MarkLR wrote: "This article deals with commerically published knock-offs, it has nothing to do with fan fiction as dicussed in the article."
It's true that Lessig's article doesn't address a situation identical with this one in every detail. In my opinion the core of Lessig's discussion, dealing with the motivation for the legal action, is still relevant.
Lawrence Lessig's comments on lawyers and comics seem relevant here. Or rather here.
In short, Lessig argues that the harm done by fan fiction is at least in some cases a fiction created by lawyers who don't necessarily have their clients' interests in mind.
The problem with mbox format is that many email clients don't produce it. Some email clients will produce files of concatenated sendmail-format messages, which evolution can import if you go through and manually modify spurious From lines. It would be much cleaner to just import the individual messages as-is.
Worse yet, you can't just wait for IE to support it, you have to wait for the versions of IE used by everyone you want to visit your web pages to support it. If you want to support the oldest browsers (I don't, but some folks do), you'll never be able to use PNGs.
As an aside, many have pointed out that comparing PNGs to GIFs doesn't make a lot of technical sense. But it makes a lot of practical sense to anyone who has a web site. If you want to put up some images, you have limited choices. There are no options that are lossless, unencumbered, compressed, and supported by both old and new browsers. Depending on which of those you're willing to cave on, you may choose PNGs, GIFs, or JPEGs.
I've found evolution to be more than a little on the heavy side, but otherwise I don't mind its borrowed look and feel. The virtual folder feature is handy for organizing email sometimes, although I personally wouldn't mind keeping multiple copies of messages to accomplish the same thing.
One issue that dogs me constantly with email clients, though, is limited import/export. I have old email in lots of different formats. I can generally get messages back into something like sendmail format, 1 message per file, but that's about as close as I've seen to a common format for email import/export. And a lot of clients make even this difficult. Is the latest evolution any good at importing and/or exporting a directory of thousands of messages? Are there other clients that will do better?
I forgot to reply the first time this article was posted, so here goes...
Schofield seems to think that the incredibly obvious and oft-repeated arguments he presents have some relevance in evaluating the beliefs of people who think Beta was superior to VHS. He doesn't present a survey of the beliefs of these people, so I'll have to go with my own experiences, which in every instance contradict Schofield's view.
Schofield's insight mostly boils down to the obvious fact that the product that won was the one that on the whole was preferable to consumers. No Beta advocate could possibly dispute that. Nonetheless, there is actual substance to the claim that Beta was superior to VHS. People who preferred Beta did so on the basis of particular attributes that were important to them, and that were demonstrably superior in Beta. "Technical superiority" is a fair characterization of these attributes, and is clearly the point people are making when they say or write that Beta was better than VHS.
Schofield's condescending and infantile tone aside, his argument has no demonstrable substance. For whatever reason, he chooses not to understand the trivial and obviously factual point made by people who point out that Beta was (at least in many important respects) technically superior to VHS. Does he really think that Betamax advocates think Beta offered a better "whole product" than VHS? That seems unlikely. My guess is that he wanted to write that pointing out Beta's technical superiority is beside the point. But it makes better headlines to say something is a myth than to say it's beside the point, especially since not everyone cares what Jack Schofield thinks the point is. The fact that he has to create a straw man in order to do so seems not to worry him.
His argument is akin to pointing out that someone who says Shawn Bradley is a very tall center is missing the point. Obviously, commenting on Shawn Bradley's height is not the best way of assessing his talents as a center. But when I say he's tall, I mean he's tall. If I wanted to comment on his value as a center, I'd do that. If Schofield wants to argue that someone has a "failure to understand how technology markets work," then he should find a claim about technology markets. The claim that Beta was technically superior to VHS is not one.
Just to be clear, I was never a Beta advocate. I did have both kinds of machines when I was younger, and on the whole I would have been happier had Beta won, but my comments are not motivated by any history of rabid advocacy. On the whole, I couldn't care less than I do about VCR tape formats. But I do get a little upset now and then when ignorant people abuse their soapboxes to mock folks with more reasonable and well supported views.
