From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Wed Nov 27 2002 - 11:44:15 MST
> (Regina Pancake <regina@appliedfx.com>):
> Being in the industry in question here, I can vouch for the fact
> that a lot of us have seen this coming.
> The piracy issue with movies will gut the film industry, just like
> it did already to the music industry.
That would be far more worrisome if it were even close to the truth,
but fortunately it's not. I know it's very inconvenient that the
actual /evidence/ of how music-swapping has benefitted musicians
doesn't match the ignorant fearmongering pronouncements that the
RIAA pulls out of its ass to justify its existence, but I think it
is important that if we are to extrapolate from one industry to
another, we do so based on facts, not superstition. Jack Valenti
and his predecessors have predicted the end of the world 100 times
over. It startedwith broad cast radio and television (which were of
course going to put musicians and entertainers on breadlines by the
millions), then the Xerox machine (which was going to bankrupt the
publishing industry), to the VCR. You can still find Jack's own
testimony in the congressional record about how the VCR would
destroy the movie industry and must be banned. But as anyone with
higher than a room-temperature IQ could predict, he was 180 degrees
from the truth as were all his predecessors--the VCR greatly
expanded the market of the movie industry and is now one of its
major revenue streams. Every time a new technology makes the
distribution of information easier, the monopolists of the current
media create a panic about how it will be the end of the world,
and every time it makes them even richer. It's time to stop
listening to them cry wolf. How soon people forget.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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