6 ms·

What changes to copyright law would decrease piracy, yet still incentive content creation? I'm genuinely interested if anyone here has any ideas; it seems like

What changes to copyright law would decrease piracy, yet still incentive content creation? I'm genuinely interested if anyone here has any ideas; it seems like a very difficult problem.

thwarted 17y ago
I think first we must ask if content creation truly needs to incentived. That content would go uncreated, and that we'd somehow lose out on content that needs to be incentived in order to be created, and that said content is somehow more valuable than content that doesn't need an incentive to be created, seems like a pretty big assumption.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Pirates go after the multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters moreso than art school film projects. Revealed preferences seem to suggest that people often prefer media which has a non-trivial cost of production. Pirates dig Avatar, too. And there will be no Avatar when they can no longer charge for it.
  - actf 17y ago
    I don't I buy that argument without data to back it up. I'd hypothesize that the amount of piracy a title gets is directly proportional to its popularity. Sure with an indie title you have fans that are more sympathetic to the producer, but with mass market titles you have the entire mass-market demographic. Do you really think that the number of people in the mass-market who are too lazy, dumb, or otherwise choose not to pirate out-weigh the ratio that sympathize with indie producers? Show us some statistics please if you're going to make this argument.
    - jacoblyles 17y ago
      >"I'd hypothesize that the amount of piracy a title gets is directly proportional to its popularity." I'd hypothesize that its popularity is directly related to its production values and budget, with a few exceptions. That is, the more popular media is the kind of creation that needs to be incentivized, because its expensive. I've seen people who aren't even particularly tech savvy pirate Hollywood movies and major label music. It seems to me that pirates are killing the very content makers whose products they most enjoy. I don't have any statistics or evidence beyond the unanimity of my personal experience and observation. Could you give me statistics that show people pirate low-budget content more than the reverse?
  - thwarted 17y ago
    Art school film projects are created to satisfy a class requirements -- few people want the linked list implementation some freshman CS student wrote. That being said, piracy is often asserted as occurring by those who intend to financially exploit their output, a film school student who achieved a wider audience would most likely be ecstatic if their work was "pirated" and achieved wide exposure. However, there's little demand for film school student work because it's not marketed. And there's nothing saying that just because something is marketed (or has a big marketing budget), has wide exposure, there is demand for it means that it's actually good, valuable and worth having been created. Admittedly, that can't even be measured until consumption occurs and people experience it, which may just mean that pre-paying for content creation before having a chance to judge if it's worth it having been created or not (baring reputation of the creator) ends up financing the wrongs things -- we've all been in the situation of having paid $10 to see a movie that's barely worth 50 cents. Not all creative output needs to be blockbusters to be considered high worth.
- dkimball 17y ago
  I think the assumption is sound. The kind of content that doesn't need to be incentivized to be created, is the kind of content that is created for a purpose other than "to be good content of the type in question." We see how this works out in the historical patronage system; before the development of copyrights, most reproducible art (poetry and the like) was created not to sell, but to flatter some aristocratic bigwig -- that's why its conventions were so stubbornly moribund, and why it took something like 1400 years for the novel to be reinvented after the end of the Western Roman Empire. I think this is a particularly alarming situation in regard to computer games; it would mean that the average game would probably be a cheaply-produced advertising piece -- imagine a world in which the Burger King promotional games outnumber _Jagged Alliance_ and _Final Fantasy 6_ by an even larger margin than they do now. I think that we can get a hint about what would happen by looking at the Arab world, where piracy is unusually rampant and the only active game development is done by Muslim fundamentalists...

What changes to copyright law would decrease piracy, yet still incentive content creation? I'm genuinely interested if anyone here has any ideas; it seems like a very difficult problem.

thwarted 17y ago

I think first we must ask if content creation truly needs to incentived. That content would go uncreated, and that we'd somehow lose out on content that needs to be incentived in order to be created, and that said content is somehow more valuable than content that doesn't need an incentive to be created, seems like a pretty big assumption.

jacoblyles 17y ago
Pirates go after the multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters moreso than art school film projects. Revealed preferences seem to suggest that people often prefer media which has a non-trivial cost of production. Pirates dig Avatar, too. And there will be no Avatar when they can no longer charge for it.
- actf 17y ago
  I don't I buy that argument without data to back it up. I'd hypothesize that the amount of piracy a title gets is directly proportional to its popularity. Sure with an indie title you have fans that are more sympathetic to the producer, but with mass market titles you have the entire mass-market demographic. Do you really think that the number of people in the mass-market who are too lazy, dumb, or otherwise choose not to pirate out-weigh the ratio that sympathize with indie producers? Show us some statistics please if you're going to make this argument.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    >"I'd hypothesize that the amount of piracy a title gets is directly proportional to its popularity." I'd hypothesize that its popularity is directly related to its production values and budget, with a few exceptions. That is, the more popular media is the kind of creation that needs to be incentivized, because its expensive. I've seen people who aren't even particularly tech savvy pirate Hollywood movies and major label music. It seems to me that pirates are killing the very content makers whose products they most enjoy. I don't have any statistics or evidence beyond the unanimity of my personal experience and observation. Could you give me statistics that show people pirate low-budget content more than the reverse?
- thwarted 17y ago
  Art school film projects are created to satisfy a class requirements -- few people want the linked list implementation some freshman CS student wrote. That being said, piracy is often asserted as occurring by those who intend to financially exploit their output, a film school student who achieved a wider audience would most likely be ecstatic if their work was "pirated" and achieved wide exposure. However, there's little demand for film school student work because it's not marketed. And there's nothing saying that just because something is marketed (or has a big marketing budget), has wide exposure, there is demand for it means that it's actually good, valuable and worth having been created. Admittedly, that can't even be measured until consumption occurs and people experience it, which may just mean that pre-paying for content creation before having a chance to judge if it's worth it having been created or not (baring reputation of the creator) ends up financing the wrongs things -- we've all been in the situation of having paid $10 to see a movie that's barely worth 50 cents. Not all creative output needs to be blockbusters to be considered high worth.
dkimball 17y ago
I think the assumption is sound. The kind of content that doesn't need to be incentivized to be created, is the kind of content that is created for a purpose other than "to be good content of the type in question." We see how this works out in the historical patronage system; before the development of copyrights, most reproducible art (poetry and the like) was created not to sell, but to flatter some aristocratic bigwig -- that's why its conventions were so stubbornly moribund, and why it took something like 1400 years for the novel to be reinvented after the end of the Western Roman Empire. I think this is a particularly alarming situation in regard to computer games; it would mean that the average game would probably be a cheaply-produced advertising piece -- imagine a world in which the Burger King promotional games outnumber _Jagged Alliance_ and _Final Fantasy 6_ by an even larger margin than they do now. I think that we can get a hint about what would happen by looking at the Arab world, where piracy is unusually rampant and the only active game development is done by Muslim fundamentalists...