It strikes me the best cure is to restrict copyright to force federation - if you sell to one company who retails to consumers in a geo locality then you're required to make available to any company at that price.
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.
There already are compulsory licensing schemes that work like this. For example, in the United States, there are “mechanical licenses” [1] available by statute for streaming and downloaded music recordings. In practice, most big platforms negotiate with a rights organization or with the artist directly[2], but the statutory rate operates as a price ceiling.
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]
This presumes piracy is bad. Which I'd say is mostly true, but I'd go so far as to suggest that, e.g. Spotify is worse.
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.
always find this argument so weird - The amount of people who can create music and find an audience now vs a decade ago is exponentially higher; subsequently, the market price of a song has fallen and Spotify pays accordingly.
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
If copyright law said that the price a piece of content is available for is the highest amount any provider in a region is willing to pay then you're setting up for a monopoly, as Netflix or Amazon Prime with their near infinite content budgets set the price of everything they like higher than any new competitor can afford to pay.
Sorry, I don't think I expressed that well, I intended to say it was akin to a "most favoured nation" situation; if Netflix get a lower price per person, then you have to offer that price to others.
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.
[I fear you were being sarcastic, but in any case ...]
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.
I'm the US copyright is to allow creators control over their creation, for a time, presumably so the can monetize it. This incentives creators to create. Yes, in the long run, public domain wins. But so do the creators.
Forcing them to sell to everyone takes a lot of control away from the copyright holders.
On the other hand, I firmly believe that creators must be able to choose any distribution way they want (similar to "right to burn"). E.g creators may choose to sell unrestricted copyrights to the most evil companies they want, it's their ultimate right.
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.
I mean this particular part I have a problem with: "may choose to not give copyright protection" -- we, consumers, don't have a say in creator's copyrights, because we don't have these copyrights, creators do. Creators may as well be with us and sell their content to a company that abides by these laws of restricted copyrights (e.g. GPL license is particular example). Or not.
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.
> I mean this particular part I have a problem with: "may choose to not give copyright protection" -- we, consumers, don't have a say in creator's copyrights, because we don't have these copyrights, creators do.
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.
I had completely stopped downloading movies in 2018, and even for that year, I downloaded very few. I had been tapering off since 2015. These are real numbers from my NAS. I got a seedbox 2 months ago. This was my last straw: trying to rent some movie on Amazon and was told I had to subscribe to some service to watch it--there was no price to watch it once.
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.
> 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.
Ironically, the biggest russian torrent site is just a phpbb forum and it is wonderfully organized and very well moderated. Easy to find the content you want.
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!
I genuinely do not understand how Amazon can have dropped the ball on their UI for this long, this bad. Given their drive to get customers to consume shipped product, their track record with digital products is abysmal. Video games is a product problem and that's a different discussion, but "television" and movies are a different matter. The product and consumer appetite are there, but the roadblock is the UI. Does no one who is in upper management use the product? I know they treat their testers like crap, but surely someone in the marketing or graphics department has at least done some usability polling. Right? Right?
I don't understand it either. It might be hard to quantify the affect of their Prime streaming business on their sales and thus they don't prioritize it ? That's my only guess, it feels to me like their most public product and its received the least attention.
The UI and general use of these apps are so bad - that I literally find myself torrenting things from Netflix, Prime, and Disney+ rather than use those apps, purely to be able to consume it on Plex.
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 Beavis and Butthead music video thing is a decades old problem, unfortunately. The DVDs were like that too. Something about failing to obtain the music video rights for the show outside of its original airing.
Happens sometimes with some video games as well. In the past when remasters came out they couldn't secure or couldn't afford the music licensing costs so they had a cut or replaced score.
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.
I subscribed to watch season 8 of alone. Each show had about eight thirty second commercials that you couldn't skip. Last time I'll try that way to watch something.
Why would I? Most of the content on my PLeX is paid for elsewhere. And, anything I pirate which I like I buy. I watched _Pig_ and immediately went to Amazon and paid $14.99 for it. If I pirate something that is terrible, there's no point.
My anecdata is definitely this. I used to pay for almost all my media, but switching regions, logging in and out of shit, buying iTunes cards on ebay, checking through 4 different streaming apps, and then extra work when you do find what you want and try to watch it only to be told your subscription doesn't actually cover it but you can pay extra (looking at you, Amazon Prime), it's just so much fucking work when tracker -> torrents dir -> plex is so much easier and user-friendly.
I found this site from the torrentfreak link below and thought it was pretty cool.
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.
It does make some sense that movies which have been available for three years could have more downloads than movies which have been available for one year.
A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.
Additionally, I guess there are also many people, myself included, who download stuff again, but I don't use torrents, as I have indeed been burned in the past by that. I now use forums that link to encrypted Mega accounts or similar.
> A friend who torrents these things just checked for me and saw well over a 100,000 'snatches' for that Avengers flick on just one private torrent tracker.
This makes far more sense, I wonder why their numbers are so bad.
The stats can be collected only from public torrents where DHT is being used (AFAIK). There are many private trackers that are closed to the outside world and have tens of thousands of members, each of whom may not only download from the peers within that private tracker, but also share the downloaded content with others.
Yeah but if most people have services - I have three - then the most popular movies for that year will be on all the services almost. Endgame has been on all my services at some point over the last couple years. I've seen it probably 20+ times. Probably also the people who are most likely to want to watch Endgame have services.
Specifically for the example of Australians watching pirate rips of television programs, the percentage of us doing it dropped like a brick after Netflix launched here back in 2015 and has climbed back slightly since the fragmentation occurred.
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%.
My parents asked me to help them get into streaming a few months ago after they got a new iPad. So I bought them a Chromecast, taught them how to switch the input source between the Chromecast and Cable on their TV, which they were cool with.
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.
After my sister died, my brother in law was in a deep hole. I wanted to cheer him up somehow, and so I ended up giving him a 2TB hard disk connected to an old laptop. Then plugged a gen 1 Chromecast into his TV, and installed Plex onto an old tablet. He said it was a life saver. It helped get him through a really bad winter. I can't even think of a way I could have given him that content "legally". Some of it was great but obscure stuff ripped off DVDs that I bought over years. It's not just the complexity of multiple apps and devices - some content just isn't there. Like a shitload of really decent TV series and movies from the 60s onward.
> It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.
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.
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.
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.
I'm right there with you. I'm increasingly frustrated by the experience of using my various streaming apps. I don't even mind having to bounce between different apps for different content. But just _finding_ the content I want is such a fucking chore sometimes.
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.
anecdotally, I freeload on a Netflix account paid for by a friend, and last year I was tempted to get my own subscription. Then I noticed Netflix had fewer and fewer movies I was interested in, and just went back to sailing the high seas.
Yeah. The attraction of Netflix was the ease of access to a lot of desirable content even faster than finding it online somewhere else*
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.
It is one of the biggest reasons to use torrents. You see, this is the only non-fragmented service that has all media content!
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?
PirateBay became a haven for false torrents infested by malware. I'm ta lking about rutracker.org
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
Netflix seems like a split brained company. Most of its original movies are terrible, and are in sharp contrast to many of the Netflix original series which are very good. I personally wouldn’t (and don’t) look for movies on Netflix.
It seems like there isn't a widely available service to just bundle everything and serve what you want (?) Anyone kmow is that a cost restriction or do the companies disallow it?
