May 01, 2008

Buckets of Suck.....

Over at the A Distant Soil Blog, is this  post on  the PlagueCon NYCC which, despite its, er, 'horrifying' illustrations is well worth a read as a whole. However, of particular interest to many here, is this paragraph...

I spoke with a number of the manga/anime sellers, and while all said their manga sales were OK, they had nothing but sad stories about the fansubs on the internet killing the market for anime. So much for “Free on the internet will get you customers!” Several said that they had a number of titles they could not bring to the US commercially because pirating had killed anime sales. However, scanlations of manga did not appear to have had the same effect. Hm.


I suspect that this is what was involved in the recent ADV scare. And I'm pretty sure it was involved in the decisions that killed Geneon.

The sad thing is I know of some people who will take pride in that.
 

We've had  50 or so years  of socialists  denigrating the very concept of property rights and now technology that has advanced to make intellectual property very difficult to protect without the very social pressures and norms that such rhetoric erodes. This is a perfect storm of suck for creators and those who otherwise innovate.

The bitch of it is that intellectual property, that is invention and creativity, is far more valuable to a society in the long run than tangible property. It is how innovation and creativity happen.

This is bigger than comic books, or film.

If copyrights and patents have no ability to be enforced then the act of creating looses its market value except in the rare cases where the inventor/ creator has access to production and distribution infrastructure to turn a profit imediately on said innovation/creation....before it is copied by those who do not have the costs associated with invention to pay back.

The enforcement of patents and copyrights was one of the primary things that made western civilization possible, because it encouraged rather than discouraged innovation...the vast majority of history was not graced with this and tended to be pretty stagnant.

The products might have value, but inventing new things makes no economic sense if there is not some exclusivity for the creator to profit from his/her invention for a time.

This is rather bigger than our little hobby.

I'm not sure what the ultimate solution is, or if there is one, and if so, if there is one that doesn't involve some pretty draconian and intrusive measures.

And as sick and cold as it makes me to say it....said measures could possibly be the best of a set of bad options...anyway...discuss.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 451 words, total size 3 kb.

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
22kb generated in CPU 0.0689, elapsed 0.4321 seconds.
67 queries taking 0.4141 seconds, 202 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.