

The death throes of an industry - hawke
http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry

======
odnamra
Wow. Simply, wow.

I was literally 90% done with my Kill Hollywood RFS application when I saw
Paul's tweet about this article and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Can
anyone tell me that the Kill Hollywood is about making the world better and
not simply about revenge?

I just finished ranting like a lunatic on twitter (sorry Paul), but I'm going
to try and be nice here. Keep in mind that you are attacking my very
livelihood. I've been working in the film industry for my entire adult life. I
recently quit my job at Paramount, a key member of the "most unscrupulous of
all the industrial conglomerates" and rampant exploiter of "artists they
pretend to represent."

I'd like to offer my perspective as a humble filmmaker. Are there any other
filmmakers here... any? I highly doubt it, the amount of ignorance I see
tossed around on the subject of Kill Hollywood is simply staggering. When will
I see ANY balanced perspective? One real solution? One real alternative? I can
promise you that it won't happen unless Silicon Valley is willing to at least
talk to a damn filmmaker about these issues. Here's my email:
odnamra@gmail.com. Hell, here's my cellphone: 323-963-4433. You want to kill
Hollywood, call me anytime.

First, everything the RIAA and MPAA has down is WRONG. As a filmmaker whose
future is on the line, I can tell you that it affects me more that it affects
you. It's my livelihood, but only your inconvenience.

Now, on to the article. The author makes two technical points: sharing is
easy, and storage is abundant. My response is… well, duh!

Here's a hint, killing Hollywood is NOT an engineering problem. All of the
engineering problems have been solved, the technology already exists! We can
instantly share a movie to all devices anywhere. We can store every type of
media ever created. Thanks. It isn't helping.

The author also offers one pseudo solution about marketplaces. I hate to tell
you this, but distribution is already a marketplace! Sure it might be
inefficient, sure it is mostly dominated by a few key (evil) players, but it
DOES exist. Paranormal Activity was made by one solitary man. It then went
through a series of marketplaces and eventually pulled in $200 million
dollars. I know the guy who made the film, we met when I helped make
Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 (he's a former videogame developer fyi), and I can
tell you that his "blood, sweat, energy and tears" paid off pretty damn well,
thank you very much! Question: Can this marketplace be improved? Answer: Yes,
but… here's a snapshot of what this mythical marketplace would have to
replace:

Total industry size $90 billion. New movies enter the market through theaters,
generate $30 billion, then proceed through windows rental>cable>VOD>DVD/Blu-
ray>streaming>etc. The order can sometimes be different, what's important is
that there are relative amounts of money made at each stage. A distributor
might pull in $7 per ticket PER PERSON at a theater (how many friends do you
take to the movies with you?), $5 per DVD/Blu-ray, and only 50 cents on
streaming. [source: [http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-
demand-fo...](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-for-
movies-tv-shows-will-surpass-dvds-this-year/)] Can your solution replace three
friends going to a movie theater and generating $21 for the distributor with
three friends watching Netflix and generating 50 cents? Also consider the fact
that you may see a movie in theaters, then buy it on dvd, then buy a blu-ray,
and THEN watch it on Netflix over the span of several years. Also, marketing
is a huge problem, the cost of marketing that movie worldwide is amortized
across the entire lifecycle, and is heavily front-loaded. If you skip straight
to digital streaming, for example, you skip out on huge amounts of
advertising. Don't believe me? Name five indie movies that came out this year.
Now name five Hollywood movies. Lastly, and this is important, what Jacques
fails to realize is that the cost of making new movies REQUIRES all of these
windows to exist. I personally don't want to live in a world where the only
movies I can watch are kickstarted documentaries. You tell me we can crowdfund
a $500 million dollar Avatar without using the hedge fund approach of a major
studio, and I will change my mind.

P.S. income from ALL DIGITAL is currently ~$3 billion of the $90 billion pie,
why would Hollywood be in a hurry to abandon scarcity?

Ignoring everything I've said, what happens when you get your wish? I can
promise you that if cut out theaters so you can stream Ironman 4 (the
documentary) to your retina display iPad while sipping lattes on Powell St.,
the whole system will come crashing down.

Clearly the MPAA and the RIAA are assholes that need to be destroyed, but
consider what you destroy along with it. Some of the greatest living
storytellers on this planet are filmmakers. Tell me what you are offering
James Cameron, creator of the 1st and 2nd highest grossing films of all time
(almost $5 billion dollars worth of customer validation) in exchange for the
theater, his medium of choice?

