[o_dammage]

Originally Posted by Imbrifer

Very intersting, dammage.
[...]
We have the potential to have almost entire industries (music [except for live], video, literature, more?) becoming 'open source', meaning that there is no direct exchange of money in their production and consumption.
Musicians do get most their cash from live performances, there would still be demand for visual arts, people still like to hold a book, and going to the movies will still be around. But selling CDs/tapes/records, selling books, movies, visual arts could become much less common. But again, what implications are there for our voraciously-capitalistic economy when people just start sharing, and you can't stop them?

[...]

Unfortunately the creators still have to eat. So should we pay for these things, or should they get their earnings elsewhere?

I stripped a bit, hopefully there was no content change because of that
I'll describe it a bit later and start with a famous quote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win

I think it comes handy here in terms of file sharing and so on. As you already said it: the artistic work lost its value, but the big4 and others have a big business model built on top of that value.
As one of the capitalistic rules is that those who are dynamic and flexible enough to enter new (growing) markets faster than their concurrents, will get the biggest reward and those who will lie like a stone, will get smashed.

The biggest revenue today as you said comes from services - performances, ads, fan articles. Things which cannot be copied or the copy will never achieve the quality of the original. And while the proprietary models build up on top of the value of the copy, the open source world builds on top of the value of the original.

There are tons of different models to be applied for the open source world.
Selling services, street performer, providing support and far more.

Especially Street Performer might become very interesting very soon. You create a work the common folks desire. Now you release a "demo" version and say you will release the full work for free (open, freeware, whatever) as soon as you raise $xxx donations. A neutral party is set up which collects the money. Most prominent successful execution is Blender (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_%28software%29.)

It is not the first "piracy" attack. Roman writers had problems because their books got illegally hand-copied, as Gutenberg developed the printer, a new piracy wave came, then photography fought portrait painters into a new edge, motion pictures opened a fully new world and motion cartoons fought against comic books. Now digital industry is fighting copying and table games fight against Valve

Did any of those branches die out? Big paintings still get stolen because of the originality, comic books adopted and have a debut in magazines and such stuff (you read them where you have no TV, don't you). What about street portraits? They still do the money. Digital copies of books are still hard to read (but I wouldn't count on that for the future).

Those adopted and others will. Eventually OpenSource will fight piracy away from the big scene and then something more superior will fight OpenSource. But they will still coexist if they don't fail hardly ( = in any case only negative profit. Like with copying books by writing nowadays)