iTunes didn't decrease music piracy that much, either.

And with some exceptions (Disney and movies geared to a particular time of year) things hit video within a few months these days, not the six to nine months that were traditional when I worked at a video store.

They're not going to release a Christmas movie in March, but beyond that, they really have reduced the window.

Lots to read here, whew! Re: Entertainment providers keeping up with the tech, I have a Rhapsody account that is on my laptop and android phone. And the rumor mill says it will be coming to my blu-ray player soon. This gives me access to a massive library of music. About the only thing I can't stream off of the subscription is Metallica, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and The Eagles. And, except for the Beatles, all of them can be bought and played through Rhapsody.

Where movies and TV are concerned, Netflix (on phone, laptop, and blu-ray) has a *lot* of past seasons, and the current stuff is available from my cable provider on my phone and laptop as well as live/dvr/on demand on the cable box. Netflix's only real problem is their streaming movie selection which, quite frankly, sucks. Thank Blockbuster and their predatory agreements for that. They refused to carry movies unless they were the exclusive provider and now they (Blockbuster) are going out of business but have screwed the streaming industry for some time to come. Cable's on-demand offerings aren't helping either. Netflix lost it's deal with Starz because Starz felt their offering was being hurt by the competition from Netflix where it was included in the subscription price.

In short, the industry is getting there as long as the studios will work with the innovators.

Yeah, netflix getting hosed is one of those 'industry killing innovation' things. And remember... blockbuster is owned by the movie industry. They are literally fucking themselves over.

I guess it really comes down to which part of the industry... The major movie studios and record labels are blind and backwards and screwing themselves and us. But the independent studios and labels are embracing the tech.

SacredDigits said
"iTunes didn't decrease music piracy that much, either."

Does it matter? If people who are never going to pay for music still pirate then this has no effect on the profits of those putting in the work.

It has an effect on the ability of people to actually get properly paid for the enjoyment of their work, but the main reason I said it was because I was receiving the "if major companies distributed their work on the internet for a fair price piracy would go away" argument, and I don't think anyone could convince me that 99 cents a song isn't pretty fair.

That's fair, but the question is what impact does piracy have on music production.

The simple assumption is supply vs demand, the if demand goes up, more suppliers will enter the industry and more music will be produced? (because there is more profit)

And piracy reduces the amount of profit thus hurts demand.

Does this work in the music industry?

Well first, the beatles are dead. No amount of demand will affect the supply.

Second the cost of copying is very low. Thus it is in a music producer's interest to sell lots of one artist's record instead of taking on the extra cost of producing another artist's album. So more production can mean more cheap copies (if you had to get a performer each time you wanted to supply music then the standard supply-demand might be closer to accurate) and less diversity and less people joining the industry and making their own music - this is a negative result of our copying technology and piracy is, by contrast the positive.

If you look at the individual, I may set aside €20 per month to spend on entertainment (new games, eve subscription, music and videos) If i can't afford more than €20 then no matter how many time i copy a music album the most i can spend on the music industry is €20 - there is no millions being lost by the music industry in this senario. If i come across a new artist who i like (and donate on their website to help promote them) then there will be more supply, more artists earning a living from producing their music. (or equally if i go to their concert having already heard their music for free online and pay for my ticket)

itune on the other hand offers me a substitute to pirated music, and the product itself (as i understand it) is worse. It can only be played on certain devices, and thus is less valuable to me (and they want me to pay more money for it)

No you're not going to change people's behaviour by offering them sub-standard products when they are currently used to something better.

The movie and games industries are doing a little better.
DVD release contain 'extras' and while they are often shit, imho, they are extra content, they're giving you more if you buy the DVD. Games companies can provide DLC, DownLoadable Content, which they only send to their registered users who bought a legit copy.

webdiplomacy and wikipedia provide examples of not-for-profit business models. They still try to provide a decent service but they run for free, because they have truely embraced the new technology. (Kestas could, i suspect, easily make more money from this site if he highlighted the donate button more often - and a fair wage would be fair.)

The difference is customs and legality. Free music online may be a viable business model. Free movies... well youtube is a shining example of how well that works, and i don't think google are making much money from youtube....

iTunes can be played on a pretty wide variety of devices. You just need Apple's software, but you can put it on Windows machines and most MP3 players. Plus, catalogue sales (like, say, the Beatles) have always been principally used to bankroll the "finding new music" efforts of labels, rather than making piles of cash to roll in, which, granted, they also do. But they're never going to stop putting out the proven sellers that have already paid off...if they make less money, they're going to cut new unproven people. That's where the overhead is.

itunes still offers a worse product than music which is DRM-free. (and i was unable to install it on ubuntu recently, that's really my only experience of it)

You didn't address the rest of the supply vs demand fallacies.