I believe there are solutions, LOTS of them, but we need to work together to
create them.

/rant complete

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Capitalism is supposed to be a way of dealing with scarcity, not maintaining
it in the face of its oncoming abolition by technology. You are a bourgeoisie
screaming that the Revolution has come and you don't like its shape ;-).

I agree with you, _but_ moving to a post-scarcity bit-distribution model is,
in its way, inevitable. After all, _how_ much does the RIAA/MPAA claim as the
"pirated" value of "their" content? As I recall, it adds up, in some
estimates, to more than the current size of their industry, and possibly even
more money than exists in the entire economy (of some nations if not of the
United States).

Why should we _destroy_ all that value by rendering it illegal through
copyright-based rent-seeking? Plainly we shouldn't.

But filmmakers, programmers, authors and other bit-producers need to eat too,
need to somehow interface _our_ desired post-scarcity "pirate economy" with
the scarcity-based rentier capitalism of the current "material economy" to pay
rent, buy food, carry health insurance, etc.

So the question is, how do we interface post-scarcity with scarcity to let
people work in the former world but eat dinner in the latter?

~~~
odnamra
Bourgeoisie? :) I worked my way up from nothing and my perspective is simply
that of someone who has seen the industry from several different angles.

Also, like any sane person, I believe that pirates are only frustrated
consumers (I know I am).

But where does that leave us... how do you keep humanity entertained while
"software is eating the world."

What does that technology look like? For distribution, is it an open standards
network of p2p+affiliate marketing+an index fund? For creators, will it be a
cost equalizing combo of reality-emulating audio engines and photorealistic
cloud rendering of user-friendly 3D modeling? What happens to the concept of
celebrity (celebrities = risk mitigation for movies)?

I personally think it's important to step back and think about the user
experience of a movie. Can you succeed in delighting users and negating
Hollywood at the same time?

~~~
vibrunazo
> For creators, will it be a cost equalizing combo of reality-emulating audio
> engines and photorealistic cloud rendering of user-friendly 3D modeling?

Oh hi, you're describing my start up ^^ So yea, I personally am betting my
money that's how the future looks like for creators. In the future, you
_might_ not be able to fund a $500m Avatar. But the bet is you won't need to,
because you'll be able to produce something much better with much less money.
With better technology, costs decrease. Or at least I'm working everyday to
make that happen :)

As for celebrities, that will always exists. There are many e-celebs today
that got famous for playing games professionally, b/vlogging or podcasts etc.
And there will always be people willing to pay to see them. So there will
always be an economy for them regardless of which route technology goes to.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Sounds like a cool start-up. Got a website?

------
jiggy2011
You know, I've heard this Hollywood/The RIAA is dead meme repeated for at
least 10 years now and I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

Is there even any evidence that they are dying? Are their revenues falling
year upon year, piracy advocates insist that they aren't.

I still see trailers every year for the latest $BIG_MEDIA_MOVIE with no sign
of slowing down, how many movies you can fit on a 4TB drive is pretty
irrelevant. Since the original iPod came out people have been able to store
more music than they actually listen to anyway.

Anyway, what would replace it? Youtube? Half of their content is either scenes
from TV/Movies or people talking about TV/Movies. Kickstarter? Yes for folks
who are passionate enough to think about what they want and go out actively
looking for stuff they might like. Many people just want to see a trailer for
latest big blockbuster so that they know what to buy for their kids when they
want some peace and quiet or what to talk about at the watercooler on monday.

What about piracy? Everyone seems to be firmly of the opinion that the cat can
not be put back in the back with this one. Me, I'm not so sure. The feds are
going after pirate websites with the big guns. Not to mention that on the
whole the people who _make your software and hardware_ are on the side of the
content producers.

Since we are all going "Post PC" and many computers will become more like
appliances, what's to say that your future Apple TV will even play any content
that has not been directly licensed from iTunes and the like?

Look at the MSN Messenger/Pirate bay issue. You don't really need the
government to do anything, the big tech companies can do it all by themselves.

What would happen if Windows 8 and the next OSX just flat out refused to let
you navigate to a torrent website, or even install a torrent client?

Sure , you will have an underground scene of jailbreakers and people who still
run open hardware etc but they won't be getting the subsidies on buying that
new family entertainment system that everyone else is getting.

