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Comment by kd5bjo | Hacker News Reader

Without copyright, for example, movies would have to recoup (most of) their production costs before ever showing the film to the public. Once they do, there is huge incentive for theaters to obtain third-party copies and show them without any remuneration to the moviemakers. There are similar arguments for books, music, and video games. How do you propose that this would work in practice?

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What about crowd-funding?

Kickstarter already funded over $1m entertainment projects. So did the Louis CK experiment. These are far and far away from the mainstream popularity that buying movie tickets have. Don't you think that it's reasonable that web organized crowd-funding could finance even big blockbuster movies as these websites get more popular?

Imagine if popular celebrity directors with huge cult-followers like Tarantino would post a project on Kickstarter, then properly advertise it. I'd imagine a huge movie could be funded that way.

It's possible, but there's still a lot of details that need to be worked out. For example, how do you deal with projects that don't spend all of the money that was collected? If you've raised $100M to make a movie, it must be tempting to only spend $10M, and pocket the rest.

> Without copyright, for example, movies would have to recoup (most of) their production costs before ever showing the film to the public.

Kinda true, although lots of films make more money through merchandising than the box office.

But even in that situation, why can't movies be funded by crowdsourcing? I'm sure there's lots of fans of LoTR who'd be happy to crwodfund The Hobbit, for example.

In a copyright-free world, that merchandise could be made by anyone; there's no guarantee that any merchandising money will make it back to the movie's creators.

Crowdfunding can be a viable option, but paying large sums of money before any work is done makes it tempting to abscond with most of the money and produce either an inferior or nonexistent product. How would you prevent this from happening on a regular basis? Would your solution make it too risky to attempt large projects out of fear of them not being deemed "good enough"?

> In a copyright-free world, that merchandise could be made by anyone

Not if you keep trademarks and have trademarks on the relevant characters, objects, etc.

If you allow trademarks on the characters and such, you end up in a worse position than when you started: Nobody can reproduce the original work or create any kind of derivative work without permission. This lasts in perpetuity as long as it is defended, and permission will likely never be given out of a belief that the trademark needs to be protected.

In other words, you're free to do anything you want with the Harry Potter movies, so long as you remove all instances of the name "Harry Potter" and all likenesses of Daniel Radcliffe wearing a robe?

I'm describing how trademark works. And yes, it does a lot of that.

Mind you, the trademark owner can authorize things. And I think there is even some analog of fair use for trademarks, but you should consult with a lawyer if you ever have more than an academic interest in such things.

The ability of trademarks to protect against commercial re-use of intellectual property isn't a good measure of how much they can replace copyright protection. If I write a fantastic book, trademark protection isn't going to help protect me from someone just duplicating it wholesale and changing the name.

Bad things are done in the name of copyrights (and patent protection). That doesn't invalidate the whole concept, it just means reform may be needed.

You don't need it to. Kids don't want crappy knock-offs.

Have you looked at the list of top 10 movies from last year?

Besides, it's only a knock-off if you were exposed to the original.

Things worth being made would be prefunded, and things that aren't won't get made. As much as we enjoy entertainment, we cannot claim it is implemented as cheaply as possible.

This would let the market actually sort out what is naturally viable.

Things worth being made would be prefunded, and things that aren't won't get made.

Because prefunding is effectively a requirement, there's no way for a creator to take a gamble, produce something with their own resources, and then try to make it up later. This is essentially the process by which all novelists get started now. Are you sure that prefunding is a suitable replacement?

Ideas are cheap, tools for writing/directing/coding/filming/editing are cheap--hell, cheaper than they've ever been! I would disagree that this gamble is unavailable to anyone of even modest means.

If you can't raise sufficient funding, frankly, that's a your problem. There are a lot of people (myself and cofounders included) who prefund by working some job (of varying degrees of satisfaction) and diverting the funds towards development of their own creative enterprises.

In the absence of patrons, yeah, we fund ourselves, and one day it'll pay off--or it won't. That's life.

Novelists are great and all, but it seems obvious that if you cannot write something quickly enough on a budget, or in your freetime, and it isn't good enough to get picked up, well, sorry. The system should be in place to let you fail fast and figure out what to do next.

The gamble isn't available because the payoff isn't there. Why would any company pick up something that you've already made if they can't make any money on it due to the lack of copyright? They can publish it without paying you. Even if a publisher does pay you, some other publisher can undercut them because they didn't have to pay you.

Things worth being made would be prefunded

Prefunding isn't going to get us flying cars, just faster horses.

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