Greed extraordinaire
It appears that the movie and TV industry are continuing their fight to extract every last cent they possibly can from the consumer. The obvious thing to point out to these nitwits is that it’s just entertainment. It’s nice enough and I enjoy it but if Hollywood and the TV industry shut their doors tomorrow life would go on.
You write a story that someone thinks is good enough to make into a show or movie. If the production is done well you end up making large amounts of cash at the box office or off of advertisers. Movies and TV shows end up making another killing off of DVD sales. At this point you have made your fair dollars worth for a fictional story from your imagination. To worry about someone copying it to put on a shelf for their movie collection or to give to a friend is just pure greed. If you didn’t make much money off the movie or DVD sales then chances are it wasn’t any good and nobody is copying it anyway.
One thing they need to keep in mind is that people get fed up with this kind of crap eventually. If they push to hard people will use the multitude of software at hand and their own imagination to write stories and produce shows that they distribute freely. It’s already happening some.
The last point is that they can do everything they want to try to prevent “illegal copying”. It will still get copied. Copy protection has always been one of the biggest wastes of resources. It can always be circumvented. Try charging a fair price for your product and the general consumer will just buy it. Price it to high and the consumer will not pay you for it. They may still get it from a friend who knows how to copy it but they will not pay for it. You call them a crook at this point but the truth is, if they didn’t get a copy from the friend they still would not pay you for it. They would simply do without, as it is not essential for them to see it. Or they would go to the house of a friend who did buy the DVD and watch it. What’s next, are you going to put a sensor in the video equipment to see if the people in the room are normally there? Wait, I better not give you any ideas. Of course they could just lend the DVD to a friend. Are you going to have the video equipment mark the DVD with a code from the first player it's put in? Wait, that's another idea you might actually try in your greedy quest to get more out of your product than it's worth.
You write a story that someone thinks is good enough to make into a show or movie. If the production is done well you end up making large amounts of cash at the box office or off of advertisers. Movies and TV shows end up making another killing off of DVD sales. At this point you have made your fair dollars worth for a fictional story from your imagination. To worry about someone copying it to put on a shelf for their movie collection or to give to a friend is just pure greed. If you didn’t make much money off the movie or DVD sales then chances are it wasn’t any good and nobody is copying it anyway.
One thing they need to keep in mind is that people get fed up with this kind of crap eventually. If they push to hard people will use the multitude of software at hand and their own imagination to write stories and produce shows that they distribute freely. It’s already happening some.
The last point is that they can do everything they want to try to prevent “illegal copying”. It will still get copied. Copy protection has always been one of the biggest wastes of resources. It can always be circumvented. Try charging a fair price for your product and the general consumer will just buy it. Price it to high and the consumer will not pay you for it. They may still get it from a friend who knows how to copy it but they will not pay for it. You call them a crook at this point but the truth is, if they didn’t get a copy from the friend they still would not pay you for it. They would simply do without, as it is not essential for them to see it. Or they would go to the house of a friend who did buy the DVD and watch it. What’s next, are you going to put a sensor in the video equipment to see if the people in the room are normally there? Wait, I better not give you any ideas. Of course they could just lend the DVD to a friend. Are you going to have the video equipment mark the DVD with a code from the first player it's put in? Wait, that's another idea you might actually try in your greedy quest to get more out of your product than it's worth.
posted by Churt(Elfkind) at 07:01
1 Comments:
One thing they need to keep in mind is that people get fed up with this kind of crap eventually. If they push to hard people will use the multitude of software at hand and their own imagination to write stories and produce shows that they distribute freely.
That's the salient point. It doesn't require a crystal ball to look into the future a few decades and see that Hollywood's iron-grip control over the entertainment industry is destined to fade away. It will be a very close analog of what is happening to the news media industry right now. Newspapers and networks are rapidly losing audience and mindshare--and with those disappear their relevance.
Hollywood will soon be facing the same problem, once technologies like BPL and virtual actor software begin to penetrate a significant portion of the market. I, for one, will shed no tears for them, as the vast majority of what they've produced in the past ten years has been utter dreck. They deserve to die, for lack of originality if nothing else.
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