Okay, point taken. However, are these necessarily the best pictures? Is some MySpace free download as good as [your favorite artist]'s new release? Is some YouTube video as good as a major studio’s film? My point is, someone who knows what he’s doing won’t (or shouldn’t) do it out of the goodness of his heart.
Like I said, I’m a little out of my depth in the photography world, but movies and music simply could not be made in the same quality as they are now, because even as lots of people copy them with impunity, enough people buy the CD, DVD or movie ticket to make it worth the producers’ while.
No, it won’t. Without the ability to sell the same picture multiple times, the value of a picture will be heavily reduced. Having to rely on selling a service instead, photographers will make more of their work freely available to act as advertising for their services, so there will actually be greater availability of high quality images.
Or maybe that won’t happen…but don’t act as though your theory is absolute fact. It’s as speculative as mine. The fact of the matter is that there are already freely available images that haven’t “magically appeared”.
I was at the Celtic Media Festival a few months ago and one of the talks was given by the animation studio who did (Oscar nominated!) The Secret of Kells. Part of what he talked about was how their day-to-day work consisted of doing animations for adverts, corporate videos, etc to pay the bills and equipment and worked on The Secret of Kells whenever they had spare time. He said that if they had to actually account for all their hours spent on Kells, there’s no way they could have afforded to do it. They worked on the mundane stuff to pay for what they really wanted to do.
Do you think that if there was no copyright law, they’d never have made that film?
That’s one example of one short film by a little independent company. It could happen. I’m quite sure that Lord of the Rings couldn’t have been made in the same way, though.
Wait—now that the film is made, do they control ownership of it, or is it freely available for anyone who wants to to copy it or use it however they want? If you don’t tell us that, I don’t see the relevance of your example.
It’s not speculative at all. There’s nothing stopping a professional photographer from using that business model RIGHT NOW. The fact that most DON’T is strong evidence that’s it’s not viable.
With the assumption that if they made something wonderful they would be financially rewarded.
They were an unknown studio. They couldn’t get any up-front financing for their art. So they found a way to pay the bills while making their movie. Clearly it required a lot of sacrifices and unpaid overtime. But they knew that there was a chance their hard work would pay off if they made something a lot of people would pay to see.
Do you really think they would have made those sacrifices for free?
And this, I think, should settle the thread. If anyone who creates “information” thinks we’d be better off without copyright, they’re already free to release their own work to the public domain under the present system. That so many choose not to do so is pretty strong evidence that copyright serves a useful purpose.
How is that different from the way things are now? Don’t aspiring filmmakers shoot movies in the basement with borrowed gear and share them for the sheer joy of it and the hope that they’ll make a name for themselves? Don’t musicians play at open mike nights and bars to build a following and hone their craft?
Are you under the impression that a green director is handed a multi-million dollar budget and set free to make a blockbuster? Everyone who works in these industries starts small and builds their talent and reputation on low-budget stuff.
You even point out that it’s easier now than it’s ever been to do so. A teenager with a laptop, a handheld camera, and a youtube account has better equipment for filming, editing, and distributing a movie than anyone had a handful of decades ago. It simply doesn’t take a tremendous amount of money to get started on this stuff.
And they all do it because they hope that some day it will make them fabulously wealthy.
Artists are no better than anyone else. They work because they want to get paid; if there was no chance of hitting that jackpot, they’d all get easier jobs. The most talented artists are all mercenary schmucks who are in it for the money, just like the rest of us.
I asked that in post 181 and the only response I received was Iamthewalrus saying enforcing copyrights was incompatible to his view of a free and open society.
The fact that I was asking about the world we live in and not hypothetical-land was, apparently, irrelevant.
Why should the consumers matter more than the creators? The creators get what, exactly, by making information free? Nothing. The consumers get something very valuable, all the free content that they want. And the creator gets whatever pittance that the consumers feel like throwing their way.
You’ve got it backwards. The creators are the ones who matter. Without them the consumers have nothing.
Every time this subject comes up I am rather amazed at those who want to do away with copyright. They spout slogans about freedom yet can never answer a very simple question. That question is this: Presently artists can choose to forgo copyright protection. If they can make money without it, why do the vast majority of artists keep copyright?
Additionally, if you are going to make all information free, that includes your own. Your credit card number is nothing but some 1’s and 0’s on a server some where just like any song stored on a server. If the music should be free so should your CC number. So post it. After all, information should be free, right?
I don’t think that’s as damning as you’d like it to be.
I fully agree that current content producers would lose a lot of money by not copyrighting their work in the existing legislative framework.
