Seth Godin writes a lot about the Music Industry, how it has changed and how it needs to respond.
Here is the transcript of an interesting talk he gave to conference of music industry fundis.
The concern of things being easily replicable is that people won't get adequate reward for their intellectual property. Good musicians don't necessarily get that... and musicians in general have only got rewarded in the last 50/60 years in any dramatic form. The ones who got rewarded were the good marketers, not necessarily the good musicians.
The market has changed. There are still lots of ways to make money. Find them.
A concern with not protecting intellectual property is that the financial incentive to create it is removed.
The points mentioned in the comments of the last post were Movies and Pharmaceuticals.
For movies... you can't replicate cinema's easily. People still go watch movies even though they can rent a DVD cheaper... or wait for it on TV. People are willing to pay for immediacy. As for other ways to make money... I don't know... brainstorm... you can't artificially keep barriers in a digital world.
As for pharaceuticals... yes, I agree, there needs to be some way of providing financial incentives to innovate. The difficulty with health industries is the clear moral quandry. The problem extends past drugs to medical aid, and finding ways of making the medical profession financially attractive.
1 comment:
I mention movies because the ease of copying is actually a problem for the film industry. The effects take place at the margin, so the fact that lots of people still go out to movies isn't much more relevant than the fact that many people still by cd's at look and listen.
I agree that the music does need to adapt if it wants to be successful, and i'm sure lots of lovely innovation is just over the horizon. But I say this with kind of a sigh, life isn't fair, sometimes the "bad guys" win.
Even the fact that we'll still keep getting new music doesn't really tell us much, because we can't compre the resulting product to what we would have gotten if artists were able to protect their intellectual property.
I guess I just put more weight on the fact that the music they create, is in fact theirs.
I think I know what you mean by the clear moral quandary. but here I think that companies making money off drugs is very unproblematic, especially compared to the other major moral problems inherent in much modern medicine.
* Overregulation in loads of ways. which makes it too expensive and difficult to become a doctor (and hence see one).
* relucance to use evidence based medicine and to innovate.
* overcautiousness in drug testing.
* and the general fact that more care doesn't do people any good.
Anyway I wrote another post on this.
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