Oh, I don't know. AT&T had a monopoly over telephone services in the US for decades, but there were independent telephone companies, varying in size from GTE, which was fairly large, to very small operations which might have had as few as a couple of people serving rural communities of only a few hundred people. In practice, you can have a monopoly without extinguishing absolutely all other competition.

Further, you can have a monopoly which has been granted to you even if you face an enormous amount of competition, because according to the government granting the monopoly, only you have a right to do that business.

Which brings us to your other point:

You're half right. There are two kinds of property that can be owned. The first kind is the kind that you can personally defend from anyone who might try to take it from you. Running away with it is a perfectly valid form of this.

But since this wasn't good enough for most people -- and to be fair, it really isn't very good -- we organically developed the other kind. Which is the sort where additional people will cooperate with you to protect it, and will recognize your claim on it, in exchange for your doing the same for them.

The ability to own property boils down to a question of who uses the most force to hold control over it. Mutual defense is a good way to be able to draw upon a lot of force. This isn't a pretty way of doing things, but it works.

Copyrights aren't really property; they're propertyesque. But their existence completely hinges on enough people agreeing that they exist, agreeing on the pertinent rules, and helping to defend them. Pirates can have an effect on the conversation -- if everyone comes out as a pirate, we might agree to change the rules. But otherwise, the rules stay intact, and piracy is like trespass.

No it doesn't. The copyright holder still has the monopoly. It's just being infringed upon, like how a trespasser might interfere with the use of land, but not its actual ownership or the power to control it. Indeed, it's only when there is infringement that the copyright becomes useful, as a means to take legal action to stop the infringement.

Here's what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say:

Note the dates of the examples. Copyright as we know it -- a right granted to authors to control the publication of their work -- didn't exist until 1710. The idea of 'piracy' having this meaning therefore predates copyright itself. Examples of this sense of 'pirate' go as far back as 1603 -- over a century earlier.

Of course, it was hyperbole for authors and the stationers to call it piracy when they were living in the golden age of the arr-matey type of piracy on the high seas. If they were trying to coin a word for it now that had equal impact, it would be either rape, terrorism, or genocide, I expect.

But having had to deal with this label for over four centuries, I say it's not a fight worth fighting. Better to just seize control of it and make it unobjectionable.

Check again. Space isn't cold per se. It's a vacuum up there. Which means that any heat that a ship generates, it cannot get rid of it through conduction or convection. That only leaves radiation, which is very inefficient.

What you want to do, generally, is to build the ship so that it will radiate more heat than it can possibly generate or than it can absorb from something else radiating heat. Then, whenever you're not getting enough waste heat through normal operations, you turn on heaters to generate more. If you didn't do this, your ship would accumulate more and more heat and would eventually destroy itself.

You may recall how the Apollo 13 astronauts wound up having to deal with an interior temperature of around 40 degrees by the end of their mission. That's because due to power shortages, they had to turn off most of their equipment (which gave off waste heat) and the heaters, but couldn't prevent the ship from radiating heat as it was designed to do.

A naval nuclear reactor is designed to dump heat into the ocean; in the absence of the ocean, it would quickly meltdown.

It might help if we figured out how to make a working fusion reactor on Earth first. The problem with an 3He reactor is not simply a shortage of 3He.

Probably not; a sub's reactor would likely depend on the presence of the ocean for part of its cooling system (cooling is always a big problem in space -- basically it can only be done with radiators, which isn't very efficient), and is surely way overpowered for most missions.

The US and Russia have sent up actual reactors before. The US had SNAP and the USSR had BES.

But you really don't need nuclear power sources at all unless you're either far from the sun (beyond the orbit of Mars, usually), have serious power needs that modern solar power isn't sufficient for (the recently landed Curiosity rover on Mars uses an RTG for main power), or need heat to keep systems from getting too cold (the solar powered Mars rovers had small RTGs in them for heating purposes, IIRC).

No, the cost of production is highly relevant to the asking price; they're going to try to set the price so that they make a profit if their prediction as to the number of customers is basically right.

For a good example of this not working out, see the Atari version of Pac-Man: there were an estimated 10 million Atari VCS consoles thought to be in use, so management had 12 million copies of Pac-Man made on the assumption that people would buy the console just to play it. But as things happened, only 7 million copies were sold, and the game was so lousy that many of those were returned. The Pac-Man debacle is seen as one of the factors causing the Videogame Crash of 1983 as well as a reported loss by Atari of half a billion dollars.

Anyway, what I was trying to say was not that there is no connection between production costs and ticket prices / retail cost (there is), but that production values themselves, which is what incur the production costs, are fairly arbitrary. Films don't require hundreds of millions of dollars of budget in order to tell a story; the story can be told just as well by less expensive means. And in fact, a lot of special effects are used to keep the budget down: it's cheaper to blow up a plastic model of a spaceship than it is to build a real one just to blow it up. Of course it's cheaper still to tell the story so in a way that you don't have to show it getting blown up, or to rely more on the audience's imagination rather than a convincing pyrotechnic display.

