Streaming services would be forced to compete in everything except content. Creators would still be paid.
Copyright isn't a natural right, it should be continually adapted to serve the public.
What are the problems with this?
My personal views, of course.
One big problem with compulsory licensing is that rights organizations that manage the payment of royalties often become very powerful themselves and are sometimes seen as copyright bullies. For example, ASCAP, which represents composers and licenses musical compositions rights, pursued the Girl Scouts for unlicensed singing of campfire songs. [3]
[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/licensing/m200a.pdf
[2] example: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/24/taylor-swif...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/17/nyregion/ascap-asks-royal...
Essentially, they both mean that creators don't meaningfully get paid, only that Spotify appears legitimate due to the breadcrumbs and "exposure" they do give out.
E.g. Bandcamp is better than piracy, but I'd argue piracy is better than Spotify.
Except now, as an independent artist I can get easier exposure on Spotify and build up more income from live shows, merch and whatever else as a result. My closest fans will still often buy from band camp, or buy a vinyl or whatever. Except now I have a ton more fans than I could have reasonably achieved in the iTunes era
And the distribution of wealth has stayed relatively similar - huge artists (The Taylor swift’s of the world) continue to be minted, small unknown artists continue to make a comparatively tiny living - except now many, many more people can make that living and stream music
I can't see how Amazon and Netflix could push prices up without unlawful collusion? But if they did push prices up for all media how would they sell their service?
It's not unheard of for major players to have contracts that say 'if you're offering this to another company for less per unit than you are to us then you agree to reduce our price accordingly', the idea is just to make that lowest price universal so that.
I sell license for prints of my painting to Acme for £5 then ABC can print the same painting and pay me £5. As creator I can choose not to sell the work for £5, but that's no different to now; what I wouldn't be able to do is restrict who - in the wholesale market - could buy the work for that price.
The fundamental trust of copyright is literally to make things worse for consumers to the benefit of producers. If you see consumers being inconvenienced in an expensive way as a problem then you haven't engaged with the problem copyright is here to solve.
Copyright is to enrich the public domain. It's foundation in the West is Queen Anne's statute which followed on from printmakers making their own regulations. It shifted power from the printmakers to the creators, buy it served the public domain by having a limited period of protection and by preserving copies of works which could be referenced.
It made things better for the public because after 7 years (IIRC, I think it was later extendable to 14 years) the work was free to get printed anywhere vastly aiding the spread of culturally important works. The fundamental bargain also aided the demos (as opposed to the consumer, per se); that bargain being that a creator could exclusively - with the backing of the law - control reproduction during those 7 years and so profit sufficiently to continue creating further works without having to seek a patron.
Copyright is supposed to be, and was, about liberation of creators from control; and democratisation (making available to the people) of works.
The change I propose aids creators getting paid, and aids works benefiting the public. Moreover, it wrests some control from the "printmakers" in keeping with early copyright laws.
Consumers have a right to consume or not consume, but they may not limit creator's freedom, nor by "restricting copyright to force delegation".
Creators may choose who to sell to, with you there. But then we (the demos) may choose to not give copyright protection. We're not limiting creators freedom, we're limiting who we choose to protect from the open market.
It's our job, though, to make that available and easy for creators (e.g. kudos to RMS for making and popularising the GPL).
But no one should be able force anything on _all_ creators.
PS: Well, the outcome would be that creators would stop create at all, and in some cases that might be fair and just, but that's another topic completely. E.g. some societies regard as fair and just limits on drawings of humans and animals, so there's no such drawings. And they see it as fair and just.
But demos doesn't mean "we, consumers" -- it means "we, the people". As in, the body politic, from whom all laws and therefore copyright ultimately emanates. Creators only have those copyrights because we've granted them. This is a law of man, neither God-given nor a law of nature -- we can, if we want, un-grant them.
The other things I did recently: 1) paused Google YTTV because NBA season was over 2) canceled Netflix because I never watch it
I've been watching content (some of it very old, like The Larry Sanders Show) on HBO Max, but the app on Roku is *SO HORRIBLE* I'd rather pirate content and watch it on PLeX.
The Amazon app/UI is *HORRIBLE*, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I'll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.
Not only that but I've even seen the seasons presented in no order whatsoever: i.e Season 2 followed by Season 8. It is nonsensical.
Fun fact: previously it tried to cooperate with the content owners and removed content by request, so the UX was considerably worse. But then, someone successfully litigated to block them 'forever' in Russia, so... They restored all prevoiusly removed content and now it has almost everything I ever wanted. Great win!
