Re: [dvd-discuss] 2001 Best year ever for movies

["Peter D. Junger" <junger(at)samsara.law.cwru.edu>]

microlenz@earthlink.net writes:

: 
: Hmmm...De Vany is at UC Irvine and consults with the Motion Picture
: industry and he has a paper showing that the Sherman AntiTrust act 
: doesn't apply to movies or shouldn't have 50 yrs ago My skeptics 
: meter jumped a couple of points. Can't say I've read any of the 
: papers just glanced at them. I'll agree that it isn't a Gaussian 
: world (and even Galton never claimed so. He merely stated that the 
: Gaussian 1 or 2 sigma fit a large number of situations). the problem 
: has been with the tail and I'll agree with De Vany on that Now 
: fitting the tail of distribution from statistical data is pretty 
: difficult but Im skeptical of accepting the conclusions for such a 
: fit... More sophisticated mathematics than P&L but the same problem-
: make the assumptions so the model can be made to do something but 
: that something doesn't really justify applying the conclusions as 
: "scientifically proven" It's interesting that.He speaks a lot
: about complex revenue dynamics and information cascades but concludes 
: in one paper that
: "The audience makes a movie a hit and no amount of \star power" or
: marketing can alter that. The real star is the movie. "

There are quite a few article out there concluding that the income from
movies fits a Pareto distribution.  (The point is made among other
places in _Butterfly_ economics.  If this conclusion is accepted
the insurmountable problem of calculating the amount of copyright
protection needed to encourage the production of movies would seem to
get even more difficult.

And does it also suggest that extensive ``piracy'' of a movie is likely
to make the movie a box office success?

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu   
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