For many people in the content industry its a way of life. The wheeling and dealing, the insider club, the exclusivity, once you get there you have a small group surrounding you. A group that you tend to stick with. That shares the same values, have their own dialect, and has the same faith in the way things have always been done.
Groups like this tend to strike out at anything that threatens their way of life. Religious, Â Political, and Social groups all do this. They rationalize their actions and believe anything, no matter how logically incorrect, to support their point of view. In order to maintain the coherence of the group they always find another group or a concept to demonize. For the longest time it was any sort of change, now their demon is the internet and they are using Google as its face.
If large enough these groups become stuck in a perpetual denial, anger, bargaining loop. The loop is driven by a meme gaining strength and giving hope, running its course through the group. Each time through the loop they push further, each time thinking this will fix the problem. The content industry has been doing this for 30 years now. The end result is the copyright in its modern form.
What is amusing is that it is a free market operating at its best.
small group of producers make a product, customers see value in product equal or greater than purchase price, customers buy product
Then new technology comes along. it now costs next to nothing to press a cd. Customers know how much it takes to record the cd. So the total value to the customer is in music. apparently the music isn’t worth $30 a cd.
Content providers cry, Our profits are falling. But so are the costs, and the customer knows this. Unfortunately the content providers priced themselves out of the market.
When the cost in time to do something illegally is greater than the legal price then you will see a return to the legal market. Following this logic, content providers have decided to wage war on the consumer to try and increase the price of doing illegal business. Waging war doesn’t win you friends. And it costs an awful lot. A cost that they are trying to put onto the consumer by making it a crime.
The most amusing thing is that records were originally sold to encourage people to go see live shows, which you can’t digitally replicate.
Truth be told I think content has a convenience factor associated with it. Hence the popularity of Netflix and various music streaming sites. The old content industry seem to be acting in a way that is disorganized and childlike, with each group yelling mine, and no you can not have this unless I say so. It is all pretty pathetic.