Music would still be around as it has a low cost of initial production and can be performed live in concert. Studio movies would cease to exist and independent pictures would be quite small without any external funding. Oh, and no more video games.
Actually, it does. Again, when dealing with a small scale like you’re referring to. In the Legal/Not Legal sense, it’s as illegal as me downloading a few tracks. But, if you sell the thing off on the cheap once to some choad who may not have bought it at full price anyway, and he keeps it and it doesn’t resell 1000s of times throughout the globe, then it isn’t any more morally reprehensible than my situation. A foin example, Midnight Son my son!
OTOH, most serious musicians used to get court (or church) appointments to support themselves. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of an important composer before Beethoven who supported himself without court/church appointments (maybe Haydn, late in life, but he’d already practically retired by then).
Gav
Made for TV movies exist with $0 in ticket sales and free distribution. The only revenue generation is from advertising. So I’d say that is the lowest level that movies would fall to. And even then I think you are being excessively alarmist. Seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience is an experience that no TV can match. I’d still pay for tickets to go to a theatre and see a movie. Hollywood would still have revenue.
Console games wouldn’t miss a beat, since the console makers can build all sorts of esoteric encryptions into their product, Xbox style, that will keep piracy beyond the ability of the casual user. PC games would probably have to transition to smaller-budget smaller-profit type endeavors, but isn’t that the direction the industry is going in anyway?
The bottom line here is that copyright law is obsolete. It was enacted to protect business from each other, not from their consumers. Protecting businesses from their consumers in a free market setting is ludicrous.
Absolutely correct. I’m not saying the arts don’t need funding, I’m saying trying to use copyright law to force an economic incentive model onto creative activity is a poor idea. It does create an incentive to create more content, no question about that. I would question that quality of said content, and the extreme costs to society that arise from having intellectual property locked away and not usable for the public good.
[quote=“Nick_Walter”]
Absolutely correct. I’m not saying the arts don’t need funding, I’m saying trying to use copyright law to force an economic incentive model onto creative activity is a poor idea. It does create an incentive to create more content, no question about that. I would question that quality of said content, and the extreme costs to society that arise from having intellectual property locked away and not usable for the public good.[/quote]
So as long as it’s for “the public good”, why shouldn’t we just divorce folks from owning any part of their own products? What happens when “the public good” becomes a bit more pressing than divorcing people from the aural recordings of their singing? I mean, even if we accept that, say, an automobile has some inherent value due to material and labor cost, the logical conclusion is it’s perfectly acceptible to somehow force automobile makers to sell at raw material cost, not above. And by extension, their suppliers should have to sell at actual labor cost, not above. After all, the public must be as served by having folks able to locomote themselves as, say, listen to the latest hard rock exodus from whatever offshoot of GnR happens to not be coked up at the moment, right?
Why is the line drawn at music/movies/literature, rather than somewhere else, if not simply because the people who think it’s nifty to be able to take something that they legally don’t own believe it ought to be? (Well, coupled with the fact that it’s damned easy to smuggle a audio recording down a fat DSL pipe, and so far a bit more problematic to get a car down one. Give it time, though…)
The line can be drawn at such creative endeavors because linking them to economic incentives has been of dubious benefit, at best.
Linking other products directly to economic incentives has been a much clearer success… their production levels and levels of quality respond fairly well to well thought out economic incentives.
Of course, this doesn’t really answer the “is it moral?” question, but there is a good reason for why we should draw the line there.
Assumptions:
- 100% of popular TV shows are available on peer to peer networks for free without commercials within 24 hours of airing. Unpopular shows are not difficult to find and will become less so over time.
- Broadband penetration is growing rapidly and will achieve saturation within 10 years. Cost of bandwidth will drastically decrease as thousands of miles of dark fibre is lit up.
Conclusion:
- Without unbreakable DRM the television business model will shrink and inevitably, eventually, collapse.
- Commercial television will die as a medium.
Am I wrong?
[quote=“Anaxagoras”]
The line can be drawn at such creative endeavors because linking them to economic incentives has been of dubious benefit, at best.
Linking other products directly to economic incentives has been a much clearer success… their production levels and levels of quality respond fairly well to well thought out economic incentives.
Of course, this doesn’t really answer the “is it moral?” question, but there is a good reason for why we should draw the line there.[/quote]
So it’s more reasonable to take from the artists since they do it for the art in the first place?
Not sure I buy that, but it’s a concrete enough difference that I can rest a foundation on it, thanks.
What concerns me more is as technology advances, it will become more and more likely that you’ll be able to “pirate” real products (i.e. not creativity based ones). Software is there already. Someone with a few 100k can buy a CnC machine and build reasonably complex machinery that used to be the firm province of a skilled craftsman working by hand. Inasmuch as it’s just a matter of raw material costs at that point, plus the (digital) schematics to control the machine, today’s copyright discussion over music could have a few more tangible repercussions. Given that I’ve seen a tendancy for many folks to justify software piracy (economic impetus) in the same terms that music theft is being couched here, I don’t think that’s an entirely far-fetched scenario. (Other than needing the couple 100k to buy the CnC machine, but those prices will go down; they always do.)
