Jonathan Handel, a digital media, entertainment and technology lawyer posts on his blog about the nature of content in today’s society.
He sees six reasons for content’s devaluation:
- Supply and Demand: The supply of online content has grown enormously in the past decade, including user-generated content, a bunch of which includes content created by people who don’t care if they get paid for its creation.
- Loss of Physical Form: When you steal an object (like a DVD, for example), you deny it to the owner. When you “steal” a movie, by downloading it, it’s still there for others to use. Its intangible nature makes its appropriate feel much less like stealing.
- It’s Easy: Getting content from the internet is far easier than through traditional methods.
- New Media is Ad-Supported: The “freemium” model makes content available at no cost to the user – so why should the user see the content as valuable?
- Market Forces: Computers and web services are more valuable when more content is available, and non-professionals flock to use the new technologies of the web, as they had long been denied access to distribution via traditional methods.
- Culture: A generation of users has grown up indifferent or even hostile to copyright.
More of this article can be found here…