Part of the answer to this question has to concern how we interpret the following phrase:
"the product's vendor considers this information to be proprietary"
But I couldn't think of a meaningful interpretation of this. It's possible they consider the contents of their support forum proprietary in some sense. But I don't think that would strike anyone as any different from the many other commercial support enterprises. It's also possible they consider the information itself proprietary. But I can't see how that could be meaningful in the context of an open source project.
The phrase "the prefrontal region of their brains, which governs emotion and creativity," is a little misleading. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is poorly understood, but one could just as accurately write that it governs problem solving and decision making, or that it governs voluntary eye movements and short-term memory.
There is certainly some evidence that activity in the PFC can go down with practice, but it's not exactly a rock solid reliable effect (perhaps a no-brainer?), and I don't think when it's been observed it's been associated with creativity, whatever that is.
I'm not sure how it would help the national economy either. But I work at home a lot, which for me often means running an X windows server for processes running elsewhere. If I didn't have broadband, I'd be out of luck.
Another viable option for me would be doing some of the work locally, which would require downloading some large but not unmanageable files (say on the order of 100MB). This is also something that wouldn't be practical without broadband (and is in fact hampered by my provider's limits on upstream rates).
Having a fast connection also facilitates some kinds of online shopping, like buying downloadable software, or browsing samples of music and movies that you might want to buy.
So I don't know how it would help the economy exactly. But I'm more productive because I have a cable modem. And it does facilitate lots of commercial things that aren't just watching movies or surfing. And that's just the stuff that works right now.
Is there a good source out there for bare LCDs in small quantities? I've been able to find some at earthlcd.com,
but in general it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can find at your local Radio Shack. Ten inch TFT displays there run around $300 minimum, so I don't see bringing the whole project in under $100 as practical, unless you're planning to go directly to the manufacturers and order thousands of units.
Re:How to manage popup windows in the new Mozilla
on
Mozilla 0.9.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Apple wouldn't dream of making a feature that didn't have a UI interface whereas with Linux it's the norm."
I'm not a particularly savvy Mac user, but over the years I've made dozens of modifications to various system features via resedit and by downloading little hacks. I'm sure there have been hundreds if not thousands of such undocumented features. With OSX I'm sure there are easily thousands of features you can alter that don't have a nice interface. So I don't think your statement is well-supported. It would be much more correct to say that Apple wouldn't dream of documenting a feature that didn't have an interface. I don't think it's productive to fault Linux software for not taking this same shield-the-user attitude. People may be trying to make Linux more idiot-friendly, but I have yet to hear anyone suggest that it should also be made less geek-friendly.
Actually, the researchers have a fairly complex view of multi-tasking, that doesn't happen to include all the concepts you'd like to read an article about. It applies more to switching on a smaller time scale. Very little of their view is reflected in the CNN article -- actually, almost everything in the article could have rested on some research from about 25years ago and from 80 years ago.
It's worth noting that it didn't take eight years of constant work to conduct this research. It took eight years to get it published, probably because some of the people who do research in this area are territorial and can make it difficult to get good work published. In the meantime, all of these authors did many, many other things, including finding a new career for one of them.
Others have pointed out that the hole doesn't cover most material from the past five years (due to appropriately revised agreements). It's also worth noting that the memory hole for stuff prior to that won't be permanent. Copyright protection lasts a long time, but it does expire. The details are slightly involved:
While I agree with DiBona's reasons for objecting to Java as a learning language, my suggestion would be a language that really insulates the programmer from the hardware: LISP. If you want to force someone to learn something about structuring code, I think it's a good adjunct, though not a substitute for c.
There's a huge over-supply of reviewers writing glowing reviews of unbelievably abysmal movies for prominent magazines and newspapers, or for TV. Real reviewers, people with recognizable names, even. It's hardly possible to make a movie that's so bad you can't find a single gusher among all the morning shows on TV. So the real question here is pretty obvious. Why would they even bother?
