Would You Rather Be 'Right' Or Realistic?

from the being-right-in-fantasy-land-doesn't-help-much-in-the-real-world dept

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.



I sometimes wonder if this simple, grown-up fact gets ignored during all of these discussions about digital distribution.

We often try to fight problems by yelling at them instead of accepting the reality of what people do, from controversial national legislation to passive-aggressive office signs. Such efforts usually fail, often with a lot of collateral damage, much like Prohibition and the ongoing “war” on “drugs”....



[....]



Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working. It’s unrealistic and naive to expect everyone to do the “right” thing when the alternative is so much easier, faster, cheaper, and better for so many of them.

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We recently wrote about the excellent comic from Matthew Inman'sto highlight how companies turn would-be buyers into infringers by not making the content available. Here's a snippet.In response, some folks sent over columnist Andy Ihnatko's response, in which he suggests the comic is actually representative of the sense of entitlement that people feel towards such content. Ihnatko's writeup is slightly amusing as he tries to mock those consumers for actually having an opinion on how they consume content and concludes with this basic statement:I was going to write a rather long response to why this is kinda silly, but Marco Arment did a better job than I ever would in explaining the difference between being "right" and being "pragmatic." You really should read the whole thing, because it involves a rather detailed example involving the physical layout of a restroom. I'm going to skip over that part and highlight the summary point, but it's worth reading the full thing:This point could be seen as the central theme of many of the 40,000 plus posts that have been made on this blog: dealing with reality is always going to be a more effective way to go about things than taking some "moral" stand on how things "should" be. And, if you can deal with the realities and it actuallythe whole moral "I'm right!" part at the same time, what good is it to not deal with realities?Taking the point even further, there's a simple fact of today's world, which is that. Ihnatko's entire point seems to assume that this consumer power is "entitlement." I tend to think of it as consumers making their will known -- and that tends to lead tothat should make. What Ihnatko ignores is that a market isdetermined by just one side. It's the interplay between buyers and sellers, and if the buyers aren't happy, they express that to the sellers in certain ways -- and infringement is one of those ways. It's a market signalling method. I'd argue that it's just as much an "entitlement" mentality by the "sellers" to pretend that only they get to decide what the consumer should be able to get, without listening to what the consumer wants.

Filed Under: business models, infringement, morals, practicality, realism, right