Posted on

Will the internet kill copyright? Here’s hoping…

“In the information age, electronic data or informational goods can be copied for free. Accordingly, this is what goods should be priced at: zero, instead of monopoly pricing.

Ironically, pirates are acting as conventional economists claim people should – that is, they are rational agents seeking to maximise their utility (happiness) by obtaining copies of informational goods at marginal cost.

Other costs include those associated with the court system and patents offices, which have effectively become a joke. People and firms are endlessly suing each other over potential and real copyright infringements, with these legal expenses essentially acting as a tax on innovation that is passed on to consumers.”

Philip Soos, Deakin University

And if not by the economic cost, then it will crumble by the political movement spurred by each draconian iteration of Copyright laws on the Internet. Does the name Pirate Party rings a bell? There are currently legal parties or movements to constitute one in over 62 countries. Big-Media and other Copyright business “actors” in their eternal blindness somehow fail to see that incoming freight train.

Posted on

Censored YouTube Videos Cost Us Millions

““We want to see streaming services like Vevo and Spotify in the German market. [These platforms] must not be blocked by GEMA any longer,” he said earlier. “Artists and music companies are losing sales in the millions.”

So here we have the boss of one of the largest music labels blaming another group for their repressive copyright enforcement. It’s the world upside down, but a promising change from Sony’s side.”

Sony Music Boss, via TorrentFreak

A Sony executive with some basic understanding of reality!? Really!? Now that’s a shocker. Maybe someday they will stop handicapping their excellent hardware and maybe once winning a technology “war”. Maybe…

Posted on

Piracy and the four currencies

” The problem with most piracy debates is that the only “cost” they discuss is money-dollars.  So, the problem is framed somewhat like this:

“Buying the game from us costs money-dollars.  Pirating it costs zero money-dollars.  Therefore, most people will pirate the game if they have the choice and we must do everything we can to physically stop them.”

The familiar Money-dollar ($M)  This is wrong because there are at least four currencies involved here, not just one (money-dollars).

I propose the following:

  • ($M) Money-dollars

  • ($T) Time-dollars

  • ($P) Pain-in-the-butt-dollars

  • ($I) Integrity-dollars”

Lars Doucet

Can we somehow get the linked essay delivered to all the games, music and movies Executives?

Posted on

Thinking Outside the Box Office

“But that’s not even the interesting part. The movie goes out to theaters, DVD, and high-definition cable TV – all on the same day. […]

WIRED: Why did you decide to release Bubble in all formats at once?

SODERBERGH: Name any big-title movie that’s come out in the last four years. It has been available in all formats on the day of release. It’s called piracy. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Ocean’s Eleven, and Ocean’s Twelve – I saw them on Canal Street on opening day. Simultaneous release is already here. We’re just trying to gain control over it.”

Wired

My God man, Sanity! When will this end?!

Posted on

The Piracy Threshold

“Give us convenient content at a reasonable price, and we’ll buy it. Sell the stuff without DRM, for a few dollars. Make it available to everyone, worldwide, at the same time. Then take the massive, unending pile of money, forever.

Or keep doing what you’re doing, and enjoy your ceaseless war of attrition, ever-rising tide of negative public opinion, and eventual forced irrelevance. And get fucked.”

Matt Gemmell

You should really the full article. Nothing that hasn’t been said endlessly but it’s a good summary of the subject. And the “piracy threshold” chart is also interesting as a tool for further business approaches to the subject.

The most strange think that i can’t understand is: if there are endless stories about how “easy and convenient and just” made people pay for their content, why is that some media executives never get to find it? Is the Internet Browser on their computers riddled with DRM to prevent them from ever reaching sane conclusions?

Posted on

Dedicated to the Anti-Comments crowd

Megaupload made a LOT of money distributing content which they did not hold the copyrights for. Which means, THEY made money, the authors and publishers and illustrators and musicians – DID NOT.

