Comment by jcelerier
5 years ago
> When you buy a DVD, you don't expect hundreds of hours of unedited footage to come along with the film so you can cut together your own version.
instead of accepting this as a fact of life, it should definitely be discussed and debated. What are good reasons for not having this right by default ?
For instance, Star Wars fans have made the despecialized edition from footage from the various movie - the result is pretty good. People remix music all the time; there have been plenty of initiatives over the years to provide songs as separated tracks to allow for more advanced remixes. etc etc...
> What are good reasons for not having this right by default ?
The good reason is that someone or some company paid for creating all those hundreds of hours of footage, so they get the first and final say over who gets to view and/or use it.
> so
there is nothing obvious in that deduction.
For cinema for instance a loooot of the money that serves into making movies come directly from taxpayer money - a figure I can find in the US is 1.5 billion $ of tax per year for instance in one occurence : https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/us/when-hollywood-comes-t... - and let's not get started about public tv which is pretty much mostly public funds.
Likewise for my country, France - only a minority of money invested in movies comes directly from private pockets: https://i.f1g.fr/media/figaro/704x319_cropupscale/2019/03/19...
I just went off on you on your use of of the term “rights” but when you bring up the government subsidies of movies here in the States—-I agree completely. In fact, as far as I’m concerned any government subsidy at all should render the entire production public domain. I’m not being facetious.
Thank you for pointing this stuff out.
> For cinema for instance a loooot of the money that serves into making movies come directly from taxpayer money
I don't quite get your point either. Are you implying you would like ownership to be transfered from your tax money to whatever is created afterward with that money?
Would you feel entitled to ask for reports of how your neighbor spends his unemployment grant, because that's partly paid with your tax money?
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> there is nothing obvious in that deduction.
But it is: The concept of "private property" is pervasive and deeply ingrained in modern Western civilization. You should have very, very good ethical and practical reasons for why this should be changed.
Let me try a different angle: If you put a two-minute video of an albatross gliding through the air on Youtube, should viewers of your video also have the right to see the other five hours of your holiday footage?
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That is not a reason or an answer to that question.
No one denies that whoever creates something has the right to dispose of it however they wish.
Having the legal right to annoy your own customers is not a good reason to annoy your own customers.
The question was why couldn't the material be packaged up in any other ways? What's the "good reason" it can't be? Does it kill any babies?
> That is not a reason or an answer to that question. [...] The question was why couldn't the material be packaged up in any other ways?
Re-read the original question by jcerelier, who explicitly asked why consumers don't have the right to view all the uncut footage: "What are good reasons for not having this right by default ?" [1]
> No one denies that whoever creates something has the right to dispose of it however they wish.
That's not correct. From another comment: "I'd rather have no notion of private ownership of ideas, knowledge and cultural goods at all." [2]
> What's the "good reason" it can't be? Does it kill any babies?
That's a really stupid argument to make. What's the "good reason" you don't send me 100 Euros? Would it kill any babies?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25507455
Ever read "unseen before footage", "exclusive archive content", "behind the scenes"? These come from content they didn't use and stashed away. If they just package it all with the initial product, they more or less kill the potential of exploiting their own IP later down the line.
because if there weren't fairly strict limitations on what you can do with the material, someone could reproduce the work and you'd be deprived of your profits, leaving no incentive to make stuff, which costs money.
No one asks for it, and it would be a technical challenge to distribute that much footage. If data speeds and storage densities keep going up it wouldn't surprise me if it eventually happens.
For first release, sure. But forever? Why? If I want to remix Steamboat Willie in 2020 why should Disney still have an exclusive right to that today?
It depends on whether you think the creators of something do or do not have the right to sell or not sell it if they choose. If they do, then surely they can choose to include or not include any parts of their creation. Why should anyone have a right to cut footage the owner has chosen not to sell?
This is where there needs to be some careful thinking about terminology, since we don't have any right to other people's stuff by default.
The people who made the movie have all the rights to it and then they make some DVDs and sell them. They only sold what's on the DVDs. They didn't sell the other stuff, so people don't have a right to that stuff.
Now, that is not to say that the products couldn't be different in the future. It might turn out that movies which include a footage "parts kit" do better in the market place, so much more so that it becomes the normal way of doing business and is what is the ordinary and expected product at the ordinary price. But there's no reason to expect we have any particular rights to stuff other people did, or that they can't carefully parcel out the rights at prices that they set.
> What are good reasons for not having this right by default?
Getting tired of such free use of the word “right”. [EDIT: see bottom of this post!]
I will assume you’re not from the US, or are using hyperbole when you use the term “right”. Here in the USA our rights are clearly defined in the Constitution & Bill of Rights and they have a special quality: Our military and politicians literally swear not to defend King or country, but the Constitution, which represents a set of rights no human is allowed to abridge.
Rights are things we send our sons and daughters to die for in war.
So maybe you mean something a bit less dramatic?
EDIT: After my bloviating I reversed my position based on something the parent posted regarding government subsidies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506982
> I will assume you’re not from the US,
yes