Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Well you might want to drop VUP and meBooks a line if that’s the case with The Luminaries because when they launched they made quite a noise about being DRM-free.
Fergus is a smart guy. He can see that publishers are in danger of being captured by the big online retailers to an even worse degree than the music companies were by iTunes. A retailer that controls access to your work via DRM can -- and will -- control its pricing and supply.
Look at how brutal Amazon has been this year:
Early last year, one of the big-six U. S. publishing houses, Macmillan, pushed back against the growing power of Amazon. At the time, Amazon had near total control of the electronic book market and was pricing e-books at a loss in order to maintain its market dominance and keep potential competitors on the margins.
Fearful of being at the mercy of a single buyer, Macmillan decided to level the playing field for other retailers. It declared that it would determine the retail prices for its e-books and pay booksellers a 30 percent commission on each sale.
Apple, which was just entering the e-book business with its iPad, quickly agreed to Macmillan’s terms. But Amazon balked. It removed the buy button from every Macmillan title on its web site. The showdown lasted a few days and then Amazon relented, agreeing to the new pricing structure. Since then, every major U. S. publisher has adopted Macmillan’s pricing policy.
But, of course, using a common, open format also has the side-effect of making your works more amenable to piracy.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Isn't that kind of the issue? Person who made his fortune by helping people share files they had no right to upload (and I'm passing no judgment on what kind of social ill that may or may not represent) creates service that makes it harder to tell if a user has done so.
Encryption does also make it much harder for potential downloaders to find such files. They're not indexed by Google, which can only see open advertisements for infringing content.
You run into tricky territory if you start telling people they can't protect their own privacy via encryption, when there are legitimate reasons they might wish to do so.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
To be fair Russell, I don’t think your fur would be easily unruffled if it was your signature on the invoices for the rather substantial reprint of The Luminaries arriving this week instead of VUP publisher Fergus Barrowman.
The Publishers Association release was pretty strong stuff though -- it accused Mega of knowingly "ripping off" New Zealand authors. It's pretty hard to stand up such an accusation in the circumstances.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Mike Kilpatrick,
Personally I can’t wait for WhaleOil’s anti-YouTube campaign given they’re, at this point, way worse in providing illicit access to copyrighted work than Mega is.
It's not the same thing. Virtually all music and most other video material is identified by YouTube, which notifies registered owners. Any original master recordings which appear in any context on YouTube effectively remain there with the permission of the rights owners, who collect a small revenue share on them.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to peter mclennan,
re Megabox, it’s still coming, apparently – Dotcom announced it was now called Baboom, back in early sept, see…
Ah, thanks. Hopefully they've ditched the ad-substitution idea. It's a complete non-starter.
From the linked story it appears that Baboom users will only be able to upload works in which they own the rights.
It's possible Baboom could apply a Content ID system like that on YouTube -- which allows rights owners to claim revenue and even chart status on works uploaded without permission -- but that would require a degree of cooperation from the industry that seems a long way off.
-
Hard News: Mega Strange, in reply to Cam Slater,
Funny how you demand this of me but never of anyone else. Double standards much?
I'm demanding nothing. I am observing that the story doesn't appear to be as it originally seemed.
-
That customer registered with a throwaway email address.
Ban throwaway addresses for registrants? Problem is, one man's throwaway address is another, well, email address. One appeal of the Mega service, which our house used to transfer some raw video files, is how seamless it is to start using the service -- you can be drag-and-drop uploading before you've even finished setting up your account. I guess the government could require a more onerous registration process -- proof of identity, etc -- but that would leave every other similar service on the internet under no such constraint
-
Hard News: Friday Music: The Next Kids, in reply to Joe Wylie,
A rather slow version of a song that Toy Love made their own.
I seem to recall a few other bands played that song too. It was a bit of a standard.
-
Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to chloe smith,
While not in any way fairly mentioned, it is appropriate however to acknowledge his contribution = since 1993 RT has brought $787,649,180 of screen production into NZ (specifically Auckland) and 50% of this spend has been on labour alone.
Hi Chloe -- thanks for coming here. I was in no way trying to shortchange Rob Tapert's extraordinary contribution.
Those figures are the ideal riposte to claims that the LBSPG only benefits a wealthy few.
For those who don't recognise her name, Chloe has produced nearly 200 episodes of Hercules, Xena and the others for Pacific Renaissance -- and more besides.
-
Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Keir Leslie,
The more commercial the government funding gets, the more it is open to critique as simply a subsidy to capital, which isn’t really something I’m super interested in.
And that’s fair enough. But I can’t get behind Gordon Campbell’s scathing post on Power Rangers. Yes, the production and performance work is all contracted and the days can be long. But it’s a project-based sector and it’s how people in the industry are used to working. Some of them buy their own gear and hire it out, set-builders have workshops, and so on. And yes, of course you don’t own your likeness as a Power Rangers actor.
A decade of Power Rangers has helped support a standing workforce and equipment base. I don’t know of anyone in the Auckland industry who wouldn’t have wanted it to continue. It’s going to be harder for someone like the brilliant Chris Burt of Inside Track, who made the Power Rangers sound effects, to stay in business.
We gave back the Power Rangers company $2.5 - $3m of their production spend each year. I’m not wild about subsidising capital either, but it would cost us a hell of a lot more to directly fund a level of screen production that would give you the same skill base.