End Piracy, Not Liberty – Google
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Can anyone demonstrate to me that Piracy is actually such a huge problem? These media corporations are making record profits, piracy is not killing them, they are just being greedy.
Every copyright holder has a mini-monopoly in the production (aka reproduction) of their own content. It is a well-established result in economics that a monopolist provides a price/quantity combination which maximizes their own profits, but not the total welfare of both the producer and consumer. (With competitive providers, under usual and fairly reasonable assumptions, the price/quantity of a good traded trends towards a level maximizing overall welfare.) So the very idea of "intellectual property" as little monopolies-on-reproduction is in service of rightsholder greed, maximizing their profits at the expense of others, often beyond necessary creative costs or incentives.
Granting such monopolies may have been a necessary compromise when copying and distribution was costly. A better system that maximizes returns for a larger group should be possible today.
People view copyright as less essential than patents, but the truth of the matter is that without copyright laws, there would be a significant decline in the production of movies, music, games, and many other costly mediums. Without copyright, I could legally create a competitor to netflix that paid studios nothing and played every movie ever made on any device for close to nothing. I could create a competitor to steam that distributed games and was every bit as useful and integrated, and I'd pay nothing to developers. Even if you think online piracy isn't as big of a problem as studios claim it is (and you'd be very right), the laws that keep it illegal are all that stand between today and a collapse of the content development ecosystem.
Even if copyright doesn't maximize for society's benefit because of the monopoly it creates, every copyrighted work sold is a net plus to both the consumer and the producer. Without any copyright framework, there's a significant chance that the producer could never afford to make that beneficial product in the first place. Even if you only eliminate prosecution of people/entities that don't make any money from what they're doing and allow non-profits like wikipedia to host full movies, you still irreparably break the incentive system that exists today. Maybe we don't need new movies and games, but people want them and as long as that's the case they'll want to keep protecting them with copyright.
Maybe someday, systems more like kickstarter could replace copyright, but I highly doubt it. They don't do nearly as good of a job.
That said, I'm all for much shorter terms for copyrights and the elimination of software patents.
I disagree. What were talking about here is art, and mankind has been producing art since long before government-guarded IP. It isn't because IP laws provide an incentive that we create things; we do it because it's human nature. The ability to freely copy other people's work lowers the barrier to entry, so eliminating IP laws would spur a creative renaissance. The only downside is those big media companies would be forced to innovate.
You lost me. What would being able to freely copy lower the barrier to entry of? How would it spur a creative renaissance?
On the other hand, if you're afraid that using someone else's work can result in a huge fine, then you're less likely to do the project at all. If you choose to do it anyway, you'll have a lot more work to do. There is a higher barrier to entry.
That said, one potential advantage is that if content is being produced simply because creation is human nature, rather than because a similar item sold well last year; it could lead to higher quality output.
Art would still exist, but it would exist much differently than it does today. Free copying does allow for more creative freedom in many respects, though I would argue many of those benefits can already be had through current fair-use practices, which are quite extensive.
I've often heard the argument thrown around that "the world could live without another Transformers 2." I don't know if you fall into that camp, but many people really enjoyed that movie. In aggregate they were willing to pay more to see it than ~99.999% of individuals globally produce in a lifetime. If big-budget movies, pop stars, and games cease to exist, other things will surely take their place, but they won't be the same and most media will start to look a lot more like youtube and less like hollywood. Most people probably don't want that.
People need incentives to do things. Incentives are probably the second most powerful force in the universe, after compounding interest :), and a lack of them is why communism fails. People are not benevolent. They do derive utility from things other than money, but money is able to coordinate the interests of many individuals from disparate backgrounds under a common goal. Other things can too, and the Linux OS I'm running right now is a testament to that, but Linux can exist in a world with copyright while Transformers 2 most likely cannot. At least not until everybody in the world is a lot richer and making Transformers 2 is a lot easier.
The difference between youtube and Hollywood is such a chasm only because of IP laws. Hollywood is a superstar market. It's filled with aspiring artists waiting tables because the barrier to entry has been artificially inflated.
