Indeed it is. Legit avenues like Netflix and iTunes are showing people are willing to pay for content, so long as it's available. There's dwindling tolerance for manufactured scarcity.
Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.
I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and one of the most expensive DirecTV packages. Yet I still torrent most of my television. Yes the very same television I can get from satellite I download via internet. For some reason I just find the (watching) experience so much cleaner and easier.
Rewinding/fast forwarding is easier; so are subtitles. It works on the subway, and on airplanes. It works when my neighbors are saturating the local bandwidth.
It's because it's so damn convenient. No dicking about with ads, settings, codes, authentication, drm, whatever. Just look, download, and go. Usually higher res too.
The fact that "We need to get in on the streaming thing" is probably said in the boardroom of every media company is exactly what's going to kill it.
I am willing to pay for exactly one streaming service. The idea that streaming services will become the "pay only for the channels you watch" is second to the fact that all but a few streaming sites will wind up being complete shit.
So far only YouTube and Netflix have passable interfaces, cross platform support, and a half-decent discovery algorithm.
Who said anything about the money? Having multiple services is a pain in the ass, even if they're free. Non-overlapping device support, DRM, having to waste time searching for a particular work on each one, etc.
Just yesterday, I overheard a conversation in my very own living room that went something like this:
SPOUSE: We have this movie on DVD.
SPOUSE: You could watch it without commercials.
KID: Okay. Where is it?
SPOUSE: Somewhere in the DVD cabinet.
KID: Ummmm.... that's okay.
KID: I'll just watch it on TV.
These are the same people that trampled all over my "genre, then alphabetical by title" filing system every time they retrieved a disc, until I finally gave up and stopped doing it. Before, I could say "second shelf, third row, on the left," and now I say, "find it yourself, you bogosorting heathens."
The lack of searchable indexes is a huge obstacle in every form of media. Imagine if you went to the library, and rather than a central index, you had to check each floor in the stacks separately to see if a book was available.
I am not big into videos, but muscially I really miss being able to choose cd, stick it in a player and play. Now I have to boot the computer up , open up the music player, find the tracks, and play. 10 seconds versus a few minutes.
Likewise I used to grab a cd or tape for my walkman before leaving the house. Now it takes at least 5 minutes (probably more) to transfer files to an mp3 player though admitedly they can hold way more.
The only place I see this as a win is with the kindle where book sizes are so small, I can store way more than I am likely to read.
Because Amazon Video and Itunes have a huge selection and people won't want to pay 3 dollars a movie or 2 dollars a show.
In fact I recently had to use Amazon video instead of torrent because amazon had what I was looking for and torrents didn't.
If the parents position is that he literally needs everything in one or he'll never leave, it's an unreasonable demand. No business or service will ever have 100%. Not even torrents.
Look, I don't care about your moral/ethical feelings toward piracy, but one would be completely irrational to not pirate content because $1/$2 a show is a completely ridiculous price and doesn't not in any way reflect it's true value.
Let's assume that we're talking about a show which is an hour long. Which means we're paying $2 per hour.
Netflix charges $8/month with the average usage of 2.4 hours a day in the US which comes out to $0.11/hour. More aggressive users looking to completely replace TV can average 4/5 hours a day knocking the price down $0.05/hour. And a household of three with different preferences can effectively triple that getting us down to $0.04/hour if they're casual users or $0.02/hour if they're aggressive.
Torrenting costs more in time than $0.05/hour so it's no surprise that people are willing to pay for it.
If torrenting is to be defeated it will require cooperation and a realistic view of what content is actually worth to people.
Amazon Video exists in only five countries in the world; most of us don't have access to it. And iTunes only has TV shows in a dozen countries as well.
When your legal avenues of getting content become fragmented enough, and you're paying for so much extraneous and/or overlapping content, torrenting becomes the most attractive option. (If you can look past the legal/ethical issues)
Speak for yourself. I'll use whatever service is better. The money itself is not enough to really notice for things like this, but services you don't have to pay for consequently don't require any account management, so it's a tough advantage to overcome.
And of course there are many people for whom the money does matter, which makes the gap even wider.
Then again, there are people who prefer a legal solution when it's available and offers sufficient quality and ease of access.