But that doesn’t mean that a society without copyright would make us all, or them, worse off. Just because some people won’t take a given action unilaterally doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t all be better off if everyone had to take that action. It also doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing we should consider when crafting policy. Kings lose a lot of power by giving up monarchy, but that’s not much of an argument for the system of monarchy. People with a vested interest in particular powers always want to keep those powers.
It could also be that they’re short-sighted. There’s a fairly well-established history of those in the content business shouting that the sky is falling when technological changes require a change in business model. Jack Valenti famously compared the VCR’s effect on the film industry to that of the Boston Strangler on a lone woman. Turns out that he wasn’t just exaggerating, he was actually fully wrong in the other direction. VCRs have bolstered and greatly improved the film industry. I’m not saying that that’s necessarily the case with the abolition of copyright, but humans have a distressing lack of ability to future benefits and a tendency to overweight known short-term losses.
This argument is dumb.
I don’t think that anyone disputes the idea that authentication systems require secrets. So, yes, not all information should be free. You win the argument that no one was having over a facile interpretation of the thread title.
Note, of course, that you can have secret authentication systems without copyright. And, in fact, you damned well better, because once the secret is out, it can be copied. None of that stuff you mentioned is protected by copyright, nor would it do anybody any good if it was. The only reason to keep that stuff secret is to protect against fraud, which is illegal whether or not downloading mp3s is.
Yes, but we’re not talking a change in the business model, we’re talking about an eradication of a legal structure which has been in existence for 500 years, and the cost/benefits of this change. Jack Valenti being wrong about VCR’s is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I’m curious as to how you’d play, say, World of Warcraft, or Dragon Age, or Metroid Other M, or L.A. Noire, or any other game more complicated than a beat-em-up, rhythm game, or rail shooter, out of an arcade cabinet.
It’s relevant to the point I was making, and to the argument I was refuting, which was that content producers’ desire to maintain tight control over the replication of their content doesn’t prove that even they are better off with that control (let alone that everybody is). The film industry tried pretty hard to kill the VCR, but has since profited from it greatly.
And I am saying this advantage is of negligible value. These “advantages” wouldn’t even be worth as much as having a prettier cover, and a rival publisher could come up with a prettier cover than the original.
Why would it be the less attractive option if it had exactly the same content, was of comparable physical quality, and cost less to buy? In a world without copyright, every publishing house in the world would be free to produce its own editions of major hits like the Harry Potter series. Any of the big publishers is capable of producing a book that looks just as good as the official edition, and they could do it for less money because they wouldn’t need to pay the authors anything.
The end of copyright wouldn’t lead to a world where literature flourished because authors were finally able to charge for their Harry Potter fanfiction, it would lead to a world where publishers took even fewer risks than they do now and mostly stuck to knock offs of books that were already proven successes and new books by a few big name authors or celebrities from other fields. I have no doubt that at least some of the big publishers would manage to get by, but authors and consumers of books would be a lot worse off. The former would be paid less and the latter would have fewer choices.
If you look in the books section on Yahoo! Answers, you’ll see a very common question is “Where can I get [popular book] free online?” And these are people who can at least use the Internet well enough to get online and find Yahoo! Answers. There are plenty of others who are either less adept at the Internet, are worried about viruses, or prefer not to break the law.
As I said, the price wouldn’t be the same because the “authorized” publisher’s costs would always be higher. They’d have to pay the author, and they’d have to pay for marketing if they wanted a new book to become a hit. Rival publishers could piggyback on their success without paying the author or spending much on marketing.
Corporations have to follow copyright law the same as anyone else, it doesn’t matter what they think is fair or right. If corporations could legally take the work of independent artists without their permission and sell it to the public then I’m sure they’d be happy to do so. But they can’t, because copyright law protects artists from having their work used without their permission. As badly as corporations screw over artists today, at least this is more or less consensual – the artist has to sign a contract first.
But this has nothing to do with copyright, the subject of this thread. Regardless of whether Valenti (who wasn’t a film executive, just the head of the MPAA) liked VCR’s in 1981, he surely wasn’t arguing for the elimination of copyright protections.
Here’s the (excerpted, paraphrased) argument, as I interpreted and intended to make it:
slee: “If doing away with copyright is so good, why don’t people voluntarily do so?” me: “Maybe they’re shortsighted (example of film industry being shortsighted about changes that reduced their control over copying of work).”
My point (with the Valenti example) is that the content industry is not necessarily the best predictor of which changes will or will not benefit them. The example is a case where they were very wrong (there are plenty more). And it’s in direct response to an argument against doing away with copyright. How is this not relevant?
So, he was, what, going it alone on that one? You’re saying I can’t take the statements of the mouthpiece of the American film industry as indicative of that industry’s historical position?