Cable channels used to be about narrowcasting to targeted demographics. About eight years or so back, the channel owners started to rethink that strategy. So The Nashville Network (country-targeted) went to TNN and then became Spike, aiming its programming against a broader male demographic and de-emphasizing and abandoning an explicit connection to the music genre. Unless a cable channel has a lock-hold on a very loyal demographic with a great profile for advertisers, it will go to diversifying its programming and slug it out with general interest programming with a more subtle skew.
Whether there's a QuickTime Pro these days or not, the QuickTime that comes with Snow Leopard does not show any locked features, nor invites us to send in some more money.
As to Point 13 and specifically "eventually," if that moment is 2012, then maybe one could go from XP to the no-doubt-better-successor to Windows 7. Is the cost of XP to Win7 and Win7 to Win8 really going to be less expensive than XP straight to Win8? If it were, then people will choose to stick with XP. Costs and applications trump the underlying benefits of the new operating system, unless those benefits are realized with little user intervention. XP to Win7 was not such an upgrade.
"Experience" is one of these bogus points that one side will bring up when they think they have an advantage and ignore when they don't, even as the other side starts singing the tune. I voted for Obama and am absolutely convinced that he was and remains a better choice than John McCain. I am also pretty certain that where I disagree with Obama's policies, Hillary Clinton would not have acted differently, so I don't regret my primary election vote, either.
Any way, in 2008, experience worked, probably, against Obama. In 2012? Well, isn't he going to be the only person in the race with experience as President of the United States? Which is why, for the Republicans, mentions of comparative experience will not be heard in 2012 at all.
Well, most every day problems being procedural/imperative is akin to saying most every day physics is Newtonian. Very true, but the vexing computing problems of the day relate to scale, concurrency, and parallelism.
Now people are very much single-threaded, so perhaps the program-as-cooking-instructions analogy and procedural languages provide the best entrance point for many. My first language was BASIC from the days of numbered lines and GOTO. It wasn't the language, but what I could do that hooked me.
You know what is really starting to get on my nerves?
Updates and how.
Really, I am a grown-up. I do not expect perfection. I do not hold update counts against developers, in fact, the opposite, shouting huzzah whenever problems get fixed.
But here's what has happened in the past few months. There's something I want to do, and I fire up the software, and I'm greeted with an update available modal box which has to be addressed, probably with a "later" because at that moment I hadn't planned to be sys-admin dude.
With regards to Kubuntu, which I have installed in many places, I have had the occasional bit of bad luck in which a kernel updates seems to wack something for a few days until other packages catch up with their updates.
I contrast that with the iThings where updates are indicated quietly, download and install is neatly done, and I'm real sure that the update won't gum up the other apps or the gui.
I'm all for updates as long as they don't interfere with why I'm running a system, which is to do something that gets me paid or enjoyment, not administration and definitely not whack-a-mole dependency roulette.
The Beatles had great taste in music. They were also at the right time and right place for an intellectual Renaissance and some of them had interests which merged them with the London art world, and the theories of art echoed back into their music and presentation and conceptualization of the LP as a art piece even when on the book shelf.
They had two great songwriters who were friendly rivals who could see what the other was seeing and see what they were not. Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane. Not all dualities are resolvable and, besides, her defenders nonetheless, I don't think many bands would survive Yoko Ono. McCartney was experimental but never wanted to abandon his pop base center. Lennon wanted to tear the playhouse down but would lower the axe, take a break and love those 45s from the 50s.