If filmmakers and other creators spend less making works -- which may involve lower quality standards, but that's alright -- then they can better withstand smaller numbers of paying customers.

For example, the recent Lone Ranger film had a budget of $225 million, worldwide revenues of $244 million in theaters, hasn't yet hit other venues such as home video, and is already viewed as a massive, massive flop. Had the movie been made for a budget of about $8.5 million (which is how much, adjusted for inflation, it took to film the popular western epic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), it would've been a gigantic success with ticket sales of that magnitude. Hell, you could chop the ticket sales by 75% and it would still be a big hit. The vast majority of the money spent on The Lone Ranger was just wasted, and that's the fault of the filmmakers. Even if it had been produced cheaply and flopped, at least it could've been more tolerable.

So get it right: I am arguing in favor of responding to piracy by having authors and publishers spend less up front, so as to better be able to tolerate making less money.

No, that's just what gets made and promoted the most. It's a risky all the eggs in one basket strategy and it doesn't work as well as you'd think. In the last few posts I've pointed out several examples of huge successes that were made relatively cheaply (Beauty and the Beast, The Wrath of Khan, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and you could add films like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity (horror has an edge in that it's scary to not see things), Mad Max, Rocky, American Graffiti, or Napoleon Dynamite.

The analogy to Prohibition was to point out that the government should not prohibit the public from engaging in behavior that is commonplace and generally seen as inoffensive, unless there is a damn good reason for doing so.

People really thought, back then, that drinking ought to be banned, but it was a common activity, no one felt that their own drinking was wrong, and the attempt to go against our social norms and force people to dry out failed utterly.

Well, now copyright infringement is commonplace, and most people don't see ordinary file sharing to be offensive. (Though commercial piracy, such as in the article likely would be!) Attempting to enforce copyright on the masses regardless is foolish unless it is critically important. And it's not.

Like I said, non commercial infringement by natural persons should be legalized. This will reduce the pool of potential profits to be made, but by continuing to ban commercial infringement and infringement by artificial persons (e.g. corporate entities), that smaller pool will remain protected. So for example, you'd still have to pay for a ticket to watch a movie at a theater, and still have to pay a monthly fee to watch a movie on Netflix, but you could also torrent a movie for free so long as no one involved was in any way making money from the infringement.

And if authors and publishers reduce their budgets, that smaller pool can prove sufficient to fund their efforts. They'll have to adapt, and stop throwing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars away for effects (Michael Bay may be out of a job), but there are plenty of good things that can be done without needing that.

That depends on what you're trying to make. Disney's Beauty and the Beast has excellent animation, was well written and performed, got nominated for a Best Picture (which was such a shock that animated movies soon got pushed into their own category, away from the serious live action films), and was produced for what would be in today's dollars, a $41 million budget. A few years ago, Disney released Tangled, which has excellent animation, was well written and performed, and did get some awards although not best animated feature, and was produced for what would be in today's dollars, a $273 million budget.

Both are good movies. But Tangled, which cost over six and a half times as much as Beauty and the Beast, after adjusting for inflation, is not six and a half times better. You can make perfectly good movies on lower budgets.

And yet, everyone loved Star Trek when it was on TV, and had such a low budget that they had to use the backlot for the Nazi, Gangster, and Roman planets, and the villain of the week was the giant floating head of Zsa Zsa Gabor! And everyone still loves The Wrath of Khan the most, and adjusted for inflation, it was made on a $26 million budget.

You know what would've been a better use of my time instead of seeking ST:ID? Seeing Trek in the Park.

I'm not arguing the latter, but I am arguing something close to the former. If it were legal for people to make and distribute copies of works on a strictly non-commercial basis (no charge for copies, nor for the media, nor bandwidth, no tip jars, no ads, not used as a draw for something else, no donations -- all completely at a loss), then that would simply be a factor for producers to take account of in budgeting films. Just think about how happy Hollywood would be if going to the movies was mandatory, and that you'd commit a felony if you didn't buy a ticket once a week. If maximizing their income is our priority, why don't we force people to go? If not, then why should it bother us if their income is not maximized, or even if it is less than what it happens to be now? They might make less than they do now, but they'll cope, I'm sure.

I have news for you: that's still true. The technology has gotten better, and some of the skills, like literacy, are more widespread, but pirates do not have magic wands.

And the movie studios are free to use whatever equipment best serves their interests for making their own copies. They are not at a technological disadvantage. A huge movie studio can afford the same gear that the average basement-dwelling nerd can. In fact, usually legitimate publishers have the upper hand, being able to act openly, serve larger audiences, and use better, faster equipment which is nevertheless has lower marginal costs. At most there might be parity, but pirates never have the upper hand unless publishers are doing something stupid to handicap themselves.

I assure you, it doesn't work.

