[Groop] Groo... What pirates? (File Sharing)

[Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat]

Le jeudi 29 janvier 2004 à 13:25, Chris.Emmett at uk.standardchartered.com écrivait:
> 
> If you watch the copyright blurbs on DVDs they talk about not showing them 
> to groups whether for profit or not - I paraphrase, of course. I expect 
> the same thing applies to Comics and that showing them to 30 of your mates 
> is, in fact, breaching copyright. Unfortunately, I don't have any comics 
> here at work to check it in :(

You have to look at the other side of this part of the story: public
libraries make books and CDs and all sorts of copyrighted stuff available
for all, given a usually small fee. They might be paying their books
more than the average consumer (I do not know about that) or buy them
with special bindings (those books are meant to be read by a lot of
people, they'd better be hard to damage). Are public libraries infriging
copyright? Should people pay more when they take a book in a library
because they're not giving enough money to the publisher? At least those
books cannot be infinitely copied for free, and if many people read
them, the library will buy several copies.

I think that one big problem most publishers have today is that they want
to make more money with less. They'd rather have you pay each time you
listen to a CD (even a single song) or read a page of a book, than
selling it to you only once. That's because once you've bought it, it's
yours (the object, not the art) and you can (as it's a physical object)
lend it your friends, resell it, listen or read it as many times you
want, and they never get a cent from this. That's the problem the
big corporations face. They want 15% growth and rentability, forever.

I tend to think that the artists' problem is more to get decently paid
for their hard work, not having their creations taken away from them
(either by pirates, counterfeit sellers or abusive contracts) and also
get possibly rich and famous if they creations are really successful.

Also note that the recent Blueberry movie (very loosely adapted from
a French comic-book by Charlier/Giraud (aka Moebius)) is already on
file-sharing networks. Except that it looks like it's been filmed by a
screener, and is interrupted after a few minutes by the main actor and
the director who give a talk against downloading movies, especially
before they are shown in theaters. And then the rest of the file is made
of bits of the "making of" and other promotionnal items. So, companies
are already using those networks for advertisment and public relations.

-- 
 Philippe "BooK" Bruhat

 To talk about the Wanderer is dangerous to do-
 It can be just as deadly as to find yourself with Groo!
                                    (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #56 (Epic))