Y Combinator Wants To Kill Hollywood 424
An anonymous reader writes "Y Combinator, a firm that invests in startups, has put out a call to kill Hollywood. In a post on their site, the firm said attempts at legislation similar to SOPA wouldn't stop until there is no industry left to protect. They now want to incubate ideas for new types of entertainment, so we can evolve the movie and television industries. Quoting: 'There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries. Microsoft seemed like a technology supplier to IBM before eating their lunch, and Google did the same thing to Yahoo.'"
Retries destroy the pacing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Video games (Score:5, Interesting)
Video games really just shift the problem. The ESA (which until very recently supported SOPA, against many of its largest members' public whims) could very well be the MAFIAA of the future.
The problem isn't Hollywood, the problem isn't even industry groups... The problem is publishers. Music labels, in particular, need to die a quick death.
Kill the book publishers. Kill the music labels. Kill the movie studios. Kill the video game publishers. The latter two, I realize, might not quite be feasible yet, as the economics are such that it's really not possible for an unknown group to fund themselves for a large movie or game project, but in the case of books and music? They serve no purpose whatsoever anymore, and are just parasites sucking money out of those they represent, putting impediments in front of those they sell to, and slowing down the pace of technology and innovation.
Follow The Money.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why dont the top 100 odd tech firms just get their boards together and buy out the entertainment industry, Fire all the old chaff, then figure out what do do with whats left. Even if they end up writing off the entire investment, the savings in reduced interference from a dying industry(Lawsuits, Trusted Computing, SOPA/PIPA etc.) will justify the few hundred billion. Plus, the innovation it will unleash when all those rent-seeking collaboration-killing laws become irrelevant will bring soo much new life into the dying(yes DYING!!) economies of the developed world.
Sadly, i dont have any hope that such a scenario will ever come to pass, especially when most tech firms behaving more like a pot of lobsters...
(sigh...)
my new model (Score:3, Interesting)
People:
1) hate advertisements
2) like renting
3) don't want to spend money on garbage
4) don't want to spend more than $5 on on good content
Thus: ... LESS than $5 ($0.25 to $3) -- if it isn't on par with price of any other renter service out there it won't work. This way people can get their money back if they really don't like a movie. If they rent (and pay) the same thing multiple times (two or three for instance) they should automatically OWN a drm-free version of the movie (they've proven they aren't pirates so don't be bitches about it)
Online streaming rental service (2 day rental) of content where the user can watch the first half of whatever program for free (eg. an hour of a two hour movie) and then ~half-way through at a strategic place the movie will pause and allow the person to continue watching it at a nominal fee
Just buy them (Score:5, Interesting)
The distribution channels (Apple, Google, etc) are bending over backwards on deals with companies that they could acquire in a hostile takeover tomorrow if they wanted to. It's crazy.
Foster Creativity By Shortening Copyright Length (Score:5, Interesting)
There is all this raging against "the music industry" and the "film industry." Meanwhile the people doing all the raging are soaking or craving up the products of those industries like mad. Isn't that hypocritical?
I have no problem with the music and film industries vigorously protecting their rights. But I am extremely pissed off that those rights extend for so damn long.
I don't care too much about the parasites who want their movies and music for free. I care a lot about the creative people who want to be able to draw from music and movies from the thirties, forties, and fifties. They should be free to copy and mash and improve on those earlier works. That would make our artistic world a much richer place.
Remove corporate fake citizenship.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Here's the problem with Corporate Citizenship...
They claim all of the rights and privileges without any of the responsibilities.
Taxes? Avoided by placing shell companies outside the borders and funneling sales through them.
Draft? Who to draft? They claim they are LLCs or INCs which no one individual can be held responsible for. No one individual to lay the blame or responsibilities on.
Jury duty? Employees as individual citizens certainly, but the corporate citizen can't be brought in to sit through jury duty.
Criminal offenses? Again, no one or group of individuals to be held accountable unless it's done by the mobs and so publicly that the government has no choice *but* to intercede and do something. Otherwise, they get a little fine of maybe 1/100th of their profit from the illegal action and it's back to business as usual.
So how do we fix it?
Remove the ability to avoid taxes. If you sell products to US citizens, you pay US taxes off that sale - stop income tax, make national sales tax.
Draft? Additional taxes on the corporation equivalent to pulling the bread-winner from a family of 4 to go to war. Essentially, yank 80% of their income if their number is drawn.
Jury Duty? Sorry, but most officers of companies are so narrow minded and focused that we really don't want them on juries.
Criminal Offenses... All officers of the company held responsible based on their salary/bonuses/perks/golden parachutes/etc. If the company does X, all officers get the full punishment allowable by law.
Political Donations: Cut off 100% Any corporation trying to donate to a political campaign gets fined 2 Billion dollars for every dollar donated, no bankruptcy loophole, officers held accountable.
Lobbying: No lobbyists can hold prior or after positions in corporations that benefit from the lobbyist's efforts. All lobbying must be for the good of the people, not corporations.
