The reality, it seems is different. In an open letter to Washington, several such people – the creators of the very content the MPAA and RIAA claim they are trying to protect – object strongly to SOPA/PIPA. They cite the benefits of an open internet for both themselves and society, as well as their fear that the legislation puts too much power in the hands of copyright holders. The believe that the impact of SOPA/PIPA on piracy will be negligible, while its effect on a free and open internet could be devastating. The full text of the letter, which may be found here, is below. Notable names on the list include author Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame,

We, the undersigned, are musicians, actors, directors, authors, and producers. We make our livelihoods with the artistic works we create. We are also Internet users.
We are writing to express our serious concerns regarding the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level. Commercial piracy is deeply unfair and pervasive leaks of unreleased films and music regularly interfere with the integrity of our creations. We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works.

We, along with the rest of society, have benefited immensely from a free and open Internet. It allows us to connect with our fans and reach new audiences. Using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, we can communicate directly with millions of fans and interact with them in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

We fear that the broad new enforcement powers provided under SOPA and PIPA could be easily abused against legitimate services like those upon which we depend. These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process, causing collateral damage to the legitimate users of the same services – artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result.

We are deeply concerned that PIPA and SOPA’s impact on piracy will be negligible compared to the potential damage that would be caused to legitimate Internet services. Online piracy is harmful and it needs to be addressed, but not at the expense of censoring creativity, stifling innovation or preventing the creation of new, lawful digital distribution methods.

We urge Congress to exercise extreme caution and ensure that the free and open Internet, upon which so many artists rely to promote and distribute their work, does not become collateral damage in the process.

Respectfully,

Aziz Ansari
Kevin Devine, Musician
Barry Eisler, Author
Neil Gaiman, Author
Lloyd Kaufman, Filmmaker
Zoë Keating, Musician
The Lonely Island
Daniel Lorca, Musician (Nada Surf)
Erin McKeown, Musician
MGMT
Samantha Murphy, Musician
OK Go
Amanda Palmer, Musician (The Dresden Dolls)
Quiet Company
Trent Reznor
Adam Savage, Special Effects Artist (MythBusters)
Hank Shocklee, Music Producer (Public Enemy, The Bomb Squad)
Johnny Stimson, Musician

The Social Network was up for: Best Picture, Best Direction, Actor in a Leading Role, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound Mixing, and Music (Original Score). It won Best Adapted Screenplay, Film editing, and Music (Aaron Sorkin, Angus Wall/Kirk Baxter and Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross respectively).   

Last month, The Social Network won 4 Golden Globes for Best Director, Screenplay, Best Score, and Best Picture, Drama. It  had been nominated for 6.  Jesse Eisenberg, the actor who portrayed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, was nominated for the Best Actor, Drama award, but lost out to Colin Firth for his performance in the film, The King’s Speech. Andrew Garfield, who played Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Christian Bale for his performance in The Fighter. 

The film missed out on any wins at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, though Eisenberg was nominated for Outstanding Performance By A Male Actor In A Leading Role. 

At the Oscars, The King’s Speech won Best Picture, Tom Hooper won Best Director for that film, Colin Firth won Best actor for it, Wally Pfister won Best Cinematography for Inception, and Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick also won Sound Mixing for Inception. 

Read our review of The Social Network here.

Are you going to watch "The Social Network" when it comes out? Let us know.

On his site, Reznor talks about how David Fincher, the director of the film, asked him to do the score, his initial reluctance, and his satisfaction with the semi-finished product…

“David Fincher started inquiring about my interest in scoring his upcoming film, The Social Network. Yeah, the movie about the founding of Facebook. I’ve always loved David’s work but quite honestly I wondered what would draw him to tell that story. When I actually read the script and realized what he was up to, I said goodbye to that free time I had planned.

Months later, I’m happy to tell you we’re nearing the completion of this and I couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out. The level of excellence that David operates on is inspiring and the entire process has been challenging and truly enjoyable."

So what does Reznor think about the film? ”it’s really fucking good. And dark!”

Do you think Trent Reznor was a good choice to score the film? Tell us what you think.

You can check out the teaser trailer for the film below…

Here’s why the latest gift to NIN fans means something to all you web professionals out there.

There’s more than one way to profit from your work, even if it seems like the only route goes through one place, be it a monolithic music label or other type of company structure, small or large. For Reznor, it will be the fan interest that will translate into solid ticket sales, greater interest in merchandise sales at shows, and even the sale of physical versions of the free digital download of The Slip being made available now.

It’s all about control. The loss leader has been a staple of retailing for years. Look no farther than the phenomenon of Black Friday, the shopping day after Thanksgiving, when retailers vie with each other to get people into their storefronts in the dark of morning. Offers of heavily discounted items from tools to electronics spur shoppers to come inside, where enough of them may buy some other items at their usual margins.

Giving anything away poses a scary prospect to anyone, when it comes to business; we aren’t talking about charitable causes of course, but the items that make up part of the customary operation of the business.

