"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit."
http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Hei...
I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal.
(Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.)
And copying the music streaming business, where convenience is worth a low monthly subscription, doesn't work for TV/film. Producing a TV show is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than an album.
I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.
Electronic media are a viable business as things stand, so you must be considering whether they would continue to be viable without the sort of laws being discussed here.
Whether any business model is viable is relative to the laws in effect. Without laws governing issues like property and contracts, a great deal of today's commerce would be infeasible. Without labor and fraud laws, all sorts of exploitation would be the norm. Without either, exploitative practices would be the only viable ones, but they would not be particularly productive - that is how things have been through most of human history, and continue to be so in parts of the world. There is a lot more at risk here than TV.
On the other hand, the current law in this case strikes me as excessive, reflecting the anti-democratic influence businesses have over legislation. My point is that there are no simple answers; the sort of economy that has brought a previously-unimaginable standard of living to a subset of the human race is a battleground of competing interests and trade-offs.
I'm responding to the parent post who is arguing we must have current laws because otherwise tv would not be viable.
The current laws might make sense. They have problems, but i'm also not super sympathetic to people who resell the work of others without adding anything to them, for commercial gain. However i dont think, without law X, industry Y wouldn't exist is ever a sufficient reason in and of itself. If that's the only reason we have for a law, then the industry is not worth it.
Fairly recently I saw a very interesting proposal for this. The basic idea was to base it off of how artist commissions work, and combine that with crowdfunding. A creator can decide how much they need to make a thing - including both costs and how much profit they need to find it worth doing - can use crowdfunding to get the payment upfront. Then once they make the thing, it gets freely released.
This works out for everybody. The creator has already obtained the amount of profit they desired. The people who paid to have to created have gotten it. The people who didn't pay can enjoy it if they wish. And overall everybody who "engaged" with the content now has a better idea of how trustworthy the creator is. The people who did not pay this time may have gained enough confidence to pay for the creators next project.
Obviously, there are many realities to face here. The degree of departure from the current model is rather large. It's not something you can just flip the switch on tomorrow and expect everything to just magically work out with no pain. But I think it's an interesting idea, and one that meshes better with the realities of the digital medium than the current status quo.
Okay, and what stops my competing company from running a subscription service, where I take all the shows that Netflix funded, and streaming to my customers for lower monthly price than Netflix’s, which I can do, as I don’t spend a dollar on content creation and acquisition? Oh, that’s right, copyright stops me from doing that.
Funding live action movies in this way is still not very popular, though. Arguably, the cost structure in this industry might just be too challenging to succeed in the first place. The fact that they do get funded by other means looks like a bit of a puzzle! It might even be more of a loss-leading, perhaps marketing-focused activity than anything aimed at directly making a profit.
Should society be facilitating that for them by allowing the law to punish people for sharing their work? Copyright serves society, not the other way around.
We have had legally enforced copyright all this time so why would any company take the risk and try out another business model. That we did not see one does not mean one is impossible.
The money spend on copyrighted content would not just disappear without copyright and could be funneled into content by patrons or via grants. Big-budged productions are also already getting funded by product placment and other sponsort-type deals.
Then there is also a cultural aspect: The existence of copyright creates a society where sharing is often not seen as a good thing. Where people are less willing to pay for the creation of something if that would mean that freeloaders could then get it without paying.
And last, I don't agree with your implication that the current big-budget films and TV are something that needs to be protected. Yes, changing funding models might change what kind of content is produced, but never in human history has there been a lack of demand for entertainment or lack of entertainment to fill that demand.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-a...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-c...
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That industry should be killed with fire.
Have copyright return to creators after a period of time, ie 20 years.
Billions of dollars will be spent fighting hints of this suggestion.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite.
But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would have turned to a less expensive solution, such as Pixelmator Pro which is $40 and I can afford.
If people are pirating content, then consuming that content is not worth the hassle to obtain.
> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
In that way, stamping out piracy is trying to address the symptoms, not the cause, and even if you are ultimately successful in eradicating piracy, then you'll likely still end up with a bunch of non-customers.
Anecdotally, the popularization of Netflix definitely greatly reduced piracy among my demographic, up until the point where every publisher decided to roll their own, often subpar, streaming service, each with different region-locking rules.
I've always thought and argued that while money might be part of the motivation for digital piracy, ease of access and user experience is also a large component. 10 bucks a month to stream anything, without commercials, was great! For those few years I didn't download anything, because I didn't have to. It wasn't the path of least resistance.