Overlooked among all the misleading things the RIAA has said in this context is their gross misunderstanding of what it would actually take to demonstrate something like harm from Napster.
This kind of correlational observation is not helpful, no matter how you slice it. RIAA profits could have dropped precipitously and it would not be clear Napster had anything to do with it. Their profits could have doubled, and no one could prove that Napster hadn't done them harm.
The basic truth is that no one, not the RIAA, not a single Slashdot reader, not even Kurt Loder, knows how well the RIAA would have done last year if Napster hadn't been around. The world did an uncontrolled experiment, and interpreting the results is going to be more of an art than a science. The art is in estimating how well the RIAA would have done last year in a world without Napster.
That said, of all the imaginable face-valid ways to estimate what we should have expected the numbers to look like without Napster, I would say that simply looking at the change from last year is probably the worst.
Just because it doesn't set a legal precedent in the case law sense, that doesn't mean it doesn't set a precedent. Just like when I told my wife I'd wash the dishes, and then she figured she could get me to do it again. If someone called the case "groundbreaking," they obviously think it sets a precedent for something, in the english language sense. Not necessarily for legal argument, possibly just further indictments. Or possibly just further press conferences.
I recently spent some time trying to figure out if I needed a trademark for a tiny company I was starting up. (Eventually I gave up and named my company after myself.) In the process of looking into it, it became apparent that I had to worry not only about the desired name already being trademarked, but also whether or not it was in use without having been registered with the USPTO or any state -- that is, whether or not it was a common law trademark. Unless an actual lawyer cares to contradict me, I think this implies that holding a common law trademark is in some cases sufficient to prevent a confusable business from trademarking your name. I'd imagine in practice companies with big fat lawyers get just about whatever they want, but that's just a guess.
I guess my point here is that if your goal is to prevent some other company from stealing your name, there may be avenues simpler than getting your own trademark registered. Of course figuring out how to do this effectively would likely require the expensive services of an IP lawyer. The punch line is that the reason I never registered my own trademark is that even superficial consultation would have wiped out my profits and then some. So although consulting an IP lawyer is probably the right thing to do, it's not always an option for a freeware development team.
Do you feel the same way about music, or do you really want Christina, Britney, *NSUCK, and
Backstreet Boys to fill the airwaves? The content that can't stand up on its own and leans on its
marketing is not the true content.
Of course I don't feel the same way about music, that's why I posted a message on Slashdot to say so. My point was not that we need the crappy music the music industry provides. It was that it will be much harder to replace the big budget movie industry than it will be to replace the music industry. Although it would be cute to see your Quake mod, it wouldn't go very far towards replacing what I get out of movies.
It takes a fairly small investment to produce music that rivals anything the music industry produces. I think it will be a long time before the same can be said for movies. So if I felt morally obligated to boycott products associated with the RIAA and MPAA, or if I were witness to these bloated industries collapsing, I'd probably miss the MPAA more. Their product, crappy as it usually is, is not yet reproducible on a shoestring budget.
Almost necessarily, the technology that makes it easy for dedicated artists to produce music cheaply also makes it difficult to protect that music from being redistributed illicitly. I would personally welcome this in music. I don't think the big music money-grubbing machine is contributing much to the quality of music. At risk of losing some talented people who happen to be in it for the money, it would be nice to make room for talented people whose work gets smothered by the big studio releases.
But what about movies? Short of large computer generated casts and scenery, it's hard to imagine certain types of movies being produced cheaply. Although graphics are getting better, it seems like a certainty that widespread sharing of DVD-quality video will precede the point at which someone could produce, say, The Sound of Music on weekends at home. So how much longer will there be an incentive to produce $50million blockbusters? Although I enjoy low-budget independent films as much as the next guy, and I have a serious issue with blockbusters, I think there's good reason for concern that certain types of movies will no longer be produced by anyone.
What would happen if it became impossible to make money publishing books? We'd lose a lot of good and bad books by people who only write for money. But we'd gain a lot of books written by dedicated authors, books that were previously buried under the Grisham/Oprah piles.
