Trade secrets are different than patents. A person can be sued as an infringer of a patent without knowing about the patent, and without copying and without any relationship to the owner of the IP. That's why there can be a patent "troll" and why the rights are more narrowly circumscribed. To violate a trade secret, you have to have a relationship that you knowingly breach. So there is little need to define precisely the IP - it's enough that you knew it was secret and violated the trust.
As to the "why" IP supports not just creation but also investment. Coca-Cola has built a large business on that trade secret. If everyone could sell Coca-Cola, Coca-cola would have little incentive to invest in distribution, marketing, etc. - so the trade secret generates economic activity that creates jobs. The trade secret doesn't prevent other people from inventing their own soft drinks - they could even sell an identical drink as long as they come up with the formula themselves. So trade secrets have a limited negative effect on competition and are generally thought to be pro-competitive and benefit consumers.
The argument for why this is bad, is that it harms the people who put in the effort to develop the technology. Here that is Google. It creates an incentive to sit back passively and just steal someone else's investment. So that is bad from a societal point of view - we WANT people to make that initial investment. That's the core goal of IP.
You always make the "well Google still has the stuff, so what have they stolen" argument. It's bogus because it is way too narrow. You've taken a "non-rivalrous good" description and planted it on IP. If people sneak into a theater into an empty seat, if they take a college course without paying tuition, if they free-ride on someone's hard work, they are hurting the social compact that these are things that cost money, and there is an expectation that the people who benefit will pay whatever is being charged for them (or, in the case of Google, the company that made the investment will have the opportunity to be the one who reaps the rewards). Competition is great - but do it fairly, invest the money, innovate - don't steal.
This is a totally bogus argument - it essentially argues against copyright law, not least cost avoider. (By the way, there is lots of collateral damage from stuff like rules against asbestos - but congress has made the judgment that the benefit to public safety outweighs other benefits, like low cost fire prevention). The fact that you're protecting someone else is why you need rules of liability law at all. Otherwise, you're just protecting yourself and you don't need the law to do the cost benefit. On the other hand, driving carefully saves pedestrians who didn't hurt anyone and it's lower cost to ask drivers to be careful than to protect every pedestrian with concrete suits. Copyright owners don't benefit from infringement - they are innocent bystanders getting hurt by it. In contrast, service providers do benefit. In some cases, you might be right that they aren't least cost avoiders, but in some cases they are. And that's the right inquiry to make in each case, not the argument that even if they can avoid infringement, they shouldn't.
Mike - their brief does a lot of demolishing if the facts were true, and if Viacom's position was the position that they characterized it as. In fact, Google and Youtube decided not to even test filtering in early 2006, and then decided to filter ONLY for people who they had a business deal with. All the dissembling and misstatements aside (you should look at the actual emails, rather than just Google's distortions) - those facts are really uncontroverted. Viacom's not asking for perfection, instead it is invoking the perfectly reasonable rules of Grokster (and actually supported by Tiffany's) that you don't get a defense to the extent you willfully blind yourself to the facts. "Willful blindness is knowledge in copyright, as it is in the law generally" - Judge Posner
Since when are piracy and creativity antithetical? This is wonderful stuff, and very creative. The new creativity is copyrightable - and Kutiman ought to be able to decide how his new works are exploited.
People lose sight of the fact that whether you infringe someone elses work is different than whether what you create is original for copyright.
I could create a copyrightable book of other people's photos - but would still need rights to the pictures.
In this case, these uses seem pretty clearly fair uses - but if he was going to make a significant commercial use of his works, he'd probably want to obtain some clearances. At the same time, no one could use his NEW work without his permission. that said, by posting it on Youtube, he's probably granted his permission.
Since when are piracy and creativity antithetical? This is wonderful stuff, and very creative. The new creativity is copyrightable - and Kutiman ought to be able to decide how his new works are exploited.
People lose sight of the fact that whether you infringe someone elses work is different than whether what you create is original for copyright.
I could create a copyrightable book of other people's photos - but would still need rights to the pictures.
In this case, these uses seem pretty clearly fair uses - but if he was going to make a significant commercial use of his works, he'd probably want to obtain some clearances. At the same time, no one could use his NEW work without his permission. that said, by posting it on Youtube, he's probably granted his permission.
