The issue that when you "buy" a movie, you don't really own it would have a lot more salience if more people actually wanted to own a copy of a movie forever. But, the reality is that most people, when they consume movies, only want to watch it once, so the basic rental model suits them just fine. After all, in the rare case where, years later, you do want to watch a movie again you already watched, you can always just pay another $5 to rent it again.
Given the above, I'm actually somewhat surprised that the movie purchase option even exists anymore these days, and it wouldn't shock me if they took that away altogether in the future. Any government "own means own" regulation would undoubtfully accelerate this.
I support Brian from Beaverton's theatre endeavors, and the weirdness of theatre. Live theatre and theatre making is becoming increasingly novel, as analogue games, exercises and play performances [still] demand live actors on a stage, eventually collaborating with playwrights, composers, designers and technicians, to offer live story telling to an audience. Weirdness is relative. Going to see a play is still a crap shoot, but I certainly hope that we will support our children, our families, and our friends, by going to see their work, and talking about it. The revival of Oklahoma that I found most extraordinary was the one Daniel Fish made at Bard, and later toured to NYC and - eventually - other cities. Weird? Absolutely. Wonderful? It was to me, but then, I'm a weirdo.
I know your answer wasn’t going in the direction. But regarding the digital ownership question I think the physical media holders are too optimistic.
With everything being internet connected now, it’s seem terribly possible that physical media could be DRM blocked via any device in the replay chain (dvd player, TV, Sonos, whatever) having internet access.
I hope that doesn’t happen. And it may be very unlikely. But it’s definitely not impossible.
I think Max is underestimating how much progressives detest MGP here in WA-03. The guy that lost the primary has been kind of crashing out on Facebook with all these progressive grievances and saying he’ll never vote for her, and there are a bunch of people in the comments really cheering him on. The one person trying to stick up for MGP eventually got shouted down in a local left-leaning Facebook group I’m in, and nobody backed her up.
Obviously this didn’t stop her from winning, but this just isn’t a very progressive place.
Thanks for answering my question! I fully agree with the idea that a lot of theatres have stopped trying to cater to a broad clientele, and that’s part of the reason—maybe the biggest reason lately—for our financial struggles.
To your point on comparing theatre to the National Symphony or concerts, this is something into which I’ve put a lot of thought. While it’s true that we can’t structure an individual evening of theatre in a way that starts with new or lesser-done work and ends with a classic, I think you CAN structure a season in a similar way. A lot of big theatres do seven-show seasons. I’ve been advocating for a few years now on a particular structure for such seasons: 3-4 big sellers, and 3-4 “art” shows. You can even alternate them if you do 4 big sellers and 3 “art” shows. The “art” shows can be anything from new work to lesser-done shows expected to attract a niche audience to classic shows with a significant twist. The big sellers pay for the art shows, and everyone gets a piece of the metaphorical pie.
I used to work in theater, and our Artistic Director said she'd gladly do "A Christmas Carol" every year if she could do what she wanted the other 5 shows.. That was more about money but I was reminded of it by this discussion.
Re: Making digital purchases permanent, the issue is that if you let people have a DRM free file, then they can share unlimited copies with others, but if you have privately-administered DRM, then the people administering the crypto keys that you have to validate in order to unlock the file can withdraw access or go out of business.
It seems to me the answer is to make DRM a public utility. You buy a key for a movie, the record of that is kept in a public server, and you can either keep a local copy of the file, or you can always re-download it. If the originator goes out of business, the Library of Congress (or whatever other government agency) will take over hosting the file so you can get it later.
I'm still angry from X-mas when the Grinch (original) I bought on Amazon a couple years ago, was no longer there this past year. We no longer buy from Amazon. We also got a DVD player and broke out our old (rather large) collection. Baltimore also has an incredible DVD rental place that I may need to resubscribe to if things keep going down the current path.
So I think the general left-wing valence of 'creative culture' in general is actually pretty simple - in 1940, both parties sucked on gay rights, women's rights, etc. But even then, there were many non-straight people in Hollywood or even more powerful woman than in the median of society, famously. But since being pro-gay or being less sexist wasn't automatically associated w/ the Left, that meant you could be the type of creative comfortable with the vibe of creativity that was to use a modern term 'queer-adjacent' but also be say, right-wing on taxes or Communism.
Like, outside of a few specific examples, even famous Hollywood Republicans of the World War II or 50's era weren't overly socially conservative. John Wayne was kind of an outlier about all this, but kind of gets used as the ur example. Even Reagan largely went right-wing after he wasn't really in Hollywood anymore and around...well, rich executives.
But as you'd expect, as social conservatism rose on the GOP, it squeezed people and made them pick between their colleagues and their belief on tax rates, and people chose the former and thus, a 20 year old who might've went to drama school but still ended up a Republican kind of automatically became at a minimum a soft liberal because the GOP was opposed to people they knew and cared about in drama school, etc.
Also, the social conservatism of the GOP meant that actors who might've been Republican self-selected into a kind of libertarianism of folks like Kurt Russell. Like, as much as Taylor Sheridan sort of cosplays to get friendly articles written about him by right-leaning publications, he's likely pretty socially liberal just to survive in Hollywood at all and in it's weird way, Yellowstone is quasi-woke.
So, even writers who could've made conservative-adjacent films disappeared and we're left w/ only DailyWire slop on the right.
If you are going to look at the creative culture of bygone eras, you are going to have a massive blind spot if you don't cover how celebrities basically had a patronage relationship with mafia and mafia like organizations.
