Over thousands of years of human history, new technologies have changed the ways people communicate, from language to writing to the printing press, and so on. Every change shifted the economic balance, so things that once were prohibitively expensive became easy, and people who derived economic benefit from former scarcity became disadvantaged.
I hear what the proponents of DRM-encumbered browsers are saying - media streaming companies control huge chunks of our popular culture, and significant political power, and it's expedient to give in to their demands and stop threatening their business model. But when I look back at the last thousands years of technological progress, I cannot bring myself to say "yes, this is good enough. We should legislatively freeze our technology at early-21st-century levels forever." Our civilisation has benefited from technology so much already, I can't in good conscience deny people the benefits of future technology, even in exchange for the right to stream Game of Thrones.
Media producing companies that have no way of safeguarding their revenue stream would like the technical threshold for copying to be at least a minor deterrent, because otherwise people have no incentive to pay them; many many people are in fact OK with being freeloaders.
I'm so sick of seeing Game of Thrones offered as the standard example. Sure, HBO has more more money than any of us would know what to do with. I, on the other hand, make my living working on films with budgets that only amount to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars, and believe me that does not go very far - the lower cost of digital vs. celluloid film is only one line item in the production process, whereas you still have to pay for locations, costumes, props, housing, transport, food, lighting, and a whole bunch of other things before you even get to handing out any wages.
It's very, very hard to monetize a low-budget film. And there's constant downward pressure on production budgets, because indie films don't usually have fat box-office payoffs, and instead depend on small-scale releases in festivals and the art-house cinema circuit, followed by (you hope) some international box office and (you really hope) a long tail of DVD/streaming sales. And that long tail is highly vulnerable to piracy, and the existence of piracy is a big deterrent to investors.
So when you're saying Big Studio makes enough money with their latest superhero franchise movie, or HBO makes enough money with their huge base of cable subscriptions, and so you don't feel bad about pirating Superhero 4 or Game of Thrones well sure, I understand that - none of the producers are in any danger of losing their shirts, everyone on the cast and crew got paid handsomely at the fairly generous rates their guilds/unions have negotiated over the years, and the shareholders still make plenty of money and get a nice dividend check every quarter.
On the other hand, lots of smaller content providers are getting fucked financially because it's a lot harder to answer the question of 'how will investors make their money back?' than it was a few years ago. So spare me the stereotypes of evil media barons trying to stop the brave plucky technological underdogs. That same technology is also massively disruptive to creative professionals and small businesses that work outside the Big Media tent, and actively hinders their ability to make a living.
I'm not saying that HBO is rich so it's OK to pirate their stuff, I believe the entertainment industry as a whole, from Big Five studios down to indie filmmakers, is no longer viable -- at least in its current form. Previously, duplicating a creative work was labour- or resource-intensive, so comparatively few entities could attempt it, and the effort required to police them was small compared to the economic and cultural gain. Now, duplicating a creative work can be done at the twitch of a fingertip, by anybody, anywhere, anytime. As a civilisation we could spend the time and effort to police such things, but I'm not sure it would be worthwhile.
As you point out, it's already hard to monetize a low-budget film and it's not getting any easier. But that's not because people are freeloaders or because they refuse to allocate their resources responsibly (although both may be true). Ultimately, the real problem is that the world changed, and things that had been difficult became easy. We can't put the genie of general-purpose computing back in the bottle, and I think it would be irresponsible to lock it down in its current state. The only reasonable alternative is to move forward: this will mean a great economic upheaval for artists, just like the invention of the printing press and recorded music and television were, but I don't think that's a deal-killer. Humans have been creating art, with or without economic recompense, for thousands of years, they're not going to stop now.
Duplication is only one half of the economic picture. You don't need to explain to me how the costs of duplication have fallen to zero, but I would like you to address the fact that the fixed costs of creating something people want to duplicate are very far from zero.
Humans have been creating art, with or without economic recompense, for thousands of years, they're not going to stop now.
And for the longest time art was the preserve of the wealthiest segment of society that used it as means of keeping the population in line. The idea that people who work in the arts should not be allowed to use technology to monetize the product of their labor is a bunch of self-serving bullshit. Nobody is entitled to have an artwork they produce become successful, but if it does become successful (in terms of people wanting to watch/listen/read) then they're entitled to something in return for the utility their product has provided to the consumer.
