You can consume as much media as you want for free: you can rent music, books, movies, and games at the library. But if you love it so much that want your own copy of it, shouldn't you show your appreciation to the artist by just buying it?

> Are you saying that because it's digital, it not longer has any value?

Well one might not go that far, but the marginal cost is zero.

digital copying is a perfectly competitive zero marginal cost game.

only immoral thieves IMHO are the monopolists who want to make society worse off by trying to enforce artificial and pointless barriers to that market.

It's insane how people somehow arrive at that point in their thinking.

This is a common misunderstanding of the payment dynamic. The reality is it is actually a power dynamic. I make something that you want and I can keep it from you until you pay me.. is more approximate to the truth.

there is no inherent value in work, but only in supply and demand. Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply. Un-natural limitations (social acceptability, guilt, lawsuits, criminalising, etc) are being attempted but it seems likely they will all fail eventually.

"You can consume as much media as you want for free"

The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons. If, on the other hand, they want to be stinking rich, or they want to bet big and spend hundreds of millions of hollywood dollars on expectation of a payout, they have to understand and manipulate that power dynamic. Just don't try and make out there is any kind of moral right to get paid.

That sort of presupposes that your wants should be satisfied as a matter of course, no? I have to agree with some of the posters above about the immaturity of this attitude. In the natural world, you get some things for free and you have to work for other things; eg you might find a coconut on the ground, but that's not guaranteed - chances are that you'll need to forage or hunt for your food most of the time. You can want the coconuts at the top of the tree to any degree imaginable, but your basic choices are to stay hungry or climb the tree. Is the tree exercising power over you by withholding the coconuts? Of course not. In the natural world, when you want something you frequently have to put your money where your mouth is - that is, expend some effort to get hold of it.

The actual power dynamic in the case of piracy is that any attempt at establishing a contractual relationship between producer and consumer can be easily undermined by a small number of people who are willing to break that contract by giving away copies for nothing while painting producers as morally deficient and undeserving of compensation.

Digital goods have demand, but no natural limitations in supply.

This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply. Just because the marginal cost of supply is zero does not mean there are no constraints on supply. You're equating non-substitutable creative goods with quite high costs of supply from the producer standpoint with fungible commodities in a marketplace of perfect competition.

The corollary to this of course is, artists can make as make media as they like, but to make a decent living from it they need to show appreciation and respect to their patrons.

So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked - you wish your consumption to be reflected back to you in heroic terms, because you place such a currency value upon your attention. Put another way, you consider the time invested in consumption of entertainment as a form of economic labor which is traded for the aesthetic pleasure (qua economic utility( that you hope to extract from the art work.

your example of the coconut is perfect in fact, it dehumanises or de-moralises the idea. the coconut evolved with its fruit/seed high up, hard to crack, heavy and slow germinating. however it came to be, it is resistant to birds eating it and germinates near the shoreline dispersed by the tides. other fruit evolved to be eaten and dispersed by birds. no morals, just different distribution methods. different power differential.

"This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply." no, there is a fixed cost of creation. supply is unlimited (virtually). the media industry got rich precisely due to the fact that a fixed cost of creation could scale up to massive increase in distribution virtually for free (at scale). and here we are only talking about that small percentage of artists who seek to leverage their fix cost of creation to make the same money time and time over. it is arbitrage on an artificially limited supply. now the industry is feeling the flipside of this 'free' distribution.

"So what you're saying is that you want to be entertained and have your ego stroked" no. but reading back, i see how you thought that. what i mean is that artists have to respect what consumers pressure points, and their understanding of value is and respond to that rather than to keep pushing shit uphill, so to speak. understand that perhaps the time is gone when an artist can receive 10x value from 1x work. because now to put that 1x work out to a market where the market decides whether it will pay or not completely changes the power dynamic. it forces the artist to foster a relationship with their patrons.

also, as an aside, i put forward a point of view about power dynamics in trade and about the non-existence of morality in this issue. i get the feeling that you are trying to moralise not only about the existence of piracy (which imho is in itself a profound misreading of reality) but about me, about which you know nothing. i find this vaguely offensive.

if you care to know, the existence of piracy, abundance of content, and the leverage of being one of thousands of eyeballs has allowed me to shift from being a powerless consumer to being a producer, and a patron, as i please. which is awesome.

This is a bit rich coming from someone dictating what artists need to do to please you as a consumer.

the power dynamic exists purely because 'want' is your weak point in a trading situation, and my ability to keep that from you is my strong point (my weak point is my need to eat).

The need to and the costs of production still exist even when the ability to recoup investment by controlling distribution does not.

"This is simply not true - there is a fixed cost of supply." no, there is a fixed cost of creation. supply is unlimited (virtually).

