The real problem, of course, is that the law can rarely be analyzed logically. Even when the text seems perfectly clear and direct, its application often belies that by creating an entire superset of byzantine rules that encompass the actual text and dramatically change its reading.
I think this actually goes far further along to describing the difference between mathematicians and other people. Mathematicians, through mathematics, have essentially created an entirely arbitrary system of explaining reality and are used to applying that ruleset independent of anything else (despite the fact that in some cases, it is patently absurd to do so). The law can be seen as an arbitrary set of rules. Therefore, mathematicians look at the law as an arbitrary set of rules and apply it accordingly. The problem is that, unlike mathematics, the law is not applied independent of anything else- especially not in cases where it is patently absurd to do so. The law as written is one part but not the only, or even the largest, part of the system that determines what the result of an application of the law will be.
When you ask someone to decide whether or not person A violated the law, they can't just look at the law on its own; they have to examine the rest of the system that the law operates within.
I'm not sure what the grandparent meant, but I think the US does take more 'direct' action. Most other Western nations tend to have heavily developed regulatory structures in the first place, which necessitate less in-place tinkering after the fact.
Obviously you have never actually dealt with the bank's consumer facing 'security' measures. It's perfectly possible to go in and clear out other people's accounts, simply by claiming you're them.
The entire consumer-facing security system of banks is generally smoke and mirrors.
That doesn't sound amateur at all. In fact it sounds fiendishly complicated to get right, and would require highly advanced laser technology for the satellite.
Actually, he's probably better considered "the greatest Canadian PM ever". I mean, he ranked third in The Greatest Canadian!
Also, in an Angus-Reid poll in late May, 39% of Canadians say Trudeau was the best PM in recent history, followed by Harper with 11% and Chretien with 9%.
Oddly, the opposite is not also true: 22% picked Harper as worst PM, followed by Mulroney with 19%, Chretien with 12%, and Trudeau with 10%.
Actually, I'm not sure that's true, but even if it was, it makes a pretty bad example.
Firstly, military units are somewhat autonomous within their mandate. Top-down control simply means that the very top decides what they want, and lower levels decide on an increasing level of specificity how to achieve that goal until you go from the President deciding he wants to invade a middle-eastern nation to a squad-leader deciding how his squad will attack a specific house. The military is not top down in the sense that the commander in chief is deciding how to knock down doors.
That said, unlike companies where the only really overriding mandate is to make profit, the military tends to be organized into very much more specific overriding goals. You can't have random battalions deciding they'd rather attack Pakistan, for example. This is not necessarily true in either R&D or the private sector; in both those cases it's perfectly possible to basically split off groups.
For example, say your company makes widgets. You hire more and more people, until eventually you have 200 people. So you decide to make two lines of product, Widget A and Widget B. Both teams need only a very little communication- they essentially work autonomously. Eventually, they both grow large as the demand for widgets increases that you split off two more groups- and now you have Widget A, Widget B, Widget C, and Widget D. You're working more efficiently and making things better for your customers (because you can make a solution closer to what they want) with each increase in specificity.
I think an argument could be made that those organizations tend to split development drivers (groups of designers, etc) into sub-150 person groups which are, at least to some extent, autonomous within their given mandate.
For example, look at DARPA, which is basically designed along exactly this principle.
I agree with your basic premise- that is, that people create government. But I would also put forward the theory that there is an immense ontological inertia present in any state of government. It takes a huge amount of hatred for people to actually decide to significantly change their government. It's not something that happens even if everyone is just a little bit unhappy, or even if everyone is reasonably unhappy. They have to be extremely unhappy and extremely motivated to change it for it to change significantly.
The majority of people in Iran could very well care about democracy, freedom, human rights, whatever. However, unless they are also incredibly unhappy with their current government, nothing will change. A lot of Iranians are unhappy with their government. Some of those are very unhappy. That's not enough to create change.
Look at the United States, for example, back in 2006/2007, the percentage of people who approved of George W. Bush's policies had dropped to less than 40%- in some cases as low as 30-35%. And yet there was not even a (reasonable) attempt made to remove him from office. The majority, by a significant margin, disapproved of what he was doing- and yet they did not disapprove enough to demand a change in regime.
