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Free Content = No Cash
An argument for protectionism in digital media
Everyone in Silicon Valley has exactly the same advice for the major labels: Free your content and your cash will follow, to badly paraphrase George Clinton. I've never been able to tell if tech types offer this kind of advice because they really believe it or because they know how much money they stand to make from broadband pipes clogged with free music. Doesn't matter; it's still lousy advice.
Yesterday I wrote about how the Transformers DVD sold 8 million copies its first week in stores — more than all the week's album sales combined. Films have always been more popular than music, and giant robots have their own enduring charm. There are several reasons why DVD sales are so strong, and several others why CD sales have declined. But one factor no one ever mentions is that DVDs are copy-protected while CDs are not.
This is like telling someone the world is flat — or like telling Tom Friedman that it's round. Everyone knows that copy-protection doesn't work! Everyone knows that movies are available online! Everyone knows that consumers want to watch what they want to watch, where, when, and how they want to watch it!
Then, of course, there's the evidence — far from conclusive but somewhat compelling. Music, which can easily be copied, is widely available for free. Movies aren't quite as easy to copy, so they're not as widely available for free. Think about it: You can find anything online for free, but whether it's worth doing depends on how much you value your time.
Let's say that it takes you 10 minutes to find and download a free copy of an album, which means that you can download six albums in an hour. That means that, at $15 per album, anyone who makes less than $90 per hour, and is short on scruples, might logically be tempted to steal music. That's an awful lot of people. Finding a good copy of a movie might take twice that long — plus much longer still to download it — so it might not be worth the hassle. That's mostly because movies take up more bandwidth. But it's also partly because, due to DVD copy-protection, there aren't as many copies of films floating around online.
Yesterday I wrote about how the Transformers DVD sold 8 million copies its first week in stores — more than all the week's album sales combined. Films have always been more popular than music, and giant robots have their own enduring charm. There are several reasons why DVD sales are so strong, and several others why CD sales have declined. But one factor no one ever mentions is that DVDs are copy-protected while CDs are not.
This is like telling someone the world is flat — or like telling Tom Friedman that it's round. Everyone knows that copy-protection doesn't work! Everyone knows that movies are available online! Everyone knows that consumers want to watch what they want to watch, where, when, and how they want to watch it!
Then, of course, there's the evidence — far from conclusive but somewhat compelling. Music, which can easily be copied, is widely available for free. Movies aren't quite as easy to copy, so they're not as widely available for free. Think about it: You can find anything online for free, but whether it's worth doing depends on how much you value your time.
Let's say that it takes you 10 minutes to find and download a free copy of an album, which means that you can download six albums in an hour. That means that, at $15 per album, anyone who makes less than $90 per hour, and is short on scruples, might logically be tempted to steal music. That's an awful lot of people. Finding a good copy of a movie might take twice that long — plus much longer still to download it — so it might not be worth the hassle. That's mostly because movies take up more bandwidth. But it's also partly because, due to DVD copy-protection, there aren't as many copies of films floating around online.
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19:23 EDT, 26.Oct.07