In economics there is supply and demand, and fixed costs and marginal costs (ie the cost to produce one more unit of a given product). Creation is not treated as a separate thing from supply, since it is a necessary precursor. Some goods are supplied in single quantities. Please don't lecture me about economics if you are not familiar with the basic terminology of the field.

i get the feeling that you are trying to moralise not only about the existence of piracy (which imho is in itself a profound misreading of reality) but about me, about which you know nothing. i find this vaguely offensive.

Well, now you know how I feel about being told that because artists and publishers of the past have made lots of money from industrialized distribution, artists of today should not expect to get paid for supplying a product the market wants, which is a rather annoying fallacy of composition. Just because the industry has done well overall does not mean that everyone has been receiving '10x value from 1x work,' as you put it. The majority of people in the film industry work on fixed pay scales and see little or no residual income.

if you care to know, the existence of piracy, abundance of content, and the leverage of being one of thousands of eyeballs has allowed me to shift from being a powerless consumer to being a producer, and a patron, as i please. which is awesome.

In what sense do you consider yourself a producer?

"This is a bit rich" but it is still not what i am saying. its amoral, not moral/immoral!

"The need to and the costs of production.." but that is the thing, if there is no market for it then you can't do shit. if the market is not willing to pay for the costs of production, you push the cost of production down, find another way to push costs up, or you just starve. this is not me telling you this. this is just how it is for everyone.

"In economics there is supply and demand.." fair enough, i see we are saying the same thing here. tbh i just read your sentence as gibberish to impress how much you knew about economics. i understand the meaning if not the terminology, no need to be an arse.

"Well, now you know how I feel.." to be fair, i knew how you felt. i was just trying to disabuse you of the notion that there is anything fair about work and pay. it is power pure and simple. that is, in fact, why some people get the 10x income, and some do the 1x work.

"In what sense do you consider yourself a producer?" i am sorry, but i cannot help but read that as being a bit fucking condescending. so finding it difficult, but giving you the benefit of doubt, perhaps you are asking if i am a big p Producer? no. i am a designer. 1 x work for slightly less than 1x pay.. as it happens.

But the thing is, they're not. Distributors provide a lot of liquidity and a lot of their bets don't pay off. Even the big studios only make profit margins on the order of 5-7%. Besides liquidity, the distribution process itself involves significant logistical complexity; it essentially involves doing multiple product launches on different scales almost every week of the year.

"In what sense do you consider yourself a producer?" i am sorry, but i cannot help but read that as being a bit fucking condescending.

It's just a straight question, because I don't understand what your relationship to the industry is, if any. I do work in film productionand post-production, usually recording sound on sets or editing and supervising other editors in post production.

Your aunt's pine cone example is stupid because that's a trivial task. Making a movie or an album is not a trivial task, so you can't really compare.

If you aunt built homes, and then people just moved into them without paying for them, I'm no sure you'd be telling the same story.

No one is asking to be paid simply for creating something, they are asking to be paid when people consume that creation, when they benefit/enjoy/use it.

I'm not sure you get that.

If my aunt builds a home, she can lock that shit down and not give the keys until you pay. Heck in some states she can kill you if you break in. And yes, same story. She can charge 50 milliion for a 10x10 foot box. Doesn't mean she deserves it does it? Also, even if price is "reasonable", my point does not change.

I totally understand wanting to be paid, I really do. I want to be paid for everything I do too. Not likely though.

The market is trying to figure out the value of movies/music/digital goods. Piracy is part of that. Maybe one day it will stop (figure out how to lock that down so can't be shared). Maybe it's here forever (cat-and-mouse continues, lawyers continue to sue individuals). In either case, the market rate is what people are willing to pay in the aggregate.

I have yet to hear an explanation or argument that suggests an inherent moral right for a creator to control their work once it has been shared, and I have heard several very good ones that "Copying is not Stealing" and that we have a right to share, consume, and remix ideas and media that have come into our possession.

Ideas are not material, and equating theft, which deprives the rightful owner of all use of their property, and copying, which violates a state granted monopoly, is an egregious false equivalence. When someone moves into the home of our hypothetical aunt has built she can no longer live there, lease the property, or sell it, she is deprived of the use of a specific physical thing.

I am very sympathetic to the need for creators to make a living, and I am aware that there is probably some level of injustice in copying and enjoying their work without paying them. It seems to me that the loudest complainers have been producers and studios. The middle men extracting rent from the copy machines artists needed to be able to sell their work. Those who make media and sell it directly to the public, or sell tickets to live performances still seem to make a decent living, and absent those gatekeepers I can enjoy a much wider variety of music than my parents did at my age.

Yes there is a small harm when artists are not paid, but it is much less than the continual erosion of our right to own things we have bought, and to participate in our own culture

Completely ignoring the legal aspect for a moment, the thing about respect for rights is a two way street. Most of the media companies out there have literally none for their audience. DRM rootkits, draconian terms, absurd prices, the lot. Why should I have the slightest bit of respect for someone that has no respect for me?