People are lazy and don't want to make their cultural choices themselves.

------
cstross
_An industry is dying ... That industry is the media industry_

That's a spectacularly vague assertion. Let me give you a more pointed one:
_there is no such thing as the media industry_. In [textual] publishing alone
there are at least a dozen different highly specialized industries that, aside
from a common technology base (the printing press) are radically different in
structure and operation. And that's within any one language/nation; if you
look at, say, mass-audience consumer movies, is it reasonable to stretch and
assertion that "the movies are dying" to cover both Hollywood and Bollywood,
much less crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized
art films from France?

(I'll agree that the MPAA and RIAA are parasitic and preside over a business
model that doesn't appear to be long-term viable without lobbying for
government support -- but that's not the same thing at all, and I really wish
pundits like Mattheij would be a bit more circumspect in their predictions.)

~~~
jmillikin
The term "media industry" is not usually applied to "crowdsourced low budget
SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France", any more
than the term "agricultural industry" would be applied to someone's backyard
herb garden.

The OP did not claim that "movies are dying", he claimed that the media
industry is dying, which is a completely different statement. If the media
industry dies, people will still make movies, they just won't have the massive
budgets that contemporary movies have.

For what it's worth, I think the OP is letting his anticipation cloud his
better judgment. While the media industry will certainly decrease in size and
influence, and will probably become more selective about which scripts it
funds, it will continue to exist so long as customers are willing to pay $20
for the experience of watching a blockbuster on a hundred-food cinema screen.

~~~
prawn
Hundred-food cinema? Mine only stocks popcorn and choc-tops.

~~~
jmillikin
Agh, hundred _foot_!

Though I suppose "hundred food" works also.

------
michaelpinto
I do a great deal of work with youth marketing so I have a slightly different
perspective. I can't speak to music -- but films cost a great deal of money to
make, and YouTube videos just won't replace that.

If you look at the next generation of consumers (kids) they're watching more
broadcast television than any other demographic, they're camping out overnight
to see films like the Hunger Games and this may surprise you ancient
twentysomethings but these kids are actually paying for their music too. This
is why Katy and Gaga are making real money, but more sophisticated music aimed
at young adults isn't doing well.

The biggest mistake that techies make is that they assume that their lives are
the lives that everyone else leads: And this just isn't the case. Are kids
spending tons of time looking at YouTube? Yes! But they're also spending hours
looking at the Disney channel too and paying for songs on iTunes with that
gift card that grandma got them for their birthday.

Will the film and music companies go through a great deal of disruption? Very
much so — but they won't be replaced by tech companies, unless those are
videogame companies. The only way that tech companies will disrupt Hollywood
is if they get into producing content - so far the only examples of this is
Steve Jobs taking over Pixar to make films and Sony with their valuable music
and film business.

~~~
shalakhin
Here in Ukraine people are forgetting "TV" as more and more people use
computers. So the TV situation could differ among countries.

But I totally agree with you that the strongest way to defeat Hollywood would
be some "Anti-Hollywood" producing great media content appreciated by people
watching it.

~~~
jiggy2011
I imagine what they are watching on their computers is stuff that is basically
"TV".

------
benologist
You're envisioning a future where you replace the middlemen you don't like
with a set of ones you do like, that aren't up to the job anyway.

Marketplaces have existed for years in various forms - iTunes, Amazon,
YouTube, TPB, MegaUpload etc ... their users are almost exclusively interested
in Big Content stuff. Mininova highlights this - they went legit and right now
135 people are downloading their most popular video, _70 times fewer_ than the
number of people currently downloading the 4th Mission Impossible rip which is
pretty much the very definition of Big Content easy, safe fluff. Mininova was
one of the most popular websites in the world _before_ they went legitimate -
this isn't people not knowing, this is people not _caring_.

Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete
opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future.

The overall premise that the RIAA/MPAA are or have to die at all is pretty
sketchy - the problem is they're predatory and not keeping up with technology
and consumers, not that they're redundant.

~~~
jacquesm
> Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete
> opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future.

Tell that to these guys:

[http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-
festiva...](http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festival)

I'd happily pay for Pat Metheny to produce his next album _before_ I can get
my hands on it with a mechanism in place that would revert the money if he
never released it, and even without that mechanism I'd take the risk.

~~~
benologist
Yeah it works when it's _novel_ , now imagine that it's _normal_ ... instead
of going to Netflix and streaming a movie tonight you go to kickstarter-for-
movies.com and book what you're hopefully going to watch for Christmas.

I cannot imagine a worse way to be entertained, it actually returns us to the
pre-internet days with the added plus of gambling on and paying in advance for
everything we want.

