The terrifying thing about the thesis that people charging for content 'when they can' is that they will find ways to arrange the content so they can charge for it.
So we get App Stores, Xbox/PS3/Wii stores, and ever-creeping, ever-more-hard-to-crack, ever-more-restrictive DRM solutions. It's theoretically possible to make uncrackable DRM, which means someone will do it. It's just a matter of time finding an economically viable solution that won't annoy users excessively. There's demand for expensive information--expensive in the economic sense, in that making this information takes lots of work from lots of experts. People want the latest movies, TV, software, video games, music.
And then there's the ultimate DRM, PG's favorite thing to invest in: the webapp. What better way to make users pay then to demand they do all their work on a server you have, not their own computer? To demand users sign over their financial information to Mint, their private email to GMail? When they don't pay in money, they pay in loss of privacy. Sometimes they pay in both.
I want free information, free not in the GNU sense--though that's always an option--but free by the social norms of fair and legitimate use. I want software, media, and so on to be my own; I want to be able to use it without some corporation knowing. I want to be able to back it up and mash it up and lend the original copy to friends.
But content creation representative groups such as the MPAA and RIAA have conducted themselves in ways that threaten our very democracy. In an ideal world, society recognizes that commercial information can't be both free as in speech and free as in beer, industry and the Internet community find a reasonable way to punish the worst pirates without infringing our general freedoms, and the MPAA/RIAA's justification for its horrible lobbying vanishes in a puff of logic. (That's another thing; I don't think the technology community understands how sympathetic people are to the stance that information must not be stolen.)
No idea if or how this will happen, so I guess that makes everything I said kind of a rant, but one can dream... and I do think people need to realize that the market isn't some magic thing that does what you want. Half the market is people trying to earn money. The increasing trend is that the content creators are finding technical solutions giving users no choice but to pay them. I don't understand why this is a good thing. The world of Richard Stallman's 'The Right to Read' is a famous hacker nightmare, except now hackers seem to be endorsing it. What the hell?
Also consider the paradox that business software is often more freely available than personal software. To use almost anything from Oracle, I can just download it myself! But to use Netflix there's all this DRM stuff that gets in the way. Why? Because Oracle can sue businesses that illegally use their software--anti-piracy is enforced.
It would be so much better for society if I could use quality personal software on my personal information. If I could freely redistribute media, make mixes to distribute amongst friends, mash stuff up and make original art without having to pirate or crack DRM...
It's funny, because you first say "Business software is cool because it isn't controlled by DRM, which is because piracy is minimal". Then you say, "I wish more software was like business software, so I could pirate it more easily".
I edited much of that out of my original post... but let me respond. The point is that the solutions to piracy treat fair use as though it's just as illegitimate as piracy, with the paradox that you sometimes have to commit piracy to get fair use.
I'm assuming you are talking about things like sharing amongst friends, but I can't find any evidence that is actually covered by fair use.
purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. --Wikipedia, "Fair use"
Certainly you won't get sued for sharing your Metallica record with your friend Bobby, but I don't believe that is related of fair use.
So we get App Stores, Xbox/PS3/Wii stores, and ever-creeping, ever-more-hard-to-crack, ever-more-restrictive DRM solutions. It's theoretically possible to make uncrackable DRM, which means someone will do it. It's just a matter of time finding an economically viable solution that won't annoy users excessively. There's demand for expensive information--expensive in the economic sense, in that making this information takes lots of work from lots of experts. People want the latest movies, TV, software, video games, music.
And then there's the ultimate DRM, PG's favorite thing to invest in: the webapp. What better way to make users pay then to demand they do all their work on a server you have, not their own computer? To demand users sign over their financial information to Mint, their private email to GMail? When they don't pay in money, they pay in loss of privacy. Sometimes they pay in both.
I want free information, free not in the GNU sense--though that's always an option--but free by the social norms of fair and legitimate use. I want software, media, and so on to be my own; I want to be able to use it without some corporation knowing. I want to be able to back it up and mash it up and lend the original copy to friends.
But content creation representative groups such as the MPAA and RIAA have conducted themselves in ways that threaten our very democracy. In an ideal world, society recognizes that commercial information can't be both free as in speech and free as in beer, industry and the Internet community find a reasonable way to punish the worst pirates without infringing our general freedoms, and the MPAA/RIAA's justification for its horrible lobbying vanishes in a puff of logic. (That's another thing; I don't think the technology community understands how sympathetic people are to the stance that information must not be stolen.)
No idea if or how this will happen, so I guess that makes everything I said kind of a rant, but one can dream... and I do think people need to realize that the market isn't some magic thing that does what you want. Half the market is people trying to earn money. The increasing trend is that the content creators are finding technical solutions giving users no choice but to pay them. I don't understand why this is a good thing. The world of Richard Stallman's 'The Right to Read' is a famous hacker nightmare, except now hackers seem to be endorsing it. What the hell?