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Is Piracy In the Consumers' Best Interests?
moviemodel writes "Warner Home Video in China are beginning trials of 'simple pack' DVD releases at $1.50. They state they are doing this as a test to see if they can recover a market lost to pirate DVD's at 75c each. They also sell higher priced and more complete DVD sets as 'silver' and 'gold' packs. Maybe this marks the beginning of movie industry realism and long hoped for shift in business models, forced by piracy. Perhaps they can take it on as a better model for movie downloads worldwide, facing the same problem of competition from pirated movies. Is such a model viable in the long term?"
They have less of my money at $1.50, which is good. When they get what they're currently charging there's a risk they'll make more crap films starring clueless overpaid actors, and that's not a risk I'm prepared to take. I only watch a film once, so why pay more for a DVD than it costs to watch in the theater?
At least they can make some money now selling cheap DVDs instead of nothing selling overpriced ones.
1.50? You don't even have to go that low. Make them 5 bucks and you already have a deal. 5 bucks, no DRM and, hell, why should anyone DL movies anymore? Wait for a day to DL stuff, only to find out that instead of Ice Age 2 you get a cheap copy of Sally does Houston. AND you find out when li'l Jimmy starts the film.
... well, there is DRM, but so far nobody noticed it yet 'cause the IPods didn't break down yet.
Why is the IPod so popular? Affordable tracks and
But for some reason I expect this to be some PR stunt, showing that in China you can't even get the market back when you go down to 1.50 bucks. One reason COULD be that the average Chinese doesn't have those 1.5 bucks to spend on DVDs. Why do you try it in China, why not in the US? Or Europe? Or some other country where people actually (still) have the money to actually buy content?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People who steal are very good at talking people into thinking that what they did is OK, or even helpful. Bear that in mind. As UKL would say "Don't listen to the dragon''
DVD's should basically be 1.50 every where else in the world too then.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
http://davidlita.googlepages.com/copyrights
Apparently it IS possible to sell them for such a price. Why not here? This just proves that they CAN sell for less but do not WANT to.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It states Gold releases go for Rmb35, or 3 times the $1.50 release, so $4.50.
Geeks installing Windows 3.1 and 3.11 on their work computers on top of DOS, is the flagship operating system/GUI made its initial foothold. Wordperfect was originally the dominant tool for word processing and when people started pirating MS Word in the same offices, it gave MS an addition line into each office. Finally...look at the MP3 device industry. There wouldn't be a demand for Ipods and other MP3 players if it weren't for piracy. Piracy helps more than it hurts. But copyright holders issue these exaggerated claims about how much piracy hurts them and how much money it costs them. The truth is those claims are exaggerated because many of the installations of pirated software or music are things that most would never buy anyway. So piracy does have its plusses. It's just that intellectual property rights holders know that if they do not actively protect their intellectual assets, US law will not be on their side.
Is it 5:30 yet?
I thought new DVDs were between $15 and $20. The article says people are paying more than $20??
Is the movie itself. I do not want ANY options other than to play
the movie. No advertisements, trailers or anything else.
Will they do that?
The same goes for music. If you're limited as to where you can play your music for buying at an online music store, it suddenly seems more advantageous to start pirating music, so you can play it on an uncertified MP3 player or an operating system that doesn't have DRM support.
If the movie and music industries want to fight piracy, they're going to have to provide a product that is at least as good as what you can get by pirating.
It's about time the big cooperations woke up to the correct way of combating the problem. In Hong Kong the pirate CD market essentially forced the software companies to sell their software for more realistic prices. The same goes for the films. It is now almost as cheap to purchase a legal copy (of certain films and software) as it is to get hold of a pirate copy. So most people's reasoning is why not buy the legit version if it is the same price? They have piracy to thank for this. To all those that say this is stealing etc. etc., don't you know that you are getting shafted big time with those prices? By just accepting those prices you are just reinforcing the companies perception that the public will take whatever is handed to them.
There is NO way they will lower the prices in the rest of the world. If they did then all video rental stores would go out of business - or start moving a lot more merchandise. Likewise, direct-to-DVD releases cannot be priced very low; DVD sales are their only form of revenue.
As much as I would like to see movies for $1.50. It will never happen.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Free stuff is always in the consumer interest.
s such a model viable in the long term?
Of course is viable. You just profit less. And even that perhaps is not true. I've been in China, where you can get absolutely anything in DVD for about 1 dollar each. In fact, it would be difficult for you to try and get a properly licensed film in China. I know I didn't found any. And there was another difference. I had friends there that had more that two thousand DVDs at home, many of which they hadn't had time to see. They simply bought on impulse, because spending 1 dollar is not something you think a lot about. Of course my friends had higher than average (for China) earnings, but in time more and more chinese families will approach that income level.
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow. I cannot guess if that increase would be enough to compensate for the much-reduced margin on each DVD, but I would bet it would be better bussiness in the long term.
Add to that the release of DVDs on the same day of first screening (sell the things as people exits the cinema), and you have the film distribution model of the future. Big-screen film watching is a fundamentally different experience than DVD watching, and there is but little market cannibalising between the two of them. Film distributors should start to know that.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
It doesn't matter.. you'll just find some other obscure justification for pirating the movie. Let me ask you this- do you purchase the so-called low quality movie, and then download a better quality "backup" copy? Or is the movie industry just S.O.L. because they didn't bring their A-game with the original DVD distribution?
This article http://www.business-in-asia.com/china_wages.html states: "To give an example of the spread in salaries in a foreign firm in China, a professional employee could earn an annual salary of approximately 100,000 RMB (approx. US$12,000) while a factory worker or an ordinary employee could expect about 36,000 RMB (approx US$4,340).
So, one "cheap" DVD costs 12RMB, or 1/362nd of their yearly salary. In our terms, say with a salary of $30,000, that would be $82.95.
I come here for the love
Content is interesting, as a commodity. It has HUGE fixed costs and almost ZERO variable costs. I.e., studios have to pay a LOT to create some song, but the cost per CD to make is very close to zero.
Now, to make a CD costs, say, 10 cents. That's the difference between pressing this single CD and not pressing it. Material cost, if you want. Because the artist played, whether the CD exists or not, the hype runs, the pressing machine is standing there with the master ready to press, the workers are there, all of that independent of whether or not this one CD is being pressed or not.
Now, selling this CD at anything more than 10 cents is better than NOT selling it at all. And in China, the market is saturated with bootlegs. So you usually DON'T sell at all.
Now, you can't sell all your CDs at 20 cents. Yes, sure, you'd cover the cost of the CD. But you would never be able to cover the fixed costs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Great, so the next time I travel to China I can stock up on DVDs cheaply and actually get a receipt for them so I won't have to worry about being searched at customs. A few dozens of DVDs are always a bit tricky to explain in those situations.
Can't see how this will make a difference for the Chinese consumers, though, unless there is a massive anti-piracy campaign sometime in the near future.
Since the media industry is a monopoly because only one vendor can provide a specific product, there is not price balance. The particular vendor is free to charge whatever they like. Piracy now is providing that price balance because the vender can now only make they product price at a point that the consumer will not want to deal with downloading it.
.99 ITunes. The industry would never have agreed to this price if piracy was not a factor.
The best example of this process at work is the
In short, piracy will provide price balance as long as it is kept in check...
"Warner Home Video in China are beginning trials of 'simple pack' DVD releases at $1.50. They state they are doing this as a test to see if they can recover a market lost to pirate DVD's at 75c each."
Well first of all the rest of the world isn't China.
"They also sell higher priced and more complete DVD sets as 'silver' and 'gold' packs. Maybe this marks the beginning of movie industry realism and long hoped for shift in business models, forced by piracy."
Shame humanity has to enact change through illegal acts. Next up we change the US government via sniper rifle.
"Perhaps they can take it on as a better model for movie downloads worldwide, facing the same problem of competition from pirated movies. Is such a model viable in the long term?"
Piracy essentially is the content producer competing with themselves.
Actually, with HDDVD/BluRay this could get worse. If a pirated HDDVD offers HD, whether or not all your equipment is "safe" from you, you could even see those pirate DVDs being sold more expensively than the originals. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does this mean, that the 99% of people selling dvd's on EBay, which are always from China, will now be selling legitmate product? Does this mean I no longer have to worry that the DVD's I buy which are supposedly legit come on dvd-r's and have chinese subtitles?
If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.
If they sell discs with high-bitrate main feature (DVD-9 filled to the brink please), original-language soundtrack available and no UOP gimmicks, they win. Hell, if they do it consistently, they could sell such discs for a whopping $4.30 in Russia and I would gladly buy them over pirated ones. Besides I throw the box away, anyway, and pack the discs into a wallet to save space right away. Just give me the properly mastered stuff, no frills.
To bad I suspect the cheap licensed edition would be crippled. Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
What's really going on is the effect of the public community.
OpenSource, GPL, Musicians and Bands offering their music for free MP3 download, Linux - free OS, Blender, Gimp, OpenOffice...all free software that are comparable to commercial versions are a part of a HUGE new revolution that have literally SNEAKED upon the commercial industry, and because of their own onslaught on people...threatening legal users with DRM, SpyWare and restrictions....haunting people down for just being "people" - have brought fire to this revolution.
