• anlumo@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    They didn’t need the army of lawyers to get license deals, so that’s not a fair comparison.

    • FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      Its almost like its unecessary shit made up in order to keep profits away from working people artificially

    • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      Their scale was also an insignificant fraction of what Netflix has, making the point even more irrelevant.

      The best figure I could find on Jetflicks user count was 37k, where as Netflix has 269 million users.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Prices should go down with scale not up though.

        There’s initial investment on the initial servers (and the software), and afterwards it should be a linear increase of server costs per user, with some bumps along the way to interconnect those servers.

        The cost also scales per content. Because that means more caching servers per user and bigger databases, and licenses.

        So this service has less users and more content, it should be way more expensive. The only reason they are cheaper is because they don’t pay those licenses.

        • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.

          The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.

        • zbyte64@awful.systems
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          5 months ago

          Certain types of content. But YouTube’s own existence started because people made content without licensing rights.

          • evidences@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Technically YouTube exists because three horny nerds wanted a dating site with video integration. It only turned into a video sharing site when they realized they couldn’t find the clip of the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction and they decided they wanted to build that platform instead.

        • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Not really. I can undersgand licensing but at this point it’s become a distopian practice completely separated from the basic need to monetize the content an make a profit. That’s why those companies become such gargantuans monsters.

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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          5 months ago

          Nope. People will still make content. It’ll be on far less of a budget, but that didn’t stop the Film School generation of independent films in the 1970s (before which you had to sell your life and soul and beating heart to a studio). In between all the schlock were the occasional arty films we consider classics today.

          And then there’s government subsidization of art projects, as per the National Endowment of the Arts.

          I think the MCU movies, the DC movies, the many studio iterations of Spiderman have shown us what capitalism eventually churns out. Sony actually chose this path content as product the same resort to formula that plagued the music industry in the 1980s (and drove the Hip Hop Independent movement of the next half-century).

          We just need to empower artists. Make sure they don’t have to moonlight as restaurant wait staff in order to eat and pay rent while they create, and make sure they have access to half-decent (not necessarily high end) hardware with which to do their thing. And yes, as Sturgeon observes, most of it will be schlock, but through sheer quantity of content we’ll get more gems than Hollywood is putting out.

          • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            If you take away the ability to own and control your intellectual property, then you won’t be empowered.

            Licensing art allows creators to earn a living off of their hard work.

            • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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              5 months ago

              Not in the US or the EU. If you make music in the States, then RCA or Sony owns your content, not you, and when they decide they’ve paid you enough (which is much less than they’re getting) then they still own your stuff. Also, if you make an amazing film or TV series ( examples: Inception, Firefly ) and the moguls don’t like it, they’ll make sure it tanks or at least doesn’t get aftermarket support, which is why Inception doesn’t have any video games tie-ins, despite being a perfect setting for video games.

              Artists are empowered in their ability to produce art. If they have to worry about hunger and shelter, then they make less art, and art narrowly constrained to the whims of their masters. Artists are not empowered by the art they’ve already made, as that has to be sold to a patron or a marketing institution.

              No, we’d get more and better art by feeding and housing everyone (so no one has to earn a living ) and then making all works public domain in the first place.

              Intellectual property is a construct, and it’s corruption even before it was embedded in the Constitution of the United States has only assured that old art does not get archived.

              I think yes, an artist needs to eat, which is why most artists (by far) have to wait tables and drive taxicabs and during all that time on the clock, not make art. The artists not making art far outnumber the artists that get to make art. And a small, minority subset of those are the ones who profit from art or even make a living from their art, a circumstance that is perpetually precarious.

              But I also think the public needs a body of culture, and as the Game of Thrones era showed us, culture and profit run at odds. The more expensive art is, the more it’s confined to the wealthy, and the less it actually influences culture. Hence we should just feed, clothe and home artists along with everyone else, whether or not they produce good or bad art. And we’ll get culture out of it.

              You can argue that a world of guaranteed meals and homes is not the world we live in, but then I can argue that piracy (and other renegade action) absolutely is part of the world we live in and will continue to thrive so long as global IP racketeering continues. Thieves and beggars, never shall we die.

              • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Sorry, I’m not going to read all that, but it seems like you’re upset about the shitty deals made by record labels and other large corporations, not intellectual property rights.

                • Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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                  5 months ago

                  The notion of the latter informs the former. The public domain is intellectual property rights of the people. Restricting the public domain takes that away.

                  • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    So if an artist creates a piece of intellectual property, do you not think they should have control over how it’s used? Including who can make profit off of it?