I self-published a book. It wasn't a thousandth as hard as it would have been fifteen years ago. I don't expect to make a ton of money from it, but with companies like Amazon, I can probably recoup my investment. If there were no competition from big publishers (actually, in my case there isn't), I wouldn't need to sell a zillion copies to make writing the book worthwhile for me.
To be sure, there are lots of authors I enjoy who would find it difficult or impossible to put their books on my shelves without big publishers. But there are also lots of authors whose work I haven't had the opportunity to enjoy because of those big piles of Grisham. Publishers have been shirking their editing responsibilities anyway. So I'm not ready to get too upset about all the book publishers going out of business.
The root of the problem is that many of us really really want to deal with particular publishers, record producers, movie studios, or whatever. If you absolutely can't live without the next Tom Cruise movie, then you are over a barrel with respect to whatever the producer decides to demand. Today they don't demand much -- a few dollars, and they do not cede their control of distribution, so you can't sell second generation copies of your DVD of Cocktail. In the future they may decide that newly released movies can only be viewed in approved screening rooms, and that they will have the right to scan you and remove devices from your person on the way in. They may demand the right to lobotomize you on your way out. If you're so desperate to see that movie, then there's not much you can do. If they wanted, they could produce the movies and not let anyone see them at all.
In a large, free market, with all kinds of roughly interesting movies to choose from, this is no big deal. You don't do business with the movie studios that require lobotomies. They may or may not go out of business, who cares. If you're insanely lucky, you can do business with publishers, bands, and studios that explicitly give you the right to redistribute their music as needed.
We don't live in that world now. The only solution is not to want stuff that comes from organizations that demand more than you're willing to pay. It's hard to arrange. On the other hand, authors and musicians, who traditionally get screwed anyway, should bear some of the blame if things get out of hand. I don't begrudge anyone the rights that copyright grants. But authors who, given some choice, allow their books to be published with (and let me coin a phrase here) lobotomy licenses attached are not helping things. (I say this having self-published my own book -- ask me in a year how it's doing.)
Slashdot Mirror
MarkLR wrote: "This article deals with commerically published knock-offs, it has nothing to do with fan fiction as dicussed in the article."
It's true that Lessig's article doesn't address a situation identical with this one in every detail. In my opinion the core of Lessig's discussion, dealing with the motivation for the legal action, is still relevant.
Lawrence Lessig's comments on lawyers and comics seem relevant here. Or rather here.
In short, Lessig argues that the harm done by fan fiction is at least in some cases a fiction created by lawyers who don't necessarily have their clients' interests in mind.
The problem with mbox format is that many email clients don't produce it. Some email clients will produce files of concatenated sendmail-format messages, which evolution can import if you go through and manually modify spurious From lines. It would be much cleaner to just import the individual messages as-is.
Worse yet, you can't just wait for IE to support it, you have to wait for the versions of IE used by everyone you want to visit your web pages to support it. If you want to support the oldest browsers (I don't, but some folks do), you'll never be able to use PNGs.
As an aside, many have pointed out that comparing PNGs to GIFs doesn't make a lot of technical sense. But it makes a lot of practical sense to anyone who has a web site. If you want to put up some images, you have limited choices. There are no options that are lossless, unencumbered, compressed, and supported by both old and new browsers. Depending on which of those you're willing to cave on, you may choose PNGs, GIFs, or JPEGs.
I've found evolution to be more than a little on the heavy side, but otherwise I don't mind its borrowed look and feel. The virtual folder feature is handy for organizing email sometimes, although I personally wouldn't mind keeping multiple copies of messages to accomplish the same thing.
One issue that dogs me constantly with email clients, though, is limited import/export. I have old email in lots of different formats. I can generally get messages back into something like sendmail format, 1 message per file, but that's about as close as I've seen to a common format for email import/export. And a lot of clients make even this difficult. Is the latest evolution any good at importing and/or exporting a directory of thousands of messages? Are there other clients that will do better?
A subtle tautology? It's hard to imagine one more blatant.
