I would call it piracy prevention program - that way no one will be able to find piracy content trough google.
If google returned empty pages for something it didn't agree with, the implications would be appalling.
Google should do during the spectrum wars when they bid on spectrum and territory to leverage telecom co.s. They should threaten to back netflix or start a studio to make movies and content. They already have distribution and funds.
That said, aren't both usually owned by the same studio/company?
nevertheless hollywood does everything to abolish itself producing only comic/computer game adaptions or se-/prequels.
The thing is that when the level of CGI realism gets to the point that most blockbuster movies don't really need to shoot on location at all, there's no need for Hollywood production anymore. The Pixar office campus model starts to become the norm. You can produce movies from anywhere you can fit a server rack. The only films that will need Hollywood will be the ones that wouldn't work as CG - comedies, documentaries and dramas which don't make much money and will need to get cheaper and cheaper to be viable.
Basically Hollywood as we know it will collapse eventually. The companies that will win at the filmmaking game are the ones with their fingers in digital distribution, a global marketing apparatus, cheap compute resources, and cheaper human talent. AKA Google / YouTube. So the MPAA needs to knock out Google for any hope of survival. Tactics like this will only accelerate the process. So Google wins.
Films are hugely labour-intensive, particularly to produce to the standards that the public demand. There are a variety of interesting avenues to pursue if you are interested in disrupting Hollywood - I blog about many of them when I'm not actively pursuing them - but none of them are trivial.
As for CGI realism: ish. I actually moved away from CGI to live-action quite recently, after nearly 20 years of making low-budget animated movies, because IMO live-action is actually far more promising right now. CGI is extremely useful as a backup and emabler in conjunction with live-action, but not so much on its own. I wrote more about that here - http://www.strangecompany.org/why-the-guy-who-coined-machini... .
Hollywood accounting is infamous, but it seems Hollywood actually know what they are doing business-wise. They pay stars a lot of money because it translates into ticket sales, not because they are idiots.
Many movies are made outside of Hollywood (so-called independent movies) with cheaper talent (sometimes working for free), but only rarely are they as financially successful as Hollywood movies.
There are one or two individual producers who crack the code to making movies that are financially successful AND outside the Hollywood model, but they're rare.
Right now, Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious) and Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Safety Not Guaranteed, Creep) are the two names to watch in the indie-but-also-profitable space.
Ultimately, I've come to the conclusion that thinking about Hollywood as "production & distribution" is naive - if that were really the case YouTube and Netflix would have long replaced Hollywood by now. And I don't think "CGI" realism will disrupt them either.
What Hollywood has, to an overwhelming degree, and which is really hard to "automate" is talent. From writers, singers and to actors and directors, Hollywood is really effective at finding and growing talent and the rest of the world hasn't really figured out how to write great content other than "throw millions of dollars at it" (like Netflix with House of Cards).
Simply put, you can have the best distribution channels or the cheapest platform but the top tier talent is expensive - but also has the best returns. And couple that with the fact that media production is very hit or miss (you can spend 150MM on a movie and have no one watch it, or make 1B), you are faced with something you can seemingly only "disrupt" by spending as much as everyone else.
I agree some aspects of film are ripe for disruption but many aspects have already been disrupted multiple times over the years.
I'm in the medical industry, which is another field that tech newbies think will be fixed real soon now as hackers turn their attention to it. In both cases there is a lot of hard earned insider knowledge that outsiders (arrogantly) discount.
I work in med-tech on the tech side. Every CEO of the small companies I deal with have 15+ years in medicine. Almost all of them have experience in both the practitioner and administrator roles. From my experience, these arrogant outsiders you speak of either don't exist or make such an insignificant impact that you'd have to put effort into actually finding them.
Healthcare has some systemic similarities I suppose, but the case I'll make is that there's a historic precedent for digital disruption of creative media with books, increasingly TV, and particularly music. We think of online piracy as the main disruptor of the record business, but the record industry also lost a lot of power when artists no longer needed a major label's advance check or marketing to record & distribute a successful album. Advances in home recording technology and social media are decentralizing the music business, and if similar leaps come along in filmmaking tech it isn't a stretch to guess it would decentralize the film industry in a similar fashion
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/02/netfl...
http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#hollywood
Yes, they're ripe for it. The consumers are ready for it, too. More power to those who pursue it!
Whether it is Paris Hilton or Bill Maher, stars are the people who rise to the top of the system and become household names. The various media wings need a place with a critical mass of famous people. That happens in LA, and to a lesser extent in New York. Look at Vancouver. Lots of films, lots of money, but none of the media associated with LA's star system. The physicality of this system means it is resistant to disruption by technology. Hollywood will be king for a long time.
After documentaries on Netflix and Hulu, cartoons are already all that I watch, except maybe local news.
I thought that was poetically ironic.
They obviously failed before execution, but that shouldn't matter...
Does anyone know if Google can use this information in court for a lawsuit against MPAA?
Although it will probably go precisely nowhere, this is an interesting point. This sort of attack goes beyond a "character" attack on the company. Indeed, Google isn't directly affected by a drop in stock price; but as a Google shareholder, I am.
How is that fair or remotely acceptable? I suppose that's the purpose, and it's despicable. Once the political support for the MPAA ends, they'll have nothing left.
