Intellectual Property and the Economics of Entertainment
By: nikky Howard
Submitted: 2010-06-29 20:37:33 | Word Count: 616
There's been abuzz over the past few weeks regarding how Cond? Nast, the New York Times, and different publishing firms are busily getting ready digital versions of their varied publications. The gist is that they want to be ready for the only-rumored, yet heavily hyped, Apple Tablet. Apparently, the Youngsters From Cupertino have achieved such a level of credibility that corporations will pour money into getting ready for a tablet-vogue laptop that Apple might be thinking about launching maybe next year.
Here we tend to have yet another piece of evidence to point that the written word has begun its unavoidable migration from paper to the digital media. Sensible news for tree huggers; dangerous news for Hammer mill, Champion, and anyone who owns a printing press. Not that the tactile enjoyment of a shiny magazine or well-made book is probably to be replaced by a sterile LCD screen any time soon. And we tend to won't be closing libraries and replacing them with large servers within the foreseeable future. Of a lot of immediate concern, but, is that the impact the presumed Apple Pill and also the all-too-real Amazon Kindle might have on the supply of all that content - the writers.
Over the past twenty years, digitization has changed the music industry. Album sales have declined over the past decade to the purpose where combined CD and download sales now represent only a fraction of what CD sales alone accounted for in 2000. Thousands of recording trade jobs has disappeared; thus have thousands of retail record stores across the country. Today, the primary revenue source for the artists is live performances. Being a rock star ain't what it used to be.
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Different styles of digitized entertainment, like cinema and video games, are managing to carry their own against pirate attacks for the time being. But as books become simply shared digital files, how will the authors and their publishers be able to control unlicensed dissemination of the work? Can a Stephen King, a John Grisham, or a Dan Brown continue to provide entertaining works of fiction when the sales greenbacks begin to decline? Unlike music, there is not a terribly lucrative marketplace for live performances by an author.
There is no money in poetry, of course, and poets continue to write down, don't they? The difference is that poets write for the aim of self-expression, to not entertain others. A serious distinction between art and entertainment is that the latter requires a revenue stream to justify its existence. This isn't to say that works produced to entertain cannot also be art, however let's not forget that Shakespeare wrote plays to earn a living.
You can't own what we tend to call "intellectual property" any more than you'll own an idea. What you'll be able to hold onto is the proper to regulate the copy and dissemination of its physical manifestations - hence the term "copyright". Ought to writers and publishers be in an exceedingly hurry to embrace a methodology of distribution therefore inherently liable to illicit reproduction and sharing? If you had a novel visiting press tomorrow, would you be willing to allow it to be printed digitally still? Does one see any means to guard book authors within the future... before all of them flip to writing for the stage or screen? I would have an interest to know if you do.
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Nik has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in Economics, you can also check out his latest website about:
