The value of Content is determined by the lowest price customers are prepared to pay.
If Amazon charge $USD-70 per month for all you can eat downloading of their content and HBO charge 49.95 for a basic cable plan and Comcast has 250 GB cap on their monthly downloads then the aaggregate price of content is worth in the region of 4.7-6.5 cents per 90 minute movie.

Method = 720 hours per month – timeshifted to DVR. & Divide Bandwidth of Comcast by (Cost) + (Movie Size [700 MB])

However, if then most persons (chinese P2P downloaders) are not paying anything for the content, and the number of eyes viewing HBO/Amazon and Comcast is lower than the numbers of eyes watching the P2P downloaded content in China – It is, then the value of the content is a funciton of the population percentage of the china viewing english speaking movies for free versus the percentage of population viewing english speakingg content in the USA resulting in a lot lower than the 5 cents proposed by the content sellers above.

So as long as folks in the USA are happy to continue to pay for content, then artists will not starve.
However – as chinese people all grow up wanting to sell to the west 0 they have to learn English so they can communicate better with their potential customers. Who then buy chinese made goods that puts American firms out of business.
The current downturn in the economy is a result of a consumerist based society ignoring eceonmic fundamentals and being too greedy for nice new “CHEAP” shiny baubles.
The content industry that created that “desire” is itself to blame for growing GDP reduction of US production and for the chinese imperitive to learn English.

A little bit like the bankers who are bailed out by the Federal Reserve – only to put the bail out money in their own poskets as Bonuses.

I hope that helps.

I hope you’ll take my criticism as constructive, but this is poorly constructed rhetoric, the like of Which I often see on TechDirt.

You may see little distinction, but there is a profound difference between art and copies (or message and medium).

If copies are free, then a business model that expects to fund the production of art through sale of copies (with a price protected by state granted monopoly), is going to be in trouble…

However, the fact remains the art is just as valuable. Just because you have two copies, the art isn’t twice as valuable or even half as valuable. Art’s value to its audience remains unaffected by the price of its copies.

The market for copies is over. The market for art remains as strong as ever. The business models may change, but people value a good story as highly as they always have.

So, let’s be a little clearer in distinguishing between the sale of art and the sale of copies. Otherwise we only help do the cartel’s work for them and mislead people into believing that no-one’s going to be paying for art any more, that movies will no longer be made, and artists will starve.

Take a leaf out of Richard Stallman’s book: Free as in free speech, not as in free beer.

Keep up the great articles! I look forward to more.