But for now there is no competition in the HI DEF DVD market. No competition equals higher prices for consumers.
It will now be interesting to see how the market reacts. Will people buy less and prices drop or will people jump on the Blu Ray band wagon and keep prices high. Time will tell. It is fun to watch the free market work its magic.
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Of course, prices only go up because the government enforces patents that reduce competition, and those patents are far too strong, restrictive, and long-lasting because of lobbyists influencing politicians to make them so. Would you prefer the government not enforce patents at all, or that we use campaign finance reform to prevent companies from manipulating the patent laws?
That is a well educated question. I do not know if I am smart enough to come back with a well articulated answer.
My gut wants to say that governmnets should not enforce patents, but I am not sure of all the legal consequences of that. I am thinking about Netflix and if another company used that patten to create competition. I would say I am okay with that. Competition is always good - so if government gets in the way of competition that bothers me.
Probem is I do not understand the campaign finance part of your argument. Too smart for me. Talk to me like I am a child (just this once).
Yeah, I iplied a lot of backstory that may not be common knowledge (my best friend from HS is an inmtellectual property lawyer so I know a lot of the backstory).
Basically, companies like Disney, GE, pharmaceuticals, and other powerful innovators have, for the last hundred years, been applying pressure on legislators to get intellectual property laws to become stricter and stricter, and specifically for patents and copyrigths to last much longer than they were ever intended to when the system was originally established.
For instance, when copyrights were first issued, the founding fathers were explicitly worried that they represented a type of monopoly and wanted to limit their duration. The initial copyrights
lasted 14 years, with the option of one additional 14-year expansion if the other was still alive and vigorously defending the copyright. Today, after a series of bills quietly passed with massive backing (with corresponding massive increases in campaign contribtions each time) by various companies (mostly Disney, as each bill extending copyright got passed just as the copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to run out), the standard length of a copyright is 70 years after the author's death, or 120 years for a corporate producation (anything made for hire). Similar expansions have happened for the scope and duration of patents, each time corresponding to massive lobbying efforts and campaign contributions on behalf of companies who want their government-sanctioned monopoly to last longer and be broader.
So basically I'm saying that, if you want the government enforcing intellectual property rights at all (look at China for a model where tehy kinda don't, with interesting consequences), you have two options: prevent corporations from influencing lawmakers who make the intellectual property laws, or else accept that government-sanctioned monopolies will be warping the free market on a much larger scale than what is neccessary to promote innovation.
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