Because of this revolution, more and more people will witch to free alternatives, and the "biggies" didnt even see it coming for all their own greed and hysteria.
The way we exchange services - will change forever.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
when you abuse your monopoly position by price gauging, piracy becomes your competition.
And face it, the software and entertainment industry have been gouging the public for so long, they think that the situation is normal.
Does anyone else remember $85 movies on VHS? In 1985!
All piracy is doing is forcing the software and entertainment industry to price their products into the affordable range.
$200+ dollars for an operating system? Why? There is something seriously wrong when a peice of easily replicated digital information (ie. ludicrously cheap) costs as much or more than full system hardware.
I've been seeing these $1 DVDs at 7-11 here in Utah. I've actually bought a couple (for my parents, as most of the stuff is old classics that they would probably like to see again.)
Everything above $1 better have a very serious justification for why it is so expensive.
Other than "to make the studios/developers really rich."
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
All they need to do now is package advertising for cheap drugs / medications, low interst mortgages, genitalia enhancement, etc. Good for the consumer, eh?
I think video rental changed that by showing that alot of people would buy a video if it were sold at a lower price, and the studios would reap the profit instead of the people who rented the video. In many ways the video rentals places were stealing money from the studios in the same want online piracy is, and video became priced to compete with that grey area of acquisition.
Now, when we got DVDs the studios got greedy. They jacked the price, but that was somewhat defesible becuase of the added value. What they did do is put unskippable ads, warning, etc that made the DVD less valuable. In most cases, one cannot just put a DVD in and have it play. In addition, if one just wants a movie, it can't be had. The consumer is forced to pay for the extra content. And if the consumer wants to keep the original for backup and watch a compressed version in a more convinent format, for instant putting an entire series of one DVD, that cannot be easily done.
So the economics is this. People who want the DVD product tend to pay for it. People who merely want to watch the film once tend to rent it. People who do not want the DVD product, but want the film, are just out of luck. There is simply no legal way to aquire the film without the baggage.
And so we back to the dawn of video rental. There is no legal way to acquire the product, but there are many grey areas in which the product can be aquired. So the studios are either going to ignore this demand and perhpas not maximize profit, or find a way to tap at least some of the sales. There are limits. DVD DRM is not going away, so person who do not want to deal with 10 DVD for a season are still going to download, but a $1-5 basic edition goes a long way to satisifying the basic market.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Every time you pirate a movie, the studios lose the cost of that movie. If the movie costs $20 then they lose $20, and if it costs $30, then they lose $30. They know they can't possibly compete with free, so they're doing the best they possibly can to reduce their losses. By only charging $1.50 for each copy, this will cut their piracy losses considerably even if they don't sell any.
I'd have to say that you'd also have to figure in that the expenses for the workers are much less as well. Most of them don't own a motor vehicle. I pay 14% of my net for my car alone, and I don't have anywhere near the car that many do.
If they have a TV & DVD player, I can also see them doing what I did in my youth: Trade. We'd trade our computer & video games around, effectivly increasing our entertainment on the dollar.
I don't read AC A human right
"Apparently it IS possible to sell them for such a price. Why not here? This just proves that they CAN sell for less but do not WANT to."
Don't worry Guruvi. When the US economy resembles China's then you all can get content at "Wal-mart" prices. Hell you will be able to get EVERYTHING at Wal-mart prices. Hope you all enjoy your new economic environment. It's worth it for the LOW, LOW prices.
I bet that, at $1.50, there will be a large market for gray-/black-market imported copies to the U.S. Even if you factor in buying a DVD player with a Chinese region code, compare $1.50 to $20 and the DVD player has paid for itself within a few movies.
Otherwise, this sounds like a great idea.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
What is probably the case here that china has a large spread in incomes and that the new middle class does have more money to spend then a factory worker. In a country of a billion plus the middle class even if it is just emerging must be a gigantic market.
Still yeah, your math shows the real problem. In western terms the difference between $0.75 and $1.50 doesn't seem much but translate it to percentage of income and it is huge.
Just wonder what the prices were like before. A dvd costing a weeks salary or more? And they wonder why there is piracy.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've seen several people refer to pirating as "stealing". Keep in mind, it's only stealing when you would have gone out to purchase it in the first place! At least that's how most justify it.
If I clone something (like a nice stereo, for instance - impossible, but for the sake of our conversation), it's not really stealing it. If I make it available to other people (i.e. like sharing my stuff on P2P), that's almost worse than stealing... but if I clone something that I wouldn't have purchased to begin with, that's incredibly easy to justify, because there's no money lost. Again, I wouldn't have gone out to purchase a $25 DVD, whether it could be had for free or not, just like I wouldn't have gone out and purchased a $1200 stereo when my $150 Aiwa that I already bought works great. There's no physical product missing somewhere... I cloned it. Now if I could only clone a Viper...
The ultimate question in my mind is, what is the actual cost of manufacturing and distributing? It's like a $0.03 piece of plastic, the disc that is. Generic packaging like they talk of here can't cost very much. If it gets 15x the people to start buying movies again IN ADDITION to the people who currently pirate them, well... for $3 or $4 per release like some have suggested, I bet they stand to make their money back.
Certainly the music industry won't be far behind in this little "experiment".
This smacks of hypocrisy to me. If online piracy is also such a massive problem in the US and Europe, why aren't they drastically slashing prices on DVDs here to help people come into compliance with the law?
not only if you're a peasant farmer from somewhere smack in the middle of China but also for people who live in "selected Chinese cities" such as Shenzhen etc. The average factory worker earns US$ 60 a month (450 CYN) for work which they would get at the very _least_ 20 times as much in the US (and still be in abject poverty).
Therefore the real cost of this special discount offer is: 20 x 1.50 = just if YOU had to pay $30 dollars for it.
At that cost they wont be selling much of these, but that is probably what they want in the first place so they can once more point at all those heathen pirates.
Until they start selling "Hollywood Premium Content (tm)" at $1.50 at Walmart in the US this is not news.
So other markets should pirate DVD's as much as China to get a better price?
Sounds like the rest f the world has some catching up to do.
Common sense is not so common
A few years ago Polish magazines started to include DVD movies. I'm not sure how the deal with the distributors worked but essentially you could buy a magazine without a movie for $1-$2 or with a movie for $3-$4. With some less popular movies you could even get 2 or 3 movies in one magazine so one movie could cost you $1 (I got 3 excellent Almodovar's movies this way). The magazines were doing it for the promotion and probably didn't earn anything extra (but got more circulation). The movies were indeed basic, in a paper envelope, without extras, without other language versions but they were just fine. The movies were not new but you could buy good movies that were a few years old or sometimes last year's movies. I don't know how the deal worked for the distributors but I bought several movies that I would never purchased for a full price so they got a profit from me. The only drawback was that the selection was limited (essentially with several magazines on sale at a time you could choose among several titles). But you also got the magazine (ussually a stupid one, though) free. The movies are still sold this way so it seems it is profitable.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
That's funny... They claim, that they will start doing this in China, but in Poland, for years now, you can buy legal DVDs with papers and magazines for $2-$3, and normal commercial releases of not-so-fresh movies for $5-$6. When you factor in costs and risks associated, many people see no incentive in pirating dvds.
;)
Meanwhile CDs with latest crappy pop music start far beyond the $20 point and -- SURPRISE!!! -- no one is buying them
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Whether or not you agree with pirates (who sell the copyrighted material) or simple copyright infringers (who upload it gratis), these media industries need to compete with them in order to survive. If they were to provide services like allofmp3 where the media is unrestricted (because you trust your customers; you can always sue those who pirate later on) and at a competitive price, people would flock to that service. If you can't compete via price with the freebie pirates, then compete via value of what you're selling. Offering a clean interface, unrestricted and high quality media for an acceptable price will surely appear to be the better deal to most consumers.
Kudos if they keep this up. China seems to make sense as a place to start since they already get a lot of their media via pirated means anyhow.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow.
That sounds good when you first hear it, until you realize that this is actually going to give the MPAA and their like even more power.
The industry globally adopts such a model, there is even less chance of independent films making decent money. Everyone has to sign with the "big labels" and take a cut of the mass-produced cookie cutter movie model.
Once you adopt the position that no one but large companies (selling hundreds of different movies for $1.50 each) can recover their costs, you destroy the independent market entirely.
Pirate more!
I just came from the supermarket where I saw a pink Nike T-shirt going for 22 euros ($27 US)! Compare that to the price of a DVD (19.99 euros and up). Those marketing departments have lost touch with all reality.
Now where did I put that pack of inkjet T-shirt transfer paper...
realkiwi
What will happen is that there will still be people buying the 1USD illegal ones instead of the 1.50USD official ones.
Say that a DVD now costs 10USD and 5 times as many people will buy it. That only brings income to 7.50.
In both cases their income will be less. It would be a great opportunity to say to everybody: hey you told us to lower the prices and that we would gain more with that. Well, guess what, we tried it and it didn't work.
We made less money and people still buy illegal copies.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Chinese consumers can buy the legal cheap DVDs and sell them for a profit on eBay.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Every time you pirate a movie, the studios lose the cost of that movie.
