There’s been a lot of press coverage about the purported box-office slump afflicting the motion-picture industry, and I have offered my own speculations here about why such a slump might be occurring.

But Edward Jay Epstein’s recent article in Slate points out that, as far as Hollywood’s home-grown films are concerned, there is no slump.

Even though the studios do not provide a road map for outsiders to the
precise sources of their wealth, the real numbers are available in
Hollywood. Indeed, every 90 days, each major studio sends a precise
breakdown of all its revenue from all its worldwide sources, including
movie theaters, video distributors, and television stations, to a
secretive unit of the Motion Picture Association called Worldwide
Market Research, located in Encino, Calif. The unit combines the data
into an All Media Revenue Report and sends it to a limited number of
top executives. As the studios’ trade organization, the MPA presumably
can circulate such secret data without running afoul of antitrust
laws…

Without such information, however, it is impossible to render an
accurate picture of Hollywood. Consider how earlier this year
entertainment journalists rattled on for months about a slump in the
American box office?”Box Office Slump In Its 19th Week”?as if it were a
sporting event in which the Hollywood studios couldn’t get winning
hits. The story would have been different if they had seen the data on
Page 16 in the 2005 Three Month Revenue Report. (Click here for that
page.) Instead of a box-office decline, the studios actually took in
more from the U.S. box office in the first quarter of 2005 ($870.2
million) than they did in the similar period of 2004 ($797.1 million).
So even though the total audience at movie theaters declined during
this period, this came mainly at the expense of independent, foreign,
and documentary movies. For the Hollywood studios (and their
subsidaries), in fact, there was no slump at all.

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I’m one of the judges in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s current “blog-a-thon,” in which entrants are challenged to post to their blogs something about their “click moment” … which EFF defines as the “the very first step you to took to stand up for your digital rights — whether it was blogging about an issue you care about, participating in a demonstration, writing your representatives, or getting involved with EFF.”

My own “click moment” of course happened just before the founding of EFF, and, as Bruce Sterling tells it, it ended up getting me a job there.

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There’s a nice column here by Canadian law professor Michael Geist regarding the court order in Canada that required those who’d purchased Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince too early to return the book to the bookstore, along with any notes they’d taken about its contents. Writes Geist:

The order compelled anyone with a copy of the book to return it to the publisher along with any notes and other descriptions of its contents. Moreover, it prohibited Canadians from reading or discussing any aspect of the book.

I don’t argue with the publishers’ right to seek a court order against the booksellers, ordering them to try to recover books sold too early. After all, the booksellers are obligated under a contract with the publishers to prohibit distribution until a certain date. But ordinary citizens (even Canadian citizens) are not under any similar contractual obligation to the publishers. The buyers acted lawfully in obtaining the book, and shouldn’t be subject to a court order such as that described by Professor Geist. The attempts to ground the court in trade secret and copyright law are also particularly overreaching.

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There’s been a buzz in the blogosphere about the recent posting at Rolling Stone’s site of an excerpt from James Howard Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency. As the excerpt makes clear, Kunstler’s thesis is that the world is now facing a long (economic, technological, and every other kind of) decline because oil production has peaked and will only decline (and become more expensive) from now on.

The article is worth reading, if only to underscore the reasons one might believe that oil-based civilization has passed its point of sustainability, even apart from the ecological damage it causes, including climate change.

But the article is not without its critiques. My favorite is Bruce Sterling’s amusing, almost optimistic point-by-point response called “The Mad Max Scenario,” which will eventually be posted here. (It’ll be note 00449 when it goes up.) In a nutshell, he says, why not start transitioning away from fossil fuels now, rather than wait until after the collapse of civilization? (That seems like a reasonable suggestion to me.)

And Bruce points us to a funny rant by Mark Morford about what he’ll have to give up when the “Peak Oil” phenomenon kicks in.

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Financial Times reports today that Apple’s sales of iPod music players have grown by 616 percent since this time last year, thus confirming what anybody who rides a subway or walks down a city street can see for himself — the country has gone iPod-crazy. (I may count as one of the crazy ones — I bought an iPod myself last fall after experimenting with a less-than-optimally designed four-year-old MP3 player a friend gave me.)

