In my personal opinion, we should fix this in the streaming market -- basically force media producers to be blind as to the buyer (as with DVDs), if they sell at $X per unit, in order to maintain their copyright then $X is the sale price and any distributor can acquire a license to redistribute (for private use) a work at that price.
I would give a grace period to allow for exclusives; 2 years from release, maybe.
Popcorn Time (free torrenting service) but with a payment of a few cents for each work would be possible. Instead of subscription to lots of expensive services.
IPR is a system maintained by the democratic government, make it work for the people.
Can you give some more details? "The Scene" is a very common name. Presumably you're taking about first-sale doctrine in USA, is that relevant to re-broadcasting?
The DVDs avoid all the licensing issues that properly licensed streaming media has because the profit and control for the rights holder ends when the sale of the media happens.
Similarly, the profit and control of the media ends for the rights holder when it enters The Scene for release amongst their myriad distribution channels.
> I can't remember the last time I wanted to watch something…
…filmed in the USA, I assume? There’s a tremendous amount of content from other countries that’s not available on any major streaming platform. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of the USA movies that have never been streamed as well.
> You expect millions of hours of work to be available to you for pretty much free.
I don’t think there’s a legal way to watch the majority of movies that have ever been filmed.
If your only issue is price then I'm happy, market will decide that surely, I'm not suggesting prices be changed from what they are now just distribution monopolies would be removed.
That said, how much should I pay for an episode of a TV show from 30 years ago where the producers are dead and the other creators are mostly comfortably living in retirement having already earned their living and been paid for their work? The offspring of the people working on the show in many cases probably don't even know that their forbears did such work.
Well, many of us know that popular phrase ‘piracy, it just works.’
When I download a movie this way, I truly own it. Same as I own a DVD disk. It’s just the medium that is different. E.g. I have a collection of Friends on disks, which is legal, I own it. But when it’s ripped as files and stored on an old hdd so I could rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB. I assume it is likely to be illegal.
The thing is, copyright holders think it’s wrong, and they want us to rent the content, not own it. I mean it could be done other way technologically, avoiding physical medium and still making it legal somehow. It could be done if the party was interested in it. The problem is not in the physical medium itself.
> [Piracy:] When I download a movie this way, I truly own it.
When you download a pirated copy, it's more likely that you _possess_ it, rather than _owning_ it. You are in control of the bits and bytes, they will not just disappear; but since your copy is unlicensed and illicit, the copyright holder could take legal steps to make you delete your copy (and pay for your infringement on their copyright).
> Same as I own a DVD disk.
That's different. You own the physical disc, and the right to re-sell or potentially lend out that physical disc. (However, you can't take the data from that disc, and stream it to a public audience on the internet.)
> [...] rewatch some episodes just plugging the disk via USB
Depends on your jurisdiction, but in many places it is legal for you to create a backup of a physical disc that you own, and make personal use of that backup. In some places you are allowed to share your backup copy with friends and family (on a non-commercial basis, of course). It gets nuanced.
Ripping is pretty much undetectable though unless they decide to torrent it for others. So in practice they own it.
As to the 2nd point, it's not really 1:1, a more accurate equivalent would be a netflix dvd rather than a bought one.
> When you (or Netflix) buys a disk, you own it. It’s yours.
Only because the laws say that physical media is treated differently. If the law said that you could buy a disk and then stream as many copies as you have of the disk, it would completely change the business model.
And? As if the law in these things has no relevance. Of course it does. You can't just discount this because it's in the law. Good luck seeing these kinds of laws applying to digital media. It's just not treated the same.
Yes, we could have compulsory licensing, like with music on the radio.
If radio stations have a copy of a song, then provided they pay the legally-mandated royalties to the rightsholder, they can play it. They don't need to negotiate with the rightsholder, and the rightsholder cannot prevent them from playing it.
We have a working model for how it can work, so we could do the same thing with TV shows and movies on OTA/cable/streaming... but we just don't.
None of it is "legally" mandated, i.e. there are no laws specifying what a recording artist should get paid. All of it is a complex series of contracts and rights agreements between various corporate entities that have generally become standardized, in order to eliminate negotiations for every song or every artist. But that doesn't mean these agreements are necessarily fair or equitable to all parties.