Say that you were once charged with some awful crime. I mean really really bad crime. A little later the police noticed it was actually forgotsusername who they were after, and you were let go and even given a public statement that it wasn't you. But say I pulled up the records of you originally being charged and put them up on a billboard. Let's say I even showed the part where you were let go. But the crime is so horrible, and some people are so jumpy and so strongly believe in the 'where there is smoke there must be fire' line of thinking that your employer decides you are just too much of a liability. Would you have a case against me?
(Granted this might depend purely upon local laws where you live, so maybe the question should be: should you have a case against me?)
Yes. According to the article it's in a court filing. I presume for the following lawsuit:
http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_jimhood_dec...
Publishing an editorial in the WSJ with the intention of manipulating a company's stock price certainly feels like it should fall under the same category..
They spent millions, had an array of hilarious 'mom & apple pie' witnesses flown in from the US and managed to lose on many points (but not all) and were left with a useless judgment which they can never collect on as they were stupid enough to sue two people with no assets or any prospect of having any.
They did however, become a laughing stock in the legal world and have an array of TV programs and plays, mocking them mercilessly. Plus some of the, till then, unproven, claims of disgusting practice ended up being proven and therefore repeatable without risk - which was not the case beforehand.
Defamation actions are never a good way to go. Even winning one does not generally help you much.
MPAA current members: Sony, Disney, Fox, Universal, Warner and Paramount.
Netflix is not a member. Lionsgate is not a member. You tube is certainly not a member. The MPAA therefore doesn't represent the content industry let alone all of Hollywood. Those writing about the MPAA (Wired) should not take its word as representative of anyone other than its FIVE backers. And some of those (Sony) aren't exactly happy with them these days.
The MPAA is "Hollywood" for sure, inasmuch as that term has any meaning at all. I simply don't understand what point you're trying to make.
My point is that the MPAA does not represent these other "Hollywood" content producers and shouldn't be described a representing any content producers beyond the five members.
In this particular case it's pretty clear the MPAA and the AG were both out of bounds. Why would the AG, the top lawyer for the state government (and supposedly for the people), need to help the MPAA with a smear campaign? According to Google, AG Hood's office supplied a proposal to the MPAA [2] with an editorial suggesting slumping stock prices, media segments in collaboration with the AG, regulatory lawsuits...
This is a conscious, targeted attack against Google because Hollywood didn't get its way. The project was even codenamed "Project Goliath" (related to the MPAA & affiliates, not the AG) [3].
Google has the resources, capability and will to vigorously defend itself where others may have not.
[1] https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/MPAA_v_ThePeople/ [2] https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2179... [3] http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/12/7382287/project-goliath
Not to mention Google is by now a pretty deft political player.
* Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, said that "One of Apple's employees works closely with Hollywood on so-called product placement so its gadgets are used in movies and television shows.
Plenty of video services like netflix, amazon prime are producing their own quality tv shows that exceed most of the crap movies we get. Everything is CG or some dumb plotline about sex. I'm sure films & tv shows will turn out from tech giants. I think if Google jumped in and began paying celebrities to star in their movies it could do well. I've always thought Hollywood to be a propaganda machine.
Elstree.
From the wiki: >Filmed in a Belfast studio and on location elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Iceland, Morocco, Spain, Malta, Scotland, and the United States,
So it does not come from Hollywood. HBO is owned by Time Werner, but operate independently. So neither the physical production place nor the company that made it screams hollywood.
As for the Netflix only stuff, it is owned by Netflix.
"Films on demand" - some aspects of this are near-future plausible given existing script, mocap and voice acting. Simple programmatic cinematography is just about possible, and AI editing is getting better. 5 years away, maybe, for sitcom / soap-opera equivalent lighting and cinematography. A LOT longer before you're replacing Roger Deakins, though.
"Photo-realistic" - photorealistic CGI films have been just around the corner for 15 years now and continue to be so. Proof-of-concept 15 second renders are doable, feature-length films with non-humans are doable (albeit with a LOT of human intervention), but 90 minutes of CGI humans is a lot harder.
"Characters" - moulding their appearance is almost doable now. Motion is a lot harder - we've got semi-programmatic facial animation but it's a bit rubbish. Programmatic body animation is getting there. Programmatic voice acting is a Really Hard Problem and I'm not aware of anyone making any significant moves forward in that area.
"Unique scripts" - no-one has demonstrated anything close to an AI scriptwriter at this point. It may well be that's a problem which requires strong AI to solve.
We might be looking at Hollywood being replaced completely at some point, but I doubt it'll happen in the next 20 years.
However, what IS a huge threat to Hollywood is the increased power of indie filmmakers with technological assists. I write about that sort of thing over on my blog at http://www.strangecompany.org/blog/
One filmmaker today can do things that would have required a crew of 20 back in 1993. The cost of filmmaking is plummeting. And that certainly is a threat to Hollywood.
You're vastly underestimating the work that goes into an authentic hollywood movie.
Also, vastly overestimating the quality of video game 3d engines, the performance requirements, the potential plot quality resulting from player-driven storylines, and so on.
Games are struggling to match the offline renderings of 14 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaI7ZPA9I1c - in particular pay attention to the lightning and textures, less so the animations. Especially those off in the distance, something that games continue to struggle with in a big way.
Photo-realistic video games are very, very far off. Significantly the costs required to achieve high-end graphics these days are astronomical.
Lucasfilm is already experimenting with using video game engines for their film making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdsFEMDceNg
Would Star Wars fan want Oculus Rift + Haptic Bodysuit + Star Wars world with full ray casting and realistic models?