I am subscribed to several services, but often, usually for the newest and coolest, it is simply not possible for me to stream a movie legally. If they would only focus on solving that instead of raging against their customers, they could maybe _then_ start to complain about piracy.
As you yourself agree, the laws here are asinine. So unless you're actually going to get into legal trouble over it (spoiler alert: you're not) why does it matter whether your preferred solution follows them?
This is often mentioned, but it's just not true. Humans produced creative work long before there was copyright or even money, and they will continue doing so long after our civilization has crumbled. People are hard-wired to create. The social status associated with creative output is the main incentive - money is just icing on the cake.
You might argue that if we don't pay theater admission for bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels, then those specific genres might not be produced, and would be replaced by lower-budget plot/character driven cinema. But that's at least arguably a feature, not a bug.
Is account management really a burden, or an excuse? For many typical usages, it's a one time setup on a dedicated device or two. For people who bounce devices a lot, there are password managers.
I understand many people prefer to torrent, but a lot of the rationalization doesn't make much sense to me.
Password managers work well for one person using one account. When multiple people are in the picture, everyone has different sets of passwords that are sometimes appropriate to share and sometimes not. Account information for a netflix-like (for lack of a better descriptor) service is something you would want to share. It is consequently a huge nightmare that non-account-tied systems like popcorn time completely bypasses.
Sorry, but I don't see the huge nightmare here. I share my Netflix account with multiple people. We all know the password, and you only have to type it once into every device you own. If someone forgets or gets a new computer, they could message me and have the password immediately. Netflix even has features to support multiple people using the same account.
Sure, if you don't care about security you can do all kinds of things. You could even make the password your name or give everyone keys to your house so they can look at the piece of paper with the password written on it. I don't want to do any of those, and I shouldn't have to.
Netflix haven't renewed one of their contracts, I think it mostly affects content from Lionsgate. I wonder how much can disappear before consumers get sick of it.
Interesting question. I for example use netflix mainly to view series that have not been available in my country before (or only packed with lots of useless stuff in some expensive cable subscription) or for their own content (House of Cards, Orange is the new black etc).
I vaguely recall having heard that movies are actually not the main interest of their viewers but that might have been some PR ;)
They actually lost access to a lot of movies, with the expiration of their Epix deal.[0] Between that and Starz, I don't know how anyone can actually rely on Netflix for movies anymore. They've bet the company on their original programming and the ability to binge-watch back catalog shows.
I'm not sure that's such a great argument. We'll all might be making less money if security improves, complexity decreases, more people learn to program etc. Doesn't make those bad things. I personally don't make money from selling consumer software nor have I ever worked for someone who does. My programming is in that regard more akin to performing.
Even as a fairly radical pirate I know that most people don't care about copyright, for or against. To the extent that people are against copyright it's mainly about absurd copyright terms, harsh punishment and general industry dysfunction. There's no basis for the idea to abolish copyright, essentially no one thinks that nor will it ever happen. It's scare tactics.
Also the scenario where authors can't control distribution has already happened and has been going on for years and years. From poems to professional software.
To be fair, it's not "all" in the sense of "all of us".
Many (frankly most) programmers are employed in positions where the revenue supporting their salary is not the sales of licenses to potentially copyable IP. I work for a hardware vendor. Web developers sell services and data access, etc...
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent's position on copyright, but the content utopia those folks envision isn't actually implausible.
They work in a market alongside people whose compensation is entirely derived from intellectual property law. Their wages are driven up by compensation from those firms.
Which is true, though that gets to your use of "a lot" in the original.
To claim that content IP licensing pays for some programmers salaries is straightforward. To extend that to argue that salaries of all programmers are significantly higher needs numbers; it's not at all an obvious corrollary.
I don't directly profit from software IPR (I don't sell shrink-wrap). If software IP was indefensible, I think I'd lose more than 40% of my market value.
I don't think that the trend towards SaaS and IAP as primary revenue models is an accident - reliance on control of the distribution channel for a good with zero marginal cost is a losing proposition as internet access, speed, and reliability globally increases.
It seems to me that software markets are already moving in the direction of assuming that creators don't have control over distribution of digital goods.
I think opposition to proprietary software is as mainstream here as opposition to film copyrights. (Maybe we should have a poll to find out.)
(There are plenty of nuances of people's opposition, for example people who think arbitrary copyright licenses should still be enforceable but that it's mean to use a proprietary one.)