So if I make 100 billion pirated copies of a movie, does that mean they will go bankrupt?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Respectfully..
With $1.50 being the price for sales, an effective argument can be made that the barrier to entry for someone to actually sell quantities of product goes down. In fact, hopefully this will cause the creation of more smaller content houses making the barrier to entry for films, documentaries and other content lower as well.
In terms of this being good "long term": who knows. I usually consider that "long term" would include the aging of *this* model to the point where it wasn't effective anymore either.
But if it lowers the *threat* (real? perceived? contrived?) of piracy, even for a few years, and wakes the marketing and business sides up to the fact that they DO have to compete in a changing marketplace, it is a good thing.
they will make the imports of those Chinese version of the films, illegal aswell.
That position is very short-sighted. It isn't "theft" to extend copyright laws. The rough analog to the copyrighted material devolving from private property to public property is Congress writing a law that causes your house to be turned over to the city after 100 years. While you almost certainly will be dead when it happens, what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
That's not even a roughly accurate analog. Real property is finite. There is only so much real estate on the planet. Ideas are not. Therefore, scarcity of real property exists without any outside involvement by the state or any other actor. Scarcity of intellectual property is a legal construct designed to provide people who create innovative ideas with the ability to profit from them for a short time, in order to spur the development of new ideas, which are beneficial to society as a whole.
The impetus for creation of intellectual property right flowed from the goal to improve society by providing a carrot to innovators. It was government intervention in economics, not the development of a fundamental right akin to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
While I'm sure the public good can be shown to be "served" by confiscating physical works of art, it still smells like theft to me. Is the case any less obvious with intellectual property that is essentially entertainment?
The public good has not been shown to be served by confiscating physical works of art, which is why in the United States the government can't just come and snatch up that Picasso you have hanging in your den. Intellectual property that primarily serves entertainment purposes is not physical. It is constructed by the legal system, in the same way that any other IP right is constructed. Recorded art in particular is the beneficiary of government largesse.
If there were no way for us to record musical works or create movies, artists would still be able to make money through live performances, because those performances would be naturally scarce, without any government intervention. This is in contrast to the situation we have today, where music and movies are anything but scarce. They are all around us, distributed in a wide variety of forms. Yet the movie and music industry would have the government continue to enforce an arbitrary scarcity that bears no relationship to economic reality. If we were talking about the distribution of physical products like silicon chips or automobiles, we'd call this protectionism - government intervention that serves no party but the big businesses being protected. Ultimately, it doesn't even serve them, given that it only shields them from economic forces that should be causing them to alter their business model.
Copyright coverage for a short time does spur creation of new art, but copyright of any duration is always a tradeoff between the previously-existing natural rights of society at large and the artificially-created rights given to the copyright holder.
"The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but '[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.'" - Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority in Feist v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc. (1991)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If the damn studios would cut the price to $3.00 for a first run movie and do away with region locking, they'd probably sell more of them then you'd believe possible. Once it's no longer a 1st run but into second/tertairy runs and you reduce the price to 1/2 $1.50, you actually convince people to impulse buy the movie because it's less then the price of a pack of cigarettes. Buy a Movie instead of a pack of Camels. Of course you'd pretty much eliminate the entire USED CD/DVD market if this was applied to all optical media.
Basically the idea is the same thing that Walmart does. Sell as much of the stuff for as little cost as possible while making a little profit on each sale. I suspect someone can figure the numbers and show how this would actually generate anywheres from a 10-20x increase in revenue for the studios while reducing our desire to pirate stuff by simply making it not worth the time/effort to do so.
I'll give an example to start with:
Couple with young child buys Dora the Explorer DVD's at $5.99 ea. purchase maximum of two per month. Minimum of 45 minutes of content. Basically 7 episodes without commercials.
Now add price point of $0.99 with only 20 minutes or total of two episodes or better yet, single episode with multiple language versions. Parents now purchase 2 discs per week for total of 102 per year instead of 12-24 per year.
So how much would overall profit increase? Must factor in the families that now have reason to purchase portable DVD players instead of TV's (walmart again)that will see no reason not to purchase that movie mom/dad want to see or that Dora/Power Rangers/AirBender series the kids want to see. Hell if the kids want it bad enough (DragonBallZ maybe) they'll figure out how to get a couple of dollars together to buy it. Thus increasing the market. At this price point, they'd be able to start replacing the comic/animae books that lots of kids buy. Maybe we can get Marvel/DC to jump on the bandwagon and re-release their carton archives and add to them
Piracy is not a competitive market where buyers and sellers interact in a free exchange of goods for cash. Rather, it is a onesided market where costs are essentially nil and demand is large, thus pushing prices down down down. The pirate does not need to consider the costs of production NOR does the pirate (in the presence of other pirates, as is always need the case) really consider overall demand for the item (the price of the pirated DVD will generally be the same whether it's "from Justin to Kelley" or the latest popular blockbuster).
If we find publishers competing with pirate prices, it is basically a sad admission that law enforcement is inadequate and/or an attempt to train a new generation of consumers. However. as a basic principle, the underlying problem is a failure of the right to uphold the rights of the copyrightholder (ie, not curbing piracy), NOT that of the DVD being priced too high. Clearly, as numerous ejaculatory posts here have insinuated, if DVDs were priced at $1.50, you'd buy more of them. Well, duh, because that price is clearly priced well below the competitive equilibrium price and gives you (the consumer) an unfair surplus. As much as we like this as a short term thing as consumers, it is clearly unsustainable in the long run.
But when has anything but thinly-veiled self-interest ever motivated the slashdot piracy justifier?
Dvds typically cost 10rmb (about $1.25), and oftentimes they are less, around 5 or 6. After living in China, I'd saw this is the only way for big media companies to make any money. It is either make very little money or lose it all to piracy.
This also goes to show how fricken high the margins are when you sell a dvd for $20.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
..but you can get some pretty cheap tractors from China now if you are willing to spend a couple weekends re-assembling them. They are called "crate tractors" and are shipped partially disassembled packed in a wooden crate. For less than 6 grand you can get approx 15 grand worth of compact diesel tractor.
The DVDs here, heck ya they could sell them a lot cheaper and still make a profit. Volume sales. At $20 I buy none, same at $15. Drop that to $5 I buy a few, $3 for bits on a plastic disk (let alone the $1.50 figure in the article), and I would buy a lot. The movie and music moguls at the top who make the final decision on what a "good" retail sales figure are can't see this sort of situation applies to a considerable amount of the population, they are universally multi millionaires and think $20 is dirt cheap already. $20 to them is like 50 cents or a quarter (whatever) to "normal" people.
That's a funny way of looking at it, and I partially share it. You may copy all my commercial goods all you want, distribute them, etc. etc. ... the day that I can copy a loaf of bread*. Until that day, I have to buy my bread, and you have to buy my commercial goods.
(* and the baker can copy wheat, and the farmer can copy seeds and manure, etc.)
If you don't agree with that - by all means. If you subsequently also act upon your disagreement by copying my commercial goods, you're an ass -and- you're breaking the law.
-----
Looking at it another way... if you wouldn't have gone out to buy the product, then what on Earth makes you feel like you're entitled to it all the same?
"$200+ dollars for an operating system? Why? "
Well, because in the cast of MS Vista, because it will eventually take 6 years, and 10's of billions of dollars to code it along with thousands of programmers.
I wish I could agree with moviemodel's dreamy idealism, but I've seen enough of the ugliness of the MPAA to believe that it's completely unfounded. The situation in China is desperate, it's not only cheaper, it's often more convenient to purchase pirated movies there, and often you're getting some pretty decent fake packaging and decent quality rips too. The MPAA does not have the power to manipulate the Chinese government as they do in this country and they are finally realizing that they must compete at the basest level - competitive pricing, to survive there. Between lobbying and lawyers, the MPAA will continue their reign of terror in the US at least for years to come.
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then probably yes. In reality, piracy is the cartels' best freind. It acquires and maintains mindshare of the product being pushed at the moment. And I do mean 'pushed'. Piracy is free advertisement. And also, the gov't gets to look like law enforcement heroes when they bust the pirates. So it's win-win-win for the gov't, the cartels, and the sheep.
What?
They have a website for these cheap DVDs already.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Yes, I know the standard spelling is "speech," but you see, I have free speech.
And I give you speach for free. Do with it as you will.
KFG
Congress has breached a lot of such contracts with the public in the past fifty years or so.
Perhaps the difference between me and most Slashdotters is that I have actually been alive through those 50 years.
To me these breaches are not historical breaches of contract with the public, but actual breaches with me.
I was made specific promises that specific works would enter the public domain at a specific time.
They did not.
This is the breach, not merely that copyright law was modified.
KFG
Yes, this model is viable in the long term. My reasoning isn't based on how much they can make on a movie today but on how little it will cost to make a movie tomorrow. Computer generated effects have already cut the cost of making movies by reducing the number of extras, allowing production in settings that would not otherwise be possible, allowing complete "green screen" movies, and allowing completely CG movies. I feel certain that within fifteen years movies will routinely be made without human actors and the cost of production will be quite low. This will bring an explosion of creativity as hordes of amateurs try their hand at movie production.
Like the artists who get paid several millions of dollars for a few months work on a film? Yea, right.
