>This is like going back to the old days when great works of art were only made by artists with wealthy patrons.
I suspect that being canonized as a great work of art probably also had something to do with those wealthy patrons. Thinking of record companies, maybe not much has changed... But that's neither here nor there.
>This means that you would have to charge an exorbitant amount for that first copy.
Speaking within the software realm, make your product not tied to your redistributable. MMOs, games hosted on servers, software as a service, selling support for software or expertise, etc. are all examples of how to deal with this. And yeah, custom software has always been expensive.
There's not an easy answer in every situation. That's why, at least as far as I can see, the people who can figure out how to monitize difficult products will be the people making money.
But, hey, you don't have to agree with me. I'm not making the rules here; the crowd is. If your product is infinitely redistributable, chances are you're not getting paid. Its probably better to just accept reality & deal with it. All I think we've seen so far is that fighting the digital masses on this is a losing battle. My only real point is that the battle is probably also unnecessary.
You are not paid because you work hard. Hard work has no inherent financial reward.You are paid because you have something that other people want that is scarce. If what you produce is infinitely redistributable, then you can expect to get paid only for the first copy.
Don't worry, though, you can keep your job as a programmer. I'm in the same boat you are, and I'm not scared. For whatever business you're in, you just need to create your program such that it doesn't depend on people not copying your distributable. Just assume they will, and move on. It's up to you to work out a business model that works in the environment you're in. _That_ is what you get paid for.
I don't think anything has changed in terms of people's values. If people around here are looking for a bloodbath, they're looking for it against people (and lumbering corporations) who are resisting change, resting finding new ways to do business, and ultimately resisting progress.
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.
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?
Why would you assume that this wouldn't happen?
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.
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.
democrasy
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.
You and your ilk
Honestly? Who talks like that? I'm done with you. Shut up and go do your homework.
if you want these companies and their policies destroyed, why is it better to download than to not use their products at all?
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.
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.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.