I know you all think it is, but it's not a matter of money. All the software I make is already freely distributable by its users, and that was an important reason why I chose this job.
I think I'll take the many tens of thousands of dollars in premium that intellectual property law allows my work to command in preference to the warm fuzzies I might get at the prospect of Zac Efron's "We Are Your Friends" being free and immediately available on my Macbook, which also would not exist without intellectual property law.
You are also turning down the uncountable amount of economic growth that would be stimulated by the relaxation of copyright and especially patent laws in the software industry.
I'd take that regardless of whether it comes with free access to movies, music and TV shows.
edit: I think it's debatable how much impact it would have of software developer salaries. The only way I see it causing a drop in salaries is if it causes a reduced demand for developers by increasing software development efficiency.
"which also would not exist without intellectual property law"
What about all the things that still would exist? Would all those things be worse? What about if we had strong data protection laws? Maybe all those celebrities wouldn't have been violated. On the other hand maybe Google wouldn't have existed at all or maybe that is if copyright had actually been enforced. Hm.
The point being that the only thing we can be certain about is that things have changed and are going to change. When do we reach a point were copyright has to be reformed and at which point of that reform doesn't Zac Efon get to make his movie?
I'm personally not sure that the entitlement of Zac Efron is a huge factor in my views on copyright.
True enough. Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."
Edit: Actually, krapht's response led me to see that this is completely wrong. "Creators and makers" have robust (though not totally unlimited) legal rights to determine the conditions under which their works are copied, but do not have an all encompassing and well established legal right to determine how their works are distributed after the first sale.
Of course, the easy confusion (that I fell prey to) is that distribution often, but not always, entails copying. When it does, creators have strong legal rights. But when it does not, their rights are considerably more limited.
The example of libraries brings this distinction out nicely.
Not entirely. For example many forms of music are subject to either compulsory or statutory licensing. Also, the United States government has long held that it does not need to comply with patent law for its own internal use (e.g DoD can ignore your patents).
If you write/compose a song, and/or record a song for the public in the United States you do not have complete control over it anymore.
This is true, of course. I did not mean to claim that creators' rights to control subsequent copying are comprehensive and unlimited. They are not. But they are very robust.
> Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."
This is very very debatable. Do you enjoy jumping into arguments where the salient points of debate have been decided before the discussion has even begun?
In what sense (taking my edit into account) is it debatable that today's copyright law gives creators a robust set of rights to control the copying of their works? (Perhaps our disagreement is over our use of the word 'right'? I had meant it only in the concrete legal sense, and in that sense I don't think there is much to debate. Though if one uses the word in the broader moral sense, I agree that the proposition is very debatable.)
Again, it is true that a lot of people disagree with it from a normative perspective. But not a lot of people disagree that this form of ownership does actually exist under our current system of laws, descriptively. At most, one might disagree with the use of the word "own," but this disagreement is fairly meaningless when discussing what rights do and do not exist, since the bundle of rights referred to by the word "own" is well defined regardless of the label used.
If you want "own" to be synonymous with a bundle of statutory rights having nothing necessarily to do with the normal English language definition or emotional impact of "owning" something, why didn't you call it "gleeb" or "fnarg" instead? I do in fact disagree with using "own" because I consider it to be smuggling in connotations under cover of a claim to precision which is unlikely to be adhered to - the user will then pivot to words like "steal" or "pirate" and smuggle in a shedload more connotations, and soon will be talking about copying a pattern as if were equivalent to hotwiring your car.
As a matter of fact, I do think that holding a copyright (are you OK with 'holding'?) is a form of ownership in the usual sense of the word. A copyright holder can sell her copyright to someone else and can exclude others from using the copyrighted material. These are the two primary criteria that are commonly understood (among lawyers, at least) to pick out ownership relations. What other criteria are there for a relationship to qualify as an ownership relationship?
It can't just be that a copyright is intangible, because there are a lot of intangible things one can one: money, shares of stock, debt...
The difference between copyrights and property is that the scarcity is entirely artificial. If I have your sandwich, you can't eat it. If I steal your money, you can't spend it. (There exists the possibility of copying your money, that's counterfeiting and it's a distinct issue. Not all monetary systems are vulnerable to it. But whichever way, copying your money is never seen as a crime against you. You can still spend yours.)
