Movie Sequels and Comic Book Adaptations: Based on a True Soda

While I don’t agree that this article‘s argument that the following is a bad thing:

Let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

I do think the author is totally correct about how Inception’s success has been so easily dismissed as a fluke:

Consider: Years ago, an ace filmmaker, the man who happened to direct the third-highest-grossing movie in U.S. history, The Dark Knight, came up with an idea for a big summer movie. It’s a story he loved—in fact, he wrote it himself—and it belonged to a genre, the sci-fi action thriller, that zipped right down the center lane of American popular taste. He cast as his leading man a handsome actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, who happened to star in the second-highest-grossing movie in history. Finally, to cover his bet even more, he hired half a dozen Oscar nominees and winners for supporting roles…That film, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, received admiring reviews, became last summer’s most discussed movie, and has grossed, as of this writing, more than three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide.

And now the twist: The studios are trying very hard not to notice its success, or to care. Before anybody saw the movie, the buzz within the industry was: It’s just a favor Warner Bros. is doing for Nolan because the studio needs him to make Batman 3. After it started to screen, the party line changed: It’s too smart for the room, too smart for the summer, too smart for the audience. Just before it opened, it shifted again: Nolan is only a brand-name director to Web geeks, and his drawing power is being wildly overestimated. After it grossed $62 million on its first weekend, the word was: Yeah, that’s pretty good, but it just means all the Nolan groupies came out early—now watch it drop like a stone.

And here was the buzz three months later, after Inception became the only release of 2010 to log eleven consecutive weeks in the top ten: Huh. Well, you never know.

He makes the case for why Inception was good, but I don’t think he really makes the case for why any of those things like “four adaptations of comic books” or even “two sequels with a 5 in the title” are bad.

I know he’s not directly saying that a movie based on a Stretch Armstrong action figure will have to be bad or that its creators are somehow plotting against good cinema to make it, but he’s sure implying it.

This article does a lot to summarize the great points that he makes. My problem with the full article though is that those really valid points about how the movies don’t cater to certain audiences because marketers aren’t interested in learning anything about those audiences (which he does prove), is muddled by the subtext of the article: that Hollywood’s “bland assembly-line ethos” creates end-products that aren’t as good as they could be (which he doesn’t really prove).

The other conclusion that I can agree with are that good movies die and mediocre ones get greenlit because of fear. Just like any business where a lot of money changes hands, the people who control the money tend to be risk averse. When you can lose millions of dollars in one weekend, it makes sense to hedge you bets with known commodities — even if your commodity isn’t any more certain than a Magic 8-Ball.

For the studios, a good new idea has become just too scary a road to travel. Inception, they will tell you, is an exceptional movie. And movies that need to be exceptional to succeed are bad business. “The scab you’re picking at is called execution,” says legendary producer Scott Rudin (The Social Network, True Grit). “Studios are hardwired not to bet on execution, and the terrible thing is, they’re right. Because in terms of execution, most movies disappoint.”

Just look at Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Brilliant execution, but for one reason or another, people didn’t come. You can blame the marketers if you want, but at some point, you the paying movie-going public is responsible as well. You get more of the types of movies that you go support.

Critics: imagine a five-part Hollywood movie as a classic movie serial, and you might feel good enough about it to actually give it a fair chance. It’s a shame that if a summer movie is based on a Philip K Dick short story critics will give you a pass, but as soon as it’s based on a comic book, you movie somehow becomes guilty until proven innocent. Movies are movies no matter what their source material are.

I’ll even go further and say that I personally welcome any innovation that will keep the movie industry in business whether that be bad, misguided 2D-3D conversions or flavor-of-the-week event movies because those are the things that keep the industry alive, allowing them to make movies like Inception every few years.

If you want to name your movie after an action figure, a video game, or a brand of soda to get people in the seats go ahead…

I’ll be happy as long as you also make sure to make that movie good.

via GQ

Photo Credit: Chung-Cha

Contract Drafting Word Salad

At one point, I imagine this contract’s insurance provision was readable:

and the certificate or other evidence of coverage shall provide that if the same policy applies to activities of BUILDER not covered by this Agreement then the limits in the applicable certificate relating to the additional insured coverage of AGENCY shall pertain only to liability for activities of BUILDER under this Agreement, and that the insurance provided is primary coverage to AGENCY with respect to any insurance or self-insurance programs maintained by AGENCY

Then over the years, it was probably added to and amended into the word salad that it is now. Keep in mind that that excerpt was only the last half of that sentence.

