[Air-l] socio-technical problems of film downloads...

Gina Neff ginasue at panix.com
Wed Oct 24 08:17:07 PDT 2001


Frank's dream is a great one -- however, in the early ventures to do just that--establish sites for downloading films--legal definitions of distribution came into question. A couple of sites tried to be web distributors for independent (mainly) movies. The problem, however, was with the way film production contracts are written. Many filmmakers obtain everything--from rights to songs on the soundtrack to talent--contingent on the distribution level of the movie. World-wide distribution rights for a song on the soundtrack require a whole different league of payment than for "festival rights." Similarly, there are problems with contingent payment for actors and screenwriters whose contracts often stipulate pay structures based on distribution and percentages of sales. Legally, the web is international distribution, and while there was a market demand for films that hadn't been picked up by distributors, the tangle of contracts on the production side prevent production companies from being able to explore the option. Distributors, though, could get involved in internet distribution, and at the Toronto film festival a small distributor just announced the online distribution of one of their features, which is the first to be offered online by an independent distributor.

The major studios have only recently formed a couple of alliances for video on demand, Movies.com (Disney and News Corp) and Movie Fly (MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner), and infrastructure costs alone are estimated at least $50 million. Microsoft's Intertainer launched last week in some digital cable and broadband markets with the 8,000 programs and movies they obtained distribution rights for.  If Intertainer's initial pricing is any indication, it's not going to be cheap--$8 per month for the service and $3-4 per movie.

Gina Neff


-----Original Message-----
From:	Frank Schaap [SMTP:architext at fragment.nl]
Sent:	Wednesday, October 24, 2001 7:07 AM
To:	air-l at aoir.org
Subject:	Re: [Air-l] more net films

<snipped zillions of great films>

<dreaming>with the internet at our fingertips, wouldn't it be great if you
simply could go to movie.com or documentary.com and every movie would be
there, download the movie (pay for it when necessary, I imagine some of the
old stuff would be free downloads), watch it or burn it to DVD and show it in
class.</dreaming>

Frank.


--
The Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources
==> http://fragment.nl/resources/



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