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

[microlenz(at)earthlink.net]

TOUCHE!

The piracy of inferior copies may create word or mouth advertising 
that increases box office sales for people who want to experience the 
film or people who want to buy DVD to have their own personal 
experience! 

I doubt that Hollywierd wants to hear that one. 

Mathematically, the fundamental problem with all the distribution 
fitting is that there is always some error associated with fitting 
the distribution on the main lobe (which is where all the date is you 
are trying to fit it to is) and the tails which is being fit with 
very little date because the tails are rare events and are very 
succeptable to what the main lobe is doing. But to be concerned about 
what the tails are doing is fixating upon the extreme with little 
information and missing the majority.....I've done enough 
distribution fitting over the last 20 yrs that whenever somebody 
tells me they got "it" my reaction is "Oh yeah......and do you really 
think you understand it or have proven anything?

To:             	dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject:        	Re: [dvd-discuss] 2001 Best year ever for movies 
Date sent:      	Tue, 12 Mar 2002 00:21:58 -0500
From:           	"Peter D. Junger" <junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu>
Send reply to:  	dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.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   
>         NOTE: junger@pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu no longer exists