Wow, color me surprised to see Matthew Yglesias discussing the programming of contemporary symphonic music — my mastermind subject!
I'm a composer and conductor and I have to say, he's basically spot on here: symphonic concerts almost always open with a piece of new music, essentially an alien visitor from another genre. It would be like if you went to a bluegrass concert and the opener was a rapper. Or if you went to a ballet and there was a 10-minute gymnastics opener.
I have liked the recent trend of symphony orchestras collaborating with contemporary artists or doing video game music or doing music accompanying a live showing of a film. I'm not sure if that's perceived as "selling out" within the symphony community but it certainly entices people like me who wouldn't otherwise go.
Regarding Saia's question on foreign policy/energy/climate, an anecdote that comes to mind for me was a fire here in central/eastern WA state. The fire crew wanted to drive across a protected field of flowers to setup a new fire line. They were stopped by state agencies because of the protected flowers; driving on them would cause damage. Not seeing the forest through the trees, the firemen sat in their trucks and watched all the environmental folks watch it all burn.
Taking a holistic view of the entire landscape, to Matt's point about generalism, just seems like a much clearer, simpler, and overall better approach.
I would vote for a Phil Scott/Mike Bloomberg/Nelson Rockefeller style Republican in a heartbeat. A tough on crime YIMBY who tells the stationary bandits to go eat shit is EXACTLY what NY needs. The problem (as Matt has pointed out) is that this isn't on the menu with Blue State GOPs, it's just Boomer Right NIMBY Trump mini-mes vs. Everything Bagel Liberals with the smallest sprinkle of Abundance (but only with prevailing wage!). Sigh.
A big issue is how this affects national power struggles, though, which was Matt's point about redistricting battles. A sane non-MAGA governor who does sensible things locally sounds fine, but if he also helps tip congress toward Trump having the power to get away with his continuing depredations, not so much.
Tbf Phil Scott hasn't done this, and any Governor serious about winning the Northeast (especially NY) would have to credibly be anti-Trump. I sincerely doubt Marc Malinaro (at least his 2018 version) would've been a Trump sycophant, but who knows
So much of the current centrist and center left angst about DSA is basically a version of "Murc's Law" I mean I get it to an extent. If you're someone like Matt, the vitriol you mostly get is from the left so you're ire about what needs to happen gets direct back in the other direction. Also, can't emphasize enough how much discourse about DSA/moderate wars is a) horserace coverage is news catnip b) it's August which is usually a dead zone news which means anything remotely newsworthy gets outsized attention c) Dem primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin are absurdly late in the year and probably damaging to Dem candidates given the shortened time they'll then have to pivot to a general election campaign.
But in general, I don't think it's really appreciated enough that these DSA candidates are viable in a lot of Blue cities because of the lack of any reasonable alternative. The other huge reason DSA gets outsized coverage is reporters live in NYC metro and Mamdani is mayor. But look at Mamdani's electoral margins. It was actually quite close. Like if the alternative was Bloomberg I suspect Bloomberg wins in a landslide. But instead, Mr. Sexpest and a crazy person are the alternatives.
Like I don't think its really recognized that DSA or DSA leaning voters still make up a small portion of the Democratic party. And if GOP actually decided to run candidates who are suitable for races beyond R+20 districts in Texas they'd have an actual shot of winning and an actual shot of defanging the growing left influence.
"But there is a good-faith belief that the audience will genuinely enjoy the opener."
Is there? For probably a majority of the rock concerts I've been to, I thought the opening act was mediocre to terrible, and when I've commented about this to other people, I've had them tell me that they thought it was common to deliberately pick inferior quality opening acts so as to make the main act look better by comparison.
Saw Epica opening for Sabaton at one point (my mate came for Epica specifically) and it seemed decent to me; of course that concert introduced me to Sabaton and I don't really seek out Epica so *shrug*.
Really? Most concerts I’ve been to the opening act is just less well known or has a smaller catalog, and therefore can’t sell out a building as a headliner or play as a lengthy a set. But I don’t think they’re deliberately inferior.
I'm personally not sure they're deliberately inferior, but I've found it weird that, on multiple separate occasions when I've complained about opening acts, the people I was speaking to independently gave that same explanation, so I think there's at least some folk belief on the subject.
Honestly, this sounds like a great use of the midwit meme. My guess is the idea that people don't want to be "shown up" by the people that open for them sounds like something people believe. So, they think this must be happening.
The problem, of course, is pretty much every amazing act started as an opening act. My wife saw Ed Sheeran the other day and Myles Smith was an opener. Someone that is getting really good radio airplay. I'm guessing they don't have a relationship where they think he is somehow worse than Ed Sheeran. Probably they are friends.
Did it stick out to anyone else that in the first mailbag question about hypothetical support conditions for a ‘28 or ‘32 republican presidential candidate, Matt’s answer only talked about house gerrymandering and state governors?
Yes, it 100% struck me that Matt Y *completely* evaded the issue of “under what circumstances, if any, would I vote for a Republican for the House or Senate or President?” Come on, Matt Y, be brave! Tell us what you think!
Well he answered the Governor part of the question but not the President part. So I guess he can't see a scenario where he would support a Republican presidential candidate in 2028 or 2032?
I've wondered about that myself and all I can say that is Matt has a mysterious relationship with the mailbag. For example, although it's been a while since he's done it, he used to sometimes complain about the mailbag that in a way that struck me as very odd -- it would come across like he felt burdened by responding to the mailbag questions and had some obligation to deliver a particular minimum volume of content in connection with it.
