cringe
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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!
suction@lemmy.world 1 week ago
GroundedGator@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
Tja@programming.dev 1 week ago
Get your communism here! Only $9.99 a month, or just $99.99 for a year!
LonelyWendigo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah that competition really did demonstrate what an awful service all those media monopolies provided.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
Cosmicomical@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be fairer nobody asked them to produce content. They decided to create it because it’s cheaper that lixensing the actual good stuff.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
eh some of it is good
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Netflix service started as hosting only.
MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 1 week ago
correction… Netflix started by mailing DVDs, even before Redbox was a thing
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, imo it was also a bit more difficult then. But yeah as others said, the licensing was hard too
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
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.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
aidan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be fair, the service they provide isn’t hosting the videos, it’s making them, which I assume costs a bit more
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
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.