Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hey, you're the "adapt or die" guy. You don't get to tell people they're being too simplistic.
Why not? I don't say the issues are simple, I say there's a simple solution. Your picture is of simple issues, when I can point to unquestionable evidence that counters your argument. Can you point to any evidence to counter my "adapt or die" position? Of course you can't, because there's no evidence to support or deny any solution. There's only guesswork, modelling, and speculation. My solution is simple to implement, and simple to monitor: leave the media industries with the tools they have, allow technology to develop and spread unhindered, and foster new solutions by not caving in to media interests every time they feel they're not getting their way.
History says that if you leave them alone, technological changes will lead to things unimagined at the time of invention. 30 years ago, you'd have been locked up if you'd tried to suggest that little plastic disks with a silver coating would be the major source of income for movie studios. If the studios had had their way, that reality would likely not have come to pass. Thankfully Vallenti's hysteria was ignored, the VCR flourished, and now we have Blu-Ray. What might we miss out on if we ignore history and instead grant the media moguls that which they now seek?
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If there is a channel that enables you to take somebody's work for free, then no, it's no longer accurate to say that it's available for sale.
Except that the reality of the current world says that this is far, far too simplistic a viewpoint. After all, iTunes makes money, and lots of it, CDs are still sold, but downloading for free is still very viable. That's reality, and that makes for a rather murkier picture than the one you're painting.
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Also, thinking about it, copyright as it is now, with authors and musicians as mere serfs of the gatekeepers, is a far worse evil than downloading. Forced to turn their work over to corporations, denied the right to utilise it on their own terms.
So, you were saying? -
Gio, what has been taken? The work is still theirs, still intact, still available for sale. Copyright as it exists now is designed for a system revolving around scarcity. What we have now turns that entirely on its head, because it is entirely possible for effectively limitless numbers of people to have perfect copies of the same song at a near-zero marginal cost. Rules of scarcity do not apply, and trying to shoehorn the old model of copyright into the new reality of digital isn't working out terribly well.
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the argument we're having here is just the beginning our kids will be having this argument about physical objects
And then we get into a whole new can of worms. One of the reasons that I get royally peeved with the downloading==theft argument is that theft, as defined in law, requires that someone be deprived of possession of their property. If I download a copy of a song, who have I deprived of property? We can get into the whole debate about notional lost revenue, but that's incredibly arguable and really detracts from the point that you still have your bits that assemble to make the song, and I also have some other bits that assemble to make the same song. We both have the song; nobody has been deprived of a song. This is as opposed to, say, my neighbour's car, which the law says can be stolen, because if I have my neighbour's car, my neighbour obviously doesn't.
Once you can copy physical property, everything changes. The law cannot cope with that notion as it is - that you can steal electricity required special provision in the law, because it is not governed by the physical laws of tangibles - never mind in a future when everything can be duplicated. Criminal law doesn't cover it, and shouldn't. Copyright law doesn't cover it, and can't without introducing some really nasty hooks. Trademark law kinda covers it, sorta, but only if you're selling duplicates of a design that's trademarked, like a Lamborghini. Patent law will doubtless cover the technology for creating duplicates, but that's not the same thing and, in any case, a patent only lasts for 17 years.We can't even deal reasonably and civilly with duplicating songs that retail for a buck. How will society cope with duplication of cars and houses and yachts that sell for millions?
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In The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson does a very good job of imagining what the electronic book of the future might look like. And it's still most decidedly an object.
Yes, but even a Kindle is still an object. What a Kindle most decidedly is not is vaguely book-like. That is the objection of Paul and Islander, and even myself to quite some degree. I like books. It will take the creation of something that is very much like what I just described before I would switch away from dead tree and ink, but such a creation is well inside the boundaries of science fact based on current technology.
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What mistakes did the movie and music industries make?
Fighting their customers. Suing their customers, in the case of the music industry. Refusing to release product that consumers want in the absence of supposedly-perfect protection against duplication in the case of the movie industry. They force people into downloading because they fail to deliver what is being sought.
Again and again you have demonstrated an unwillingness to believe that people will pay for products delivered digitally. I even presented you with an unequivocal example - iTunes - and still you persist with language and positions that predicate on the untenable premise of the digital consumer being only after products that are free. That is not the case. They take what is free because it's the only thing going, not because they don't want to pay. The controlling industries won't give people what they desire, so the consumer is forced to pursue other avenues. Any diminution of illicit downloading of music has zero to do with the lawsuits and everything to do with easy availability, at a reasonable price, of digitally-delivered music in convenient formats. That is what I mean by "the mistakes of the movie and music industries" - the attempt to achieve absolute control, rather than accepting that such control cannot be achieved and, instead, that it is better to take some revenue from an imperfect product than no revenue from a non-existent one. If people are already trading your works in digital form, is it not better to offer them something for which you can get money, even if it's not much money, than to throw your toys and not participate at all?
E-books may well cost a fraction of a cent if they are out of copyright and the text is readily available
No, in every case the production of an e-book costs a fraction of a cent. The content is expensive, the "book" is cheap.
And look up "electronic paper" before you start waffling on about the joys of a tangible object. It's not an e-book in the style of Kindle, but rather a paper substitute that displays whatever is required. If its apparent potential is realised, one minute the book (paperback or hardback, you decide) you're holding is the collected, annotated works of Shakespeare, the next it's Bronte, then Freud, and now it's from the top of the New York Times' latest best-seller list. Looks like a book, reads like a book, even feels pretty much like a book, but with all the benefits of digital distribution.
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[ah shit - dumb questions are now illegal]
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[dumb arses are now illegal]No, suspicious. It's still not illegal to be a dumbarse and/or ask dumb questions. Which is very fortunate for a great many first-year university students, and indeed for a great many members of the general population.
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People like reading and owning books, made from dead tree and obtainable from all good book shops. Authors like it that people like that.
Absolutely true, but also not in any way certain to remain absolutely true. It would be an enormous shame if the same mistakes of the movie and music industries were made by the book industry, but we are, sadly, seeing exactly those same mistakes being made with the Kindle. That bodes poorly for the future, especially since with the Kindle we're seeing attempts to restrict e-books to being a lesser object than a real book. Real books cost a lot of money to produce, e-books cost a fraction of a cent. Electronic paper is well on the way to being a reality, allowing the traditional appearance of the printed word with the convenience of digital transmission. Publishers would do well to consider a future where that is how books are consumed, instead of trying to fight against the shifting reality.
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Books currently don't seem to be on the path much at all
Largely because they've not been digitised until very recently, and there's still the BS format war going on with Kindle and every-other-man-and-his-dog's proprietary formats. Once there's a standardised format things will start to change. Google Books also alters the picture significantly, but is still too new for people to have worked out the hows and whys.