No sympathy for business that depends so heavily on obstructing innovation that it requires special laws. The enforcement of these laws is a clear case of socialized costs with privatized profit.
At least they don't request that every transport company has to police the cargo on their behalf and remove anything that the dealers say is a car (to be later decided that maybe it was not a car after all, or maybe a car but one that does not threaten their monopoly.)
Downloading copies of "Gears of War" is not "innovation", and the laws against copying aren't any more "special" than the laws against fraud or embezzlement or any of the other ways of violating peoples' property rights that aren't in the Bible. Our whole system of existence depends fundamentally on people being able to depend on the government to protect their rights. This is true even when technology renders makes it easy to violate those rights.
Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale.
We need to stop making these silly analogies. Only then will we be able to attack the real problem - that we have no historical guidance on how to tackle piracy, and have not yet come up with a way that makes sense.
> Fraud and embezzlement cause actual material harm to people. If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale.
This is a ridiculous trope. Say I take a Luis Vuitton bag from a store, leaving an amount of money that precisely compensates LVMH for the cost of replacing and restocking the bag, along with the fair rental value of the bag during the time until it is restocked. No harm no foul right? LVMH has not been materially harmed, right? They are in exactly the same position they would be if I hadn't taken the bag. Since I compensated them for the marginal cost of the bag, all they have lost is the potential profit on a potential sale, and there is after all no guarantee I could have afforded the bag anyway, right?
In our system, we don't measure harm in terms of the cost to put someone back to the status quo ante. We also include the expected profit. E.g. if you breach a contract with someone, which causes them to lose $200, you don't just owe them the $200, you owe them the $200 plus their expected profit on the contract. We do this because in our system, people are entitled to the benefit of the bargain. People are entitled to profit from the difference between what the market will pay for a good and the cost of producing the good, even when the marginal cost of that good approaches zero.
Re: analogies, analogies are tremendously valuable. They show us how things that seem different can actually be understood in terms of familiar concepts. The harm from copying is actually a perfect scenario in which analogies are useful. The common refrain among people who are pro-piracy is that the marginal cost of a copy approaches zero, so "no harm" is done by copying. This is based on the fallacy that digital copying is somehow sui generis. Yet, analogizing to other situations shows us that in the rest of the law, we don't protect the marginal cost--we protect the sale price. We protect peoples' right to profit from the market price of their products. The fact that the marginal cost of producing a good is 35% of the sale price (iPhone) or 5% of the sale price (LVMH bag), or 1% of the sale price (textbook) or 0.1% of the sale price (an MP3) is irrelevant.
If someone pirates a game, has the publisher been harmed? No, they've just missed out on what might have been a sale.
I can't pay the mortgage with stats from the Pirate Bay. 10,000 people viewing my film for free is satisfying on an artistic level, but 1000 people paying a $ for the privilege is what actually puts food on the table. I don't want to get into a long argument and Rayiner is making these points excellently, but I'd like to point out that profit and loss are not abstractions that happen only to already-rich people in Beverly Hills who will have to be content with only one Ferrari this year.
The ability to distribute a OS to everyone on this planet at less cost than the annual salary of one dev is certainly innovation. Piracy is not violation of a property right, since the creator would not have any stake in what I do with my copy anymore than VW has a say in who borrows my car and technology can certainly change which laws are reasonable or not.
The creator of a creative work does have a right to control how you reproduce his work, because the law gives him that right. Is this a wholly artificial construct? Yes. But so is any property right. In the state of nature there is no concept of "my." Animals in the state of nature don't "own" things. They merely possess subject to a bigger, stronger animal coming along and relieving them of possession. The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as well.
As for technology changing which laws are reasonable, that is definitely true. But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works. It has simply made it easier to violate those rights. Should the ease with which a right can be violated be a criterion for deciding which rights should be granted?
>> The idea that you can "own" a physical object and the state will defend that "ownership" with violence on your behalf is a wholly artificial construct as well.
Yes, but being able to license intellectual property is a very different thing from ownership of a car, both in the effects on my rights and in the moral basis of the law.
>>But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works.
