Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market. You seem to be of the opinion that supporting the least-evil companies will slowly shift the standard MO in the market towards less evil activities, but there's two problems: (1) This hasn't actually helped unseat the incumbent corporations, and (2) there's nobody who is sufficiently not-evil to the point where they are worth supporting.
This isn't a consumer-and-business problem. This is not something that can be fixed by improving consumer awareness. The problem isn't that consumers aren't making smart choices, the problem is that this market exists at all. Copyright was never meant to be abused this way, and our continued compliance towards the market and the corporations participating in it are not helping.
I'd like to make an analogy. Consider the bottled water market. This is a market which takes a free good (water) which is generally considered too cheap to meter, and sets a relatively outrageous price on it. The markup is justified through the packaging, quality assurance process, and a general insistence on part of the producer that the bottled water is somehow superior to non-bottled water.
What's the answer to bottled water? Supporting bottled water startups? Seeking out and raising awareness of disruptive bottled water producers? I'd say that the answer is simply to not buy bottled water.
At this point, you're gonna say that bottled water isn't a good analogy because piracy would equate to stealing pallets of bottled water. You're right; the analogy doesn't carry that far. Feel free to come up with a more accurate analogy.
(I'm gonna get US-specific at this point.)
Do you recognize this? "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is the clause of the Constitution which authorizes Congress to establish copyright. This is the only authority under which copyright may operate: It must be limited, it must be aimed at content creators, not merely redistributors or advertisers; it must promote common culture. The point of copyright, as we historically know, is to ensure that artists can make money without patronization, in order to permit an artist who continually makes work to be remunerated for that work. The idea of a limit on copyright was to ensure that the common culture, the public domain, which was considered more important than the right of an artist to be compensated, would not be ignored; anything which is published will eventually belong to everybody and not any single person or group.
Know how long copyright was originally? 14 years plus an optional 14-year renewal, if the author was still alive. That was in 1790, for the "encouragement of learning." It was intended for copyright to eventually shrink as distribution improved; after all, why would we need a long copyright when authors are nearly instantly remunerated in this age of speedy international distribution? And now copyright lasts longer than most people.
You and I, and everybody else, have minds filled with cultural information. It really should belong to all of us, shouldn't it? Isn't it a damn shame that Mickey Mouse, after three-quarters of a century, being a character our grandparents enjoyed, isn't somebody we can have? That the cultural contributions of John Coltrane aren't ours to enjoy? I'm not gonna keep listing things from the twentieth century which we all know but aren't available to us; there's just too much stuff and too little space in this tiny textarea.
So, in this space, who do you see as a disruptive or interesting player, and why? Who will you support with your wallet? Because I'm done. I'm tired of it.
"Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market."
But yet, they still take the content. It's a half-hearted and disingenuous form of boycott. If the goal were really to send Hollywood a message, and to take an absolute moral high ground in doing so, then wouldn't a more effective message be sent in not consuming the product whatsoever? Not buying it and not pirating it?
For what it's worth, I don't disagree whatsoever with your anger toward the industry, or with your critiques of their business practices. The only functional difference in our positions is that I don't try to pretend that downloading a product I haven't paid for is somehow justified by a post-facto moral facade I bolt onto my actions.
Now, all of that aside, let's get to the heart of the matter here: people enjoy quality content. Hollywood produces a lot of quality content (despite Michael Bay's best attempts to undermine that fact). What people enjoy about Hollywood is the production side of the business. What they don't enjoy is the distribution side. Historically, those two have been intertwined because production -- in and of itself -- is not profitable. It is the cost center of the industry. Spending $200MM to produce a tentpole movie, or even $2MM to produce a little indie movie, is an investment that can only generate a return when packaged, distributed, and monetized somehow.
Therein lies the challenge. We all want Hollywood to make product, but we don't want Hollywood to sell us that product. Eventually, Hollywood might pull out of the distribution side of the business altogether, and find a way to monetize its production by charging its distributors (Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) higher fees of some stripe. But eventually, those fees will get passed onto the consumer, one way or the other.
But yet, they still take the content. It's a half-hearted and disingenuous form of boycott. If the goal were really to send Hollywood a message, and to take an absolute moral high ground in doing so, then wouldn't a more effective message be sent in not consuming the product whatsoever? Not buying it and not pirating it?
Not participating in a societies culture is a very high price to pay for not wanting to support how companies distribute said culture.
If libraries were to disappear, would you still claim people should stop reading if they won't want to or can't afford to support the publication of certain books?
I think it's worth trying to tease apart the several issues you raise regarding copyright in general. That copyright has been extended again and again is indeed kind of ridiculous, supposedly all to prevent people from remixing Steamboat Willie or Mickey Mouse, but isn't that fundamentally a different thing that is commonly described as "piracy"? Yes, we all have minds filled with cultural information and it should be part of the public commons that we can draw upon to create new works. But let's not confuse that with downloading copies of new work created this year, by some creative person somewhere, who may wish you would compensate them for what they invested in their work.
> So, in this space, who do you see as a disruptive or interesting player, and why? Who will you support with your wallet? Because I'm done. I'm tired of it.