Instead of making additions, some contract language just need to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.

A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting and Working With Contracts: What Law School Doesn’t Teach You may help

iPhone Developer Agreement: Contract With the Devil?

If you sign contract with terms that you can’t negotiate, you’ll often end up agreeing to all sorts of things that no-one in their right mind would agree to. iPhone game and application developers should know that they’re not exempt.

Prospective developers should make sure they read and understand the agreement they enter into with Apple when submitting a new App to the App Store for approval.

If you’re just furious by what you read there, keep this in mind: Apple isn’t being “evil,” it’s just being pragmatic. Apple understands its position: the App Store is extremely popular and for better or worse, people will agree to anything to get their software sold there. Also, it’s very possible that any of the apps submitted to the store could cause a lot of trouble for Apple, so naturally Apple would want to do everything it can to shift those problems away from the company and back onto the hands of the developers.

Among the bad-for-developer/good-for-Apple terms in the agreement that developers should be aware of are…

• (A) Apple can disable your app at any time (section 8),
• (B) rejected Apps can’t be distributed by competing app stores (section 7.2), and
• (C) if there’s ever a dispute, Apple will never owe you more than $50 (section 14) in damages.

It seems appropriate that Apple would also include section 10.4 which prohibits developers from making statements about the terms of the Agreement which keeps developers from sharing information about the agreement’s more onerous provisions.

Though more than 100,000 app developers have clicked “I agree,” public copies of the agreement are scarce, perhaps thanks to the prohibition on making any “public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple’s express prior written approval.” But when we saw the NASA App for iPhone, we used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to ask NASA for a copy, so that the general public could see what rules controlled the technology they could use with their phones. NASA responded with the Rev. 3-17-09 version of the agreement.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation

Photo credit: Michael Batfish

Indie Video Game Developers: The Clone Wars

For game developers copying isn’t black and white. “Inspired by” can sometimes rise to the level of wholesale theft. Copyright law expressly doesn’t protect scenes-a-faire, facts, phrases, concepts and ideas, but in practice, the “Total Concept and Feel” approach to analyzing infringement that some courts adopt essentially throws all of those restrictions on the law out of the window allowing courts to protect (or not protect) whatever they want.

So what is “gameplay” and is it protectable? Can copying that constitute infringement? Probably under the right facts. Young game developers learning their craft who want to make a game inspired by an old classic should do so at their own risk.

One carefully worded cease-and=desist letter could mean game over to your hard work.

It doesn’t take an eagle-eyed observer to point out the remarkable similarities between Gameloft’s top software and the most popular console games. The science fiction shooter N.O.V.A. is a thinly veiled knock-off of Bungie’s Halo, right down to the warthog-esque vehicle and blue AI chick. And Zombie Infection bears a striking resemblance to Resident Evil 5…

Another sticky situation was Capcom’s recent iPhone game, MaXplosion, which reeked of Twisted Pixel’s ‘Splosion Man in a brazen clone that the original game’s programmer called “complete theft”. Both games feature frenetic red protagonists, confined to laboratories, that leap in the air by detonating their internal organs. Or something.

An IP address is not a person

Where I work, we often speak with plaintiffs in the various file-sharing/copyright infringement free-for-alls going on right now. The most troubling cases are the ones with accused plaintiffs with unsecured internet connections who clearly have no idea what BitTorrent is.

An IP address is not a person. Placing the blame for infringement that happens on an unsecured Internet connection on the person who pays the Internet bill isn’t just lazy legal practice, it totally subverts the way direct infringement should be analyzed.

Also keep in mind that the people who still use unsecured internet connections these days are probably amongst the least savvy of Internet users, so they’re probably the least likely people to be using services like BitTorrent for illegal downloading.

