- From: cobaco <cobaco@freemen.be>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2013 23:25:39 +0200
- To: public-restrictedmedia@w3.org
On Sunday, Sun, 2013/07/07, David Singer wrote: > nor will high-value content be accessible through the web What makes you believe it's still high value? The world has changed, technology has moved on... Making copies of information, and sharing that copy with somebody (or a umpteen somebodies) on the other side of the world is now -literally- childsplay This is a digitally connected world. We all read, write, watch, photograph, film, share, and copy all day long. The unavoidable economic consequence of that is that we all realise just how cheap one more copy distributed worldwide is, and consequently how low the value of that one extra copy is. The view that a digital copy of something is a high-value good is simply outdated (as economy 101 tought all of us that passed it: the cost of a good tends towards it marginal costs) In terms of movies produced Hollywood is no longer the centre of the world: China, India and Nigeria all have thriving movie industries that now produce more content then Hollywood does. None have production costs that are anywhere near those of Hollywood. And while it's true that living costs in America are higher... According to wikipedia [1] the average nigerian movie is shot in a week, costs 17-23k to produce and routinely sells 150-200k copies at 2-3$ a dvd. Now for 200k copies you'd make a million at 5$ a copie. The average wage in america was 43k a year in 2011 [2], that means: - you can hire 20 people full time for a full year at 16% above average wage for a million bucks - or 200 people full time for a full year for 10 million bucks Succesfull hollywood movies routinely gross upwards of 10 million at the box office alone, that's before you get into swag, dvd's and tv/internet licensing (boxoffice mojo [3] has charts that count in millions, the major box office success routinely gross upwards of 100 million at the box office alone, the 15 successes all grosed over a billion) Obviously there's plenty of economic opportunity for profitable movie productions at prices significantly lower then today ... even in America. When hollywood tries to protect prices of a movie copy at 15$, that's just not realistic anymore. Welcome to the 21st century (and it's only gonna get worse) You want to stop piracy? You don't need DRM. What you need is a site that allows us to: - purchase a movie - at a reasonable price (and 15$ is nowhere near it) - without jumping through needless DRM-hoops that limit the device or software we can play the movie with, that stops us from time or format shifting, from making backups, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_Nigeria#Distribution [2] https://www.socialsecurity.gov/oact/COLA/AWI.html [3] http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/?pagenum=1&p=.htm > do you really think there are no consequences? that other principles > won't suffer if you only look at this one? Let's turn that around, let's think about the long-term consequenses of DRM schemes There's lots of content hidden in propriatary file formats that's now lost forever, as no-one can access them any more, the companies that made those file formats and their documentation is gone, the programs that wrote them no longer run. DRM is the same thing, in 10 years time whatever DRM scheme a CDM implements is gonna be unsupported,and any content locked up in it is going to inaccesible. That's our cultural heritage that we risk loosing (yes the big successes will be released in new formats, the less succesfull stuff will simply be lost) Why should W3C sacrificy true interoperability (it's quite clear CDM's are bound to specific hard and/or software configurations) for the current outlier of hollywood mega-profits? > "our principles are that one only eats organic food; unfortunately, there > isn't enough available to feed everyone, and we've decided everyone will > be a little malnourished" erm, we produce about 2-3 times the amount of food we need to feed everyone world-wide, foodwise the problem is not production but distribution, that's due to greed and to much control of markets by the economically dominant parties. DRM is the same kind of control and will result in the same kind of poverty on a cultural level. > "we will only stock this library with books no-one objects to on any > principle. if you find the contents bland and unappealing, we have > decided this is the price you will pay for purity of content" nobody succesfully does that, quite the contrary there's dedicated groups fighting that kind of thing, and firestorms get raised whenever that crops up. people hate corporate/religious/political interests that try to enforce artificial limits. That's something the pro-DRM camp might want to keep in mind, attempts at strong control over distribution tends to produce large and succesfull black market. As the example of prohibition in the US shows quite clearly: if you want to kill the black market, then just loosen the attempted control. (that means no DRM in this context) -- Cheers, Cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
Received on Monday, 8 July 2013 21:26:16 UTC