Copyright fight contributes to media industry decline

If you're not selling it, not making it available yourself, you shouldn't be controlling it.

It'd be nice if copyright law were amended to properly capture its justification as a tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts -- it should be illegal to use copyright without attempting to reach those ends.

One thing the author doesn't seem to mention is how that video could actually raise revenue. I, as well as many others, had no interest in Australian Tennis, but upon seeing this video have suddenly become both aware and at least a bit interested in it.

How many people would be more likely to watch if they expect something similarly funny to happen?

I can't think of a single reason why someone who had the intention of watching the match would no longer be interested in it because of a two minute clip (loosely related to the match and not containing any "spoilers"). On the other hand I can think of a reason why someone who didn't know about or was debating watching, will now watch.

The clip added value, not simply didn't reduce it.

I was looking at what was going into the head end of a social media aggregator and was shocked to see that video clips expire on the web sites of the major television networks after they go out of the "window" that they intend to have people view them.

I know it's the way they do things, but my attitude as a web publisher is that eyeballs are precious and you're never going to tell people "move along, nothing to see here" unless you've got a really good reason.

A few years back I wanted to buy a Disney movie that was not being distributed at the time. Rather than going to a file sharing network, I bought a copy on eBay. I unwittingly got a disk that played perfectly, but for which all the materials had been printed with an ink jet printer... A pirate copy. I would have been happy to pay full price for a legitimate copy, but they wouldn't take my money.

The really sick sector of the industry is multichannel television. Everyone on the industry is constantly repeating that "the king is still on the throne, the pound is still worth a pound" but the bundling model is slowly killing them the way the music industry began to die slowly in the 1970s.

Bundling causes a number of contradictions.

One of them is sports programming: some people are fanatically dedicated to sports (I'll never turn off a game with a TV-B-Gone, but usually get cheers if I turn off Fox News) other people don't care. The price of sports programming goes up rapidly because the fanatics will go bezerk if they don't get it, but that raises the cable bills of people who don't care. Like health insurance, bundling tricks people into paying more for a service than they would on their own. If sports fans were paying for teams or games individually, they'd pay more and the teams would get less.

Another one is quality. When I visit family and friends with cable I usually find it very hard to be entertained. Sometimes there's a good movie on, but I just can't stand the endless reruns of Spongebob Squarepants, the reality shows, the "news" channels which show nothing but white people talking.

The reason you don't see Al Jazeera on U.S. Cable is because it makes the other channels look bad: when cable is showing "news" shows with tea party idiots talking about how we have to cut taxes AND balance the budget at the same time and reality shows about coupon clippers, there's a reality show on Al Jazeera about a bunch of people who overthrew an evil dictator in Libya and won their freedom.

Even innocuous channels, like the Weather Channel, are useless in my mind -- the Weather Channel was innovative in the 80's, but between the web and NOAA Weather Radio, who needs it?

The system stands because there are people who'll watch whatever is on. However, without market discipline, the industry is in a "boiled frog" situation. They can make stuff that is worse and worse and will find gradually that people lose interest in it. Although the situation will develop gradually, they'll act quite surprised when reality hits them.

It's almost like your customers are pointing out business opportunities to you for free. And you thank them with lawsuits.

Copyright has been bastardized. Its original purpose was to protect inventors and artists from wealthy interests: people who had access to the best distribution channels and would put the original authors out of business (if they could legally do so) by distributing their content without payment.

Copyright emerged in the same time as modern nations did in Europe and North America. No accident there. (Note that usage fees are called "royalties", a payment to the sovereign or the nation.) National governments believed (correctly) that the quality of arts and sciences would be much higher if inventors had a fighting chance of making a living without being born into the access that would enable someone to get a patron. It was a national pride issue: a desire for French or American or Spanish literature to be the best in the world.

Copyright replaced the patron system with mass micropayments and thereby democratized it. It's also a lot less expensive than a patronage system: you can get quality media for $1-2 per hour of use. That's pretty great. I wouldn't want to not have that.

So let me make that clear. Copyright isn't just a useful thing. It's actually (at its roots) a very liberal concept. It was to protect innovators and creators from wealthy, well-connected miscreants who would steal their work (and before copyright, many did) and compete against them with better distribution.

The problem in the modern economy is that copyright is being abused by the same class of people it was designed to hold back. It's way, way, way more transferable than it should be and we have a disease where copyrights and patents, being valuable, trickle up to the top of the social pyramid, under the effective control of a class of people who produce nothing except mean-spirited lawsuits.

Morally speaking: should you pay for stuff if you can afford it? Yes. I don't pirate if I can get the same level of convenience and quality through legal means. I have no problem with paying $1-2/hour for quality entertainment. That said, I'd much rather support the artists (and sound technicians, and actors) directly than support a bunch of shitbag executives who produce nothing. I would participate in an "under the table" mechanism allowing for that, legal or otherwise-- a "piratical" system that requires enough payment to reimburse artists and technicians as much as they'd take in royalties, but deprives the scumbag entertainment executives outright.

Honestly speaking, SOPA estabishes that the major corporate copyright owners are evil. Not just greedy and stupid, which are forgivable because great empires have been built on greed and stupidity. Evil. It deprives them of their moral high ground, and establishes that piracy-as-moral-statement might make sense.

I also think Facebook and Google deserve a lot of credit for coming out to fight SOPA/PIPA. Yes, Google has Youtube which would be in serious pain; but the fact is that Google and Facebook would (perversely) benefit from it. Large businesses do better in overreaching, ill-designed or undefined regulatory environments because they have the connections and resources to end up OK no matter what laws pass. It's small businesses that would wither and die if SOPA and PIPA were to pass. A lot of startups would have to shut down. "Social" technologies would become an oligopoly within a decade. The short-term effect for Google and Facebook would (my guess) be positive, so these companies deserve a lot of credit for looking at the bigger picture.