~~~
rosser
You don't go to "kickstarter-for-movies.com" to be _entertained_ (unless you
find that kind of thing entertaining, obviously). You go there to support the
kind of entertainment you _want to see more of_. Anyone supporting a
prospective project in that way and expecting immediate returns doesn't
understand the model, at best.

Your argument seems to be that since crowdfunded alternatives can't
immediately supplant the incumbents, there's no point to even bothering with
them. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever that they can't coexist, with
the new model picking up slack that comes available as the old model withers.
In point of fact, that's exactly what I expect to happen, at least to some
degree.

(EDIT: TL,DR: streaming and crowdfunding are utterly orthogonal; I'm having a
very hard time understanding how and why you're conflating them.)

~~~
jiggy2011
I think kick starter will work, but in the sense that it will be more like
"high art" and popular with a commited minority.

The fact is that people are generally inclined towards and option with a small
payoff if it will be immediate rather than a large payoff in the long term.

This explains in the first place why passive forms of entertainment like
TV/Movies are more popular than active ones like pottery.

------
PaulHoule
This is big talk, but in the meantime I went to the gym the other day and
checked out the movies for sale and bought a Blu-Ray of the Truman Show for
$7.99.

I went home and played it, there were no annoying trailers or anything. Me, my
son, and the reporter who's always writing about our coven in the newspaper
all watched it and had a great time.

Hollywood offers consumers many chump choices (like bloated cable packages)
but it also offers good value too.

Hollywood leads the world in producing compelling content and it's always been
smart about turning it into money -- I'm sure things are going to change in
the next 20 years, but odds are good that some fraction of Hollywood is going
to stay on top.

~~~
odnamra
I love this. You are correct on all accounts. In theory, creating a movie is
about telling a story with the best possible content and the best possible
experience. You might laugh at the thought, but I can promise you that all
filmmakers toil under that aspiration. Actors, hair, makeup, wardrobe,
location, sfx, vfx, audio, music... ALL handcrafted and laboriously created in
pursuit of telling the story as best you can. Theaters, Blu-ray, Dolby, HD,
3D, all developed in the hopes of creating the best possible experience for
that content. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of crap (lord knows I've
personally worked on many terrible movies), but I'm speaking of ideals here.
Shall we Kill Hollywood and replace everything with cat videos on Youtube?
That's too easy. I can offer many suggestions on how to vindictively kill
Hollywood right now, but that would be a disservice to people like you who
just want to enjoy watching a movie. And it's because Hollywood contains this
fantastic talent base, and enormous back catalog, that they will be around for
a long time to come.

------
nyellin
I'm not convinced this is a global issue. Here in Israel, many local TV shows
are freely available on the internet, including the ever-popular Eretz
Nehederet.

Plenty of Israelis pirate content, but the local media industry _seems_ to be
doing fine. I can't recall any attempts to crack down on pirates, let alone
attempts to pass draconian anti-piracy legislation.

This is all anecdotal. If someone knows where to find the data supporting or
contradicting this, please post.

~~~
vectorpush
_I'm not convinced this is a global issue._

I wouldn't be so sure.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-
yorkshire-1735520...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-
yorkshire-17355203)

~~~
nyellin
Yes, the death throes of the American media industry are a global problem.

