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Comment by stoney | Hacker News Reader

But if you go down the road of leaving it up to suppliers to secure against copying, you end up with ridiculous DRM systems.

Would you rather receive an un-DRM'ed mp3 in exchange for the promise that you won't make copies of it for everyone else, or receive a DRM'ed file that you are free to try and circumvent? Particularly for less tech-savvy people I think the unDRMed option is better.

(the third option is an unDRMed mp3 that we can legally copy and give to our friends, which you can have already as long as you stay away from the major record labels, but I don't see why the big industry players shouldn't be allowed to continue to use IP laws - no-one is forcing you to listen to their music/play their games/watch their movies).

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If the state is left out of it, the market will select against crappy DRM systems and either the whole concept will go away, or producers will find a non-crappy way to implement DRM.

No one is forcing me to watch their movies, but laws that get passed stop me from copying a string of bits when absolutely no harm is done to the producer if I do so. This basically presumes that everything I say or do should be monitored by the state, since I could be breaking IP laws in the process. How about instead, the law protects actual property from actual theft, meaning something has only been 'stolen' from you if you don't have it anymore, and industries that create easily copied content get with the 21st century and stop bitching.

> 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.

I 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.

I'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.

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