3 ms·

This notion of supply works if the producer has an enforceable monopoly on production and distribution of the content. While the big studios do have a monopoly

• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > For all practical purposes, once a work is pirated it is effectively supplied by a large number of individual actors within the market, and not the original distributor. Which just means that content producers are forced to raise unit price on the first few units to amortize the fixed costs over a shorter window (and focussing appeal to that narrow audience willing to pay those higher costs over that shorter window.) Or, why whenever there is a widely-supported in-theater feature that widely available consumer devices don't support (or at least, don't support well for pirated content) -- whether its 3D or higher frame rates or something else -- movies will tend to make heavy use of it.
• snowwrestler 12y ago
  > For all practical purposes, once a work is pirated it is effectively supplied by a large number of individual actors within the market, and not the original distributor. Yes but the question is not whether something is possible, but whether it should be legal, and what enforcement options should be made available to the government. All property rights are legally granted monopolies. There is nothing inherent in the physical properties of, say, a bottle of water that creates or protects the supplier's rights. Instead, society has created a set of legal rules that govern the relationships between the supplier and its distributors and customers. Likewise, society has created rules that create the concept of copyright to govern those relationships. In discussions of piracy, the degree and manner in which the law enforces IP rights is the very topic of discussion; assuming that such enforcement is impossible is simply a neat trick to try to win the argument before actually having it. It is incredibly easy to pick up a bottle of water and walk out of a store without paying. The ease with which a law can be violated is not disproof that the law is needed. In fact, it was the very ease of distribution that led to the creation of copyright in the first place. Prior to the printing press there was little need or concept of copyright; the physical difficulty of copying a book was sufficient protection. After the printing press, when authors started having their books quickly copied and sold by others--that was when the foundations of copyright were laid. So: arguing today that because it's easy to copy, it should be legal to copy, flies in the face of history and logic. The easier it is to violate property rights, the more important (not less) legal protections become. The cost/benefit of protection vs. innovation is a great topic for discussion! My point is just that it's not insightful or helpful to try to misuse basic economics to disprove the laws that govern economic relationships in the first place.