The legal question of who’s liable for file-sharing on an “unsecured” internet connection is still up for wild conjecture in the United States until some of these cases actually reach the courts, but it’s finally getting some clarification in the UK.

Wrapping up the last of the United Kingdom’s notorious copyright infringement “pay up” letter cases, a UK patent and copyright judge has had a major revelation. Just because some lawyer cites an Internet Protocol (IP) address where illegal file sharing may have taken place, that doesn’t mean that the subscriber living there necessarily did the dirty deed. Or is responsible for others who may have done it…

All this may seem rather obvious to Ars readers, but these are key principles that are only now finding their way in major judicial opinions. The revelations could have some serious implications for the UK’s Digital Economy Act, too. That law requires ISPs to forward P2P warning letters from copyright holders, and it opens the door to throttling and Internet disconnection for repeat infringement.

via ARS technica

Little Princesses

“Girl power” in the 1990s was about little girls proving they were worth something and giving the world everything that they’ve got.

“Girl power” in 2011 means finding all the things that are worth something taking everything that they can get.

My daughter got a make-your-own messenger bag for her seventh birthday. It was like a cheap messenger bag kind of thing, and then iron-on transfers to put on it, and the iron-on transfers were like pink and purple and orange hearts and stars and flowers and whatever, and your name, and things like that with letters. But then it said, one of them was ‘pampered princess’ and one of them was ‘spoiled’ and one of them was ‘brat…’

And so there’s this weird way that the ideas that were being put forth in the girl power slogans of the 1990s, which were about self-actualization and self-determination, and being valued for what you do and not how you look, have been distorted so that it’s its own opposite, so that girl power means being valued for how you look instead of what you do. And that being confident is expressed by being spoiled, pampered, bratty, narcissistic.

via Mother Nature Network

What do hip-hop and BitTorrent have in common

Those who want to reform the practice of IP law often say: If users are using BitTorrent to download unauthorized files, target the unauthorized files and the users who want them, don’t target BitTorrent technology.

I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to apply this to other areas of our culture. If you feel that musicians are using rap music to somehow “debase” culture, don’t blame rap, blame only those rappers.

Its 2011. Even if you don’t like hip-hop or electronic music, if you can’t at least acknowledge the positive cultural importance of rap, DJing, remixing you’re going to be severely handicapped working with a large group of creative professionals now and in the future.

I understand that for the generations that proceeded mine, the musicality and dynamism of hip-hop and remix culture may lost on you, so if you can’t make that leap, at least don’t write wholesale hogwash like this:

Rap music is characterized by greed and lust and vanity. Greed for money, and cars, and cribs, and bling-bling. Lust for a crude form of sexual gratification, that is not liberating, but is demeaning and dehumanizing. And a simple-minded form of boastful vanity that would be easily seen as vulgar if, say, a white teenager in Van Nuys exhibited it, but that is somehow an admirable expression of racial pride if a sneering black rap performer prances about with his ego on display.

via Larry DeWitt, Rap Music: Making Excuses for a Degenerate Culture

A Harsh Word for Patent Trolls

Having interacted with a lot of lawyers in the past three years, I’ll go out on a limb most lawyers really do act nobly in this profession. Maybe I’ve just hung out in good neighborhoods, but the vast majority of lawyers that I’ve met are concerned with being professional, doing a thorough job, and being highly ethical.

If you’re around enough the law though, you also see some of the dark side. After all, the law is a business, and shady not-quite-ethical things happen all the time in any business.

Since I work at a non-profit where we’re unconcerned with making money from the people who contact us, we can advise people to act in a way that generally works toward the greater good. For the clients who have questionable agendas (which is a higher percentage than you’d think), we can tell them politely to find someone else to do their dirty work.

Most lawyers don’t have that privileged though. They have to pay their bills, so free from any sort of do-gooder-moral-compass, they do the economically rational thing and take the work given to them. Since lawyers are mostly just the arms, legs, and mouths of their clients, the general public might not realize that a scummy client can give an otherwise decent lawyer a bad name.

Patent and copyright trolling is part of that dark side of the law, and the companies that do the trolling are just that kind of scummy client who can pay a lawyer handsomely to help spread misery and ruin small businesses in the name of “protecting intellectual property.”

