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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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
Then everyone else in the world should be making $40,000 a year, too.
This guy's the limit!
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.
stealing isnt rigth term.They just copy the information.Nothing stolen.
I wonder why people look at "piracy" so
prejudiced, it isnt a very good thing helping more people to get their entertainment and information?
At cheaper cost and even free with file sharing (BitTorrent,file hosts,etc).
Piracy is "wrong" because it promoted as such by cartels that hold copyrights.
Free world doesn't need such leeches.
They will get rid of sooner or later.
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.
Shame humanity has to enact change through illegal acts. Next up we change the US government via sniper rifle.
/= Immoral.. Yet, if something is illegal long enough, people seem to think it is immoral.
Aren't pretty much all changes enacted through 'illegal' acts? civil disobedience, revolutions, founding of the United States of America..
Illegal
--- We need more Ron Paul!
People who steal are very good at talking people into thinking that what they did is OK
Ya mean like constantly expanding the range of copyright laws so that nothing ever actually goes into the the public domain, so the free money cow never dries up?
KFG
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'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".
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 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?
I can see it for shared works of commerce such as open source software where ALL participants agree to pool their interests for the public good. But I don't see it for art. 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?
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 $20 point and -- SURPRISE!!! -- no one is buying them
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, 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.
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...
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
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.
Great. And since nobody has a place to store 102 DVDs we will start throwing them out to make room for new ones. Since there will be no secondary market they will just go in the trash and the landfill. Then the environmentalists will start bitching about it, the EPA will pass laws restricting the number of DVDs that can be manufactured and the prices will go back up. People will be digging through landfills for old Blues Clues DVDs. Anarchy will ensue and modern civilization will come to a halt.
Nice plan for causing the end of the world.
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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.
ôó
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?
Please note that I used the word "theft" somewhat sardonically, because that was the word used in the post to which I responded; however:
.what public good is enhanced by destroying private ownership?
. .
You do not understand the social contract of copyrights and patents. Like, at all.
The are not private property. A temporary right of monopoly is granted insofar as that grant benefits the public good by insuring they reach the public domain; and in a timely manner.
Free speach is the primal law which "Intellectual Property" laws are subserviant to (where such free speach laws exist, which they should in all jurisdictions that are signatory to the Berne Convention, since the assumption of free speach is part of the social contract of the Berne Convention).
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.
Because that is theft. As is taking a DVD from the store without paying for it.
Copying the work of art is not theft.
Denying the right to copy the work of art is theft from the public domain. It denies the right to possess what is legitimately your property. Back in the day when the American copyright laws were being formulated the parties who were against it and the parties that were for it both understood this explicitly.
Get the hence and read the correspondence between Jefferson and Monroe on the matter (Jefferson was Ambassador to France at the time the Constitution was drafted, which fact leaves us with a fortuitous public record of the their arguments).
KFG
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Seized from evil creatures with peg legs, steel hooks for hands, and eye patches?
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Hell, I do this already(netflix, not BT or USNET like you criminals thought!)
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Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
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 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.
With Digital Products it is very cheap to re-produce tons
Fixed. There is a large distinction. The cost of a digital product is the initial costs, which could be quite large + the reproduction costs. While pressing a DVD may cost $0.50, the material you are pressing on that DVD might have cost $100+ million to produce. So, even if you do sell 100 million copies at $1, you still have yet to break even.
Before the last 5 years or so there was not any affordable effective way for the masses to digitally copy or transmit. So in that respect the Movie and recoding companies had the monopoly on the means to record. And that is all copyright is, it was a royal decree that only the favourite buddies had a right to have a printing press.
In case you hadn't noticed those days are gone, adjustments are required. People have new unique ideas every day, other people copy them, that is how economic and social progress is made. Even when they study chimp communities, this also happens this way.
This requires some revision of thinking, that the RIAA cannot seem to grasp. Their FUD is still theft. How if someone buys a blank CD and copies information onto it, does that information belong to a recording company? If none of that existed in the first place, and since the content cannot exist without the containing media, the theft definition is a long stretch. It is the concept that only a privileged few have the right to copy that needs to be revisited.
Because much as I try to grasp this concept it eludes me. If the content cannot exist without the media that it resides in, and cannot be accessed without the playback technology, why do the inventors, creators and owners of this technology not have the same rights as the creators of the content. Because the content is nothing without this technology. And if this technology did not exist it would still all be pay for admission to stage theatre, and live bands. How come only the content creators get a special privilege, and not also the technology creators that makes it even possible?
Do the recording companies license the recording equipment, and pay a license fee to the manufacturers for each copy that they make? Or do they buy this equipment and own it the same as Joe citizen?
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...
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.
...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!
Thank god somebody understands. If everything was priced relative to earnings you might as well go and make everything free, because you've removed my incentive to work hard. If I could do nothing all day and still go out to the store (or down to the auto dealership) and take stuff home with me, you can damn well bet I wouldn't be busting my ass getting up at 6:30 Monday morning to go to work.
Yeah, I've heard all these quasi-socialist arguments that "people aren't motivated by money and physical goods, they'd still work for the joy of working," and I think it's a load of crap. I'd probably do something with my time, but you can bet it wouldn't benefit anyone but me: I'd be sitting around building radio-controlled airplanes, probably, or maybe seeing how cool a home theater I can build in my basement. The world and the economy doesn't benefit from that, at least not in the way it benefits from the job I normally do (and wouldn't do, if it wasn't the ticket to a standard of living that I enjoy).
Any system which gives a low-value worker access to the same things that are available to a highly trained worker just destroys the motivation for a person to work hard and produce more. People work because they want things: a bigger house, a nicer car, put their kids into better schools, whatever. If you go into work every day because you honestly love your job, and you'd do it regardless of whether or not you were being paid, congratulations on putting one over on your boss, because they're overpaying you! The great majority of people do what they do because they think it's worth doing in return for the compensation they get. Make it easier to get that level of compensation, and people will take the easier jobs.
It should be obvious, but there are a whole lot of quasi-socialists who have their heads in the sand, and think that they can somehow create this wonderful world where rice farmers in Indochina and software engineers in Delaware can both drive the same car and have the same DVD player because they both work as hard. It doesn't work that way, and never will.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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 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.
...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.
I think there is a perfectly legal and legitimate marketplace that is thriving in the digital age: the second-hand market. Secondhand media prices tend to reflect the true market value of the product, rather than the over-optimistic price demanded by retailers.
The problem is, this has morphed into a black market...not because laws have failed...but because the market has performed as predictably as ever. Thanks to the ease of replication of digital media, the supply of entertainment has been raised to nearly infinity, and so the laws of supply and demand have accordingly lowered the street value of entertainment to zero.
Imagine what will happen when the majority of material goods achieve this same ease of distribution and duplication. Don't laugh...you can use a 3-D printer to manufacture real objects now. What happens when you can buy one of THOSE at Costco?
DRM is the unwanted band aid of desperate fat cats stalling for time. Our culture is facing a much more far-reaching problem: the market economy just hit the ground harder than Humpty Dumpty.
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.
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.
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.
People who steal are very good at talking people into thinking that what they did is OK
Thats no more true than "People make excuses for their choices in life" It has nothing to do with theft.
What a theif can do is be honest and explain why the had to steal...
Also there is a big problem in this country where most people think criminals are just murderers, drug dealers and online pirates.
Most people fail to realize that the most severe forms of crime are at the corperate white collar level. Ask a Criminology professor.
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.