Is money over?

If I was a billionaire, I would buy the rights to tons of books, television series, movies, anime, manga, comics, and music in order to localize and sell them to the masses in collected box sets.  Yet with the Internet, even the most obscure media can be distributed freely, with no rights to purchase, and no costs for the viewer.  The value of everything becomes zero, with the only cost being the internet connection and the computer and storage media.  The cost is in downloading, but the media itself is free. 

The Internet allows the trading of costless goods-  A "free" economy in which everything is free, except the service of the Internet itself.  Perhaps the days of legally selling things in retail outlets is over.  Who needs an official release of obscure series #437 when you can get it without effort or cost?  Especially when it may be better translated, in better quality, or have no censorship.  And localizing an obscure fan favorite can always backfire with dismal sales, bankrupting the company because only sixty fans bought the product.

The idea of acquiring the rights to everything and selling them for the sake of being available may become outdated, when everything will truly become available to everyone, with no price barrier.  Of course the law will step in someday, but it will always be circumvented. 

Of course the law will step in someday

No, the law will be modified.

This is why capitalism is wonderful. If you are the type of person who would do such idiotic things with their money, ain't no way in hell you'd become a billionaire unless you inherited it, and if you did inherit it, ain't no way in hell you'd stay one. (And just for the record, only 2% of millionaires in the USA inherited their money...) People, and I mean democrats and liberals in particular, want to continuously complain to the uneducated masses that the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer in this country, but why is this really happening? The rich keep doing the things that made them rich in the first place, while the poor keep doing the things and decide to stay in the situations that either made them or kept them poor in the first place. And why do they keep doing this? The ones that got it down, got it down, and they'll continue to succeed. And the people that stay poor? They're either unmotivated, don't have the necessary education, which you can pretty much blame our government run and funded schools for, or in very few cases that are irrelevant to the point I'm making, are poor because they are either physically or mentally handicapped. Other than that, you pretty much have no place to be complaining.

>>3
Fortune is 100% luck. And some non-stupidity.

So profitable actions are innate at all levels?  If I can be a millionaire I should be selling oranges to make profit, while people who sell oranges should eventually be millionaires?  This doesn't take into account cost of entry- if something requires hundreds of thousands to start up, then it doesn't matter if you've made profit in the low thousands.  Of course someone who is now in the millions of dollars range can afford the cost, so they've earned the right to buy and sell in a much higher range.    But some guy who has a profitable attitude can still be poor all his life or lack the funds to get started.

>>3
I think it has to do with how people are brought up. 

A child who grows up in a nice house with successful parents learn things early on.  The parents likely teach certain values along the line of "work hard and you will be rewarded", etc.  For example, how many doctors have children that grow up to become doctors?  A parent that's a doctor has the knowledge and experience to cultivate the child's interests and also calls upon that experience to remind themselves what their hard work brought them later in life.  This child has the continuous support of his or her parents - emotional, as well as financial (private schooling, top tier university education, etc).

Meanwhile, a child who grows up in a shitty inner city neighborhood and attends class in a piss-poor school system believes that - at best - a high school diploma is all you need in life.  At worst, they believe that the world is an establishment that exists to keep them down.  Why work hard?  After all, their parents work hard every day and they still live in a shitty neighborhood.

I don't know if I've communicated my train of thought here, but I guess I have a more philosophical stance on this.  We are the product of our circumstances and our experiences.  We aren't born with some magic factor that pushes us to become successful.

Kids that grow up in the inner city can still be "profitable" by selling drugs.  Regardless of rich or poor parents, someone can be "profitable" by scamming others, selling gimmicks and get rich schemes, and selling untruthful books meant to make a quick buck.  Whether brought up "good" or "bad," there are always people who will manipulate others out of their money. 

It doesn't even mean they will keep making money, if they have their reputation destroyed or get jailed or fined for what they are doing.  Just because you know how to make money doesn't mean you will always be a great business owner, and not all rich people started off with money-making "know how" in the first place.    

... Ah, now I remember why I stopped posting here.

Look guyz, John Galt has returned!

Got anymore verbose tirades about how we're all keeping you down?

Money > Ethics

>>9
Oh, I could flood these idiotic threads with my verbose tirades... Care for me to try again? Most of you people aren't even worth trying to fuck some sense into. Hope you all end up well off with your government high-school diplomas.

>>1

How many people won't buy Advent Children because they've had six months to watch it for free?  How many people won't pay $10 per manga volume, $3 per comic issue, $10-20 for a DVD and $30+ for a boxset?  I'm willing to bet at least 25%, maybe 50%.

Good point. One point missing.