All I could ever think of when I'd see those complaints was that (from my perspective, at least), Matt can (i) answer as few or as many questions as he likes (ii) as comprehensively or superficially as he wants to, so complaining about "not getting enough good questions" or complaining about answering certain questions in a way that implied he was being obligated to do it didn't make a lot of sense, especially when (from what's been said about mailbag workflow in the past) the questions are normally filtered by the SB intern anyway!
Also regarding IP being purely about creating incentives we really need to both shorten the duration of copyright and get rid of the ridiculous idea of authors having moral rights over how their creations are used. If you want to change the bargaining position of creators versus buyers that's something else -- but this idea that people should have a right to tell other people how they can use an idea just because they created them is nuts. Allowing IP rights at all is an unfortunate necessity we need to create incentives.
I tie these together because the idea that the author somehow deserves to have control over their creation is the only even plausible excuse for allowing such a long copyright term. It's not important for incentivizing development because the long tail only provides value in a very small fraction of the use cases but the mere existence of long term copyright creates massive roadblocks to our culture and innovation.
Yeah, my thought when I read that part was that, unfortunately, the demands for formal "moral rights" protections in IP law are, if anything, ratcheting higher and higher, between AI/LLM concerns and Big Tech's turn to the right.
For books a decent portion of the revenue does come through long tail and there are many series that are still being updated by the original author (or sometimes their child) after multiple decades.
Fanfiction is very alive and well if you want to write your own stuff, you just can’t make money off of it unless you file off the serial numbers.
We may have an issue about what kinds of time periods we are talking about. Yah sure 20 years -- similar to a patent -- or 30 years makes sense we could debate a bit more.
Life of the author plus 70?!?! Or for works for hire 95 years?! That's ridiculous and only the tiniest fraction of works generate nontrivial revenue after 40 years.
As for authors continuing to write books after multiple decades sure, but without copyright nothing stops them from continuing to write new works. The ones whose books are still popular are the ones who will get purchasers. Do you really think we'd see many fewer aspiring authors submitting manuscripts if they thought that after 30 years someone else could write a book using their characters? Of course not because that eventuality only comes up if they are a huge success and most authors won't be. And that lotto ticket of huge success is no longer needed to fund initial publication because we don't need massive presses.
If that protection only applied to the literal copying of the words I think the debate would be more plausible. But the ownership of the setting and characters essentially make the kind of public culture that we used to have before copyright impossible because you can't riff or improve on existing works. That is a real harm and there is very little benefit to more than 30 years of protection in terms of what gets created.
It’s actually really easy to riff on existing culture—“Puffs” was an unlicensed off broadway Harry Potter play, “Space Balls” obviously drew its inspiration from a particular source, “How It Should Have Ended”, “RiffTrax”, Woody Allen’s stuff, etc etc, parody is protected free speech.
Kindle Worlds did exist briefly where Amazon had licenses to a bunch of IP, but that failed. Star Wars EU was a cool concept, but anything not written by Zahn was typically dreck and it had a decent amount of authors reconning each other’s plots even for something that was supposedly coordinated.
It’s not that TV shows and movies of books aren’t getting made and movies/shows can be made that aren’t books movies. In fact I’d argue that it might help culture because you don’t have the comic book reboot problem of people needing all sorts of background to understand things.
I guess I don’t know what particular problem you’re trying to solve? I’ve been reading Allingham Mysteries lately and while it’s slightly annoying that they’re in public domain in Canada and not the US, I have the options of just using a Canadian website or piracy if I don’t want to pay $2/book.
People literally like to see the same characters and places they know from existing stories. The benefit is literally people being able to recognize them as that character/place so if you need to hide it you lost the benefit.
It might not be the most high art notion but go look at traditional myths and stories. They are all about further adventures of known characters. People want to see the characters they love in more situations -- not because those characters are better than other ones but because they are familiar. They don't need to be reintroduced or given a backstory. SaPeople literally like to see the same characters and places they know from existing stories. The benefit is literally people being able to recognize them as that character/place/etc so if you need to hide it you lost the benefit.
It might not be the most high art notion but go look at traditional myths and stories. Then Zeus/Odysseus/etc did this. They are all about further adventures of known characters. People want to see the characters they love in more situations -- not because those characters are better than other ones but because they are familiar. They don't need to be reintroduced or given a backstory.
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Parody has special protection that you don't get for using the character seriously.
Eric Flint's portal story/alternative history 1632 series intentionally did this--he encouraged and supported fanfiction, coauthored stories with fanfiction writers whose work he liked, published the best of the fanfiction in collections and incorporated characters and side plots into the main line of the stories, etc.
Name recognition sells, yes. But we already have a rich background of public domain characters including those myths you mentioned. Presumably Madeline Miller could've written about Hermione Granger or Susan Pevensie instead of Circe if the copyright situation were different, but I don't know that a book about either character would necessarily be better than Circe. Off the top of my head, James, Demon Copperhead, Stephen Fry's Greek Myths, and the Other Bennett Sister also came out fairly recently.
For people that want to read about more modern IP, there's half a million fanfiction works on Ao3 for the Marvel Movies or Harry Potter and a quarter million for Star Wars. A huge proportion are terrible and/or geared to the tastes of teenage girls, but I'm not sure that the average quality would necessarily increase if Harry Potter were public domain.
