Interesting copyright question

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Originally Posted by HarryT

If corporations could not hold copyrights, where would be the incentive to make movies? "Blockbuster" movies are so astronomically expensive, costing hundreds of millions of $ to make, that they are really outside the budget of any but the wealthiest of individuals.

The incentive is in the ticket price, as usual.
Why do you think that the lack of corporation-owned copyright will prevent people to go to movie theathers?

I see DVD-RIP movies in torrents before they're out in theathers. And if there have been enough TV promotion, they're not ampty at all.
Just say in TV "go to the theather", and hudreds of thousands of people will be going. Copyright or not.

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Originally Posted by pholy

Sorry, I forgot about movies.... They aren't really part of my life :-)

I guess I just hate big authoritarian corporations. Am I unique?

More pholy

You can grant corporations movie rights, but not books rights. It's easy to dstinguish between them.
Even for novelizations and movies derived from novels...

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Originally Posted by bill_mchale

Ok, a couple of points here....

1. It is not a forced monopoly. Ideally it is a limited term monopoly that is granted by the state over a work to allow the creator of that work a chance to profit from it. Since the very notion of copyright is written into the United States Constitution, it is hardly a forced monopoly but one granted by the social contract that all American citizens are a part of.

2. There is no need to have a monitor in every computer. Any decent web server software already keeps a log of all attempts to access it and through what computer it was accessed. It would be relatively easy to monitor for downloads and report the number of unique downloads (not necessarily whose doing the downloading) to determine how the creators of works are to be paid.

--
Bill

And why should I pay for a downloaded book, if I don't read it?
In the paper world, I buy a copy, which is physical, and I have to pay for it..
Part of the price I pay is for the hardware, and part is for the content.
Since it's not possible to part content from container, I have to pay every copy I buy.
In the world of pbooks, the "per-copy" model can work.

In the digital world it can't.
First of all, because the simple act of downloading a book produces at least 6 copies itself (on the serve's disk, on the servers RAM, in other computers in the network, in my RAM, in my disk cache, and eventually in my hard disk).
And then, how do you deal with people with mirrored RAID disks? Do they have to pay more because they've got more "copies"?

Another POV: whenever I buy one copy of a p-book, you can't have it.
If I buy a "digital" copy, billions of people can have an identical one.

Wherever you look at it from, a "copy-based" model in digital business, is a complete nonsense.

Now think about books, and imagine that the street price is divided into its components: the price of the content, and the price of the container.
You can buy content without container, of course, from the author himself. Since then, you''l have to pay containers (being files, prints, audiocd's...) every time you pay a copy.
It's like to have a lifetime license to get access to a book, no matter how many copies you own.
You pay for the hard work behind production when you buy paper, but you don't have to pay the author twice, if you already have.



It can work.
The hard part is to make people understand the immateriality of files, and to make Disney understand we will not feed their greed for a long time...