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Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

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Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#471

Post by robertlagrant »

CrimsonCape wrote: post #443
robertlagrant wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I think there are two new issues this cycle: 1. They are testing what the market will bear. Ubisoft's silly "quadruple-A game" rhetoric and executives saying "people will have to get used to $100 games" is them testing the water. This should pull back, as most people don't want games that cost that much, unless they're really amazing. They aren't (currently). I imagine this same thinking is going on in hardware…

It seems like their strategy will be to just raise hardware and media prices. Just keep doing the same at a higher cost. If it's a loss leader today, it will stay a loss leader tomorrow, just at higher cost. The question is whether the customers keep showing up at the higher prices.

Indeed. No one expects console manufacturers to take unlimited losses, but yes, the price at the end of it all is what will matter.

Re: Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

#472

Post by Silhouette »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #463
Silhouette wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has a right to have an economic value for what they sell. This is true. (It's true in every other industry as well.) But the opposite side of that coin is that if you want people to spend the considerable amounts of time and money required to create new works that are actually any good then you need to have some viable model for compensating them that makes it worthwhile for them to do that. Whatever else you…

Copyright is not a way to compensate for innovation. Innovation is compensated by being first to market. The specific rent that copyright causes is due to holding the copyright and restricting the produced supply. Copyright provides compensation even while mantaining the status quo and not doing any innovation, just by holding the intellectual property. Without copyright, there is a specific revenue for bringing some…

Innovation is compensated by being first to market.

That argument works if you're talking about something like a patronage model where most or all of the compensation for the creative activity comes from a single source. But it makes no sense at all for creative work that has a small value to each consumer in a large market. Copyright allows the cost of production to be amortised over a large market.

Intellectual property creates compensation without a corresponding benefit to the public.

No - because numerous members of the public benefit multiple times every day from the amortisation effect I described above.

You need a counterfactual for that, which you did not provide.

I'm not sure I really do. We can see clearly how finances flow in creative industries supported by copyright work. We can see the scale of both individual works and the cumulative production supported by copyright. And it doesn't take great insight to see that if everyone were allowed to copy and redistribute any work as soon as they had access to it then the whole model would collapse - again for the same reasons as above.

In any case if you'd like counterfactuals then I'll cite pre-copyright history, community-driven initiatives like FOSS and Creative Commons, and artists who have offered their work on a "pay what you think it's worth" basis. In each of those cases there have been some excellent works produced and enjoyed by many people - and the number of those excellent works is barely noise compared to the scale of production in modern creative industries supported by copyright.

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