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What you're describing is a world with major leagues only. The farm leagues are what drops away, and over time, the whole thing weakens. People at the top righ

by alexqgb 14y ago

What you're describing is a world with major leagues only. The farm leagues are what drops away, and over time, the whole thing weakens. People at the top right now got their starts in the 1990's Indy boom. What you're seeing now is like the light from a distant galaxy. My point is that the commensurate runway for the here and now is caving in on itself. "But Merchandising" is the worst argument ever, since the range of material that can work in this paradigm is astonishingly narrow. Also, you're not getting reliable information from TorrentFreak. I'm sorry, but these people just aren't going to give you straight story. If they had any integrity, they'd account for inflation (adjusting for that, and the peak Box Office year was actually 2002). Also, they wouldn't cherry-pick by limiting their analysis to box office revenues while ignoring the declines from every other sales channel. Here's a much more realistic look at what life is really like: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/business/la-fi-ct-film-pirate-20100928 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/28/business/la-fi-ct-fi.... Again, this is the future you're looking at. The starvation that's setting in at this level is what people who care about the future of these mediums should be focused on. What's really awful about this is that vector for piracy isn't people swapping stuff among themselves. Personally, I don't have a problem with that. That's like playing music at parties. It's part of human life. The issue is sites that aggregate pirated content to make money selling advertising. Those are the people I want to see thrown in jail. And I want to fine the living shit out of the advertisers who appear there. Not that they chose the outlets - that's the work of their ad buyers who are invariably third parties. The point is to drive those fuckers out of business too by making sure advertisers suffer enough pain to ensure that their ads aren't being served on illegitimate sites. Once they start having to pay serious fines, they'll stop doing business with people who can't guarantee that their ads won't show up in shitty places. Again, this isn't some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law. This is people building building layers of commercial enterprise around the amazing "free" resource that is pirated IP. I'm sorry, but no fucking way. And this doesn't require an Orwellian police state to deal with. People making money in this scenario all have corporate offices and return addresses (e.g. Grooveshark). All that's needed is an arrest warrant and a hearing.

deleted 14y ago
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ynniv 14y ago
The problem isn't "some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law". Cheap hard drives capable of storing every movie worth watching already exist. Flash media capable of storing a year's worth of new interesting movies are about the same expense. Replace "a DVD" in your scenario with "every movie more than a year old" and it complicates your position. If lots of guys share "every movie more than a year old" with their fathers-in-law, who cares about sharing online? Sharing online is dangerous, and slow. Maybe you get the absolute latest media, but most of the latest media won't survive the test of time anyway. You think that shutting down the ad supported streaming services will solve the problem, but they're small fry compared to what's coming. By the time I send my kids to college, they will take with them a phone capable of storing 2,000 TB: enough capacity for everything that has established classic value in human history, in their pocket. Everyone will. Recognizing that online sharing is slow and risky and mostly important for the last year's worth of unevaluated new media, they could basically forego the public Internet altogether during their studies. They wouldn't be sharing media with their new friends because their friends would also already have everything that matters. They'll pay to watch the latest movies, but outside of box office sales no one will have any idea how popular movies actually are because there will be no external record of performances and the number of "copies" of a movie that exist will approach the number of personal computing devices. Grooveshark generating revenue off of unlicensed media might sting, but in less than a decade the ability to know who has a copy of a piece of media and how many times it has been watched is going to disappear completely. It will certainly take an Orwellian state to enforce copyright then.

by alexqgb 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ynniv 14y ago

The problem isn't "some guy sharing a DVD with his father-in-law". Cheap hard drives capable of storing every movie worth watching already exist. Flash media capable of storing a year's worth of new interesting movies are about the same expense. Replace "a DVD" in your scenario with "every movie more than a year old" and it complicates your position. If lots of guys share "every movie more than a year old" with their fathers-in-law, who cares about sharing online? Sharing online is dangerous, and slow. Maybe you get the absolute latest media, but most of the latest media won't survive the test of time anyway. You think that shutting down the ad supported streaming services will solve the problem, but they're small fry compared to what's coming. By the time I send my kids to college, they will take with them a phone capable of storing 2,000 TB: enough capacity for everything that has established classic value in human history, in their pocket. Everyone will. Recognizing that online sharing is slow and risky and mostly important for the last year's worth of unevaluated new media, they could basically forego the public Internet altogether during their studies. They wouldn't be sharing media with their new friends because their friends would also already have everything that matters. They'll pay to watch the latest movies, but outside of box office sales no one will have any idea how popular movies actually are because there will be no external record of performances and the number of "copies" of a movie that exist will approach the number of personal computing devices. Grooveshark generating revenue off of unlicensed media might sting, but in less than a decade the ability to know who has a copy of a piece of media and how many times it has been watched is going to disappear completely. It will certainly take an Orwellian state to enforce copyright then.