This isn’t necessarily a continuation of any previous arguments I might have been making, but more of a response to mouselock and stusser’s last two posts.
If you both concede that technology is inevitably making production of all goods and many services a local, easily-reproducable endeavor, why is the next step in your thinking that there must be a need for DRM?
Copyright law as we know it was created as an almost offhanded concession to the need to encourage “culture production,” under the assumption that if moderate (e.g. seven years or so) protections were given to the works of artists/creators, there would be more opportunity for people to dedicate themselves full-time to their work, instead of forcing all the Victorian rock stars to have day jobs. But as copyright begins to encroach on more than traditional works (writing, music, art in general) and becomes in a digital age the cornerstone of all production, does it really make sense to continue to extend the reach and grasp of law that, at best, was designed to be a short-term catalyst?
Obviously, I don’t think it does, but I’m curious what the rationale is behind your presumption that DRM and the like is necessary to the continued health of our arts and culture, such as they are. I’m prepared to accept that the current models of mass culture art production (and presuming cheap CnC and mythical countertop nano-assemblers, everything else production) are being obsoleted as we speak, obviously.
Bonus Rhetorical Question: Which DRM system will be embraced by the Chinese in the next decade?
This isn’t necessarily a continuation of any previous arguments I might have been making, but more of a response to mouselock and stusser’s last two posts.
If you both concede that technology is inevitably making production of all goods and many services a local, easily-reproducable endeavor, why is the next step in your thinking that there must be a need for DRM?
[/quote]
Because, inasmuch as a lack of DRM now on “soft” products with copyright tends to breed a culture that thinks it has an inherent right to products simply because it’s ‘too difficult’ to lock them up reliably, I foresee that being a problem in the future when the things that we can easily reproduce without buying them extend beyond the reasonably trivial realm of media.
I spend (and will continue to spend) my days at work generating nothing but IP. I don’t make products. I don’t generate work that directly makes products. Instead I do basic research. There will always be other countries with less labor costs than the US. We have too many minimum standards to meet. It’s far easier to keep labor costs down if you don’t have to make sure that, for instance, what you pay someone is enough to actually support them and guard against inflation. If you don’t mind leaving the poor in whatever lot they’ve fallen in, and you feel no compunction to care for the elderly or infirm. Our economy, instead, will continue to transition to one that produces raw ideas and knowledge as our primary form of saleable product.
So arguments that say “Eh, it’s not all that important. I mean, there’s no raw material costs related, so the corporations are just ripping us off anyway. We ought to have the ability to access these products for what we feel is fair.” disturb me, because you’ve basically totally thrown out however much work and effort it takes to get to the point that the actual work is produced, and you just see the work as the entire cycle.
But as copyright begins to encroach on more than traditional works (writing, music, art in general) and becomes in a digital age the cornerstone of all production, does it really make sense to continue to extend the reach and grasp of law that, at best, was designed to be a short-term catalyst?
Obviously, I don’t think it does, but I’m curious what the rationale is behind your presumption that DRM and the like is necessary to the continued health of our arts and culture, such as they are. I’m prepared to accept that the current models of mass culture art production (and presuming cheap CnC and mythical countertop nano-assemblers, everything else production) are being obsoleted as we speak, obviously.
So the question becomes, if we don’t grant inherent rights to creators of IP, what impetus do people have to continue to create it? Pressing need? Hope of fame and acclaim? Our whole society is based upon the premise (roughly) that if you create a better item, people will reward you, monetarily, for doing so. The lack of DRM on (non-trivial) products basically throws this notion out. Do you envision government sponsored pools of people who devote large amounts of time to coming up with new and better fusion technologies? If so, how does the government fund it when there’s no revenue stream being generated by the populace at large, because 80% of the goods that have any inherent value are IP, and there’s no impetus (or method) to control the flow of IP. (Certainly to have transactions, a cornerstone of economies, one has to control the flow of the products being transacted, no?)
Bonus Rhetorical Question: Which DRM system will be embraced by the Chinese in the next decade?
None, of course, because in general IP concerns are the mark of a matured technological society, and China is, at current, a nascent one. However, along the same line of Rhetoric, in the next 15 years when China has reaped the effects of it’s current industrialization boom, and they manage to produce a microprocessor that’s better than Intel’s, do you suppose they’ll be happy with the thought of us just wandering over and appropriating those schematics because, as they themselves have demonstrated, copyrights, patents, et. al. really shouldn’t apply to countries who don’t wish to voluntarily police themselves and buy into them?
