Peenie Wallie

Keep in mind that, until about 100 years ago, we had no means to record sounds at all. The RIAA did not exist. No WIPO. No MPAA. And guess what? People still made music. Before there were copyright laws, people wrote books and told stories. The scholars of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire wanted to be recognized as the authors of their works, but they had no economic rights from the books.

So, my point in all of this is that, people will still make movies. They'll do it for little or nothing. People will write stories and produce music for free. The artists do it because they love to do it. (Think starving artist). For them, it's cathartic. There's no reason that these artists won't continue to produce, especially given that they're doing it pro bono today.

In all likelihood, what will happen, is that Hollywood will lose their monopolistic stranglehold on the miserable movies that are made and shown in theatres. I'm not clear that this is a bad thing. Hollywood has a history of stifling creativity, and producing 1-size-fits-all big budget blockbuster. Just stereotypical, plasticine, unoriginal, hero gets the girl in the end flicks.

Let's say, for arguments sake, that Hollywood can't recoup the investments of $150 million dollar movies, and stops making them. Then what happens? You close the theatres? No. You show the films that other people produce. The theatres costs go down. They can pass on the cost reduction to the public. People go see movies that are made on a smaller budget by companies all over the world.

What will happen is that these rapists will be routed around, because they are inefficient at distributing their product to the masses. The reason that people take cameras into theatres in Asia and film movies to release them in the U.S. is partly because the geniuses at the movie industry won't release them globally at the same time.

I buy pirated DVD’s off the streets of London, San Francisco, and Mexico City because they aren’t for sale anywhere else. So, this is a problem. It’s a real problem that the distributors refuse to address. So, they will lose revenue. Laws will not change this basic fact.

The intellectual property thieves are actually entrepreneurs, as are the drug dealers and prostitutes. They're just providing a service for which there is a great demand. The reality is that this can't be stopped. Laws won't stop it, any more that they stop drugs, prostitution, or anything else.

Besides, the big media companies have never been good at predicting the impacts of technology on revenue. They said that the cassette would kill the RIAA because people would copy music. The opposite happened. People copied songs, heard them, shared them, and sales went up. The claimed the VCR would ruin Hollywood. It didn't. Ditto with the CD burner, the DVD burner, and the Tivo PVR. The media giants are just afraid of change. Afraid of the paradigm shift that is occurring, and they’re too dense to look beyond the current paradigm to how thing will be in the future.

So, let's begin to deal with reality which is:

1) Anything digital can be copied. (Someone somewhere will be smart enough to crack any recording encryption created.)
2) The amount that you can charge for a product has to be somewhat related to economic reality created by Rule 1. (If someone can download a pirated copy off the internet for an hour’s worth of effort, they might pay $5.00 for a movie, but they are less likely to pay $20.00)
3) If your distribution network is inefficient, the technology will rout around you. (You can expect people in Europe or America to watch a move in the theater and then wait a year for a movie to be released on DVD.) Laws will not change this. They don’t stop people from risking life in prison to sell a $5.00 crack rock, and they won’t stop people from selling a pirated copy of your move for $5.00 either.
4) If you don’t make movies, the world will not come to a grinding halt. The sun will continue to rise and set, and, in all likelihood, and, a hundred years from now, people won’t even remember you or your company’s name.

So, now that we understand what reality is, how can we deal with it? How can we cope? How about if we think outside the box for a second.

In the music industry, how do the big companies help the artists? They front them money to cut albums, pay payola to buy them airtime from the DJ’s on the FCC controlled airwaves, and then pay off the stores that sell CD’s to get good placement in the stores. So, a large part of this could go away. If the artists borrowed money and recorded the music themselves, they could sell it on the internet for a dime and make more money than they’re making from their own songs today. It would be cheaper to pay them a dime to download a song, than to try to hunt for a bootleg copy on Kazaa, Morphues, BitTorrent, or Tor.

Why not use product placement to generate revenue? Ad based revenue is what drives the economic engines of television, magazines, newspapers, and the internet. Why not movies? If the main characters drink Coca Cola and read Time Magazine in the movies, can’t you generate revenue from that? Using this revenue strategy, you could distribute your movies on the internet for free, track how many people watch it, and generate revenue that way. Making “bootleg” copies this way would actually help by getting the media in front of more eyeballs.

So, it isn’t like there aren’t solutions here. It’s just that the myopic film and record industries have no talent in their marketing and advertising divisions. The decades that they have wasted focused on consolidating control of their industries, while raping the artists and the consumers alike, have left them bereft of vision and creativity. The real question you should be asking of these miscreants is “Who will miss them?”