Quote:
Originally Posted by cynoclast
Electronics and the internet are just new things that the market is still adapting to.
Look at the timeline of information encapsulation and note that every single one of these is a method of recording information for distribution: - Hand copied books - ludicrously expensive, being nothing but a scribe was a well paid profession.
- printed books - much cheaper, but still expensive, few homes had any, only the weathly had a "library"
- recorded music/spoken word (wax cylinders) - very expensive, specialized machinery required to perform it, and to produce copies
- recorded video (reel to reel) - see above
- recorded video with audio (reel to reel) - see above
I'll skip the description of all of the intervening formats from laserdisc (I own several!) to Blu-Ray here, but you get the idea.
Throw in an honorable mention for mp3s and audio/video encoding, and ebooks. Add the internet and watch the bottom follow out of the information encapsulation market.
You'll notice that with each step, the cost of producing copies goes down.
Naturally, artistic works, such as movies, music and books still have value, but due to technological advancements, the value of the recordings have progressively gone down with no end in sight.
What we're seeing these days with DRM, lawsuits, the DMCA, etc. is an attempt by those with a vested interest in selling things comprised mostly of what in this day and age is artificial scarcity to preserve the viability of nearly obsolete business models by criminalizing any attempt to cut out the middle man. Nothing more.
To me, their efforts appear no more sane than saying we should all still be paying scribes to copy books for us by hand, and getting fined or thrown in jail for attempting to create a printing press.
It's obvious to anyone with a lick of common sense that all the laws we have protecting Intellectual (Imaginary) Property were created not in the public interest, but for the sole purpose of attempting to maintain the profitability of some outmoded business models.
While I disagree with all of their efforts philosophically, I don't blame them for trying, but let's just say I wouldn't invest in any industry that relies on artificial scarcity of information. They can subvert the legal system to their advantage all they like, but you can't stop billions of people from doing anything. |
Keep in mind that it used to be difficult to mass produce copies of any given work. Even if you made a cassette tape of some songs off of several albums, and then copied those tapes, you lost most of the fidelity over time. The music became more and more degraded.
Same thing even back when you had scribes ... it was expensive to employ a scribe and it took one hell of a long time to make each copy.
Now we come to the digital age. And, what do we have ... just an extremely easy way to make flawless copies of books, music, even some artwork, and to distribute them all over the world with a single click.
Of course the legal distribution chain is scared as all hell. What they need to realize is that if they come up with an inexpensive and fairly uniform method of distribution, people will buy into it without resorting to theft.
I like to think that they will eventually come to that conclusion as they see other companies that use that model being successful with it.
However, I don't believe that massive theft through file sharing is a way to create anything except a reactive reflex in the form of tighter DRM restrictions.