Elizabeth Peters published her final book in the Amelia Peabody series 35yrs after her first one (her twelfth which was published 25yrs after the first was her first to break the NYT bestseller list), but she did ask her friend and fellow mystery writer, Joan Hess, to finish a final book after her death. That book was rather awful--bad characterization, cartoonish plot points, inconsistent continuity with the rest of the series--and she had many advantages including the original author's notes, and assistance from some of her fact checkers.
Maybe a wider net of commercial authors would result in better books being written in a given IP and revived interest, but I doubt it. I think more likely the original audience would shatter into a few different areas of interest with most becoming fatigued.
(Also you really wouldn't have authors building on eachother as their original characters would then have copyright protection so the universe would be pretty static)
I'm open to the longer of the author's death or 20yrs, but I personally do see it as a good thing that the author has copyright for life.
Saying we 'have enough' proves too much. We have a ton of books and lots of people writing and giving it away for free -- surely that doesn't show that we don't need copyright protections for writing at all anymore.
Even a bad version of a star trek series or a mediocre new harry Potter book tends to sell way better than someone who writes a good book with novel characters and setting. That is content people would like that is getting made at lower levels than it would be without the extensive copyright protections. Hell the mere existence of fan fic tells you there is a hunger out there.
And I think that leaves you in a difficult spot. Seems like you are on the horns of a dillema. Either:
1) content produced online without editing or commercial incentive is just as good as that with the incentive.
In that case we don't need copyright incentives in the first place. People will make just as good content without monetary inducement and since copyright obviously imposes costs and denies people access it's trivial it would be better without.
2) It really is the case that the inability to commercially publish such works, put on plays etc does deny the public better content.
But now you need to claim that on net reducing copyright durations will reduce the amount of content even more than the benefit it provides. Ok, I'm open to that argument but that's very different than arguing things are good enough now.
I like to read old weird fiction from the 1930s and 1940s and its like half of it has been public domain for 50 years and half of it will become public domain in the year 2065.
Yah it's complicated depending on both where it fell with respect to the various copyright acts and how it was written (eg works for hire aren't based on the author's lifetime).
I suspect that a big part of the challenge faced by theater is the difficulty doing theater set in worlds familiar to the audience. If you look at historical live performance there were often well known characters -- or at least types -- who would appear in many different shows.
This is in large part a problem created by overlong copyright protection. You can't set a play or musical in the same world people watch on TV because by the time it is out of copyright it is no longer relevant.
People really like a mixture of familiarity and novelty in their media. It's why so many movies and TV shows are set in existing worlds. Let's be honest, neither the star trek, star wars or Harry Potter universes are really amazing acts of world building (and as great as it is LOTR has limited openness to new epic stories) but we keep getting new material set in those universes because they are good enough and don't need to introduce the setting.
Maybe one day we will have open source settings appropriate for plays as well but I agree with the commenter that there are difficulties with that coming from the people who put on the material. Knowing it inside and out and seeing it from the inside is just a very different perspective than a fun night out and seeing it for the first time.
I'm very confused by what, "You can't set a play or musical in the same world people watch on TV because by the time it is out of copyright it is no longer relevant," means.
There are lots of new plays set in modern times, and probably the biggest single complaint I see about musical theater from hardcore musical theater fans is the number of musicals in recent years that are adaptations of movies/TV shows rather than being original works.
I think the issue is that there’s no Pierrot and Harlequin characters that anyone is allowed to re-purpose. It’s difficult to get permission to do a play where the actors do Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George but where for some reason George is the landlord and the hijinks are different. (I did once see a performance of two episodes of the Golden Girls done by drag queens, but I suspect there was more cooperation there, and it would be harder if they were trying new stories in the Golden Girls universe.)
My advice on the community theatre question is that genre can be a powerful force for mainstreaming new ideas.
People will see an indie horror film, because even though they don't know the director they know what a horror film is supposed to be. Horror movies are allowed to take wider swings without a preexisting fanbase. Even with an emerging microgenre you have a bunch of one-off narrow-cast books that make up "weird girl lit", and now that the term "weird girl lit" exists you have a mechanism where no name authors can possibly breakthrough.
So that would be my advice, is you don't need to do the same 12 plays, but you need the audience to understand how they will feel and who it is for before they enter the theatre. Plays for D&D fans, burlesque for date nights, comedies for people who escaped evangelical communities, serial killer but make it sexy, whatever it may be.
Horror genre films can be incredibly cheap to make. The first Paranormal Activity was produced for 75 thousand, and it made over a 100 million, enough money to create Blumhouse Productions. Get Out cost 4 million and made over 150 million. Night of the Living Dead was made for 75,000 and it has made much more than that over time. Blair Witch Project was incredibly cheap.
Horror audiences skew younger and now include a much larger female fan base. So there actually is a pre-existing fan base for horror films in general, even new films. This was the case with Backrooms and Obsession, also.
The issue that when you "buy" a movie, you don't really own it would have a lot more salience if more people actually wanted to own a copy of a movie forever. But, the reality is that most people, when they consume movies, only want to watch it once, so the basic rental model suits them just fine. After all, in the rare case where, years later, you do want to watch a movie again you already watched, you can always just pay another $5 to rent it again.
Given the above, I'm actually somewhat surprised that the movie purchase option even exists anymore these days, and it wouldn't shock me if they took that away altogether in the future. Any government "own means own" regulation would undoubtfully accelerate this.