I think the most important analogy between material and immaterial goods fifteen years ago was, that an immaterial good needed a physical medium, like a CD. And the buyer of the physical medium had after that property of a thing, and could do what he wanted ( in reasonable limits). Most importantly, as long as CDs were copied by cassettes, the buyer could supply his friends with low quality copies.
So it seems to me, that the entire idea of intellectual property revolved around the inability of most people to produce a high quality copy of the medium. In contrast, nowadays everybody could easily produce and distribute a high quality copy. So I think that with the internet the physical medium vanished and with it the part of an immaterial good which made it possible to speak about 'ownership' and 'property' in the first place. So it is certainly the case that we need a consensus, what reasonable behaviour of creators and consumers is. But I think that talk about 'ownership' is just muddinging the water. And personally I find it quite frustrating that we have all these fascinating technology which create abundance of all digitial works. And we are not allowed to actually use them, because we can not figure out how to pay creators (which has not necessarily anything to do with copying in the first place).
> Yes, but being able to license intellectual property is a very different thing from ownership of a car, both in the effects on my rights and in the moral basis of the law.
In case of rights: If I buy a car, I own it and the idea is, that I can do with it, what I want. Most importantly, when I buy a car the manufacturer has no longer any claim on the car and can for example not force me to just use one brand of gasoline. This is in contrast to intellectual property, where I do not actually own the copy, but I did only license the IP and have a contract with the creator. ( For example the MS EULA of Windows 98 did prohibit the use of it in nuclear power plants. )
On the other hand, I think that the moral basis for property rights is, that physical property is exclusive, in the sense that only one person can use a physical good at any single time. It is therefore morally wrong to steal, not because one enriches himself, but because the victim is deprived of the utility of the good. Again, this is quite different with IP, since the original 'owner' of the first copy is not deprived of the utility of 'his' copy.
“The cloud also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.”
Sorry, am I to understand that you are upset because pirates did something for free that you could have charged for? Not that I defend piracy, but this is the same song as VCRs, DVD burners, Napster, etc...
This argument is rehashed to the point where it's laughable, just like everything else that comes out of Hollywood.
It is ridiculous. This is endemic to the entertainment industry. And you're right, they (companies that the MPAA represents) have had a long time and plenty of great examples to create a service and charge for it. Pirates aren't costing them money -- they are costing themselves money.
I'm reminded of this: "HBO co-president Eric Kessler has said he thinks the move away from traditional television to an internet-based model is just a fad that will pass – a 'temporary phenomenon' tied to the down economy" [1]. This is in reference to Game of Thrones being the most pirated show two seasons in a row.
So in 2012, a major entertainment company's president thought a move to an internet delivery model is a recession induced fad...
OK, so where is the revenue stream for filmmakers? Filmmaking has been my day job for a decade, and they're not that cheap to make, even with every technological shortcut and agile technique that there is. So how can a producer recover the cost of making a film, and ideally make enough to cover the rent, bills and so on? Even the cheapest no-budget feature represents about a man-year of cumulative effort.
One possibility is to bundle your work with others and create your own stream-on-demand network. A walled garden where you publish trailers and maybe one or two free-to-access programs to YouTube with your branding on them, charge a nominal fee for access to all content and comment privileges on site, and a larger fee for site supporters who get some extra perk, signed stuff, or whatever. Stream live events on the site from time to time, allow users to interview talent, etc.
If you only have one or two things you're selling, and somebody has already downloaded and watched them, you're out of luck. But if you're bundling with other content serving diverse interests, offering the promise of new content down the road, and giving your audience something for paying that they can't get for pirating, you can set a better hook. Suddenly, when content from you or your partners is pirated, it becomes a loss-leader advertisement for your venture, and the cost of that (and benefit from it) is shared across your group. There's a site that just got featured on Reddit not too long ago, http://www.swearnet.com, that really captured my interest in this regard, if you want to see an example of how this type of thing could work in action.
Piracy always struck me as something only the biggest interests could gain anything from worrying about; an efficiency problem where so much product is being moved that getting 1-2% more of it paid for could make more sense than trying to reach 1-2% more audience, perhaps because they've already saturated their target market.