Copyrights and patents are properly understood as granted monopolies. In the same category as having "a monopoly on the sale of salt". Basically, a way of governments playing favourites by making someone a needless but coercively enforced toll-booth owner.
The main problem with that standard, focusing on copies, is that when a work isn't fixed in a physical medium (like an optical disk), everything is a copy. The internet just copies, into your system memory, onto your storage device.
(When you play a DVD, you copy it into memory. But at that moment you give it to someone else, it's the physical thing.)
This all means that the spirit and the mechanical effect of the laws are different, now that we use the internet for everything.
There's a greater good argument to be made that people shouldn't be denied access to education and culture simply based on the country they live in or how much money they have.
While I agree that you are correct under current laws the position as I see it is about it should be fully legal to copy any publicly published piece of information.
I am not too worried that literature and art will go away. Literature and art existed before we had avenues for mass audience to buy or rent personal copies and they will continue to exist after we dismantle copyright.
I'd like to note that I support trademarks. I do not condone people selling modified versions of Microsoft Windows including keyloggers that call home to the seller and claiminf it is official, unmodified Windows. One shouldn't sell malware with someone else's trademark on it. The problem as fsf explains well is that we have grouped disparate things together under vague intellectual property when the entire exercise is anything but intellectual.
If that's true, then the government should be paying these people to produce the content. Otherwise you're saying that poor people are entitled to content for free, without the creator getting anything.
What do you make? What do you make to pay the bills; what do you make for passion? How would you feel about people pirating what you make to pay the bills?
Even if you are 100% open source everything for free forever, do you acknowledge that other people may be looking to their creative work as a source of income, and may want a more restrictive license on their work? Do you feel they are morally wrong to ever want to be paid for all the time and labor that goes into performing their craft, and probably into paying off their absurd student loans as well?
We all want legal privileges, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean society should grant them. "I want" is not an argument. If people can't live off of doing some activity, they have to choose whether they can afford to keep doing it or not.
Student loans, and obligations in general that people have contracted with certain expectations, only justify that we take a "softer" approach, it doesn't change the argument.
Absolutely! First, let's agree that "creators and makers" in this particular sense mostly refers to big studios, i.e. large corporates, not just to up and coming indie bands or filmmakers. So let's rephrase the statement as "corporations should have the right to determine how and where the [patented] work they own is distributed".
It's then easy to see that the above does not hold true in all cases, many examples of public greater good can be provided but the case of generic drugs is perhaps the most well-known: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898.
As best i can tell (not a copyright scholar) that is a generalized version of the French "rights of the author".
While the English copyright only dealt with, well, copying, the French system dealt with things like how and when a play or musical piece could be performed.
This because they cared not just about the monetary angle, but about the reputation of the creator (like say if a politician the creator didn't support wanted to use a song or similar).
The reason we see this pop up is that copyright was standardized across Europe with the Bern Convention. Later this was extended across the world (USA didn't sign on until the 1980s, btw).
The french is also to thank for the whole "life+X" copyright duration...
It's a cute and anachronistic practice. Unfortunately, it seems to have in mind some ministrel or author scraping-by in poverty instead of the more likely modern publishing/licensing corporation.
When copyright first came to be, it was a negotiating leverage between the singular author and the owners of printing presses (very mechanical and labor intensive to operate, and therefore it was rarely done without sales in mind) for a share of the profits.
Without it, it was not uncommon for a printer to buy a text for pennies and then resell copies for pounds.
Then again, it also introduced the title page holding the name of author and printer. Thus the government had names to lean on if the content was not acceptable...
Quite some civil law countries in europe have this system. For example "droit d'auteur" in france, "derechos de autor" in spain and "Urheberrecht" in germany both named not after the work or the act (to copy it) but after the author.
As best i recall, Germany was a latecomer to the whole copyright thing. As such, they had wide and cheap access to all kinds of texts. Both informative and entertaining.
This in turn supposedly helped them bootstrap their industrial base.
While I'm not a fan of the entitlement-culture that's a massive feature of large parts of the popular internet, there's more to this than simple entitlement. Demanding content for free is entitlement.
Being happy to pay for content, but being denied access based on your geographical location isn't entitlement - at least to me, and I think to a lot of people both on and off the internet.
