An individual copyrighted work is not a “monopoly.” It is one choice out of many such works. There is, for example, plenty of competition in the soft drink industry, but only Coca Cola Company can make Coca Cola. Avatar is not the only movie out there, and you can watch any opening weekend as different movies fight each other for consumer dollars.

“Competition” is a wide range of different offerings in a particular field. Claiming that each brand is some kind of “monopoly” because you can’t choose something else without getting a different brand is just silly.

If you don’t like how Avatar is being offered, get something else. You don’t want an IPad at ruinous Apple prices, find another system or lump it.

If you think you should have a right to access a specific, individual product or work of art at the price you demand, maybe you’re just having entitlement issues. And “dependency?” You really don’t want to go there. Take a closer look at the entire plot of Wall-E.

Two things in the real world have always defined a free market: Competition and the free flow of information. Those two principles are so central to free market principles that violations of them are generally, but not always, considered criminal acts; but absence of either one “breaks” a market.

I covered lack of competition due to copyright laws in another post. It’s a misleading red herring to point to the existence of multiple “studios” as amounting to competition, because copyright grants a monopoly on each work. There is no competition to sell you a copy of the movie “Avatar” or any other; there is only one vendor of “Avatar”.

You yourself illustrated the absence of the free flow of information when you described the marketplace as consisting only of sellers and their middlemen. When there’s competition there’s also rich feedback to the community of sellers telling them what buyers want and what price they’ll pay. But when there’s no competition, the feedback channel constricts to pretty much a binary “it’s selling/it’s not selling”. And people who are doing well managing a portfolio of monopoly rights are really not going to pay much attention to what consumers want.

Sellers don’t really benefit from freezing out consumers, in the long run, because among other drawbacks, they lose valuable information from the marketplace. I think that the role of a market as an information clearinghouse can’t possibly be understated. Without information flowing freely in a market about the market, everybody makes bad decisions.

How in the world is all this science fictiony? Best I can come up with is this visualization that I think of as The Apotheosis of Consumerism:
(from that great work of extrapolative fiction, “Wall-E”) That’s where we’ll all end up if we don’t renounce the dependency fostered by consumerism.

Remember, you don’t have to buy anything you don’t feel is a good value.

What you got from what I wrote was that I want my digital media for free, and you respond with the mantra of passive consumerism: “Shut up and be grateful for what trickles down.”?

What’s always amazed me about that attitude of yours is that I’m desribing, and you’re tacitly endorsing, a broken marketplace, a perversion of a free market in which the buyer is merely a passive consumer of the output of the sellers.

Here’s how you describe the marketplace for digital media:

…movie studios, streaming video sources, DVD makers, and probably many others. There are licensing issues, bootlegging issues, copyright issues, conflicts of interest between different markets, and trying to create new markets without killing any of the several geese laying the golden eggs. That they can kludge it out at all is a miracle.

In other words, Corporate America–”they”–will work it all out amongst themselves, and tell us how it’s going to be. You didn’t mention the consumers anywhere in that cast of characters.

You’d make the perfect spokesman for the one percent, Tom.

I get all this cool stuff in the first place because there are a load of businesses out there looking to make shitloads of money.

There is an enormous amount of high-speed adaptation going on here, with accommodations being worked out between movie studios, streaming video sources, DVD makers, and probably many others. There are licensing issues, bootlegging issues, copyright issues, conflicts of interest between different markets, and trying to create new markets without killing any of the several geese laying the golden eggs. That they can kludge it out at all is a miracle. There is no “technical” reason they can’t give you all this product for free. That’s not the issue.

Listen to you whining because you can’t get theater-resolution new movies squirted on demand into your computer at the touch of a button for the price you think you deserve to pay.

When I was in high school, I was taping Star Trek for a project using goddam reel-to-reel half-inch tape. In black and white.

For this situation to represent improvement would require that a work be produced (first recorded) in a low-definition format, then somehow a higher-definition version comes into existence.

That would violate the laws of information theory just as egregiously as a perpetual motion machine violates the laws of physics.

The true situation is that vendors choose to make renderings from a master at strategic resolutions that they sell into different markets, segmenting their product lines in such a way as to maximize revenue squeezed from the consumer. Think of the product matrix as working something like the game of go, where an arrangment of products, or lack of products, can block a consumer’s wishes and force him to spend more money. In this case the strategic gap is lack of downloadable 1080 videos, forcing people to buy lower rez versions for some devices, and buy blu ray a second time to get 1080 for home entertainement devices.

A clear illustration of that strategy is the way that Amazon restricts downloadable video to 720 except for a privileged few who purchase hardware devices licensed to work with Amazon Video. Those lucky bastards get 1080 for the same price I pay for 720.

There’s no technical reason why all Amazon customers can’t have 1080. They just choose to sell it only to a few.

This isn’t like successive generations of recording technology. Not like going from digital studio recordings to analog vinyl albums, then later going from digital masters to digital CDs, then again going from digital masters to MP3s. It’s not a White Album. situation, happening over time, it’s happening all at once and is a matter of strategic choices by those doing the rendering. It’s not technological advancement that’s behind this.

You have such an innocently Pollyanish view of business, Tom. Can you really not imagine a business playing hardball to maximize profit?

As with computers, nobody’s holding a gun to your head to upgrade.

I never do download video. I’ve got better things to do with my storage space. The DVDs that I replace with blu-rays end up at my used bookstore where I get credit and cash for them. I rarely buy blu-ray movies and product right out of the gate, since most of them end up on some kind of super sale price if I’m patient. This is especially true of large packages like “Firefly.”

It is annoying to have “special versions” keep coming out of the same thing (*cough* Disney *cough*), but I’ve learned patience on that, too. I didn’t buy the original “Lord of the Rings” non-extended blu-rays, and I haven’t bought the new ones yet either. The price will drop.

This is a pretty common aggravation in the online video market right now. The studios are protecting their product lines jealously to squeeze the maximum profit from consumers, and for them the ultimate win is to force a consumer to repeatedly buy the same work in order to get better and better quality or simply to be able to play it on multiple devices they own.

How many times have we purchased the White Album, eh? It’s an old retail scam.

Actually, I already have Firefly. I love that series.