Valenti-Lessig Debate Reprise

One of Inside.com's columnists wrote a nice story on the Valenti-Lessig debate that we posted a few days ago. It's a pretty funny play-by-play evaluation, nails Valenti for his evasiveness, and there are archives of the debate available, which is not as dry as you might think it would be.

Lessig's got the point

[Masem]

Whether it's Napster, DeCSS, the CueCat, or whatnot, Lessig hit the biggest nail out there: Copyright extends too long. If I were defending Napster, I'd be arguing about these near-infinite copyright laws, such that there's a precidence to send that to the Supreme Court and revoke all those Sonny Bono-like copyright extention laws. Lessig offers 14 years, which is somewhat fair, but in today's age, I'd go lower, maybe 10.

A funny point was also made; Valanti stated that 2 out of every 10 movies made (at an average of $56mill) get movie back, so therefore the motion picture industry needs 'protection' to keep all their profits. Except that most reports indicate declining audiences, decreasing satisfaction with movies, and increasing money spent on making and promoting the movie. Hint, Hollywood: not every picture you release needs to be IML-ed or big star-ed to the gills. You can and HAVE made good movies with small budgets. Go back to the golden age of film and watch those movies; certainly you can't just take those and remake them, but you can learn a thing or two of what makes a good film. And if you start making good films again, maybe you'll get more people to see them, and then get more money back for each film made! (Gasp, what a concept!)

Re:Lessig's got the point

[rgmoore]

A funny point was also made; Valanti stated that 2 out of every 10 movies made (at an average of $56mill) get movie back, so therefore the motion picture industry needs 'protection' to keep all their profits. Except that most reports indicate declining audiences, decreasing satisfaction with movies, and increasing money spent on making and promoting the movie. Hint, Hollywood: not every picture you release needs to be IML-ed or big star-ed to the gills

A bigger and, IMO, more important point is that Hollywood bookkeeping is notoriously fishy. You're talking about companies that can make a movie that costs $50 million and sells $400 million in tickets worldwide but still shows a large book loss. In some cases, I've heard, the books are actually so crooked that a movie will lose more money on paper the more tickets it sells. This is done by allowing some of the people involved in making the movie- usually the studio, the director, and big star actors- to skim a percentage of the gross recepts from ticket sales. If the gross profit participants get to skim 75% of receipts, the movie has to make 4 times the combined film, distribution, and marketing costs before it will make money on paper, despite the fact that the big interests in the movie will already be laughing all the way to the bank.

It's actually worse than it sounds because the gross is actually only a fraction of the ticket sales, since the movie theaters get to keep a share. The result is that almost any movie out there will need box office receipts 5-10 times the nominal production cost before it shows a paper profit. Of course the studio will have more than recouped its costs well before they reach that point, since their share of the gross isn't counted as part of the net profit/loss. The whole system is set up to bilk the small investors who help to fund a lot of movies. I'm amazed that even 20% of movies make money under Hollywood bookkeeping principles.

Valenti says...

[PhilHibbs]

Valenti says: "Just because technology makes stealing easy, it doesn't make it right."

I say: "Just because your technology prevents theft, that doesn't make simultaneously denying fair use right".