Summations Only

Why would the cinema operator pay for content he can get for free?

crashfrog writes:Nothing needs a "big company that people can't identify with."

I think we need to punish rights holders who opt to punish those who attempt to patronize artists.

Because we are talking about laws relating to piracy for personal use not for financial gain.

I addressed a question regarding what would happen if copyright were abolished.

Again, the point that you're ignoring is that you can't increase competition by erecting barriers to entry. That's completely backwards.

If the benefit isn't immediately and profitably obvious, then there's little reason to suspect that the market would be better off.

You're right for once...

Who wants to abolish copyright?

You've just done away with Hollywood and most of book publishing.

I'm missing a really big point somewhere. Artists have survived throughout history on patronage.

They're free to do whatever they like with their own copyright.

Instead I described a scenario in which competition actually would increase despite the fact that there was a barrier to entry.

And in my Google hypothetical, Google was quite surprised to find out that there was an actual advantage.

Do you see no advantages to society at all in having more than one solution to a problem.

crashfrog writes:Sure. Fuck 'em! Why does content have to come to us through the controlled bottleneck of a small number of elite tastemakers?

The question isn't what they're free to do, it's what they're asking the government to force me to do - for instance, to ensure that my own DNS servers (yeah... I have one) don't contain IP address resolution entries for any of a list of websites determined by the FTC, without review or opportunity for appeal, as linking to "infringing" content. What is the FTC's criteria for "infringement"? Somebody with an expensive suit comes in and says "my company holds this copyright, and this website is infringing."

Huntard writes: Look, I can repeat myself again, but until you show some evidence, I don't think there's a point to it. Please show your assertions to be the case, I tried to give you evidence of mine. (I showed you a person who got famous without any investment, and is now making money for a record company, I showed you that the most expensive movie ever made over here was a total success, and yet, all you do is assert that what I say cannot be the case).

Ok, another example, Esmee Denters is a Dutch singer who became famous because she herself placed videos of herself singing on youtube. Only after she got famous did she get picked up by a record company. Free content actually made her career, and people bought her CD, despite all of the material being available online for free. No money was spent by any company to make her famous. In fact, if SOPA had passed, stories like these would become impossible.

Before the film was released, the rights for distribution had been sold to distributors in 52 countries

Because of financing problems the filming did not start as planned in 2004 but was delayed until August 2005.[8][9] In this month it was announced that Black Book received about 2,000,000 support from the Netherlands Public Broadcasting, the CoBO Fund, and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.[10] There were also several foreign investors, which made the film a Belgian, British, and German coproduction. With a final estimated budget of 18,000,000 the film was the most expensive Dutch film ever, at the time of its release.[3]In October 2006 twelve crew members and businessmen started a lawsuit in which they demanded the bankruptcy of Zwartboek Productie B.V., the legal entity founded for the film. Some of them were already waiting for more than a year to get their money, in total tens of thousands of euros. Production company Fu Works settled the case and promised to pay the creditors.[11]

VII. Conclusion
We find that file sharing has no statistically significant effect on purchases of the average album in our sample. Moreover, the estimates are of rather modest size when compared to the drastic reduction in sales in the music industry. At most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction of this decline. This result is plausible given that movies, software, and video games are actively downloaded, and yet these industries have continued to grow since the advent of file sharing. While a full explanation for the recent decline in record sales are beyond the scope of this analysis, several plausible candidates exist. These alternative factors include poor macroeconomic conditions, a reduction in the number of album releases, growing competition from other forms of entertainment such as video games and DVDs (video game graphics have improved and the price of DVD players or movies have sharply fallen), a reduction in music variety stemming from the large consolidation in radio along with the rise of independent promoter fees to gain airplay, and possibly a consumer backlash against record industry tactics.26 It is also important to note that a similar drop in record sales occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that record sales in the 1990s may have been abnormally high as individuals replaced older formats with CDs (Liebowitz, 2003).
Our results can be considered in a broader context. A key question is the impact of file sharing (and weaker property rights for information goods) on societal welfare. To make such a calculation, we would need to know how the production of music responds to the presence of file sharing. Based on our results, we do not believe file sharing will have a significant effect on the supply of recorded music. Our argument is twofold. The business model of major labels relies heavily on a limited number of superstar albums. For these albums, we find that the impact of file sharing on sales is likely to be positive, leaving the ability of major labels to promote and develop talent intact. Our estimates indicate that less popular artists who sell few albums are most likely to be negatively affected by file sharing. (Note, however, that even for this group the estimated effect is statistically insignificant.) Even if this leads record labels to reduce compensation for less popular artists, it is not obvious this will influence music production. This is because the financial incentives for creating recorded music are quite weak. Few of the artists who create one of the roughly 30,000 albums released each year in the U.S. will make a living from their sales because only a few albums are ever profitable.27 In fact, only a small number of established acts receive contracts with royalty rates ensuring financial sufficiency while the remaining artists must rely on other sources of income like touring or other jobs (Albini, 1994; Passman, 2000). Because the economic rewards are concentrated at the top and probably fewer than one percent of acts ever reach this level (Ian, 2000), altering the payment rate should have very little influence on entry into popular music.If we are correct in arguing that downloading has little effect on the production of music, then file sharing probably increases aggregate welfare. Shifts from sales to downloads are simply transfers between firms and consumers. And while we have argued that file sharing imposes little dynamic cost in terms of future production, it has considerably increased the consumption of recorded music. File sharing lowers the price and allows an apparently large pool of individuals to enjoy music. The sheer magnitude of this activity, the billions of tracks which are downloaded each year, suggests the added social welfare from file sharing is likely to be quite high.27Major label releases are profitable only after they sell at least a half million copies, a level only 113 of their 6,455 new albums reached (Ordonez, 2002). 52 records account for 37% of the total sales volume (Ian, 2000). Twenty-five thousand new releases sold less than one thousand copies in 2002 (Seabrook, 2003).

It's not surprising that sales of goods fall when the same goods are available for free

Even after all that it doesn't seem as though it was a big commercial success. It cost 18m to make and despite being the biggest box office success in Dutch history it only took 6,953,118 gross (ie before costs and payments to rights holders) at the Dutch box office.International sales may have doubled that and sell through to video will have added more but it's not an obvious financial success - and this is the biggest and most successful movie the Dutch have ever made. It would have been utterly impossible to make without copyright protection.

caffeine writes:International sales "may" have doubled that? Holland is a tiny market, with a population smaller than the New York metropolitan area. It's international box office gross was more than 20 million Euros. Box office figures are also only a small part of the revenue stream for a film. A typical Hollywood film makes more on both DVD sales and on licencing for TV than it does at the cinema, so looking at the domestic gross doesn't tell us much about the overall financial success of a production.

jon writes: Obviously. But that only raises the question: Does the world need for-profit art?

The existence of for-profit art doesn't prevent the production of not for-profit art.