The logical flaw in your argument is that one is legitimate progress and the other is theft. It may or may not be true that online kills the theatrical experience - but that is not really a policy issue, it's a market one. The Kindle is killing bookstores and I wish it wouldn't - but the market is speaking. Theft, on the other hand, undermines markets. If no one liked to watch movies - than the woman losing her job has lost it to progress. But if everyone likes movies - they just like to steal them - then they are actually undermining the production of what it is they like to watch. Comparing legitimate innovation with theft - THAT is a propoganda campaign.
Really? All property law is a construct of the law. It's a bundle of rights granted to you that are respected by government and other citizens. No property - no freedom really because the system devolves to one purely of power.
"intellectual property" is hundreds of years old and the term piracy - as applied to IP - dates to the 17th century.
The law - which respects property rights - has evolved in copyright from at least the Statute of Anne in the 18th Century, through Article I section 8 of the constitution (which calls out intellectual property as a specific power granted to congress), through numerous revisions of copyright and patent law - all of which were deemed important enough to protect.
Freedom at the expense of other's rights is not freedom. Physical property limits your ability to go into your neighbors house and take their stuff. Other laws prevent you from maiming them or driving drunk and putting others at risk. So all laws limit freedom in some fashion, right? So yes, copyright does limit freedom in some sense of the word - as every rigth does. But it protects freedom at the same time - freedom not to have people take what you create without your permission.
So what part of history and the law are you referring to?
Its hard to argue when you disagree about basic premises. Copyright is a property right and markets are based on teh exchange of property.
"Scarcity" is the basis for markets - when something is infinite, the price is zero. The fact that IP is a "nonrivalrous good" is a red herring. Intellectual property often has zero marginal cost, yet total costs can be quite large - whether the cost of developing a product (e.g., Microsoft Windows) or a copyrighted work (e.g., Iron Man 2). What IP does is create a market for the work - the creator can decide how to price and market the work or invention and consumers or intermediaries decide whether to buy it. If the market is competitive - which many of these markets are - and the markets work, then demand (consumers) and supply (creators) come into balance.
You propose abolishing the market for intellectual property works by decreeing that they all are in the public domain. Under such a theory, an otherwise large initial investment simply can't be recovered - cost goes to marginal cost of the medium (transmission or a cd, for example) - So why invest? I thought public or common ownership of property was precisely what command economies like the soviet union were trying to do.
It's often that we hear that people should move to new business models. Do you have any in mind? Would you like to invest in a movie and distribute it without copyright to see what happens? Musicians have tried it and been largely disappointed. Love to see the studies - because the concepts seem entirely divorced from actual experience or economic logic. My example is a fair one - if you agree that content creators are entitled to be paid for their works, why should they depend on volunteers to pay for it? No other part of the economy works that way.
It is TRUE that widespread distribution of all or part of a work can be promotional. People ship samples all the time. But I believe the best result is achieved when the copyright owner can decide what in the promotional self-interest
And it is unfair how you group the world into copyright maximalists and minimalists. The extent of copyright (term, fair use) is really a different axis than protection of copyrighted works (e.g., allowing the owner to protect the making of an exact copy for commercial gain). Is your beef with too extensive rights - because we have much in common there - or in enforcement of constrained ones?
and by the way you didn't call them stupid. you called them clueless.
This is the kind of goofy post that BestNetTech constantly passes for analysis in IP.
First - the arrogant policy maker problem: I don't understand it therefore everyone else is stupid. Sure - large economic interests, filled with experienced business people - don't know what's in their own best interests - but government, law professors and lobbyists do? Markets, which are supported by private property, are proven to be smarter than nearly any a priori attempt to tinker, design, or reorder them. Compare the post-world war ii russian economy with the american one. Markets are democratic trust individuals to look out for their own self-interests. Give me a property right and i'll fix my house - take it away and the neighbors might decide that we're all better off if they walk across my lawn and peek into my bedroom. The anticopyright movement thinks record company executives are stupid. I assure you - they are not.
Second - the "it follows, therefore it was caused by" fallacy. innovation (by what measure?) was down, so greater IP must be responsible. How about weak economy? How about increased piracy? How about a ton of things we haven't even analyzed. I got out of bed and then the sun came up. Definitely my getting out of bed caused the earth to revolve.
Third - the conflation of copyright with patent. COPYRIGHT DOES NOT PROTECT IDEAS. Read Section 102(b) of the copyright act. It protects expression. The antiproperty movement wants to conflate them so they can take patent concepts and criticize copyright. Patent is different - and complicated - but the "innovation" criticisms simply don't apply to copyright. If you want people to spend their days and nights doing analysis, criticism, journalism and making art - then they need a way to get paid. How about if we told policymakers that they should work for free, and then, at the end of the session, we'll take up a collection and see if they did anything worthwhile that we feel like paying for (and not free-riding on).
