I would call it piracy prevention program - that way no one will be able to find piracy content trough google.
If google returned empty pages for something it didn't agree with, the implications would be appalling.
Google should do during the spectrum wars when they bid on spectrum and territory to leverage telecom co.s. They should threaten to back netflix or start a studio to make movies and content. They already have distribution and funds.
That said, aren't both usually owned by the same studio/company?
nevertheless hollywood does everything to abolish itself producing only comic/computer game adaptions or se-/prequels.
The thing is that when the level of CGI realism gets to the point that most blockbuster movies don't really need to shoot on location at all, there's no need for Hollywood production anymore. The Pixar office campus model starts to become the norm. You can produce movies from anywhere you can fit a server rack. The only films that will need Hollywood will be the ones that wouldn't work as CG - comedies, documentaries and dramas which don't make much money and will need to get cheaper and cheaper to be viable.
Basically Hollywood as we know it will collapse eventually. The companies that will win at the filmmaking game are the ones with their fingers in digital distribution, a global marketing apparatus, cheap compute resources, and cheaper human talent. AKA Google / YouTube. So the MPAA needs to knock out Google for any hope of survival. Tactics like this will only accelerate the process. So Google wins.
They obviously failed before execution, but that shouldn't matter...
Does anyone know if Google can use this information in court for a lawsuit against MPAA?
MPAA current members: Sony, Disney, Fox, Universal, Warner and Paramount.
Netflix is not a member. Lionsgate is not a member. You tube is certainly not a member. The MPAA therefore doesn't represent the content industry let alone all of Hollywood. Those writing about the MPAA (Wired) should not take its word as representative of anyone other than its FIVE backers. And some of those (Sony) aren't exactly happy with them these days.
The MPAA is "Hollywood" for sure, inasmuch as that term has any meaning at all. I simply don't understand what point you're trying to make.
My point is that the MPAA does not represent these other "Hollywood" content producers and shouldn't be described a representing any content producers beyond the five members.
In this particular case it's pretty clear the MPAA and the AG were both out of bounds. Why would the AG, the top lawyer for the state government (and supposedly for the people), need to help the MPAA with a smear campaign? According to Google, AG Hood's office supplied a proposal to the MPAA [2] with an editorial suggesting slumping stock prices, media segments in collaboration with the AG, regulatory lawsuits...
This is a conscious, targeted attack against Google because Hollywood didn't get its way. The project was even codenamed "Project Goliath" (related to the MPAA & affiliates, not the AG) [3].
Google has the resources, capability and will to vigorously defend itself where others may have not.
[1] https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MPAA_v_ThePeople/ [2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2179... [3] http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/12/7382287/project-goliath
Not to mention Google is by now a pretty deft political player.
* Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, said that "One of Apple's employees works closely with Hollywood on so-called product placement so its gadgets are used in movies and television shows.
Plenty of video services like netflix, amazon prime are producing their own quality tv shows that exceed most of the crap movies we get. Everything is CG or some dumb plotline about sex. I'm sure films & tv shows will turn out from tech giants. I think if Google jumped in and began paying celebrities to star in their movies it could do well. I've always thought Hollywood to be a propaganda machine.
Films are hugely labour-intensive, particularly to produce to the standards that the public demand. There are a variety of interesting avenues to pursue if you are interested in disrupting Hollywood - I blog about many of them when I'm not actively pursuing them - but none of them are trivial.
As for CGI realism: ish. I actually moved away from CGI to live-action quite recently, after nearly 20 years of making low-budget animated movies, because IMO live-action is actually far more promising right now. CGI is extremely useful as a backup and emabler in conjunction with live-action, but not so much on its own. I wrote more about that here - http://www.strangecompany.org/why-the-guy-who-coined-machini... .
Hollywood accounting is infamous, but it seems Hollywood actually know what they are doing business-wise. They pay stars a lot of money because it translates into ticket sales, not because they are idiots.
Many movies are made outside of Hollywood (so-called independent movies) with cheaper talent (sometimes working for free), but only rarely are they as financially successful as Hollywood movies.
