New drugs are one thing (though even there, prizes and academic grants are a meaningful alternative to patent protection), but do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste. Most of them have trouble ever making a profit, and that's in spite of extreme levels of copyright enforcement (at least wrt. average users, not dedicated pirates).
If that were true, most of the big-budget movie studios would be going out of business regularly. But that isn’t happening, by and large. They do sometimes want you to think they’re not making money. Having worked in the film & games industries, I’ve witnessed some of the creative accounting that gets used.
> do we really need big-budget movies? They seem like a total waste.
Well, people pay for them, and our IP laws are designed to protect the business of creations and inventions. Most of the pharma industry is also peddling stuff we don’t need and is wasteful, however it is big business.
It is interesting, but should be taken with a couple pretty big grains of salt IMO. It does a good job of discussing the many varied sources of cost and income. But the secret unsourced data of unnamed movies that is “trust me” better than what’s on Wikipedia and Box Office Mojo… really big red flag. I absolutely do not buy that the average profit is 3.7%. I worked on one of the movies he discusses (Shrek 2) and the paragraph about it is misleading, which for me makes me wonder how many other paragraphs are misleading. I also worked for a 2nd major film company and watched first-hand how they account for production budgets, which can involve trading costs with other nearby productions to make the expenses appear larger in order to do things like justify restructuring decisions, hide gains and losses, divert money toward or away from bonus pools. What really happens is impossible to know even as an insider, but the outcomes of this industry reveal that despite what they claim, it’s quite healthy for the big-budget crowd.
It's worth understanding that "profit" is usually not the goal, and in any business can be easily made to go higher or lower.
For example if I want my business to make more profit, I can stop paying me a salary. I can just take the same money out as profit. Or vice versa. Ultimately I end up optimising my salary/profit ratio according to the tax laws.
Notice the studios managed to spend 8 billion on "other stuff". That's not "profit" (so less to pay people who have profit share) but it certainly went somewhere. And those feeding at the $8b trough certainly view big budget movies as a massive win.
Sure Hollywood Accounting is well known, but it's no different to any business. Profit is a meaningless number and ultimately the flow of money is optimised for many other things.
If you abolished patents you'd have to reduce regulations on drug discovery enough that university teams can make new ones (like in the bad old days of the 1950s). Big budget movies we can just do without.
On a related note: If you reduce the regulations on drugs you could go back to the good old days where new drugs cost under a hundred million dollars to make. This would let smaller companies make new drugs and drug companies would get slightly less insane margins (your average big pharma company gets $2 for shareholders for every $1 they spend on R&D, manufacturing, admin, advertising, etc).
Lots and I really do mean lots of drugs are funded almost entirely by governments and basic research at universities. Covid vaccines being one example.
If you look at where the money for research comes (for new drugs, not for variation of existing drugs) from in big pharma you'll see a significant part of it is government money.
But ethically do you think it is okay for big pharma to keep the intellectual property on medicine that can very well save lives? I think you have to make a very good case for patents being a force of innovation to justify keeping this medicine out of peoples reach. Let's not forget when bill gates spent millions of dollars distributing information in Africa against the copyright waiver the government was planning in order to make AIDS medicine affordable. Rent seeking on medication is, in my opinion, one of the worst use cases for copyright.
And then, from there, isn't access to culture also a human right? Personally I think it is. Of course in our current societal and economic system it is extremely punishing to be an artist. But to me, that indicates there is something wrong with our system when artists have to rent seek or starve! We do have to question the basis of what makes our society tick more carefully. There are always trade offs, but I think the direction we've taken... The direction of strenghtening rent seeking behavior is probably at odds with creativity and freedom of expression.
I mean, look at "memes". These images with funny text that people make. These are often anonymous pieces of work that are meant to be copied and distributed for free! I think the proliferation of talent and artwork is related to the disruption of access rather than copyright. Look at the amount of free work that is produced on the internet, from tiktok to memes to fanfiction. 60 years ago it took a lot to be a writer, publishing was very expensive so of course there needed to be a system to support that. But that's no longer the case, the internet gives you a way to reach millions of people instantly. Anything that can be digitalized is on a whole other level now.
So to me, the cost of maintaining copyright has to be put in the balance with its benefits... And I'm not sure we wouldnt see big budget productions without it. I mean, wasnt game of thrones the most pirated show ever anyway?
