Investors Recognizing How ProIP Is Bad For The Entertainment Industry

from the it's-not-a-bad-thing dept

Kevin Stapp writes in to point out an interesting article over at the Motley Fool, where the author, Anders Bylund, points out why the new ProIP law is bad for the big entertainment companies from the perspective of an investor in those companies. Basically, he recognizes what some of us have been saying for years. If you rely on stronger copyright as a crutch to protect an old business model, you're much slower to adopt newer business models that can greatly increase the size of your market. In other words, by denying the growth potential of infinite goods, you shrink the potential size of your market, and that's bad for the company and bad for investors:

As much as I love my Walt Disney investment and the great entertainment the company has created over the years, it's also part of a boneheaded industry that can't deal with the digital revolution.... Disney, Warner Music, and their colleagues could handle rampant piracy in a much more delicate manner and turn today's massive problem into free distribution and dirt cheap marketing. Yes, there are ways to make money when others copy your dearly beloved content for free. The PRO-IP Act is a step in exactly the wrong direction, though.

Exactly. And this reinforces the point that it's a mistake to keep trying to find the right "balance" between content producers and content consumers. There's no need for a balance if the content producers adopt business models that both expand their market (by properly defining the market) and leave consumers free to share and promote the content in a way that actually helps the bottom line of the content producer. It's quite rare to see short-term investor-types recognize such strategies, so it's quite interesting to see a discussion like this on a mainstream site like the Motley Fool. Hopefully others will start recognizing this reality soon as well.

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Groups Urge Senate Not To Turn The Justice Department Into Hollywood's Private Police Force

from the bad,-bad,-bad-ideas dept

As we noted earlier this summer, Senator Patrick Leahy had introduced a companion bill to the House's dreadful Pro-IP bill, except that Leahy's bill went further. Beyond just adding a "Copyright Czar" position to the White House, it would authorize the Justice Department to start prosecuting civil copyright infringement lawsuits. In other words, it would have the government act as the private police for of the entertainment industry. This is scary stuff. Beyond already handing out unnecessary gov't granted monopolies, the gov't would now be using taxpayer money to settle business disputes from an industry that was only in trouble because it stubbornly refused to update its business model.

It's difficult to see why taxpayers should be paying FBI agents to protect one industry's obsolete business model.

A bunch of special interest groups made that argument to Senators this week, noting that it was a pure gift to Hollywood -- pointing out that all of the companies and groups in the industry already have their own enforcement arms, and it made little sense to have the FBI take part in private business disputes. Hopefully, there are still enough Senators who haven't been convinced by the propaganda provided by the entertainment industry on this issue to recognize what's actually at stake here.

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