In some places and times, people have been able to do those things with minimal risk of getting caught. They almost always do.

Also, almost everyone who buys an album distributes it to some people for free, at least in the sense of playing it for them. Only a few want to share it with hundreds of thousands, but then, it only takes a few.

I would also point out that the arts have been around before copyright and commercialization and will almost certainly be around after (especially if humans in general have more leisure time).

It may become harder to make millions of dollars making a film, but I don’t see that in itself as something necessarily worth preserving. Certainly it leads to being able to make films that cost millions of dollars, but since the cost of filmmaking is declining precipitously, it’s not clear that you need that kind of massive resource approach anymore. (It’s also not clear that it ever produced, or currently produces, better films than the alternatives.)

Well, I can’t look into people’s hearts. Maybe they really wanted to distribute the album they bought to hundreds of thousands of people for free. They couldn’t. Maybe, if shoplifting, fare dodging or tax evasion could be done with minimal risk of getting caught, people would do that as well. They can’t.

I dispute the “as they used to” as facts not in evidence.

Of course if you don’t care all that much about film, you don’t care, and there’s not much that can be done about that.

It may be that the communal experience of film is going away, and I’d miss that, but I don’t see evidence of the death of an art form.

Are there fewer films being made now?

Yes, because we are not talking about toilet paper, but about the future of an art form and a pretty amazing one at that. Now, of course one could say that, say, all these guys:

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/index.html

should make (or have made) films in IMAX 3D format or whatever, and otherwise sod them, who cares – but that seems rather callous and ignorant. Of course if you don’t care all that much about film, you don’t care, and there’s not much that can be done about that. But a lot of people do, without even taking into account those involved in the production, distribution and marketing of film, whose livelihood depends on it.

Is there some larger problem afoot?

Seems to me the problem is quite clear:

Seems to me the problem is quite clear:

The problem with the movie home viewing market is that there is a substitute that is relatively good, and cheap-to-free – pirated movies via your BitTorrent service of choice. (…) I would be thinking very, very seriously about ways to differentiate my product and move into a more secure market where individuals were less likely to be able to upload free competitors to my product and hence cut my margin to ribbons.

The whole problem could easily be solved

You don’t seem to be aware what a cumbersome and incredibly expensive process filming in the IMAX format is and the same goes for distribution and projection. Essentially the consequence of your suggestion would be that films could only be made by big studios with deep pockets. Also, the vast majority of productions are simply not suited to the IMAX workflow.

In the age of increasing democratization through digital technology (you can get a RED camera, which shoots at 4K, with lenses for around $25.000 and set up a more or less professional editing and color grading suite for an additional $10.000), relying on expensive gimmicks and focussing “user experience” instead of content would be exactly the wrong signal to send.

The whole problem could easily be solved, if people respected respected creative work as they used to and stopped pirating films.

I’ve seen a couple of the new 3D movies. They look good if you’re in the rear center of the theater. Otherwise, they don’t look good to me. I think that they render each camera angle with the assumption that the viewer is looking at the screen at a level angle along the center line. If you’re in front of the theater on the side, it looks horrible.

Who knew Cory Doctorow was such a Greenbergian formalist?

(Did you know that (a) colour is an important part of most paintings, and (b) you can make money selling black-and-white engravings of paintings, if you exist in the right time period?)

Doesn’t look good for any of the arts that are digitizable and work by individually touching their audience.