As for condemning Iranian culture and your whole tangent in that respect, all I can say is you need to get a life. Iranian society is not 'horrible'. Their quest for nuclear weapons is no more an attempt to 'seek revenge' than any society does. It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe nuclear weapons are some kind of 'moral' issue and that the 'bad' people should never be allowed to get them. Not necessarily because of any well-reasoned security analysis, but just because those people are "BAD" and bad people should not be allowed dangerous weapons.
It's really no easier, actually. The second amendment is irrelevant now and always has been irrelevant.
I point you toward a comparative legal analysis of the UK, the USA, and Canada, which have three different but similar systems of constitutional law and rights. The differences between the three systems are limited to a difference in political culture.
Let me repeat that. Despite having enormously different legal constitutional guarantees of rights, the practical effect of these legal constitutional documents is exactly zero.
That's not what he's saying, though. What he's saying is that the law means nothing without the people who interpret it. The law is, ultimately, it's interpretation; safeguarding the law requires more than a law without loopholes, it requires people who enforce the law to want to uphold its spirit, not only its letter.
In that sense, adding digital 'rights' to the constitution is irrelevant. Unless there are people in the government who want to uphold digital rights, they will not be upheld.
I believe it was Lawrence Lessig who elaborated on this most clearly when he said that a constitution is really nothing more than a piece of paper. It cannot stop anyone. It is nothing more than an ideal to live by.
Why are you using 'lifespan' as 'all the time'? It's rather conclusive that time runs for a lot longer than your mere existence. Or is there something out here I'm not following?
Copyright is for a 'limited time'. The period encompassed by 'time' is an infinitely large number. Zero is the smallest period of time. (well, perhaps dirac time, but you get the idea). 75 is very close to zero on the scale from zero to infinity.
You are about 99% wrong. The cost of duplication is effectively zero. Basically the cost of some small percentage of electricity. There is no cost to create the "first copy", the cost is 100% tied up in creating the "original". That is the only significant cost and it has absolutely nothing to do with copying the original.and making subsequent copies. If you want to get really pedantic you can include the percentage of all costs directly associated with the copying (internet service, datacenter electric, heating/cooling, etc...) Even if you add all that up the direct costs for the 10 seconds of download for a song or 10 minutes for a movie comes to less that $0.10. Possibly under a single penny under some circumstances.
When I said 'first copy' I thought it was obvious that I meant 'original'. In the case of electronic data the difference between copies and the original is non-existent so in my mind it seems silly to draw a distinction between them- they're all copies. The first copy is the original, but it's also a 'copy'.
Your line of thinking is purely a business abstraction on how to extract value from the original. It has nothing to do with the actual cost of duplication. It just so happens that with the internet the control of duplication has slipped out of the companies hands and the costs are effectively zero. This basically means that your way of thinking for valuing a copy now has fundamental flaws and you should find a smarter way of extracting the value.
Of course it's a business abstraction. That's what the entire discussion is all about. The cost of duplication is relevant to the 'price' of the object, just as the cost of creating the original/first copy is relevant to the price of the object.
Your argument essentially boils down to the fact that because people can illegally duplicate something, and therefore you should not even attempt to sell it is silly and goes directly against the entire purpose of copyright- a very reasonable, intelligent purpose.
No, it's not a fallacious argument. You just don't understand economics. If the cost of duplication is zero, then there is no way to charge for each incremental copy other than by artificially controlling and distorting the market. Note how I NEVER said that because the PRICE was free that the value was zero. Those are two very different things. The incidental cost has no bearing on the duplication cost. It's a sunk cost, and investment, a write-off, if you will. You use it as the basis, the investment, to make your services and the actually scarce goods that you control that much more valuable.
I think you're distorting the original argument I responded to. You said the cost of copies should be free. I pointed out that regardless of whether or not the cost of distribution is zero, the cost of copies should not be free. You still need to extract your original investment, which necessitates at least some price per copy. Not all these copies need to cost the same, certainly. But if you sink costs with no expectation of return on that cost, economically, you're an idiot.
