Hollywood Accounting and SOPA

Hollywood Accounting refers to the opaque accounting practices used by the film, video and music industry to hyper-inflate expenditures such that their products never make any profits so they can then screw artists out of fees and royalties due to them. See a friendlier definition in wikipedia.

Basically by the terms of my contract, if a set on a WB movie burns down in Botswana, they can charge it against B5’s profits.
Michael Strazynski, Writer & Producer of Babylon 5

Three points:

  • These are the people behind SOPA, PIPA, DRM and region encoding. The same people claiming that their losses are bigger than the Wall Street bailout, while never providing any evidence or proof. And said fictional evidence is even more fictional because its Hollywood Accounting fiction.
  • These are the same people claiming that ‘piracy’ (downloads) are worse than terrorism, because these ‘pirates’ are taking money out of the pockets of real artists. Yet these are the exact companies that are supposed to be paying real artists their royalties and are not doing so because their Hollywood Accounting practices declare that there is no money available.
  • Its tax time in the USA, how can I get me some of that (joke)

The way I read it, whether or not I buy their films, videos, or music, the artists get the same amount of money. Zero, zot, nada, bupkis, none. But if I use, refer to, mention, have playing in the background, or post anything from these films, videos or music, I and the poor bastard that hosts the thing I post are treated as criminals. That is Hollywood Accounting.

UPDATE: My point, Hollywood Accounting is creating the fiction that copyright infringement is hurting real people and that SOPA and PIPA are needed to protect these people. Yet they get nothing, whether or not copyright is infringed or not, whether or not SOPA or PIPA exist, they still get nothing!

Posted By Hilton Lipschitz · Jan 17, 2012 8:32 PM