Friday, May 29, 2009

The Death Of Copyright



What the Motion Picture industry has not figured out is that the price of any product will go down to its marginal cost. How do you make a profit in such an environment? Volume. The difficulty of course that the available time for watching movies is limited.

So let us look at what my internet service costs me. I pay about $40 a month for high speed cable. I'm a heavy user and spend probably 12 hours a day on the 'net. (retirement is fun) Figure 30 days in a month. Twelve hours a day. Sixty minutes an hour. That is 21,600 minutes a month. At $40 that comes to about .2¢ a minute. So what is a reasonable charge for entertainment? One or two cents a minute. At most. Don't forget that while I can't watch while I'm not at my computer I can be downloading. And if I was into it, file sharing.

New technology kills old business models. TV killed live stage entertainment. Just as motion pictures before it did. Lots of theaters had to convert to motion pictures. So how can motion pictures make money? Use them as vehicles to sell stuff. Just as Star Wars did. I have a plastic Yoda sitting atop my computer. Still. At my daughter's high school graduation yesterday they played the Star Wars theme music. I'm sure a royalty was paid.

Actors? Their value is going down. What will take its place? Community theater. My #1 daughter has provided The Rockford Dance Company with many years of free labor as a dancer in community productions. It is one way a small community like ours (150,000) can have live ballet. For my daughter of course it is a labor of love.

You can watch the rest of the videos by following the below links. You may have to click some of the links in the sidebars to get the whole thing.

Part One
Part Two - Shown above
Part Three
Part Four

Trial Editon

I highly recommend this history of book publishing and censorship. Steal This Film II. It may explain the origin of our First Amendment Rights.

Personally I was one of the first users of computer information distribution called Resource One which I accessed at the Whole Earth Store in Berkeley. That led me into the computer revolution and subsequently my design of the I/O board that went into the world's first BBS. I helped Ward and Randy fix some bugs in the early Intel Serial I/O chips with hardware fixes. I have a few more words on the subject at this link.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Unfortunately it's long been decided how to cut costs in film making : scrap out the film, scrap out the actors.

Make it 100% virtual. Repeat some old story, have 90% of the actor's movements decided by some AI program, then use a director to correct out the kinks.

Sorry for your daughter, but the future is not free ballet. The future of entertainment is programs, just like the near future of just about any field is programs.

Unknown said...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/29/video-dustbot-will-clean-up-the-eurotrash/

just the latest example

M. Simon said...

Don't feel sorry for my daughter. She enjoyed every minute of it. She was more often late to school than late to dance.

Tom's link