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Comment by shuntress | Hacker News Reader

What would people consider the ideal realistic system?

Something fair to content creators, distributors, and consumers.

I, personally, would like to be able to purchase one time "unlimited" licenses (like buying a book or a DVD) that can be easily validated by the publisher's web API and enable non-subscription content to be served by netflix/hulu/amazon/etc.

To enable (for example) streaming an amazon show through netflix. Presumably, streaming providers would (assuming the cost on an individual movie/series basis would be too small to be practical as a single payment made by me at time of consumption) include low-cost "Bring your own content" add-ons to subscriptions that would cover distribution costs through aggregate balances between providers.

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The fundamental thing to realize is that there are two kinds of people: those who want to have access to everything and those who want to own things. Most people are probably somewhere between the two.

You really don't need to get very creative, as the solutions already exist for music: Bandcamp and Spotify. Streaming services provide access to all music, as long as you keep paying. Bandcamp is pretty much perfect for buying the music you want.

I'm mostly in the second group, and if everything would be on Bandcamp I would end up buying a lot more. Top quality, hassle-free, DRM-free, for a reasonable price, with generous previews. Payment unlocks a download link, and an optional account allows you to maintain a collection. Everybody wins.

Music not being on Bandcamp is the easiest way to make me reconsider a purchase, and only offering it through streaming services is the easiest way to unlock piracy as a potential option in that consideration.

Other people like a streaming service, and both can and should exist in the same universe.

You'll never kill piracy, but it's very easy to be better. Just give the customer what they want. It doesn't have to be free. The industry should stop wasting so much time and money fighting illegal solutions to a problem they actively keep causing. It is much simpler and cheaper to just fix it.

Rights holders get paid sane cost per use that diminish over time and are rather opaque because of distributors flat rates.

Distributors compete on service quality not library. If I need 2, or more service subscriptions, including my isp, that's too many for me and I will actively seek out solutions that provide better functionality without paying a tax for worse service.

It is very strange that we have to emulate physical goods with music and videos. The underlying technology would allow copying with a marginal cost of zero. The problem of course is how to feed the artists and all the other people in the industry if we give out the content for free.

One thing that I believe doesn't work is a "culture flatrate" where you pay a fee and can access what you want. In the end, this is not much different from having a tax, and having the state pay the artists. And I really don't want the state to decide what is art and what not.

What I really think we have to do long term, and I'm totally serious, is to move to a post-capitalist society, and get rid of money and the requirement to do wage labor. I'm convinced there are many pressing problems - climate change, rising inequality, the fact that many people are overworked despite productivity increases - that we cannot easily solve in our current society. It's like our political system has collected too much technical debt.

I know, Joel Spolsky says you should never do a total rewrite, and I think this applies even more for your whole society :-) but I believe strongly we're in for a serious refactoring and core replacement. And the content industry is only one small symptome of that.

It's not so much "emulating" physical goods as it is trying to capture separate costs that physical goods link intrinsically and (mostly) effectively.

With physical media (paper books, boards games, records, film, etc) the cost of creating+distributing copies is so high that it meets or exceeds the cost of creating (or, curating/funding an environment/projects that enables the creation of) the original work. Creation and distribution of physical copies is challenging and profitable enough that creators can be paid by a portion of the profits from distribution.

In contrast, copying + distributing digital media is so phenomenally easy and egalitarian that there is very little opportunity to add value and create profit. So the method of paying creators that is essentially "built in" to physical media does not exist for digital media.

Some of the streaming music services do something like this. They scan your local music library and unlock those tracks to stream regardless of your subscription accesses. I used Google Music for this a while back.

Mp3.com That was attempted back in the day with CDs. It did not end well.

"To make the service easy to use, MP3.com did not require users to load their own music into the virtual lockers. Rather, a user merely had to insert a copy of the music into the CD-ROM drive of a computer, at which point MP3.com would verify that the person had possession of a CD, then the company would automatically put a copy of the music into the person's virtual locker."

"However, the lawsuit by the record companies asserted that MP3.com had violated copyrights by creating the digital database of albums to which they held the copyrights. In April, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com had infringed companies' copyrights."

"In the ensuing months, MP3.com reached settlements with four of the record companies, including Sony Music, Time Warner, EMI Group and Bertelsmann. Details of the settlements were not made public, but analysts estimated the company paid $20-million to each company."

https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2000/08/29/mp3-com-chief-de...

Didn’t iTunes use to have that a few years ago?

Universal media access should be a thing. The government could demand access to entire digital catalogs, compensate and resell to front-end streaming providers.

I buy the file, the file gets downloaded to my computer. Nothing more, nothing less.

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