I don't know about that... why should I have to buy media and programs and spend time altering their deliberately buggered up product, when I can just get it off the net right away?
They don't respect me (attempting to deny me the 'play', 'menu', and 'fast forward' functions on my player), making crap and tuning their ad campaigns to misrepresent it as quality - and charge $20 for it. Why in hell should I respect them?
What an interesting concept it would be if one received a free copy of the movie on DVD immediately upon exiting the theatre... or, more realistically, if one had to pay a small fee... then retail DVDs could maintain prices much higher than these theatre DVDs, of course hopefully not as high as they are right now. I suppose the movie industry would then have to have a DVD release prepared in time for the movie release, but I mean that's not too much to ask, considering it would be free of special features and the like. I would certainly buy more movies if they sold them cheaply on the way out from seeing it... even the ones I barely liked.
And, all this talk about the rental businesses being left in the rain if the industries lower their prices... I personally think that everyone should ignore them. This is between the consumer and the producer, and the rental places are just capitalizing (not that it's a bad thing, but there's no guarantee that people should have to be able to rent out movies). The only thing we should factor in that involves rental companies is their profitability to the actual producers (that is, as a source of actual income). I'm not sure, but this can't be ALL that much... possibly enough to be able to eliminate without posing a threat to profit-turning. It's not the producer's fault if it's no longer worth it to rent movies..
I think the contributor needs to check his sources....
;)
Walking into the supermarket tonight I bought "V for Vendetta" for five RMB, currently thats about 60 cents. He's obviously a tourist.
It really is that bad here - but ive noticed that some studios are already doing this. Ive seen 60 RMB ($7) movie packs that are what we would see in the states - but who the hell would think of buying that when the best movies are not only cheaper but on every corner and more convenient. That said I have seen some maor releases (Harry Potter for one IIRC) that were on sale for only 20 kuai ($3) but still - when I can get it for 60 cents and its just around the corner.....
Its funny, a few weeks ago there were (almost) no bootleg DVD's for sale in Beijing. Apparently the government randomly declares "No Illegal Wares" weeks like twice a year. Who knows. The more I stay here the more it makes sense - and that is the scary part
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
The inefficiency of a product's development has zero bearing on its value. A case can be made for the value of Vista being $0, because that's the price of a substitute product.
they have a dollar section for older DVDs and $2.50 for newer DVDs for two days, one day for new releases. I find no need to own the DVD after I watched it already, unless it is a good movie or something and then I'd buy a copy. The rental store even can sell me a used copy of the DVD for $10 or less.
All I need do is wait for the movie to be released on DVD and then watch it at home, pop some microwave popcorn and drink a soda and save money from buying the DVD or seeing the movie in the theatre.
The $1.50 must be for China only, the only DVDs I see that sell for that or under that in the USA are old movies that lost their copyright and went public domain. The Dollar Stores usually sell them in a cardboard sleave.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I'm not saying that you should! I don't, personally. But if you were standing in front of a judge trying to explain your actions, I don't think he'd be impressed by the logic. The argument boils down to the idea that it's faster and easier to download a movie than to run a backup program (which is perfectly legal) and rip out the parts you don't want. Even if you and I think that's true, the law is unlikely to accept that as a valid excuse.
Again, I don't care how much you download. The MPAA is so seriously heinous that I have zero sympathy for them and their complaints. However, I still think you should be able to defend your beliefs if called to the carpet for breaking the law (however silly it may be), and in my opinion this rationale doesn't do that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Of course they will recover the market from pirates. The overpricing of easily reproducable materials is the reason piracy comes into being anyways. That has always been the case in history of civilization, and it will be so in future. The 'copyright' concept is still being taken as if we were in the days where voltaire, rousseau published their books. Book was something expensive to produce and publish, resulting in high prices. In the recent years, it has become increasingly easier to produce and publis materials, but prices did not take a steep dive, leading to high profit margins for intellectual rights market participants. However the 'invisible hand' always does its trick - piracy came into being. If anyone does not want to be pirated, s/he/they shouldnt be selling anything in exorbitant prices. Someone might object by saying 'but so and so prices are normal in the industry' - nay you cant decide what is an exorbitant price as the seller. The buyer decides what is an exorbitant price and what is not. If there is piracy somewhere, it means something is being pushed into the market far more than its market value there.
Read radical news here
don't just comment, vote! http://www.exploremix.com/polls/slashdot-piracy-aa a.php
Please...go ahead. I'll start with some illegal ones that are near and dear to my heart:
American Revolution
American Civil War
Blar.
"$200+ dollars for an operating system? Why? There is something seriously wrong when a peice of easily replicated digital information (ie. ludicrously cheap) costs as much or more than full system hardware."
I don't know about you, but I value my digital content more than the hardware the "plays" it.
My DVD collection is worth more than my DVD player, and rightfully so. I could care less about someone stealing my DVD player, but would be quite pissed if they stole my DVDs. Same goes for CDs vs CD player, games vs Xbox, LPs vs record player, etc.
Computers are a slightly different case, since the hardware is more expensive. But the software is more valued than the hardware. But I don't see anything wrong with programs being worth more than the hardware the runs them just like the typical CD collection is worth more than the CD player the plays them.
As for your example of an OS being worth more than the hardware, OSes are also a bit different than other software, since an OS is required to make a computer run, so one could look at the OS as part of the overall computer package, and therefore regard the OS's price as part of the overall computer package's price. Besides that, the OS is a significant part of the package, regardless of how cheap it is to "replicate" a copy of it. For example, what makes a Mac a Mac these days is the OS far more than the hardware. And there's nothing wrong with Apple charging for the OS or upgrades to the OS if they want to. Other OS providers can give their OS away for free, that's fine too (they, like you, feel that the OS they provide isn't worth much compared to the hardware).
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
You just read the headline. Didn't read a single word of the summary, did you?
Ok, let's say some music studio follows your advice. To offer an IDENTICAL product, they must release the music in a raw format with absolutely no restrictions (i.e. a plain REDBOOK CD, like they used to do). Ok, that's all well and good. Now somebody comes along, and puts up an ISO of the CD somewhere. Now, not only is the pirated version IDENTICAL to the studio version; it is also FREE, making it the superior product. Now, how on earth can the studio sell an IDENTICAL, yet SUPERIOR product? It is impossible. Now they have to offer "goodies" that cannot be electronically duplicated easily, such as liner notes, trading cards, figurines, charm bracelets, whatever. But then essentially you are spending $18.00 or whatever on liner notes, trading cards, figurines, or charm bracelets (since the content on the CD can be had for free). So now your excuse would be "Why should I pay $18.00 for a CD and some stupid "goodie" when I can get the CD for FREE? The "goodie" is clearly not worth $18.00." So, my question to you is this: What would the studio have to do in order to both A. offer a superior product, and B. get you to purchase that product?
Yes, piracy is in the consumer's best interest. You get all of the newest content you might want to check out and you don't have to pay much if anything for it. So, yes, it's in their best interest. It puts the power back into the consumer's hands and actually makes the content provider/evil price gouging corporation fight for their customer base. What a concept!
I think we may be living in a bubble also.
I'm taking an "ethics of IT" course right now, and most of the ethical systems proposed in the books I'm reading entirely don't work in a world of open source.
They are written with a fundamental underlying assumption of closed source. This is the way 99% of people that claim to know about computers still think. We still have a ways to go.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I would buy so many more DVDs if they were this low of a price (or maybe a little higher). It seems like they are selling some with no menus, extra features, etc. All I care about the movie. I have never really cared about behind the scenes-type stuff. As long as it's excellent quality DVD-9 MPEG2 for that price, I'l certainly pay. Also, it has to come with covers just like any other DVD. I really am not into downloading. Physical media continues to make more sense to me because unlike downloads, it's truly tangible.
you can buy DVD films at yours news stand packaged up with a cardboard backer to make them 'magazine shaped'. A bit less similar in the UK is the trend for convenience stores to sell DVDs for very little. Now it used to be the case that these were rubbish, straight-to-video titles - but now they all seem to be perfectly good films, that you never quite got around to buying.
I'm currently trying to clear out my flat and looking at a the good few hundred DVDs I have on the shelf, was sorely tempted to just bin all the packaging - I just don't want to as I F'in paid for it through the nose.
I'm not saying that an operating system shouldn't have value, but that it is over-valued right now.
It's basically given away for about 1/10th or just free so that it goes with new systems, but if you try to buy a full copy on your own hardware, it's exceedingly expensive.
DVDs were at that same point, but they are finally coming down in price because they are having to compete. Value of fully commercial product versus very crappy copies... but the copies let you get the story and watch the show.
Piracy is a self-defense mechanism against abusive monopolies that are in place now.
Strangely, our government is fostering these abuses because it's a major revenue generator and taxable source. It's making money almost out of nothing.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
Thinking about how 1.50 dollars could be a days wage in some parts of the world, and just 3 minutes in other parts. Do you think that such a trinket of entertainment should cost a full days work for one, and just 3 minutes of work for the other ?
It means that labor in "some parts of the world" is grossly overvalued. For instance China had frozen the exchange rate between American money and renminbi for over a decade. A more free market would take care of the discrepancy, through outsourcing or exchange rate shifts or both.