Hollywood hates innovation. Transformers 3 could be funded in a myriad of ways that have never been attempted. But because they'd rather lock down IP laws, the entire economy suffers.
A world without IP protection is not a world in which there is no money to be made; It's a world in which new business models need to be innovated.
There's a demand for movies. If you cut off the source, fans will make their own. They won't be the same (lower budgets), and their distribution will be different (initially theatres, protected by contracts), and they will have more product placements, but they will still be there. You won't have LOTR, but you will still have low budget talky stuff, suspense thrillers, and so on.
Eventually, animation techniques will allow fans to collaboratively make big budget special effect movies.
If movie company's wanted, they could survive quite well on theatre takings, and release stuff on DVD simply as collector items (after they movies are leaked online anyway). They would have to make cutbacks, but they'd still survive.
The main difference is - what a consumer does in their own home should be sacrosanct. Telling a theatre not to leak a movie (as part of a commercial contract) is fine, but attacking consumers for ripping a DVD they bought is not.
Where do you draw the line? Commercial entities? I'm sure I could raise funding for a non-profit that offered every ebook ever written for download. That would single-handedly destroy the ebook industry.
I never said movies would go away, but you wouldn't have Transformers and you wouldn't have LOTR. As you said, you'd have movies that are more locked-down in their distribution and you'd have more ads and product placement in films. All for what? So that you can freely share those films to lower your entertainment budget? So that indie films can take more market share because you prefer them? Because copyright law is already largely unenforceable?
I'm all for more lax punishment for piracy, lower fines, etc. I'm not for eliminating IP law.
It might seem very intuitive to say such things, but it is not truth. The truth is that the economic evidence is just not there. What do Landes & Posner say?
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare." -- 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.
That means we do not know whether it does good overall. Hard to quite believe? Well there it is.
Regardless of whether there is a decline in production, there would be a certain decline in production of high-quality, expensive content. If you think expensive to produce != high quality, you're wrong. Expensive content is only produced because it earns more money, and thus is better liked by more people. That's the only objective measure of quality I know.
That's actually backwards. The more costly copying and distribution are, the LESS you need any kind of copyright protection, because the original author/publisher can capture almost all of the market value before the copiers can get their copies produced.
There was a famous article on this by Stephen Breyer, before he was a Supreme Court Justice: Stephen Breyer (1970). "The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs". Harvard Law Review 84 (2): 281–355
I tried to find an online copy of this, but failed.
But if most of the market is patient enough to await the arrival of slow-copycats, the initial investment in the 'first batch' (by not just the creator but the publisher/wholesaler/retailer is in danger, and thus deterred without copyright. In fact, large losses could be incurred being stuck with an inventory that's later undercut. Fears of such losses could cut off a gradual build to popularity before it starts.
Digital reproduction/dissemination eliminates the need for most of that 'first batch' investment and all the downside risk of production/inventory; only the creation itself must be incentivized. All the other once-necessary costs no longer need a legal hack (statutory monopoly) as a sort of subsidy.
I'll have to look at the Breyer reasoning to know what factors dominate under which assumptions.
If the music industry, all those years ago, would have recognized music licences instead of music media, a plethora of iTunes-like services would have sprung up as soon as the technology was ready, there to fill the demands of consumers.
There never would have been a Napster to let the genie out of the bottle because most people would have been more than happy to pay $0.99 for a song. While there will always be a small underground of sharing "mix tapes," Napster only rose to fame because there was no other choice for consumers.
For copyright to be successful, it requires respect from both parties. Dictating exactly how media must be consumed is not showing respect. In turn, the consumers lose their respect to spend their money.
I have my own copyrighted work that is pirated more than it is paid for. While it would be nice to paid paid for each transaction, I recognize it is not the consumer's fault. Those who put a death grip on their works before me have ruined it for the rest of us.
As far as I can tell DMCA takedown notices work fairly well in most cases.
The main issue is that the US doesn't have international juridiction and they don't like that very much. The US puts a lot of pressure on foreign governments to enforce our laws (I believe wikileaks recently leaked how the US influenced a SOPA-like law in Spain.)