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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

At no point in my entire life has modern or popular music been more available than it is now. I haven't "bought an album" in over a decade, because virtually everything is instantly available at no additional charge beyond the one simple service I subscribe to. Short of all recorded content being de facto uncompensated, which is what the logical conclusion of Napster winning would have been, it's hard to see an outcome here that would be better for consumers than the one we have.

I suspect we'll be in a similar position with video content in 10 years as well. Already, I think it's easy to make the case that we're better off than we were in the status quo ante of cable bundles and video rentals.

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I'm not so concerned with access to the originals as I am with the restriction of derivative works. Look back through human history and you'll find people retelling and adapting stories and songs freely. With our effectively-infinite copyright length, we've now locked our shared culture behind Disney's lawyers. That sucks.

I am unclear on how trademark interacts with copyright on this. Unlike copyright, trademarks really were intended to be infinite: they expire only when people stop using them (and paying the relevant fees).

So even if Steamboat Willie were to become public domain, would trademark limit the derivative works that could be made? The movie might be public, but the main character isn't. Can you tell me how that would work?

This so much. When I first learned about how US copyright laws were extended (and then pushed on the rest of the world via trade deals, etc), my respect for IP rules plummeted. In college I had no qualms using Napster, and later bitorrent, etc.

Even today, I get frustrated by geo-ip blocking (I'm Canadian) and I have no idea how I'm going to watch the Animaniacs reboot (Hulu isn't available here). Even worse, a lot of content gets licenced to Canadian media companies which then (if I legally want to) force me to watch through terrible apps with terrible commercial interruptions at bad times. The last movie I tried to legally watch via that last method has 20 minutes of commercials for every hour of the film.

I pay for Netflix and Apple music because they're affordable and extremely convenient, but get in my way and I'll have no qualms finding a better way.

That's great and all, but has nothing to do with the fact that the Charlie Brown Halloween Special will be on Apple TV and not network TV. It's always been the case that nerds can watch pretty much whatever they want by ignoring copyright and just downloading stuff. It was that way all the way into the streaming wars. Streaming services aren't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on content catalogs because they're worried that you're going to upend their business with torrent sites.

I've been hearing forms of this argument on HN for a decade (usually, it's Star Wars we're "locked out of"). If your "shared culture" is confined to Olaf the Snowman and the Avengers, then, respectfully, you're the one with the problem, not Disney. Read a book! There are zillions of them.

Meanwhile, if you're a parent that wants to put Olaf the Snowman on the TV, it has never, ever been easier or less expensive to do that.

I don't see how pointing out particular cultural examples is relevant. Most software from the 80s is commercially useless right now; should it still be protected by copyright? Books from the 1700s are still culturally relevant; is it OK that they aren't? What would society lose if I could create an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that includes red shoes? Literally everyone involved in the original creation is dead, but WB owns it until 2035[1]. Is that ethical?

There's a balance somewhere between the rights of the creator and the rights of society to adapt and disseminate our own culture, and the argument we're making is that the scales are currently tipped way too far on the side of the creator. I don't care how easy it is to watch Frozen in 2020, I care about what the children who grew up with that film can do with the culture they grew up in when they are adults.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_The_Wizard...

"Our own culture" is just handwaving. What makes one title "our culture" and another "intellectual property", unless you outright don't believe in IP at all? The latter would at least be a coherent argument.

It's not a dichotomy. Culture is the environment you live in; if you have humans, you can't not have culture. IP is a set of laws that govern people's behavior. I'm saying we got the laws wrong and it impacts our culture negatively.

To me, it just sounds like a special pleading argument; nerds like Star Wars, believe it should be free, and so dub it "shared culture". What film or album isn't "shared culture"? By some definitions of the (very loose) word "culture", it's all "culture".

Yes, it is all culture, regardless of the copyright status. The question is whether our IP law results in "better" or "worse" effects on our culture, whatever those terms mean. I think the current length of copyright harms our culture more than it helps it. I don't care about any particular media property's copyright status, I care about what impacts copyright has on our culture.

I feel like you are not responding to the points I am making, and are hung up on something else.

As the opportunity to purchase physical or non-streaming versions of content dry up consumers will be forced into subscription services. There won't be a non-recurring-payment option for consumers who don't necessarily want new media. I don't know what the size of that market segment is, but the subscription-based streaming-only future isn't a "win" for them.