The media market should work in the same way. Once a recording is made, it has no price due to free duplication, but it has great value in getting the creator publicity (assuming it's any good). The creator can then charge for scarce goods tied to that free, yet valuable, infinitely copied data. Signed albums, t-shirts, hanging out with fans, whatever. Lots of things that are scarce that people will pay good money for. The thing missing is that there's no RIAA, no A&R man, nobody being the "gatekeeper" as to what's good and bad, as to who succeeds and who doesn't, as to who gets heard and who doesn't. The economics, if they worked naturally instead of through the distortion of asinine laws, would enrich society as a whole. It'd just make fewer "super stars", and it'd make the people who call themselves artist representatives and such actually work rather than simply act as toll-collecting gatekeepers.
That's an entirely different argument, though. Essentially you're suggesting that you should make a sunk investment in the music itself in order to reap rewards in the selling of other things. That seems to be a silly argument at best. What if I have no interest in making t-shirts or signing albums or hanging out with fans? The music has value. If it didn't, people wouldn't listen to it. It's only economically sound in that the costs of copying a t-shirt or signed album and selling it are non-trivial and therefore people are not likely to counterfeit them.
I was using 75 years as an example, not a hard date.
The other questions are part of the equation I have mentioned as to determining the relevance of copyright; they are not determinative in and of themselves. (One could argue there is incentive to create for economic stability for one's children, for example).
There aren't an infinite number of people to kill. As a proportion of the theoretically available 'space', 6.7 billion people is very much closer to 'all' the people than it is to 'none' of the people. Seventy-five years is very much closer to 'none' of the time than it is to 'all' of the time.
How does that invalidate my comment? They're there to promote what they know will make money. The actual printing of 'records' (CDs) is fairly trivial.
Firstly, content creation and delivery has gotten much easier in the past 150 years or so. It's possible for someone, in their spare time, to create content and distribute it widely; and because they are doing it in their spare time, they can also afford to distribute it for free and care only for eyeballs.
That said, however, there is a problem. The amount of time required to become masterfully proficient in something is impressive- on the order of at least 10,000 hours of practice, which is a figure often bandied around. If you're working full time (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year) that's five years of solid practice doing nothing but what you want to do to become technically proficient in. Most of the people like you, who are doing this in their spare time, are, with respect, not masterfully proficient- or even close to it.
That was the design of the patronage system of the middle ages and the enlightenment- that a wealthy patron essentially paid someone to do nothing but work on something for their enjoyment, so they could devote that time. It worked.
But there are few wealthy patrons these days. Copyright was created to provide an incentive for individuals to put in the immense amount of time required to become masterfully proficient.
While the internet age does make it easier to create and distribute content, not all content can be created by amateurs in their spare time. Nor would we want it to. Erasing copyright without replacing it with something which provides a similar incentive program would essentially choke off that content production. You'd have a huge glut of amateur producers and very, very few expert producers; and while in this time of 'just good enough' content, that might suffice for some people it would be, at least in my opinion, disastrous for society as a whole.
The patron system had some advantages, to be sure, but as you point out, it really depended on your patron. If your patron was wealthy and willing to wait, you got some marvelous things, like the Sistine Chapel. The problem is, there are relatively few of those; copyright attempts to extend at least some measure of protection to the entire populace to ensure a much wider spectrum of creators.
Which is, as I think we agree, why that system went out of style 400 years ago..
Yes, it would. But in order for there to be incentive for them to produce, they have to be recompensed for doing so (whether this recompense needs to be monetary or not is debatable and depends on the artist).
Copyright is intended to secure that recompense. The open question is what balance is most efficient for society as a whole; which balancing level of copyright produces the right amount of artists and the right return into the public domain of their work.
I am dubious that that number is zero copyright, however, just as it is also dubious that that number is infinity. Really, however, on the whole you are seeing a relatively short span for copyright; 75 years, for example, is much closer to zero than it is to infinity.
Your argument seems self-defeating. The primary goal of the record companies and their primary reason for existence is promotion; getting CDs to stores, in iTunes, on Amazon, etc; getting them played on the radio; making music videos and getthing those played, etc, etc. I imagine that actually pressing CDs is probably a trivial part of their business.
That's a fallacious argument, to be sure, that because the cost of duplication is zero, then the price should be free. The way that equation works is that the number of copies approaches infinity, the price of each individual copy approaches zero. But each individual copy is never free, because there is always a) an incidental cost per copy, and b) a cost to create the first copy.