This is sort-of how the distribution industry works right now, and I agree that over the long term technology should allow us to exploit long-tail effects to do more with less, just as technology has made the movie production process much more affordable and accessible. The problem at present is that between a fall in (some) costs and the disruption of existing and long-established distribution networks (accompanied by an apparent fall in revenue), finding the investment capital is ironically tougher than ever.
I don't see anything in the WSJ article about piracy. The JSTOR article is behind a paywall, but from the preview it looks to be discussing much the same thing: The major studios are destroying the independents as a result of more control over distribution channels, greater economies of scale, larger budgets to make better movies and their ability to spread risk over a larger number of productions.
If anything that makes the argument for new distribution technologies that could allow the independents to reach greater audiences without using the distribution channels under the control of the major studios.
>OK, so where is the revenue stream for filmmakers?
Where is it right now?
There is a lot of movie piracy. Making movies is very profitable. Both statements can be, and are, true at the same time. So where's the problem?
New technologies tend to increase the amount of piracy and the amount of purchasing, because making media consumption better or easier means that people do it more, both legally and otherwise. In many cases the rate of piracy increases more than the rate of legitimate consumption, but when both increase as a result of the innovation, why prohibit it?
I love how you just throw that out blithely as if it were a well-established fact. In fact, the odds of a given film turning a profit are about 1 in 30. For a detailed examination of the economics of the film industry, I recommend the book Open Wide. For a brief introduction, try this: http://www.baselineintel.com/research-wrap?detail/C8/what_ar... and other articles on this site.
Now, part of this is skewed by the fact that many films are just bad. Not so bad they're good, so bad they're bad - incomprehensible dialog, blurry photography, murky lighting. Let's dismiss 2/3 of films as bad - that's excessive, but let's be harsh. So about 1/10 of the remaining films can make money. Half of those lack commercial elements, they're competent but terribly dull and hard to sell. Of the 5 films you have left that are competently made and have potential commercial appeal, one will sell. There's a <1% chance it will be a hit; more likely it will eventually recoup its costs via foreign sales (as a sweetener in a package) or from rental income via Netflix or the like. That takes about 5 years.
That's indie films. Big studio films tend to lose money more often than not as well. I am on first name terms with one billionaire who writes a single check to pay for all the costs of a big famous film you probably saw 4 or 5 times a year (I would prefer not to mention names). 4/5 of those films lose money despite stars, critical acclaim, excellent technical elements, and a great story. Eventually, most of them will break even - that's why you cast stars, you can extrapolate sales with reasonable accuracy once you know the opening data. But the financial destiny of most films is to offset tax liability for the small number of films that do make bank.
I own a financial interest in a number of the films I've worked on. I keep the documentation mainly for souvenir value, but I have zero expectation of ever seeing a penny from them. I find it amusing but also frustrating when you roll in here and tell me how profitable it is.
There is also the well-known phenomenon of numbers being juggled to make the movie look like it came out a loss to screw people who are only paid out of profits.
I didn't say making a movie is very profitable. That's the nature of art. Some works are going to be wildly successful, others will never make a dime. But that isn't a result of piracy, it's a characteristic of the market for artistic works regardless. And on average they make a lot of money. The major studios are posting record profits.
You're also not addressing the point: If a new technology increases piracy a lot and increases sales a little, why should it be prohibited? Why not allow it and then give the market a chance to convert those new pirates to purchasers over time by experimenting with different distribution models, so that eventually (like the VCR) it can be made to increase sales a lot and piracy a little?
Among other things, people are driven by incentives. This includes the fine folks at the MPAA and RIAA. Given that their primary goal is making money, and that rampant piracy causes them to lose money (or so they believe), they clearly have a strong incentive to keep piracy in check, as well as any forms of innovation that make piracy easier. If you account for a few other universal psychological factors (cognitive dissonance, fear of loss, human short-sightedness, desire for consistency) as well as situational factors (lots of money with which to hire lawyers and lobbyists), their actions are unsurprising. Expected, even.
Does this make them right? Of course not. But that's irrelevant.
What matters is that we as human beings comprehend our nature and strive to create systems that account for all of its idiosyncrasies. We can spend all day complaining about the immoral and illogical bad guys, but at the end of the day, human nature is human nature. If a system exists that allows for and incentives bad behavior, people will engage in bad behavior. Period.