Think about Prohibition in the US, however. Telling people that alcohol was bad for you didn't get people to stop drinking. Telling them that it was immoral didn't work. Technological solutions, like denaturing alcohol so that it was poisonous didn't work. Legal solutions, like busting up the rum runners and speakeasies didn't work, and in fact resulted in massive corruption of the legal establishment instead! Ultimately, the issue was found not to be so massively important that continuing to cram Prohibition down the throats of Americans was worthwhile, and the government basically gave up. There was some regulation of alcohol, and a few dry jurisdictions, but overall, the restrictions fell away.

Pretty much everyone infringes on copyrights all the time, and being unaware of it, or doing it completely accidentally is no excuse, due to the strictness of the law. It's widely felt that some amount of copyright is acceptable. But people break the law all the time, suggesting that we have more than the amount that people consider acceptable; their violations are only of the excessive portion of the law. If we reformed copyright, and shrank the law, it would likely diminish somewhat the profits of the copyright industry, but I think that's an okay trade for no longer making virtually all Americans criminals and scofflaws. If it means that movies with gigantic budgets stop getting made, that's fine. After all, no one misses the super-gigantic budget movies we don't make now, because copyright law isn't even worse than it is. All you need is good writing and good acting, which aren't too expensive, and the rest basically takes care of itself.

Well, copyright didn't exist until the 18th century, and then didn't become widespread until the 19th and 20th centuries (in many places, due to colonialism, rather than because the local population liked the idea).

So now you have a pretty good idea of what it would be like.

Of course, you'd have to factor in differences unrelated to copyrights: many places have less censorship than they once did; they have higher literacy rates; they have publishing technologies that are far more efficient than what was available when they adopted copyright laws, including the ability to publish sounds and moving pictures, which had not been possible; we have artificial lighting, inexpensive and widely available means of telecommunication, and data capture, editing, and storage technologies; improvements in agriculture, manufacturing, and labor law provide somewhat more leisure time than once may have been available; the population has increased (thus increasing the number of actual and potential authors); etc.

Wile I think that we're better off with some degree of copyright than none at all (though probably less than we've got now), I think that a world without copyright would be okay; not optimal, but okay.

I think that what matters is the writing and the performance, not the budget. I saw the play version of Driving Miss Daisy before the movie came out. The play had three actors, and usually the third wasn't on stage. The set consisted of a couple of chairs and nothing else. The actor playing Hoke (the driver) had to hold his arms in front of him and pretend that he was steering the car. It worked fine, and everyone enjoyed it. The movie added real sets, real cars, location filming, a number of additional actors, and wa fine too, but it didn't need to. It would've been just as good had they filmed the black box stage performance, like the movie Dogville.

Also IIRC, there was a low budget (I mean really low budget: http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2008/12/19/star-wars-live-on-stage/ ) that went over well. While multi hundred million dollar movies with bad writing and bad acting like this year's The Lone Ranger, get to go directly to the trash. Big budgets are not necessary.

Well, I don't think that copyright infringement should be a crime; let it be a civil matter so that if copyright holders care, they can go to court, and if they don't care so much as to spend their own money on enforcement, the bill is not passed to taxpayers. A purely civil copyright system worked fine for a long time, as it did for trademarks, and still does afaik for patents.

(That said, if they were defrauding customers who thought they were getting legitimate copies, that might justify the involvement of law enforcement)

OTOH, I do think that commercial piracy of this sort ought to be illegal. Sure, there's plenty of currently infringing behavior that ought to be legalized, but this is too far. But I'm not surprised to see that copyright maximalism has gone so far as to sour many people on the whole idea, such that they call for the abolition of copyright, rather than simple reform. Had the publishing industries not acted greedily at every turn, they wouldn't have engendered so much opposition.

What the previous poster was talking about is called the Dormant (or Negative) Commerce Clause doctrine: That even in the absence of federal legislation regulating interstate commerce, the Constitution forbids states from improperly acting to impair or discriminate against interstate commerce, such as by trying to protect local businesses from out of state competition.

And in this case, a law that said that plates legal for use on cars registered in California must be made in California probably would be unconstitutional.

No, it's fine. The publishers set a wholesale price they were happy with, and which they turned them a profit. Amazon paid it, then sold at a lower retail price than the publishers wanted. Ebook profits for publishers were never in jeopardy.

If you're in the US, yes.

The relevant part of 17 USC 109:

Of course, it might not be the best business plan. There aren't a lot of video rental stores left. But if you can make it work, go for it.

Got a case on that? AFAIK everything except phonorecords (that is, audio recordings, such as CDs) and non-console software falls squarely under first sale for rental purposes. Boilerplate notices of dubious accuracy printed on a DVD label are no EULAs.

Well, in the US, at least, it's perfectly legal to rent ordinary retail DVDs. There are good reasons to go with a distributor, such as early access to copies so that they can be on shelves and ready to go ASAP, but if you're not getting prices lower than if you just got discs retail, and worse if you're locked into a requirements contract which precludes you from shopping around, I don't know if its worth it.

In any event, it seems to be a mostly moot point now.