Posted by Touchmonkey Link: The full interview here
on 9/11/2009, 12:50 am, in reply to "I don't know squat about the Google Books project."
There was an interesting interview with Joss Whedon a while back, not so much about the google books thing but relevant none the less - excerpt below.
Whedon:
We can't accept anything remotely like [our current situation] with the studios.
When the studios talk about the difficulty of monetizing the Internet, they're not lying. There are a lot of paradigms wherein you aren't making that much money. But it's all pure money for them because they have these libraries they can just put on. They're really not interested in putting on original stuff because they can just throw the libraries on and make free money off of that. None of us is in that position.
For [the studios] not to offer the creative community a percentage of what they make -- they say, "oh, it's too difficult" and "we're not going to make any money" -- is disingenuous to the point of criminality. What they're making is pure profit. For them to shut out the people who actually created the content is something that should be looked into by a federal investigatory committee.
Knowledge@Wharton: It sounds like you want what you've done with "Dr. Horrible" to serve as a model for similar original content.
Whedon: I do.
Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think the likelihood of that is?
Whedon: That largely depends on a number of people -- one of whom, sadly, is me. This could just stand out as Camelot and disappear. Or it can be a model that is built on. And I'm one of the people who needs to be building on it. That's something I'm looking into right now.
I'm not a business man. I'm also not a techie. My ideas on how to monetize the Internet for independent productions are ideas that other people have already had. But I am in a position to try to take advantage of them in such a way that we get a toehold in this medium and [establish] a system of creating some original content before the giant companies sweep in and fence it all off.
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