What content owners have seemed to fail to grasp, repeatedly, is that governments operate at least partly by consent[0]. No matter how successful you are at convincing the government of a country to pass the law you want, if it's a law that's very difficult to enforce and is generally perceived as being unfair/unreasonable, it will often get ignored entirely.
The problem in this particular case is that in much of the world, the content owners have taken an incredibly aggressive stance, making it extremely difficult or impossible to access lots of content legally. This is often regarded as unfair by the general population of that country - "Why can't I listen to this song/watch this film? It's been available in <other country> for months/years".
From a legal standpoint, the content owner is within their rights to say: "Actually, I don't really care about country Y. I'll not bother releasing my content there."[1] However, in practice, it's unlikely their wishes will be respected.
No matter how you or they might feel about it, in the real world, content owners have two options:
1) Make it legally available under reasonable terms.
2) Accept that it will be available illegally.
There is no third option.
0: Yes, there's debate as to what degree this applies, but for the purposes of my point that shouldn't matter, as long as you accept that there's at least some degree of consent required.
1: In theoretical discussions of this topic, it's often presumed that market forces will counteract this, and incentivise the owner to make their content widely available in most markets - this is demonstrably not the case in practice however.
Bingo. Where i'm from, it was legal to copy cassettes and pass them on to friends and family. This in part because the politicians realized that trying to enforce a strict ban meant either banning players outright, or place a cop in every home across the nation.
Though i guess it helped that they had the big scary communist block to be compared to if they had tried.
This because they also ended up allowing imported CB radios to be operated, even though the band was originally allocated for a different use.
Being "happy to pay for content" is not binary. In the most extreme case, if you were willing to pay for distribution rights for your country, you would be able to get that content.
It's a contrived example to show that when people say "I'm willing to pay for content", what they really mean is "I'm willing to pay a small amount for content that may or may not be as much as the content actually costs".
It's like saying "I am willing to pay for a car" and then complaining that nobody will sell you an Audi S6 for five thousand dollars.
This contrived example doesn't go anywhere near showing that. The fact that somebody won't single-handedly buy distribution rights to the movie doesn't mean they wouldn't pay a reasonable price for it ("reasonable" here meaning "in line with what other people pay").
If a no-name artist wanted $100,000 for their painting they'd be laughed out of most places and die well before ever selling a single painting. Your example works both ways.
Good/services are ultimately priced by the people willing to purchase. The producer can charge more than what people are asking - but can only go so high. The higher the producer charges, the less people buy their good/product. Sometimes this trade off is worth it (ie. luxury brands).
If nobody was willing to pay so much as a penny over $5,000 for an Audi S6 you can bet one of two things happening:
a) An Audi S6 would be sold for $5,000 (and never see production again)
b) No Audi S6 would ever be sold (and never see production again)
It really isn't. Copyright is riddled with exceptions of many kinds, and the granting of it is completely in the hands of whatever a government wants to provide.
Is there room to debate the notion of artificial scarcity and copyright limits? Sure. Does a creator of a work sacrifice all rights to distribution simply by the act of creation? Nope.
Or, in a more real-world example, if I found out a religious organization was using one of my original works as a soundtrack to a commercial - without my consent or receiving compensation - I'm going to fight to keep my rights to tell them to shut it down. The implication of your statement is much more problematic.
If you oppose copyright, you are required to oppose Free Software. "Creators and makers should have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed" is the only reason copyleft licenses have any power.
You do not get to be a copyright abolitionist and a supporter of mandatory source code distribution at the same time.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between these communities, and the cognitive dissonance is just stunning.
I think you missed the point of Free Software entirely.
The GPL, like the Discordian Kopyleft, is a legal exploit, or a hack if you prefer, that uses a silly IP law to nullify itself.
If some people are using IP law to restrict the freedom of users and makers of software, why can't they use the law to defend themselves? It's like complaining that anarchists are hypocrites for calling the police when they are victims of crime.
In the absence of copyright, you would be free to do whatever you want want, including modify Free Software and redistribute your modified binary without source code. Every GPL and AGPL license is effectively downgraded to BSD.
In a world where selling software is less relevant than selling network access to software or devices with software on them, this places companies at a huge advantage (since they don't really need copyrights on binaries) but the Free Software community can no longer forcibly extract the source code of derivatives.