For your postulate to hold, the incidental cost must be zero, and the original copy must cost nothing to produce. What is really happening, however, is that as the number of copies increases, the original cost is distributed across all extant copies so that each copy costs a+b/(n) where a and b are as above and n is the number of copies. If the incidental cost is trivial ($0.0001, for example), you can get very close to free indeed but you can never reach it.
I suppose that's an issue of subjective vs. objective value. The orange never changes; it's value to you is decreased, but if you're starving again its value 'increases'. If you put a starving person and a person who's just eaten a four-course meal in a room with a single orange, the orange's value to the starving person will be much greater than to the person who's just eaten- but this has nothing really at all to do with the orange.
I think what he's saying is that we all have things that we value; and this 'value' does not go away. We do not suddenly end up valuing nothing or valuing everything. But what we value often changes, and how we express those values also changes. 'Value' is not created or destroyed, but the way we perceive it is consistently in a state of flux.
The content industry, like any other industry, must keep an eye on the perception of 'value' and modify what it is selling accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem, of course, is that the law can rarely be analyzed logically. Even when the text seems perfectly clear and direct, its application often belies that by creating an entire superset of byzantine rules that encompass the actual text and dramatically change its reading.
I think this actually goes far further along to describing the difference between mathematicians and other people. Mathematicians, through mathematics, have essentially created an entirely arbitrary system of explaining reality and are used to applying that ruleset independent of anything else (despite the fact that in some cases, it is patently absurd to do so). The law can be seen as an arbitrary set of rules. Therefore, mathematicians look at the law as an arbitrary set of rules and apply it accordingly. The problem is that, unlike mathematics, the law is not applied independent of anything else- especially not in cases where it is patently absurd to do so. The law as written is one part but not the only, or even the largest, part of the system that determines what the result of an application of the law will be.
When you ask someone to decide whether or not person A violated the law, they can't just look at the law on its own; they have to examine the rest of the system that the law operates within.
I'm not sure what the grandparent meant, but I think the US does take more 'direct' action. Most other Western nations tend to have heavily developed regulatory structures in the first place, which necessitate less in-place tinkering after the fact.
Obviously you have never actually dealt with the bank's consumer facing 'security' measures. It's perfectly possible to go in and clear out other people's accounts, simply by claiming you're them.
The entire consumer-facing security system of banks is generally smoke and mirrors.
Wouldn't both the wolves also be armed? In which case, the sheep is STILL screwed.
That doesn't sound amateur at all. In fact it sounds fiendishly complicated to get right, and would require highly advanced laser technology for the satellite.
Actually, he's probably better considered "the greatest Canadian PM ever". I mean, he ranked third in The Greatest Canadian!
Also, in an Angus-Reid poll in late May, 39% of Canadians say Trudeau was the best PM in recent history, followed by Harper with 11% and Chretien with 9%.
Oddly, the opposite is not also true: 22% picked Harper as worst PM, followed by Mulroney with 19%, Chretien with 12%, and Trudeau with 10%.
Actually, I'm not sure that's true, but even if it was, it makes a pretty bad example.
Firstly, military units are somewhat autonomous within their mandate. Top-down control simply means that the very top decides what they want, and lower levels decide on an increasing level of specificity how to achieve that goal until you go from the President deciding he wants to invade a middle-eastern nation to a squad-leader deciding how his squad will attack a specific house. The military is not top down in the sense that the commander in chief is deciding how to knock down doors.
That said, unlike companies where the only really overriding mandate is to make profit, the military tends to be organized into very much more specific overriding goals. You can't have random battalions deciding they'd rather attack Pakistan, for example. This is not necessarily true in either R&D or the private sector; in both those cases it's perfectly possible to basically split off groups.
For example, say your company makes widgets. You hire more and more people, until eventually you have 200 people. So you decide to make two lines of product, Widget A and Widget B. Both teams need only a very little communication- they essentially work autonomously. Eventually, they both grow large as the demand for widgets increases that you split off two more groups- and now you have Widget A, Widget B, Widget C, and Widget D. You're working more efficiently and making things better for your customers (because you can make a solution closer to what they want) with each increase in specificity.
I think an argument could be made that those organizations tend to split development drivers (groups of designers, etc) into sub-150 person groups which are, at least to some extent, autonomous within their given mandate.
For example, look at DARPA, which is basically designed along exactly this principle.
From US v. Sprague: The 10th Amendment means jack shit.
From US Public Workers v. Mitchell: The 9th Amendment means jack shit.
