MPAA and RIAA studios, please take an example from the blackout of Wikipedia, Reddit, and several other sites planned for Wednesday.
Use these blackouts as an example for your own protest, and take a year off of doing any work to foster "content creation", and any of the other things that you do, so that the citizens of the United States can make an informed decision about how necessary SOPA and PIPA are. I am certain that no movies will be created, and absolutely no new music will be recorded without you. That'll teach us to not like your proposed legislation.
/s
Unfortunately your farmer example is flawed. Food is a necessity, not a luxury. Entertainment content is a luxury, and is (or at least should be) created not out of a desire to generate profit, but as a way to entertain, and provide enjoyment and relaxation, or out of a love for the medium or for sharing a particular story. Profit is a byproduct of people enjoying that content. In my mind, we have gotten away from content created for enjoyment of a story, and relaxation, and have transitioned to an unsustainable model where profit is the driver, rather than the sharing of a good story.
Historically we have had few people that can make a living as an entertainer, perhaps that's the norm, rather than the content bubble that we seem to be deflating from currently.
On a separate note, anytime i can buy an old record on clearance for $1, and get around 10 songs for my dollar, or I can buy one of the songs off of iTunes for $1, can you guess where I'm going to spend the dollar? To me, there's a disconnect there, that perhaps the music industry needs to consider...especially when it comes to monetizing back-catalog music.
Here is an idea. Instead of trying to sell single songs, or single dvds, they could come up with reasonably priced collections of media. An example would be the entire run of a television show that is no longer on the air.
The cost to create these collections is brought to near zero due the the ability of a computer to replicate the bits that make up the media in a digital format. The main cost would be digitizing the media, which is a one-time cost. Therefore nearly any amount of money they make is a profit.
One example that I would offer would be providing all episodes of a show like Family Matters, or Scooby Doo, for a price somewhere between 20 and 40 bucks.
This is something that I would pay for, as it would cost me a lot of time to go out and download all episodes of these shows, not to mention that the quality could vary widely.
I know this is strange, but maybe the content companies should consider selling all of their old media instead of locking it up in a vault somewhere, since it's pretty cheap to digitize it, and there's certainly a niche that would pay money for it.
Before you say that collections like this already exist, keep in mind that I suggested a reasonable price. I know that what is reasonable to me is different that what may be reasonable to you, however think of it this way: they can sell a lot of collections of a show to a lot of people for less money, and come out ahead, or continue offering incomplete collections (first season only, or what-have-you) for a huge amount of money, which few people will see value in.
Technology allows them to rapidly create copies with very little cost, they should take advantage of that technology, add value(such as not having to go search for good quality episodes of a show), and sell it.
I would like to know where all of you folks that say that Apple is a closed ecosystem and that's is just ok were when Microsoft was merely integrating their product (Internet Explorer) with their operating system (Windows).
To address my question, I truly know that you were screaming your heads off that it was an antitrust violation, even though other operating systems and browsers existed, because they were the PREVALENT operating system.
What many people are trying to point out to you, as you plug your ears and say "I'm not listening, I'm not listening", is that this is the same thing. iTunes is the PREVALENT music management and purchasing software on the market. Yes, there are others. The presence of other options was not enough to stop Microsoft from getting smacked down, so in an unbiased world, the same would happen to Apple.
The only real difference is that public sentiment is different towards Apple currently than it was towards Microsoft.
A Modest Proposal
MPAA and RIAA studios, please take an example from the blackout of Wikipedia, Reddit, and several other sites planned for Wednesday.
Use these blackouts as an example for your own protest, and take a year off of doing any work to foster "content creation", and any of the other things that you do, so that the citizens of the United States can make an informed decision about how necessary SOPA and PIPA are. I am certain that no movies will be created, and absolutely no new music will be recorded without you. That'll teach us to not like your proposed legislation.
/s
Re: Re: Nothing acttually costs anything, so...
Unfortunately your farmer example is flawed. Food is a necessity, not a luxury. Entertainment content is a luxury, and is (or at least should be) created not out of a desire to generate profit, but as a way to entertain, and provide enjoyment and relaxation, or out of a love for the medium or for sharing a particular story. Profit is a byproduct of people enjoying that content. In my mind, we have gotten away from content created for enjoyment of a story, and relaxation, and have transitioned to an unsustainable model where profit is the driver, rather than the sharing of a good story.
Historically we have had few people that can make a living as an entertainer, perhaps that's the norm, rather than the content bubble that we seem to be deflating from currently.
On a separate note, anytime i can buy an old record on clearance for $1, and get around 10 songs for my dollar, or I can buy one of the songs off of iTunes for $1, can you guess where I'm going to spend the dollar? To me, there's a disconnect there, that perhaps the music industry needs to consider...especially when it comes to monetizing back-catalog music.
Re:
Here is an idea. Instead of trying to sell single songs, or single dvds, they could come up with reasonably priced collections of media. An example would be the entire run of a television show that is no longer on the air.
The cost to create these collections is brought to near zero due the the ability of a computer to replicate the bits that make up the media in a digital format. The main cost would be digitizing the media, which is a one-time cost. Therefore nearly any amount of money they make is a profit.
One example that I would offer would be providing all episodes of a show like Family Matters, or Scooby Doo, for a price somewhere between 20 and 40 bucks.
This is something that I would pay for, as it would cost me a lot of time to go out and download all episodes of these shows, not to mention that the quality could vary widely.
I know this is strange, but maybe the content companies should consider selling all of their old media instead of locking it up in a vault somewhere, since it's pretty cheap to digitize it, and there's certainly a niche that would pay money for it.
Before you say that collections like this already exist, keep in mind that I suggested a reasonable price. I know that what is reasonable to me is different that what may be reasonable to you, however think of it this way: they can sell a lot of collections of a show to a lot of people for less money, and come out ahead, or continue offering incomplete collections (first season only, or what-have-you) for a huge amount of money, which few people will see value in.
Technology allows them to rapidly create copies with very little cost, they should take advantage of that technology, add value(such as not having to go search for good quality episodes of a show), and sell it.
Where were you all when IE was bundled?
I would like to know where all of you folks that say that Apple is a closed ecosystem and that's is just ok were when Microsoft was merely integrating their product (Internet Explorer) with their operating system (Windows).
To address my question, I truly know that you were screaming your heads off that it was an antitrust violation, even though other operating systems and browsers existed, because they were the PREVALENT operating system.
What many people are trying to point out to you, as you plug your ears and say "I'm not listening, I'm not listening", is that this is the same thing. iTunes is the PREVALENT music management and purchasing software on the market. Yes, there are others. The presence of other options was not enough to stop Microsoft from getting smacked down, so in an unbiased world, the same would happen to Apple.
The only real difference is that public sentiment is different towards Apple currently than it was towards Microsoft.
For those that asked about deregulation
This may provide a very little bit of insight with regards to deregulation:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a6M1QA55PB9Y&refer=home