There was a post last week that said cited a paper that claimed that even though IP rights had increased, investment in IP creation had gone down. The authors - Harvard professors - cited copyright term extension for the proposition that IP rights had increased. This is the weatherman who is predicting a snowstorm when its 100 degrees outside. Piracy is rampant! Maybe there's a stronger connection with that than copyright term? Read and think about the paper before you cite it as conclusive proof!
This first amendment thing is the latest attempt to insert false information into the debate. The way takedowns work, you send a notice, the individual poster gets notified, if they object, the clip is reposted unless the copyright owner sues and wins. So yes, there's lots of due process.
And, as the supreme court noted, it's entirely impossible to sue every infringer (and BestNetTech would be first to complain if copyright owners tried).
And, no, takedowns don't work. Just today, YT announced an unindexed section of the site. Add to that private sections and the overwhelming of the site with copyrighted stuff whenever something is hot, and it is impossible to use the takedown process to limit infringement.
And, no, just giving up isn't the answer. the right of creators and, yes, consumers, to participate in lawful business models without interference of theft is way, way too important.
well reportedly it's 200 clips out of 63,000. And last I checked Google was engaged in the search business. Maybe they could tell on a few of the other 62,800? Or maybe they decided they wanted to build a huge video business and conveniently claim that they were "shocked, shocked to find that piracy was going on"? It's pretty interesting that there was no porn, or other offensive stuff, etc. etc.
The fair use defense to copyright is available equally for positive and negative criticism. ("Criticism" doesn't mean that it has to be negative. A positive review is protected equally.) There are several fair use factors in the law, and they are listed (and explained a bit) here. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
Also check out wikipedia's entry on fair use - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
where there is a lot of useful information
From a copyright law perspective, the issue is whether more of the work is used than is needed for the critique. Once you fail fair use, though, it's up to the copyright owner to decide whether the work goes forward. That said, many fan sites are allowed to remain even if they aren't fair use as the copyright owners appreciate the fandom - provided it doesn't unduly interfere with their ability to commercially exploit their work.
(This post represents my personal pov, and not necessarily Viacom's)
Ok – forgive me for not understanding that your defense of piracy is more fully evolved than I knew. I’m new to your column, although not to the topic.
The first link cites to Thomas Jefferson who said that ideas become free as soon as made public. He’s right – it is the expression of an idea that is covered by copyright. In fact, because it is a fundamental value of this country that ideas be expressed and debated, an economic incentive to express them was created. This is how copyright is different from patent (by the way, Lessig deliberately, and misleadingly, combines the two into “intellectual property”). Writers (like you) choose to write so everyone will know their opinions. Some writers choose to make their works free so they can sell the experience, others (like lessig) sell their books. Both models have a place (like in software), but book writers don’t insist that you put your works into the public domain.
Movies are expensive because talent is expensive and because there is a market for viewing the latest and greatest. Technology HAS made movie-making cheaper – bringing, for example, the latest computer animation within the means of a movie-maker. Sure, you could now do Goldfinger for less, but audiences turn out to see Transformers. Maybe you think that’s dumb, but if consumers want it, shouldn’t they be allowed to see it?
Traditional scarcity exists in the rarity of a steven spielberg or jj Abrams and so many others and the scarcity of the capital to hire them. What if some people want to see movies in theaters, others on TV – shouldn’t the market support both, without ONLY permitting the model of giving it away? There is a role for giving it away, but you would compel it. If, absent piracy, these markets go away – good riddance. But if piracy is forcing the change, then consumers and producers both lose.
Finally, the “movie business” is doing just fine argument. We used to hear that about the record business. Then when the record business began its steep decline, the argument changed to “they’re all terrible people and abuse the artists” so it’s ok that they are hurt. The reality is that the record business used to spend a lot of money nurturing and developing talent, promoting artists and taking risks. They don’t now. As bandwidth and storage follow the inexorable path of Moore’s law, movies may not be far behind. If we want to see risk-taking and investment in movies and tv, producers must be free to choose free when it works and choose licenses when it works, and not have the path chosen for them. Put differently, parasites do well when the host is healthy, but if they aren’t checked, the host dies and the parasites with them.
BestNetTech has not posted any stories submitted by pixelm1.
Re: Re: Re: Why protect trade secrets by law?