I have a very small DVD collection because I tend to ask myself a question when I look at one: "How many times am I going to watch it?" The answer is "once or twice" for most movies, "three" is rare. Then I multiply by the rental cost and generally come up with half the price on the sticker. And move along.
Alas for me, other people do not ask this question. They just want to own it because they like owning movies, having the shelf-full. At least that's what they say when I ask them the "how many times..." question. This urge means that "all the traffic will bear" is over twice the price that (I think) it should be.
If people WILL PAY such a price - and DVD's have been flying off the shelves for years, a stunning growth market that very happily surprised the studios so that they are now frantically printing their whole back catalog and blowing the dust off 60's TV series - why would any sane businessman charge less? "All the traffic will bear" has always been the price for ANYTHING in history unless tightly government regulated.
So quit calling them greedy.
Granted, they have a monopoly of sorts - only the copyright holder for "Air Force One" can sell you a DVD of "Air Force One". But the products are fungible to the extent that you can spend your evening watching other movies, too. If all the studios are in collusion to hold the price up, that's oligopoly and charges are possible - and have been done with music companies.
Pursuing an oligopoly is a serious government priority if they're driving up the price of wheat or steel and affecting the economy - but driving up the price of leisure products that people didn't have a few years ago and don't really need because they could just rent? Not a priority. (They'd have to arrest most of the fashion industry first - why "protect" people from $30 DVDs when they pay $300 for jeans?)
Piracy here isn't like Asia: No wide-open, over-the-counter sales possible; our "pirates" have to spend about an hour finding and downloading and burning and it severely limits the "competition". Even quick-to-download MP3s only took (at most) a few percent of the "market" and reduced CD prices at very most 10%.
Not only can I not be bothered paying $20 for "Batman Begins" I can't be bothered finding it and downloading it and all that - there's more likely something worth my time on my ad-free movie channels (no doubt "Batman Begins" in another six or ten months), or on my DVR, or at worst rentable for $3.
The only thing that will make our prices drop significantly is for people to get over that "I just want to own a copy" urge, and pay only rational prices. This isn't food we're talking about; it's a luxury good - particularly when they can be rented for $3 when they leave the "new" shelf in a few months.
Well one reason he wouldn't do that is that it is just as ILLegal to use said back-up program. To back up a DVD you have to circumvent the copy protection on the disc and that is in breach of the DMCA as it currently stands. So he can either spend his time and effort doing something illegal, or get that same end product, also illegal, with less hassle.
Compressing 9 gigs of a DVD down to a 700 meg DivX rip makes it look like fucking ass.
I walked into an adult video store once, and most of the DVDs were priced at $60 and up. Some people don't care about fucking ass video quality; they just want to see the fucking ass.
How long do you expect it will take for the Pirate Party movement to spread outside Sweden?
I got King Kong SE DVD (2 discs) for $10 USD a few weeks ago at Wal-Mart in Mexico.
Universal Studios is promoting "affordable releases" here and I believe it is a step in the right direction. I for one will support this schema.
Kudos to them.
run a backup program (which is perfectly legal)
Only if you can 1. find a developed country without DMCA that will let you immigrate, and 2. afford to emigrate.
DVDs are a discretionary purchase. Consumers in every country have an individual price point where they will buy a DVD because the price is reasonable for the limited entertainment value it provides. I believe, in the US, that the optimum price point is about $5. Look at how many DVDs Wal-Mart sells at that price point.
The question, of course, is where is the optimum price point for DVDs to sell in China, given its consumers' standard of living. I believe WHV is on the right track here.
A quick personal note: I bought 6 old John Wayne films earlier this week for $5 each. How many would I have purchased if they were $10 each? None...
"My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow."
That sounds well and good, but you would have to do careful research and real market analysis of this. What's to stop people from buying these super cheap movies? There are only so many hours in a day, and if they're doing other things, movies can't eat them all up.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
As an example, consider the cost of cigarettes in Canada in the late 1980s. Tax rates were so amazingly high that ordinary people were willing to buy cigarettes smuggled in from the U.S. -- exact duplicates of the "legal" product, sold at a fraction of the price. The black market became ubiquitous and socially accepted. It undercut the legitimate market so badly that the government had to lower taxes so there would be a legal product left to tax.
Now consider a product like a movie, where the cost of reproduction is absurdly low -- zero, in fact, if you just download the movie from the Internet. DVDs in the U.S. are priced to compete with that, and I do in fact buy DVDs of films I could easily download. In China, movies are burned to DVD then sold for $0.5. Studios, trying to compete with that, hope that a price point of three times the black market rate will attract buyers to their legitimate product, thereby making the production of ripoffs unprofitable.
This is not my sandwich.
Can I safely assume that your "ethics" of IT course is a less-hilarious version of Don't Copy That Floppy? ("Sharing with your neighbor is evil" to rewrite proprietors' words into a Stallman-style) If so, then I can say that I sadly agree with you.
What I got out of the first reply was that we haven't yet seen the revolution where very few users will be on those proprietary and closed systems, we're still getting to it. Hey look at Ubuntu, it's 0-a-dozen. It's all over the media... the more people getting it, the more popular it will be (really I've heard a few friends tell me "You've got to try Ubuntu! It's free and it's more than what you'd expect from free!").
Speaking of the "revolutions" (they rarely are in IT), we need Jabber to be more popular, down with the proprietary IM clients and protocols.
There should be a rule about calling someone a communist in a discussion about Intellectual Property. We have Godwin's law for the idiots who parallel everything to nazi-ism. What do we have for idiots like you who parallel it to communism?
If so, the discussion is over before it begins. The Article talks about American movie studios' pricing strategies in the People's Republic of China, which is ruled by a Communist Party.
I am tired of being forced to sit though anti-piracy adverts that I can't skip though when I buy legitimate DVDs. In response I propose that the following (skippable) advert should be added to pirated DVDs.
By purchasing legitimate DVDs, you are unwittingly helping to finance state terrorism through the sales tax (VAT in the UK). The terrible weapons purchased with your money are used to maim and kill thousands of innocent women and children throughout the Middle East in air assaults. Do you really want children to be dismembered and killed by a cluster bomb that you helped to purchase?
Think before you buy. State Terrorism is a Crime!
A copyright should last for lets say 40/50 years or the life of the author plus maybe 5, maybe 10 years
I say less...the original copyright was only 14 years. It was later extended to 28, and so on. When the copyright was first incorporated into law, media producers faced some real challenges with distribution and production, and I believe, had a right to cover those costs and make a reasonable profit. Today, it's much different - the geographical and production/reproduction issues have been drastically reduced (via the net, and the ability to acquire the content in digital form). The irony here is that the length of the copyright is now longer than it has ever been in its history.
If you buy a genuine diamond, you're also getting shafted.
Coming this fall: cultured diamonds from Apollo Diamond. Give your girlfriend[1] what she really wants: a real diamond free of connections to insurgency finance.
[1] I must be new here.
I share your sentiments that pirating media is similar to stealing.
The thing that is difficult to get around in this debate is that there is something broken that is preventing the development of a dynamic price sensitive marketplace for media. Prices seem to be fixed by monopolists and consortiums. Even worse, there is not an open marketplace where we can go to find all of the old media that we might want to access.
In the absense of a working marketplace, Warner Brothers is now responding to price pressures from piracy. This is quite interesting
The fact that media monopolies have started responding to price pressures from piracy is interesting. Personally, I think it would be better to have a dynamic marketplace. I am angry that P2P-piracy destroyed early attempts to establish such markets based simply on trust.
The P2P-piracy advocates will never realize the damage that they did by undermining trust. Having destroyed the most fundamental element of an open marketplace (trust) I am not sure how or even if we can develop the open marketplace for media.
Big-screen film watching is a fundamentally different experience than DVD watching
Of course it's different: Limited selection of food and drink. Exorbitant pricing. Dirty floors. Improper volume settings. Cellphones. Commercials. Crying children in PG-13 and even R rated movies. No intermissions for restroom breaks. Having to hire a babysitter for R rated movies instead of just sending your kids to bed. In many ways, DVD-Video on a mid- to high-end home theater system is better than what you get at a cinema.
Too bad we can't pirate gasoline.
That's why you buy a diesel car instead of a gasoline car, or use diesel-powered public transportation. To "pirate" diesel, you can grow crops with a high oil content and turn them into biodiesel. Heck, some modded diesel engines can run on straight vegetable oil for the ultimate YarrCar.
Game piracy is rampant everywhere. There are clearly more games downloaded and played than purchased legally.
But what exactly is piracy? If somebody downloads and plays a GPL'd clone of Bandai's Lumines instead of buying a PSP and a Lumines disc, is that piracy?
Yet PC (and console) games distribution is not a monopoly proposition
Try to get your independent game ported and distributed on any set-top console or any handheld system, and tell me it's not a collusive oligopoly. Got any hints?
A case can be made for the value of Vista being $0, because that's the price of a substitute product.
I'll guess that your "substitute product" is Ubuntu Linux or some other popular GNU/Linux or *BSD operating system. But imagine a piece of hardware that has a working driver for Windows NT series operating systems but no driver for Linux *cough* 4-digit Microtek scanners *cough*. The price of the substitute product would have to include the price for a substitute for the hardware as well.
