[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Overnight? Very little would change. Over the next thirty years? Plenty would change, because artists would have no financial incentive to share their works widely. Why publish a book, with all its setup costs, when anyone can grab it & re-publish it cheaper--if nothing else, without the editing and selection process the original went through? Why go through the expense of making a movie, when you can't have any assurance of getting back the costs and making a profit?

Anybody in 30 years time publishing an actual physical book will be a specialist, akin to someone making a reproduction Queen Anne table right now. And people have been writing novels, stories, plays, making indie movies for the last hundred years without hope of getting the money back they invested to make those cultural artifacts. There's NO assurance as it is that you'll make a single cent on a movie you make, especially an indie movie, so you must make it out of passion, because you HAVE to make it. Your profit-centered approach to art is peculiarly American, where everything is bottom-lined and dollar based. In Europe, Art has been subsidized for a long time and a lot of it is created just because we want to further the arts, not make money.

All screenwriters certainly aren't going to act, direct & produce movies on their own. They need a team, and a lot of equipment, to make their idea into a public-viewable presentation. Who's going to pay for all that? Only those who can afford to do it in their leisure time?

This is where I believe you couldn't be wronger. The actual costs associated with independent film making are getting smaller and smaller. Digital cameras such a the RED are allowing even those with the smallest budgets to go ahead and see their dreams fulfilled. Look at the recent Lord of the Rings fan film - the Hunt for Gollum - and tell me that you can't create a great movie just because you want to. I can't find the exact quote, but George Lucas predicted that with the advances in technology, a single person in a bedroom with a home computer would be able to replicate his Star Wars prequels in quality by 2050. The same goes, incidentally, for music production. Ten years ago you needed studio time at the costs of thousands per day, a producer also costing the same, now you can replicated all of that on a low end Mac with a copy of Pro Tools. Both can be distributed on the web for very low cost.

Performing artists would have a great time. One reason that many bands didn't get behind DRM is that they like to play, not sell CDs; they're content to get paid enough to live on by being on stage. Authors don't have that option; selling copies is their only way to make a living at their craft. Or, of course, they can make a living assembling motherboards, and work on their craft in the evenings, if they've got the energy.

And there's the thing, authors can no longer expect to make a living following their passions, just as a painter can't or a poet. Why should we expect to make money? Writing, acting, painting, performing has been done and will continue to be done without any monetary reward. It's not like the publishers are actually helping authors out in any case. 5-7% of f**k all is not a way to make a living. In any other industry the publishers would have been taken to court for unfair work practices. Authors have zero protection from the publishers, even when they join the ridiculous 'guilds', who haven't done shit for authors since their inception.

Artists would be limited to those who are able to charge for a performance, or can afford to produce their works for free, or for random unknown amounts of money. And they'd have no incentive to produce publicly--quite the opposite; patronages with strict exclusion contracts might become common.

Amateur Dramatics societies are a staple of every small town in the UK. These enthusiastic, and a lot of the time, very good actors put on plays and musicals because they love to, not because they need to make a living. That thought doesn't even enter their minds. They do it all, from set design to arranging venues after they've completed their bread-and-butter jobs. I love my local Amateur Dramatics society and what they do for the community and I'd rather see these joyful 'amateurs' put on a production of 'Abigail's Party' than go to the cinema to watch Sequel IV the Search for More Cash.

Of course, digital copies are easy to produce & distribute, so there'd be no reason not to share those. But DRM would also become more common, and more types of it would flourish--without the requirement of fair use, and the right to own one's purchases, materials would be distributed under "Usage Licenses" controlled by the creator or, more likely, a third-party software company. And even free digital copies would work to deepen the cultural divide between families wealthy and educated enough to use computers, and those without those resources.

And if DRM flourished, we would find more and more ways to crack it, more and more ways to distribute freely. If one single clean copy exists, then a billion can exist, and we'll make sure they do exist. We won't let your future scenario come to pass. If the content creators want to go that route, then they better hire the brightest and the bold, because you really don't want to piss of the Open Source crowd and their supporters.

Inner-city libraries in poor neighborhoods would stock up on letter-sized printout binders of works from the web. Eew.

It's an interesting thought, but unlikely in your 30 year scenario. We, in all likelihood, won't have libraries in 30 years time (physical that is). And printouts will, if there's any justice in the world, be consigned to a footnote of computer history.

I agree that copyright as it stands is seriously broken; it hinders more creativity than it encourages, and it's got a stranglehold on our history. However, that doesn't mean it should be removed entirely; we still need the protections copyright was created to grant. We just need to figure out how to grant those protections without blocking huge amounts of creative and sharing efforts.

I love Lessig's idea of making noncommercial derivatives entirely legal, and having much less protection against either noncommercial copies or commercial derivatives. That premise is a good start for sorting out how the law needs to change.

Copyright doesn't work in favour of the creator, and hasn't since the first ridiculous extensions. Now it cannot work in a zero-cost, infinitely replicable culture. The content hoarders like Disney and all the other Mega-Hyper-Corps in their rush to control everything, ruined copyright forever. But they also opened the doors to absolutely free culture. A culture that knows no price, that is created out of joy rather than money. As we have seen both capitalism and communism haven't worked, now we're heading toward something very different. I don't know what that something is, but it's going to be exciting to find out.