From: spike66 (spike66@ATTBI.com)
Date: Fri Mar 29 2002 - 19:53:59 MST
>
>
>On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 23:45, Hal Finney wrote:
>
>>In my opinion, the situation we face is very clear. If unlimited
>>free reproduction of information goods continues to be possible on
>>the Internet, then the profitability of those goods is going to fall
>>drastically, and people are going to stop creating them. In a nutshell,
>>we are not going to have much new music and movies, if no one has to
>>pay for them.
>>
We have a clear precedent in the world of published sheet music. When
photocopiers became widely available in the 70s, it became so easy to copy
music that the profitability of publishing sheet music decreased
dramatically.
Consequently fewer artists bothered to publish in that format. As
a child and teenager, I always wondered why so much of the music
libraries were old, ten years or more. Now I know. This is a clear
example of both quality and quantity of a type of intellectual property
declining in proportion to the decline of its profitability. spike
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