I support Brian from Beaverton's theatre endeavors, and the weirdness of theatre. Live theatre and theatre making is becoming increasingly novel, as analogue games, exercises and play performances [still] demand live actors on a stage, eventually collaborating with playwrights, composers, designers and technicians, to offer live story telling to an audience. Weirdness is relative. Going to see a play is still a crap shoot, but I certainly hope that we will support our children, our families, and our friends, by going to see their work, and talking about it. The revival of Oklahoma that I found most extraordinary was the one Daniel Fish made at Bard, and later toured to NYC and - eventually - other cities. Weird? Absolutely. Wonderful? It was to me, but then, I'm a weirdo.
Broadway has tons of crowd-pleasing shows, not sure what Matt is on about here. Labor and production costs are the real issue there.
I know your answer wasn’t going in the direction. But regarding the digital ownership question I think the physical media holders are too optimistic.
With everything being internet connected now, it’s seem terribly possible that physical media could be DRM blocked via any device in the replay chain (dvd player, TV, Sonos, whatever) having internet access.
I hope that doesn’t happen. And it may be very unlikely. But it’s definitely not impossible.
I think Max is underestimating how much progressives detest MGP here in WA-03. The guy that lost the primary has been kind of crashing out on Facebook with all these progressive grievances and saying he’ll never vote for her, and there are a bunch of people in the comments really cheering him on. The one person trying to stick up for MGP eventually got shouted down in a local left-leaning Facebook group I’m in, and nobody backed her up.
Obviously this didn’t stop her from winning, but this just isn’t a very progressive place.
Thanks for answering my question! I fully agree with the idea that a lot of theatres have stopped trying to cater to a broad clientele, and that’s part of the reason—maybe the biggest reason lately—for our financial struggles.
To your point on comparing theatre to the National Symphony or concerts, this is something into which I’ve put a lot of thought. While it’s true that we can’t structure an individual evening of theatre in a way that starts with new or lesser-done work and ends with a classic, I think you CAN structure a season in a similar way. A lot of big theatres do seven-show seasons. I’ve been advocating for a few years now on a particular structure for such seasons: 3-4 big sellers, and 3-4 “art” shows. You can even alternate them if you do 4 big sellers and 3 “art” shows. The “art” shows can be anything from new work to lesser-done shows expected to attract a niche audience to classic shows with a significant twist. The big sellers pay for the art shows, and everyone gets a piece of the metaphorical pie.
I used to work in theater, and our Artistic Director said she'd gladly do "A Christmas Carol" every year if she could do what she wanted the other 5 shows.. That was more about money but I was reminded of it by this discussion.
Re: Making digital purchases permanent, the issue is that if you let people have a DRM free file, then they can share unlimited copies with others, but if you have privately-administered DRM, then the people administering the crypto keys that you have to validate in order to unlock the file can withdraw access or go out of business.
It seems to me the answer is to make DRM a public utility. You buy a key for a movie, the record of that is kept in a public server, and you can either keep a local copy of the file, or you can always re-download it. If the originator goes out of business, the Library of Congress (or whatever other government agency) will take over hosting the file so you can get it later.
I'm still angry from X-mas when the Grinch (original) I bought on Amazon a couple years ago, was no longer there this past year. We no longer buy from Amazon. We also got a DVD player and broke out our old (rather large) collection. Baltimore also has an incredible DVD rental place that I may need to resubscribe to if things keep going down the current path.
At least The Grinch is the funniest possible title to do that with.
So I think the general left-wing valence of 'creative culture' in general is actually pretty simple - in 1940, both parties sucked on gay rights, women's rights, etc. But even then, there were many non-straight people in Hollywood or even more powerful woman than in the median of society, famously. But since being pro-gay or being less sexist wasn't automatically associated w/ the Left, that meant you could be the type of creative comfortable with the vibe of creativity that was to use a modern term 'queer-adjacent' but also be say, right-wing on taxes or Communism.
Like, outside of a few specific examples, even famous Hollywood Republicans of the World War II or 50's era weren't overly socially conservative. John Wayne was kind of an outlier about all this, but kind of gets used as the ur example. Even Reagan largely went right-wing after he wasn't really in Hollywood anymore and around...well, rich executives.
But as you'd expect, as social conservatism rose on the GOP, it squeezed people and made them pick between their colleagues and their belief on tax rates, and people chose the former and thus, a 20 year old who might've went to drama school but still ended up a Republican kind of automatically became at a minimum a soft liberal because the GOP was opposed to people they knew and cared about in drama school, etc.
Also, the social conservatism of the GOP meant that actors who might've been Republican self-selected into a kind of libertarianism of folks like Kurt Russell. Like, as much as Taylor Sheridan sort of cosplays to get friendly articles written about him by right-leaning publications, he's likely pretty socially liberal just to survive in Hollywood at all and in it's weird way, Yellowstone is quasi-woke.
So, even writers who could've made conservative-adjacent films disappeared and we're left w/ only DailyWire slop on the right.
If you are going to look at the creative culture of bygone eras, you are going to have a massive blind spot if you don't cover how celebrities basically had a patronage relationship with mafia and mafia like organizations.
Wow, color me surprised to see Matthew Yglesias discussing the programming of contemporary symphonic music — my mastermind subject!
I'm a composer and conductor and I have to say, he's basically spot on here: symphonic concerts almost always open with a piece of new music, essentially an alien visitor from another genre. It would be like if you went to a bluegrass concert and the opener was a rapper. Or if you went to a ballet and there was a 10-minute gymnastics opener.