In this particular conflict, we should be spending our effort fighting for a government that:
(a) Understands that no industry has a guaranteed "right" to continued profit in the face of technological/market changes.
(b) Affirms and upholds the true purposes of copyright and patent law as originally intended: to protect and encourage innovation for the good of the people, not to make certain people rich.
(c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo)
Of course, this is all easier said than done. But it's good to at least focus our efforts in the right direction.
> (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo)
I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the particular problem at hand here, or how it's necessarily consistent with the otherwise clear and valid argument you're making about the nature of incentives and the functioning of institutions as systems. What does "the influence of money on political process" consist of in the status quo, by what means could it be limited, and what new equilibrium do you expect to emerge if and when it is limited?
Having lots of money gives you significant advantage in dealing with our government in its current incarnation. This is especially true with the judicial branch (hiring better attorneys, surviving longer trials, etc) and the legislative as well (lobbyists, etc). I think it's pretty obvious that a contest of law should never be decided or even influenced by which party is financially better off. The fact that it can be means the system can be gamed, more or less, by those with spare money to spend.
Hence, you see big organizations like the RIAA and MPAA funding massive efforts to get alleged piracy perpetrators "settle or be sued". Should not recipients of these threats feel they have a fair chance to win should the case go to court? And would the RIAA and MPAA engage in such a strategy of their money afforded them no significant advantage?
I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what the fix is. But I would challenge anyone who says it's impossible to design a governmental system that limits/erases the influence of money.
One thing that I think would help would be to make it simpler. It would be nice if you only needed a lawyer for really really complicated cases, and the rest of the time you could trust common sense. Seems like the legislative process could be simpler too. Maybe if it was easier to get up to speed, we could reduce the need for career politicians, making lobbyists work a little harder to gain influence. This is obviously not easy.
I don't think you can erase the influence of money; if nothing else, there is a baseline of people who will simply ignore the law.
I think the list could go on. These are all outside-of-market solutions to the content industry's competition problem. The hope is that if these avenues are no longer available to the MPAA/RIAA, they will be forced to consider collaborating with modern technology solutions that give consumers more freedom, more choices, and more control (because the competitor, piracy, gives people these things already).
> I think the list could go on. These are all outside-of-market solutions to the content industry's competition problem.
In a way they are, but so are the laws against theft, fraud, embezzlement, tortious interference with a contract, you name it. You can argue about what the scope of the "right" here should be, and that is a separate argument, but once a right is established, people should have the protection of the government, within reason, in securing that right.
You probably don't oppose the fact that we don't leave protection of more traditional property rights to "market solutions." That would of course be ridiculous because you can't have markets without property rights.
I'm not sure how any of these examples necessarily reflect money as the root systemic cause of the vulnerability of the political process to being co-opted by factional interests.
If money were somehow removed from the equation, surely the same concentration of political power would exist, and the same parties would possess the same interest in directing its use; it doesn't seem that itself is a source of influence, but just a means employed in applying that influence.
So how does removing money from the politics actually prevent the MPAA, RIAA, and other cartels from using politics as a means to alter market conditions in their favor? I think we might need significantly more fundamental reforms; trying to restrict the role of money in politics, with all else being equal, might even backfire, and cause something even more concerning than money to become the dominant medium for influencing politics.
I have difficulty reconciling the community of creative professionals who are skilled enough to create the environment that amazing works of cinema emerge from and the individuals who make comments like this. Are they really so unimaginative that their solution is "filter anything that remotely resembles sketchy"?
That philosophy applied to a city like New York would prevent people from entering the city solely on the accusation that someone at one time maybe broke the law. On what planet would someone think that the value gained by implementing a policy like this would outweigh the potential for abuse and for beautiful content (read: potential inspiration for new movies) to be blacked out by a censorship screen? This doesn't even speak to the massive PR debacle that always erupts from comments like this, be it about a VCR or "the cloud."
While we're on this topic, what's the definition of insanity again?
The money men in Hollywood aren't creative people. They are managers and attorneys. When they don't want things to happen, they can draw upon the resources of the unions who are stakeholders ensuring that congress gets the message.
