Bankers have rights. Stockholders have rights, sort of.
Little people who make stuff - no. Unless they have teh sexy. Then they have rights, of a sort.
Given this - which is the premise of all the vampire blood-sucking sites, including Pirate Bay, etc - it's already a lost battle. Because buyers, and vampires, assume creative work is worth exactly nothing.
The bizarre thing about the file sharing sites is that so many uploaders expect people to say thankyou, and get in a strop if they don't. They've gone to all of the trouble to take ten minutes to rip and upload something, and by god, the rest of the world had better be grateful for that hard work.
The way to reinject value isn't to worry about units of stuff. The unit model worked when creative work could be sold in physical units. Now that's increasingly unlikely, it has to rely on a different premise.
I think the key is that all marketing is identity politics. People who don't want to pay money for a CD or DVD will be more likely to pay to feel a part of - something.
There are many possible somethings that's true for.
For example - see this.
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html
What as dishonest was trying to co-opt creative culture with the rules of hacker culture.
Art is not code. You can't open source art in the same ways you can open source code. They're different media, with different social, personal and political functions.
You can't even map patent and copyright law from one to the other, because the traditions and history are so different.
Interestingly, there is an essay by Stallman or one of the other FSF people somewhere which acknowledges the concept of art as personal testament, which shouldn't be changed by third parties - any more than diaries or personal op-eds should be changed.
I find this article perversely fascinating.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010312/moglen
Very little of that ARPA-ish research was militarily useful. A lot of it ended up in general domestic computing instead - which is likely a good thing.
What's depressing is the extent to which the free content movement has been driven by lawyers like Moglen and Lessig, who really know nothing at all about art, or what kind of work is involved in making it, but still seem to feel qualified to preach to working artists and musicians about how they should be trying to make a living.
However, I suspect, like many preachers, he would do well with that scheme.
However, this insecurity, valuable though it seemed in principle, was cherished almost exclusively either in the second person or in the abstract. Its need was thought urgent for inspiring the efforts of other persons or people in general. It seldom seemed vital for the individual himself. Restraints on competition and the free movement of prices, the greatest sources of uncertainty for business firms, have been principally deplored by university professors on lifetime appointments. Their security of tenure is deemed essential for fruitful and unremitting thought.
- Galbraith, The Affluent Society If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Plus we get Pamplamoose Music ...
With publications (whatever the media), the publication is the performance.
One of the factors that pushes Japanese anime to focus on pandering to "otaku" culture, even where it may result in less mainstream appeal, is that in otaku culture, "buying all the stuff" from a favorite show is a way of showing off, so its possible to sell a series by the two-episode (25min episodes) DVD volume, then the boxed set with trinket to all pre-orders, then the collectors box set, all to the same customer. Plus a wide range of merchandise on top of that.
However, that is just one income stream for the anime producers. With other income streams under pressure, there's the risk of having all your eggs in one basket - and there also the question of just how much anime can be produced on the back of harvesting a large share of the income of obsessive otaku. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
... in which I think Beyonce looks like some kind of hypersexualised cyborg freak, compared to that cover.
But the cover is a cheat too. The video performance has nothing to do with the recording, which is heavily autotuned and looped. It looks folksy and cute, but it really isn't.
Pomplamoose won't get any income for their time. It's an enjoyable cover that probably took a day or two to put together.
But it's free entertainment.
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules: What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice). If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
So not every loop is on screen at the same time, but supposedly every loop shows up on screen sometime. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
And loop technology is way past simple repetition. You can't be me, I'm taken
If they did the scratch effect with some other device or on the computer, and just pretended to do it with the patch box, that would be cheating. If they made a click sound electronically and showed it as closing a classic If they muffled the bass drum (their September cover) electronically but showed it being done with a muppet hand puppet, that would be cheating. And confer where they have the keyboard that is clearly computer filtered, they have both the keyboard and the laptop in one of the shots.
Its all samples mixed together, but they claim, at least, to show where all the of the samples come from in the video.
... though maybe La Vie en Rose is more apropos ... I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
I'd bet on the opening harmony being autotuned, because it's just a little too perfect and shiny. But after that it gets less clear. There's quite a bit of timing slop on the vocals, which suggests live recording for at least some of the harmony lines.
Not that I'd want to be too picky - it's a very good cover, and I like it a lot more than the original.
And of course, there's no promise to show every sample they recorded, just the ones they used. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Breaking down distributor strangleholds sounds great, but if it is at the expense of killing off the production studios, its not so great.
Studio Rikka and Directions Inc., that produced Time of Eve seem to working on a "direct to stream" model, producing six shorter-then-television format episodes over the course of about a year, with Crunchyroll their American distribution partner. They also sold DVD singles of the episodes in Japan.
(They have also announced that they will release the series as a movie in Japanese theatres accompanied by a BlueRay release. So if the whole package does well enough for a second series, that is a "direct to stream/DVD-single, repackage as film for theatrical / Blue-Ray / DVD release" model.)
All English subs are available for free stream for the first season of Time of Eve (recommended), but I don't know whether there are European streaming rights restrictions. Part of Crunchyroll getting set up for all legit streaming was filtering streams by country of destination, which leads to constant complaints about specific series that are not available in specific countries. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
I think the key is that all marketing is identity politics. People who don't want to pay money for a CD or DVD will be more likely to pay to feel a part of - something. There are many possible somethings that's true for.
This comes around to contact what Erica Friedman has been writing about social marketing and micro-niche marketing. In her Sunday piece at Okazu, on Conventions, Trade Shows and the Anime/Manga Bubble:
But where anime and manga companies really fail is at Reward Your Market. Instead, they have been rewarding the audience, regardless of their commitment to the company. That means there's no meaningful way to gauge genuine interest and the size of the market becomes conflated with the size of the audience. Market Research cards and mailing lists are not commitment. It's easy enough to fill out a card or sign up for a list with fake or junk info. There are only two real measurements of commitment - Time or Money. Time and Money are measurements of passion. Reward people who give you Time or Money and your reward will have significance. People value want they pay for and do not value what they receive for free. Make fans sit through a 10-minute discussion of why subs and scans are killing what they love - then reward them for sitting through it. It reinforces the time they spent and the value of that time. And the thing they get becomes more meaningful because they had to work for it. Instead of handing out bags to anyone who stops by in hopes that free publicity translates into sales, how about giving bags to people who pre-order one of a specific set of items, or who sit through your panel, get the card handed out at the end and cash it in for that goodie? Make your consumer work for that reward and they'll value it more.
There are only two real measurements of commitment - Time or Money.
Time and Money are measurements of passion. Reward people who give you Time or Money and your reward will have significance. People value want they pay for and do not value what they receive for free. Make fans sit through a 10-minute discussion of why subs and scans are killing what they love - then reward them for sitting through it. It reinforces the time they spent and the value of that time. And the thing they get becomes more meaningful because they had to work for it.
Instead of handing out bags to anyone who stops by in hopes that free publicity translates into sales, how about giving bags to people who pre-order one of a specific set of items, or who sit through your panel, get the card handed out at the end and cash it in for that goodie? Make your consumer work for that reward and they'll value it more.
Reward commitment - of time or money. Where would this tie in with the "teaspoon model" for fighting back against the leach streaming sites? It would be easiest if you were running a legitimate streaming site yourself, like Crunchyroll, where you could give, say, a X% discount on a monthly subscription to anyone who has made a "first report" of the file location being used to store bootleg copies for streaming.
But it would probably be more effective if it was organized as a group and there was some way to receive group rewards, like advance "reviewer" screenings of shows not yet available for general release. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
