I think it is great that one can take an off-the-shelf video camera and make a movie. And this sparks a whole world of creativity. Each day a 100 years of video are uploaded to Youtube.
What we need is a way to compensate professional artists and performers in a world where the cost to distribute is effectively zero. Some stuff (for example a "Michael Moore"-style documentary on the oil spill) is complex enough that it is difficult to produce it without having a way to cover your costs. Does Cory Doctorow's way of doing this scale to movie production?
Oh, and we need camcorders and the like to integrate free codecs - the ones currently available by default often produce H.264-movies which need a license if you want to profit from your work in any way...
What we need is a way to compensate professional artists and performers in a world where the cost to distribute is effectively zero. Some stuff (for example a "Michael Moore"-style documentary on the oil spill) is complex enough that it is difficult to produce it without having a way to cover your costs. Does Cory Doctorow's way of doing this scale to movie production?
Oh, and we need camcorders and the like to integrate free codecs - the ones currently available by default often produce H.264-movies which need a license if you want to profit from your work in any way...