One sign of how things have changed — a year ago I created the small pastime for myself of counting how many iPods I saw on the commute to work. Generally, I rarely saw fewer than two or more than three sets of the distinctive white iPod earbuds on fellow commuters. This year the game has ceased to be fun — on some days, I can count three or four iPods on the way to the subway … followed by another five or six on the train itself, plus two or three more on the walk from the subway to the office. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

My own use of my iPod is mainly to listen to audiobooks. It’s probably the only technology that could enable me to keep up with my 12-year-old daughter’s consumption of Terry Pratchett novels.

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Ernie Miller has been having an exchange with PFF’s James DeLong over the latter’s statement that “‘collective licensing or a media levy’ is a euphemism for turning creativity into a socialist gulag.” Improbably, DeLong defends the analogy, which Ernie says comes pretty close to an instantiation of Godwin’s Law. Note that Ernie is not a booster of compulsory or collective licensing, and neither am I, in most circumstances.

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I’m used to reading frightening articles these days — the ones aboout global warming scare me in particular — but this book review in the Times scared me even more, by suggesting that global competition, together with an absence of well-considered government policy promoting the American economy, may trigger another Great Depression for the United States. I’m not sure I accept the premises of the book being reviewed, but the review is one of those articles I wish everyone would read.

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The Daily Texan today is running an opinion piece co-authored by former Texan editor Andy Yemma, former TSP Board chairman Michael Hoffman, and me, calling for restoration/restructuring of Texas Student Publications as a non-profit corporation. As I hoped it would, The Texan frames the piece as an Independence Day-themed editorial.

The history of Texas Student Publications as a non-profit corporation can be found at this archived page.

The central point of the new piece is that, if TSP wants to be free of “prior review” of its newspaper copy (and of the products of other student media), it ought to be structured as an independent corporation.

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My quick-and-dirty analysis of the Grokster case, its significance and longterm meaning, is up at the Reason Online site.

Here’s an excerpt:

Don’t Stop Grokkin’: Apparent MGM v. Grokster slamdunk is really a mixed bag

… As a technical matter the content companies won MGM v. Grokster; the decision remands the case to a trial court for further factfinding as to whether defendants “induced” infringement. But it’s clear that they didn’t win anything like what they had been asking the Supremes for—a rule that would penalize any company that made money off a product widely used for infringement, regardless of what the company intended. And though the technical companies and consumer groups are troubled by the outcome in this case, there’s still much to encourage them….

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The movie industry is desperately worried about the 18-week slump in overall box-office performance. According to the Associated Press:

“Batman Begins” took in $26.8 million to remain the top movie for the second straight weekend, but it could not keep Hollywood from sinking to its longest modern box-office slump.

Overall business tumbled despite a rush of familiar new titles “Bewitched,” a “Love Bug” update and the latest zombie tale from director George Romero.

Revenues for the top 12 movies came in at $116.5 million, down 16 percent from the same weekend last year, when “Fahrenheit 9/11″ opened as the top movie with $23.9 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

What theory can we come up with that would explain the fall-off in movie revenues? It probably helps to consider what last weekend’s top ten moneymakers were:

1. “Batman Begins,” $26.8 million.

2. “Bewitched,” $20.2 million.

3. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” $16.75 million.

4. “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” $12.75 million.

5. “George Romero’s Land of the Dead,” $10.2 million.

6. “Madagascar,” $7.3 million.

7. “Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith,” $6.25 million.

8. “The Longest Yard,” $5.5 million.

9. “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D,” $3.4 million.

10. “Cinderella Man,” $3.3 million.

Of these top ten movies, six are either franchise films or remakes. (”Mr. and Mrs. Smith” doesn’t count as a remake despite its having the same title as a 1941 Hitchcock movie.) What’s more, only two of the films — “Batman Begins” and “Revenge of the Sith” — arguably require a big screen to be enjoyed fully. Is it any wonder that so much of the movie-loving audience might decide it’s a better entertainment option to stay home? Me, I caught “Bewitched” over the weekend (not Nora Ephron’s best, but I was a fan of the show as a kid). But the best movie experience I had over the last few days was an HBO re-showing of Martin Scorsese’s brilliant 1990 film, “Goodfellas.” I’d seen it when it came out, but even a re-viewing was more fun than just about all the first-run movies I’ve seen this year.

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