Nine Inch Nails is in a position to give away music, as Reznor has an established and sizable global fan base. Free may be an option for other digital creators even more today than it has been over the past years the Web has been in place. More people have faster than dial-up connections than ever, enabling more of them to participate in such a giveaway.

The investment of goodwill and public relations may pay off well for Reznor. If it brings out more fans to shows, drives more sales of merchandise, with him reaping the profits, label-free, who could argue his free strategy was a bad idea?

No one should leap into free promotions without researching their impact. History is littered with giveaways that didn’t pay off; a notably ill-fated one was an all you can eat crab legs promotion at Red Lobster that cost the CEO her job. But free may be a strong enough loss leader to make other parts of the web enterprise more desirable and profitable to its owners.

Though the online availability of Ghosts may haunt music labels, no one will be chilled by Reznor’s lyrics. The Ghosts four-volume collection contains instrumentals only.

Trent Reznor
(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

On the Ghosts’ website, Trent Reznor said, “I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams.”

“I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference,” he continued.

An instrumental-only work from Nine Inch Nails would have given label executives fits. Mainstream radio simply does not play instrumental works; confusion would reign for the American Idol-addled audiences Clear Channel and Cumulus reach.

However, savvy businessman that he is, Reznor gave fans plenty of of options to enjoy Ghosts. The first nine songs may be obtained for free, along with a 40-page PDF document and a pack of “digital extra” that include wallpapers and icons.

All 36 songs may be purchased in one download for $5. Fans spending $10 on the 2 CD set will receive a download key for Ghosts ahead of the April 8 shipping date.

Where Reznor shows the real potential of the digital marketplace comes with options tailored to the hardcore fans who have been around since Pretty Hate Machine and are willing to spend on more content. $75 combines the 2 CD pack with a DVD and a Blu-ray disc, to be shipped in May.

$300 picks up the $75 goodies, plus “an exclusive four-LP 180 gram vinyl set in a fabric slipcase, and two exclusive limited edition Giclee prints in a luxurious package,” signed by Reznor and limited to 2,500 pieces.

Musicians with an established fan base, or the desire to build the kind of devotion that makes a $300 content offer a viable option, need to look at what Reznor believes he can do without a coterie of major label executives leeching off of his work.

Top label executives should look even closer and think about how they might construct such an approach for their acts, before those musicians decide the Net delivers better chances to connect with and profit from their fanbases.

I say it’s a great interview, and it is — but Trent also says something that I think is pretty dumb: he says that he’s in favour of an Internet tax, in which everyone would pay their service provider $5 extra and that money would then be distributed to artists to compensate them for downloading. He’s not the only one who thinks this would be a good way to solve the problem, either; the Songwriters Association of Canada recently came out in favour of the exact same thing: i.e, a tax on ISPs.

This idea is appealing primarily because it seems so simple. In reality, however, it would be horrendously complicated to administer, on top of being wrong. Why is it wrong? Because imposing a tax on a broad range of people for the behaviour of a small percentage isn’t just unfair, it’s bad policy and in most cases doesn’t work (and please don’t compare this to the taxes I pay to provide medical care to smokers or whatever; that’s life and death, and this isn’t).

Why should everyone who uses the Internet — even those who just use it to get their email once a week, or to send a web link to their bridge club, or better yet to legally download songs from iTunes — have to pay a fee to compensate artists for the fact that less than 10 per cent of Internet users commit copyright infringement on a semi-regular basis? It makes no sense at all, despite how appealing it seems at first glance.

I sympathize with Trent, and with other artists who are struggling to find a way to adapt as traditional business models fall apart around them, but coming up with new taxes is the wrong solution.

Comments

The rocking virtual house on the Internet looks like a House of Blues to the major labels that have squeezed fans and artists for decades. Shed no tears for an industry that thought $18.99 and up was a brilliant price to charge for CDs.

Artists who are free from their contractual obligations to major labels can choose to experiment with how they want to distribute their music. Prince put a couple of million free CDs in a British newspaper, and sold out concert after concert in London.

The move by Radiohead to offer In Rainbows at a name your price rate has been followed by Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor hinting at distributing his music in a non-music label kind of way.

That crack in the music label’s wall of control shows signs of spreading. The Telegraph named Oasis and Jamiroquai as a couple of bands ready to emulate Radiohead’s example.

The story also cited Alan McGee, manager of The Charlatans, in suggesting that his band and acts like famed Manchester scenesters Happy Mondays may be positioned to follow the Radiohead example.

“How do you get them profile?” he asked, regarding these bands that were once big but simply do not get the exposure of other acts. “You give away the record.”

Oasis has been very big, definitely in the conversation when talking about Radiohead or NIN, and their next single will be a download-only track. They can offer an iTunes-like price, but instead of watching a label chow down on 70 percent of the sale, or more, Oasis keeps the money, less expenses.

We would be thrilled to see vociferous Napster critics, Metallica, follow this example. It would be a nice way to apologize for ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’.