zedz wrote:How disingenuous can you get? Clearly the core of MoC's product is the 'data' - the movie - and it's where the bulk of their outlay has been. Or do you honestly think that MoC's customers see their releases as incredibly expensive Amray cases containing. silver ornaments for hanging from their Christmas tree?
I'm an MoC customer, and yes, the product is the data. But I'm not going to argue anymore about the fact that file-sharing, and file-sharing software, is legal, and that there are gray areas between privacy, intellectual property, and a personal sense of ethics. I have simply tried to pose the argument that the Internet and file sharing have changed the idea of intellectual property, that there are gray areas, and that large companies more and more are encroaching on people's privacy rights.
I have listened to a lot of small DVD-company owners in this thread, and I am persuaded by the intellectual property rights arguments. There are many artists who support file sharing willingly; others don't. Customers should respect the opinions of the ones who don't. Generally, I try not to download or copy material if an artist has come out against downloading and file sharing (Robert Fripp, for example), or if an artist is operating a small company, and downloading something would personally make me feel like a cretin (Greg Sage and the Wipers, for example). In fact, I have rarely downloaded or traded anything that isn't unavailable in R1 or completely obscure or OOP. I draw a distinction here between copying the occasional CD that a friend bought, or sharing something I converted to MP3. Why? Because I do. I don't feel sharing what I own with friends is violating anything, especially the spirit of the artist. If a friend comes over to my house 25 times and I play the same album for him every time, should we pay the artist 25 times because my friend didn't purchase it? Is there a difference between playing something 25 times for someone or burning them a copy of the album? Where do you draw the line? Then again, sometimes (Greg Sage again) I will tell friends that they should just buy a copy of an album because it's affordable and worth supporting the artist. Sometimes I don't.
I grew up making cassette tapes of albums during my teenage years, and have retained the concept that making "tapes" for friends is not a violation of any rights. Some people disagree with that. Maybe they should sue the tech companies and programmers that allow people to extract digital files instead. Oh wait, tech companies have been sued for this, and yet Apple, for example, keeps releasing new LEGAL versions of iTunes, which you can use to extract digital files from copyright protected CDs. Sorry, but I have listened to new albums at a friend's house, burned a copy of the CD, and then went to see the band live, and spent money on a t-shirt, too. This is the kind of economic fluidity that feels threatened by overly prohibitive copyright protection.
But back to your point about the product. Of course the data is the product. What I can do with the data I purchased is the question. But to the point, for many people, myself included, it
is the packaging--the design, paper quality, and attention to detail (well written and EDITED copy [I work as an editor and notice these things, British style notwithstanding]), not to mention a good selection of essays--that separates CC and MoC from other smaller companies. A lot of smaller companies are doing decent transfers of films; most of them do not do packaging well. And these are mass-produced media products, after all, but don't tell me you don't fetishize over them because that would be disingenuous. You wouldn't be a member of the Criterion Collection forum if you didn't. So the package matters.
zedz wrote:It seems to me that the 'good business model' to which your dubious logic is pointing is one in which the kind of marginal films which MoC and others deal in simply would not be published. Thank God the people behind these labels are not mere businessmen. Your analogy with mass-market publishing is specious. That model would (and, to an extent, already does)apply to major label DVD releases. With MoC, the comparison would be to small specialist presses or academic publishers, and I don't see their wares arrayed on trestle tables at Book Barn, Inc. But I do see them struggling to stay in business.
What is dubious to me is that the music and film industry still hasn't figured out how to deal with downloading and digital media in the real world, and that you are giving them a pass for that.
As for publishing, I said nothing about mass-market publishing. I should have made this clear but I was talking about niche-market, i.e. "literary," publishing. And I routinely see hardcover and first-run paperbacks of smaller, "literary" titles marked way down in the independent bookstores where I live. Maybe not at Borders or Barnes and Noble though.
But this is a separate discussion, really. The film and music industries (especially music) are overcharging, or have an inflated sense of value, about their products when compared to book publishing. (That said, we aren't in the laserdisc days anymore, thankfully. That they could get away with what they charged for laserdiscs then is precisely the point.) However, the book-publishing industry is probably to blame for its own demise, to be honest, because it started "taking back" books that didn't sell, and crediting bookstores. To some extent, book publishing has never recovered from that. Nevertheless, books are cheaper for customers because of this--if you know where to look, or, I guess, live near some good independent bookstores. Anyway, I think MoC and CC could mark down their products even more and still manage to stay in business. They're doing well; don't let the poverty and profit-margin cries fool you.