I forgot to reply the first time this article was posted, so here goes...
Schofield seems to think that the incredibly obvious and oft-repeated arguments he presents have some relevance in evaluating the beliefs of people who think Beta was superior to VHS. He doesn't present a survey of the beliefs of these people, so I'll have to go with my own experiences, which in every instance contradict Schofield's view.
Schofield's insight mostly boils down to the obvious fact that the product that won was the one that on the whole was preferable to consumers. No Beta advocate could possibly dispute that. Nonetheless, there is actual substance to the claim that Beta was superior to VHS. People who preferred Beta did so on the basis of particular attributes that were important to them, and that were demonstrably superior in Beta. "Technical superiority" is a fair characterization of these attributes, and is clearly the point people are making when they say or write that Beta was better than VHS.
Schofield's condescending and infantile tone aside, his argument has no demonstrable substance. For whatever reason, he chooses not to understand the trivial and obviously factual point made by people who point out that Beta was (at least in many important respects) technically superior to VHS. Does he really think that Betamax advocates think Beta offered a better "whole product" than VHS? That seems unlikely. My guess is that he wanted to write that pointing out Beta's technical superiority is beside the point. But it makes better headlines to say something is a myth than to say it's beside the point, especially since not everyone cares what Jack Schofield thinks the point is. The fact that he has to create a straw man in order to do so seems not to worry him.
His argument is akin to pointing out that someone who says Shawn Bradley is a very tall center is missing the point. Obviously, commenting on Shawn Bradley's height is not the best way of assessing his talents as a center. But when I say he's tall, I mean he's tall. If I wanted to comment on his value as a center, I'd do that. If Schofield wants to argue that someone has a "failure to understand how technology markets work," then he should find a claim about technology markets. The claim that Beta was technically superior to VHS is not one.
Just to be clear, I was never a Beta advocate. I did have both kinds of machines when I was younger, and on the whole I would have been happier had Beta won, but my comments are not motivated by any history of rabid advocacy. On the whole, I couldn't care less than I do about VCR tape formats. But I do get a little upset now and then when ignorant people abuse their soapboxes to mock folks with more reasonable and well supported views.
I once found an old hard disk with the same Slashdot story repeated thousands of times, each with slightly different wording!
Part of the answer to this question has to concern how we interpret the following phrase:
"the product's vendor considers this information to be proprietary"
But I couldn't think of a meaningful interpretation of this. It's possible they consider the contents of their support forum proprietary in some sense. But I don't think that would strike anyone as any different from the many other commercial support enterprises. It's also possible they consider the information itself proprietary. But I can't see how that could be meaningful in the context of an open source project.
The phrase "the prefrontal region of their brains, which governs emotion and creativity," is a little misleading. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is poorly understood, but one could just as accurately write that it governs problem solving and decision making, or that it governs voluntary eye movements and short-term memory.
There is certainly some evidence that activity in the PFC can go down with practice, but it's not exactly a rock solid reliable effect (perhaps a no-brainer?), and I don't think when it's been observed it's been associated with creativity, whatever that is.
dan
I'm not sure how it would help the national economy either. But I work at home a lot, which for me often means running an X windows server for processes running elsewhere. If I didn't have broadband, I'd be out of luck.
Another viable option for me would be doing some of the work locally, which would require downloading some large but not unmanageable files (say on the order of 100MB). This is also something that wouldn't be practical without broadband (and is in fact hampered by my provider's limits on upstream rates).
Having a fast connection also facilitates some kinds of online shopping, like buying downloadable software, or browsing samples of music and movies that you might want to buy.
So I don't know how it would help the economy exactly. But I'm more productive because I have a cable modem. And it does facilitate lots of commercial things that aren't just watching movies or surfing. And that's just the stuff that works right now.
Is there a good source out there for bare LCDs in small quantities? I've been able to find some at earthlcd.com,
but in general it doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can find at your local Radio Shack. Ten inch TFT displays there run around $300 minimum, so I don't see bringing the whole project in under $100 as practical, unless you're planning to go directly to the manufacturers and order thousands of units.
