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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I don’t really understand how this follows from what I said.
For every $1 spent on the moonshots, we got $14. Feel free to look for other investments, but big science really has proven itself.
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.
caused “substantial harm to television program copyright owners,_
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.
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
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