I have liked the recent trend of symphony orchestras collaborating with contemporary artists or doing video game music or doing music accompanying a live showing of a film. I'm not sure if that's perceived as "selling out" within the symphony community but it certainly entices people like me who wouldn't otherwise go.
Regarding Saia's question on foreign policy/energy/climate, an anecdote that comes to mind for me was a fire here in central/eastern WA state. The fire crew wanted to drive across a protected field of flowers to setup a new fire line. They were stopped by state agencies because of the protected flowers; driving on them would cause damage. Not seeing the forest through the trees, the firemen sat in their trucks and watched all the environmental folks watch it all burn.
Taking a holistic view of the entire landscape, to Matt's point about generalism, just seems like a much clearer, simpler, and overall better approach.
I would vote for a Phil Scott/Mike Bloomberg/Nelson Rockefeller style Republican in a heartbeat. A tough on crime YIMBY who tells the stationary bandits to go eat shit is EXACTLY what NY needs. The problem (as Matt has pointed out) is that this isn't on the menu with Blue State GOPs, it's just Boomer Right NIMBY Trump mini-mes vs. Everything Bagel Liberals with the smallest sprinkle of Abundance (but only with prevailing wage!). Sigh.
A big issue is how this affects national power struggles, though, which was Matt's point about redistricting battles. A sane non-MAGA governor who does sensible things locally sounds fine, but if he also helps tip congress toward Trump having the power to get away with his continuing depredations, not so much.
Tbf Phil Scott hasn't done this, and any Governor serious about winning the Northeast (especially NY) would have to credibly be anti-Trump. I sincerely doubt Marc Malinaro (at least his 2018 version) would've been a Trump sycophant, but who knows
So much of the current centrist and center left angst about DSA is basically a version of "Murc's Law" I mean I get it to an extent. If you're someone like Matt, the vitriol you mostly get is from the left so you're ire about what needs to happen gets direct back in the other direction. Also, can't emphasize enough how much discourse about DSA/moderate wars is a) horserace coverage is news catnip b) it's August which is usually a dead zone news which means anything remotely newsworthy gets outsized attention c) Dem primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin are absurdly late in the year and probably damaging to Dem candidates given the shortened time they'll then have to pivot to a general election campaign.
But in general, I don't think it's really appreciated enough that these DSA candidates are viable in a lot of Blue cities because of the lack of any reasonable alternative. The other huge reason DSA gets outsized coverage is reporters live in NYC metro and Mamdani is mayor. But look at Mamdani's electoral margins. It was actually quite close. Like if the alternative was Bloomberg I suspect Bloomberg wins in a landslide. But instead, Mr. Sexpest and a crazy person are the alternatives.
Like I don't think its really recognized that DSA or DSA leaning voters still make up a small portion of the Democratic party. And if GOP actually decided to run candidates who are suitable for races beyond R+20 districts in Texas they'd have an actual shot of winning and an actual shot of defanging the growing left influence.
You're not wrong, I live in Astoria (life-long resident) so I'm always in the eye of the storm
"But there is a good-faith belief that the audience will genuinely enjoy the opener."
Is there? For probably a majority of the rock concerts I've been to, I thought the opening act was mediocre to terrible, and when I've commented about this to other people, I've had them tell me that they thought it was common to deliberately pick inferior quality opening acts so as to make the main act look better by comparison.
Saw Epica opening for Sabaton at one point (my mate came for Epica specifically) and it seemed decent to me; of course that concert introduced me to Sabaton and I don't really seek out Epica so *shrug*.
Really? Most concerts I’ve been to the opening act is just less well known or has a smaller catalog, and therefore can’t sell out a building as a headliner or play as a lengthy a set. But I don’t think they’re deliberately inferior.
I'm personally not sure they're deliberately inferior, but I've found it weird that, on multiple separate occasions when I've complained about opening acts, the people I was speaking to independently gave that same explanation, so I think there's at least some folk belief on the subject.
Honestly, this sounds like a great use of the midwit meme. My guess is the idea that people don't want to be "shown up" by the people that open for them sounds like something people believe. So, they think this must be happening.
The problem, of course, is pretty much every amazing act started as an opening act. My wife saw Ed Sheeran the other day and Myles Smith was an opener. Someone that is getting really good radio airplay. I'm guessing they don't have a relationship where they think he is somehow worse than Ed Sheeran. Probably they are friends.
Did it stick out to anyone else that in the first mailbag question about hypothetical support conditions for a ‘28 or ‘32 republican presidential candidate, Matt’s answer only talked about house gerrymandering and state governors?
Yes, it 100% struck me that Matt Y *completely* evaded the issue of “under what circumstances, if any, would I vote for a Republican for the House or Senate or President?” Come on, Matt Y, be brave! Tell us what you think!
Plausibly he just thinks that question is less interesting than the one he answered?
I have seen him do that a couple of times, and I don’t really get it. Why not just pick a different question to respond to?
Well he answered the Governor part of the question but not the President part. So I guess he can't see a scenario where he would support a Republican presidential candidate in 2028 or 2032?
I've wondered about that myself and all I can say that is Matt has a mysterious relationship with the mailbag. For example, although it's been a while since he's done it, he used to sometimes complain about the mailbag that in a way that struck me as very odd -- it would come across like he felt burdened by responding to the mailbag questions and had some obligation to deliver a particular minimum volume of content in connection with it.
