Apple’s Massive Numbers and Some Context

Of all the great nuggets pulled off the web by MG Siegler yesterday regarding Apple’s earnings call, my favorite is this one:

Apple’s profit last quarter was $3 billion more than all of Hollywood’s gross box office receipts for all of last year, notes Eric Spiegelman via Anthony De Rosa.

So… Apple tired of playing games with Hollywood? No problem. It can take a small portion of its almost $100 billion in cash and just buy it.

[My apologies to anyone who read the oddly posted version yesterday. It’s gone now. Some weird WordPress hiccup. Below is the actually completed version I meant to publish.]

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Here’s the question that is going to screw Chris Dodd: who do you trust more, the tech industry or Hollywood?

Once upon a time, Americans spent all of our free time in movie theaters and in front of television, reading newspapers and paging through magazines. Once upon a time we believed in the folks who ran those businesses and starred on those screens. When Ed Sullivan said smoke Kent cigarettes and use Wisk laundry detergent, America did. When Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was bad, America agreed. We had faith in Cary Grant and James Stewart and John Wayne. We believed that the newspapers and magazines were telling us the news we needed to know, straight up.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, that faith began to falter and by the 1990s and into the new millennium, that faith was gone. When a starlet promoted a brand we asked how much is she getting paid? When the Times wrote a story we asked where’s the bias? We became cynical, we stopped believing what we were told, believing that the person or entity telling us had an agenda.

If time is an indicator, clearly the tech industry is trusted more. Now we don’t read papers, we read Twitter, we watch YouTube, we follow our friends on Facebook, and we search for opinions we care about on Google. Somewhere between 1970 and 2010, we stopped trusting old media and started trusted tech.

So jack-ass Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association, can say on Fox News that he’s going to take his bribe money and go home if the Congress he bought doesn’t get in line. But Chris Dodd doesn’t understand that the MPAA isn’t trusted enough anymore to make those claims.

What Chris Dodd doesn’t understand is that PIPA and SOPA just woke the lumbering giant, the tech industry he just tried to screw. And if that lumbering giant decided it will take center stage in guiding this country politically in the 21st Century, Chris Dodd and the rest of his old world media politicians better watch out.

Because America doesn’t trust you anymore.

Dodd Calls for Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Meet

I really hope Chris Dodd does what he says and sits down with the tech industry. And I really hope that this statement does not indicate that Chris Dodd and the rest of those backing PIPA and SOPA think that they would have been more successful if they just would have moved quicker.

But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington’s savviest players — not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America — signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism.

What Dodd, the MPAA, RIAA and everyone else backing these bills needs to understand is that this isn’t about money, it isn’t even about piracy. This is about government being able to run rough-shod over what services people use. If SOPA/PIPA backers brought a reasonable bill to the tech industry that was actually aimed at cutting down on piracy and not shutting down web sites without a judges review (you know, innocent before proven guilty), my guess is we’d back it.

The biggest problem, though, that those backers don’t understand (and don’t seem to want to) is that the power to slow piracy is already in their hands. I’m going to say this in capital letters so hopefully someone over there hears it:

THIS IS ABOUT GIVING US REASONABLY PRICED CONTENT WHEREVER WE WANT IT.

This isn’t rocket science.

How in the world is Apple going to keep textbooks up-to-date and not lose your highlighting and note positions?

Did Apple come up with some magical new way of marking the beginning and end of the highlight area? The obvious way is to store the start character position and length (or end character position). But what happens if a word changes before that section? Do they, in essence, track changes and figure out how many characters to adjust the highlight position? What if a word changes in the middle? Do they know where it is and can adjust the highlight length? What happens if the entire passage you highlighted is deleted by the author?

Or do they do what Amazon did: throw away your notes and make your start over? (Bad. Very bad.)