I'm not a particularly savvy Mac user, but over the years I've made dozens of modifications to various system features via resedit and by downloading little hacks. I'm sure there have been hundreds if not thousands of such undocumented features. With OSX I'm sure there are easily thousands of features you can alter that don't have a nice interface. So I don't think your statement is well-supported. It would be much more correct to say that Apple wouldn't dream of documenting a feature that didn't have an interface. I don't think it's productive to fault Linux software for not taking this same shield-the-user attitude. People may be trying to make Linux more idiot-friendly, but I have yet to hear anyone suggest that it should also be made less geek-friendly.
Actually, the researchers have a fairly complex view of multi-tasking, that doesn't happen to include all the concepts you'd like to read an article about. It applies more to switching on a smaller time scale. Very little of their view is reflected in the CNN article -- actually, almost everything in the article could have rested on some research from about 25years ago and from 80 years ago.
It's worth noting that it didn't take eight years of constant work to conduct this research. It took eight years to get it published, probably because some of the people who do research in this area are territorial and can make it difficult to get good work published. In the meantime, all of these authors did many, many other things, including finding a new career for one of them.
Others have pointed out that the hole doesn't cover most material from the past five years (due to appropriately revised agreements). It's also worth noting that the memory hole for stuff prior to that won't be permanent. Copyright protection lasts a long time, but it does expire. The details are slightly involved:
The LOC on how long copyright lastsWhile I agree with DiBona's reasons for objecting to Java as a learning language, my suggestion would be a language that really insulates the programmer from the hardware: LISP. If you want to force someone to learn something about structuring code, I think it's a good adjunct, though not a substitute for c.
There's a huge over-supply of reviewers writing glowing reviews of unbelievably abysmal movies for prominent magazines and newspapers, or for TV. Real reviewers, people with recognizable names, even. It's hardly possible to make a movie that's so bad you can't find a single gusher among all the morning shows on TV. So the real question here is pretty obvious. Why would they even bother?
Overlooked among all the misleading things the RIAA has said in this context is their gross misunderstanding of what it would actually take to demonstrate something like harm from Napster.
This kind of correlational observation is not helpful, no matter how you slice it. RIAA profits could have dropped precipitously and it would not be clear Napster had anything to do with it. Their profits could have doubled, and no one could prove that Napster hadn't done them harm.
The basic truth is that no one, not the RIAA, not a single Slashdot reader, not even Kurt Loder, knows how well the RIAA would have done last year if Napster hadn't been around. The world did an uncontrolled experiment, and interpreting the results is going to be more of an art than a science. The art is in estimating how well the RIAA would have done last year in a world without Napster.
That said, of all the imaginable face-valid ways to estimate what we should have expected the numbers to look like without Napster, I would say that simply looking at the change from last year is probably the worst.
Just because it doesn't set a legal precedent in the case law sense, that doesn't mean it doesn't set a precedent. Just like when I told my wife I'd wash the dishes, and then she figured she could get me to do it again. If someone called the case "groundbreaking," they obviously think it sets a precedent for something, in the english language sense. Not necessarily for legal argument, possibly just further indictments. Or possibly just further press conferences.
I recently spent some time trying to figure out if I needed a trademark for a tiny company I was starting up. (Eventually I gave up and named my company after myself.) In the process of looking into it, it became apparent that I had to worry not only about the desired name already being trademarked, but also whether or not it was in use without having been registered with the USPTO or any state -- that is, whether or not it was a common law trademark. Unless an actual lawyer cares to contradict me, I think this implies that holding a common law trademark is in some cases sufficient to prevent a confusable business from trademarking your name. I'd imagine in practice companies with big fat lawyers get just about whatever they want, but that's just a guess.
I guess my point here is that if your goal is to prevent some other company from stealing your name, there may be avenues simpler than getting your own trademark registered. Of course figuring out how to do this effectively would likely require the expensive services of an IP lawyer. The punch line is that the reason I never registered my own trademark is that even superficial consultation would have wiped out my profits and then some. So although consulting an IP lawyer is probably the right thing to do, it's not always an option for a freeware development team.