All I could ever think of when I'd see those complaints was that (from my perspective, at least), Matt can (i) answer as few or as many questions as he likes (ii) as comprehensively or superficially as he wants to, so complaining about "not getting enough good questions" or complaining about answering certain questions in a way that implied he was being obligated to do it didn't make a lot of sense, especially when (from what's been said about mailbag workflow in the past) the questions are normally filtered by the SB intern anyway!
I don’t think there would be much subscriber unrest if Matt went to a bi-weekly mailbag or a monthly mailbag, would there be?
He did go to a monthly mailbag for a while, and then backtracked.
Wow, I'd forgotten he did that!
I doubt there would, although I'll stress that I like the weekly mailbag format.
Also regarding IP being purely about creating incentives we really need to both shorten the duration of copyright and get rid of the ridiculous idea of authors having moral rights over how their creations are used. If you want to change the bargaining position of creators versus buyers that's something else -- but this idea that people should have a right to tell other people how they can use an idea just because they created them is nuts. Allowing IP rights at all is an unfortunate necessity we need to create incentives.
I tie these together because the idea that the author somehow deserves to have control over their creation is the only even plausible excuse for allowing such a long copyright term. It's not important for incentivizing development because the long tail only provides value in a very small fraction of the use cases but the mere existence of long term copyright creates massive roadblocks to our culture and innovation.
I feel very lonely having this position these days. The left, especially those who hate LLMs, seem all in on moral rights.
Yeah, my thought when I read that part was that, unfortunately, the demands for formal "moral rights" protections in IP law are, if anything, ratcheting higher and higher, between AI/LLM concerns and Big Tech's turn to the right.
Ironically since big tech will just sign deals with big content to get the training data they need and the IP rights that let them make content.
It's the ability to train open source or academic models that is at serious risk.
For books a decent portion of the revenue does come through long tail and there are many series that are still being updated by the original author (or sometimes their child) after multiple decades.
Fanfiction is very alive and well if you want to write your own stuff, you just can’t make money off of it unless you file off the serial numbers.
We may have an issue about what kinds of time periods we are talking about. Yah sure 20 years -- similar to a patent -- or 30 years makes sense we could debate a bit more.
Life of the author plus 70?!?! Or for works for hire 95 years?! That's ridiculous and only the tiniest fraction of works generate nontrivial revenue after 40 years.
As for authors continuing to write books after multiple decades sure, but without copyright nothing stops them from continuing to write new works. The ones whose books are still popular are the ones who will get purchasers. Do you really think we'd see many fewer aspiring authors submitting manuscripts if they thought that after 30 years someone else could write a book using their characters? Of course not because that eventuality only comes up if they are a huge success and most authors won't be. And that lotto ticket of huge success is no longer needed to fund initial publication because we don't need massive presses.
If that protection only applied to the literal copying of the words I think the debate would be more plausible. But the ownership of the setting and characters essentially make the kind of public culture that we used to have before copyright impossible because you can't riff or improve on existing works. That is a real harm and there is very little benefit to more than 30 years of protection in terms of what gets created.
It’s actually really easy to riff on existing culture—“Puffs” was an unlicensed off broadway Harry Potter play, “Space Balls” obviously drew its inspiration from a particular source, “How It Should Have Ended”, “RiffTrax”, Woody Allen’s stuff, etc etc, parody is protected free speech.
Kindle Worlds did exist briefly where Amazon had licenses to a bunch of IP, but that failed. Star Wars EU was a cool concept, but anything not written by Zahn was typically dreck and it had a decent amount of authors reconning each other’s plots even for something that was supposedly coordinated.
It’s not that TV shows and movies of books aren’t getting made and movies/shows can be made that aren’t books movies. In fact I’d argue that it might help culture because you don’t have the comic book reboot problem of people needing all sorts of background to understand things.
I guess I don’t know what particular problem you’re trying to solve? I’ve been reading Allingham Mysteries lately and while it’s slightly annoying that they’re in public domain in Canada and not the US, I have the options of just using a Canadian website or piracy if I don’t want to pay $2/book.
People literally like to see the same characters and places they know from existing stories. The benefit is literally people being able to recognize them as that character/place so if you need to hide it you lost the benefit.
It might not be the most high art notion but go look at traditional myths and stories. They are all about further adventures of known characters. People want to see the characters they love in more situations -- not because those characters are better than other ones but because they are familiar. They don't need to be reintroduced or given a backstory. SaPeople literally like to see the same characters and places they know from existing stories. The benefit is literally people being able to recognize them as that character/place/etc so if you need to hide it you lost the benefit.
It might not be the most high art notion but go look at traditional myths and stories. Then Zeus/Odysseus/etc did this. They are all about further adventures of known characters. People want to see the characters they love in more situations -- not because those characters are better than other ones but because they are familiar. They don't need to be reintroduced or given a backstory.
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Parody has special protection that you don't get for using the character seriously.
Eric Flint's portal story/alternative history 1632 series intentionally did this--he encouraged and supported fanfiction, coauthored stories with fanfiction writers whose work he liked, published the best of the fanfiction in collections and incorporated characters and side plots into the main line of the stories, etc.
Name recognition sells, yes. But we already have a rich background of public domain characters including those myths you mentioned. Presumably Madeline Miller could've written about Hermione Granger or Susan Pevensie instead of Circe if the copyright situation were different, but I don't know that a book about either character would necessarily be better than Circe. Off the top of my head, James, Demon Copperhead, Stephen Fry's Greek Myths, and the Other Bennett Sister also came out fairly recently.