However, evidence is needed to prove that the global media industry is dying.

~~~
vectorpush
Ah, I see what you mean. In that case it's not even an American problem since
Hollywood is doing quite well.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-
once-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-again-
fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office.ars)

------
DanielRibeiro
Steven Blank made a much more in depth analysis of this phenomenon on his:

 _Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA_ [1]

In a nutshell, it shows how much the movie industry always fought change, it
always lost, and it always made more money out it.

[1] [http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-
cant...](http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04/why-the-movie-industry-cant-
innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/)

------
crusso
The business model will definitely evolve with all the digitization and
internet pressures. Claiming that the industry is exhibiting "death throes" is
way way way premature, though.

The way I look at it, government power and spending are on the rise.
Meanwhile, big media continues to be very important to politics, both as a
source of money and as a source of star power for re-elections. Those two
forces working together will be extraordinarily difficult to kill. Like a
many-headed hydra, we'll whack off a head or two, but the darned thing will
keep fighting for its existence.

------
guard-of-terra
The idea of a digital stockpile of the world culture in your closet is very
interesting.

I already have a torrent of 100 thousand books on my mirror raid, for example,
so I'm sure I won't be missing much even if they go nuclear on internet
piracy. In a few years you'd be able to do the same with music and movies.

------
davidw
> Maybe that will mean that there will be no more media superstars.

Why would that be? The superstars are the ones _most_ likely to survive in
some sense. You need to 'think at the margin':
<http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/01/21/thinking-at-the-margin> \- it's the
little guys on the edge of doing their art full time or not that are the ones
most likely to be buffeted around by the winds of change. The Rolling Stones
will still make lots of cash somehow.

Also, the ransom model has been with us for a while - it was proposed as a way
to fund open source software too. So far, it hasn't worked that well (a few
anecdotes notwithstanding). It can, in some cases, but most consumers want to
have a look at something, evaluate it, and then get their instant
gratification, not wait another N months for it to actually be produced.

------
A1kmm
Hopefully once the large copyright industries start to realise that the
current system will lack efficacy going forward, we can all unite for
something better to replace the current intellectual property laws (note: I'm
excluding trademarks here because that is a different matter).

Simply getting rid of IP is not the answer - this is an opportunity to
completely replace them with something better.

IP law, if it worked as intended, has two consequences: * The more quality
content you produce, the more revenue you derive from it. * The more content
you consume, the higher your costs for it are.

The former is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective - it incentivises
the creation of quality content - and very few people would disagree that it
is a good thing.

However, it is a bad thing to make people pay more to use more content / ideas
/ knowledge - from a macroeconomic perspective, if there is no marginal cost
to using something, but it improves efficiency, then if more people use it,
that is better for everyone.

Therefore, there is a need to decouple paying people based on how much content
they produce and how useful it is (the good part) from the idea that you pay
more to use more content. Some kind of flat rate (perhaps as an alternative to
the current system in the interim) would be one solution - everyone pays a
flat fee for blanket exemption from liability under copyright and patent law,
and are obliged to cite sources for their product. Content producers declare
their costs, and the received flat fees are divided to content creators /
knowledge discoverers based on development costs and level of usage (direct
and indirect).

There would be numerous complex cases and ways to exploit the system that
would need to be closed and resolved through the courts, but I don't think it
is fundamentally impossible, and it would both revitalise innovation and allow
new types of content creation industries to be sustainable, reversing some of
the vertical integration that currently occurs due to the current difficulty
in making certain types of ideas profitable if you don't apply them yourself.

------
epscylonb
The smart people in the music industry know that to remain relevant they need
to stay close to the artists. This once lopsided relationship is changing to
be more equal, the record companies need the artists to make money.

There is value in curation, marketing and management. I expect some of the
current media companies will surive but they will look different and be much
more competitive.

------
api
I think there's a larger picture here. It's time to declare war on middlemen,
period.

There are producers and customers. There is no place for anything else in the
21st century.

Here's a startup formula for you all:

1) Identify a place where a middleman is taking a cut or gate-keeping an
industry.

2) Design a system, technology, or service that either eliminates the
middleman entirely or replaces it with something far more efficient and much
lower margin.

3) Profit.

~~~
jiggy2011
To be honest, most of what I see startups doing is _creating_ middle men, not
destroying them.

In fact in most cases that's all startups are, someone trying get between a
customer and something they want. Hopefully adding some value on the way.

Facebook: Want to talk to your friends? Talk through us.

Dropbox: Want your files? Get them from us.

etc etc

If startups were serious about decentralizing anything they would be
developing P2P protocols and open formats, not putting everything behind a big
web app wall (with ads).

~~~
odnamra
You are saying exactly what I just said to another reader. Replace
distribution with an open standard that has an embedded financial model, then
we might have something interesting. Everything else is just a different
middle man.

~~~
jiggy2011
"Open standard" and "embedded financial model" are kind of mutually exclusive.

The whole point of an open standard is that it allows anybody to compete in a
particular market, e.g browsers or word processors.