If at the turn of the 20th century there had been an organization, say the BWAA (Buggy Whip Association of America), I'm sure that organization would've been lobbying for the exact same kind of anti-progress laws regarding the development of automobile technology.
The shame of it is that technological innovation could actually be used by the MPAA to produce things that people want to pay money for. Instead what we have is a bunch of soon-to-be fossils thinking that they will be the first people ever in the history of humans to successfully stand in the way of progress and not be steamrolled into oblivion.
Oh, so it was them! Hong Kong was trying to pass a draconian copyright law which meant that satire of existing copyrighted works became illegal, as well as giving the option for the government to pursue offenders on behalf of copyright holders - effectively meaning the government can pursue citizens producing political satirical works.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadWe need to stop making these silly analogies. Only then will we be able to attack the real problem - that we have no historical guidance on how to tackle piracy, and have not yet come up with a way that makes sense.
This is a ridiculous trope. Say I take a Luis Vuitton bag from a store, leaving an amount of money that precisely compensates LVMH for the cost of replacing and restocking the bag, along with the fair rental value of the bag during the time until it is restocked. No harm no foul right? LVMH has not been materially harmed, right? They are in exactly the same position they would be if I hadn't taken the bag. Since I compensated them for the marginal cost of the bag, all they have lost is the potential profit on a potential sale, and there is after all no guarantee I could have afforded the bag anyway, right?
In our system, we don't measure harm in terms of the cost to put someone back to the status quo ante. We also include the expected profit. E.g. if you breach a contract with someone, which causes them to lose $200, you don't just owe them the $200, you owe them the $200 plus their expected profit on the contract. We do this because in our system, people are entitled to the benefit of the bargain. People are entitled to profit from the difference between what the market will pay for a good and the cost of producing the good, even when the marginal cost of that good approaches zero.
Re: analogies, analogies are tremendously valuable. They show us how things that seem different can actually be understood in terms of familiar concepts. The harm from copying is actually a perfect scenario in which analogies are useful. The common refrain among people who are pro-piracy is that the marginal cost of a copy approaches zero, so "no harm" is done by copying. This is based on the fallacy that digital copying is somehow sui generis. Yet, analogizing to other situations shows us that in the rest of the law, we don't protect the marginal cost--we protect the sale price. We protect peoples' right to profit from the market price of their products. The fact that the marginal cost of producing a good is 35% of the sale price (iPhone) or 5% of the sale price (LVMH bag), or 1% of the sale price (textbook) or 0.1% of the sale price (an MP3) is irrelevant.
I can't pay the mortgage with stats from the Pirate Bay. 10,000 people viewing my film for free is satisfying on an artistic level, but 1000 people paying a $ for the privilege is what actually puts food on the table. I don't want to get into a long argument and Rayiner is making these points excellently, but I'd like to point out that profit and loss are not abstractions that happen only to already-rich people in Beverly Hills who will have to be content with only one Ferrari this year.
As for technology changing which laws are reasonable, that is definitely true. But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works. It has simply made it easier to violate those rights. Should the ease with which a right can be violated be a criterion for deciding which rights should be granted?
Yes, but being able to license intellectual property is a very different thing from ownership of a car, both in the effects on my rights and in the moral basis of the law.
>>But I don't see why technology has made it less reasonable to grant ownership rights in creative works.
I think the most important analogy between material and immaterial goods fifteen years ago was, that an immaterial good needed a physical medium, like a CD. And the buyer of the physical medium had after that property of a thing, and could do what he wanted ( in reasonable limits). Most importantly, as long as CDs were copied by cassettes, the buyer could supply his friends with low quality copies.
So it seems to me, that the entire idea of intellectual property revolved around the inability of most people to produce a high quality copy of the medium. In contrast, nowadays everybody could easily produce and distribute a high quality copy. So I think that with the internet the physical medium vanished and with it the part of an immaterial good which made it possible to speak about 'ownership' and 'property' in the first place. So it is certainly the case that we need a consensus, what reasonable behaviour of creators and consumers is. But I think that talk about 'ownership' is just muddinging the water. And personally I find it quite frustrating that we have all these fascinating technology which create abundance of all digitial works. And we are not allowed to actually use them, because we can not figure out how to pay creators (which has not necessarily anything to do with copying in the first place).
