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> How about instead... industries that create easily copied content get with the 21st century and stop bitching. I like the ideal of what you're saying, but I
by stoney 15y ago
> How about instead... industries that create easily copied content get with the 21st century and stop bitching.
I like the ideal of what you're saying, but I worry about the practicality of it. I don't see how you could finance a huge blockbuster movie without having some guarantee that you would have exclusive rights to exploit that content for some limited period (which is effectively what copyright is about).
Sure, the harm to the producer isn't measurable if you download a movie from the internet. But I don't think that would scale to the wider population - if downloading for free became the standard way of getting movies, how would they recoup the production costs (I guess if you can answer that question then you could become very wealthy!).
Maybe there's some painful expectation realignment due from those whose salaries are paid by making movies (I don't think we'd be short of good actors if they were paid thousands instead of millions per movie). Could they produce the same quality of movie at a massively lower cost? Another question that if you could answer you could make yourself a lot of money.
- danenania 15y agoI don't feel like any of those things are problems. If it really isn't possible to make a profit making blockbuster movies without invasive liberty-destroying laws, then so be it. There are lots of potentially great things that just aren't profitable to produce in practice. Why are movies so special? That said, there would still be huge demand without IP--I think people could figure something out.
- bcaulf 15y agoI'm pretty much in your corner--I think copyrights and patents have been extended and abused and need major reform. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. It sounds like you are happy to sacrifice Hollywood movies. Fine. But there are so many other creative activities that do require some form of copyright or patent protection and enforcement in order to generate revenue. Do you really think we would still have professional studio musicians and recording engineers, journalists, fiction writers, critics, copy editors, if all copying were legal? Do you want to ditch all of that and be left with only amateur work? Or maybe we can have extensive product placement in all creative works, so there's some revenue source. Linux and Wikipedia are amazing but I don't think their model applies to everything.