Now I have to deal with a half dozen streaming platforms, some of them don't work on my laptop (Peacock), others which are spotty (Disney+) and others which insist on wanting me to see commercials, despite taking my money (Hulu). With increasing fragmentation and a decreasing user experience, the path of least resistance has gone back to downloading and I expect it to increase. :/
I wonder how long until the industry re-invents cable packages. It might work if Netflix handled the tech, though I admit that would never happen in the real world.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I have all the streaming services, and yet now I find that most of what I want to watch is not licensed to any service! I'm constantly using justwatch.com and yet still many famous movies aren't being licensed by any of the services I have (at least in the US).
Piracy it is then, and I guess it's time to start canceling these subscriptions to services that no longer license the kind of content they used to.
I just want to watch 80s action garbage like the A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGyver. I'd pay $5/month for an 80s service, I already got suckered into Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon; something that has the low class stuff I want would be an easy sell.
Edit: fixed spelling of MacGyver
You know what really grinds my gears? This! It's not that hard to find a suitable splice point, most TV shows even have a natural break as part of the episode! Youtube sometimes does it during Colbert at a point which ruins the comedic rhythm.
> ...A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGuyver...
I have similar taste; I swore there was a period of time I watched all 3 of these on the same streaming network, but I checked again and see only MacGuyver on Paramount/CBS. Which is an example of another poor user experience -- shows hop between platforms, so you're never actually sure that you have access, until you go to watch, and it's gone.
Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the content creators actually made them available. People go crazy for Disney+ because everything is on there for one monthly fee.
I download every single video on youtube that I think there's any chance I'll want to watch again.
When I look at my playlists, so many of the videos have been deleted. Even if I paid for youtube I wouldn't be able to watch them again.
Except Netflix, Now TV and Amazon Prime etc DON'T HAVE any of the shows I actually want to watch. It's farcical.
I want to pay them, I want to watch shows legally but I can't, so I end up watching them on the 'illegal' sites that do have them.
Such a regime would encourage content creators to make it more readily available so that users are willing to pay for the convenience, a la Netflix.
The idea behind a copyright is to have The People temporarily forfeit their innate right to communicate art, ideas, and stories in order to stimulate an industry of artists and scientists.
If the business model depends on people not copying your data then you can always sue for relief in the courts. Get damages, hooray. But criminal copyright infringement seems like a big stretch. Maybe worthy of fines or public service but imprisonment? Extradition to another country for potential imprisonment? Seems totally backwards.
From 17 U.S.C. 506(A) & 18 U.S.C 2319:
> . A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).
Yet, we do have both. We are at both peak piracy and peak revenue for digital content.
I think it’s false that people state that these things are exclusive.
I’ve been hearing this chicken little shit for 30 years and every year piracy is so bad that the end is near.
I think it’s more likely that piracy drives and improved digital sales. That’s just my hunch, but it’s based on my experience of everything going digital, companies making more money on it than ever, and piracy greater than ever.
Philosophically, I think piracy is a more future oriented and likely successful than the alternative. I fear for a future when we are digital beings having to subscribe to Apple Music in order to remember a song and play it in my “mind.” Piracy today is peace of mind tomorrow.
For example Adobe and Microsoft has turned a blind eye on piracy for years. I believe it was Steve Jobs who had the gut to point out the obvious, Student on campus just pirate their Photoshop.
For content, you could derive additional revenue from non-content product like merchandise or other form of cross-industry IP sharing. You cant have these sort of deals without getting significant mindshare of the public. And for some piracy is part of it. Think Game of Thrones. The most pirated TV shows on the planet. And is the same with Music. Most artist dont earn much with licensing, streaming or disc sales any more. It is about live performance tours and merchandise. Streaming Music isn't doing as well as most media would like you to believe, such as back to to the peaks of 90s without accounting for inflation and population difference.
That is why I sort of think in the future some content could end up going the freemium model. Just like how mobile games are doing.
In the reality with excessive copyright terms, yes.
> Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.
Are government grants for the arts a bad thing now?
The current state of OSS exists in a world with copyright. If you want to extrapolate that to a world without copyright you better have a good argument why the incentives for OSS funding would not change.
Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts.
It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming!
Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega millionaires; their figurative identity obsession is not any more important than rest of ours, except due to political protectionism. Our doing human shit empowers these specific people; they can lose an order of magnitude in wealth to honor that.
As a result we’d be able to bolster health, education, and infrastructure everyone relies on. Deference to their wealth literally causes us to screw ourselves out of the time for such things.
There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people.
The timing is likely not coincidental either. Expect to see more of this as content once again fragments across providers, reanimating the traditional package TV structure in fresh form.