How so?
On the other hand, I think that the moral basis for property rights is, that physical property is exclusive, in the sense that only one person can use a physical good at any single time. It is therefore morally wrong to steal, not because one enriches himself, but because the victim is deprived of the utility of the good. Again, this is quite different with IP, since the original 'owner' of the first copy is not deprived of the utility of 'his' copy.
“My butt also represents a threat in that it facilitates piracy, and the pirates seem to have gotten into this space first.”
I automatically see it replaced with "my butt".
Sorry, am I to understand that you are upset because pirates did something for free that you could have charged for? Not that I defend piracy, but this is the same song as VCRs, DVD burners, Napster, etc...
This argument is rehashed to the point where it's laughable, just like everything else that comes out of Hollywood.
How long until the general public accepts disruption of the status quo as the new status quo?
Are we dreaming to think that that will actually happen, are change resistance and hoarding immutable properties of human nature?
I'm reminded of this: "HBO co-president Eric Kessler has said he thinks the move away from traditional television to an internet-based model is just a fad that will pass – a 'temporary phenomenon' tied to the down economy" [1]. This is in reference to Game of Thrones being the most pirated show two seasons in a row.
So in 2012, a major entertainment company's president thought a move to an internet delivery model is a recession induced fad...
1. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/HBO-Boss-Thinks-This-Whol... (the original forbes article seems to have changed)
If you only have one or two things you're selling, and somebody has already downloaded and watched them, you're out of luck. But if you're bundling with other content serving diverse interests, offering the promise of new content down the road, and giving your audience something for paying that they can't get for pirating, you can set a better hook. Suddenly, when content from you or your partners is pirated, it becomes a loss-leader advertisement for your venture, and the cost of that (and benefit from it) is shared across your group. There's a site that just got featured on Reddit not too long ago, http://www.swearnet.com, that really captured my interest in this regard, if you want to see an example of how this type of thing could work in action.
Piracy always struck me as something only the biggest interests could gain anything from worrying about; an efficiency problem where so much product is being moved that getting 1-2% more of it paid for could make more sense than trying to reach 1-2% more audience, perhaps because they've already saturated their target market.
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/18/film-school-roger-...
and http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1803469?uid=3739560... are very much worth a read to understand why the film industry views piracy with such trepidation.
If anything that makes the argument for new distribution technologies that could allow the independents to reach greater audiences without using the distribution channels under the control of the major studios.
Where is it right now?
There is a lot of movie piracy. Making movies is very profitable. Both statements can be, and are, true at the same time. So where's the problem?
New technologies tend to increase the amount of piracy and the amount of purchasing, because making media consumption better or easier means that people do it more, both legally and otherwise. In many cases the rate of piracy increases more than the rate of legitimate consumption, but when both increase as a result of the innovation, why prohibit it?
I love how you just throw that out blithely as if it were a well-established fact. In fact, the odds of a given film turning a profit are about 1 in 30. For a detailed examination of the economics of the film industry, I recommend the book Open Wide. For a brief introduction, try this: http://www.baselineintel.com/research-wrap?detail/C8/what_ar... and other articles on this site.
Now, part of this is skewed by the fact that many films are just bad. Not so bad they're good, so bad they're bad - incomprehensible dialog, blurry photography, murky lighting. Let's dismiss 2/3 of films as bad - that's excessive, but let's be harsh. So about 1/10 of the remaining films can make money. Half of those lack commercial elements, they're competent but terribly dull and hard to sell. Of the 5 films you have left that are competently made and have potential commercial appeal, one will sell. There's a <1% chance it will be a hit; more likely it will eventually recoup its costs via foreign sales (as a sweetener in a package) or from rental income via Netflix or the like. That takes about 5 years.
That's indie films. Big studio films tend to lose money more often than not as well. I am on first name terms with one billionaire who writes a single check to pay for all the costs of a big famous film you probably saw 4 or 5 times a year (I would prefer not to mention names). 4/5 of those films lose money despite stars, critical acclaim, excellent technical elements, and a great story. Eventually, most of them will break even - that's why you cast stars, you can extrapolate sales with reasonable accuracy once you know the opening data. But the financial destiny of most films is to offset tax liability for the small number of films that do make bank.
