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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?"
12 of 36 000 is 1/3000 = so your math is out by a factor of around 10.
$8 for a DVD isn't so bad (assuming the rest of your calcs are correct - I didn't check)
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
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
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