Speak for yourself.

I could subscribe to 3 or 4 premium streaming services and be spending less than I was on CDs 20 years ago.

Don't have to spend hours ripping them all, either.

...except unlike those CDs, the moment you unsubscribe, you'll lose access to everything.

And then you'll sign up for the competing service that has for all intents and purposes the same catalog, and get access to everything once again.

If you're, I guess, weird, you can just buy CDs the way we did in 1998. They're all still available! The bands would really like you to buy them! I'm genuinely not sure what the complaint is here. It seems to be that super-cheap, super-convenient music is available in addition to the CDs we were buying instead?

I think it's weird to be excited about being beholden to some big, faceless company that charges you a monthly fee AND sells personal data about you AND which you know your favorite artists secretly despise. Also kind of weird to be music-less when not connected to the internet or if you don't have a specific app installed. But you do you, man.

The excitement comes from not having to manage "stuff". Don't need to store/manage/catalogue/find anything physical. Don't need to store/manage/backup/catalogue anything digital either, just search for what you want in the app and play.

If collecting is part of the fun for you then go for it, but there's a whole lot of people for whom the collecting stuff isn't fun it's just unnecessary work.

You know that album you really like? Yeah it's gone now. The estate of $ARTIST doesn't want it available on $SERVICE_A now that $SERVICE_B is offering a better deal. Oh, and $SERVICE_B isn't available in $COUNTRY of course, but someone could buy the rights for it there and publish the music, someday, or never, we don't care.

I don't get it either, and yet these services are massively popular to the point of alternatives going away. Meanwhile I have tons of music on my laptop, desktop, and HTPC, and can play it as long as there isn't a power outage.

Streaming is great for things I know I want to watch once (e.g. TV series) and don't care if I can't rewatch it tomorrow. For music? Nope.

Or you can usually buy it in digital form DRM-free though I usually prefer to buy the CD and rip it myself if the price difference is minimal.

In general, the situation with music is much better than video in general. There are exclusives and gaps (especially for some oddball stuff) but, for the most part, all the major services have most of the music people typically listen too.

I have a big library but I augment it with streaming and (mostly) don't buy a lot of new music.

You don't own anything, though. I listen to CDs I bought 20+ years ago and then ripped all the time, in my home, at work and in cars. If you cancel your streaming service today what will you listen to tomorrow?

I can probably find it on youtube

and download it with youtube-dl...

wait a minute -

The market for people who actually want to own it is vanishingly small. I for instance literally do not care if I own it or not. All I really want is to be able to listen to it when I want to and I have that. I don't see a realistic future where I won't be able to listen to it.

All in all I'm with tptacek here. For all but the most niche consumer this is unambiguously better than we had before.

Nice to know you've completely lost touch with the rest of the world in terms of being able to watch significant chunks of recurring revenue fly out the door, along with realigning incentives away from getting any ambitious or different music that isn't "investment grade".

>"Screw you, got mine," does not tend to score points with the youth of today, and it doesn't score points with me. Not that what I think matters one lick. All of my music has either been consumed via radio, adopted via possession through being the family backup media, or public domain/OST, typically from ye olde CD store.

Furthering the arts my arse. Furthering the exploitation and monetization of the Arts as business model through aggressive litigation is more like it.

I like that I have a large music library--some of which is at least a bit oddball and, I'm guessing, not available streaming. But that's in no small part because I ripped a large CD collection (and pulled other songs off Napster, mostly to replace songs I only had on old vinyl).

That said, I'm not at all sure that I'd try to build a library from scratch if I were starting today. Maybe I'd buy the odd album here and there but probably not wholesale.

As for video, the vast vast majority people of people don't buy a lot of DVDs any longer. Heck, I've certainly had people express surprise that I even own a DVD player.

Ownership is some sense is useful b/c you can pass your records / cds / mp3s on to your kids. I guess what you would pass down would be playlists.

Playlist, MP3, CD, or LP: your kids won't want them regardless.

I enjoyed discovering my Dad’s LPs.

I'm just saying that in the large, lovingly handed down collections of popular music are not really a thing.

I am not talking about popular music.

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