I own a financial interest in a number of the films I've worked on. I keep the documentation mainly for souvenir value, but I have zero expectation of ever seeing a penny from them. I find it amusing but also frustrating when you roll in here and tell me how profitable it is.
You're also not addressing the point: If a new technology increases piracy a lot and increases sales a little, why should it be prohibited? Why not allow it and then give the market a chance to convert those new pirates to purchasers over time by experimenting with different distribution models, so that eventually (like the VCR) it can be made to increase sales a lot and piracy a little?
Does this make them right? Of course not. But that's irrelevant.
What matters is that we as human beings comprehend our nature and strive to create systems that account for all of its idiosyncrasies. We can spend all day complaining about the immoral and illogical bad guys, but at the end of the day, human nature is human nature. If a system exists that allows for and incentives bad behavior, people will engage in bad behavior. Period.
In this particular conflict, we should be spending our effort fighting for a government that: (a) Understands that no industry has a guaranteed "right" to continued profit in the face of technological/market changes. (b) Affirms and upholds the true purposes of copyright and patent law as originally intended: to protect and encourage innovation for the good of the people, not to make certain people rich. (c) Limits the influence of money on political process. (most importantly imo)
Of course, this is all easier said than done. But it's good to at least focus our efforts in the right direction.
I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the particular problem at hand here, or how it's necessarily consistent with the otherwise clear and valid argument you're making about the nature of incentives and the functioning of institutions as systems. What does "the influence of money on political process" consist of in the status quo, by what means could it be limited, and what new equilibrium do you expect to emerge if and when it is limited?
Hence, you see big organizations like the RIAA and MPAA funding massive efforts to get alleged piracy perpetrators "settle or be sued". Should not recipients of these threats feel they have a fair chance to win should the case go to court? And would the RIAA and MPAA engage in such a strategy of their money afforded them no significant advantage?
I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what the fix is. But I would challenge anyone who says it's impossible to design a governmental system that limits/erases the influence of money.
I don't think you can erase the influence of money; if nothing else, there is a baseline of people who will simply ignore the law.
PIPA
SOPA
DMCA takedown abuse
Foreign raid on Megaupload
Mickey-Mouse copyright extensions
huge fines for filesharing
I think the list could go on. These are all outside-of-market solutions to the content industry's competition problem. The hope is that if these avenues are no longer available to the MPAA/RIAA, they will be forced to consider collaborating with modern technology solutions that give consumers more freedom, more choices, and more control (because the competitor, piracy, gives people these things already).
In a way they are, but so are the laws against theft, fraud, embezzlement, tortious interference with a contract, you name it. You can argue about what the scope of the "right" here should be, and that is a separate argument, but once a right is established, people should have the protection of the government, within reason, in securing that right.
You probably don't oppose the fact that we don't leave protection of more traditional property rights to "market solutions." That would of course be ridiculous because you can't have markets without property rights.
If money were somehow removed from the equation, surely the same concentration of political power would exist, and the same parties would possess the same interest in directing its use; it doesn't seem that itself is a source of influence, but just a means employed in applying that influence.
So how does removing money from the politics actually prevent the MPAA, RIAA, and other cartels from using politics as a means to alter market conditions in their favor? I think we might need significantly more fundamental reforms; trying to restrict the role of money in politics, with all else being equal, might even backfire, and cause something even more concerning than money to become the dominant medium for influencing politics.
That philosophy applied to a city like New York would prevent people from entering the city solely on the accusation that someone at one time maybe broke the law. On what planet would someone think that the value gained by implementing a policy like this would outweigh the potential for abuse and for beautiful content (read: potential inspiration for new movies) to be blacked out by a censorship screen? This doesn't even speak to the massive PR debacle that always erupts from comments like this, be it about a VCR or "the cloud."
While we're on this topic, what's the definition of insanity again?
The shame of it is that technological innovation could actually be used by the MPAA to produce things that people want to pay money for. Instead what we have is a bunch of soon-to-be fossils thinking that they will be the first people ever in the history of humans to successfully stand in the way of progress and not be steamrolled into oblivion.
http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008...
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/196747/hong-kong-artists-cry-fo...