Outsourcing: Made illegal. Fines 1 billion per outsourced employee, per day.
Wall Street: Shut down. Speculation: Ended Futures: No longer sold, or if sold, person buying must pay all associated fees for growing, harvesting, storing, shipping said products until they are sold. Make the costs of ownership be true.
Intellectual Property: Call it what it really is. Imitation Property. Imagined Property. Pseudo Property. It's not real, it doesn't exist. Ideas once shared belong to whomever they were shared with.
Software patents: Ended. Gone. Never allowed again.
MPAA / RIAA - Shutdown / Gone / Forbidden from ever existing again. Get the money made to the people who make the works they're claiming ownership of.
The attention limit now prices copyright material (Score:4, Interesting)
Another way of looking at the copyright licensing problem is the continuing assumption that every single copyrighted item must be sold for a specific price under the terms of a custom sales contract that is unique to every item sold.
OK, I am stating the copyright goods sales assumption in an overly dramatic form.
The first problem that the Internet has created is the electronic distribution of any kind of copyrightable object costs less than a penny. A file that costs 1/10 of a cent to transmit over the Internet is overwhelmed by the 45 cent credit card transaction fee.
The second problem that the Internet has created is there is so much copyrighted material available that every person in the developed world has more copyrighted content available than that person can possibly attend to. As a perceptive analyst has pointed out: The Internet has created a state of information saturation.
A single human being can only absorb x hours of movies, books or research material transmitted over the Internet in a single month. That means, a fair payment for copyrighted material is limited to Y dollars for x hours per month per person.
So what this would point to is a mandatory automatic quitclaim copyrighted material payment system. No matter what the content is, the total payment price should be somewhere around 1 penny per hour of file transfer time. It should be so cheap that a user's personal storage would simply be full and only a relative few items stored.
Missed the true point of SOPA (Score:5, Interesting)
Its really not about protecting the music/movie/etc industries. That is just the excuse to get it passed with ( some ) citizen support. Its really about the restriction of freedoms and a increase in government control over our lives. The entire 'anti piracy' angle is just a 'shiny smokescreen' if you like.
Killing music labels is feasible (Score:5, Interesting)
Killing the music labels is quite feasible. They don't do much. They don't manufacture records - that's outsourced, and anybody can have a CD manufactured. They don't run the download systems - Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do that. They don't run recording studios - those are mostly independent, and anybody can book studio time. Their relationships with record stores (what record stores?) hardly matter any more.
The music labels have two remaining functions, one of which is attackable under antitrust law. They pay payola to radio stations for airplay and make deals with concert venues. Both have been the subject of antitrust investigations. They also do promotion. That's their real function.
The one remaining function of record labels is venture capital. They "sign" bands and put in startup capital. Others can do that. YCombinator could do that. Venture capital firms might fund a company to do that. Myspace briefly did that. That's where the labels are vulnerable.
"Own your own stuff" - Joan Jett, to new musicians.
Re:Cue the lawsuits (Score:5, Interesting)
Who exactly are you trying to kill? All of these entities are deeply enmeshed with, if not outright owned and operated by "old media."
In the end it's going to be approximately the same people doing the same sort of business under the same names, they're just going to get their money from ads instead of from sales, subscribers and tickets. Progress?
Re:Cue the lawsuits (Score:4, Interesting)
It is less of a problem than one may think. The main issue is that online gatekeepers have USA on the brain.
There is a world of content creators out there. We have been used by Hollywood studios to make A Grade content for decades, and then we are tossed onto the scrapheap when contracts are completed.
New Zealand, Australia, India, South Africa, England, Ireland, South Korea, The Philippines... all viable content sources. In many cases, Americans have no idea that the mini series, animation, TV shows are staffed, set in, voiced by, acted by and starred by New Zealanders or Australians who are pretty good at faking American accents. When I have listed some in the past, Americans can not believe that some Stephen King mini series was not shot in Maine and instead shot in a small town just outside Auckland New Zealand.
Production is cheaper outside USA, but not cheap enough. Thats where creative disruptive people like myself come in. As a storyboard artist and director, I am always finding cheaper ways to give the same effect. I have halved the cost of production on some of the projects I have been associated with.
I have been in preproduction for my own online TV show for 2.5 years. We are ready to shoot the pilot in two months. We have already created half a dozen disruptive technologies that should reduce the cost of production 50%. As a bonus, it should speed up the production to a weekly turnaround on a cast and crew of ten.
If we source writing talent from outside USA, the writers will come cheaper than American Hollywood writers, and as a bonus, they come up with the original ideas. After decades of having their ideas stolen by Hollywood Writers, Directors and Producers, it will be a refreshing change for them to get paid... and refreshing for us to get the new stories straight from the creators, instead of filtered through the Hollywood Homogenising machine.
Re:Cue the lawsuits (Score:4, Interesting)
With Loser Pay embedded in the Constitution. [wikipedia.org] (If you try to just do it via legislation, the courts will find some way around it.) The United States is the ONLY Western Democracy that doesn't follow the "English Rule" in litigation.