...that every bit of packaging beyond a printed cardboard sleeve and a waterproof plastic wrapper exists solely to convince you on a subliminal level that you're buying something more substantial than data.
Same goes double and triple for software. One DVD's worth of data, in a fat 6 by 4 by 2 inch box with a half-inch thick printed manual (how quaint!) and some packing peanuts. As unsubtle as a puffer-fish!
Check the history of Mastertronic, who dropped the price of computer games to GBP1.99 and no longer had a piracy problem, even though you could copy a game for GBP0.80, it just wasn't worth it.
our government is fostering these abuses because it's a major revenue generator and taxable source.
So why doesn't the US Congress take more action on HR 2408, which would establish an additional "intellectual property tax" on works that are still exploited after 50 years?
The problem is the question of cause and effect - if we remove copyright much of the economic incentive to produce this abundance would disappear, and we would likely to be facing a great decline in both abundance and quality.
I never said anything about removing copyright, and the example of the Hong Kong film industry is irrelevant to discussions of copyright term length.
When copyright was introduced in the comparatively slow-moving commerce of the nascent United States, the term was 14 years, with a right to extend for 14 more years if the author was alive.
Now we live in a global commerce environment that moves much more swiftly, where tremendous profits are made in days and artistic works can be distributed all over the globe in a matter of weeks. Yet amazingly, the copyright term is now the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years for works under corporate authorship. This came into effect even though the vast majority of copyrighted works provide no revenue to their owners beyond a few years.
This has nothing to do with piracy. United States law in effect says that the ideas of an individual can continue to make money for another party long after the creator dies. It has gone from being an incentive favoring creativity, to an incentive for corporate entities to milk the monetary value of artistic works as long as possible. It is corporate welfare handed out by the government to support established media distribution cartels. They are using legislative action to stave off the collapse of the business models that brought them so much wealth in the 20th century.
As a final note, don't you think it is ironic that Disney, the most powerful promulgator of copyright extension, is using copyright law to extend their exclusive rights to control so many films that originated from the public domain?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
They're already selling them cheap elsewhere I am in Latvia right now on a Fulbright. One of the "big" supermarkets in Riga sells DVDs for 1-2 lats. (1 lat = $1.75). I only get Latvian and Russian cable so I will take what I can get. Typical movies like: "The Chronicles of Riddick," "Underworld," "Resident Evil," etc. are one Lat.
Latvia is an EU country so these are clearly NOT pirated. Of course the per capita income is lower than in the US but higher than China by far (no real piracy problem of course), the price is very reasonable locally since a movie, the opera, etc is about 10 Lats. I almost never buy DVDs in the U.S. because the price is not worth paying for a movie that might suck. I do not go to movies for the same reason. My local public library has a great selection of CDs risk free, however, and you can buy a whole season of something good (B5, CSI, etc.) for 40 bucks.
Anyway, I have bought dozens of them since I arrived. The last time I bought a video in the U.S. was at least five ago. Since I can get used videos for five bucks in many places (or free at the library), why should I give the industry a penny more? Now they can make something from me -- since the prices are reasonable.
As many have pointed out here, if they lowered the price (like that booze in the mini bar in the hotel), many people who do not buy would start buying and piracy would be pointless. Same principle as the boneheads who bitched about outlawing smoking in bars and then discovered that the young people and bar crowd still goes out but now so do the non smokers. Go figure.
[Somehow I posted this earlier to the wrong story -- one I never even read. Sorry.]
in Poland, for years now, you can buy legal DVDs with papers and magazines for $2-$3, and normal commercial releases of not-so-fresh movies for $5-$6.
I'd bet that they're dubbed into Polish only as an extra form of region coding on top of the player-enforced Region 2 code. Now you see part of why the soundtrack costs more than the movie nowadays.
I've known a few people who've successfully run five-guy record companies
How do microlabels verify that a songwriter has not subconsciously copied an existing copyrighted work that was played on the radio ten years ago? How do microlabels promote their product to minors, who cannot visit music venues with affordable ticket prices because such venues rely on alcohol sales to make up the difference? How do microlabels promote their product to minors, who are often forced to listen to major label music on commercial FM radio on the school bus on the way to and from public school? How do microlabels sell their product to minors, who cannot pay with anything but cash?
Man, you're making me feel old ... I've witnessed 40 of those 50 years. BTW, your description of the situaiton as Breach of Contract is very well worded.
... that's the piece I consider to be the material breach. More specifically, the original copyright terms formed a valid contract - the three requisite parts were satisfied (offer, acceptance, and consideration.) The "consideration" in this case is an exchange of a short-term monopoly for public-domain status at the end of that term. Disregarding the offer and acceptance aspects of the retroactive extension, there's only benefit for the copyright holders and none for the public. The copyright extension act therefore fails the consideration test, and is not a valid contract. The public already had the "revert to public-domain" element in the original contract. The extension offers benefit to the copyright holder in exchange for ... what? (hint: nothing.)
... are we up to number three already?
That said, I feel like I'm in the same exact situation. I've expressed my dissatisfaction with the Sonny Bono Indefinite Copyright Extension nastiness. The retro-active part makes me particularly furious
I've used the term "breach of contract" in many discussions. Is it possible to file a class-action lawsuit against Congress for Breach of Contract?
I'm quite certain that the lawyers would have a field day with that. The original contract was negotiated by representatives of the people, and I'm also quite certain that they'd argue that the terms of said contract were re-negotiated by representatives of the people. The whole "representation" thing creates a nasty grey area - we citizens aren't allowed to opt-out of laws we don't like.
In the words of Ed Howdershelt: "There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order."
Looks like we're exhausted the first two
I feel certain that within fifteen years movies will routinely be made without human actors
Not even voice actors? The first Felix the Cat films came out in 1919, and after over 80 years we're still using human voice actors for animated films. We're also using human model artists, human texture artists, human cinematographers, human experts in (virtual) lighting, human script writers, human soundtrack composers, and human lawyers to secure licenses for songs on soundtracks. It takes a lot more humans in a lot more specialties to make a feature film than to make ten recorded songs, which is why you're not going to see garage movies take off as quickly as garage music.
I find no need to own the DVD after I watched it already, unless it is a good movie or something and then I'd buy a copy.
You more than likely do not have small children, who will happily watch the same G-rated animated movie week after week.
"Today, it's much different - the geographical and production/reproduction issues have been drastically reduced..."
Yeah, LOTR only took, what, eight YEARS to produce?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The Creation of Monetary Wealth by restricting the flow of information should become more and more difficult to justify every new day of the 'information age'. Creativity is Capital. Wealth should be measured by Progress otherwise it pays to have a small boy break windows.
I have seen these Warner DVDs at a Canadian truck stop for CAD0.99 which is about USD0.85 - or are these the pirate copies? The US truckers buy stacks of them...
Oh well, what the hell...
Swedish publishers could then have used my photographs for free where they occasional pay me license fees now.
I don't know how privacy laws work in Sweden, but if they're anything like how they are in the United States, people who reproduce and distribute your photos of human subjects may still need the permission of each subject. You can set yourself up as a license broker for rights of publicity in your photos whose copyright has expired.
"Is such a model viable in the long term?" you ask. No. It will lead to the end of the Hollywood movie age. MWahahahahaha.
I was mainly referring to the actual physical production of the medium, not the content itself. My point stands that the industry is benefitting from economies of scale that weren't available when copyright was first enacted. If they want to blow years and millions of dollars on its creation that's not a requirement, it's a choice.
...gives you a unique perspective and brings home reality over their BS they spew. I'm in a similar half a century + change personally screwed by those bozos. A couple of my pet peeves are them continuuing to muck about with gun rights after they promised the 68 act would be "it", no more after that, and later on with the huge illegals amnesty during the reagan years (I think, don't remember, 84??), then they said they would "crack down" and "enforce the laws on the books".
Oh ya, my all time *favorite* "random courtesy roadblocks". WTF is up with that?? Remember back in school we were taught only supremely evil and totalitarian bad places like east germany and whatnot had those sorts of roadblocks (Your papers please!) and how wrong and illegal it would be here?
Man, there's a bunch. You are right, people of a younger age don't have any frame of reference on some of these subjects outside of an academic one.
Now here's one I keep trying to maintain a frame of reference on, the great depression. It's hard, but I try, I keep it in the back of my mind when I look at economic news andd geopolitical events. I wasn't around then, but my parents and aunts and uncles, etc, were, and I distinctly remember the stories they told me about it and how amazingly fast things can change and how utterly bogus the stock market/government currency manipulators are when it comes to hosing the population with their congames. Keep promising them just this huge something for nothing deal until they are all sucked in, then WHAMO, drop the hammer and walk off with all the REAL wealth leaving the peons holding the bag with worthless paper. Seems they pull this stunt on a big scale every other generation or something, because it takes that long for people to "forget" those "leaders" main skill set is *lying*. They are professional grifters.
Someone from China is going to make a killing selling those legit DVD for $3.50 on Ebay!!!!
"f they want to blow years and millions of dollars on its creation that's not a requirement, it's a choice."