Trade secrets are different than patents. A person can be sued as an infringer of a patent without knowing about the patent, and without copying and without any relationship to the owner of the IP. That's why there can be a patent "troll" and why the rights are more narrowly circumscribed.
To violate a trade secret, you have to have a relationship that you knowingly breach. So there is little need to define precisely the IP - it's enough that you knew it was secret and violated the trust.
As to the "why" IP supports not just creation but also investment. Coca-Cola has built a large business on that trade secret. If everyone could sell Coca-Cola, Coca-cola would have little incentive to invest in distribution, marketing, etc. - so the trade secret generates economic activity that creates jobs. The trade secret doesn't prevent other people from inventing their own soft drinks - they could even sell an identical drink as long as they come up with the formula themselves. So trade secrets have a limited negative effect on competition and are generally thought to be pro-competitive and benefit consumers.
Re: Re:
The argument for why this is bad, is that it harms the people who put in the effort to develop the technology. Here that is Google. It creates an incentive to sit back passively and just steal someone else's investment. So that is bad from a societal point of view - we WANT people to make that initial investment. That's the core goal of IP.
You always make the "well Google still has the stuff, so what have they stolen" argument. It's bogus because it is way too narrow. You've taken a "non-rivalrous good" description and planted it on IP. If people sneak into a theater into an empty seat, if they take a college course without paying tuition, if they free-ride on someone's hard work, they are hurting the social compact that these are things that cost money, and there is an expectation that the people who benefit will pay whatever is being charged for them (or, in the case of Google, the company that made the investment will have the opportunity to be the one who reaps the rewards). Competition is great - but do it fairly, invest the money, innovate - don't steal.
This is a totally bogus argument - it essentially argues against copyright law, not least cost avoider. (By the way, there is lots of collateral damage from stuff like rules against asbestos - but congress has made the judgment that the benefit to public safety outweighs other benefits, like low cost fire prevention). The fact that you're protecting someone else is why you need rules of liability law at all. Otherwise, you're just protecting yourself and you don't need the law to do the cost benefit. On the other hand, driving carefully saves pedestrians who didn't hurt anyone and it's lower cost to ask drivers to be careful than to protect every pedestrian with concrete suits. Copyright owners don't benefit from infringement - they are innocent bystanders getting hurt by it. In contrast, service providers do benefit. In some cases, you might be right that they aren't least cost avoiders, but in some cases they are. And that's the right inquiry to make in each case, not the argument that even if they can avoid infringement, they shouldn't.
Mike - their brief does a lot of demolishing if the facts were true, and if Viacom's position was the position that they characterized it as. In fact, Google and Youtube decided not to even test filtering in early 2006, and then decided to filter ONLY for people who they had a business deal with. All the dissembling and misstatements aside (you should look at the actual emails, rather than just Google's distortions) - those facts are really uncontroverted. Viacom's not asking for perfection, instead it is invoking the perfectly reasonable rules of Grokster (and actually supported by Tiffany's) that you don't get a defense to the extent you willfully blind yourself to the facts. "Willful blindness is knowledge in copyright, as it is in the law generally" - Judge Posner
Since when are piracy and creativity antithetical? This is wonderful stuff, and very creative. The new creativity is copyrightable - and Kutiman ought to be able to decide how his new works are exploited.
People lose sight of the fact that whether you infringe someone elses work is different than whether what you create is original for copyright.
I could create a copyrightable book of other people's photos - but would still need rights to the pictures.
In this case, these uses seem pretty clearly fair uses - but if he was going to make a significant commercial use of his works, he'd probably want to obtain some clearances. At the same time, no one could use his NEW work without his permission. that said, by posting it on Youtube, he's probably granted his permission.
Since when are piracy and creativity antithetical? This is wonderful stuff, and very creative. The new creativity is copyrightable - and Kutiman ought to be able to decide how his new works are exploited.
People lose sight of the fact that whether you infringe someone elses work is different than whether what you create is original for copyright.
I could create a copyrightable book of other people's photos - but would still need rights to the pictures.
In this case, these uses seem pretty clearly fair uses - but if he was going to make a significant commercial use of his works, he'd probably want to obtain some clearances. At the same time, no one could use his NEW work without his permission. that said, by posting it on Youtube, he's probably granted his permission.
