this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.
Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially
Yeah its almost like if we didn't keep extending copyright protections a bunch of stuff would be in the public domain and any streaming service could offer it without having to deal with licensing.
I mean that's all well and good, but then how would the very deserving shareholders get dividends?
Won't somebody think of the shareholders!?
PLS KEP LNE GOE UUP
It's true that Hollywood is corrupt and csuite pay is absurd, but those deals are the only mechanism by which ANY money makes it to the writers, actors and staff who deserve it
It's the exclusivity bullshit that gets me.
It could be: New movie is released! Anyone who pays the price tag gets to stream it!
But no, we must bidding war gouge.
On top of that, X Y and Z services exist in America, but not in other countries, so in this other country, everything is on Netflix, while I had to jump between three different services at one point just to watch Stargate
Or fund new content
Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.
The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.
Prices should go down with scale not up though.
There's initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.
The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.
So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don't pay those licenses.
The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You're also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
If we get rid of the licensing we get rid of the lawyers.
If you get rid of licensing you get rid of the content
Nope. People will still make content. It'll be on far less of a budget, but that didn't stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.
And then there's government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.
I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).
We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don't have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we'll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.
If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won't be empowered.
Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.
Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they've paid you enough (which is much less than they're getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don't like it, they'll make sure it tanks or at least doesn't get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn't have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.
Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they've already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.
No, we'd get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.
Intellectual property is a construct, and it's corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.
I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.
But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it's confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we'll get culture out of it.
You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.
Sorry, I'm not going to read all that, but it seems like you're upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.
The notion of the latter informs the former. The public domain is intellectual property rights of the people. Restricting the public domain takes that away.
So if an artist creates a piece of intellectual property, do you not think they should have control over how it's used? Including who can make profit off of it?
That's an extremely vague question, and presumes that any art is de facto intellectual property.
It also presumes that anyone has access to the institution that defines and enforces intellectual property.
Also, intellectual property isn't a real thing, but you don't want to read too many words, so you'll have to figure that out for yourself.
In most if the modern world, copyright laws give automatic ownership of unique works of art. Legally IP is a real thing.
Is it your intention to appeal to law? Here in the states, extrajudicial detention and torture by state actors is legal. Does that make it right?
Do you think the copyright term of life + 70 years is fair to the public? Do you know how we got here?
I think there's room for improvement on copyright laws, but that's a far cry from the outrageous claim that intellectual property isn't a real thing.
Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn't affect you.
If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn't affect you.
The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we're seeing fair use rights fade since states aren't willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.
So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.
So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.
However, if you're going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.
And that, of course, is not pirating your product.
You are thinking about IP with tunnel vision. You just want to gain entertainment for free. There's more than that to IP laws. How would you like it if you made art that was then used in a manner that you philosophically disagree with. For example, Meghan Trainor had a song that was used against her will in a political campaign against same sex marriage, she was able to cease and desist this use because of IP laws.
Certain types of content. But YouTube's own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.
Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn't find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.
I wonder what youribe would have been like if they didn't sell to google
probably redtube