It's not so much a choice as it's an investment, made in the hope that someday said investment will be profitable. Remove the potential for profit, and the investment would not be made.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In China, the price of pirated DVDs in Shanghai (pirated DVD capitol of the world -- they have brick and mortar shops) is firmly set at 8 kaui by the pirated DVD mafia. Whereas you can haggle with Shanghai shops on nearly anything (I got a North Face jacket for 20$ when they wanted $150), I couldn't once budge even a street DVD hustler off the 8 kuai price point (they're people that walk up to you on the sidewalk and sell unsleeved DVDs). The street "Rolex" hustlers, by comparison, would usually haggle down to a 10-to-1 ratio off their starting price.
8 kuai is right at $1 right now (buying at 7.99, selling at 8.02), not 75 cents. So they're coming in closer to the pirates price point than that. And Chinese people I talked to actually prefer real goods; it's just hard for them to justify when the pirated goods are so much cheaper... sounds like it should work.
but for newer ones that have yet to break even (they don't all manage to at the box office) it's definitely a factor.
what if the movie sucks and it deserved to lose?
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
I find it interesting that so many people who believe in Free Markets (hint, you can count me in that number) do not think the Free Market can find a solution to this problem (hint, I am probably not in this number) but that the government is needed to step in and grant monopoly rights or art and the like would cease to be made.
[They'd wait for him to perform, tape it and distribute the song that way, without giving him a cent.]
And exactly how would they do this? The artist would have a EULA on the back of his concert tickets making this illegal. Let's hear what they would do instead.
[The balance is way off. But that doesn't mean we have to throw the right out, we just have to put it back into balance.]
This is true, perhaps not for the reasons you hold, but do you have any sure fire ways to do this in a reasonable time frame? You don't have to throw the right out, but you could without taking one of those inalienable rights from anyone.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
ths situation in china today is that we still have very large number of people willing to work for very low profit margines, this provide most of the economic backbone of china it is these efficent workers thats realy sluging it. In the case of praicyn, tis due to the shear number of people whilling to try and pirate DVD, it is almost impossible to enforce since it's essentaly a bottom up effect. much akin to the file sharing that is currently going on on the internet, there is no legit long term distributors or distupution network. It's all done localy becasue it can be done, this is also one of the reasons why legal operations find it soo hard to compete, because it needs to manualy distrubute the content which is probably produced more expensive as well with no ensurance on sells, compared to the pirates who only need 2 have a computer, half decent printer and a internet connection. The two major diffrence realy is that instead of lets say, sony making money, some ripper in china is. The second problem as mentioned b4 is that the artist is the one who realy misses out on the cash benifits of this kinda of system. But it does mean however the artest is more likely to be famous becasue more ppl have seen his work, thus increasing the demand for his work. ie: he gets loaded any way since now every one wants a piece. In the long term however such as systeme degrades the quaility of work produced by local chinese studios since they get very little in terms of direct fincal feedback. This is not a great problem in china at the moment because a most of the pirate DVDs are Hollywood films and old short TV series, which have already lost their value or can be dl for free any way. The only netigive feedback one gets for buying a pirate DVD is that it's bad quilty but watchable.
The next refinement is to look at the area between those lines. It's lost revenue. If supply and demand converge at 50 quatloos for an isolinear chip, then all the people who would have been willing to pay 100 quatloos get a free ride.
Look around and you'll see zillions of clever ways to charge both 50 quatloos and 100 quatloos for the same isolinear chip. One is the "early adopter tax", in which the 100-quatloo folks get the first samples of the chip. Another example is air fares, where expense-account people get on-demand anytime travel but 50-quatloo people have to stay over Saruday.
Price discrimination feels unfair but economists say it's efficient and beneficial. More planes fly, more isolinear chips get built.
Piracy happens when there's no price discrimination. There are people willing to pay $15 for a CD, or at least there used to be. If you insist on selling all your CDs for $15 you miss out on the $7.50 narket and on the people who'd be happy to pay $3 to avoid the hassles of P2P. If you're not blinded by greed and scrambled by drugs you segment the market and put products at all of those price points.
The sound of the grandparent's comment passing through the air in a locale distant to the parent.
Doesn't follow the thread of discussion at all. The GP was arguing that the quality of the legal releases is not higher, and thus not a very good alternative.
The grandparent lives in a land where all the legal houses are trailers, built to fall apart in five years- not because of the cost of building real homes, but simply because it's the only legal game in town, and the consumers "have" to accept it. The free, illegal homes are the only ones worth it...
Equalizing the prices in the American and Chinese DVD markets can ultimately only be sustained by equalizing the prices in all other markets that they interact with. Critically, the labor market. If you want $1.50 DVDs in the USA, you should also be willing to accept Chinese wages.
Are you adequate?
Warner is rewarding a country for having a legion of pirates. As a consequence, Warner is punishing us for being legitimate buyers. That really annoys me.
Okay, you were talking about justifying copyright by the public good. A lot of people would agree with you. Most libertarians wouldn't. For them, if it involves force, it is wrong, and any perceptions of public good are wrong too. Most moralists, myself included, wouldn't. For me, theft is taking that which is not yours and is someone else's.
That *does* include piracy. Going on the high seas, taking a ship (or causing it to break up on a reef with false lighthouses) is taking that which is not yours.
Likewise, going around the law to copy a DVD which is named as someone else's is also theft. It is taking for yourself that which belongs to someone else.
But so, too, is trying to extend one's copyright, even through use of the law. That product belongs to the public domain as of year X, and to try to attempt to seize it for one's exclusive ownership is to steal it from others.
Let me take it a step further: the original attempt at legislating copyright was also theft. God did give to us the ability to intellectually reporoduce ideas, and to manufacture products, including copies. That did originally belong to each and every person, and was a major factor in the renaissance of Europe, the philosophy of Greece, the Library of Alexandria. To take that gift of God away from the populace, and hand it over to a single person, was also an act of theft. To justify it in the name of public good is no better or worse than to say "I'm stealing it because I need/want it " (or because my wife wants it.
But one theft does not justify another theft. If someone steals something from you, you should not just steal it back, or join the thieves and start stealing whatever you need. That destroys the common trust of society. In the end, it means that all who are honest will be hurt the worst. Rather, if someone steals something from you, you should either get the theft rectified by going to a proper authority over the both of you -- or you should simply accept and forgive the theft, lest your response cause even worse evil and damage.
Does this mean that thieves will thrive? Yes, for a time -- but they will also make enemies, and when disaster strikes them, they will find few friends to help them out.
Wouldn't this gall honest people? To some extent, yes. The "galling" is an internal protest at one's lack of power to enact justice. But remember that we are in fact unable to defend ourselves as much as we need, so "galling" means that we are seeing things clearly.
But it does seem to me wrong to ask if there is a benefit to piracy. I would say no. There is definitely an apparent benefit to piracy -- that is unmistakable. But the appearance and the reality do not always agree. I would contend that piracy also destroys the fabric of society. It may not seem significant, but I would contend that it is real and important, and will add up in the end.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
works for hire are already done that way (though with a term thats far longer than I think it should be) but creations by individuals are not.
this effectively means that unless you know who created something you can NEVER be sure its in the public domain!
imo a couple of decades from the initial release to public domain entry would be perfectly sufficiant for companies to cover thier costs. It would also stop companies just sitting on classics for years and force them to innovate to stay in buisness.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
2 tickets to an evening showing of the latest movie: $17.00. Bucket of popcorn and soda: $6.00. Gas to drive to theater and back (in new 44mpg car) $3.00. Cost of babysitter: $0.00 (Thanks to Grandma!). Total cost: $26.00
New released DVD: $20.00. 2-liter soda and popcorn: $5.00. Gas: $0.00 (Bestbuy on route home). Babysitter: $0.00. Total Cost: $25.00
Not to mention at home we can pause the movie if we need to get up. And if we do like the movie, we can watch it again.
All in all, $20.00 doesn't seem like that bad of a deal to me. At $1.50 a movie, they have to be looking at 10 million sales to GROSS the cost of a bargin basement movie. Most likely they'll need close to 40 million sales at $1.50 just to cover the cost of the movie and distrobution. And that's just for a $15mil movie. Imagine trying to turn a profit off of a AAA title!
And we're not talking about Jimbo in his dorm room downloading a song, we're talking about companies that rip and re-press DVDs for resale and mass market distrobution. Nah, the primary issues are 1) copy right infringement. And 2) the artificially low value of Chinesse currency.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Sally Does Houston?
:-)
You mean Houston like the Houston 500/620 ?
You've now brought me to a question that I didn't think I'd have to ask...what is the average period of time over which such an investment is recouped? To clarify, at what point is such an investment considered a loss, or a profitable venture? Do you really believe that studios and other content creators amortize their "investment" over the entire life of the copyright?
The problem is that copyright creates an artificial scarcity in the market.
When that scarcity is invalid or nulled, the price aims for zero $0.
I learned that in high school economics (non-honors).
Libertas in infinitum
Eventually the consumers will become zombies and take to wandering around foggy graveyards or something. Obviously, zombies do not buy movies; they prefer to entertain themselves by eating your brain.
