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MichaelDignanSecondPaper 4 - 07 Sep 2011 - Main.IanSullivan
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| | | Is the Movie Industry Going to Die Soon? (Like the Recording Industry) | |
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< | With copyright protection eroding, in an era where copies are made freely and infinitely, there seems little reason to continue a monopolistic regime of copyright protection set up for an analog world. If Gavin is right we basically live in a de facto copyfree world already. But even Moglen admits that creativity could be dampened when the upfront capital costs are high for a certain project, citing much of the movie industry as an example. While music has always been fairly cheap to produce, it is now incredibly cheap to copy. Not so for the movie industry, where, at least in Hollywood, the budgets often run into the dozens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars. Is a de facto copyfree world the best world if we want to continue creating a lot of digital movies? The music industry has all but capitulated the fight against free copying. The RIAA, once attempting to intimidate illegal downloaders into buying their music, has gone limp. The movie industry has seen slumping sales recently, while it could just be attributed to the economic disaster of 2008, downloading movies from the internet presents a real threat to the profitability of an industry that has high capital costs and depends on its ability to sell movie tickets as well as a large volume of home video DVDs. | >
> | With copyright protection eroding, in an era where copies are made freely and infinitely, there seems little reason to continue a monopolistic regime of copyright protection set up for an analog world. If Gavin is right we basically live in a de facto copyfree world already. But even Moglen admits that creativity could be dampened when the upfront capital costs are high for a certain project, citing much of the movie industry as an example. While music has always been fairly cheap to produce, it is now incredibly cheap to copy. Not so for the movie industry, where, at least in Hollywood, the budgets often run into the dozens, or hundreds, of millions of dollars. Is a de facto copyfree world the best world if we want to continue creating a lot of digital movies? The music industry has all but capitulated the fight against free copying. The RIAA, once attempting to intimidate illegal downloaders into buying their music, has gone limp. The movie industry has seen slumping sales recently, while it could just be attributed to the economic disaster of 2008, downloading movies from the internet presents a real threat to the profitability of an industry that has high capital costs and depends on its ability to sell movie tickets as well as a large volume of home video DVDs. | | | Some might say that the decline of Hollywood would actually be a good thing, since it would no longer dictate the movie industry’s norms and standards in an effort to wring more profit out of staid genres and hackneyed scripts. And it is true that it is getting cheaper to produce movies, some independent movies can be made on smaller, three figure, budgets. But leaving aside the question of whether it is desirable to preserve Hollywood in the face of copyright erosion, perhaps it is possible for them to continue making movies, and money, in spite of it. |
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