…

You’re also wrong about the ownership of ideas. True, one person cannot ‘own’ an idea, but he does own the rights for the manifestation of that idea. If you wrote a book – even if it’s the same old story – it’s still something you’ve created for other people to enjoy… if you want to do it for free, it’s your choice! But the world should not FORCE you to do so. That’s why there are copyright laws – we are going to see a whole lot less quality content because of two very big movements:

from Pachino on a comment on Paulo Coelho’s blog

My reply&comment:

You’re missing the point there. Yes, megaupload made money of allowing the download of “free” works. You’re absolutely right on that. And yes, no one paid the authors. Yet why didn’t the authors, publishers & producers got in on megaupload model of business? They could perfectly well have said: “here’s our works, sell them as a part of a cheap 20$ for 25GB of download up to 3 months, no DRM. Pay us the percentage of income.” or even just the percentage of the advertising business.

That would be a simple deal. The consumer knows he’s doing a “legit” business, paying the persons he respects and admires, megaupload would get paid by providing the interface, and the sheer convenience of the whole thing would make people join the idea and spend their money there.

I prefer ten thousand times to pay for my content and get it all nice and clean and properly tagged, with a nice pdf booklet or stuff and to go somewhere “nasty”, full of popups and strange hacks, and never having certainty of what i’m downloading.

But you know what i don’t like? being treated like a criminal moron. Having to spend 10 minutes reading FBI warnings, about me pirating the movie i just bought, or watching unstoppable & unskippable trailers. Or waiting 2 years for the movie that i want to see becomes available in my “geographical dvd” area. Or paying over 25$ for the recording of a music performed by a maestro, orchestra and composer dead over decades&centuries ago. Or not even having the “privilege” to get those works because the editor, publisher or distributor couldn’t care less.

You know what else i don’t like? That if i develop a new combustion engine, or a new cancer vaccine or a new pain killer, or even a new kind of prosthetic material, i get to have the “monopoly” of those “idea fixations” for exactly 20 years. no more. And i have to pay for them in every country in the world. And if it is health related, i will probably spend half of those 20 years doing mandatory safety tests. And somehow, this other guy that “recycles” a impossible love story into book or films, a little folk tune in to a techno music gets to have his life plus 70 years. I’m sorry can you somehow explain to me what possible benefit can came to society from that aberration?

And now you say, “well it’s our god given right! to the ownership of our creations!” Well, sorry, it’s not. The intellectual property laws were enabled and created by the Society, to promote the general development of arts and science because that would in turn benefit the Society. The purpose of the intellectual property laws is not to pamper rock stars or authors or even geeky engineers and chemists, but to benefit the society! That is its ultimate goal. The way how it is done, is a reflection of the ways available on their time.

And here we are, somewhere on the fifth/sixth millennium of human civilization, provided with the most magnificent tool of creativity and information distribution since the Gutenberg’s Press or the alphabet and writing, and there’s some ten thousand schmucks (all of the antiquated publishers and some silly artists) trying to stop the movement and development of rest of the seven billion of us. How do you guess that’s going to end?

Posted on

My thoughts on S.O.P.A.

“When you’ve eaten an orange, you have to go back to the shop to buy another. In that case, it makes sense to pay on the spot. With an object of art, you’re not buying paper, ink, paintbrush, canvas or musical notes, but the idea born out of a combination of those products.

‘Pirating’ can act as an introduction to an artist’s work. If you like his or her idea, then you will want to have it in your house; a good idea doesn’t need protection.

The rest is either greed or ignorance”

Paulo Coelho

Artists are (usually) not the main problem here, the intermediaries are. They are the ones afraid of losing the power and revenue that comes of mediating between artists & idealists and the world.

The sad part is that they could change as well and get the best spot on the new land grab, but they are just too dumb to see it. So they will wither away, mourned only by the sounds of an angry crowd armed with pitchforks.

Posted on

The story of Fernforest and Petro Dale

“However, the attempt to ban cars caused Petro Dale to wake up to the threat of railways. They realized that even though much more commerce took place with cars and roads, and even though railways were becoming increasingly irrelevant, they would remain a potential regressive threat. In the past Petro Dale had sought to do business with the incumbent food network distributors, suggesting ways of taking the mass market food produce and distributing it to new franchises like mobile food trucks and fast food restaurants. They were spurned. Now they realized that trying to work with Fernforest was not just futile but  harmful.”

asymco

How the internet displaced/will displace the old media distributors/publishers, in a nice metaphor story. The funny bit is even if the current MPAA, RIAA and their associates management personnel read it, they wouldn’t understand it.