The logical flaw in your argument is that one is legitimate progress and the other is theft. It may or may not be true that online kills the theatrical experience - but that is not really a policy issue, it's a market one. The Kindle is killing bookstores and I wish it wouldn't - but the market is speaking. Theft, on the other hand, undermines markets. If no one liked to watch movies - than the woman losing her job has lost it to progress. But if everyone likes movies - they just like to steal them - then they are actually undermining the production of what it is they like to watch. Comparing legitimate innovation with theft - THAT is a propoganda campaign.
Really? All property law is a construct of the law. It's a bundle of rights granted to you that are respected by government and other citizens. No property - no freedom really because the system devolves to one purely of power.
"intellectual property" is hundreds of years old and the term piracy - as applied to IP - dates to the 17th century.
The law - which respects property rights - has evolved in copyright from at least the Statute of Anne in the 18th Century, through Article I section 8 of the constitution (which calls out intellectual property as a specific power granted to congress), through numerous revisions of copyright and patent law - all of which were deemed important enough to protect.
Freedom at the expense of other's rights is not freedom. Physical property limits your ability to go into your neighbors house and take their stuff. Other laws prevent you from maiming them or driving drunk and putting others at risk. So all laws limit freedom in some fashion, right? So yes, copyright does limit freedom in some sense of the word - as every rigth does. But it protects freedom at the same time - freedom not to have people take what you create without your permission.
So what part of history and the law are you referring to?
Re: Re:
Its hard to argue when you disagree about basic premises. Copyright is a property right and markets are based on teh exchange of property.
"Scarcity" is the basis for markets - when something is infinite, the price is zero. The fact that IP is a "nonrivalrous good" is a red herring. Intellectual property often has zero marginal cost, yet total costs can be quite large - whether the cost of developing a product (e.g., Microsoft Windows) or a copyrighted work (e.g., Iron Man 2). What IP does is create a market for the work - the creator can decide how to price and market the work or invention and consumers or intermediaries decide whether to buy it. If the market is competitive - which many of these markets are - and the markets work, then demand (consumers) and supply (creators) come into balance.
You propose abolishing the market for intellectual property works by decreeing that they all are in the public domain. Under such a theory, an otherwise large initial investment simply can't be recovered - cost goes to marginal cost of the medium (transmission or a cd, for example) - So why invest? I thought public or common ownership of property was precisely what command economies like the soviet union were trying to do.
It's often that we hear that people should move to new business models. Do you have any in mind? Would you like to invest in a movie and distribute it without copyright to see what happens? Musicians have tried it and been largely disappointed. Love to see the studies - because the concepts seem entirely divorced from actual experience or economic logic. My example is a fair one - if you agree that content creators are entitled to be paid for their works, why should they depend on volunteers to pay for it? No other part of the economy works that way.
It is TRUE that widespread distribution of all or part of a work can be promotional. People ship samples all the time. But I believe the best result is achieved when the copyright owner can decide what in the promotional self-interest
And it is unfair how you group the world into copyright maximalists and minimalists. The extent of copyright (term, fair use) is really a different axis than protection of copyrighted works (e.g., allowing the owner to protect the making of an exact copy for commercial gain). Is your beef with too extensive rights - because we have much in common there - or in enforcement of constrained ones?
and by the way you didn't call them stupid. you called them clueless.
This is the kind of goofy post that BestNetTech constantly passes for analysis in IP.
First - the arrogant policy maker problem: I don't understand it therefore everyone else is stupid. Sure - large economic interests, filled with experienced business people - don't know what's in their own best interests - but government, law professors and lobbyists do? Markets, which are supported by private property, are proven to be smarter than nearly any a priori attempt to tinker, design, or reorder them. Compare the post-world war ii russian economy with the american one. Markets are democratic trust individuals to look out for their own self-interests. Give me a property right and i'll fix my house - take it away and the neighbors might decide that we're all better off if they walk across my lawn and peek into my bedroom. The anticopyright movement thinks record company executives are stupid. I assure you - they are not.
Second - the "it follows, therefore it was caused by" fallacy. innovation (by what measure?) was down, so greater IP must be responsible. How about weak economy? How about increased piracy? How about a ton of things we haven't even analyzed. I got out of bed and then the sun came up. Definitely my getting out of bed caused the earth to revolve.
Third - the conflation of copyright with patent. COPYRIGHT DOES NOT PROTECT IDEAS. Read Section 102(b) of the copyright act. It protects expression. The antiproperty movement wants to conflate them so they can take patent concepts and criticize copyright. Patent is different - and complicated - but the "innovation" criticisms simply don't apply to copyright. If you want people to spend their days and nights doing analysis, criticism, journalism and making art - then they need a way to get paid. How about if we told policymakers that they should work for free, and then, at the end of the session, we'll take up a collection and see if they did anything worthwhile that we feel like paying for (and not free-riding on).