IP lawyers should make peace with what they do when they choose to work with trolls. Prey on the weak. Stifle innovation. Lose your soul. Cash your paycheck. Feed your family.

Tradeoffs.

Trolls go after the smaller companies first. They pick on startups because undercapitalized small companies cannot afford to be ideological. When faced with the prospect of extensive legal fees and a huge distraction, they do the pragmatic thing – they settle. The troll can accept less from a startup because the troll can later argue the startup has a small market share and a limited ability to pay. A smaller settlement does not preclude larger settlements with bigger players later. In a side note, one troll accepted services from our portfolio company in lieu of cash because the troll could not technically do the thing that our company was accused of copying so we are providing them with the capability. The irony there kills me. It feels a little like being forced to dig your own grave before being shot.

The trolls then use the money extorted from young startups to fund the more expensive and ambitious cases against larger more established companies with deeper pockets. These folks have more to lose but they also have more resources to defend themselves. I don’t often think about the plight of large companies but this attack has a direct impact on young companies.

via Union Square Ventures

Lawyers: Stop Going to Social Media Conferences

There should be a blanket prohibition on any more articles, conferences, lectures about the benefits and dangers of “social media” for lawyers. The average discussions range from entirely obvious (Really? I should enable privacy on my Facebook profile?) to entirely un-researched (social media consists of only Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Martindale Connected).

The term “social media” is almost entirely meaningless, but it’s even moreso when the people who talk whatever “social media” actually is can’t even articulate what makes it different than traditional media. If you’re conducting one of these lectures, tell me how the Internet creates new ethical questions for lawyers rather than treating personal blogs like magazine articles that happen to be posted online.

The ABA’s Journal article on the topic is well-researched and mostly non-reactionary. After reading it, feel free to fire any “social media experts” trying to make a consulting fee off of you or your school’s law students.

Another issue arises when an attorney seeks access to the social media posts of someone unrepresented by counsel, such as an opposing party’s witness: To what extent can an attorney use subterfuge to convince an individual to grant access to his otherwise private social media posts?

Model Rule 4.1(a) forbids a lawyer from making “a false statement of material fact or law to a third person,” and Rule 8.4(c) forbids a lawyer from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” Both these strictures are violated when an attorney friends an individual under false pretenses, according to ethics opinions from the New York City Bar Association and the Philadelphia Bar Association.

However, the New York City bar says an attorney (or agent) can withhold strategic information when making a friend request. “An attorney or her agent may use her real name and profile to send a ‘friend request’ to obtain information from an unrepresented person’s social networking website without also disclosing the reasons for making the request,” the bar’s Committee on Professional and Judicial Ethics stated in Opinion 2010-2 (September 2010).

Via ABA Journal

The Real Price of College

What do student loans and sub-prime mortgages have in common? Everything.

The ingredients are strikingly similar…Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.

Just how useful is a college education, economically speaking? It depends.

College graduates will earn $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, brags Mercy College radio ads running in the New York area. The $1 million shibboleth is a favorite of college barkers.

Like many good cons, this one contains a kernel of truth. Census figures show that college grads earn an average of $57,500 a year, which is 82% more than the $31,600 high school alumni make. Multiply the $25,900 difference by the 40 years the average person works and, sure enough, it comes to a tad over $1 million.

But anybody who has gotten a passing grade in statistics knows what’s wrong with this line of argument. A correlation between B.A.s and incomes is not proof of cause and effect. It may reflect nothing more than the fact that the economy rewards smart people and smart people are likely to go to college. To cite the extreme and obvious example: Bill Gates is rich because he knows how to run a business, not because he matriculated at Harvard. Finishing his degree wouldn’t have increased his income.

All the while students have been lulled into thinking of the extra $1 million that will be theirs, they have been forced to disgorge an ever larger fraction of it in pursuit of the degree. While the premium that college grads earn over high schoolers has remained relatively constant over the past five years, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen at twice the rate of inflation, dramatically undermining any value a sheepskin adds.

Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one–even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don’t pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn’t include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.

via Forbes