A Music Lesson On Piracy For Hollywood

from the open-letter dept

Tue, Mar 12th 2002 12:35pm — Mike Masnick

The LA Times has an open letter to Jack Valenti explaining to him why he should avoid making the same mistakes the music industry made in shutting down Napster. I doubt it will do much good, but there have been an awful lot of articles lately pointing out that the entertainment industry is really starting to piss everyone off by calling all of their customers "criminals". Maybe someone will finally get a clue.

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Mark Fox, 13 Mar 2002 @ 7:49am

Consumers have to play there part
If Hollywood does put movies on the net in a reasonable priced fashion people should play their part by not copying movies. If a commerical system is launched, promoted and cannot compete against free, expect less movies to be produced.
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Mike (profile), 13 Mar 2002 @ 9:06am

Re: Consumers have to play there part
I think that's a bit naive. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. People don't go to a movie saying, "gee, I really want to support the movie industry, so they'll make more movies". They go because they want to be entertained, and are willing to pay for that. If they can get more value by paying less (or nothing) for an equivalent bit of entertainment then they will.

If the movie industry can figure out a way to provide more value than the free downloads (and who knows how that might be... maybe extra material, simpler downloads, who knows?) then maybe people will go that way.

However, having everyone suddenly agree to "pay more" just to support the "movie industry" will never happen. They will only pay if they see value for the entertainment they are getting that they can't get cheaper some other way.

I'm sure some people will do it, but never enough to make a difference.
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