Don’t kid yourself, China will increasingly begin to care about copyright and IP property rights in the coming time, as they begin to generate their own unique IP and desire to leverage it into a worthwhile product.
You know, I think all this DRM discussion is pointless, because I think it’ll take a police state to enforce its use.
China already generates their own IP. They define the leading edge in surveillance and filtering-- they are not technophobes. As such, any technology which can be used to tighten their noose on chinese citizens will be embraced… and DRM definitely falls into that category. DRM can allow the state to control what their citizens read, hear, and see. Every citizen gets an MP3 player, but it only plays chairman mao’s speeches. Etc, etc.
Don’t kid yourself. China is a police state now, but the USA is headed in the same direction. Not to get into P&R territory, which I religiously (heh) avoid, but recent legislation truly frightens me.
Wow, great responses so far. Thanks! I hadn’t ever even considered the effects of a Chinese thought-control sort of rule and DRM in that way.
We’re pretty good at throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, especially when it comes to legislation designed to protect businesses with big business oriented executive and legislative branches in power.
I tend to assume the utter stupidity (as McCullough alludes to above) of trying to tightly and completely regulate such things will eventually make itself known. If DRM goes into action, it has to be from a proactive technological stance, rather than from a legislative one. (To be sure, there needs to be legislation behind it, but not the stupidly broad stuff that’s out there now.)
Eventually it’d be nice if it settled down to the point where transferring music and movies and videos was about like shoplifting: Illegal, reasonably culturally taboo, but nothing along the lines of “If you’re caught we’re going to throw you in prison 10 years”. The main thing that worries me is the tendancy parts of the public seem to have to remove the cultural taboo, since this is generally what controls the great mass of a society, rather than legislation. There’s just something disturbing to me when I see “Yeah, I know it’s illegal but…”
I don’t think there ever was a cultural taboo, though. People taping videos for friends, copying cds for friends, copying tapes for friends, loaning music to friends, etc.
Assumptions:
- 100% of popular TV shows are available on peer to peer networks for free without commercials within 24 hours of airing. Unpopular shows are not difficult to find and will become less so over time.
- Broadband penetration is growing rapidly and will achieve saturation within 10 years. Cost of bandwidth will drastically decrease as thousands of miles of dark fibre is lit up.
Conclusion:
- Without unbreakable DRM the television business model will shrink and inevitably, eventually, collapse.
- Commercial television will die as a medium.
Am I wrong?[/quote]
Yes.
- Being a community of geeks, we tend to drastically overestimate the number of people actually willing to take the time and effort to find/download the item in question.
- Available 24 hours or less after broadcast does not negate the fact that the best way to see what you want to see first is to watch it when it is broadcast.
- Numerous telecasts are only useful to the viewer live, including the most-watched television program in the world (the Super Bowl).
- No self-respecting blue-collar American would rather sit at his computer to watch a Quicktime rip of The Simpsons than catch the rerun on his larger TV with a couch to loaf on.
Maybe this “commerical TV dies out” scenario might have some legs once the baby boomers die off and the tech generations control the world, as we find digital convenience to be much more motivating than our predecessors. But probably not. The first real litmus test for this will come when they do away with the hopelessly antiquated Nielsen system and start using a ratings system that provides useful statistics in this 400+ channel age.
All of those objections can be countered with the following:
“But it’s free, dude!”
Also, digital convergence is here. It’s past the geek-only stage and at the early adopter stage. In a year or two everybody will be able to stream downloaded movies to their TV just like my hacked xbox right now.
I disagree. I’m fine with providing a copy of a tape or a CD to a friend. Assumably they’d do the same, and it’s a decent way to try out new music. Moreover I can judge my friends to see whether or not their values are similar enough to mine to feel comfortable doing something that’s illegal involving them. (i.e. I have no problem with copying CD’s to give them a listen or 20 to make sure it’s worth buying, but I do expect my friends to get around, sooner or later, and rather sooner, to actually buying that CD if they listen to it consistently)
The difference is the net and the advent of 99% digitally similar copy technology and the ability to use that directly. I have no problem with swapping music with friends. That’s a pretty time-honored tradition of being exposed to new stuff. I’ll be damned if I think that’s at all the same as ripping my 500 CD collection and uploading it somewhere so that 10,000 cheap bastards don’t have to spend any of their porno money to enjoy the music that I like too. I want to hear more from these artists, and especially if they’re getting pennies per CD, every CD counts.
I think there’s probably a reasonably large cultural difference between illegal activities shared by friends and done those anonymously across a phone line. Even when it comes to sharing music.
Really? Then I think you’d be surprised by the number of people at work I had ask me to make copies of games for them.
These weren’t gamers or tech-savvy users, either. These were parents who knew I was a PC gamer and wanted to get some games for their kids.
I don’t think there is much of a taboo regarding digital piracy.