Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Hollywood continues to seek ways to reduce movie downloads

Whoever Hollywood is...isn't the creative artists who must derive some income from their work. Hollywood isn't serving them (realistically, they rarely do).

Hollywood seems be comprised of technological hillbillies - have these people never gotten off the Hollywood Hills farm? They built an industry, in-fact a culture, based on what seems to the average consumer to be free entertainment. We pay for this free stuff through higher consumer product costs, and sometimes pay double by paying for cable or satellite delivery that includes commercials we already paid for...but sometimes we prefer to be fat and dumb. Where we are swift and smart is adapting to new technology, and the internet has provided us with seemingly free entertainment.

This genie can't be stuffed back into the bottle. The people have spoken, and we will continue to hunt and gather stuff to consume - unfortunately, this of course leaves little bread for those of us who create this stuff. We keep using our unlimited curiosity and ingenuity to find this stuff, and there will never really be technology that will keep us from it - the entertainment companies, with Sony's recent debacle as a prime example, must get this concept as a start of a new system to encourage creativity while deriving revenue for their buisnesses and the creators of the art.

As an example, income for songwriters comes in-part from performance rights societies - ASCAP, BMI, etc., from licenses paid by broadcasters, venues, etc., and distributed to copyright holders. The big, bad, un-understood internet is the distribution mechanism just as radio and restaurants are. Radio and restaurants do not pay to own the music, as consumers of music do not (since consumers do not pay to own the music, just a licence for an image of that music, we must stop now and once and for all calling them "pirates" when they trade files). The Internet Service Providers must pay a similar blanket license fee for being the pipe.

When this license is paid (and hopefully distributed equitably), the issue of internet file trading goes away.

The only people who could possibly fight this are the ISPs, understandably, since it would cut into their bottom line one way or another. Ultimately though, without this, their bottom line will go away.

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