Quote from: RPGPundit;821451But it doesn't what you, one person, wants or doesn't want or is or is not willing to do.  The issue is that ANYONE can download GoT, for free, in its entirety, almost instantly after it comes out.   So millions of people do.

In essence, your options are:
a) put millions and millions of people in prison
or
b) recognize that the law is obsolete, overtaken by technology, and figure out a new way to make an economy of IP that doesn't involve holding the material hostage after the fact.

I pretty much agree (although non-commercial copiers don't go to prison), but GoT seems to make money under the old law. Youtube has certainly shown that it's possible to shift the paradigm while making money off your IP. Webbots that divert the ad income from copyright-infringing uploads to the corporate rightsholder's account, for instance, are very clever (and often misused - diverting funds from fair use criticism/review pieces, for instance).
Millions of people will still be bittorrenting GoT in a few weeks, but if they have the online release set up right then many others will be giving them lots of money who wouldn't have done so before.

Quote from: RPGPundit;821451But it doesn't what you, one person, wants or doesn't want or is or is not willing to do.  The issue is that ANYONE can download GoT, for free, in its entirety, almost instantly after it comes out.   So millions of people do.

In essence, your options are:
a) put millions and millions of people in prison
or
b) recognize that the law is obsolete, overtaken by technology, and figure out a new way to make an economy of IP that doesn't involve holding the material hostage after the fact.

I get a kick out of the childlike faith people have that B will just somehow be sorted out.

It's entirely possible that as people prove unwilling to pay for digital content, fewer resources will go into creating it. And we can all share our amateur low-budget content freely with one another in a digital utopia.

Quote from: Haffrung;821843I get a kick out of the childlike faith people have that B will just somehow be sorted out.

It's entirely possible that as people prove unwilling to pay for digital content, fewer resources will go into creating it. And we can all share our amateur low-budget content freely with one another in a digital utopia.

The confidence is because methods are already appearing, and one can trust that new ones will continue to appear.

Quote from: RPGPundit;822191The confidence is because methods are already appearing, and one can trust that new ones will continue to appear.

I don't share that trust. Remember when online advertising was supposed to save newspapers? Turns out businesses won't pay for ads that nobody reads. Now newspapers are going back to paid subscriptions, at least for premium content. Even then, without their former bread and butter of classified ads, the money simply isn't there in the industry anymore. Journalist is now a very low-paid job mainly for people straight out of school before they want a real job. And that's not a case of a few companies not being creative enough. Hundreds of newspapers all over the world tried all kinds of tactics to adapt for the last 15 years and there was nothing that restored a viable business model.

It's simple economics that as the perceived value of a good or service declines, profitability declines with it, and fewer resources go into providing that good or service.

I mean, if you had a nest-egg of $100,000 to invest in the hopes of securing a good return for your retirement, would you invest it in the production of a movie?