The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record.For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.

At that, why don't they fail? Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never. For the last century the big 5 have been established and held their power base with an iron grip. Independent film is nothing compared to them, indie games vs publishers is not even close to as bad as that situation. The major movie studios have no competition to theaters besides outside media forces but never to competitive "startups" because they control the market.

Not so: the biggest jolt to the industry was antitrust regulation in the 1940s, as discussed here - though paradoxically, in a way that's vaguely supportive of censorship: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=178

The restrictive copyright model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much. Even the few musicians who hit it big with a debut album have actually worked very hard beforehand to persuade a record label to sign them, with very little reward.

They don't have to be experts, they just have to be good enough. If the decision is 100% of profits goto a label or 30% go to Apple if I just learn how to use iTunes, I think they'll choose iTunes...

Publishing means to make public and that isn't anything special any more, it's been commoditized.

I call bogus. I've only funded a single Kickstarter project, but it was a completely unknown musician I discovered while browsing Kickstarter. There's no way I'm unique in this.

Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support it.

Are you saying people who defend copyright. Conciously are only being fair to a small subset of the population. But unfair to the majority. And a net loss to humanity. And still they defend copyright?

I don't think so. It seems to me, those who defend copyright have the opinion that copyright is a net benefit to humanity. After all pros and cons are summed. Which I strongly disagree.

The point is that it isn't necessarily favoritism as anybody could create copyrighted works so I wouldn't see it as 'unfair' unless you had to apply to the government for copyright or something like that.

Besides copyright is a net benefit if it helps intellectual property get produced.

I am not arguing that IP would not get produced if it were not for copyright as that is clearly not true. However I'm not sure it is to everyones benefit if creatives had to work 8 hours a day at 7/11 and then only produce on nights/weekends or that they had to hope for some kind of handout (which could well just be companies wanting to advertise or politicians wanting to create propaganda).

Whether it's a net benefit to humanity, however you measure that, is neither here nor there. It probably is, but those are not the grounds we're arguing on.

It's sort of like defending privacy. You don't defend it cause of some net benefit to humanity. Who knows, maybe the world would be happier if there were no secrets. You defend privacy because it's fair on an individual level.

Why shouldn't I be able to make back-up copies of the DVDs that are bought with good money? Why should the descendants of Tolkien be able to censor any works of art that includes hobbits? Why should Time Warner be able to censor me from singing happy birthday in public? Why should Google be blocked from bringing out-of-print books to the public? Once a work is published, I don't see why an author should be able to control what's no longer theirs, any more that I would expect a plumber to dictate what I'm allowed to do with the plumbing in my house. Both plumbers and artists labour, and they deserve rewards for their labour, but they do not deserve the right to control my use of what I have purchased from them.

For me, the right of sharing culture is a given, and the right to restrict other people from sharing culture is at best a necessary evil.

There's a difference between sharing culture and outright ripping people off; if you think this should be prohibited, you aren't really categorically against copyright, only its current implementation.

The difference is that one cassette is much more expensive than 15 megabytes of magnetic storage, and the gas to go from a friends house to let you copy their tape is much more expensive than the electricity and internet bills to transfer the data.

But it is such a common misconception that it is stealing - it is duplicating bits of data on magnetic storage that, by nature of the physical properties of the device, are extremely easy to replicate.

Yes, it is "hard" to understand the concept that once released, the content is no longer under the control of the creator. But defying the physics of physical storage only causes what we have now - big corporate lobbies are pushing to destroy all personal privacy to make sure no one uses the inherent properties of the technology developed in ways they don't desire.

And that will destroy the internet and society at large if left unchecked. You can't take away personal privacy and expect anything less than collapse. The only solution is to accept the reality that digital content is infinitely reproducible for free, and go from there. The old brick and mortar model just does not work.

That's not an argument against copyright, really. As empiricists, we should be automatically skeptical of any social change that hasn't been tested or observed before, since we can't meaningfully predict its results.

The fact remains that while it may be unenforceable to use copyrights to restrict personal use of content, commercial use is a totally different animal. This includes things like film screenings in a commercial cinema, live musical performances, broadcasting, adaptation to other media, and use in advertising. It's not hard to imagine a future where content creators compete to emphasize these over merely selling copies of their work.

> Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never.

Not true. Television and VCR's were major upheavals comparable to the impact of the internet today.

And they fought both as if the world would end and, when they failed, they got wonderful profits from both.

What they can't stand is another player controlling distribution channels. They realize they are not in the content creation business - they distribute content.

For example if you saw something with a $100,000,000 target and $0 in donations, if all you could afford was $20 would you bother to put that in?

Also people are often quite bad at knowing exactly what they want. Let's assume that the iPhone had been a kickstarter project, I'm not sure how much the initial development costs were (for the software part at least) but I'm really not sure whether they would have raised it by just asking people if they wanted a phone with a touchscreen.

Given that, inherent to the way kickstarter works, it wouldn't actually cost you money unless the target was met, of course I would.