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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I understand the point beyond the initial foundation of Hollywood. If this was say Linux vs. Windows they would have a point, but to say "...we crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man..." when they're talking about content created by these profitable companies it makes no sense and it seems like they're trying to make it into some sort of moral crusade for freedom. Strange.

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The profitable companies are not really the creators of the content, are they? Did DC create The Watchmen, or was it Alan Moore?

A consumer-pays-in-advance subscription model would provide better price signals to the real creators, wouldn't it?

Film studios specifically try to organize things so that the company that creates the content never turns a profit.

Supplying a Wikipedia link today seems silly, but you could Google "Hollywood Accounting".

(oh what the hey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting)

Funded by isn't the same as created by. Granted, without these companies there to throw massive amounts of money at writers/directors/actors, then we probably wouldn't have much of the content that we do today (at least not how it is). That doesn't mean that culture can't exist without them.

Anyway, these companies (on the music side in particular) love to talk about the "poor starving artists", but fail to change their own habits to give those artists a better deal.

They aren't content creators. They're content funders and distributors, but the content would still be created in some form without them. In this sense, the pirate community does actually perform one of the actions (distribution), and seems to perform it much more efficiently than the big companies. They just haven't got the 'funding' part figured out yet, but when they do, that will truly signal the death of the majors.

(P.S. No, it won't - nothing will truly kill them, but it will at least give them genuine competition)

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