I agree with your basic premise- that is, that people create government. But I would also put forward the theory that there is an immense ontological inertia present in any state of government. It takes a huge amount of hatred for people to actually decide to significantly change their government. It's not something that happens even if everyone is just a little bit unhappy, or even if everyone is reasonably unhappy. They have to be extremely unhappy and extremely motivated to change it for it to change significantly.
The majority of people in Iran could very well care about democracy, freedom, human rights, whatever. However, unless they are also incredibly unhappy with their current government, nothing will change. A lot of Iranians are unhappy with their government. Some of those are very unhappy. That's not enough to create change.
Look at the United States, for example, back in 2006/2007, the percentage of people who approved of George W. Bush's policies had dropped to less than 40%- in some cases as low as 30-35%. And yet there was not even a (reasonable) attempt made to remove him from office. The majority, by a significant margin, disapproved of what he was doing- and yet they did not disapprove enough to demand a change in regime.
As for condemning Iranian culture and your whole tangent in that respect, all I can say is you need to get a life. Iranian society is not 'horrible'. Their quest for nuclear weapons is no more an attempt to 'seek revenge' than any society does. It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe nuclear weapons are some kind of 'moral' issue and that the 'bad' people should never be allowed to get them. Not necessarily because of any well-reasoned security analysis, but just because those people are "BAD" and bad people should not be allowed dangerous weapons.
It's really no easier, actually. The second amendment is irrelevant now and always has been irrelevant.
I point you toward a comparative legal analysis of the UK, the USA, and Canada, which have three different but similar systems of constitutional law and rights. The differences between the three systems are limited to a difference in political culture.
Let me repeat that. Despite having enormously different legal constitutional guarantees of rights, the practical effect of these legal constitutional documents is exactly zero.
That's not what he's saying, though. What he's saying is that the law means nothing without the people who interpret it. The law is, ultimately, it's interpretation; safeguarding the law requires more than a law without loopholes, it requires people who enforce the law to want to uphold its spirit, not only its letter.
In that sense, adding digital 'rights' to the constitution is irrelevant. Unless there are people in the government who want to uphold digital rights, they will not be upheld.
I believe it was Lawrence Lessig who elaborated on this most clearly when he said that a constitution is really nothing more than a piece of paper. It cannot stop anyone. It is nothing more than an ideal to live by.
I suggest you pay some attention to those rights you so freely tout. They don't mean what you think they do- specifically the 9th and 10th Amendments.
Why are you using 'lifespan' as 'all the time'? It's rather conclusive that time runs for a lot longer than your mere existence. Or is there something out here I'm not following?
Copyright is for a 'limited time'. The period encompassed by 'time' is an infinitely large number. Zero is the smallest period of time. (well, perhaps dirac time, but you get the idea). 75 is very close to zero on the scale from zero to infinity.
When I said 'first copy' I thought it was obvious that I meant 'original'. In the case of electronic data the difference between copies and the original is non-existent so in my mind it seems silly to draw a distinction between them- they're all copies. The first copy is the original, but it's also a 'copy'.
Of course it's a business abstraction. That's what the entire discussion is all about. The cost of duplication is relevant to the 'price' of the object, just as the cost of creating the original/first copy is relevant to the price of the object.
Your argument essentially boils down to the fact that because people can illegally duplicate something, and therefore you should not even attempt to sell it is silly and goes directly against the entire purpose of copyright- a very reasonable, intelligent purpose.
I think you're distorting the original argument I responded to. You said the cost of copies should be free. I pointed out that regardless of whether or not the cost of distribution is zero, the cost of copies should not be free. You still need to extract your original investment, which necessitates at least some price per copy. Not all these copies need to cost the same, certainly. But if you sink costs with no expectation of return on that cost, economically, you're an idiot.
That's an entirely different argument, though. Essentially you're suggesting that you should make a sunk investment in the music itself in order to reap rewards in the selling of other things. That seems to be a silly argument at best. What if I have no interest in making t-shirts or signing albums or hanging out with fans? The music has value. If it didn't, people wouldn't listen to it. It's only economically sound in that the costs of copying a t-shirt or signed album and selling it are non-trivial and therefore people are not likely to counterfeit them.
I was using 75 years as an example, not a hard date.
