Quote from: wb3 on April 05, 2011, 12:13:15 AM

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If you would like to put it like that, yes. But the point is that with transferred ownership (and hence serial viewing) it will take 11 years for 50,000 owners to watch a 2 hour movie, if they watch in a continuous marathon. If we assume that there are 4 people in the family of each owner on average and it is actually only watched during the afternoon hours (i.e. when people are home from school and work and not sleeping) Then you can if you're lucky get two ownership transfers per day and it will then take 17 years for 50,000 people to watch the movie. By that time the movie is outdated and everyone who wanted to see it has seen it anyways. I.e. this serial transfer of ownership, even when done very efficiently (i.e. twice a day), does not significantly undermine the IP (i.e. the ability of the owner to profit from his creation).

I wonder if George Lucas would agree with you.

But we might be coming to a consensus. If instead of Mailing these movies, we have a club house, that sells say beer and pretzels, where you can come and mingle, pick a movie to take home, bring any new purchases for others to the shelves of the club house, this would be OK.

Once it becomes organized it is no longer in line with fair use, so this would not be ok or at the very least borderline. Though, the creators factor in fair use into the price, so that the one who actually pays for the DVD ends up paying for the average number of freeloaders fair use involves. Needless to say if such a scheme cought on and become very common the publishers would simply compensate by increasing the price.

On the other hand the exact opposite would happen with pay-per-view and micropayment. If there were no freeloaders and every single one who ever saw the movie or listened to the song actually paid then the price per listen or pay per view would become VERY small. Let me give one of my favorite examples. Consider the success series Prison Break. It was cancelled after its fourth season (I think). Why when it was so popular? Piracy. Too many people just downloaded the series instead of watching the horrific ad-version on TV. How could this EASILY have been fixed with micropayment? The average number of official viewers in the LAST season was about 6 million. On average each episode in the third season cost 3 million to produce. So with micropayment installed in every TV, if every single official viewer paid 1 dollar per episode (45 minutes) then that would have given the series producers a profit margin of a stunning 50%. That's really, really good. Now, if you factor in all the millions of people who watched the series abroad and all the people who downloaded it then I'm quite certain we are talking about at the very minimum 20 million people. If we now say that a reasonable profit margin for such a series is 40% (to cover the high risk etc.) then each episode would have to bring in 5 million dollars. 5/20 = 0,25 dollars or 25 cents per episode per viewer. In other words, with proper micropayment Prison Break could be extremely profitable at 25-50 cents per episode. I would not hesitate one second to pay that amount, and neither would 99% of viewers.

Now, Prison Break was cancelled. But not only Prison Break. Remember Battlestar Galactica? This fantastic series was cancelled in after its fourth season due to too few PAYING viewers. Remember the prequel Caprica? Cancelled after its FIRST season for the same reason. Think back to all your favorite TV shows that have been cancelled way too early due to too few viewers. Every single one of them could have continued for a much longer time had it not been for piracy and the lack of proper payment systems. These are the casualties of piracy and bad banking laws. So all you anti-IP guys out there that love a series that has been cancelled: You got *exactly* what you asked for.

Think about the horrendous state of Hollywood today, how few truly good, creative and novel movies come out these days. That drought of creativity is entirely due to piracy and bad payment systems. In a sense all these movies and series that are NOT made is Atlas Shrugging, the men of the mind are on strike due to the widespread looting of the able.