Hacker Cinema
Pixels
2015 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Chris Columbus
ActionComedyScience FictionAdventureFantasy
Video game experts are recruited by the military to fight 1980s-era video game characters who've attacked New York.
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8 comments on Hacker News
kind of like the movie pixels :)
> So is it a copyright enforcement system or is it really some kind of cartel mechanism which is replacing copyright law?
Kinda both, IMO.
So, talking to defence lawyers about copyright cases, even if you settle before going to court, is extremely expensive, and even if you're a well-earning software developer you really don't want to pay even the counterparty legal costs that would precede a court case (and those can count as "actual damages" from an act of copyright infringement). The copyright holder may only get part of even just those legal costs back, so they don't really want to do that either.
For both rights holders and infringers, a thing like ContentID is actually pretty good. Likewise even mere suspected (but actually innocent) infringers, as things can be taken down without having to face a huge legal bill even if you're innocent.
But the downside is the cost savings is in the form of automation, and as there is no algorithm for the truth (and only just starting to be one for "common sense") this automation can be systematically abused by people who are not rights holders. (This isn't the cartel-like behaviour, this is just straight up old fashioned fraud).
Cartels are associations of suppliers who conspire to restrict competition and inflate prices. I think copyright does this all by itself[0], but the extra part of what you wrote was "replacing" copyright law, and… kinda? To the extent that ToS are contracts, and contracts bind parties to do more than the law alone, but can't do illegal things?
But the usual implication is that a cartel is doing forbidden things, even though that's not strictly true and they can sometimes be legally required[1], and that would be something I couldn't prove — but I don't see any particular reason why the big players in video IP would even be interested in doing that given they've already got copyright law. The closest I know of is things where a studio is inspired by a YouTuber, makes a big thing, and then someone sends a take-down request to the original[2], which seems familiar from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide[3]
[0] compulsory cartels include those forced by law[1], and there are copyright holders who lobby for the laws, in some places I'm told it's not possible to voluntarily renounce copyright (though that may have been a game of telephone involving a misunderstanding of a court ruling), and that this was behind the discussion of why there are equivalent licenses that aren't strictly "public domain": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain-equivalent_license
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_cartel
[2] Pixels movie and it's antecedent, and I vaguely remember Tom Scott saying something similar as an example of the one time he used a small claims court?
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9789445-the-simplistic-style-is-partly-explained-by-the-fact-that
I still find it hilarious that every time I see Billy Mitchell I think of Peter Dinklage's hilarious character in Pixels although the movie itself wasn't that great.
> I was just referencing the line from the movie Pixels
Didn't know it was a quote. Added to my queue!
That's a nice strategy.
I was just referencing the line from the movie Pixels, staying in the middle probably doesn't work that well.
There's also a pretty silly but amusing film, "Pixels" that was on Netflix sometime ago, might still be there but this also has Q-Bert hopping about in it. It's a recommended watch even if only once ...
>But if you tried to make a film that last 20 seconds like the first Lumière movies, or without sound like Chaplin most people won't understand it.
For any given object, over a large enough population, most people won't be exposed to it; those that are won't understand it. Hit TV shows might reach 10M viewers in the US - out of 350M.
FWIW I think the OPs move is slightly premature: there's a movie coming out soon called Pixels that will certainly raise the profile of this style: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2120120/
This reminds of the recent Pixels movie trailer- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAHprLW48no