interview is worth reading. From the very way that Steam is structured to how it has made its own service without worrying about copyright enforcement, Valve has done an exceptional job at showing how to run a business. If I could find the article again that I submitted a while ago, I would show how Valve seems to have learned from the "Media Piracy" book and marked down the price in Russia so more people could afford the games. But since the article already does that, there's no point in saying it again.
Again, good job Zach on showing how Ubisoft is losing ground by focusing on the wrong issues.
On the post: Feds Insist That As Long As They Break The Law In A 'Classified' Way, They Can Never Be Sued
Re: Re: this is news?
On the post: Feds Insist That As Long As They Break The Law In A 'Classified' Way, They Can Never Be Sued
Re: this is news?
On the post: The Insane Chain Of Sampling Rights: How A Folk Song Collector Became A 'Co-Author' On A Jay-Z Song
Reminds me of something...
SP: Why would corporations hang onto all these old copyrights if they are going to make it so hard to use them?
NP: Well, there's a good answer to that. The corporations that hold these copyrights are media companies that also control most of the new media that comes out. Estimates vary, but it's said that 98 percent of all culture is unavailable right now because of copyrights. So the reason they hold the copyrights isn't because they want to get paid, it's because they don't want all the old stuff competing with the media stream that they control now.
Isn't this the crux of the problem? Hell, Lomax died in 2002 as per the wiki. So who did Jay-Z clear the rights to? And who got paid?
On the post: Kevin Smith Explains Why He Had To Waste $9,316 On Movie Ads That He Didn't Want Or Need
Re: Re: Re: Re: PAYWALL!
On the post: Kevin Smith Explains Why He Had To Waste $9,316 On Movie Ads That He Didn't Want Or Need
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: PAYWALL!
I believe this is what you meant?
On the post: Kevin Smith Explains Why He Had To Waste $9,316 On Movie Ads That He Didn't Want Or Need
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Small nitpick... The last five years? The MPAA has been having problems since the 90s. When it's not indie that they're crushing under their heel, it's the consumers in trying to find the best way to maximize their profits, rather than giving customers what they want.
"It would be nice if such a thing happened as the evidence would be tested in a court with reasonable standards, but it hasn't happened yet."
These are the same people that run with the RIAA... Do we really want to trust a private business with so much information?
On the post: Feds Insist That As Long As They Break The Law In A 'Classified' Way, They Can Never Be Sued
Hold the phone...
AT&T has a revenue stream of $124B. Verizon? $106B. Just to be fair, let's look at Comcast who has $38B and Time Warner ($18B). All of this has been taken from wikipedia on 9/1.
Now let's look at how much they spend lobbying to Congress with their revenue...
AT&T - 30% more on lobbying but total money in expenditures? $12 million dollars for favorable legislation
Verizon - $9 Million
Comcast - $11 Million
Time Warner - $4 Million
Now out of all of these companies, that give a lot of money to Congress, I find it quite odd to hear that they're worried about making them bankrupt.
AND PLEASE! SOMEONE GET THOMAS BYRON A REAL TIE INSTEAD OF THAT PINWHEEL!
On the post: Puerto 80 Appeals: Asks Court To Recognize That Trampling The First Amendment Is Substantial Harm
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Puerto 80 Appeals: Asks Court To Recognize That Trampling The First Amendment Is Substantial Harm
Re: Re: Re:
So it goes against Fort Wayne Books v Indiana? Fascinating...
" Secondly, courts have ruled in the past that some protected speech may be affected when illegal speech is stopped, and that to a certain degree, this is acceptable."
"Why do you think that a Spanish website can be immune from prosecution in the US for any of it's piracy, but somehow able to benefit from US law in the matters of free speech? "
Because a Spanish website should be able to express itself without the US government interfering. The government should not be able to take away *any* property before finding evidence of wrongdoing. The government has already admitted that this case is flimsy and not against Puerto 80, but what it's *users* put on the website. It has links to places that could be charged with direct download infringement.
Further, our government has a very strong tendency to go after websites using "American consumers" as an excuse. Or have you not heard about the poker raids committed by small towns that add up to huge amounts of money for police officials?
On the post: Kevin Smith Explains Why He Had To Waste $9,316 On Movie Ads That He Didn't Want Or Need
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A possible explanation?
You're not getting it... He's already made the $4 million back. He's already paid it off. The rest is pure profit and gravy. The tickets sell for MORE when Smith is there in the theater. Kevin Smith is touring with the movie. He does QA with it. He twitters and answers questions. People can post that up on Youtube.
He is not limiting what people can do at all. They talk about the movie, more people want to see it. Why are you deliberately being shady about your ignorance of what he's accomplishing?
On the post: ISP Sued For Revealing Info On US-Based Critic Of Thai Laws
Re: Re:
This might just break that armor and immunity given to both for putting up with the violation of the 4th Amendment.
On the post: Secretly Snapping Naked Pics Of The Woman Who Ended Up With A Stolen Laptop Might Just Be Illegal
Re:
If so, there were a lot of man hours spent "reseaching" this case...
On the post: ISP Sued For Revealing Info On US-Based Critic Of Thai Laws
On the post: Kevin Smith Explains Why He Had To Waste $9,316 On Movie Ads That He Didn't Want Or Need
Re: Re: Re: A possible explanation?
I'd like to also submit the fact that the MPAA organizations spend hugely on advertisements. Advertising for people that won't want to watch the movie. Mike has talked about this at length in other articles.
...discussing how the major studios "buy" an opening weekend gross number, knowing that if you just spend $x million on TV advertising, you can pretty much guarantee a certain level of turnout for a film. However, in many cases, it's really a waste of money, because the money spent on the TV advertising can actually outweigh the value of the people they bring to the theaters (Smith has a funny story about studios advertising some of his movies on Lifetime, the "women-focused" TV station, whose demographics don't match at all with Smith's standard audience).
So essentially, all the advertisements that go into this movie are someone else's idea of what the movie is. *THIS* is the problem with the movie industry. It's so large and so bureaucratic, it can't change to a system that works for individual artists or movie makers. It works to protect the ideas of those entrenched in the system. It's what's so frustrating about going to the MPAA website or affiliates who use this entirely huge propaganda campaign. It's never been about artists. The conventional model is only to sustain the studios. The big Four don't push out creativity. They push out the same product making enough money to sustain itself.
How can any business continue to push out the same thing, hoping for larger profits, if they never try anything new?
On the post: US Copyright Group Lawsuits Based On Highly Questionable Evidence
Re: Re: Re:
Next >>