In order to redistribute GPL software, isn't Apple asked to spend more money? It has to have the ability to turn off and on the encryption, based on the license. It has to, to some degree, vet that the code is licensed correctly, or that non-GPL apps doesn't include GPLed elements. If they distribute anything that was not properly licensed, they have to mitigate the infringement, which, as a start, will be a recall off of the mobile devices and a refund, which is an ugly pr event, ask Amazon about "1984." What about the costs of hosting source code? Isn't a lot of GPL software offered at no charge, so there's not a lot of offsetting revenue for the extra bother? Licensing nuance is inside baseball. I doubt there would be significant additional demand for Apple devices for GPL code being allowed in the app store. Were Apple to allow GPL apps, Freedom as in Free adherents would still be cheesed off that Apple approves each app and/or that device owners cannot install any thing they want, except via unsupported self-modification
The developer chooses a license that suits them, and, right on, dig it, God bless 'em, and more power to them. Potential downstream users look at licenses and, if it doesn't make sense in the totality of what they are trying to do, either to pursue happiness or a dollar, they walk away from the code. Apple looks at GPL code and says, it's not worth the effort. They have the freedom to make that choice. Device buyers have the freedom to consider the intermediate's choices when they choose devices.
Certainly ownership change is a time for reassessment. It must be said, though, Apple and Sun had their history. One has to assume that Apple was behaving as per its license from Sun and the license terms would carry over to Oracle without any changes.
Still, I think the primary reason is that Apple had taken on sustaining its java environment so as to make java apps as consistent with native look and feel applications as possible. Apple has just reassessed the costs of that decision, and how the platform has changed post-mobile devices, and has concluded that all the money they spend on java does not sell a commensurate number of devices.
I use both on the Mac. There are bugs one has that the other has fixed. Page Break view in Neo in Calc isn't quite right (or wasn't last time I checked.) OO.o sometimes generates incorrect pdfs and NeoOffice handles.eps images more consistently.
I think Microsoft is in a situation of its making. With Windows 7, based on pricing and convenience, they said to XP users the most economical way to get the better operating system was to buy new hardware. Had Microsoft encouraged same hardware upgrades, there would have been angry memos from OEM partners and next thing you know, netbooks go back to Linux.
Any way, the recession means a lot of computers are clocking time, powered off, until their leases are complete. High unemployment will be, effectively, a brake on new hardware sales.
But, let's not lose sight that revenues from operating systems has been doing very, very nicely in the last year. Set it up so XP to Win7 upgrades are cheap and easy and the company makes more money, keeps a higher market cap than Apple, and Ballmer gets the regular bonus. Otherwise, I don't see any one really losing out for all those users holding back with XP.
No, it doesn't bother me. Apple has been in two businesses in recent times. They make computers and they use their interface, operating system, and hardware experience in order to make specialized consumer devices that are adapted computers. Apple does not operate in a vacuum and Apple, like everyone else, prefers to sell things profitably which may lead to other profitable sales. As a result, license and contract terms and their own understanding of their business model mean some entertainment formats or some general computing functionality may be unavailable from the external interface or its stores. For people who are interested, as a challenge or because their entertainment is not in the "correct" format or for whom every computing device must be returned back to its essential nature, and who have the chops break the device so it behaves as the owner sees fit.
I see the merits of the device freedom people's case. Why last night I was using a computer book as a cockroach termination device. On the other hand, I don't buy toaster ovens with the thought that I should be able to convert them into blow torches. Were I McGyver in trouble, my perspective, of course, would be different. In Apple's defense, I can also see that they would consider it a ghastly error to find themselves seated in a courtroom one day, being asked "You knew that by doing x, y, and z, one could make ${device} damage my client, and you did nothing about it?" So when devices are jailbroken, and I believe it is uniformly through exploitation of bugs which could be security problems, Apple has to do discourage it and fix that flaw at their next chance.
Me. I say an AppleTV is for watching tv and I don't have a tv. I could buy one and turn it into something else. Or I could just skip the middle man and the fuss and just buy the something else.
We had the WWDC keynote, which included news of This Years Model: iPhone. We also had the release of the iPhone.
So there were articles about predictions, articles about leaks, articles about why the prediction and leaks were nuts, articles about which predictions and leaks were plausible.
We had liveblogs. We had deadblogs. We had linkbaitblogs and usual casts saying "Apple awesome," "Apple evil," and "My fellow commenters are idiots and/or shills." To date, I haven't seen any "Apple is the new Nokia" arguments. Go figure.