When I can send you a copy of an LP (you know, those vinyl records with grooves in them), that's when we'll know it's all over.
Of course I don't feel the same way about music, that's why I posted a message on Slashdot to say so. My point was not that we need the crappy music the music industry provides. It was that it will be much harder to replace the big budget movie industry than it will be to replace the music industry. Although it would be cute to see your Quake mod, it wouldn't go very far towards replacing what I get out of movies.
It takes a fairly small investment to produce music that rivals anything the music industry produces. I think it will be a long time before the same can be said for movies. So if I felt morally obligated to boycott products associated with the RIAA and MPAA, or if I were witness to these bloated industries collapsing, I'd probably miss the MPAA more. Their product, crappy as it usually is, is not yet reproducible on a shoestring budget.
Almost necessarily, the technology that makes it easy for dedicated artists to produce music cheaply also makes it difficult to protect that music from being redistributed illicitly. I would personally welcome this in music. I don't think the big music money-grubbing machine is contributing much to the quality of music. At risk of losing some talented people who happen to be in it for the money, it would be nice to make room for talented people whose work gets smothered by the big studio releases.
But what about movies? Short of large computer generated casts and scenery, it's hard to imagine certain types of movies being produced cheaply. Although graphics are getting better, it seems like a certainty that widespread sharing of DVD-quality video will precede the point at which someone could produce, say, The Sound of Music on weekends at home. So how much longer will there be an incentive to produce $50million blockbusters? Although I enjoy low-budget independent films as much as the next guy, and I have a serious issue with blockbusters, I think there's good reason for concern that certain types of movies will no longer be produced by anyone.
What would happen if it became impossible to make money publishing books? We'd lose a lot of good and bad books by people who only write for money. But we'd gain a lot of books written by dedicated authors, books that were previously buried under the Grisham/Oprah piles.
I self-published a book. It wasn't a thousandth as hard as it would have been fifteen years ago. I don't expect to make a ton of money from it, but with companies like Amazon, I can probably recoup my investment. If there were no competition from big publishers (actually, in my case there isn't), I wouldn't need to sell a zillion copies to make writing the book worthwhile for me.
To be sure, there are lots of authors I enjoy who would find it difficult or impossible to put their books on my shelves without big publishers. But there are also lots of authors whose work I haven't had the opportunity to enjoy because of those big piles of Grisham. Publishers have been shirking their editing responsibilities anyway. So I'm not ready to get too upset about all the book publishers going out of business.
The root of the problem is that many of us really really want to deal with particular publishers, record producers, movie studios, or whatever. If you absolutely can't live without the next Tom Cruise movie, then you are over a barrel with respect to whatever the producer decides to demand. Today they don't demand much -- a few dollars, and they do not cede their control of distribution, so you can't sell second generation copies of your DVD of Cocktail. In the future they may decide that newly released movies can only be viewed in approved screening rooms, and that they will have the right to scan you and remove devices from your person on the way in. They may demand the right to lobotomize you on your way out. If you're so desperate to see that movie, then there's not much you can do. If they wanted, they could produce the movies and not let anyone see them at all.
In a large, free market, with all kinds of roughly interesting movies to choose from, this is no big deal. You don't do business with the movie studios that require lobotomies. They may or may not go out of business, who cares. If you're insanely lucky, you can do business with publishers, bands, and studios that explicitly give you the right to redistribute their music as needed.
We don't live in that world now. The only solution is not to want stuff that comes from organizations that demand more than you're willing to pay. It's hard to arrange. On the other hand, authors and musicians, who traditionally get screwed anyway, should bear some of the blame if things get out of hand. I don't begrudge anyone the rights that copyright grants. But authors who, given some choice, allow their books to be published with (and let me coin a phrase here) lobotomy licenses attached are not helping things. (I say this having self-published my own book -- ask me in a year how it's doing.)