For people that want to read about more modern IP, there's half a million fanfiction works on Ao3 for the Marvel Movies or Harry Potter and a quarter million for Star Wars. A huge proportion are terrible and/or geared to the tastes of teenage girls, but I'm not sure that the average quality would necessarily increase if Harry Potter were public domain.
Elizabeth Peters published her final book in the Amelia Peabody series 35yrs after her first one (her twelfth which was published 25yrs after the first was her first to break the NYT bestseller list), but she did ask her friend and fellow mystery writer, Joan Hess, to finish a final book after her death. That book was rather awful--bad characterization, cartoonish plot points, inconsistent continuity with the rest of the series--and she had many advantages including the original author's notes, and assistance from some of her fact checkers.
Maybe a wider net of commercial authors would result in better books being written in a given IP and revived interest, but I doubt it. I think more likely the original audience would shatter into a few different areas of interest with most becoming fatigued.
(Also you really wouldn't have authors building on eachother as their original characters would then have copyright protection so the universe would be pretty static)
I'm open to the longer of the author's death or 20yrs, but I personally do see it as a good thing that the author has copyright for life.
Also, my daughter spends many hours per week writing fanfic, which is visibly improving her writing.
Saying we 'have enough' proves too much. We have a ton of books and lots of people writing and giving it away for free -- surely that doesn't show that we don't need copyright protections for writing at all anymore.
Even a bad version of a star trek series or a mediocre new harry Potter book tends to sell way better than someone who writes a good book with novel characters and setting. That is content people would like that is getting made at lower levels than it would be without the extensive copyright protections. Hell the mere existence of fan fic tells you there is a hunger out there.
And I think that leaves you in a difficult spot. Seems like you are on the horns of a dillema. Either:
1) content produced online without editing or commercial incentive is just as good as that with the incentive.
In that case we don't need copyright incentives in the first place. People will make just as good content without monetary inducement and since copyright obviously imposes costs and denies people access it's trivial it would be better without.
2) It really is the case that the inability to commercially publish such works, put on plays etc does deny the public better content.
But now you need to claim that on net reducing copyright durations will reduce the amount of content even more than the benefit it provides. Ok, I'm open to that argument but that's very different than arguing things are good enough now.
I like to read old weird fiction from the 1930s and 1940s and its like half of it has been public domain for 50 years and half of it will become public domain in the year 2065.
Yah it's complicated depending on both where it fell with respect to the various copyright acts and how it was written (eg works for hire aren't based on the author's lifetime).
I suspect that a big part of the challenge faced by theater is the difficulty doing theater set in worlds familiar to the audience. If you look at historical live performance there were often well known characters -- or at least types -- who would appear in many different shows.
This is in large part a problem created by overlong copyright protection. You can't set a play or musical in the same world people watch on TV because by the time it is out of copyright it is no longer relevant.
People really like a mixture of familiarity and novelty in their media. It's why so many movies and TV shows are set in existing worlds. Let's be honest, neither the star trek, star wars or Harry Potter universes are really amazing acts of world building (and as great as it is LOTR has limited openness to new epic stories) but we keep getting new material set in those universes because they are good enough and don't need to introduce the setting.
Maybe one day we will have open source settings appropriate for plays as well but I agree with the commenter that there are difficulties with that coming from the people who put on the material. Knowing it inside and out and seeing it from the inside is just a very different perspective than a fun night out and seeing it for the first time.
I'm very confused by what, "You can't set a play or musical in the same world people watch on TV because by the time it is out of copyright it is no longer relevant," means.
There are lots of new plays set in modern times, and probably the biggest single complaint I see about musical theater from hardcore musical theater fans is the number of musicals in recent years that are adaptations of movies/TV shows rather than being original works.
Yeah if anything Broadway is too crowd-pleasing, not sure what the heck Matt is talking about
I think the issue is that there’s no Pierrot and Harlequin characters that anyone is allowed to re-purpose. It’s difficult to get permission to do a play where the actors do Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George but where for some reason George is the landlord and the hijinks are different. (I did once see a performance of two episodes of the Golden Girls done by drag queens, but I suspect there was more cooperation there, and it would be harder if they were trying new stories in the Golden Girls universe.)
My advice on the community theatre question is that genre can be a powerful force for mainstreaming new ideas.
People will see an indie horror film, because even though they don't know the director they know what a horror film is supposed to be. Horror movies are allowed to take wider swings without a preexisting fanbase. Even with an emerging microgenre you have a bunch of one-off narrow-cast books that make up "weird girl lit", and now that the term "weird girl lit" exists you have a mechanism where no name authors can possibly breakthrough.
So that would be my advice, is you don't need to do the same 12 plays, but you need the audience to understand how they will feel and who it is for before they enter the theatre. Plays for D&D fans, burlesque for date nights, comedies for people who escaped evangelical communities, serial killer but make it sexy, whatever it may be.
Horror genre films can be incredibly cheap to make. The first Paranormal Activity was produced for 75 thousand, and it made over a 100 million, enough money to create Blumhouse Productions. Get Out cost 4 million and made over 150 million. Night of the Living Dead was made for 75,000 and it has made much more than that over time. Blair Witch Project was incredibly cheap.
Horror audiences skew younger and now include a much larger female fan base. So there actually is a pre-existing fan base for horror films in general, even new films. This was the case with Backrooms and Obsession, also.
All the more reason to see the Paranormal Activity stage production