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What's _______ for you guys? Also, I truly believe they don't know. They just say no, out of some bizarre corporate reflex.

For me, ________ is basically all sports games that have ever been broadcast. Most of them are just locked away somewhere, with literally no legal way for anyone to see them.

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  • Libraries = you have a fundamental right to free media

    The precedent is already established. Piracy is the modern library. Media and software ownership needs to be something like 3 years from public release. No, you can't make one cool thing and exploit that for 100 years, and you can't milk your mediocrity either. If your BS sucks, everyone will just wait for 3 years to consume it for free. So what, you suck at your job and need to find other work. If all software was open source after 3 years, the entire world would advance much more quickly and equally. Capitalism only works if everyone can enter, no one is too big to fail, and the consolidation is a guaranteed failure.

    • The infuriating thing is, I truly believe the dragons would make more money if they conceded to everything you just said. As it stands, collector's style box sets still make a lot of money, and everyone knows that merch is where the really sweet cash gets raked in.

      If they just hosted basically everything on the Internet, for everyone to watch, for free, that would massively increase the mindshare install base of all their media, which would make way more people likely to buy shirts, bobbleheads, posters, etc.

      The profit margins on that stuff = ABSOLUTELY VAST, BEYOND ALL BELIEF. And the fucked up thing is, you sometimes DO see official merch being sold for properties that can't be legally watched, anywhere. You already paid for that show to be made, possibly 60 years ago. You could increase those merch sales any time you want, just by letting people see it.

      But dragons are gonna dragon. Hoarding behavior.

    • I broadly agree. I would generally want to push that out from three years to something more like ten years, just so that small creators can have the time to finish series they want to make without needing to rush, but I think that adults should be able to freely consume and remix the content they enjoyed as children.

      Oh, and companies shouldn't be able to hold a copyright. People make things, not companies. If a person makes a thing, they have made it and they deserve the right to it; maybe I would be amenable to a temporary but automatic license for work-for-hire which expires after a much shorter time (maybe the three years you mentioned).

      If a company wants to monetize a property, they should appropriately compensate the people who made it. If they aren't being fair about their compensation, the people should be able to take their intellectual property elsewhere.

      • Oh, and companies shouldn’t be able to hold a copyright. People make things, not companies

        Agreed. At the very least, there should DEFINITELY be some heavy regulation, governing how companies can go about transferring the rights, between each other.

        I have a horrible feeling that some of this problem comes down to the media dragons waiting for some moment of peak nostalgia, for each media property, only desiring to sell it to another dragon when it's at its most valuable. It's like a fucking commodity market, but for our childhood memories, instead of copper or soybeans.

        That's the only explanation I can think of, for why they wouldn't always want to take our money. Dragon A owns the rights to a specific show, but they don't actually operate a streaming platform. They just have their hoard of media rights that they're sitting on. They could sell or lease this particular media property to Dragon B, who does have a streaming platform, and maybe Dragon B has always wanted to buy it. But Dragon A is waiting for the nostalgia peak to happen, so they can charge the highest price possible.

        Finally, when the specific Millennial age cohort that remembers that specific show starts talking about it on social media a lot, and noticing that you can't watch it anywhere, Dragon A finally does decide to sell it to Dragon B.

        But then, of course, Dragon B will never be satisfied with the result. Even if they do see an actual jump in their subscriber numbers, which can be at least somewhat reliably tied to that media acquisition, it'll never be enough to actually pay for the ridiculously inflated price they shelled out. So, of course, when the time comes to re-up those rights, they angrily refuse to pay anything to keep them.

        Annnnnd the media goes back into the limbo hole, not to be seen again for another few decades.

        It's basically a bubble situation. Our memories are just a series of goddamned market bubbles, being speculatively traded by these monsters.

        • In my opinion, that's just a side effect of the fact that media dragons have changed their business model. Rather than earning profits by making things, they've discovered that it's less risky to earn profit by owning things, and that making things is just an unhappy prerequisite for continuing to hoard them. They're not only dragons hoarding all the things, they're very timid dragons hoarding all the things, not willing to step out of their cave to get more gold because it might mean that the gold they bring back won't be as much as the gold they already have.

          That's why Zaslav is killing off completed movies for a tax break, and that's why the cost of hosting or producing discs for beloved old properties isn't worth what they can make off of it, and that's why they continue to milk old IPs and adaptations even when they've gone far past the point where it would make financial sense to just come up with something new. I mean, they really only make something new so that they can own it later.

          You're right about it being a bubble. They're exactly like landlords, and they're contributing just as much to society.