There are one or two individual producers who crack the code to making movies that are financially successful AND outside the Hollywood model, but they're rare.
Right now, Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious) and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Safety Not Guaranteed, Creep) are the two names to watch in the indie-but-also-profitable space.
Ultimately, I've come to the conclusion that thinking about Hollywood as "production & distribution" is naive - if that were really the case YouTube and Netflix would have long replaced Hollywood by now. And I don't think "CGI" realism will disrupt them either.
What Hollywood has, to an overwhelming degree, and which is really hard to "automate" is talent. From writers, singers and to actors and directors, Hollywood is really effective at finding and growing talent and the rest of the world hasn't really figured out how to write great content other than "throw millions of dollars at it" (like Netflix with House of Cards).
Simply put, you can have the best distribution channels or the cheapest platform but the top tier talent is expensive - but also has the best returns. And couple that with the fact that media production is very hit or miss (you can spend 150MM on a movie and have no one watch it, or make 1B), you are faced with something you can seemingly only "disrupt" by spending as much as everyone else.
I agree some aspects of film are ripe for disruption but many aspects have already been disrupted multiple times over the years.
I'm in the medical industry, which is another field that tech newbies think will be fixed real soon now as hackers turn their attention to it. In both cases there is a lot of hard earned insider knowledge that outsiders (arrogantly) discount.
I work in med-tech on the tech side. Every CEO of the small companies I deal with have 15+ years in medicine. Almost all of them have experience in both the practitioner and administrator roles. From my experience, these arrogant outsiders you speak of either don't exist or make such an insignificant impact that you'd have to put effort into actually finding them.
Healthcare has some systemic similarities I suppose, but the case I'll make is that there's a historic precedent for digital disruption of creative media with books, increasingly TV, and particularly music. We think of online piracy as the main disruptor of the record business, but the record industry also lost a lot of power when artists no longer needed a major label's advance check or marketing to record & distribute a successful album. Advances in home recording technology and social media are decentralizing the music business, and if similar leaps come along in filmmaking tech it isn't a stretch to guess it would decentralize the film industry in a similar fashion
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/02/netfl...
http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#hollywood
Yes, they're ripe for it. The consumers are ready for it, too. More power to those who pursue it!
Whether it is Paris Hilton or Bill Maher, stars are the people who rise to the top of the system and become household names. The various media wings need a place with a critical mass of famous people. That happens in LA, and to a lesser extent in New York. Look at Vancouver. Lots of films, lots of money, but none of the media associated with LA's star system. The physicality of this system means it is resistant to disruption by technology. Hollywood will be king for a long time.
After documentaries on Netflix and Hulu, cartoons are already all that I watch, except maybe local news.
I thought that was poetically ironic.
Although it will probably go precisely nowhere, this is an interesting point. This sort of attack goes beyond a "character" attack on the company. Indeed, Google isn't directly affected by a drop in stock price; but as a Google shareholder, I am.
How is that fair or remotely acceptable? I suppose that's the purpose, and it's despicable. Once the political support for the MPAA ends, they'll have nothing left.
Say that you were once charged with some awful crime. I mean really really bad crime. A little later the police noticed it was actually forgotsusername who they were after, and you were let go and even given a public statement that it wasn't you. But say I pulled up the records of you originally being charged and put them up on a billboard. Let's say I even showed the part where you were let go. But the crime is so horrible, and some people are so jumpy and so strongly believe in the 'where there is smoke there must be fire' line of thinking that your employer decides you are just too much of a liability. Would you have a case against me?
(Granted this might depend purely upon local laws where you live, so maybe the question should be: should you have a case against me?)
Yes. According to the article it's in a court filing. I presume for the following lawsuit:
http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_jimhood_dec...
Publishing an editorial in the WSJ with the intention of manipulating a company's stock price certainly feels like it should fall under the same category..
They spent millions, had an array of hilarious 'mom & apple pie' witnesses flown in from the US and managed to lose on many points (but not all) and were left with a useless judgment which they can never collect on as they were stupid enough to sue two people with no assets or any prospect of having any.
