Piracy

[Angellis_ater]

Regarding the statement "it's impossible to compete with free" I give you ... "bottled water". Water, free for everyone made into anything from a fashion-statement or a way of life.

For more on "free" might I suggest reading Chris Anderson or Kevin Kelly? The Technium: Better Than Free <- this is worthwhile reading for those of us preparing for the future.

 

[Felon]

I haven't read the whole thread, but does anyone remember a mere year ago when WotC reps said that there would some way for people who bought the core books to automatically get access to online digital versions? Man, I know that ain't a false memory.

 

[grickherder]

I'm one of the pirate everything people. If there's something I'm interested in (D&D, a TV series, a certain band) I download everything associated with it.

Why? To see what I want to buy. And I do. Torrent sites are as easy to use or easier than any pay-for site. I can get the latest PDF of a D&D book way more painlessly through a torrent site than say RPGnow.com.

Then I assess what I've downloaded. It goes into one of the following categories:

1) It sucks, delete it.
2) It's good, but not awesome, buy the PDF/mp3/mp4.
3) It's good, get a hard copy/DVD/CD at the local store.

So what would change for me if everything was available for free from an easy to use distribution system?

Nothing, I'm already there.

 

[Fenes]

How would your media purchasing behavior change if there were some service, say, something as user friendly and convenient as iTunes, that offered free and legal e-books, movies, and music?

Just as user friendly and convenient as iTunes, but totally free and legal.

I'd buy more of those ebooks, and less of paper books. I do not consider the itunes really userfriendly though. What I want is a service where I do not have to install anything, and get PDFs. Not some secure reader stuff.

 

[Felon]

How would your media purchasing behavior change if there were some service, say, something as user friendly and convenient as iTunes, that offered free and legal e-books, movies, and music?

Just as user friendly and convenient as iTunes, but totally free and legal.

Well, I frequent Hulu often enough, so I'm game, but I don't mind ads to the degree other folks do. Those Philly Cream Cheese commercials sure did the trick.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Piracy is a non-issue. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Baen Free Library

 

[Krensky]

It seems people here seem afraid of a public/state model.

Mainly because every time it's occurred in the past few hundred years it's been a bad thing.

Socialist realism, Nazi propaganda films, the Stationer's Company.

Heck, let's actually look at the Stationer's Company, as that was what lead to the creation of copyright in the first place. It used to be in England that if your wrote a book you had two choices. You could make manuscripts (this was before the printing press) on your own and give them away, or you could sell the book to the Stationers Company and go write something else while they copied it and sold the copies and kept all the money. When the printing press came along, nothing changed, except that the Company made more money because printing was cheaper the copying, and printing was far faster.

This, combined with a few short stints as the Crown's censor, led to the Statute of Anne which granted the sole right to copy a work to the author for a period of 14 years. Copyright came into existence to allow authors to get paid for their work, rather then having to sell it to a government monopoly for a one time fee and then starve while they became rich off it.

 

[Chaos Disciple]

What do you suggest the alternative to be? It still requires the same amount of work and time on the artist's part, no matter what technology has done to the end product.

Well, I suspect the alternative is to stop working becuase nobody is going to pay you for it.

So either artists get paid for their work--regardless of whether it takes "physical form" or "just data"--or every art-based industry, from writing to music to art, eventually fades from society as anything more than a rare curiosity. In the long-term, there's not really a middle ground.

Im pretty sure the art-based industries will soon be obsolete. Though, Im hopeful that talented people who create, and share art for personal pleasure will continue to do so. Ofcourse with out the incentive of a pay check many people will pursue other careers, and this would reduce the amount of art created, but would likely improve the overall quality of what remains.

 

[Aus_Snow]

I haven't read the whole thread, but does anyone remember a mere year ago when WotC reps said that there would some way for people who bought the core books to automatically get access to online digital versions? Man, I know that ain't a false memory.

Yes, 'for the price of a cup of coffee'.

It never ends, so it seems.

 

[Mouseferatu]

but would likely improve the overall quality of what remains.

Not even remotely. Despite what lots of people like to think, people who create art "purely for love" aren't inherently better at it than anyone else. In fact, the opposite is arguably true at least in the long run, since they don't have the same financial incentive to improve.