We had the legions of Apple's marketing forces pumping content into the system. We had the legions of non-Apple's marketing forces dismissing the iPhone and promoting their phone/carrier/operating system, some of which were going to be totally awesome when they arrive next month, next quarter, next year, with almost exactly the features and functionality we are showing, via animation.
Then we had articles about the impending release.
Then we had articles about the Apple Store situation around the country on the day of release.
We had iPhone release reviews.
We had an Apple press release about how many phones were sold in the first weekend. We had posts that said the numbers were crazy and Apple are liars.
(We note that iPhones, as a popular consumer device, and Apple's success as a company mean Apple news goes mainstream media, i.e., jumps from the tech or business pages.)
Oh yeah. Apple and Flash, Flash, Flash.
And then, during the last three days of the month, news of the antenna and face-proximity bugs appeared.
Phew. Talk about sucking all the oxygen out of the media.
But the implication above - and I apologize, I'm not checking whether it was source or summary - that plurality of column-inches, to use a quaint measure, is entirety of attention is not particularly valid. People have deadlines and have space to fill and need to attract the attention of Billy and Betty Webnewssumer, so things are skewed to what the new outlets think drives those herds.
The original was blocked as a homage of sequences Howard Hawks directed in his westerns. Hawks explained why his heroes broke the "Code of the West" by saying that it is stupid to meet a capable, professional, opponent in a fair fight. If you respect the guy, you take him out fast, with prejudice, and no Marquess of Queensberry niceties.
Hawks essentially structured the relationship between the marshall and the town in "Rio Bravo" as his caustic commentary on the way the sheriff in "High Noon" went looking for help from townspeople. Hawks had his character tell a volunteering amateur "you'd get in my way and be me one more thing for me to worry about." Ironically, the well-meaning old friend he said that to is executed by the bad guys shortly after.
In 1977, the fairly recent USC film school grad Lucas wanted to be Hawks/Ford/Kurosawa directing John Wayne. In 1997, Lucas wanted Han Solo to be Clint Eastwood. Not the end of the world, but I do prefer the original staging.
The point of copyright is to encourage the tangible expression of ideas for those who need an economic basis to do so. We, through the government, offer that limited monopoly because we think ideas, education, culture, political debate, and their propagation are a very good thing. We don't really care about your material wealth, or, rather, I care about your material wealth to the degree you care about mine. Doing well? That nice.
Now if you sincerely only want some people to receive and share your thoughts, write them a letter.
You are asking if there's a way to optimize the outcome, that is, the persons you hire were the best ones to higher and the ones you rejected were the best ones to reject. Can't be done. So make your choices and take your chances. Go strictly by paperwork (cognizant that the mercenary and mediocre may have gotten their certifications to improve their chances at the first cut.) Or, take all the time and interviews needed to find out which quadrant the applicant belongs along the Know-Their-Stuff / Pleasant-To-Work-With Cartesian axes.
A project fails because the expenditures exceed the revenue from the people who pay. It really doesn't matter how many people don't pay, unless you can show that there are people who would have paid, except for consuming via non-licensed distribution means. Think of it this way. A scene from Americana is boys gathered around a knothole to watch a ball game. Close up the knothole and do all the boys buy a ticket? Probably not, because, generally, they are at the knothole because they can't afford a ticket. If they could, they'd buy a ticket and view the game from a better vantage point. Any way, if you look at movies and music, the things most downloaded are also the things that sold the most units.
Infringement hurts the business - if it does - by reducing the revenues of the hit, i.e., still massively profitable, but not as much. A lot of commercialized art rely on a business model where the hit pays for 4 or 5 break-evens and the 4 out and out flops. If unlicensed views mean the hit can only pay for only 8 non-hits, and a producer is still making 9 non-hits, then the producer will see negative cash flow.