The whole thing about cheap copies makes the economic theory massively flawed.

Well, how about this part.

Limited budget should equal limited consumption.

That's the way it works with food, and just about anything else, why should entertainment be any different?

Reality?

In which consumption is limited only by time. And why should it be different? It is, should copying of songs be done without technology, by having the one performer listen to another and learn to mimic??? Just to be like food? Copying is very cheap, if you could get a car or food soo cheaply then we wouldn't be having the same conversation, would we? You can't pretend it is just like everything else...

But you can't pretend it shouldn't have some limit.

Anyway, it's not important. People are on the side of the issue they're on, and there's no sense trying to convince a Catholic to become an atheist.

I don't see why you would assume, a priori, that there should be some limiting factor, beyond time and healthy life-style.

Listening to music is not consumption in the same sense that eating food is. Different qualaties, different results. My alternative model would be open free sharing with attribution to the creator. Is there some problem, in principle, which you have with this?

Kodak? Too big to fail? Allow those who fail to embrace/accept new tech/realities to lose their profits without laws to preserve the status quo

Could I ask those in favour of copyright protection laws what they think of artists who listen to pirated music?

.....Radio Caroline was an exciting part of all our lives and summed up the spirit of the times, culturally and musically." Sir Paul McCartney

For those who don't know Radio Caroline was a Pirate station set up to broadcast in international waters in the 50s and 60s to circumvent paying artists royalities.

Other quotes about Radio Caroline are:-

· "For The Who, Radio Caroline was an angelic force ........without Caroline we would not have sold a single record." Pete Townshend

· "Radio Caroline was more adventurous than most of the stations around, it championed bands like The Kinks, who owe much of their early success to Radio Caroline." Ray Davies

What about artists who even EXIST because of pirated music? Justin Bieber was discovered on youtube because he was covering Diddy songs.

Shit, I may have just convinced everyone to back SOPA.

'Shit, I may have just convinced everyone to back SOPA. ' +1

"iTunes can be played on a pretty wide variety of devices. You just need Apple's software, but you can put it on Windows machines and most MP3 players. "

I have to call bullshit on that one, SD. Most MP3 players don't even have a connection to the internet, much less the ability to upgrade their firmware to run iTunes. No, iTunes purchased songs are DRM protected and most MP3 players won't play them. Sorry to burst your bubble there.

Actually, iTunes removed DRM from its collection a while ago, but it still took them a remarkably long time, not to mention that your mp3 player isn't guaranteed to play AAC files, either.

http://botherer.org/2012/01/18/why-people-are-still-failing-to-accept-the-true-horror-of-sopapipa/

I couldn't have said it better myself... infact i didn't say it better, that's why i'm linking this instead...

On a related note, Pirate Radio was a surprisingly good movie. You can't stream it on Netflix, but you can rent/buy it on Amazon.

@Maniac

I think the point is that if IP was more easily accessible, especially in this age of the Internet, then the messy business of pirating wouldn't be nearly as rampant.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person
to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.
There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like
Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they
circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take
over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).
It's all based on the fact that we're competition.
We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.
We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws
should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the
USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:
The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.
They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the
rest of us obedient consumers.
The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with
trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that
you will stop them, before we all drown.

@Bite

You can spew out as much idealist propaganda as you want, but it's not at all conducive to finding a solution to the problem.

The fact is there isn't any problem. I live 20 minutes from Warner Bros. and one of my kids works in the business.
The only problem in entertainment is that the Sony, Warner, etc can't project the kind of numbers they "want" to project and use their political clout to create a tempest in a teapot so they can convince politicians to legislate a gigantic overreach.
The millennial copyright bill is an example of such a gigantic overreach that grossly increased the power of media companies.
Fuck them! Fuck them all!
They need to hire my company to consult them on how to use technology to increase their profit margins.
Come to think of it I'm working on exactly that.
So go ahead and post about fiction that you know absolutely nothing about, and then drive down to the studio lots in London, England and see that stage space is booked to the limit for months in advance right now as I speak and try to tell me the entertainment industry is hurting.
Total bullshit.

More proof SOPA/PIPA are totally unnecessary.
MegaUpload is shut down and its executives arrested for violating copyright.
The laws on the books give intellectual property all the protection it needs or deserves.
Enforce existing laws Hollywood/Record/Software and STFU with your massive political power grab for powers sake alone wrapped in lies and hypocrisy.

I saw someone suggest giving mega-upload to the film industry to run (instead of shutting it down)

FYI: i am against a company like megaupload taking profits from it's members to allow them view the work of creators who do not get a share in said profits.

That said, i'm still willing to pay for my internet service, which does not share it's profits with the creators of any works i might enjoy online... same deal right?