They did however, become a laughing stock in the legal world and have an array of TV programs and plays, mocking them mercilessly. Plus some of the, till then, unproven, claims of disgusting practice ended up being proven and therefore repeatable without risk - which was not the case beforehand.
Defamation actions are never a good way to go. Even winning one does not generally help you much.
Elstree.
From the wiki: >Filmed in a Belfast studio and on location elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Iceland, Morocco, Spain, Malta, Scotland, and the United States,
So it does not come from Hollywood. HBO is owned by Time Werner, but operate independently. So neither the physical production place nor the company that made it screams hollywood.
As for the Netflix only stuff, it is owned by Netflix.
"Films on demand" - some aspects of this are near-future plausible given existing script, mocap and voice acting. Simple programmatic cinematography is just about possible, and AI editing is getting better. 5 years away, maybe, for sitcom / soap-opera equivalent lighting and cinematography. A LOT longer before you're replacing Roger Deakins, though.
"Photo-realistic" - photorealistic CGI films have been just around the corner for 15 years now and continue to be so. Proof-of-concept 15 second renders are doable, feature-length films with non-humans are doable (albeit with a LOT of human intervention), but 90 minutes of CGI humans is a lot harder.
"Characters" - moulding their appearance is almost doable now. Motion is a lot harder - we've got semi-programmatic facial animation but it's a bit rubbish. Programmatic body animation is getting there. Programmatic voice acting is a Really Hard Problem and I'm not aware of anyone making any significant moves forward in that area.
"Unique scripts" - no-one has demonstrated anything close to an AI scriptwriter at this point. It may well be that's a problem which requires strong AI to solve.
We might be looking at Hollywood being replaced completely at some point, but I doubt it'll happen in the next 20 years.
However, what IS a huge threat to Hollywood is the increased power of indie filmmakers with technological assists. I write about that sort of thing over on my blog at http://www.strangecompany.org/blog/
One filmmaker today can do things that would have required a crew of 20 back in 1993. The cost of filmmaking is plummeting. And that certainly is a threat to Hollywood.
You're vastly underestimating the work that goes into an authentic hollywood movie.
Also, vastly overestimating the quality of video game 3d engines, the performance requirements, the potential plot quality resulting from player-driven storylines, and so on.
Games are struggling to match the offline renderings of 14 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaI7ZPA9I1c - in particular pay attention to the lightning and textures, less so the animations. Especially those off in the distance, something that games continue to struggle with in a big way.
Photo-realistic video games are very, very far off. Significantly the costs required to achieve high-end graphics these days are astronomical.
Lucasfilm is already experimenting with using video game engines for their film making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdsFEMDceNg
Would Star Wars fan want Oculus Rift + Haptic Bodysuit + Star Wars world with full ray casting and realistic models?
I actually don't disagree with your point exactly (though it's a little spun: original content on Netflix and Youtube represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the eyeball-minutes of the movie industry -- it might get there some day but it's not remotely there yet). But what you were trying to say was completely obscured by your insane-seeming attempt to say that the MPAA doesn't represent the interests of "Hollywood".
I'm yet to find a company which you couldn't accuse of that. The truth about humans is, no matter what your way of determining rewards are, there will always be someone to complain that they deserve more and is being treated unjustly.
I'd agree that McLibel didn't play out that well for them - however here we're talking one massive company vs another. McLibel was not even close to the same thing as e.g. Google vs. the MPAA would be.
Anyway my main point was laws already exist to protect companies from malicious communications.
My point is more that if Hollywood were lying about Google then Google would have legal recourse. If they are not then Google will just have to suck it up.
HoC, GoT, all come from Hollywood. Heck, even GRRM was a screenwriter for Hollywood. The creators of GoT are also from Hollywood (Troy, Kite Runner, the awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine, etc.) and the show is run by Warner-owned HBO.
Discoverability and marketplaces are the key problems for film at the moment. There are other groups working on that problem, but so far it remains unresolved.
