But, fundamentally, if you have a million punters with $10 in their pocket and a filmmaker who’d gladly produce a movie for that amount, it seems strange to insist that such an exchange would be impossible, that what must happen instead is that a law should be made to prosecute people for making unauthorised copies, so that the filmmaker can sell authorised copies at $10 a time. Frankly, I suggest that it’s those who reckon the latter is the way to do business who have a lot of convincing to do with plenty of evidence their approach won’t fly.

Of course the exchange I outline is brutally crude, but then so were the first flying machines. The way of getting them to remain airborne and safe was continuous optimisation, repeated re-engineering. And that’s what I’m doing. See the http://contingencymarket.com as the fuselage I’m working on to help make the crude revenue mechanism into an elegant and economically viable one.

And when was the last time you saw something like that happen?

When Serenity came out, it was stated that all the actors were under contract for two more movies if it did well. It didn’t and the proposed sequels were never made. At the time, it was suggested that all the fans who wanted to see more movies, donate money to finance them. Serenity was made for $40 million. With enough donations, they could have easily raised $100 million and spent half each on two more films. Why didn’t that happen? The fans wanted it and were willing to donate, so why is there only a single Serenity film with no chance of sequels?

Games are much more accessable than movies and there’s absolutely nothing preventing anyone from making a full-length game and giving it away. So where are all these free games? Sure, you have remakes of arcade games and level packs for existing games, but can you point me to even a single, full-length game on the order of Half-Life or Tomb Raider that was written and given away for free? I’m not talking about length by itself, I’m talking about a game with a real story and levels that progress the plot, the way a commercial game does. I don’t know of any, do you?

He’s the guy that’s gonna be walking the 2 “pirate-sniffing” dogs very soon!
8D

What we’re complaining about here on P2PNet is not the inability to make copies (there is no such inability), but the continuation of a clearly ineffective law that should be abolished, as all it does is permit the RIAA/MPAA to persecute random a priori innocent families/individuals and make their lives a bankrupt misery.

Let’s abolish the 18th century privilege of copyright, stop prosecuting the public for enjoying their own culture, and get back to the business of producing good art.

The market for copies has ended. The market for art resumes.

I wouldn’t go that far, although I do think that copyrights need to be scaled way, way back.

For all the whining people do about the “crap” coming out of Hollywood, they have made some really popular movies. Personally, I loved the Spider-Man films and hope that they make more. I also loved Serenity, Coraline, Hellboy 1 & 2 and others. However, movies of this scale wouldn’t get made if the studios couldn’t directly make money on them. Without copyrights, any theater could show these films, an company could sell them on DVD and the studio wouldn’t see a dime from it. They’re not going to invest 10 million, let alone 50 million, in a movie to just give it away. All that will be left will be independent films, made on a fraction of the budget of Hollywood films.

I’m not saying that you need a huge budget to make a good movie, but without a large budget you often end up with a shaky-cam film, shot on video with really bad special effects and no-name actors who give the impression that their main qualification was that they were willing to work for $20 a day.

What about video games? Without copyrights, no company is going to invest in months of developement time for something that people can freely copy once the first copy is sold. Sure, they could try the “Pay if you like it” method, but I doubt it would make enough to make developing games profitable. Would Valve have written the Half-Life games or Portal if people could just freely copy it?

I believe that copyrights are a necessary evil, but that they should be MUCH more limited than they are now.

The saddest part is the majority of people do take them seriously.

Seriously, this is Reefer Madness of the digital age. How can these fuckers expect anyone to take them seriously with this kind of bullshit?

Obviously a brainwashed retard that didnt have the sense God gave an omeba,
to know to run like hell when asked to sing the RIAASS theme song………
Maybe he thought it was for the mickey mouse club???

stw

@Jon, corpses come back to life man, haven’t you see those Return of the Living Dead movies? Or Day of the Dead? Dawn of the Dead? Land of the Dead? Night of the Living Dead? Nudist Colony of the Dead?

Those are what the **AA groups are hoping for, unstoppable zombies, eating our brains to stay alive. Sounds like a pretty accurate analogy now that I think of it.

“Right now, it’s on life support!”

Nope. It’s a corpse on a gurney, waiting for a trip to the morgue.

Cheers!

Material property = “You can’t take my CD without my permission”.
Intellectual property = “You can’t copy my CD without my permission”.
Reproduction monopoly = “You can’t copy your CD without my permission.”

The right is to property. The privilege is to monopoly.

The right is natural. The privilege is unnatural, unethical, and now ineffective.

End the privilege. Cease the monopoly. Abolish copyright.

Dave