So what's the problem here: is it laws (DRM) or is it profit driven?
If it's law/DRM - then the law is broken, no? How then does the law/policy exist to allow "the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity"?
If it's law/DRM - then the law is broken, no? How then does the law/policy exist to allow "the most tinkerer-empowering times of humanity"?
I think the primary driver is DRM, which itself is driven by the content owners more so than service providers.
While the streaming services themselves surely want to protect their service from theft, they would largely benefit (with some caveats) from having a platform that's extensible and flexible as a competitive edge, similar to how a phone vendor wants to have a thriving third party app scene.
Meanwhile, the content owners still use misguided tactics that punish legitimate users in the hopes of stopping piracy. Piracy that always seems to find a way to continue.
This leads to some good questions around what kind of policy can be made to give content owners legal rights to their IP while also respecting user's rights to build and extend.
Because ultimately the core offering of these streaming services is their breadth of content and the license negotiations and library management they do. Their apps are just front-ends to that.
So, a "right to extend" initiative that pairs with the "right to repair" initiatives could be something interesting to explore.
If 100% of people pirate and no money is going to funding creativity then something is likely incredibly wrong with our systems' designs and society, but at least if piracy is not illegal then authoritarian control and punishment can't be a violent-force tool to extract value that sovereign individuals decide isn't worth it to them compared to their other costs; this then would arguably cause all parties, all industries, to align to make sure the foundation - the floor - of society is solid and generating/producing [in sustainable way] to extract some value to then reinvest to generate more ROI for society; there are some more recent theories regarding a Universal Basic Income that the ROI from the UBI will actually [at least eventually] pay for the cost of the UBI itself.
TL;DR - Piracy is a useful and valuable mechanism to keep a competitive greed driven for-profit industry in check.