I wrote a bit about this on Charles Stross's blog a while ago - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/hugh-han...
The system is rotten to the core, and copyright as a concept has been broken since the day someone could drop a couple of 100s on the table and walk out the door with the digital equivalent of a printing press.
Copyright basically hinges on the act of copying being a laborious process, involving large machinery and man-hours.
This because such requirements make all acts of copying for profit activities, to recoup the costs of the copying.
But when producing one additional copy is a case of ctrl-c ctrl-v, calculating the cost heads into "angels on the head of a pin" territory.
People forget or don't know that Hollywood is the Silicon Valley of films. You need a special effect? There's a guy down the street who can do that. You need a special lens or lighting? You can rent that, today, for a hundred bucks at the shop around the corner.
That's why films, and the people who make them, congregate in Hollywood.
Is this not fraudulent?
The proposal was actually for an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google’s stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs
Since it is an editorial, one can pretty easily make the case that a sustained attack on a company by the AGs will have a negative effect on that companies stock price.
I don't like it, but if there is a legal challenge here it won't be on those grounds.
At least the article makes it sound like the stock manipulation is ancillary to Google's offense.
Even looking at The Witcher 3 running at its highest settings, the human characters are not photo-realistic. The game itself doesn't look like something that was captured on a camera; the output includes blur filters that look impressive but unrealistic (Toy Story isn't a good measuring stick, since it's not trying to be photo-realistic; something like the 2007 Beowulf movie would be a better comparison against live-action).
The biggest games aren't as profitable as movies today. Right now, there's about 35MM consoles capable of playing The Witcher 3 (PS4 and X1). Avengers: Age of Ultron passed $1 billion this summer. For TW3 to match its sales numbers, they'd have to sell roughly 16.7MM copies at $60. Almost half the number of console owners would have to buy this game at full-price for it's revenue number to be the same (yes, the PC market will have an impact, but that's harder to measure, but that market tends to be smaller than the consoles).
Moving up the timeline is meaningless toy story was 20 years old so the point is game year x ~= movie x - y. Means games in y = in ~20 years top games = today's movies assuming steady exponential growth. Which probably does not hold long term, but if today’s movies are ‘acceptable’ then that’s all you need.
I don't see this as being slam-dunk for either side.
It's a stretch, but one could imagine google's competitors piling on as well.
you have no idea how PR works...
So, will people side with Google Lawyers, or Notoriously-Shady-Film-Studio Lawyers?
As long as they don't mess around with the native search results, they'll be safer from an anti-trust perspective.
The point is they're not just at risk of losing an anti-trust battle, but simply of having their execs embroiled in it for years.
However, Google already attempts to reward original content so if they could do it algorithmically to everyone (hence not disrupting the competitive marketplace) I think they'd be able to claim "oops."
"Oops" only works when there's no proof, and it's hard to hvae an absence of proof in something that would take so much orchestration.
Secondly, that seems to be a plan and not something that was actually done. Still illegal, but nothing where they could say "they harmed us, they have to pay us".
The other aspect might be that a separate legal win is not what Google is after with that specific document. It is already part of a court proceeding and shall help Google counter the subpoena and further actions against Google by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, if I get the context right. To destroy those actions (and that man's career) would be a huge win for Google, going after specific individuals for stock price manipulation not. If I understand that right, that is something the state would have to do on its own anyway, in a normal criminal investigation, which would have to start now automatically.
Truth be told, it really depends on which side has more control over the narrative in the media.
If the MPAA tries to put a "face" on this by pulling in celebrities, that could equally backfire if other celebrities come out against it.
> for Angelina Jolie to adopt a dozen new kids
So the MPAA tells Angelina Jolie how many kids to adopt now? Did the order come directly from the Illuminati or The Bilderberg Group?
Nobody doing it: no loss to the studios.
Even without knowing exactly, precisely how many people int he USA are torrenting and pirating, the studios seem to think it's a Great Big Deal, and are willing to splash out a lot of cash, and a lot of good will to get torrenting stopped. That would seem to indicate that the US population that cares about torrents is actually pretty large.