The trouble is, there are so many complexities, not the least being demographic changes, that it is very hard to identify the effect. Let's take a look at movies: box office has increased and is at record levels. Is that a real trend or the side-effect of 3-D novelties? Elsewhere, today, I was part of a discussion about "Jaws" and "Shampoo," the number 1 and number 4 top grossing movies of 1975. "Shampoo" won best picture. "Star Wars" the top grossing film of a couple of years later was nominated as best picture. Back then, well reviewed movies also find large audiences. Last year, "The Hurt Locker" set a record for the lowest-grossing Best Picture. Can the serious movie find an audience these days?
DVD sales, the real place where movies made their money last decade, are flat to lower. Is that a residue of infringement?
Whether it is or not, it's rather academic. Hollywood justified big budget movies for the following reasons: 1) there's a certain ante, in terms of starts, stunts, and effects, for a blockbuster movie, 2) the movie will do well overseas, and 3) the movie will do well in DVD. 2 and especially 3 aren't so sure, and as a result budgets are being reduced and actors are not getting their quote.
Hollywood will continue to talk about piracy, because whether it is really the cause of alleged lost profits, it plays well with Congress and has resulted in the de facto erosion of fair use and has closed up the knotholes in the ball parks represented by our recorders, computers, and screens. That can't hurt. But, make no mistake about it, the formula I first expressed, revenues from those who do pay must exceed expenditures, is close to their wallets. The high cost of marketing a film has led them to to shutter their "independent" film imprints. For the past couple of years, they've been saying no to producers on what would have been yeses, such as a sequel to "The Anchorman," Sam Raimi directing Toby Maguire in a fourth Spiderman, and so on. (On the other hand, they've paid licensing money in order to do development deals around toy brands. Yes, Lincoln Logs has a deal. Don't ask me, I can't explain it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it every time Florian Mueller is quoted in the summary, it's submitted by someone anonymous?
Cable channels used to be about narrowcasting to targeted demographics. About eight years or so back, the channel owners started to rethink that strategy. So The Nashville Network (country-targeted) went to TNN and then became Spike, aiming its programming against a broader male demographic and de-emphasizing and abandoning an explicit connection to the music genre. Unless a cable channel has a lock-hold on a very loyal demographic with a great profile for advertisers, it will go to diversifying its programming and slug it out with general interest programming with a more subtle skew.
Whether there's a QuickTime Pro these days or not, the QuickTime that comes with Snow Leopard does not show any locked features, nor invites us to send in some more money.
As to Point 13 and specifically "eventually," if that moment is 2012, then maybe one could go from XP to the no-doubt-better-successor to Windows 7. Is the cost of XP to Win7 and Win7 to Win8 really going to be less expensive than XP straight to Win8? If it were, then people will choose to stick with XP. Costs and applications trump the underlying benefits of the new operating system, unless those benefits are realized with little user intervention. XP to Win7 was not such an upgrade.
"Experience" is one of these bogus points that one side will bring up when they think they have an advantage and ignore when they don't, even as the other side starts singing the tune. I voted for Obama and am absolutely convinced that he was and remains a better choice than John McCain. I am also pretty certain that where I disagree with Obama's policies, Hillary Clinton would not have acted differently, so I don't regret my primary election vote, either.
Any way, in 2008, experience worked, probably, against Obama. In 2012? Well, isn't he going to be the only person in the race with experience as President of the United States? Which is why, for the Republicans, mentions of comparative experience will not be heard in 2012 at all.
Well, most every day problems being procedural/imperative is akin to saying most every day physics is Newtonian. Very true, but the vexing computing problems of the day relate to scale, concurrency, and parallelism.
Now people are very much single-threaded, so perhaps the program-as-cooking-instructions analogy and procedural languages provide the best entrance point for many. My first language was BASIC from the days of numbered lines and GOTO. It wasn't the language, but what I could do that hooked me.
Yep. Some fairly tony canyons are within a mile. They have coyotes, lose pets on occasion, and have rats.
You know what is really starting to get on my nerves?
Updates and how.
Really, I am a grown-up. I do not expect perfection. I do not hold update counts against developers, in fact, the opposite, shouting huzzah whenever problems get fixed.
