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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I knew as soon as I made the observation that someone was going to mention buggy whips. The guys who set up the lighting and sound on motion picture sets have not been "obsoleted" by Reddit.

The only reason this particular economic model needs "propping up" is that people have decided that they have an intrinsic right to content produced at great expense by other people on their own terms, and, despite the fact that the law prohibiting them from ignoring the terms of the content producers is clear as glass, have chosen to establish huge anonymous conspiracies to collectively ignore the law.

Forgive me if I don't see this as a case of progress being held back by entrenched interests.

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No worries, I knew using the buggy whip analogy was a bad example but just went with it for arguments sake.

To better analogize, hollywood right now has a bunch of screen related guilds that have contracts that stipulate for example that a production can only use workers from that guild/etc... What I'm arguing or positing is that as technology improves, the need for as many as there are will decrease just like manufacturing. That or more independent filmmakers will start brokering deals with unaffiliated professionals. The overall market will get bigger most likely, but the monolithic employment in the current market is unlikely to survive.

Sorry for conveying that hollywood would be obsolete, that isn't quite what I was intending though I worded it poorly.

My only worry is the current copyright regime is seeming to be ignoring the rather stark changes in overall cost of "copying" digital files. A lot of our current law rests upon copying itself being a prohibitive process and only possible by a limited few. Until we address that fundamental difference I don't see much point in debating the conflict between technology versus current producers. There is blame enough to go around on both sides, but that isn't productive. I really don't want producers to go out of business but adapting current copyright to the digital era seems misguided unless you establish that it makes sense to do so.

I'm just rambling now with wild abandon and i'll shut-up, hopefully I conveyed things a bit better, back to work for moi.

What does the marginal cost of another copy have to do with anything, though? The marginal cost of copying any Nx1000 lines of code in the world is also zero. But if all code should be freely available to anyone, a lot of HN readers who pirate are going to be making a lot less money.

The copy cost directly feeds into the cost of production.

Take the recent machinima for Halo Forward Unto Dawn. Microsoft produced this web miniseries, which looks as good as any other tv or movie series, much cheaper than if they had to deal with the current Hollywood apparatus.

They worked with the director directly and hired other film experts for say erection/lighting/etc... on direct contract.

If it costs less than 50% or more by avoiding the current hollywood way of doing things, how could that not be disruptive to the overall cost of a copy of a film for example?

Take Primer, which only cost about $60,000 to "produce", it is much easier to charge less than $20 for a copy of the film when it is simple to produce and recoup your cost than if you invested over $100 million into a film total.

I know this last example is really stretching it but the costs for production are going down and in doing so creating a market that will be offering up competition to drive down costs. Note I'm not talking at all about piracy here. I rent videos from itunes/amazon all the time mainly due to only watching them once. But not having to pay $20 is the primary motivating factor, I don't personally think "owning/leasing" a copy to watch makes financial sense.

> My only worry is the current copyright regime is seeming to be ignoring the rather stark changes in overall cost of "copying" digital files. A lot of our current law rests upon copying itself being a prohibitive process and only possible by a limited few.

This is backwards. If copying were a prohibitive process, we wouldn't need laws to stop people from doing it.

Copyright rests on the opposite premise: That making copies of creative works is relatively easy and cheap. It was originally a response to the printing press making it really easy for anyone to publish bootleg books, which meant that actually paying an author for the rights to his or her work was a sucker's game. Copyright legislation was introduced to prevent people from taking advantage of how easy it was for anyone with a press to copy an author's work.

Right, but at the same time the ability to copy was restricted.

That is what has changed, the cost to copying digital files is almost zero. The cost to copy even with a printing press is not nearly the same. In addition the equipment required can be regulated much easier. That too is almost impossible to do with computers.

But that doesn't make a difference. It's like objecting to gun control legislation by saying, "Actually, guns are even more dangerous than you think." Copyright exists to counteract how easy it is to copy a creative work. The fact that it's even easier now just makes the original rational even stronger if you accept it in the first place.

> people have decided that they have an intrinsic right to content

They do -- people do indeed have pretty much exactly that: an intrinsic right -- to copy and share intellectual/informational goods.

Why? How? Because these are non-finite non-rival goods, hence are a commons by necessity. Since there is no scarcity in instances/copies, and one person's use does not interfere with anyone else's there is no reason for restriction. Instituting a restriction creates a conflict where there was none, it reduces an abundance that is simply there in physical fact.

> "the terms of the content producers"

What producers want is irrelevant. The validity of the law has nothing to with producers' wants. What is wrong with the actual law is exactly the consequence of that erroneous view: that the law is there to benefit and enrich content producers, and therefore should be expanded and enforced ever further and more strenuously.

