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You seem to think that any law is enforceable and with that basis, your arguments make more sense. But if I successfully lobbied and passed a law saying that an

by ynniv 14y ago

You seem to think that any law is enforceable and with that basis, your arguments make more sense. But if I successfully lobbied and passed a law saying that anyone who swore, in public or in private, owed me a nickel, that law wouldn't last long. People wouldn't obey it, and sufficient application of force and surveillance to successfully enforce would only result in riots in the streets. There is more to lawmaking than desire. The problem is that technology has changed our reality. Making the artifact of media used to be difficult, hence profitable, centralized, and regulatable. In that context, protection is easy and acceptable. If a rogue publisher bucked the system, you could march in, trash his equipment and send the other publishers a signal. Now the equipment is in the pocket of hundreds of millions of people, for completely different reasons that are more important than movies. This TPB article is about one form of online sharing that is actually pretty easy to track. What you need to consider is offline sharing, which is next to impossible to track. Today's desktop hard drive can store roughly 2,000 movies, which with proper curation is basically every movie that matters. In five years, hard drives should be able to store 16 times that - certainly every movie and song that matters. Families will keep an encrypted heirloom drive of every piece of media they value, and share it when no one is looking. If searched, they would present a different file listing. What will you do then? How can you regulate something that you cannot see? You can try to burn a couple of offenders at the stake, but that's only going to make you look like a monster. I wish that I had an answer for you, but I don't yet, and neither is it my responsibility to have one. I can only tell you that times are changing. This constant refrain of finding a new business model is not to throw you out of the castle, but to warn you of the coming storm. The truth is that as much as we would like to help, as profitable as it would be to help, we can't figure out how to prevent copying. As far as we can tell, no one can prevent copying without outlawing computers entirely. So no, we are not an ignorant mob storming the vineyard. We are an intelligent mob trying to save those old vines from the coming eternal frost, and hoping that someone figures out how to grow them somewhere else. The destruction is out of our control. Apple and Amazon are doing the best jobs with the iTunes and Kindle stores, but even those look like passing fads when you could have a local copy of every movie, song, and book that has ever been notable. I hope that you realize that I would love to help you, WE would love to help you, if we had any idea how. Every VC would fund someone who could make this happen. All that we know right now is that legislation will not work, and will have vicious unintended consequences.

alexqgb 14y ago
Anti-copying legislation won't work - I grant you that - but this is hardly the extent of all legislative possibility. What the media industries need is a box office. A point where people pay up front, then get the show delivered. And if everything is available everywhere all the time, then there needs to be a tax on life that covers the costs of what they do. Essentially , it's about creating a giant pool of money and a giant pool of media. People can stream, copy, play, or have, whatever they like for free. Corporations, on the other hand, must pay. If you're a store, and advertiser, a movie theater, a school, a business, a church - any entity that exists by virtue of a corporate charter must risk loosing that charter if they don't stream everything they touch through an auditable system that is used to distribute the pool of money according to the levels of interest that different things within it attract. Corporate entities, unlike humans, don't (or shouldn't) have 1st or 4th Amendment rights. We should be able to treat them the same way we treat robots: artificial things designed specifically to serve. And corporate entities also operate in the tangible world, and are in a position to collect money to fill the pool through the course of their activities. Essentially, this is a special tax. If a company wants the benefits of operating in a thriving culture (of which there are many) they can do their part to support it by serving as de-facto box offices. This is a rough idea, I know, and one that raises more questions than it answers. And it's not post-copyright in the sense that copyright would still function at the corporate level. What it shows is a way to think about paying for work in a Constitutionally permissible fashion while avoiding the nightmare scenario of total surveillance at the individual level.
- ynniv 14y ago
  This doesn't seem like a good deal for any involved. As sort of an NEA for movies with a popularity based disbursement instead of money up front. Not only will people complain about additional taxes or special interests (regardless of the long history of public art funding), but the customer (entity responsible for allocating funds) ends up being corporations and institutions. I doubt they will nurture the kind of art that you're looking to protect. What about a voluntary optional pricing system, a la Reznor's Ghosts[1]? Lucas also made a substantial amount of money from merchandising, which is far easier to regulate[2]. Also, box office revenues are still high[3]. That only helps about a hundred films a year, but it still generates healthy revenue for major studios. [1 http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/reznors-one-wee.html http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/re... ] [2 http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-revenue/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-reve...] [3 http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-box-office-record-121231/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-bo...]

by ynniv 14y ago

alexqgb 14y ago

Anti-copying legislation won't work - I grant you that - but this is hardly the extent of all legislative possibility. What the media industries need is a box office. A point where people pay up front, then get the show delivered. And if everything is available everywhere all the time, then there needs to be a tax on life that covers the costs of what they do. Essentially , it's about creating a giant pool of money and a giant pool of media. People can stream, copy, play, or have, whatever they like for free. Corporations, on the other hand, must pay. If you're a store, and advertiser, a movie theater, a school, a business, a church - any entity that exists by virtue of a corporate charter must risk loosing that charter if they don't stream everything they touch through an auditable system that is used to distribute the pool of money according to the levels of interest that different things within it attract. Corporate entities, unlike humans, don't (or shouldn't) have 1st or 4th Amendment rights. We should be able to treat them the same way we treat robots: artificial things designed specifically to serve. And corporate entities also operate in the tangible world, and are in a position to collect money to fill the pool through the course of their activities. Essentially, this is a special tax. If a company wants the benefits of operating in a thriving culture (of which there are many) they can do their part to support it by serving as de-facto box offices. This is a rough idea, I know, and one that raises more questions than it answers. And it's not post-copyright in the sense that copyright would still function at the corporate level. What it shows is a way to think about paying for work in a Constitutionally permissible fashion while avoiding the nightmare scenario of total surveillance at the individual level.

ynniv 14y ago
This doesn't seem like a good deal for any involved. As sort of an NEA for movies with a popularity based disbursement instead of money up front. Not only will people complain about additional taxes or special interests (regardless of the long history of public art funding), but the customer (entity responsible for allocating funds) ends up being corporations and institutions. I doubt they will nurture the kind of art that you're looking to protect. What about a voluntary optional pricing system, a la Reznor's Ghosts[1]? Lucas also made a substantial amount of money from merchandising, which is far easier to regulate[2]. Also, box office revenues are still high[3]. That only helps about a hundred films a year, but it still generates healthy revenue for major studios. [1 http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/reznors-one-wee.html http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/turn_it_up/2008/03/re... ] [2 http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-revenue/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/star-wars-total-franchise-reve...] [3 http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-box-office-record-121231/ http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-hollywood-sets-10-billion-bo...]