We have to programme the films far in advance of their release so the popularity of said films is also estimated from our curator’s experience. Good luck guessing how the new Nick Hornby will be received by audiences!

This xmas I bought a CD with, what, 9 or 10 songs. I paid 19.9 fcking euros. 20 damn euros for a 1-hour CD. For less than that I bought a 5-DVD pack of high-quality BBC documentary series by David Attenborough.

What we need is to take the shareware model to music and films, so that we can pay “after” enjoying (or suffering) a film or a music album. When I do go to the cinema (mostly for going out with friends), I do expect the experience to be, at least, good. Often, the quality of the film is not great (with scratches, etc); once the lens of the projector wasn’t even properly set and the movie was blurry; complaining was useless. And then, the movie is just a piece of crap. The anger and frustration that I get after wasting my time & money like that, and knowing that on top of that the studios are complaining why I don’t go more often to spend my money on their crap, just makes me wanna burn down the cinema.

On the other side, I have enjoyed some very good movies and documentaries online, and I would really pay, after the fact, to those who made the work. I won’t however, go buy the DVD because I know that most of the money will get lost on the way and not go to those who actually made the real work.

Of course you will always find people who are not willing to pay for anything, but that’s a cultural problem (basic education) and needs to be tackled independently. But the solution is not to fill the world with DRM (which you only are aware of when you PAY and get disturbed by it), or to treat everybody as a criminal (you could get a higher penalty by downloading some music than by committing rape in some places, come on!) displaying a “criminal warning” on those DVDs and to those people who actually paid for it.

I stop it. It’s just outrageous.

I believe the answer can only indeed be in some creative means of funding and not by enforcing a “new” crime upon the general population.

I just hope Portugal does not follow the French example…

As illustration, see this link: http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/ . It’s a summary from a one week sale of a great independent game, during which people could pay whatever price they wanted (original price being 20 dollars).

As shown, most people paid less than one dollar, they paid the minimum price, just because they could. Being confident in people to pay the “right price” is as much of a lost cause than expecting all of them to buy content they download, unfortunately.

That said, I’m french and am really ashamed of that law. This law was decided by governement, and studies realized by people linked to the multimedia market. In general, it was voted by people who don’t even understand internet. They have been told that people were stealing cultural content, and that it was the good thing to do to get rid of it…. Besides, nobody really “cared”, because only specialized medias reported about it. All other generic medias remained really quiet about this law, figure out why….

Essentially that’s pick your price. Anjuno.com is trying that, but not with movies yet.

It’s yet to be seen if artists will make as much (or more) pick your price, but it would solve the piracy problem.