Today’s news carries a story about the motion picture industry’s seemingly intractable difficulties with illegal file-sharing. This is the same affliction that brought down the record business (and forced your humble correspondent to abdicate his career as a big-shot recording engineer and get a real job), although for the movie industry it is perhaps even more worrisome, as the cost of high-end movie-making has always been higher than that of record-making — more so now, perhaps, than ever.
A lot of clever people have tried to solve this problem, but so far without success; the real problem is that these industries have gone from producing easily protected physical objects (LPs, reels of film) to producing weightless and infinitely fungible packets of information. The only hope (and it is a faint and most likely futile one) lies not with technological advances, but moral and social change — as expressed, in the item linked above, by the director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America, one John Malcolm:
If a person is a true movie lover, they will want to respect the art, the artists and the countless people behind the scenes who make the magic happen, Malcolm said.
And no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. I used to be one of the people who “make the magic happen” myself; now I’m writing code for a living. If this forlorn hope is what the industry is counting on, they’d better brace for impact.
5 Comments
Maybe as “movie stars” become more fungible, and the story once again becomes the star, the price of movies will return to affordability and the universe will be right again. for now I for one will not be party to piracy, there is two much free nad better stuff out there.
I must admit to some ambivalence about all this. I certainly want creative people to be able to support their creativity, and I don’t want them to have to resort to “day jobs” in order to pull that off. But I also believe that the idea of “intellectual property” qualifies as a species of “nonsense on stilts.” Some other approach is needed, though what form it might take I can’t tell.
That’s about the way I see it too, Bob. It’s a puzzling problem.
Illegal downloading didn’t kill the record companies. Greed did. And the pirating was a direct response to that. It’s unfortunate, but there it is. And now that the pirates are comfortable with theft, they have expanded to movies. They are anti-social self-defeating idiots, to be sure, but they are the spawn of record company’s greed..a result and not the cause of that industy’s unparalleled greed.
Hi DSRL,
I’d be the last to deny that the record companies were greedy and bloated, but when everyone everywhere can suddenly get your product free of charge, your business will suffer. And suffer it did.
The record companies were greedy all along (though I disagree that their greed was “unparalleled” – it was just ordinary large-scale private-enterprise greed, as in the movie business, the oil business, etc.). Surely you don’t think it was merely a coincidence that they did so well for so many years, then collapsed just as file-sharing came along.
It seems to me that you are simply saying they deserved it.