I guess this might stop piracy, if firms get better at distribution and DRM faster than pirates get better at distribution and cracking. Actually, it sounds like an interesting economics problem if you take financial incentive into account, but I digress..

I think its worth noting that society doesn't really need to stop piracy either way. Artists can still make money by playing shows. Video game manufacturers can host portions of their games online. Given enough time, anybody can come up with a business model that doesn't depend on copyright.

That mother nature actually manages to keep each one of the billions of 2-meter strands of DNA in a person's body untangled is a little beyond me. I mean, I've got a couple degrees, and I still routinely spend 20 minutes at a time untangling guitar chords. And I don't even want to think about the mess that lives under my computer desks... Not to mention, have you ever been on a sailboat? Mother of god!

Nyah, I think most people here are operating at a finer level of granularity than you are. They're differentiating between types of educations, some of which are much better than others. Trust me, there's no shortage of educated people on /. A lot of these posts are more like a treatise on exercise written by a fitness instructor who knows the difference between a good and bad fitness program.

Well, not exactly. Apparently American kids do not spend enough time on core subjects to compete internationally on standardized tests, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

My wife went through the Taiwanese educational system, and she deeply regrets having started to late (college) trying to be a dancer. She spent the years that one best acquires a sense of rhythmic coordination and muscle control (the language-learning years) cramming for tests. Not coincidentally, have you ever tried to listen to Asian pop music or watch 'the average' Asian movie or TV series? Of course, there is the occasional exception, but the overall quality of creative and artistic products is _much_ lower, and even the good stuff is usually an adaptation of something that originated in the West. Maybe 20 years ago one could blame this copycat-ism on economic disparities between the West and East, but not anymore. Western-ness isn't t nearly as fashionable as it used to be. Western kids learn how to paint, play instruments, dance, etc at the only age when people are really well suited to learn these subjects.

Anybody who has ever had a professional job should probably be aware that one learns roughly 80% of the skills one needs on the job. Yet the time learning these skills pales in comparison to the amount of time spent learning the other 20%: the 'foundation' skills that one acquires via the educational system. This is a terribly inefficient system.

Things are the way they are because HR departments need a filtering mechanism, since they don't have the time to interview everybody, and educators have the incentive to say that more education is required, since their paycheck is directly related to the amount of time that everyone spends in school. Societally, its a match made in hell.

If we, as a society, were really concerned with efficiency, we'd spend 20% of our educational time learning the foundation skills for our profession of choice, and 80% of our time learning (and producing) on-the-job as an apprentice. Instead, for the last century or two in Western countries, since people aren't starving at nearly the rates they used to be, we've become a lot more concerned with satiety than efficiency.

All this hubbub about standardized tests is really fairly meaningless unless one can extrapolate their results into overall economic performance. As presented in the economist article you listed, all we know is that Western kids have fallen behind on the acquisition of a set of more-or-less useless skills. When you say "compete at the global level," one ought to ask, "Compete at what? Taking standardized tests? Who wants to be good at that?"

The 'real' case? Can you think of a time when what you're describing actually happened?

Because the illicit Disney gangbang you're describing _has_ happened, over, and over, and over again,, with virtually no effect. I'll admit that, in my travels through the internet, I've seen Ariel and Pocahontas doing things to eachother that one really can't describe in polite company, but seeing this type of thing doesn't affect my decision of whether or not I'd take my kids to Disneyland one iota. Disney's lobbying for copyright, however, which I have yet to be convinced really helps consumers or artists at all, does affect that decision.

I'd venture to say you've been sold a lame argument. The concept of suck-by-association is tenuous, and probably wouldn't affect the sales of a quality product or business much at all. I might agree with you on the point that counterfeit is damaging and should be prevented. But counterfeit is conceptually a lot more similar to plagiarism than a notion of illegal reproduction, so copyright law is not the right avenue.

I'm not quite sure what you think qualifies as 'morally bankrupt', but here's how I'd illustrate the term:

• Inspiring generations of musicians (and other professionals) to toil for free in some faint hope of rockstar-scale success is morally bankrupt.
• Crowding out a cornucopia of music, and an entire economy of middle-class musicians, is morally bankrupt.
• Conning people into thinking it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a produce a professional-sounding album when it really only costs a couple thousand, at most, is morally bankrupt.
• Convincing musicians that they should live off recordings, rather than performance, is morally bankrupt.
• Subjugating art, expression, and creativity in the name of selling impressionable children on fad after fad, is morally bankrupt.
• Leveraging the legal system at taxpayers expense in a hopeless attempt to keep a depricated business model working is morally bankrupt.
• Lying to people that somehow the most fundimental law of economics we have, that price = demand / supply, does not apply, as if somehow even gravity could be driven off by a marketing campaign, is morally bankrupt.
• Capitalizing on ignorance to charge both producers and consumers for a middleman service that can be had entirely for free is morally bankrupt.
• Trying to sell people into acting against their own self interest is morally bankrupt.
• Spying on people is morally bankrupt.
• Propagandizing is morally bankrupt.
• Brain-washing people is morally bankrupt.
• Telling me I can't twiddle the bits on my own harddrive any way I see fit is morally bankrupt.

But record companies don't care about being morally bankrupt; They're just in business to make money.
And after all that, if you really think there's still some reason that record companies should exist, and moreover deserve some portion of your income or mine, I'd love to hear it.

I, for one, am disappointed that a whole treasure trove of languages was ignored by this study.