The VPN jumping lunacy bothers me. I moved countries - great so I can't use Disney+? I get it, but that now means I have to download (your new) content because you won't actually let me buy your content, directly from you. For the first couple of months I continued to pay for the service. Eventually I decided that if you don't want me as a customer, I don't feel bad about downloading it. Sad really.
The only reasonable option is to pirate.
That became worse in recent years when titles on digital distribution platforms e.g. Steam had music removed due to expiring licenses. This meant a game you had already downloaded and installed would be downgraded unless you were quick enough to stop the automatic updates for it.
Zero control over playback speed is the deal killer for me.
And, no qualms of conscience there at all?
And I pay for Plex.
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/annual/2021 If you flip thru the years at least the top movies in 2018 have more downloads than the top movies in 2021. I think that can somewhat safely answer your questions.
EDIT: WRONG because as a comment points out below older movies also might just have been downloaded more over time.
From this site, it doesn't look like their was much of an uptick in top downloaded movies from 2019 to 2020. And in general torrenting has been growing less popular.
However, the numbers on this site in general don't sanity check very well for me. For example, the End Game Avengers movie, which was incredibly popular, was only downloaded: 2,890 times in 2019? That doesn't seem high enough to me.
So yeah, not 2,890. Think millions.
This makes far more sense, I wonder why their numbers are so bad.
It's nothing like the old days where we had to wait several weeks to watch Game of Thrones legally, though.
I don't have the exact numbers on hand, but from memory it was something that around 40% of us were doing back in 2013, had dropped to around 15-20% by 2018-2019, and is now at just above 20%.
Then I tried to set them up on the iPad.
There was about 5-10 specific shows they wanted to watch, what I found was that they were literally spread across more than 5 services, with one show each. Not a single one of them had 2 of the shows they wanted to watch.
They were already set up with Foxtel and had been using it for a couple of years, they watched shows on it regularly and knew how to do everything up to hitting the 'cast' button.
So I set them up with the other services, bummed an Amazon account off a sibling, signed them up to the 3 or 4 free services we have in Australia, think I subbed to one other one or something too. I can't even remember what they all were there was so many. I put the icons all in the same place on their home screen so they knew those apps were all the streaming ones etc etc.
I logged into a few of the accounts a week or so ago and they haven't watched a single thing. Not even on the Foxtel, which they were already using, and now they've stopped using it.
It seems to me like they've just hit a wall of complexity and thrown their hands up and said fuck the whole thing.
And you know what? I'm right there with them. Half way through the set up, trying to do the right thing, I was an inch away from throwing my hands up and saying fuck the whole thing as well. It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.
There was another thread here yesterday where some bloke was going on about how he couldn't understand why people wouldn't just spin up a linux box or something instead of using Discord.
Well, this is it. It took my parents months to get used to using one app, and adding something as simple as another couple of apps to the mix has turned them off the technology entirely.
When you introduce anything other than the absolute most simple UX, you risk losing part of your market entirely. You're not building stuff for other software engineers or other TV network execs or whatever your job title is. Everyone trying to carve out their own piece of the pie is just smashing the pie to bits for everyone else.
When it was just Netflix, piracy was almost dead. Now, it's going to come back, unless content distributors can find some way to work together. That goes for music, TV and games. All 3 ecosystems are running into the exact same problem.
I do this for my family. 3TB external HDDs, each time I see them they give me the old one and I give them a another one freshly topped up (things added/removed based on suggestions/requests).
It's been a smashing hit and they all love it.
We all loved Netflix when it came out and paused doing this for a while, but it wasn't long until the fragmentation and geoblocking led to more requests for certain shows popping up again, and now we all pretty much got rid of all our streaming services and are back to the HDDs.
Right. They need to swallow their pride and realise there needs to be a way to have one interface that shows you all the content you can access from the subset of services you subscribe to, in a searchable way. My Netflix shows, Prime shows and Foxtel shows should show up side-by-side in the interface. They can put a ribbon on it and/or an opening title to tell me who the distributor is.
Purchasable/rentable content can appear in a separate section, and when I can buy content from two or more services I have an account with, present them all and let me choose which one to use.
One of the most annoying scenarios I seem to find myself in all too frequently is trying to get to the episode list for a series. The assumption that most of my services make is that when I click on the series card in the list of shows, the thing I want is to automatically be taken to where I left off. This is fine when it works (although it's a big damn assumption that the app correctly preserved where I left off, and even when it does that often dumps me into the credits for the episode I finished last night). But when I want to see the episode list, I feel like I just have to flail about and curse at the TV until I stumble upon the right sequence of buttons to get to what I want.
That's not even to mention the incredibly disheartening recent changes to the home screen of my (Shield) Android TV, where half the home screen is now taken up with ads for programs I will never watch on services I don't even use.
