*...if we went to the other extreme of having everything free everywhere for everyone."
My interest in this is wondering about areas where people innovate but rarely expect any sort of copy protection.
Few people are going to invest the budget of a Hollywood movie into a hair style. Is this because they know there is no practical way to stop people from copying hair styles?
Suppose the was never any way to copy protect [films|recordings|whatever]. How would this change things? Is (or was) the difficulty of copying things an aberration, a quirk of a relatively brief period of technology? Should we tell the MPAA and RIAA, hey, you guys just happen to have lucked out for a few decades?
If someone invested several million dollars in a hair style, and then tried to get laws to prevent people from copying it because copying breaks their business model they'd be mocked for basing a business model on an untenable condition. At what point do we do the same for people creating digital goods?
If you've ever seen a movie or listened to music, it stands to reason that you've benefited in some way from those industries, no? Come on people, engage your brains, this isn't reddit. IP is a complex, multi-faceted issue without any easy answers.
Most of the reasoning about piracy is based on the idea of content consumption. Content is not consumed in the sense that consuming it doesn't make it vanish. If I listen to a recording, you can listen to it, either at the same time, or later, when convenient.
The economics of content production and distribution changed. It's no longer difficult to move, replicate or make content from it. When refrigerators threatened ice factories we didn't outlaw them. How much does long-distance telephony cost to airlines? How much more business would they have if, in order to talk to your factory manager in Shenzhen, you had to be there? How much business have hotels lost thanks to it?
Luckily for us, they didn't have the power to outlaw long distance telephony.
This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent it.
You're conflating things that are useful with things that have some kind of inherent enjoyment value for people.
For instance, if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it, I guess we could just shrug our shoulders, but I think the world would be worse off for it.
> This is exactly what's happening with MPAA, RIAA and others - they are afraid they will have to change their businesses and will fight to prevent it.
I'm not in favor of what they are proposing by any means, but do think there's a balance to be struck somewhere. What Amazon is doing with the Kindle isn't bad: it's very quick and easy to get eBooks across a whole range of devices. It's not perfect, but things like that and iTunes seem to be a good direction.
> if someone spends a year writing a book, and gets paid nothing for it
Cory Doctorow manages that very well. There are models that make writing books and creating other works of art economically viable. Also, most writers never get well paid for the books they write. Actually, most artists are really poor.
Anecdotes are not data. Perhaps Cory Doctorow is leaving a lot of money on the table. That may work in his case, but for someone 'at the margin', it may mean they are forced to do something else, rather than write.
My interest in this is wondering about areas where people innovate but rarely expect any sort of copy protection.
Few people are going to invest the budget of a Hollywood movie into a hair style. Is this because they know there is no practical way to stop people from copying hair styles?
Suppose the was never any way to copy protect [films|recordings|whatever]. How would this change things? Is (or was) the difficulty of copying things an aberration, a quirk of a relatively brief period of technology? Should we tell the MPAA and RIAA, hey, you guys just happen to have lucked out for a few decades?
If someone invested several million dollars in a hair style, and then tried to get laws to prevent people from copying it because copying breaks their business model they'd be mocked for basing a business model on an untenable condition. At what point do we do the same for people creating digital goods?