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Comment by erichocean | Hacker News Reader

It's true that creators won't stop creating.

What's not true is that we'll continue to get the exact same kinds of things created. (Some of you may think that's a good thing.)

Take a feature film, for example. A film costs around $100 million to make, and $20 million to market.

Without copyright, that film can be easily copied by Illegitimate Theater Chain and then shown without paying the creator. Does anyone here think that $100 million films will continue to be made and marketed under such a system?

I don't.

Maybe, as a society, we shouldn't care about $100 million dollar feature films and maybe no one will be upset that they're no longer made in exchange for having no copyright laws.

One thing is clear though: copyright is the legal mechanism that allows $100 million feature films to be made today, and without it, they won't be.

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One of the reasons certain things 'cost' so much to make is because when they are made they are worth so much. Without copyright these thing surely wouldn't make as much money as they now do, so to take your example of a movie, actors would therefore not be paid as much and so on down the line.

So I think the question is should so much money be made from some of these things?

Should for example actors and sports players be insanely rich while teachers and other public servants make so little?

Also relevant is the increased availability of professional software for film/music production, and advanced technologies for producing creative content which are emerging.

How much is a Hollywood movie really going to cost to produce in five years? (Ignoring inflated writing/acting expenses.)

Great points.

The more I think about it, America would look very different if there was no copyright. There wouldn't be the huge companies that we have today. For example Disney has the sole rights to produce Mickey Mouse based products, but if anyone anywhere could produce Mickey Mouse based products, then suddenly a hole lot less money is streaming into Disney, and just take that effect and multiply it out=no more mega corps.

It would change the face of commerce and to that effect even employment, you'd probably have many more small businesses and a lot less "corporations".

In any case it would have very far reaching effects...

I don't think that the "high cost == high value" assumption is true of feature films. I've read that technically, most of the high-grossing films never actually turn a profit, due to very, very strange accounting.

When profit is disassociated from revenue, a lot of padding will go on. See the USA's defence industry for another example.

One thing is clear though: copyright is the legal mechanism that allows $100 million feature films to be made today, and without it, they won't be.

This is an overreach. While you might not be able to imagine how it could be done, history shows that the market is extremely resilient and resourceful. I might agree if copyright had never existed, but now that people have a taste for such works, the market will find a way to provide them.

Okay, how about this one?

Game of Thrones costs $4.5 million per episode. Would HBO really make them at that cost if every one of their competitors could re-broadcast them the following day, without any kind of payment to HBO? If Target and Best Buy could just sell the DVD and Blu-ray a week later without any kind of payment to HBO?

I doubt it.

I'm not saying we won't have films -- we would -- but they wouldn't be even remotely as costly as what we have today. (Not everything one thinks that's a bad thing.)

Perhaps a copyright law optimized to promote the arts could be crafted.

I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but it could probably restrict ticket sales to licensees without requiring draconian enforcement.

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