> they need to adapt their businesses to the realities of this century's technology.
You say this like it's immensely easy.
So say you're head of HBO's original programming dept. It can cost over 100 million dollars to produce one season of a quality show. You can only release it on a medium that allows it to be continuously and freely distributed. How do you make money?
Ads and Product placement is about it. You really think you'll make that 100 million back?? Especially considering that people could just edit out the ads and redistribute your work, it's really only product placement that could make money.
Operating at a loss is not adapting. There's a reason that all of the content currently on netflix/hulu/etc. is already using DRM-enabled plugins. Because you're a f*ing lunatic if you think you can make money through any other method. Throwing out the same old "they must adapt" mantra isn't getting either side anywhere close to a healthy solution.
Actually, this is about how music works nowadays. You can download DRM-free files for a small fee. It would be technically easy to redistribute them, but people still buy lots of music. Why is that?
I think it's because people are making a price-convenience tradeoff. Music companies can affect both sides of that: keeping the price low will make people want to buy, but they can also sue distribution sites to make it less convenient to get music illegally, thus raising the price that people are willing to pay before they seek out illegal music.
To a certain extent, DRM aims for the same model - it doesn't make it impossible to redistribute videos, it just raises the difficulty, and thus raises the price that people are willing to pay before they go find illegal videos. But is it necessary to use DRM for that, or would going after distribution sites be enough?
We live in a world of government-granted monopolies given to companies like HBO. It is not terribly shocking that those monopolies lead to profits, and that companies that fail to take advantage of the copyright system would have trouble.
You are claiming, with no justification, that in the absence of copyright there would be no profit available for people who make entertainment. I am not really sure where you get that idea from. It is not too hard to imagine ways to monetize a TV show in the absence of copyright -- as a simple example, a studio could refuse to broadcast the next installment until enough people have paid.
There, you have a way to make money on TV without copyright. Now can we stop attacking the Internet and start embracing the reality of the 21st century?
>We live in a world of government-granted monopolies given to companies like HBO.
I don't even know how to respond to this... last I checked cable and Satellite companies don't force HBO on you. And while cable companies held a semi-monopoly before Satellites, that market got disrupted like 30 years ago. Let it go.
>You are claiming, with no justification, that in the absence of copyright there would be no profit available for people who make entertainment.
Not completely. I'm claiming there wouldn't be enough profit to support the current proliferation or high budget entertainment options. I highly doubt shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Downtown Abbey, etc. would have gotten the funding they needed through crowdsourcing. You typically need a large studio with deep pockets to take on a project of that size. And most of them rely on ad revenue during broadcast, something that would likely diminish if there was no copyright and any TV studio was allowed to rebroadcast with different ads/no ads. Or if people were allowed to video tape it, copy it w/ no ads, and resell it.
Let's take a look at that simple example of yours. So who pays for the pilot episode to be produced? The T.V. studio? And after they air it then what? Hope enough people liked it to both pay for the production costs and a decent profit as well as fund the next episode? And you think that's a sustainable model??
If systems like you mention would be profitable why aren't there non-copyrighted entertainment options raking in the money right now? The internet has been around for awhile. There's nothing stopping people from releasing high quality non-copyrighted content and making money from it. What's the hold up? Government Monopolies??
"If systems like you mention would be profitable why aren't there non-copyrighted entertainment options raking in the money right now?"
...because they have to compete with studios that enjoy that monopoly that I mentioned above. You seem to have been confused about what that monopoly is; I think you typically call it copyright. Yes, copyright is a special, government-granted monopoly.
You say this like it's immensely easy.
So say you're head of HBO's original programming dept. It can cost over 100 million dollars to produce one season of a quality show. You can only release it on a medium that allows it to be continuously and freely distributed. How do you make money?
Ads and Product placement is about it. You really think you'll make that 100 million back?? Especially considering that people could just edit out the ads and redistribute your work, it's really only product placement that could make money.
Operating at a loss is not adapting. There's a reason that all of the content currently on netflix/hulu/etc. is already using DRM-enabled plugins. Because you're a f*ing lunatic if you think you can make money through any other method. Throwing out the same old "they must adapt" mantra isn't getting either side anywhere close to a healthy solution.