Okay, you were talking about justifying copyright by the public good. A lot of people would agree with you. Most libertarians wouldn't. For them, if it involves force, it is wrong, and any perceptions of public good are wrong too. Most moralists, myself included, wouldn't. For me, theft is taking that which is not yours and is someone else's.
I'm not sure what you mean by moralism, because every definition I've ever come across is squishy. In fact, many of the definitions call it "judgments about the morality of other people." I assume that is not the meaning you wanted to convey.
Did you simply mean to imply that a person who believes in compromise is inherently relativist, and that those who abide by an unwavering philosophy are morally superior?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
They don't rely on foreign markets to pay for their films. A film is a success if it breaks even in America. Foreign sales are all gravy.
They're trying to maximize their profits by setting a lower price point.
Ooo Ooo ... Can I play too!
Civil Rights for Blacks (1960's)
Civil Rights for Illegal Immigrants (2007)
if i could buy a DVD without the fancy packaging, without and of the hours and hours of extras they put on dvd releases nowadays, and pay $5-10 for it, i would probably be buying all sorts of DVDs, maybe a few a month. instead of only buying ones i KNOW i'm going to want to watch a few times or more, becuase they cost goddamn $25+
hi guys when you american talking about the piracy, we chinese are laughing at it and just enjoy every moives, not from the DVD disc but from the BT. that's the point why warner makes a cost down. BT, BT is the key.
Let me answer a question with a question: Do you believe that every book, album, and movie produced is a blockbuster?
Obviously not. Now a tougher one. Is every book book, album, and movie profitable? Again, if you look at the number of books and albums that are remaindered, and the number of movies who are off the screens after the first week, or the ones who go straight to DVD to start with, you'll have an answer to that question as well.
So yes, investments are recouped over time. In more cases that you'd suspect, the investment is never fully recouped, and those production costs are subsidized by more successful efforts. And don't quote "investment" at me. That's exactly what it is. And not all investments pan out.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
or one that sounds exactly like it. Any pointers?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Also as I understand, Land can reclaimed it the by the government if it is not used for a period of 70 years. If this were not the case the each time the true owner was permanently lost the amount of usable land would decrease. Likewise, if an artwork hasn't been worked on for 100 years then it becomes public domian, otherwise the updated version remains copywrited and only the old version becomes public domain. If you weren't allowed to copy works that were over a hundred years old without tracking down the owner these works would be lost permanently.
Also no idea exists in a vacuum. Most ideas come from other ideas, e.g. all of Shakespeare's works were based upon other peoples play's and stories. Giving ideas permanent ownership would mean that all aspects of our culture would be owned by someone and there wouldn't be a body of work that new works could draw from.
I imagine that the low-income Asians that these are aimed at would find these fancypants expensive DVDs hard to use because they won't "just play" on their dvd-players. I doubt many low-income asian people appreciate that to play DVDs you are "meant" fiddle with your DVD player's region encoding first, given that buying DVDs that supported this "feature" used to cost over a weeks pay.
Okay, all right, so "stealing" isn't the right term. Just because the common terminology doesn't accurately describe the practice, that does nothing to wash the practice clean of any wrongdoing. Similarily, just because (you may feel) infringement is often committed against "bad" people, this still does not say anything to the legitimacy or "correctness" of the actual act of infringment. You're arguing about peripheral subjects and haven't said a thing about the actual matter at hand.
To those with the means and ability to create content, a right is granted: to control the distribution of that content by utilizing legal systems. It is an artificial right, but it is given to counteract the fact that it is unfairly easy, given the simple physical requirements of copying, for a copier to profit from someone else's much more laborous act of actually creating content. The creator, without copy control rights, would be a fool to create anything at all, as the inventive work would be worthless after the first knock-off artist came along and did the simple task of pumping out bootlegs.
Do you have the means and motivation to create a couple hours of movie entertainment? If not, than pony up to the people who do, or go without. It's called "specialization" and "trade", and it's been a part of civilized society for quite a while.
Considering that "content" is not a right or a basic sustainance need, and that publishing is not an esoteric or vastly expensive art only available to a select few, then it's a perfect playing field to "let the market decide". So Sony, EMI, BMG, Warner, etc. are all raging bastards? Don't buy... and don't give me lip service about "boycotting" and taking the high road if you'd just go and grab it bootleg. It's not a need, and there are alternatives out there, so a "boycott" without the rather mild sacrifice involved in not actually seeing or hearing the latest blockbuster hit is just hypocritical.
I'd be right with anyone saying that the DMCA is a travesty and that things like legal enforcement for region-encoding and against modchipping is downright wrong, but to "fight" them with piracy has no real weight at all.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Very true. I've wondered this before, but I'd really like to see some sort of study as to where the majority of music on people's iPods came from. I know on mine, the majority is from CDs that I've ripped on my computer, followed probably by "unofficial sources," then online stores, then the iTMS.
I don't know anyone who could even say with a straight face that a large percentage of music they have on their iPod came from the iTMS; it's just too expensive.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Compare the price of this DVD playerY U/ref=amb_asin-coop-1_53560491/026-7568354-9917245
Y C/ref=br_lf_li_1_2/026-7568354-9917245
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000EG60
compared to this DVD of Harry Potter's
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000EBOZ
Now why should a DVD cost more than the player?
what exactly you buy besides the storage media when you buy DVDs?
1."The Service":delivery/packing/transport
2.Original packaging.Plastic cases.
3.The expense of making another copy at publishing facility.
4.Copyright extortion fee.Since you don't really own the DVD content you own a license to use it.
All this creates more expense then downloading content,contributes to pollution and waste,depletes more resources,makes people spend much more.
Advertising the service costs too.
this a "natural right"?
old rotten unproductive system.a relic of content industry."Piracy" is superior.
There is no "natural right" to information.Its free as air.
You can't erase it from my brain.
You can't make me forget it or extort fees to keep remembering it.
The only way you stop piracy is stop producing paid content.
If they release films for about $1.50 here, I might actually start paying for movies again.
Of course, $1.50 is still slightly on the high side, the movies would have to be good to merit such a price tag.
"How do you know when {insert political/corporate leader here} is lying?"
"His lips move."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Hah!
s _n3_v26/ai_17464063
The book actually cited an article named "Don't copy that floppy".
Blalock, "Don't Copy That Floppy,"
Which is apparently this article:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1365/i
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I, for one, welcome our new piracy overlords.
In a true open market... ... we are not.
Typically, the thing that holds back the $1.50 price from being worldwide is that there are laws against parallel importing (especially for pharmacuticals under the Free Trade agreements).
That means that there isn't free trade, and there isn't a true open market.
However, for DVDs I wouldn't even expect the price to be $1.50 worldwide if there were no laws against parallel importing.
I would expect the price to be about $2.00 worldwide for DVDs with all the language in the Cantonese dialect of Chinese. You want $2.00 DVDs, you'd have to learn Chinese.
Just a thought...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You pay the people involved in making the content, from concept to post-production. You pay the people who market the content (you might say you could do without that, but chances are that you wouldn't have even known about it if it wasn't marketed). You pay to keep the lights on and the schedules kept at the record label/movie studio/development house. You pay because you aren't a movie producer and they are. They possess that skill, produce that product, and if you want it, you should respect them enough to either take or leave their terms. If not, then don't get self-righteous when the lawyers come a-knockin'. At least their clients actually had something to do with the creative act, as opposed to just hitting "download".
By equating the act of distribution with the act of creation, you're cutting out a fair amount of people who are quite integral to the actual product.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Who sells their original product as real Product,not just another copy you can't copy/share yourself or share?
I don't force you(hypothetical content pridcucer/publisher) to produce content.
I don't want to be mass-marketed about your product.And i don't care about your
expenses if you choose to sell worthless licensed copies of information that you "own".You can't own my information.
A cheaper/free pirate copy doesn't have those "rights"(as opposed to Publishers Copy) becuase it doesn't comes from the "right" publisher(published by pirates),who pays "right" extortion fees(to content producer/copyrigth owner)?
As for now content is nothing more then rearranged bits.
A copy of them isn't different from another copy. plus your claims you own "the rights" to copy/share/publish my content are ridicoulous.These
Rights invented to protect steady streams of profit for copyright owners.
Piracy is just efficient distribution free of the copyright crud/DRM.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If a copy is just "rearranged bits", I suppose you'd be content to just pipe a random number generator to the sound output, and there you go... it even frees up your bandwidth! It's all the just rearranged bits, right?
Probably not, unless you happen upon a rare Monkey/Shakespeare moment. The difference between random digital noise and actual digestible content is what you're paying for. The "cartel" you speak of is... get this... people who produce salable goods for a living! Horrors! Sure, some of them are bastards, but that's what boycotts and market forces are for.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
The problem that information is not a salable good.They sell copies of their content.At their own prices.And claim they "own" your copy becuase they have "copyrights".You can't use that good.
Copy/share/publish and you're violating "copyrights".
It's _theft_ or at least its a LOT closer to theft than "pirates" copying stuff, which the *AA like to brainwash people about.
Because when you copy stuff, the original is still available.
But when you steal something, that something is less accessible or available to the public.
So when you prevent stuff from entering the public domain as it would have (or worse retroactively take away), you are effectively stealing from the public.
Actually it will be you who goes bankrupt buying storage for that 100 billion copies of a movie.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web