There's a lot of interesting disruption that may have been caused by pirates and outrage over DRM and other heavy handed approaches to control. Beyond Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and Apple selling DRM free files, many record companies will now happily directly sell you DRM free files, sometimes even in awesome formats like FLAC. You can often go to a band's site and find a crappy little Paypal storefront with files like this. It works pretty well. Not always, and maybe not on some of the bigger record company's sites. But their music is crap anyway ;)
Forgive me for being nitpicky, but it should be noted that Netflix DOES NOT provide DRM free streams. Netflix is deployed through Silverlight because of its DRM implementation. Because of this, you can not watch Netflix on Linux without circumventing their DRM schemes.
You're right, and the same applies to Spotify unless I'm mistaken. I didn't mean to imply otherwise, although I didn't make it clear.
It doesn't change my argument much, both Netflix and Spotify (in their paid versions, I know Spotify has ads in the free stream) basically allow customers to pay for content in a way that doesn't ruin it the way the OP described with Gladiator and the popups, and with the generally poor experience of bundled cable TV.
More to the point: not spending is not voting, but not spending but actually using the good sends a totally different message to both the industry and the government.
Can one have an effective hunger-strike while eating?
Actually going on strike and not consuming would/could send a 'high-road' and morally correct message. Self-deprivation innately states the value of the belief. Refusing to pay while continuing to consume only reinforces that the item of consumption is where the value actually lies. It makes people look doubly foolish for claiming that they won't pay because the item has no value.
I agree with several things you say here, but this doesn't make any sense: "Isn't it a damn shame that Mickey Mouse, after three-quarters of a century, being a character our grandparents enjoyed, isn't somebody we can have? That the cultural contributions of John Coltrane aren't ours to enjoy?"
It what sense aren't you yet able to 'have' Mickey Mouse?? Or 'enjoy' the cultural contributions of John Coltrane?
Your statement would only make sense if companies were removing these products from the marketplace and using copyright to ensure their removal. In the case of true orphaned works, I have a different mindset - but Mickey Mouse and John Coltrane are widely and continuously available in society because someone can make money off it.
Mickey Mouse and John Coltrane are widely and continuously available because people enjoy them. If their copyrights expired tomorrow there would still be plenty of Coltrane MP3s and torrents out there a year from now. However try playing Coltrane in your restaurant without paying a license or try uploading Steamboat Willy to youtube to show the world this strange old cartoon you found. Then you'll discover that people are prevented from enjoying these works because companies are using copyright to remove them.
Surely the best way to fight "bottled water" is with free water? As in public drinking fountains and the like.
I seem to recall that there's at least one person pursuing this idea. He paid an orchestra to perform all sorts of public domain classical music and was making the recordings available freely or something like that.
Pirates do vote with their wallets -- they keep their wallets closed and don't support any players in the market. You seem to be of the opinion that supporting the least-evil companies will slowly shift the standard MO in the market towards less evil activities, but there's two problems: (1) This hasn't actually helped unseat the incumbent corporations, and (2) there's nobody who is sufficiently not-evil to the point where they are worth supporting.
This isn't a consumer-and-business problem. This is not something that can be fixed by improving consumer awareness. The problem isn't that consumers aren't making smart choices, the problem is that this market exists at all. Copyright was never meant to be abused this way, and our continued compliance towards the market and the corporations participating in it are not helping.
I'd like to make an analogy. Consider the bottled water market. This is a market which takes a free good (water) which is generally considered too cheap to meter, and sets a relatively outrageous price on it. The markup is justified through the packaging, quality assurance process, and a general insistence on part of the producer that the bottled water is somehow superior to non-bottled water.
What's the answer to bottled water? Supporting bottled water startups? Seeking out and raising awareness of disruptive bottled water producers? I'd say that the answer is simply to not buy bottled water.
At this point, you're gonna say that bottled water isn't a good analogy because piracy would equate to stealing pallets of bottled water. You're right; the analogy doesn't carry that far. Feel free to come up with a more accurate analogy.
(I'm gonna get US-specific at this point.)
Do you recognize this? "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is the clause of the Constitution which authorizes Congress to establish copyright. This is the only authority under which copyright may operate: It must be limited, it must be aimed at content creators, not merely redistributors or advertisers; it must promote common culture. The point of copyright, as we historically know, is to ensure that artists can make money without patronization, in order to permit an artist who continually makes work to be remunerated for that work. The idea of a limit on copyright was to ensure that the common culture, the public domain, which was considered more important than the right of an artist to be compensated, would not be ignored; anything which is published will eventually belong to everybody and not any single person or group.
Know how long copyright was originally? 14 years plus an optional 14-year renewal, if the author was still alive. That was in 1790, for the "encouragement of learning." It was intended for copyright to eventually shrink as distribution improved; after all, why would we need a long copyright when authors are nearly instantly remunerated in this age of speedy international distribution? And now copyright lasts longer than most people.
You and I, and everybody else, have minds filled with cultural information. It really should belong to all of us, shouldn't it? Isn't it a damn shame that Mickey Mouse, after three-quarters of a century, being a character our grandparents enjoyed, isn't somebody we can have? That the cultural contributions of John Coltrane aren't ours to enjoy? I'm not gonna keep listing things from the twentieth century which we all know but aren't available to us; there's just too much stuff and too little space in this tiny textarea.
So, in this space, who do you see as a disruptive or interesting player, and why? Who will you support with your wallet? Because I'm done. I'm tired of it.