It does make one rather miss the days of a folder full of AVIs and VLC. I also had a nice Plex setup at one point. Maybe one of these days I'll get off my ass and heed the call of the open seas.
There was a little upkick at the start of the pandemic according to Sandvine, but Sandvine's methodology is not watertight and lots of people staying at home with not much to do seems a more likely culprit than service fragmentation.
You can throw money at directors, and actors, but there are just so many great movies, and most were made by hollywood years ago.
The owners of those great films, started their own streaming service.
But, nowadays it feels like Netflix’s catalog is full of its self made titles(Some of them are great), but less and less “popular” ones that we heard of somewhere and just want to watch.
If I am expected to shuffle around multiple streaming subscriptions, and pay for them individually, it is not that different from the cable TV model that these guys took on against.
Sailing the high seas indeed!
Now, of only there was a way to have a moderated search for all content on all trackers.... Maybe there is one already, and its just that i don't know it?
It has mostly russian-dubbed content, but it usually has original soundtracks, too.
Also, now it is probably better than ever (didn't watch anything for quite a while, so it's a guess), because films are currently released on VOD concurrently with premieres in theatres, and that means that good quality content appears immediately, and not after theatrical window
The only example I can think of is Nintendo Online. You can play select NES and SNES games on the Switch with a N.O. subscription.
I collect ROMs, I've got damned near 4Tb worth. I collect for two reasons:
1. Archiving 2. Most of the "good" vintage games carry ridiculous prices. Games that had over 10 million copies pressed going for $100+. Even if we assume 1 million were destroyed, that's still 9 million copies floating about. Not exactly rare or worth $100.
I don't disagree that the market is small, though. But Nintendo does have a chronic problem of under-manufacturing desirable hardware. Like, if you want a SNES Classic (good emulator, fantastic controllers), you'll have to pay 2-3x the original price. Nintendo could do another run of them every year for basically no effort, and they just...don't.
If you mean third party solutions I think there is at least one project that aims to be compatible with various original cartridges but its name eludes me at the moment. [edit] It's Polymega though it doesn't support N64 it does support SNES/Megadrive/NES/TG16 and a number of CD-ROM based consoles.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2134113860/warrior-64-c...
But yeah, Nintendo could have done this years ago had they wanted to.
$20 is exceptionally expensive for a Japanese game.
That does actually make me feel better knowing that DW4 would cost $100 if it were "new" now.
These days a sealed copy of DW4 graded at 7.0 will run you $1549. I'd be nervous paying anything less than $170 for a working cartridge alone right now.
As a consumer of these things, I've thought many times how easy it would be for someone to just print off "original boxes and content" for these old games, and sell them as if they were mint. As someone who wants this kind of thing... please don't be afraid to charge premium prices for replicas! As long as you tell us it's a replica, and it's high quality - everyone wins. Once enough time passes, replicas and forgeries all just become history.
The evidence presented does seem like a bubble, with scam/fraud properties.
I too tend to think of ROMs as strictly images of non-volatile chips, alone, but it's interesting that when we're in computer emulation territory, it's really only the size that's different; a CD iso feeds into a PS emulator pretty much the same way a rom file feels into a SNES emulator - it's just a document.
Once the market becomes completely fragmented, a new service offering to bundle it back up will inevitably come along.
You'd think they'd make their money and move on to new creations. You make something, it's successful, you make your money for 5 years or so and then it's public domain. You'd have to make new stuff to make more money. No. Copyright holders feel entitled to extract value out of their "property" essentially forever. It's the ultimate in rent seeking.
Since then the cycle to make/market/distribute/profit off a product has gotten much faster.
If anything, copyright should be shorter than 28 years. Not longer.
I love the original The Matrix(1999) movie. But it has had it's day in the sun, earned money and become "old news" at least 10 years ago.
In a "free market" sense, 12 years is a long time to have a monopoly on IP. If you have failed to make whatever money you are going to make of this IP by 12 years, then you are sucking at your marketing/use-of-IP and there should be "competition in the market" with your IP, to best make use of it.
But I agree with you, I'm surprised Steam doesn't have a way to get old ROMs.
Not quite old ROMs, but gog.com sells old computer games prepackaged for Dosbox, which because of that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. That's basically the old PC computer equivalent of what I believe Nintendo does by shipping the emulator with the ROM when you buy it through the Virtual Console so it runs as a whole.
Back in the day I was a big fan of an SSI game called Imperialism - this game pretty much refuses to run on modern software - it needs DOSBox to run smoothly and even then it does custom cursor stuff that tends to screw up very obviously on modern systems - the GOG version of the game runs smooth like butter.
