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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Jetflicks, which charged $9.99 per month for the streaming service, generated millions of dollars in subscription revenue and caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,
The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution!
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more
To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it's cheaper that licensing the actual good stuff.
eh some of it is good, I personally wouldn't want to just watched licensed shows from 50 years ago
Hence why copyright was originally in the 10-20 year range.
Movie star isn't supposed to be a dream job that makes you fabulously rich, but a decent living.
Interestingly, musical artists who work off the web will do exactly that: Tour and make hundreds of thousands instead of millions (in the aughts and 2010s, so pre-inflation), rather than rolling the dice with the record labels.
I mean, supposed to according to who?
Capitalist ideologues, for one. I remember in Macroeconomics class that wealth desparity will destroy your economy and then your civilization if you let it get out of hand.
So when (for example) we have eight guys that own more than the poorer half of the world population, that's a bad sign for every economy on the planet, and is going to cause way more problems than merely discontent and social unrest.
But, tbh, that's just some guys opinion
That's rather dismissive. Also vague. Are you saying that the notion that wealth disparity is bad is just some guy's opinion, or that you're not supposed to be able to get rich being a movie star (or a private equity investor, or a hedge fund manager, or a California gold miner)?
Usually when people are vague and terse, I assume they're losing interest in the conversation. It's okay to walk away.
I don't mean it that way.
This is true yes, but back to the original topic
This yes. I am saying nobody has any authority to assert what is or isn't supposed to be highly paid, but it is fair to believe nobody should be highly paid.
I really do genuinely appreciate the consideration, I'm fine right now, but thank you regardless!
When it comes to capitalist macroeconomics, as I understand it, wealth disparity is one of the big decay factors the government is supposed to monitor and correct for. Mind you, I learned MacEc in the mid 1980s but even after theory shifted from national economies to globalist economics (the free(-er) trade movement of the 1990s) wealth distribution, and the bow of that graph was supposed to be kept shallow.
There are a lot of ways to restore some balance, such as taxing rich people and investing in welfare programs and social safety nets. In the case of freelance musicians (and freelance investments, which allowed people of lower income classes to invest sooner) these are just paradigm changes that allowed more people to participate, with the expectation that more people would be moderately successful rather than a few people being ostentatiously successful. Fewer Bruce Springsteens, more John Coultons. This wasn't contrived by government though, so it's more of a happy accident.
And yes, Marx in Das Kapital notes that the ownership class invariably captures government and regulation which ends efforts to keep wealth more evenly distributed so we have situations like now (or like the Great Depression, a century ago) where a few people own almost everything and aren't willing to let it go, even though the only thing they can do by hoarding their wealth is accumulate more wealth. And history has continued to bear this out, and to show that a well-regulated capitalist system is only temporary at best, which has driven me to believe we have to figure out something better.
Post-scarcity communism would be ideal, but we haven't yet worked out how to get there from here, and really I'd be happy for anything that doesn't turn into a one-party plutocrat-controlled autocracy held together by fascism and a nationalist war effort.
And sure, economics is a soft science so this is all just someone's opinion, though the someones in this case are multiple smart historical figures who actually thought about it a bit. I'm not an economist, so I rely on experts who are.
PS: This is my attempt to either find common ground, or to lay plain what my position is and where it comes from. I'm not invested in you adopting it, but if you want me to consider a different one, I'll need cause to do so.
Netflix service started as hosting only.
correction.. Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing
Ah. Analogue hosting. But they definitely didn't start producing content.
Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too
The service they provide (from a perspective external to obligatory capitalism) is less about making them, but providing a framework by which people engaged in artistic expression and development get paid and permitted to survive.
As the COVID-19 Lockdown furloughs demonstrated to us, art manifests so long as people are fed and need something to do. Healthy humans can't couch-potato for two weeks without fidgeting and whittling wood into bears. And the great resignation that followed showed that enough people were able to make it lucrative (that is, work out marketing and fulfillment enough to make it profitable enough to quit their prior job) that it lowered worker supply that we were able to contest the shit treatment, low pay and toxic work environments that were normal before the epidemic.
It gets worse in other industries like big pharma in which the state provides vast grants for R&D of drugs and treatments, but the company keeps all the proceeds. Contrast the space program, which is why memory foam (the material) is in the public domain, as is a fuckton of electronics and computer technologies.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed(and there are many others who created similar tools for it) so I don't see it as particularly valuable.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results. Memory foam, cordless drills, etc could have been developed much more cheaply than the Apollo program, GPS is extremely valuable, but Apollo wasn't a necessary precursor to geostationary orbit.
If it is art that other people value then that framework already existed
From Wikipedia on Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh's work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, Van Gogh's art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius
The art we get from pre-made frameworks emerged because people figured out they like art, and then someone capitalized on that. Or in cases of monarchs and governments, they created a fund to allow artists to do their thing instead of waiting tables.
There is a compelling argument that tens of billions of dollars being used productively to research anything would have at least some useful results.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
I don't really understand how this follows from what I said.
Do you have a source for that? (And what that claim actually means), afterall, plenty of "essential" inventions in the modern day(including the base of modern rocketry) came from weapons development- does that make war a good investment? (Of course its not 1-to-1 because war is destructive, but my point is putting a lot of effort and smart people into almost anything will lead to a lot of innovation)
I don’t really understand how [The bit on Van Gogh -- that he was only posthumously appreciated in the art sector] follows from what I said.
My following paragraph is about that. Art often happens before the framework made to create it. In fact, when we have set up studio, they're already doing knock-offs, trying to repeat prior successes.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14
Do you have a source for that?
This came up during a TED talk on the benefits of investing in big science. On an unrelated research effort, I found the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which Eisenhower signed during his freak out over Sputnik, and the big grant to Fairchild Superconductor which kicked off the electronics boom in Silicon Valley (~San Jose, California), so the $14 value is certainly plausible.
As per Das Kapital our industrialists always move to capture regulation and seek to eliminate competition, which are the two aspects that can make capitalism work for the public. Then you have what we have today, late stage capitalism which is about tiers of rent, so everything is both shoddy and expensive.
That's how Disney and Warner Brothers (Warner Sister too!) end up owning all the franchises. It's how Sony owns all the music and sues to take down dancing baby videos.
The EU and California have both made in-roads to slowing down the steady takeover of regulatory bodies and the mulching and mass merging of megacorps into monolithic monopolies, but they can't stop it, and both are seeing the bend into precarity that is symptomatic of late stage capitalism.
That said, true post scarcity communism is realistically a pipe dream well beyond a few great filters we've yet to navigate, but we will see small victories, of which piracy -- what is essentially crime against ill-gotten gains -- offers more than a few.
To be fair, the service they provide isn't hosting the videos, it's making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Maybe? People willing to copy and distribute this content will always be around and you will never catch them all. People willing to pay a discount or seek not and find said content will always be around. And there will be those who will watch a show or a movie because it is freely available, who would never pay a dime for it.
They will never end piracy and I'd argue it might actually be bad for business if they did.
Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!
cringe