But here's what has happened in the past few months. There's something I want to do, and I fire up the software, and I'm greeted with an update available modal box which has to be addressed, probably with a "later" because at that moment I hadn't planned to be sys-admin dude.
With regards to Kubuntu, which I have installed in many places, I have had the occasional bit of bad luck in which a kernel updates seems to wack something for a few days until other packages catch up with their updates.
I contrast that with the iThings where updates are indicated quietly, download and install is neatly done, and I'm real sure that the update won't gum up the other apps or the gui.
I'm all for updates as long as they don't interfere with why I'm running a system, which is to do something that gets me paid or enjoyment, not administration and definitely not whack-a-mole dependency roulette.
It's not the frequency, it's the friction.
The Beatles had great taste in music. They were also at the right time and right place for an intellectual Renaissance and some of them had interests which merged them with the London art world, and the theories of art echoed back into their music and presentation and conceptualization of the LP as a art piece even when on the book shelf.
They had two great songwriters who were friendly rivals who could see what the other was seeing and see what they were not. Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane. Not all dualities are resolvable and, besides, her defenders nonetheless, I don't think many bands would survive Yoko Ono. McCartney was experimental but never wanted to abandon his pop base center. Lennon wanted to tear the playhouse down but would lower the axe, take a break and love those 45s from the 50s.
In order to redistribute GPL software, isn't Apple asked to spend more money? It has to have the ability to turn off and on the encryption, based on the license. It has to, to some degree, vet that the code is licensed correctly, or that non-GPL apps doesn't include GPLed elements. If they distribute anything that was not properly licensed, they have to mitigate the infringement, which, as a start, will be a recall off of the mobile devices and a refund, which is an ugly pr event, ask Amazon about "1984." What about the costs of hosting source code? Isn't a lot of GPL software offered at no charge, so there's not a lot of offsetting revenue for the extra bother? Licensing nuance is inside baseball. I doubt there would be significant additional demand for Apple devices for GPL code being allowed in the app store. Were Apple to allow GPL apps, Freedom as in Free adherents would still be cheesed off that Apple approves each app and/or that device owners cannot install any thing they want, except via unsupported self-modification
The developer chooses a license that suits them, and, right on, dig it, God bless 'em, and more power to them. Potential downstream users look at licenses and, if it doesn't make sense in the totality of what they are trying to do, either to pursue happiness or a dollar, they walk away from the code. Apple looks at GPL code and says, it's not worth the effort. They have the freedom to make that choice. Device buyers have the freedom to consider the intermediate's choices when they choose devices.
Certainly ownership change is a time for reassessment. It must be said, though, Apple and Sun had their history. One has to assume that Apple was behaving as per its license from Sun and the license terms would carry over to Oracle without any changes.
Still, I think the primary reason is that Apple had taken on sustaining its java environment so as to make java apps as consistent with native look and feel applications as possible. Apple has just reassessed the costs of that decision, and how the platform has changed post-mobile devices, and has concluded that all the money they spend on java does not sell a commensurate number of devices.
Getting money for something someone else has done. The NYC employees uses a Mac or LibreOffice, it matters not, Microsoft still collects.
Hear, hear
I use both on the Mac. There are bugs one has that the other has fixed. Page Break view in Neo in Calc isn't quite right (or wasn't last time I checked.) OO.o sometimes generates incorrect pdfs and NeoOffice handles .eps images more consistently.
I think Microsoft is in a situation of its making. With Windows 7, based on pricing and convenience, they said to XP users the most economical way to get the better operating system was to buy new hardware. Had Microsoft encouraged same hardware upgrades, there would have been angry memos from OEM partners and next thing you know, netbooks go back to Linux.
Any way, the recession means a lot of computers are clocking time, powered off, until their leases are complete. High unemployment will be, effectively, a brake on new hardware sales.
But, let's not lose sight that revenues from operating systems has been doing very, very nicely in the last year. Set it up so XP to Win7 upgrades are cheap and easy and the company makes more money, keeps a higher market cap than Apple, and Ballmer gets the regular bonus. Otherwise, I don't see any one really losing out for all those users holding back with XP.