Why would I ever pirate a copy of Imperialism and spend a day actually getting it set up to run sorta decently on my machine - when I can grab it off GOG for 1.89 CAD? A day of my time, even an hour of my time (even my leisure time), runs well above 2$ at this point - the convenience is there so pirating becomes a bad value proposition.
They sell old games, e.g. Sonic the Hedgehog: https://store.steampowered.com/app/71113/Sonic_The_Hedgehog/
That's a Windows program that runs a Sega Genesis emulator that loads the game's ROM.
In many jurisdictions (AU, UK), it would be legal to copy them to another device you own, such as a hacked PSP, under the "format shifting" exemptions.
Licensing hell.
https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-...
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/no-one-will-sell-no-one-liv...
Great games. Recently - well a year ago - played through them with a friend coop.
A good thing overall, tbf.
Agree, I think a more general term for 1 click solution is ease of use.
Its the same reason why people compromise for privacy and use main stream products like google maps.
Had we kept the 28 year copyright duration from 1831 almost all ROM images would be in the Public Domain now.
For example indie creator studio makes video game for the PS1. It's a huge hit, they go on to make other popular games, and one day Microsoft buys them, morphs them into an in-house team. And then one day you realise you're arguing that, Microsoft (now the owner of the license) should release this Sony Playstation game. No. Not going to happen.
When this stuff happens for individual humans, often even if the money doesn't mean anything to one person who is an obstacle, it does mean something to their co-creators and they'll do it for that. For example it would be possible for Alan Moore to have blocked a lot of stuff that uses his work, from the V for Vendetta movie (which lots of people liked but I felt missed the whole point) to the re-issues of Miracleman, but while Alan doesn't care about money, the artists on that work do, and him blocking it would hurt them. So e.g. that's why modern copies of Moore's seminal run on Miracleman say they're by "The Original Author" in big text but never mention Moore by name, that's his condition, he doesn't want the Mouse's money, but his artists do.
Corporations don't care though. If they can inconvenience a modern competitor by snuffing out an important cultural artefact that is exactly what they'll do.
I'd actually advocate outright abolition of copyright. The associated moral rights have some place, but copyright is almost entirely a means for corporations to try to control culture for their own profit and we don't need it. But 28 years is a more acceptable middle ground I guess.
That still protects the individual artists and perhaps the Banskys but doesn’t unnecessarily lock up these old games
Much like Netflix, the reality is that people aren't actually very interested in old shows apart from a handful of super famous perennials which are already available anyway.
They say they are in surveys, but consumer behaviour does not back that up. They just use newer content in practice.
e.g. https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
I didn't know how to filter out the romhacks, if you scroll down the majority of the collection is original games.
The demand is there, it's just a question of having a convenient enough package
They already do this, you need a Switch online subscription to access the NES/SNES ROMs they have available
There's not a lot of incentive for some of those groups to come together, but I imagine even if most could be assembled, Nintendo would be particularly resistant.
Technically, GameTap had some really neat little features. For example, it would track your high score for most emulated games, and for really old games where the score would rollover to zero, it noticed that and would let you see your effective grand total score. So there would be a global Galaga leaderboard that could happily go into the millions.
Regarding the success of the service, Gametap was live for a few years. It totally had its shot. GameTap was regularly advertised on TV. It had a pretty big library covering a dozen or so platforms: Several Ataris, ColecoVision, Intellivision, Sega, PC games, and more. They did a few high profile things like buying some failed MMOs and keeping the servers running for all GameTap subscribers.
At the end, I think it turned out that the folks who get really excited about playing ColecoVision games are the same folks who are very comfortable downloading ROMs.
I think it may just have been ahead of it's time in terms of model in the era of battlepasses, paid online and gamepass, as well as monthly paid streaming services in general.
Here's a fun technical secret about GameTap. Several of the companies that we bought licenses from barely knew they owned the games and definitely didn't have any original binaries or source, and for the obscure consoles/titles, we sometimes could only find cracked versions online. Those would usually have crack intros (it was the birth of the demoscene!), though, and we clearly didn't want to use them. Ultimately we cheated. We just launched the game by loading a save state just past the crack intro.
Then suddenly the highest court disallowed it. Guess what, we still pay the copy tax.
Clarification: The copy tax was meant to compensate copyright owners for consumers making copies (for private use) of purchased media. It was widely interpreted as to allow downloading from the internet as well (even from pirated sources).
Once they know it's possible, people want a one click solution for anything. The subject being taboo has nothing to do with it.
This is one reason why Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix did such a good job combatting piracy for music, video games, and movies, while ROM sites are still a ubiquitous problem for 20 year old consoles. Youtube, Spotify, Steam and Netflix made content easy to get. There's no equivalent for most ROMs, so they're still widely pirated.