As soon as you have an open standard for distribution, you basically have
something like bit torrent where the content producer/rights holder is in the
same marketplace as the pirates or anybody else wishing to redistribute the
same content under different terms (i.e free).

~~~
vibrunazo
Only if you assume the financial model depends on that open standard. For
example, try to make money by distributing media using an open standard for
distribution. Then I agree with you.

But you could have an open distribution model that is compatible with a
parallel financial model. For example, fund an art project on kickstarter and
then distribute it using an open standard. Or distribute your for free game in
an open standard then charge for players to play in your server which has
exclusive closed data that they might care for.

------
VMG
It'd be nice to have some data to prove the assumption that the industry _is_
dying. Not that I can't believe it but I think one should back up these kinds
of claims.

------
tsotha
I'm not convinced that just because you'll soon be able to fit the world's
entire electronic cultural output into your pocket the media companies will
necessarily be out of business. They're pushing for controls on the way the
rest of us consume content, and they may well be successful in the end. They
don't have to be 100% successful, just successful enough to make money.

------
shalakhin
It looks like media industry has to reborn and form a new way to do business
and get their income.

On the other hand I like indie musicians more as they try to innovate or make
music for people more than just get their money and aren't connected to
labels.

An interesting group – Singleton is an example.

------
mattchew
I'm glad he mentioned Kickstarter. I'm really excited about the potential
there. I think Kickstarter (or something like it) will be at least as
important as eBay or Craigslist.

I just wish we had it back when Firefly was dying.

------
Tyrant505
Your formatting got screwed on a copy/paste I assume, bit difficult to read.

~~~
paulsutter
Couldn't all of the mobile apps our friends are writing fit onto that same
disk drive? With room to spare for the source code to Facebook and Google?
Does that indicate that the entire intellectual property business is in its
"death throes"?

You could also include all the credit card numbers and ACH information for all
the accounts in the world on that same drive. I guess that means its OK to use
those numbers?

How can so many software guys really believe that their bits are more valuable
than the bits created by media companies? Or that stealing is "ok" just
because it's easy if you know how?

The media industry has done a shit job of making its product easy to buy or
making money ad supported. They're in decline because they have done such a
bad job adapting. But someone will figure it out.

Entertainment will definitely evolve, but it won't go away. There's a lot more
to learn reading pg's request for ideas than reading pro-piracy posts like
this that seem to litter hacker news.

~~~
ajscherer
Software is not analogous because it has been developed from the very start
with the knowledge that the bits would be easily copy-able, and has been
designed accordingly. I remember being asked to type in phrases from a game
instruction manual at least a decade before anyone was consuming commercial
audio or video on their PC. Furthermore, software is an interactive medium,
which makes copy protection easier, and copying riskier. It isn't clear to me
how you could make copy protection inherently part of music (without ruining
it). Even if you fully controlled all the hardware and software used for
playback, you wouldn't control the link between the speaker and my ears.

As to ACH information, it depends on what you mean by "use those numbers,"
since they have no inherent value. If you mean reading them for fun, I would
be OK with that. If you mean using them to drain money from people's bank
accounts, that would not be okay, but it also wouldn't be copying (since the
original would be destroyed). If you knew of a way to copy money from one
account to another, I would be completely fine with you copying my checking
account in full.

I know you would probably prefer that people think about stealing and
unauthorized copying as the same thing, but there is a difference and it's
important. One is completely physically undetectable to the victim, and the
other isn't. How can you tell the difference between your CD selling poorly
because people are pirating it, and it selling poorly because it sucks?
Without widespread snooping on other peoples' electronic communications, you
can't. If someone drained your bank account it would be trivial to detect.

~~~
paulsutter
I agree that draconian laws or snooping measures are not reasonable mechanisms
to enforce copyright.

But the analogy to mobile is interesting. Mobile app revenues are absolutely
booming, and mobile apps dont require inconvenient or invasive protection
schemes. Mobile apps are easier to buy than pirate, and they are reasonably
priced. It's bizarre to me that most of the good content isn't available for
streaming, when I'd be perfectly happy to pay per view.

I dont have any media in my home. It's all streamed. My friends who pirate all
deal with torrents and file conversions and moving files around. And honestly
I dont have time for that. It's far cheaper just to pay for it. Or not watch
it at all, because most of the good content isn't available for streaming.
Which is the real problem.

------
goggles99
Your argument has no basis. If storage capabilities have a relative
relationship to the success or failure of the entertainment industry, why is
there no trend of correlation thus far? Storage media keeps improving, yet the
entertainment industry's size and profits are not declining at all.