The other questions are part of the equation I have mentioned as to determining the relevance of copyright; they are not determinative in and of themselves. (One could argue there is incentive to create for economic stability for one's children, for example).
There aren't an infinite number of people to kill. As a proportion of the theoretically available 'space', 6.7 billion people is very much closer to 'all' the people than it is to 'none' of the people. Seventy-five years is very much closer to 'none' of the time than it is to 'all' of the time.
How does that invalidate my comment? They're there to promote what they know will make money. The actual printing of 'records' (CDs) is fairly trivial.
I think the problem is twofold.
Firstly, content creation and delivery has gotten much easier in the past 150 years or so. It's possible for someone, in their spare time, to create content and distribute it widely; and because they are doing it in their spare time, they can also afford to distribute it for free and care only for eyeballs.
That said, however, there is a problem. The amount of time required to become masterfully proficient in something is impressive- on the order of at least 10,000 hours of practice, which is a figure often bandied around. If you're working full time (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year) that's five years of solid practice doing nothing but what you want to do to become technically proficient in. Most of the people like you, who are doing this in their spare time, are, with respect, not masterfully proficient- or even close to it.
That was the design of the patronage system of the middle ages and the enlightenment- that a wealthy patron essentially paid someone to do nothing but work on something for their enjoyment, so they could devote that time. It worked.
But there are few wealthy patrons these days. Copyright was created to provide an incentive for individuals to put in the immense amount of time required to become masterfully proficient.
While the internet age does make it easier to create and distribute content, not all content can be created by amateurs in their spare time. Nor would we want it to. Erasing copyright without replacing it with something which provides a similar incentive program would essentially choke off that content production. You'd have a huge glut of amateur producers and very, very few expert producers; and while in this time of 'just good enough' content, that might suffice for some people it would be, at least in my opinion, disastrous for society as a whole.
The patron system had some advantages, to be sure, but as you point out, it really depended on your patron. If your patron was wealthy and willing to wait, you got some marvelous things, like the Sistine Chapel. The problem is, there are relatively few of those; copyright attempts to extend at least some measure of protection to the entire populace to ensure a much wider spectrum of creators.
Which is, as I think we agree, why that system went out of style 400 years ago..
Yes, it would. But in order for there to be incentive for them to produce, they have to be recompensed for doing so (whether this recompense needs to be monetary or not is debatable and depends on the artist).
Copyright is intended to secure that recompense. The open question is what balance is most efficient for society as a whole; which balancing level of copyright produces the right amount of artists and the right return into the public domain of their work.
I am dubious that that number is zero copyright, however, just as it is also dubious that that number is infinity. Really, however, on the whole you are seeing a relatively short span for copyright; 75 years, for example, is much closer to zero than it is to infinity.
Your argument seems self-defeating. The primary goal of the record companies and their primary reason for existence is promotion; getting CDs to stores, in iTunes, on Amazon, etc; getting them played on the radio; making music videos and getthing those played, etc, etc. I imagine that actually pressing CDs is probably a trivial part of their business.
That's a fallacious argument, to be sure, that because the cost of duplication is zero, then the price should be free. The way that equation works is that the number of copies approaches infinity, the price of each individual copy approaches zero. But each individual copy is never free, because there is always a) an incidental cost per copy, and b) a cost to create the first copy.
For your postulate to hold, the incidental cost must be zero, and the original copy must cost nothing to produce. What is really happening, however, is that as the number of copies increases, the original cost is distributed across all extant copies so that each copy costs a+b/(n) where a and b are as above and n is the number of copies. If the incidental cost is trivial ($0.0001, for example), you can get very close to free indeed but you can never reach it.
I suppose that's an issue of subjective vs. objective value. The orange never changes; it's value to you is decreased, but if you're starving again its value 'increases'. If you put a starving person and a person who's just eaten a four-course meal in a room with a single orange, the orange's value to the starving person will be much greater than to the person who's just eaten- but this has nothing really at all to do with the orange.
I think what he's saying is that we all have things that we value; and this 'value' does not go away. We do not suddenly end up valuing nothing or valuing everything. But what we value often changes, and how we express those values also changes. 'Value' is not created or destroyed, but the way we perceive it is consistently in a state of flux.
The content industry, like any other industry, must keep an eye on the perception of 'value' and modify what it is selling accordingly.