Newscorp wanted too much for MySpace
No, it doesn't bother me. Apple has been in two businesses in recent times. They make computers and they use their interface, operating system, and hardware experience in order to make specialized consumer devices that are adapted computers. Apple does not operate in a vacuum and Apple, like everyone else, prefers to sell things profitably which may lead to other profitable sales. As a result, license and contract terms and their own understanding of their business model mean some entertainment formats or some general computing functionality may be unavailable from the external interface or its stores. For people who are interested, as a challenge or because their entertainment is not in the "correct" format or for whom every computing device must be returned back to its essential nature, and who have the chops break the device so it behaves as the owner sees fit.
I see the merits of the device freedom people's case. Why last night I was using a computer book as a cockroach termination device. On the other hand, I don't buy toaster ovens with the thought that I should be able to convert them into blow torches. Were I McGyver in trouble, my perspective, of course, would be different. In Apple's defense, I can also see that they would consider it a ghastly error to find themselves seated in a courtroom one day, being asked "You knew that by doing x, y, and z, one could make ${device} damage my client, and you did nothing about it?" So when devices are jailbroken, and I believe it is uniformly through exploitation of bugs which could be security problems, Apple has to do discourage it and fix that flaw at their next chance.
Me. I say an AppleTV is for watching tv and I don't have a tv. I could buy one and turn it into something else. Or I could just skip the middle man and the fuss and just buy the something else.
We had the WWDC keynote, which included news of This Years Model: iPhone. We also had the release of the iPhone.
So there were articles about predictions, articles about leaks, articles about why the prediction and leaks were nuts, articles about which predictions and leaks were plausible.
We had liveblogs. We had deadblogs. We had linkbaitblogs and usual casts saying "Apple awesome," "Apple evil," and "My fellow commenters are idiots and/or shills." To date, I haven't seen any "Apple is the new Nokia" arguments. Go figure.
We had the legions of Apple's marketing forces pumping content into the system. We had the legions of non-Apple's marketing forces dismissing the iPhone and promoting their phone/carrier/operating system, some of which were going to be totally awesome when they arrive next month, next quarter, next year, with almost exactly the features and functionality we are showing, via animation.
Then we had articles about the impending release.
Then we had articles about the Apple Store situation around the country on the day of release.
We had iPhone release reviews.
We had an Apple press release about how many phones were sold in the first weekend. We had posts that said the numbers were crazy and Apple are liars.
(We note that iPhones, as a popular consumer device, and Apple's success as a company mean Apple news goes mainstream media, i.e., jumps from the tech or business pages.)
Oh yeah. Apple and Flash, Flash, Flash.
And then, during the last three days of the month, news of the antenna and face-proximity bugs appeared.
Phew. Talk about sucking all the oxygen out of the media.
But the implication above - and I apologize, I'm not checking whether it was source or summary - that plurality of column-inches, to use a quaint measure, is entirety of attention is not particularly valid. People have deadlines and have space to fill and need to attract the attention of Billy and Betty Webnewssumer, so things are skewed to what the new outlets think drives those herds.
I could have sworn I left my Calico Tablet and my Gingham Netbook on the desk last night.
With Woody Tobias, Jr.
The original was blocked as a homage of sequences Howard Hawks directed in his westerns. Hawks explained why his heroes broke the "Code of the West" by saying that it is stupid to meet a capable, professional, opponent in a fair fight. If you respect the guy, you take him out fast, with prejudice, and no Marquess of Queensberry niceties.
Hawks essentially structured the relationship between the marshall and the town in "Rio Bravo" as his caustic commentary on the way the sheriff in "High Noon" went looking for help from townspeople. Hawks had his character tell a volunteering amateur "you'd get in my way and be me one more thing for me to worry about." Ironically, the well-meaning old friend he said that to is executed by the bad guys shortly after.