An anarchist explained to me that if they are forced to pay taxes and follow laws and all that, they should at least enjoy the advantages, even if they would prefer to forego those advantages if they were then free from taxes and laws.
Much like a significant minority of Free Software advocates (notably not Stallman) believe that the ideal is to have no IP at all, but that since we have them whether we want them or not, Free Software and Kopyleft are a valid defense mechanism.
...and in that sense they act hypocritically. Its a fair cop.
The Anarchist claim is nonsense. They want no government, because it would be better. Yet when they get a free chance to act out that scenario (taking care of things on their own) still they call on the man. In what way would it hurt them to NOT call the cops after they've been mugged? They've already paid the taxes, so no marginal cost. It would let them enjoy the experience of their utopian society with no further cost to them.
I think there is a cost. Maybe in an anarchic society, they would pay for a security company, but they can't afford to pay for both public security (taxes for the police) and private security. Since they are forced to pay for the police anyway and can't afford both, it makes sense to use their services even if they believe they are inferior.
Or perhaps they are trained in the use of deadly firearms and believe they can protect themselves from crime using that but they live in a country that prohibits firearm use.
The point is, sometimes we can't act as if we already live in utopia. To reach utopia we have to get there from a place that exists in reality, not from a fantasy ideal world.
Because if I shoot the mugger instead, I get arrested by the same police I've already been forced to paid for. Why is this so hard to understand?
[Edit: incidentally, I have called the cops three times in my life. The first two times I was told "it's not my problem". The third time they just hadn't showed up in 15 minutes, so I got bored and left.]
Yep. If one consider modern machine tools, I could in theory buy a chair, you could take proper measurements of it, and then feed those into a CNC or 3D printer to get an exact duplicate.
The only one at a potential loss here would be something like IKEA, because you didn't buy the chair from them.
And that is the kind of insane territory the likes of TPP and TTIP are heading into with their clauses whereby companies can sue nations for loss of potential profits (due to new legislations or whatsnot).
You know how people use the term e-sports to refer to playing video games professionally instead of sports? The same is true for Copyright. It's not property. It's at most a 'property-like concept'.
There are those of us who do not agree with Copyright and would gladly suffer the negatives to be rid of it.
That's a great comparison because e-sports is sports, just as intellectual property is property.
I'm curious how you think the cost of IP generation should be distributed across an economy, because it sounds like you want content-creators to "suffer the negatives" for your own personal gain.
The problem with this argument is that the underlying assumption is, "I have a right to make a living through the sale of information." This is a popular idea to say the least, but it's a positive right which is why I disagree with it.
I do not think that people should be able to own ideas and information.
> And most of these people are not people who are trying to earn a living from their works.
You could make the same argument to a person who wanted to abolish slavery. Just because someone is earning a living by doing something doesn't mean it's right.
I'll ignore that we are debating this(and both getting upvotes), and thus it's debatable.
For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted.
What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.
You have a point if you ignore that under the "anything goes" regime, vanishingly small amounts of new content were created regularly. Now that we have a legal framework whereby you can potentially get rewarded for your output, we literally have more creative output than any one person can ever even understand. That's a situation many of us would like to see continue, despite the constant attempts to make it seem like the current copyright regime is somehow suppressing artists.
I did not say no IP is necessarily better than some IP, or even that it's better than the insane copyright system we have today (though personally I believe strongly that the latter is true). I'm just saying that this is a debate worth having, and that it is not happening.
The invention of IP is one possible explanation of why we have so much content nowadays. Other possible contributing factors include the population explosion of the previous century, the fundamental improvement of communication technologies, and the overall increase in the material conditions of the majority of the population.
>under the "anything goes" regime, vanishingly small amounts of new content were created regularly.
I'm inclined to believe you but I wonder how we can possibly know that. Before modern communication and distribution technologies, lots of content was simply lost and forgotten.
I'm the author of a software product. The main reason why people buy the license and renew it is the free upgrades for one year. It means I've adapted my business model to acknowledge the fact that I'm not a monster with eyes and hands everywhere in the world, as opposed to MPAA.
And it's time the music/movie industry understands that they need to upgrade their business models to the internet age. Maybe they should charge for fresh music, acknowledging that after 6 months everyone can have a copy of the music, pirated if necessary.
Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.