90% of what publishers do is services and brokerage. Your imagination is not at all anchored in reality.

To summarize my thoughts from other comments here, I'm unconvinced that creators have a moral right to control the ways people use something that they've put out there, and I have a pretty strong idea(which given this comment and a few more of yours elsewhere I seem to need to review), that Publishers(which includes Studios, Labels, Producers & so on), add very little value, which I agree is in marketing and other services.

My impression was that what a Publisher does is largely extract rent from various investments they have made in various kinds of connections, or physical facilities, and that they maintain this position by excluding people who don't buy into their particular way of doing things. While this isn't "bad" or "wrong", that impression makes it pretty difficult to sympathize with what I perceive to be a sudden increase of market discipline and pressure for them.

Here's a few book links that would give you a good overview: http://www.amazon.com/Open-Wide-Hollywood-National-Obsession... << for a lookat the work of marketing big blockbuster films

http://www.amazon.com/Feature-Film-Distribution-Deal-Importa... << very dated in respects of technical factors, but a good guide to the hard-nosed world of distribution negotiations

http://www.amazon.com/The-Producers-Business-Handbook-Balanc... << anything from Focal press is pretty good quality-wise

In a nutshell, it works like this: producer commissions or finds a great script, makes a lot of phone calls, tries to get talented actors/directors involved by signing loose contractual obligations ('letters of intent' to participate if production elements and finace meet certain targets by certain dates), then tries to raise money by pitching the 'package' of great script + bankable talent. Producers partner with production companies who partner with studios; the production company typically finances the creation of the film and the studio typically finances commercial launch (as well as some internally produced projects). Less popular fare is often sold in advance to international distributors on the strength of the package in order to underwrite the production finance, more popular stuff is sold as a function of its box-office performance.

Studios quapublishers do extract rents, but the packaging, production, and launch of a film is a combination of very high-risk financing, very aggressive contractual negotations, and huge logistical problems, and it's hyper-meritocratic for all but the very top executives (ie the heads of the studio conglomerates, who are running multibillion corporations doing everything from films to theme parks to action figures to...).

what I perceive to be a sudden increase of market discipline and pressure for them

Well let's face it, producers of other goods and services don't have to deal with zero marginal cost piracy - of course they have a lot of competition but manufacturing or delivering a good or service in most fields has a bunch of minimal physical costs, compared to a perfect digital copy that can be produced for essentially $0.

Besides that, they're already subject to a great deal of market discipline - the film market is massively, massively competitive. think about it, there are hundreds of new products launched every year and they're largely judged on the first few weeks of their sales performance. Take a look at this: http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?page=1&view=releaseda...

Out of 665 films released in 2012 you'll recognize most of the top 100 from seeing them advertised, maybe 10 or 20 of the second 200, and virtually none of the other 465. A few make megabucks, the top 100 all make at least $25 million (so more likely than not they broke even or better), but outside the top 200 very few make even $1 million (that's revenue, not profit). I mention this price point because $1m is about the minimum production budget to get a theatrical release in the first place. If your film cost less than that then it's not happening without very hefty amounts of both talent and luck. About half of films don't even break $100,000 in revenue; the theatrical release is to make them eligible for award nominations and establish a minimum quality threshold to attract the attention of a secondary (video, streaming, maybe TV) market distributor.

Most films, like 80% or more, lose money. It's not necessarily because they're crap (although many of them are), but often they have limited or specialist appeal. Most distribution deals are for packages of films, in which the revenue from a marketable film outweighs the inevitable losses made by other films in the package, but helps to recoup their production costs. Yes, this is a drag on the economic performance of the more marketable films, but everyone accepts it because if every film had to be sold on its individual merits most would never succeed and fr fewer films would get made, which would significantly raise the barriers to entry (already quite high) and significantly reduce the stream of incoming new talent.

It's a much more complex ecosystem than it might appear from the outside, and much more driven by love of the product that might at first be apparent. To characterize the industry by the negative aspects of big players like Disney, sony etc. is like saying retail is bad because you dislike Walmart or Amazon, or software is bad because you don't like Microsoft or Electronic Arts.

To characterize the industry by the negative aspects of big players like Disney, sony etc. is like saying retail is bad because you dislike Walmart or Amazon, or software is bad because you don't like Microsoft or Electronic Arts.

I try hard not to do this.My impressions were formed from film class I took in high school. It was a really nice film class funded by Spielberg, who sent an employee out monthly to teach us things and help us problem solve issues on our films. There was lots of Q & A, and several frank discussions about funding and what it would require to make our films eligible for sundance or other festivals. I was assuming that gave me more insight into the middle of the pack than I actually have, and it was probably before the impact of illegal sharing had fully shaken out.