This got modded insightful? Look, I've got no beef with asserting that many corporations treat their customers like idiots, but "Capitalist" is a theoretical orientation, not an organizational structure. And if the word your looking for is "corporation", then you've confused correlation with causation: A corporation is just a model of funding your business. Large companies require more complex funding operations so they tend to be corporations. Generally, only very large companies can get away with screwing their customers. There is nothing about screwing people that is inherent to corporations, unless you're a Marxist.

So you're about 9 years old? And you don't understand the concept of analogy. So let me spell it out for you: The law is exactly what the people say it should be. And your idea of copyright suggests that the people will make laws which sacrifice the good of the many for the good of the few. That doesn't happen in a d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y unless corruption is involved.

As regards to money being given willingly, I have billions upon billions of financial transactions daily, as well as the entire field of economics on my side. What have you got on yours? Looks like a couple incoherent sentences written by a misguided middleschooler who theorizes that the world is populated entirely by sociopaths.

Honestly? Who talks like that? I'm done with you. Shut up and go do your homework.

Personally, I think individuals who want to see these companies destroyed are reacting to these companies trying to criminalize and demonize rational behavior. Of course, these individuals still want the product, but that's kind of a separate issue. Here's the rub: the product (a copy of the movie) isn't the company's product anymore, it's the product of the consumer; they make it themselves. If, for example, movie companies were in the practice of selling original reels of film as collectors items, I expect that the price would have changed very little with the advent of the internet. ...well, that's one way of looking at things, at least... Here's another I like even better:

Nobody is more skeptical of traditional economics than myself, but it does have something of note to say in this instance: The price in exchange equals demand over supply. If supply is infinite (as it is in this case), then price is zero.

At this point, perhaps you say, this stuff isn't produced for free! People invest time and money making digital products, and they deserve to be paid for their efforts! This is especially true if a large number of people benefit from the fruits of their labor! If you don't pay, you're stealing! Unfortunately, that's not how life works. Cost of production has no bearing on price in exchange. Societal value doesn't have any bearing on revenue either. Just watch Youtube try to turn a profit, in spite of all of the people who enjoy it daily. Supply and demand are the only things that matter. How bad do you really expect someone to feel about stealing something of which there is an infinite supply? So here's where copyright comes in. Somebody thought, "well, we've got to solve this infinite supply problem. Perhaps we can legislate so that only a few people can make copies, then the supply is limited again." But that solution is not workable because:

1. It requires the entire populace to sit down and agree to something. And,

2. It requires the many sacrifice for the good of the few.

So, after all that jabber, the short answer I have to offer you is: People are (according to traditional economics) just being rational in not feeling like they need to pay for a self-manufactured copy of a work. And people really only want these large corporations off of their backs because said corporations are fighting a pitched battle against rationality.

19th century textile workers probably didn't have a lot of nice things to say about the power loom, either.

If its false, say why. Otherwise, you are at least the former.

Oh my. I can see you've been brainwashed. Let me explain: Up to this point, my entire life has been dedicated to being musician and a producer of software. I produce nothing physical. When I am gone, the only things that will be left behind to prove my existence will be my ideas. But at at no point am I under the illusion that my ideas are property, that I have the sole right to disseminate my ideas, or especially that my ideas have inherent monetary value.

The idea of copyright in a democracy is analogous to walking into a crowded room, with people carrying on vibrant conversations, on a topic which you introduced, and shouting at the top of your lungs, "Hey everybody! Shut up! Stop doing this thing that you're doing that benefits you, and instead let me be the bottleneck for distribution of this idea, at sole benefit to me personally. That's right, sacrifice the common good for my own personal benefit. And while you're at it, if you don't, please flagellate yourself. Also please beat anyone you see doing otherwise. Impose this situation on yourselves. After all, this is _my_ idea you're talking about." If you actually did this, you'd expect to be run out of the room.

So how do poor artists like myself make a living? Its like I said, its up to you to figure it out. I am not so naive or egotistical as to think that the crowd will sacrifice itself for me, or that my work-- my ideas have monetary value in isolation. There is no intellectual property. You have no rights to your ideas once they are communicated. The value of your work is the money people give you willingly for it. People willingly give money in exchange all the time. If people aren't willing to give you money for what you're offering, its no one's problem but your own. If you believe otherwise, you are either intellectually lazy or a crook. Which are you?

You're confused. Just because people would prefer everything to be free does not mean that nobody wants to pay for anything. Technically speaking, every time you engage in a mutually beneficial exchange transaction, you 'want' to pay. Although you lament narrowing your options, you wind up with something that you value more highly than those little green pieces of paper.

That whole 'mutually beneficial' thing is the key. The reason for the transaction being 'mutually beneficial' has to be legitimate. I have too many apples, you have too many oranges, so we trade. That's legitimate. I pay for a car instead of stealing it just because it's worth _that_ much to me to not live in anarchy. Still legitimate. I pay for the software because if I don't, you'll sic the government on me? Not legitimate. Not in a democracy, at least. It ultimately won't work.

Your job, as an author, intellectual, and general member of society is to make people want to pay for what you have to offer. Don't expect the legal system to do this for you. That's not what the legal system is for. If you want to sell ideas, you'd better spend some time thinking up a way to get people to want to give you money for them. Copyright is going away because it was not originally intended for this purpose, and doesn't suit it well. Your business model is nobody's responsibility but your own. You come up with it. You make it work. There's no magic formula. If there were, basic economics says that it would be arbitraged away.

In short, this is a question that you need to answer for yourself. If someone else answers it for you, then they'll be the one making money.