January 23, 2012
THE HOLLYWOOD ECONOMIST: Hollywood, SOPA, and the Pirates of the Internet
by Edward Jay Epstein
A “2.0 edition” of Edward Jay Epstein’s The Hollywood Economist releases on January 24th. Below Epstein discusses why Hollywood is so intent on passing something like SOPA legislation.
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Now we learn why Christopher Dodd, the retired Senator from Connecticut, is receiving over $1.5 million a year to head the Motion Picture Association of America.
The MPAA, the trade organization for the Hollywood studios, is financed by Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Disney, Sony, and Paramount. Each provides about $10 million per year. Aside from efforts to suppress digital piracy, it lobbies Congress and regulatory agencies. Its crucial job here is to protect the Big Six’s crown jewels: their intellectual properties. Without their libraries of movies, animated shorts, and TV series, they couldn’t survive.
Consider Warner Bros. Its library has more than 60,000 licensable properties, including 6,500 movies and 40,000 TV episodes. Whereas its DVD sales have been on the wane, its TV licensing has skyrocketed. In 2010, according to sources at Time Warner, Warner Bros. harvested over $4 billion from worldwide licensing to TV. Nearly 80 percent came from just four cable customers—HBO, Turner, ABC Family, and NBC-Universal’s cable channels. Not only did this far exceed its share of theatrical box-office receipts, which were $2.4 billion in 2010, but this licensing is highly profitable: The studio pays none of the cost of advertising, prints, or logistics. Almost all proceeds, minus some residuals paid to third parties, go to a studio’s bottom line. Whatever the vagaries of the box office, licensing is the largest and most reliable source of profits for the studios.
But these golden geese are in danger of being strangled to death by video streaming. New age companies, notably Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and Google, now compete with cable TV by streaming movies and other video directly over the Internet. Netflix, for instance, offers unlimited streaming for $7.99 extra a month with its mail-in service, Amazon offers free streaming to its 10 million Amazon Prime customers, and Google offers YouTube free.
How can they afford it? Whereas the old-line cable and satellite companies have enormous building, servicing and amortizing costs, the Internet is essentially free to transmit over. Even if the new age streamers paid the same to license, buy, or produce content, they have a comparative advantage. “I don’t see how cable can compete with free transmissions,” a savvy top executive of Time Warner told me, pointing out that Netflix, after sublicensing Starz‘s content, offers it for a fraction of what Starz charges its subscribers. No doubt Starz will end this bargain rate when its Netflix contract ends in February 2012, but so long as transmission remains free, streaming will chip away at the cable audience. “Cord cutting” will leave the cable systems with diminished revenue but the same overhead. “If 5 percent cut their cord, it would be a financial disaster for cable networks,” said a pay-TV executive. The result: cable nets would cut back on the amount they pay for content (which has happened in the case of pay-TV channels).
The Hollywood studios not only risk losing billions of dollars in licensing revenues, but their corporate parents own almost all the big cable networks. Since anti-trust law prevents the studios from meeting to restrain trade, they must act through the MPAA.
Enter Dodd. While technically prohibited from lobbying Congress until 2013, he can provide guidance to the MPAA’s massive D.C. lobbying operation. And as a former chairman of the Democratic Party and former head of the Senate Banking Committee, he knows how the who-gets-what system in Congress works.
Among other things, the MPAA has sidled into the battle raging at the FCC over regulation of the Internet regarding so-called net neutrality, which would guarantee anyone could send anything at no cost over the Internet. Proponents argue that free, untampered with transmission is vital to democracy (and their businesses). They have the support of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former IAC executive. On the other side are the telecom and cable companies that argue it’s their right to manage traffic that goes through their pipelines as efficiently as possible. Just as cities should be able to manage vehicle traffic by discriminating against trucks on certain streets, they say they should be allowed to segregate traffic along their routes, even if it results in slower, and possibly more expensive, video streaming. Here the interests of the telecoms, the cable networks, and studios converge.
The PR-acceptable issue that Dodd can use his considerable skills and connections to both solidify such an unwieldy alliance and lobby Congress is internet piracy. So we now have the MPAA supported Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The formidable roadblock to it is the powerful influence that the Internet titans have over the Obama administration. Hence the current war over SOPA.
EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN is the author of The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood, as well as, most recently, The Hollywood Economist. He writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
Edward Jay Epstein's book The Annals of Unsolved Crime is available now from Melville House.
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2 Comments
Why do you focus only on the big studios and ignore the fact that this is seriously impacting the livelihoods of artists, craftspeople, and the makers of content as well? The hackneyed notion that if we give our content away for free, then audiences will come flocking tossing dollars in our tin cups has proven false and only helps the likes of Google, YouTube, Amazon, and others that need free/cheap content to keep their business model afloat.
Basically this is a war between the old media/content providers who at least paid the artists something (UMG actually splits 50/50 with artist) and the new content providers whose model is based on free/shared content who make money from advertisers and pass very little of that down the chain to artists.
Thanks for a good, fairly neutral article.
Intellectual property (IP) is the cornerstone of our modern world. While SOPA/PIPA and government interference in the voluntary (notice I didn’t say “free”) flow of information is not the answer, the most obvious answer is not a popular one – enforce IP laws just as any other property laws.
In this world of everything 2.0 it can be hard to see why IP matters. Just think of the consequences of abolishing the patent system. Say goodbye to the next iPod. Progress, especially scientific and technological, would never be the same. Most of the luxuries we take for granted including telecommunications are the result of someone doing something for their own financial self-interest.
In essence there is little difference between a patent and a copyright. Both restrict the ability to reproduce something based on information alone. You can’t patent an idea and nor can you copyright one, so please… stop the chatter about how our views/opinions/creativity are being suppressed.
Then there’s the old enforcibility question. As an IP proponent I often find in discussions with the free culture crowd that after some time the topic abruptly shifts from “what is right?” to “what is expedient?” – as though expediency matters when it comes to enforcing someone’s rights. Some simple enforcement methods:
- Levees on hardware.
- Allow the telecom companies to control what flows through their system (and in Canada at least, one company – Bell – singlehandedly built our telecom infrastructure over almost a century). Yes, this means abandoning net neutrality and there are good arguments for it.
- Force online companies to regulate their own content. Not as far-fetched as it seems.
- Place sanctions on countries that do not enforce rights the way we do. This is done all the time for minority/women’s rights.
Protecting people’s rights may not always be convenient, but it is important. Emphasis on the rights of PEOPLE. Too often one side tends to look at the other as a faceless group, but don’t forget, this affects real individuals. Just about all of your musical/literary/artistic heroes started poor, and the only reason you ever heard of them is because somebody decided they were a good investment.