The law restricts the intrinsic right to copy and use public intellectual/informational goods only for a collective pragmatic purpose. The intent is to serve the public overall by ensuring plenty of content is made.

Piracy seems most likely good. Every extra copy that is used adds value into the economy; the only possible downside is that production might be reduced below what is desired. But is that what we see? Music, books, TV, movies -- is there a terrible shortage of these? Nope: there seems to be not only plenty but even more produced now than ever before. Piracy is de facto acting to correct the dysfunctionality of the current law.

  The guys who set up the lighting and sound on motion 
  picture sets have not been "obsoleted" by Reddit.

No, but they will be by devices like Lytro and the Kinect, and video camera descendants thereof. Instagram filters are just the beginning in terms of automated digital post-processing to allow semipros to shoot pro quality photos/footage. It'll take a little longer than blogs did to disrupt print, because the underlying data (sound, video, images) is more complex, but it is inevitable.

Blogs "disrupt" print by providing pithier summaries of content that costs millions of dollars spent on real reporters and their expenses to generate. Do you think written journalism is better in 2012, or way, way, way worse? I'm going with "worse".

But I'm not here to promote the status quo ante. I'm just saying that the idea that progress for the tech industry as an inevitable and intrinsic good is a little suspect.

Blogs have indeed disrupted print, which is why the New York Times lost its bet in 2002.

http://blog.longnow.org/02008/02/01/decision-blogs-vs-new-yo...

  Long Bets has arrived at a decision for Long Bet #2 
  between blogger Dave Winer and Martin Nisenholtz of the NY 
  Times. At stake is US$2000.00 plus half the interest that 
  has accrued over the last 5 years in the Farsight Fund, 
  all of which will go to the charity of the winner’s 
  choice.

  In the bet Winer asserts, “In a Google search of five 
  keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories 
  of 02007, weblogs will rank higher than the ‘New York 
  Times‘ Web site”.  ...

  The Long Bets decision on this bet is in favor of Winer’s 
  side, weblog page ranks came out ahead of the NY Times. We 
  will be calculating interest and sending a check on to 
  Dave Winer’s charity of choice the World Wide Web 
  Consortium in the next month.

How could it be any other way, with hundreds of millions of people -- each with their own domain expertise -- now able to compete with journalists who often have little knowledge outside of J-school? For the topics one cares about (whether they be Linux or photography or finance), you can and will find much better reporting on specialist blogs for free, outside of the lowest-common-denominator mainstream media. And everyone has some topics they care about.

Similarly, I encourage people who believe otherwise to go ahead and bet like Martin Nisenholtz of the NYT bet. Bet that Hollywood will survive unscathed in the wake of SOPA/PIPA and YC RFS9, in an era of 1 billion plus portable high quality video cams (soon depthcams), in an era where a Macbook Pro can do professional quality video editing. Bet by buying the stock of movie companies if you believe they haven't yet hit their peak, by investing in the current physical distribution model, by wagering that actors and actresses will make tens of millions in perpetuity. Bet with the confidence that only internet nerds believe Hollywood is due for a reckoning with technology.

Others will bet the other way. That's the only way to really test the confidence of an industry prediction of this kind.

How could it be any other way, with hundreds of millions of people -- each with their own domain expertise -- now able to compete with journalists who often have little knowledge outside of J-school?

Very few of those people are writing from and about Syria, or are getting 1:1 interviews with the House Majority Whip. You see this most clearly in state and city government; the demise of newspapers has eliminated practically every source of information that would give you an idea of who to vote for for State Senate.

You are absolutely right here on the government point, but I think that fact cuts a different way. Without newspapers to make up people's minds for them on who to vote for, they will now need to actually read position papers and make an informed decision on their own (or else refrain from voting as is their right). Or start their own blog if they truly care.

News coverage has a tremendous effect on public opinion (it can be argued that the media in 1992 was responsible for the LA riots), so decentralization of opinion means that journalists have much less power to decide which candidates are "acceptable".

[Regarding Syria, they did cut off their internet connection, but I don't believe the centralized news media has done a very good job of reporting what's actually going on in the Middle East in general. I trust Google Translate Arabic + first-party sources more than Judith Miller; YMMV.]

What position papers? What information are they going to use? You are very likely in a state senate district with very stable party identification. How do you know who to support in a primary? It costs money to get this information out to people, and blogs are not doing it very effectively.

Do you really believe that but for an internet connection, Syrian bloggers would be outdoing Marie Colvin, who died to bring the story back for the Sunday Times? Based on what evidence?

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