Just don’t mind the curse word’s please 🙂

Sam, your post was expressed extremely well. With that said I don’t think you have taken into account the advance in technology or the shift in thinking about digital content. This is a classic example of square peg and round hole.

Q: Should people have to pay for digital content?
A: YES!!!

Now comes the problem. Where to set the price point? The music and movie industries want that price to be the same as it has always been and that just isn’t realistic.

The web is just too difficult for the RIAA / MPAA to grasp. It’s been stated here several times that the price for one song is just way too high. The better business model would be one that capitalizes on an extremely high volume of micropayments.

I’ve personally thought about paying for music online and its the price point that always makes the decision for me. Why pay $1 for some thing I can download for free? I know the argument comes back that its illegal. Just like travelling over the speed limit is illegal, but if all traffic is moving over
the speed limit, no one gets stopped. Maybe if the price was set to something like $.10 or $.05 it would be so low that a majority of people would use such a service and avoid Limewire and other P2P apps just because the price point is low enough to override the risk of penalties for illegal downloading.

This is all about value. Music is no longer scarce nor valuable as record execs would like to believe.

I think it’s at this point that I should remind all the people that believe that the Music and Movie industries are being victimized, that previous changes in format have always benefitted those industries. Did they offer their loyal customers a discount on content that had already been purchased? If I owned vinyl and needed to buy a cassette and then a CD, shouldn’t I have only needed to pay a small fee for the materials, since I had already purchased the content? Did anyone even bother to ask or try that business model?

The digital age is removing barriers to recording music and making movies and opening new avenues of distribution, in addition to making “piracy” so easy.

Whether you like Mike’s posts or not, you have to recognize that technology has advanced to the point that the old business models are not viable. That doesn’t mean that piracy will win, but it does mean that someone will innovate a business model that will cripple the current leaders.

Well, I guess I’m in a mood to feed the trolls today…

The criticisms here of Barack Obama, i.e.that he has failed to bring the change he promised, seem off the mark to me.

Obama campaigned to promote an open internet; to encourage diversity of media ownership; to safeguard the right to privacy; and to open up IP departments (e.g. patent offices) to the public. All of the examples you just blockquoted are 100% in the opposite direction.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/index_campaign.php

Where he does come down on the side of the RIAA and MPAA is on counterfeiting. But counterfeiting is completely different than filesharing, and conflating the two is disingenuous and insulting.

For about an unfettered decade the intent of privacy law has been demeaned to conceal rampant illegal online activity of all kinds,

Privacy laws have been around for a lot longer than an “unfettered decade,” whatever that is. The “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide” argument has been around for centuries, and there’s a reason it’s considered an excuse for totalitarianism.

and rights holders have struggled trying to protect their rightful intellectual property ownership

Nobody has a “right” to intellectual property, because IP is not really “property.” Ideas belongs to everyone equally, and it is the IP owners who are denying “ownership.” The only reason IP laws exist is to provide an incentive to produce works, for the exclusive purpose of growing the public domain. That incentive is given by the public, and may be taken away by the public; it is not a “right” like free speech is a “right.”

This is not just my opinion; it is the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, the former patent officer who wrote the Constitutional article that you are demeaning.

Industry must adapt to shifts in product format, true, but no business should be forced to adapt to a relatively new form and entirely new scale of digital theft, “theft” being the term used by the Justice Department and courts and governments the world over.

It’s not a matter of being “forced” to adapt. As far as I know, nobody in government has ever arrested copyright holders for not adapting enough. You can adapt, and maybe succeed; or you can not adapt, and likely fail.

Every technological innovation (VCR’s, cassettes, radio, etc) has been viewed by copyright conglomerates as a “relatively new form and entirely new scale” of “theft.” Until they realized that this “theft” is really just another opportunity for promotion or profit.

If government officials are using the word “theft” (and many aren’t), they’re using it wrong.

Mike’s readers inhabit the leading radical fringe of belief that digital rights holders must simply surrender their work to this free for all, and relinquish a price-for-value marketplace no less fair but more difficult to enforce in the digital domain.

Nice straw man you’ve built there, buddy. All Mike’s ever done is point out that the market has changed, so “price-for-value” has changed as well.

But let’s turn this around: You’re defending the notion that the government must take away the public’s rights, at the behest of a financial cabal, to defend “rights” that cabal didn’t have in the first place. Who, exactly, is inhabiting a “radical fringe of belief?”

Moreover, the sensible majority still sees no valid reason why a new format should destroy price because mere copies are virtually free, ignoring the real world costs associated with creating one of the finest catalogs of entertainment the world has ever known.

Completely ignoring that the fact that for decades, the majority of people got their music and TV for free, and the MPAA and RIAA still made obscene profits. Or that the “real world costs” are shouldered (in the case of music) by the artists, not the copyright holders. Or that these costs are decreasing exponentially because of technology. Or that despite your worries, more “entertainment” is being produced now than ever in the history of mankind. (I won’t comment on “quality,” since that’s a separate argument – but if you really did value quality, you probably wouldn’t call it mere “entertainment.”)

I don’t think the majority actually believes what you think. But perhaps they’re just not “sensible” to you.

Digital product won’t be “free” forever just because current conditions facilitate infringement.

Well, the entire purpose of the Internet is to facilitate the free exchange of data in a decentralized manner. So these “conditions” will be current until we get rid of the Internet. That’s not going to happen soon, and do you really think it should?

I have mixed feelings about Obama

If there is one thing I agree with you about, it’s that you can’t pin this all on Obama. Mostly it’s Biden (he has a long history of being anti-democracy in regards to technology). But this is one issue where Democrats and Republicans are both in the back pockets of rich but outdated corporations.