Monday, January 11, 2010

Questioning why we need Hollywood (idea for Netflix)

I am no lawyer by any means but I honestly dont understand why Netflix "needs" Hollywood to get any streaming done at all. Take the competitor Red Box for example. They buy all of their DVD's from retail and Hollywood can't touch them legally or their profits (much to the anger of Hollywood). So the question remains why does any company need Hollywood's permission to do anything?

So here is what I propose:
Netflix buys a certain number of DVD's, lets say 10k (I have no idea how much they actually buy of one movie). Lets then say that they get a recording of the movie for streaming purposes without Hollywood's help and without breaking the encryption on the DVD (the key part to this idea). (Ripping it through the analog interface of say a VGI connector would not be great quality but we're talking streaming here so quality is not going to match the DVD to begin with) They then stream the movie to ONLY 10k people at a time (the other key part). Put another way, you are basically renting a digital copy of the movie. Fair use guidelines currently allow us to make backups of things and also allow us to stream those digital back ups from one device to another. This way Netflix gets leverage over Hollywood and forces them to negotiate with Netflix since this way they don't need Hollywood to stream things. But because Netflix can only stream to the # of people that they have DVD's for they will have to implement a queue system for new releases. So the queue reserves the digital for you to watch until you and when you do the next person in the queue can stream it. Very simple. (and then I get to stream New Releases and the entire Netflix catalog of DVDs!) Win-Win!

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Questioning how to simply end lobbying in Washington?

This is the sole reason I do not vote. It doesn’t matter who you vote for or what party they are in. Politicians will be influenced by lobbyist and big corps. But here's the rub, for some reason our court system seems to think that giving money to someone's campaign is the same as speech! I don't know how they legally came to this conclusion, but frankly that doesn’t make any sense.

Here is my solution:
A politician is required to recues him/herself from any committee or vote or amendment that directly or indirectly affects a company that donates them money over the amount that single person can.

But, no one would be able to vote on anything, you say. Exactly. The point I am trying to make here is that any corp or business that donates or has access to a senator or congressman above and beyond what I as citizen have will have more influence over the vote.

This obviously could not be a law, because the courts would be able to interfere. It would need to be a rule of conduct or house proceedings etc.

If you still want to argue against this then I have one question for you: Let’ say a big company like ATT was told that any election campaign they donated too and the person won, that that person would not be able to vote on any issue that involved them. Would they still donate the money? If the answer is yes, then this rule would not hurt the election process. If the answer is no, then clearly campaign contributions are not free speech and are bribery.