(Note: the first part of this is a copy of a comment I originally made elsewhere.)
Chanttojah: I mean for example, MGM cant just spend tens of millions to produce the next Bond film just to post it somewhere for free. Nor can most independent studios afford to produce a work of that scale.
Unfortunately, the answer to this is complex and tends to tl;dr.
A few points, though:
- I do not know. Nobody does. There are reasons to be optimistic that somebody will invent something, but until they do, we have no idea what it will be. That's the nature of future inventions.
- If nobody ever made another Bond film, it would not be the end of civilization, in the same way that the fact that we no longer build huge cathedrals was not the end of civilization — and at that, the cathedrals probably had the better claim.
- The social benefit of more Bond films does not outweigh the social cost of the proposed schemes (due process, assumption of innocence, rules of evidence, fair trial, first sale, ownership, privacy, hobby electronics, cryptography research, mathematics).
- Various relatively large Intellectual Property edifices have been created with relatively generous copying conditions, such as the GNU/Linux operating system and Wikipedia. A few years ago, in 2005, it was estimated that Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 would cost some US$ 8 billion if it were made as a traditional product — well over an order of magnitude more than any movie ever produced (US$ 0.3 billion, Pirates of the Carribean III).
- YouTube claims uploads of 20 hours every minute. A lot of that's dross, of course, but there are some pearls. I have no idea whether this is a good way to get to a future, Internet-friendly model of movie production; but it does indicate that there are a lot of people with the time and the inclination.
PS: It's been pointed out to me that the above is a bit negative; here, then, a bit of expansion on point 1's reasons to be optimistic.
- By analogy with software. Like films (and music), software can be perfectly copied for negligible cost. Also like films (and music), software traditionally requires large investments of money and effort for the fixed costs. Yet, over the last three decades or so, freely copied software has gone from "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" (Bill Gates, 1976) to the above-mentioned Debian GNU/Linux and beyond, supporting a healthy industry of programmers, system administrators, webmasters and so on.
- While I say that I do not know what business model will take hold, many proposals exist. Cinema sales will still exist, and the cinema experience is not easily duplicated in the home. Various schemes of pre-payment have been proposed, and in some cases tried. It may well be just a question of hitting on the right formula. In addition, some collaborative models may be possible, as with the Wikipedia.
- By analogy with music. Music looks like it's about 20-25 years behind software. First glimmers of plausible business models are beginning to emerge — in particular, as publicity for live work. It's a bit early to tell whether they'll last or whether they'll be supplanted by something better, but they're there and they're apparently workable.
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