      • I really don't think 3 years would hurt anyone in any real way. No one is good at playing second fiddle. In reality, fan fiction and derivatives are not hurting anyone. You do not need any real protection. It is a hypothetical that I argue does not exist. First to market carries the momentum and if not, you probably didn't do the job you may think you did. That is okay too. It is okay to fail and you should have the right to fail often without it being such a major investment and issue. You should be able to creatively exist like an open source repo where fan contributions are just a part of the process without worrying about ownership. You hold the repo as the original maintainer, they hold a fork. If they do it getter than you, the public will follow the better execution. Maybe your next idea will be better, maybe you're in the wrong line of work. Those things should not be protected IMO.

        • The big thing that I'm worried about in the three year scenario is the company screwing over the little guy.

          Think about a devoted, driven author you're aware of who has to hold another job, who works for five years on their debut novel and desperately wants to finish a trilogy about it, but whose debut novel becomes popular, leading a multi-billion dollar company to produce an inferior sequel before the original writer can finish their own. With that much money, they could easily overwhelm marketing such that the original author's follow-up would never be seen by most people.

          This isn't really a hypothetical; authors who grind away at a series part time with mild success for years and only become successful enough to quit their day job later? Companies taking a low-effort opportunity to capitalize on someone popular someone else did? Both of those things happen all the time.

          Unlike FOSS software, where the only thing that matters is whether or not your code works better than the other repo's code, the influence of marketing money on publishing can make or break a story, and the original author's power in that realm is going to be incredibly weak.

          • I don't know about that one. We live in a shitty feudal timeline without net neutrality or freedom of information. Anything you create is very limited in exposure scope. I could search for your exact project on the only two web crawlers google or microsoft either on their website or by proxy, and they will not give me results for your works. They are playing gatekeepers extorting you for exposure to an audience. You will never find success organically like in past eras when freedom of information was too hard to manage and succeed. Your echo chamber is small and growing it comes at a great cost in time and/or money. This means you either already have connections through networking and therefore momentum, or are over valuing and putting too much emotion into what you are trying to achieve, likely with unrealistic expectations.

            Like I've been casually writing, and may start posting my story universe on Lemmy at some point. I don't expect it to be popular or go anywhere. I know I'm a bit weird in perspective and have been encouraged to write by some. Maybe I'm naïve but if I create a story universe and others want to contribute it will likely be on a GPL. It is up to me to keep the story compelling and in my artistic control. Ultimately it is about gaining exposure and what you do with that exposure to capitalize off of it. Nothing about an extended copywriter is going to help you increase that exposure because there is no free mechanism for people to share your work. All of the corporate social platforms are connected. As soon as your posts appear commercial in nature they will be very limited in scope unless you pay them for exposure. That payment is more than you will ever make from the results. This is a feudal era and you are traveling a river with many warlords charging tolls far greater than the value of trade for the distance traveled. There is no public square for gathering that is free from corporate pick pockets and thieves. The exception being here, but here is too small to be relevant.

            I still see the iterative freedom of a short ownership cycle as a far greater value to artists and creators. It goes both ways. You are much more likely to take the corporate garbage that places like Hollywood vomit out constantly and do a far better job with the stories and characters that they can. This leads to reforming change where audience momentum shifts away from the corporate industrial cattle farm of content to something neutral and centralized culturally that connects creative talent with an audience directly, and with less brand image nonsense like everyone is some two dimensional sitcom character of an artist and creator. You wouldn't need to limit your creativity to your precious /s lotr :) little bubble but draw inspiration from other places as much as you want. You can even borrow characters, and make connections to other works with impunity. I think that is a much more entertaining and artistic environment that would benefit all. We need this kind of democratization if anyone wants to really succeed. Presently, success is a matter of bribery and connections. You are not a citizen in practice, but a serf behind many gatekeeper overlords that want you to invest yourself massively so they can profit from the massive tolls that will leave you no better off than where you started.

            • I mean, self-publishing is a viable way of becoming a published author specifically because this model works. But even worse, carving back intellectual property (and, crucially, ending corporate IP ownership) would make corporations desperate for new revenue streams; and jumping into a popular self-published story three years and a day after its original release, to drop a low-effort sequel and siphon off all of its popularity, while the original creator is struggling with two full time jobs trying to finish the sequel they originally came up with--well, that would be just the predatory thing a megacorp would do in this instance.

              Yes, we desperately need net neutrality, and to return to an actually open web, but that's a separate issue.

              • I guess that is where we differ most. I want to see the corporations fail precisely because the low effort benchmark they exist under is so low any alternative will beat them. Like I don't care for any video games coming out of any current company. I won't buy a subscription to anything whatsoever. I refuse to be a serf in neo feudalism. I pay attention if someone does an indie game that is creative, but I despise venture capital and investment banker art. To me, the the people in this space, on both sides, corpo and consumer are all irrelevant imbeciles. I don't want to be a part of their bubble for all the money in the world. I simply do not care about them and value my freedom over their tyranny even if it means I'm homeless in a gutter as one of the last citizens in the crush of the digital dark ages.

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