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Comment by omg_ketchup | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but why wouldn't they get paid based on streams of their copyrighted materials, or some other payment scheme? I mean, hey, it was good enough for video stores in the 90's, right? The equivalent of* Wolf of Wall Street sat on the shelf in Blockbuster for 15 years after it came out. They didn't have to hide it in the back because of an availability window.

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The "availability window" is manufactured scarcity. Those tapes were physical objects that they couldn't recall once they left the building, but with digital goods they can decide how much of which title to make available in order to manipulate the demand curve.

That's the logic for high-demand titles. The reasoning for not making all the junk available at a fixed cost is the flip side: if users had a giant library of good-but-not-hit content, they'd be less likely to chase around their HBO or Netflix or whatever licenses.

The copyright holder isn't trying to make it scarce. The studio/distributor would really love it if NetFlix extended the licensing contract window instead of letting it expire. But, NetFlix will only pay to extend its availability if the content is attracting people to its platform and that's becoming less likely and necessary as NetFlix builds its own content that will remain on the platform forever.

Basically, we're going to end up with a streaming platform from every studio/distributor where you'll pay them directly instead of paying the broadcaster since the internet has made it so easy for studios and distributors to become "broadcasters" too. What seemed like a good thing at first is actually going to be worse in the end for consumers. We're going to be paying the same as before for each movie purchase/rental and then even more than before to license each show we want to watch.

Or, if we're lucky, we wind up with a "Spotify for Movies" that pays rights holders based on how much/frequently their content is watched. I'm certain we'll get there eventually, but it may take another decade.

You don't want that. The end result is a system that looks a lot like youtube where bots rule the platform and the numbers are constantly gamed.

Well, part of that is that the price went down. When video stores were in their heyday, they often paid 5-6 times more for each tape in order to have public playback rights. The studios realized that they would make more money selling copies to individuals, but after that changed, the big rental chains changed to models where they paid the studios per-rental.

You don't need any special rights to rent out physical copies of movies. Video stores, Netflix, Redbox all could just buy disks and tapes from the local market and rent them out directly. Sure, they can make a business deal to get better pricing and cut out the middleman, but this effectively puts a cap on that negotiation because the local market is always a fallback. When streaming deals fail there is no fallback, see Netflix's depleting catalog.

The problem is that the experience of watching a movie at home only shifted a little bit during the transition from physical to streaming, while the legal and licensing framework between the two are so different they are hardly comparable. Copyright holders took great advantage of the change to a new format allowing them to redefine the meaning of licensing so that they have more control and can extract more value.

Here's a story about Redbox employees buying DVDs from Walmart to stock kiosks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/redbox-employee-buys-100-dvd...

It seems like a wink-wink, hush-hush deal struck between Redbox employees and certain Walmart brick and mortar employees. I would venture as far as assuming that the three-copy-per-person limit was am arbitrary decision by another brick and mortar employee -- policies like these usually come from subjective decisions by well-meaning but uninformed managers in the retail world.

There's a similar scenario where the last Blockbuster Video in Bend, Oregon restocks its DVDs by buying at Walmart, but it's detailed in one of the documentary videos about it that the manager of said Blcokbuster has a special off-the-record arrangement with Walmart management.

I only mentioned it as a signal that Redbox was apparently unable to get a better deal with whoever licenses/sells the DVDs wholesale than from Walmart, even if they got a special deal from those particular Walmart stores.

I don't know about the US, but here in France they do need special rights.

From what I understand, the first sale doctrine protects them in the US

That is true, and established now, but in the early days of VHS rental, it wasn't so clearly established, and the movie studios did issue high-cost tapes that came with public performance rights.

Even now, any film display outside of the home still requires a public performance license, the studios have just decided to put their efforts into enforcement on the location and business side, rather than the supply/sales side.

>...That is true, and established now, but in the early days of VHS rental, it wasn't so clearly established, and the movie studios did issue high-cost tapes that came with public performance rights.

I don't think that is right. The first sale right is a limitation of the copyright holder's distribution right. This right was first recognized by the Supreme Court in 1908 and was clearly established by the time of video rentals. Video tapes were initially priced very high as the studios were selling to the rental stores, but eventually the studios simply found they could make more money selling copies to individuals and the prices came down.

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