Peer to peer stuff is sometimes slow and unreliable. Distributing stuff over the internet in mass is cheap cheap cheap. You could distribute to the entire world for '2 dolla' an episode. You would make a bundle. You also don't have any problems with boxes and mass producing cds, which requires you to hire somebody to estimate how many copies you are going to need and then negotiate to get the stuff wholesale. In fact, with the internet, the artists can undercut the publishers.

It's a bright new era that is dawning, IF you are willing to adapt. Nothing is certain anymore, but nothing was certain in the first place.

Yours truly,
the racist

But who's willing to pay even $1 when they can find the same thing for free in greater quantity?  Even if you have some media encrypted and copy-protected, someone will always come up with a way to crack and extract it.  I could spend a couple dollars on licensed songs in proprietary format, or just download the whole album in a widely accepted format for free.  

People could still steal. No doubt. But, if you've got enough money it's much easier just to download from a site (if it is reasonably priced.) Besides, it makes you feel better paying SOMETHING. Look at linux, people donate to open source projects all the time? Why? To feel good, and to feel like they are being good samaritans. When people have more money and more things they like, they tend to be happier. When they are happier, they tend to be more forgiving. You'll always have leechers, but it'll be something like being ass raping gay. It's shameful. Your mamma gonna slap you for it.

Also, the idea of encryption and copy protection is insane, everybody should just drop these formats and stop spending billions on them. Instead they should just try trusting in human nature a little, and making their operational costs as low as possible. Use psychology to get people to buy your stuff. You don't need everybody that uses it to buy it, and enough to make a profit.


Yours truly,
The Racist

I still don't see it.  Someone goes to 4chan and posts a torrent or a rapidshare file, and someone gets the file for free.  They can give it to friends, or redistribute it.  The file has no value, but people are willing to pay for a better rapidshare account if they can't stomach one download per hour, and people are willing to pay for direct mailed CDs if they have a slow connection or lack the ability to search for everything.  So the price itself is due to demand and convenience, more of a service than the actual goods themselves, which are valueless.  It seems more like a successful venture for bootleggers, such as one site that sells roms as collected CDs.  It doesn't seem like anything a professional company could take advantage of on a large scale, but it fits the operation of an underground bootlegger who wants to make quick cash.  It's like China, who the hell wants to pay full price, and what legitimate company would want to lower itself to bootleg prices?

You're right about the bootleggers. I think that one solution would be to have task forces you can hire in order to hack and damage bootleg sights, in addition to advertising benefits for the artists etc. Also, I think it is much better in this new paradigm for artists, or groups of artists, to sell their own work instead of from a publisher. Why? Because people seem to like knowing that they are getting money to the people they actually want to benefit from things like this.

Also, bootleggers have another heavy disadvantage. Unlike p2p, if you have an account for getting money, you are in some way tracable. Prosecuting every p2p-er is unfeasible. Prosecuting every bootlegger IS feasible.

Of course, you'll always have illegal cd vendors in places like Russia and China, but I would think that their advantages would disappear after the internet proliferates enough. After all, it's more convienent to download from a fast connection for cheaper than to walk a mile and buy something on cd.

Yours truly,
The Racist

morals please

Content providers need to invest in content delivery infrastructure.  Unsecured content delivery infrastructures will always propagate quicker than secure ones, therefore those that develop content should develop unsecured infrasturctures for maximum profit.

Here's something I don't understand.  Take Sony, for example.  Sony is the owner (at least in part) of a major music label, Sony produces recording media such as CDs, and Sony produces recording hardware such as CD burners.  Does Sony expect us NOT to use the products they sell?  If they didn't want us to copy and burn CDs/DVDs, they should not have made CD or DVD burners.

SOMEBODY has to pay for the stuff, even if thousands of freeloaders get to go for a ride on his back. If somebody didn't pay, you wouldn't have it.

Money is useful not to just buy things, with enough money you can make yourself your own ruler. Buying an oil rig on the international seas and creating your own country on it. Not anymore governed by any laws free to get all the guns, cp, whores, slaves and everything, but be ready to defend your hegemony as you're only protected by yourself.

>>15
People don't donate to linux because it makes them feel good to be all alturistic and shit, they donate because they want to be known as smartay computar kernel wizard men !!!

>>1
Yeah that'd be nice but too bad you can't pirate FOOD.

>>24

Yes you can, I have been pirating apples for quite some time, I am an APPLE PIRATE !!!

I wish to join your crew.

I feel like we are headed towards a Japan style recession.  High prices, high living costs, just enough pay to get by and enjoy a hobby.

Money is not over.

Love is over.