Although I don't have numbers, it is my impression that many more musicians / songwriters are making a full time living at their music than in the past. In today's world it is a lot easier to 'go at it alone'.
> How do you rationalize the movie industries increasing year to year profits...?
OK, so "no longer viable" is perhaps a bit of hyperbole. Perhaps a better word would be "doomed", which is to say that the economic axioms it was built on are no longer as firmly true as once they were, so the industry cannot continue in its current form indefinitely. It may continue for a little while from sheer momentum, and until the future becomes more evenly distributed, and it may eventually reinvent itself (and I hope it does) in a way that is sustainable under these new conditions, but something's got to change.
> Although I don't have numbers, it is my impression that many more musicians / songwriters are making a full time living at their music than in the past.
My impression is that a lot of these musicians and songwriters are finding fans over the Internet, playing small venues and touring small areas, with maybe the help of a manager or two. When most people think of a phrase like 'rock star', they probably imagine someone who finds fans by paying for lots of radio play, who fills stadiums and tours the world with the help of a giant record label who might have hundreds or thousands of artists signed to it. When I say 'the entertainment industry is doomed', I'm heavy on the 'industry' - the giant record labels, the world tours and saturating advertising are doomed because digital reproduction puts a cap on how much money can be extracted from a particular recording. These musicians and songwriters you talk about have already figured out how to earn a living in the post-Internet era, and I hope they can serve as an example to artists in other media who currently believe that the existing industry must be propped up indefinitely so they can earn a living.
It's far, far easier to record a song or even an album than it is to make a movie. The former is something you can literally do alone in your bedroom with a fairly modest outlay on equipment, if you're willing to work on the craft of sound engineering or team up with someone skilled in that area if your main skill is as a musician/songwriter. Of course it's not the same as going to a studio with outstanding acoustics and great session musicians etc. etc., but it's very feasible nonetheless.
Making a movie is simply not something you can do on your own - it's orders of magnitusde more complex and expensive, in both time and dollar terms. Also, you can't make money on live performances or merchandising swag in the same fashion that musicians do; it's not impossible to build other streams of revenue besides ticket/rental channels, but it's a lot more difficult and the ancillary revenue potential varies enormously with the subject matter.
Thanks, as someone outside the media producing business, I found this very interesting to read.
I often like to think that we don't really need big budget productions; sure, they're fun but they are stifling our culture with marketing, big name actors, risk/controversy-free scripts.
Distribution is the other big problem. The internet has changed/balanced things and it looks like DRM is just attempts to curb that.
My sincere questions for you:
In the end, do you consider DRM good for you?
Also, aren't you afraid that if we keep going like this, with DRM embedded in our OSes and processors (with no alternatives), we will soon reach a point of no return? I'm talking App-Store like distribution, where they get 30% and handle everything for you, even what you're allowed to say.
I consider DRM a slight net positive - not because it prevents copying, but because it makes it somewhat inconvenient, and thus provides an economic incentive to use a commercial service, where the DRM is implemented transparently.
No, I'm not afraid about the OS thing to be honest. In ~30 years of using computers the trend has continually been in favor of openness, and I think anxiety over DRM taking over OSes and CPUs is wildly overblown, and largely a psychological projection of sociopolitical anxiety.
I'm talking App-Store like distribution, where they get 30% and handle everything for you, even what you're allowed to say.
Well it's not like the existence of DRM means you lose the ability to give it away in another format if nobody wants to publish it on a commercial platform. This, too, is continually getting better in historical terms, and it's an issue I care very much about personally.
I hear what the proponents of DRM-encumbered browsers are saying - media streaming companies control huge chunks of our popular culture, and significant political power, and it's expedient to give in to their demands and stop threatening their business model. But when I look back at the last thousands years of technological progress, I cannot bring myself to say "yes, this is good enough. We should legislatively freeze our technology at early-21st-century levels forever." Our civilisation has benefited from technology so much already, I can't in good conscience deny people the benefits of future technology, even in exchange for the right to stream Game of Thrones.