In 1977, the fairly recent USC film school grad Lucas wanted to be Hawks/Ford/Kurosawa directing John Wayne. In 1997, Lucas wanted Han Solo to be Clint Eastwood. Not the end of the world, but I do prefer the original staging.
What? You think newspapers don't pay business taxes?
I'm off to rewrite my resume and submit to Microsoft. Gone: all the bits about my schooling. Coming in: all the websites I visit.
This is probably venturing into "Ask Slashdot" territory, but, um, Slashdot, in or out?
The point of copyright is to encourage the tangible expression of ideas for those who need an economic basis to do so. We, through the government, offer that limited monopoly because we think ideas, education, culture, political debate, and their propagation are a very good thing. We don't really care about your material wealth, or, rather, I care about your material wealth to the degree you care about mine. Doing well? That nice.
Now if you sincerely only want some people to receive and share your thoughts, write them a letter.
You are asking if there's a way to optimize the outcome, that is, the persons you hire were the best ones to higher and the ones you rejected were the best ones to reject. Can't be done. So make your choices and take your chances. Go strictly by paperwork (cognizant that the mercenary and mediocre may have gotten their certifications to improve their chances at the first cut.) Or, take all the time and interviews needed to find out which quadrant the applicant belongs along the Know-Their-Stuff / Pleasant-To-Work-With Cartesian axes.
There are no guarantees. Mistakes will be made.
A project fails because the expenditures exceed the revenue from the people who pay. It really doesn't matter how many people don't pay, unless you can show that there are people who would have paid, except for consuming via non-licensed distribution means. Think of it this way. A scene from Americana is boys gathered around a knothole to watch a ball game. Close up the knothole and do all the boys buy a ticket? Probably not, because, generally, they are at the knothole because they can't afford a ticket. If they could, they'd buy a ticket and view the game from a better vantage point. Any way, if you look at movies and music, the things most downloaded are also the things that sold the most units.
Infringement hurts the business - if it does - by reducing the revenues of the hit, i.e., still massively profitable, but not as much. A lot of commercialized art rely on a business model where the hit pays for 4 or 5 break-evens and the 4 out and out flops. If unlicensed views mean the hit can only pay for only 8 non-hits, and a producer is still making 9 non-hits, then the producer will see negative cash flow.
The trouble is, there are so many complexities, not the least being demographic changes, that it is very hard to identify the effect. Let's take a look at movies: box office has increased and is at record levels. Is that a real trend or the side-effect of 3-D novelties? Elsewhere, today, I was part of a discussion about "Jaws" and "Shampoo," the number 1 and number 4 top grossing movies of 1975. "Shampoo" won best picture. "Star Wars" the top grossing film of a couple of years later was nominated as best picture. Back then, well reviewed movies also find large audiences. Last year, "The Hurt Locker" set a record for the lowest-grossing Best Picture. Can the serious movie find an audience these days?
DVD sales, the real place where movies made their money last decade, are flat to lower. Is that a residue of infringement?
Whether it is or not, it's rather academic. Hollywood justified big budget movies for the following reasons: 1) there's a certain ante, in terms of starts, stunts, and effects, for a blockbuster movie, 2) the movie will do well overseas, and 3) the movie will do well in DVD. 2 and especially 3 aren't so sure, and as a result budgets are being reduced and actors are not getting their quote.
Hollywood will continue to talk about piracy, because whether it is really the cause of alleged lost profits, it plays well with Congress and has resulted in the de facto erosion of fair use and has closed up the knotholes in the ball parks represented by our recorders, computers, and screens. That can't hurt. But, make no mistake about it, the formula I first expressed, revenues from those who do pay must exceed expenditures, is close to their wallets. The high cost of marketing a film has led them to to shutter their "independent" film imprints. For the past couple of years, they've been saying no to producers on what would have been yeses, such as a sequel to "The Anchorman," Sam Raimi directing Toby Maguire in a fourth Spiderman, and so on. (On the other hand, they've paid licensing money in order to do development deals around toy brands. Yes, Lincoln Logs has a deal. Don't ask me, I can't explain it.)