There was a post last week that said cited a paper that claimed that even though IP rights had increased, investment in IP creation had gone down. The authors - Harvard professors - cited copyright term extension for the proposition that IP rights had increased. This is the weatherman who is predicting a snowstorm when its 100 degrees outside. Piracy is rampant! Maybe there's a stronger connection with that than copyright term? Read and think about the paper before you cite it as conclusive proof!
This first amendment thing is the latest attempt to insert false information into the debate. The way takedowns work, you send a notice, the individual poster gets notified, if they object, the clip is reposted unless the copyright owner sues and wins. So yes, there's lots of due process.
And, as the supreme court noted, it's entirely impossible to sue every infringer (and BestNetTech would be first to complain if copyright owners tried).
And, no, takedowns don't work. Just today, YT announced an unindexed section of the site. Add to that private sections and the overwhelming of the site with copyrighted stuff whenever something is hot, and it is impossible to use the takedown process to limit infringement.
And, no, just giving up isn't the answer. the right of creators and, yes, consumers, to participate in lawful business models without interference of theft is way, way too important.
well reportedly it's 200 clips out of 63,000. And last I checked Google was engaged in the search business. Maybe they could tell on a few of the other 62,800? Or maybe they decided they wanted to build a huge video business and conveniently claim that they were "shocked, shocked to find that piracy was going on"? It's pretty interesting that there was no porn, or other offensive stuff, etc. etc.
Help for the poster
The fair use defense to copyright is available equally for positive and negative criticism. ("Criticism" doesn't mean that it has to be negative. A positive review is protected equally.) There are several fair use factors in the law, and they are listed (and explained a bit) here. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html Also check out wikipedia's entry on fair use - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use where there is a lot of useful information From a copyright law perspective, the issue is whether more of the work is used than is needed for the critique. Once you fail fair use, though, it's up to the copyright owner to decide whether the work goes forward. That said, many fan sites are allowed to remain even if they aren't fair use as the copyright owners appreciate the fandom - provided it doesn't unduly interfere with their ability to commercially exploit their work. (This post represents my personal pov, and not necessarily Viacom's)
Re: Re: Time to Get Real
Ok – forgive me for not understanding that your defense of piracy is more fully evolved than I knew. I’m new to your column, although not to the topic. The first link cites to Thomas Jefferson who said that ideas become free as soon as made public. He’s right – it is the expression of an idea that is covered by copyright. In fact, because it is a fundamental value of this country that ideas be expressed and debated, an economic incentive to express them was created. This is how copyright is different from patent (by the way, Lessig deliberately, and misleadingly, combines the two into “intellectual property”). Writers (like you) choose to write so everyone will know their opinions. Some writers choose to make their works free so they can sell the experience, others (like lessig) sell their books. Both models have a place (like in software), but book writers don’t insist that you put your works into the public domain. Movies are expensive because talent is expensive and because there is a market for viewing the latest and greatest. Technology HAS made movie-making cheaper – bringing, for example, the latest computer animation within the means of a movie-maker. Sure, you could now do Goldfinger for less, but audiences turn out to see Transformers. Maybe you think that’s dumb, but if consumers want it, shouldn’t they be allowed to see it? Traditional scarcity exists in the rarity of a steven spielberg or jj Abrams and so many others and the scarcity of the capital to hire them. What if some people want to see movies in theaters, others on TV – shouldn’t the market support both, without ONLY permitting the model of giving it away? There is a role for giving it away, but you would compel it. If, absent piracy, these markets go away – good riddance. But if piracy is forcing the change, then consumers and producers both lose. Finally, the “movie business” is doing just fine argument. We used to hear that about the record business. Then when the record business began its steep decline, the argument changed to “they’re all terrible people and abuse the artists” so it’s ok that they are hurt. The reality is that the record business used to spend a lot of money nurturing and developing talent, promoting artists and taking risks. They don’t now. As bandwidth and storage follow the inexorable path of Moore’s law, movies may not be far behind. If we want to see risk-taking and investment in movies and tv, producers must be free to choose free when it works and choose licenses when it works, and not have the path chosen for them. Put differently, parasites do well when the host is healthy, but if they aren’t checked, the host dies and the parasites with them.