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You're confusing a good being fungible with it being non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Without legal protection, you're absolutely correct that a film cannot b
by morgante 10y ago
You're confusing a good being fungible with it being non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
Without legal protection, you're absolutely correct that a film cannot be excluded from consumption by non-payers and infinite reproducibility makes it non-rivalrous.
That doesn't make films fungible though. They are very far from being even imperfect substitutes. If I am somehow able to keep the latest Avengers film excludable then very few will be willing to accept the "substitute" of a knock-off rom com with C-list actors.
In markets, profits flow to whoever owns a monopoly.
- astazangasta 10y agoThere are plenty of non-fungible goods of this sort that are purely the result of legal constructions. The simplest example is the same movie available from two different vendors with separate digital rights systems. If I have purchased rights from one, it does not give me the right to consume the media from the other, even though it is arguably the same work. This means I can multiply the number of non-fungible versions of the same product by making it available on N different competing DRM systems.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago> They are very far from being even imperfect substitutes. If I am somehow able to keep the latest Avengers film excludable then very few will be willing to accept the "substitute" of a knock-off rom com with C-list actors. This goes too far. There are clearly better movies and worse movies, but if you have the choice between two movies of the same quality, they are basically fungible. If one of them is on the streaming service I subscribe to and the other one isn't, I know which one I'm going to watch and which one I'm not going to get around to.