26 karma · joined September 13, 2011
you can reach me at lborthwein (at( gmail
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given how much randomness was involved in our creation as a species, let alone our technological ascendance, it is highly unlikely that other intelligence would develop in exactly the same amount of time elsewhere. It's astronomically unlikely. If they didn't develop at the same time as us, they're either still incapable of radio or have had radio for a long time. A long time in the life of the universe certainly doesn't mean 100 years, it means much longer. Even if it's only 1000 years, if they progress at anything like the rate we do, they'll be massively more advanced than we are.
If a species only has radio for a short period of time (like 200 years) and then disappears or loses it, the odds of overlapping with them are virtually nil (if they die out after getting this far, it says we're much more likely to die out soon too).
And I don't know if they would talk to us before we'd talk to them. Stephen Hawking has a lot to say about why trying to communicate with other civilizations is a bad idea, and they might be smart enough not to try.
The actual reason is that we have invented radio technology only very recently. Because we are so new to the technology, odds are that our communication partner has had radio for much longer than we have (millions of years probably, given the age of the universe), and thus is far more advanced.
This logical step requires a few assumptions. First is that societies don't destroy themselves soon after the advent of nuclear weapons, which would limit them to a very short window of radio capability (measured in hundreds or thousands of years).
The second assumption is that other forms of intelligence progress their technology at a similar rate to that at which we progress ours.
If the former assumption is wrong, it's extremely unlikely that we will ever talk to any intelligence, even with relatively plentiful life in the universe, because it will kill itself too fast. The latter assumption could still be wrong though, particularly if the method used for interstellar radio communication was in any way evolutionarily derived.
This is my understanding of the topic at least.
For a clear illustration, look at their respective facebook place pages: Harvard: 918,295 likes; Stanford: 248,574; UC Berkeley: 86,214; MIT: 65,339; Caltech: 2,686;
This clearly isn't about the schools' relative sizes or their popularity among past students but the global reach of their respective brand names.
Some of the things listed for Harvard rang very true from my time there (particularly the interests in consulting, new york, private equity, and famous harvard grads like Conan) while others made less sense to me (Jimmy Fallon?)
Still a very interesting data set though, if only to see what kinds of people are influenced by each school's brand.
Just because the data better fits your desired skews, doesn't mean it gets at what the users actually want.
I think a major issue at hand is that people often rate things as they expect a critic to rate them. If you would give Transformers 2 a 5-star rewatchability rating, you should be giving it at least 3 or 4 stars for quality, because obviously you enjoyed it very much. Instead, many people pretend to be film critics, whose jobs are very different, and assign an 'objective rating'. A film critic can not give personal opinions because he's supposed to speak for the masses--to appeal to some higher taste he aspires to have and that he hopes society would have. If you loved Transformers, rate it 5 stars--period. The rating isn't meant to be read by others, it's not meant to appeal to an idealized world, it's just how you felt about the thing. Convince your users to rate intelligently with that mindset and you'll start to see good data.
All that said, more data is better than less, and if you could convince your users to double their average rating-time investment and give you ratings for both, awesome. I'm skeptical that users would bother to rate two metrics for everything they've seen...but I think it's certainly possible they would. Be interested to see.
America doesn't want to force Sweden to obey copyrights just because Microsoft needs Swedish business, it does so because Sweden backing pirates sets a standard for the rest of the world that could very easily lead to a global breakdown of copyright law and less high quality content for everybody, whether they can afford it or not.
I'm sure that Sweden depends on the US as a military ally as well, it provides visas for many Swedish citizens regularly, and much more. At the end of the day, Sweden just needs the US more than the US needs Sweden, and that's why the US can argue from a position of power for its own industries.
It's not because of the content they show me, but rather because of the accuracy of their "predicted star rating" metric. Netflix showing me a broad spectrum of content I can immediately parse through by looking at predicted ratings combined with all the other standard quality metrics I look for has led me to find an immense wealth of content I never would have guessed I'd like.
Makes sense for Google just like DoubleClick did, but Hulu's platform is in jeopardy.