Disqus - Latest Comments for Greg

Re: More King Kong

Greg — Tue, 16 May 2006 10:23:55 -0000

Tim> You've got lighting crews, camera crews, makeup crews, set crews, sound crews, post-production crews, and on and on. Another major cost is the environment in which actors act.

One reply to this is that with CGI, you don't have any of those costs. Cog is right, though, that in in CGI films, the costs will expand to meet the budget. A good counter is: can CGI movies like "Shrek" or "Nemo" replace traditional film-making? Quite possibly the answer is no, no matter how good they get, at least for some viewers. They'll take a share, but "real" actors and locations will still be what Hollywood is about for some people.

A good (and entertaining) book to read, if you're interested in a broad-brush picture of blockbuster production, is The Devil's Candy, which tells the story behind the financing and production of The Bonfire of the Vanities (which flopped, which makes it all the more interesting to read about).

The big question here, though -- and what I was thinking of saying to the NBC guy -- is why is it my obligation to preserve the blockbuster form per se. Yes, we've had them in the past and they've been a successful genre and I've enjoyed many of them... But, drawing on the title of this blog, do we need to pass new laws every time technological development threatens in some way to undermine the
"blockbuster business model" in some way?

By analogy, how do you feel about state subsidies for certain art forms (e.g. ballet) that don't seem to draw big enough markets to meet their production costs? Surely if we banned television and computer technology, we'd probably increase the revenues of local ballet companies. Ballet is good, blockbusters are good, but maybe the thing that replaces ballet and blockbusters will be good too.

Re: Broken Windows on the Internet

Greg — Wed, 31 May 2006 22:10:06 -0000

Fwiw, there's a discussion of Yochai's book going on over at Crooked Timber, including a review by Dan Hunter.

link

I agree with you (of course) that the Wikipedia model provides economic value, perhaps even more than Britannica provides. It strikes me, though, that the peer production & sharing model might have a disadvantage in producing campaign contributions. One thing about these particular broken windows is that the glaziers know how to lobby effectively, while the shopkeepers face some significant collective action problems.

Re: Broken Windows on the Internet

Greg — Wed, 31 May 2006 22:12:14 -0000

Whoops, bungled the HTML for the link.

Here's the plain text:
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/30/a-general-t...

Re: Open Source and Car Culture

Greg — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 07:09:46 -0000

Yep -- I think there are a lot of ties between the way hackers feel about computers and software and the way those in "car culture" relate to their cars.

The thing that bother me most today is that most engines feel too much like DRM. I'd honestly be willing to pay more for a car I could fix myself. Even with a car from the early 80's, you could get under the hood and tune it up yourself. But, e.g., on my 2003 Chevy, when a warning light comes on, sometimes I have to take it to the dealer just so they can plug it into their system and turn off the warning light. Not DIY.

Re: Heads or Tails

Greg — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:07:19 -0000

Tim -- I think your critique of Anderson is generally right. While the typical amateur might, sensibly, not object to further copying, this hardly means that those who want to promote further copying are always amateurs.

I've posted an SSRN draft of a piece that tries to put this shift in the context of reputation incentives vs. monetary incentives. As I argue in the article, creativity fueled by reputation incentives has a long tradition and it is not necessarily anti-IP or anti-market. If you consider the enormous investments in advertising, for instance (and particularly in viral advertising as an effort to harness decentralized P2P-like distribution), you can see markets and big corporate players spending a good deal of money trying to get people to make copies of creative works.

Here's a link if you are interested:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract...

It's forthcoming in Boston University Law Review (Feb. 2007).

Re: Virtual Reality Reporters

Greg — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:20:41 -0000

I'm hoping they'll have an RSS feed. :-)

Re: Virtual Reality or Virtual Stupidity?

Greg — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:30:31 -0000

This is like the iPod -- people will be wearing these around with them turned off, just because it's fashionable.

Btw -- with a television wrapped around your head, why do you still have to look at a monitor full of clouds?

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » The Peculiar Economics of Children’s Entertainment

Greg — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:34:10 -0000

Yes, I'd call "turns" a temporary usufruct -- I think Lord Blackstone would approve.

But more importantly, while I think I disagree with you about the benefits of not promoting sharing, I *really* have to take my hat off to you for doing a close reading of the socio-economic system represented in Bob the Builder -- I too have been immersed in Bob's world (though we're moving on now). One of my constant questions was about his relationship to Wendy and their division of labor. I assumed Dizzy, Muck, and the others were "pets," mature, part of the family, but essentially dependent beings. :-)

Re: IP Chairman Boucher?

Greg — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 11:56:08 -0000

Wouldn't that be interesting!