Current intellectual property laws are absurd and were written for machine production, or physical production in general, not personal computer data, but that is not how the governments of the world look at it. They think that if the big corporations decline in value that it is a sign of economic weakness, not for the economic growth which it, in reality, is. People are making more economic choices because they can. They are acting because the means of saving, or economic choice, has been made more efficient and therefore more accessible. The media data that they purchase on the internet, for 1/5th the price of the retail brick and mortar version, frees up the 4/5ths of their money that they would have spent on the same thing. So, that savings is dispersed elsewhere in the economy and furthers the consumer’s standard of living; albeit in a new and more economic direction. They now have what they would have bought anyway, but paid dramatically reduced prices. My contention, which is fairly obvious, is that this relationship of scarcity of production goods and super abundance of digital data files, will decrease overall production of the digital data physical equivalents and that the money will be spent on physical luxuries overall, in whatever form they may take.
This may mean that some familiar retail stores go out of business. The volume of sales of physical goods that are available in digital format will erode the revenues and profitability of brick and mortar stores that make their money around these formats. We’ve already seen this, for the most part, in the corporate music industry. They still make sales, but they are in constant decline and will never recover. Movie production companies have yet to suffer this fate. Movies themselves require much more effort and labor be put into their production and this money is usually made back before the it leave the theater. Maybe, in the future, movies that don’t at least break even, before they leave the box office, won’t see mass DVD releases, but only online sales. Retail video games will go the same route as movies, but they will be more able to cope with the declines in revenue. The game developers that have been successful in the indie development world are setting the stage that all computer software developers will mimic in the near future. The difference, again, is that indie games are less likely to see mass retail distribution. So it would follow, that in the future there will be dramatically reduced quantities of the different physical copies of music, movies, and games for sale which would imply that retail stores will be proportionately smaller. There will simply be less goods that are able to be produced to put on retail shelves. This is what the internet will do to the “retail service sector” economy in the U.S. Laws prohibiting people from sharing information are illegitimate and interfere with people’s ability to make economic choices. Because of copyright laws and illegitimate intellectual property regulations the U.S. economy will further spin its way down the toilet.