Week 6 Task 1

On first glance, one would think that the protection of copy right is the biggest issue Hollywood has with the internet; as of today, there is simply no stopping internet piracy of movies. The services provided by YouTube and BitTorrent are too convenient for many people to resist them, the punishments not widespread enough, only a small percentage of the people who download movies illegally ever gets caught, the anonymity of the web does pose a problem to the police. Hollywood makes less money and is thus less eager to produce movies that aren’t boring, badly-written crowd-pleasers. Online distribution of movies is slowly gaining popularity, but as a person without a credit card and weary of online-banking I can’t really appreciate that. There has been live-streaming of movies into theatres and maybe the theatre experience will be lost completely if the industry changes to simply providing the movies in online data-banks where customers can stream the movies for a fee.  

However, beyond the copy right issue, there is the fact that the internet with its easily accessible movie making and distribution tools make it, in theory and, much more seldom, in practice, possible for everyone to realize their vision and call themselves a film producer. Hollywood with its customs, established systems, studios and famous actors/directors is threatened in a world were over night everybody can become famous for their movies, completely outside of the established film industry. All this crowds the market, making the Hollywood producers again afraid to lose money. The result is that Hollywood tries to imitate the lacklustre, unsophisticated production techniques and often surreal, post-modern themes of many popular internet short and feature films. These results too tend to be rather bad (at least in my eyes). Overall the internet, with its tendency to provide everyone with the means to follow their dreams (without regard of any existing talent in other to achieve them) can be blamed for an overall drop in creative media (writing, music, movies).