If the MPAA, the RIAA, and any other "AA" group wanted to sue you, they'd have to think twice if they knew that you could get attorney's fees from them if (when) you win. Right now, the primary reason why threats of litigation are so effective is because they KNOW that most people will be bankrupted by legal fees, even if they win in court.
see, first of all (Score:4, Interesting)
Without some kind of copyright and patent protection, there is less incentive to create something intangible
this is TOTAL bullshit. it was totally to the contrary.
most lively and active period in music was in between 1700-1850. this is the era exclusively almost ALL great composers born and died, and a number of them totally shaped what 'music' is and how is done. (even bach is enough himself, and he died a bimbo)
the most active and lively period in science and engineering happens to be within a similar period, 1750-1850. and this is also the era in which patents et al had the lowest weight in how science was done. most of the scientists lacked funds and support, and yet, many of the biggest scientists came among these people. DESPITE there were already patent offices circa 1800, scientists were totally behaving like the free software movement of our contemporary times - freely sharing everything.
starting 1850, moneyed interests and newly materializing megacorporations spanning nations have started to come into play. and from this point on, innovation and discoveries subsided. the only reason the period starting from that point seems more 'scientific' is, what was discovered in the earlier period being put into practice in daily life. a period of application than discovery.
and we are still in that direction today. we are just feeding on what the pioneers DISCOVERED in their time of free science in 18th century. if you look at the stuff we do today, its application and reapplication of already known principles - mostly refinement, than discovery.
its not like we are having gravity capable vehicles and flying around in cities, or even able to use quantum computing in applications. we are THAT slowed down.
if you look at life and knowledge circa 1700 and life and knowledge circa 1850, you will notice that it looks like a superhero comic - life was SO out of reality compared to the start of that period.
and look at 1850 and now, and you will not see the same drastic difference. almost all our technology is similar and some almost the same, but more refined.
i will leave you to ponder the words of the first chairman and founder of u.s. patent office :
Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices. Thomas Jefferson, 13 August 1813
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html [uchicago.edu]
Re:see, first of all (Score:4, Interesting)
The position that all of these people were somehow "better" composers and musicians than the people working today is highly speculative. They all worked for patrons, and generally died poor. Beethoven began to break the trend in the 1820s by aggressively selling his written works through publishers, at which time he became a staunch copyright advocate. It's clear that patronage could create great sacred music, and great dance and entertaining music, but the people who worked under these constraints were constantly trying to work around them and spent a great deal of their lives go around begging rich people for commissions.
Jaron Lanier once made the good point that patronage was capable of creating a Michelangelo or a Bach, but it's very questionable if patronage could have ever created a Stanley Kubrick or a Beatles.
When people pay for entertainment directly the n people paying for the artwork is at its maximum; paying for art with patronage or ads always reduces n.
Re:Cue the lawsuits (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... we can petition to have Chris Dodd and the MPAA investigated for bribery [whitehouse.gov]. That might be a good next step.
Re:Cue the lawsuits (Score:4, Interesting)
The distribution mechanisms are all in place, and others will come along. That's not the problem.
The problem is the content production. That's what costs millions of dollars, and needs a return on investment.
The general publics expectation of production values means small, indie content production just won't compete with the hollywood projects.
Oh, so not true! The content production value is very much in the hands of Pro-sumers today. DSLR cameras that record full 1080p HD content are under $2000USD with lenses. Add some mics and lights and you can build a production kit for way less than $10,000USD. For anyone with a photography background and some study, that's all you need to create good content. I've been involved in these types of productions for years, and I know what can be done today for tens of thousands of dollars, not millions. Granted, these aren't fully bonded and insured action pictures, and we're not doing much post-production CGI work, but that's a small amount of what's released from Hollywood anyway.
The real problem with competing with Hollywood is two-fold. 1. The GIANT marketing engine and resources each studio has that the indie crowd doesn't. And 2., STORY! Story is king and can overcome the cheesiest production standards (you do remember the pre-remasterd Star Trek: TOS from 1966? That was super cheese and turned off a lot of viewers initially, but the folks that stuck with it quickly saw how good the stories were and how well they were presented that the cheesie effects were tertiary at best; what you want really. It was these folks that, through mostly word of mouth, got more people to watch or come back and watch). All the good screenwriters end up in Hollywood because that's where the money is! Again, the money is there because of the huge marketing edge that Hollywood still posses and will for some time to come.
No, the best that this incubator could do would be to create a "minor league" for Hollywood, much like Major League Baseball's system now. I think that is completely viable and would generate a ton of really good low-budget content that would serve a lot of minority viewers (i.e., those not interested in much that Hollywood offers now, not ethnic minorities per se). It could be a breeding ground for up-and-coming talent as well as show Hollywood a little history lesson on how they got started. Have to remember folks, things weren't always as they are now. Hollywood was an orange grove not much more than 100 years ago. They had to start somewhere and I think giving storytellers a more structured, accessible voice could be a very good thing. I will be submitting a proposal.