I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.

Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.

If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.

The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.

>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)

This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.

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brainwad 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.

Because this syllogism doesn't hold. There's not a fixed pot of money that must be spent on content. If now every streaming service has access to a bigger pool of old hits, then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.

> If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.

Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content. You can see this in music, for instance, where the big streamers already have more or less identical catalogues. Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.

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BeFlatXIII 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Each service will just become sameier and compete more on their UX than their exclusive content.

This is an incredibly good thing.

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lotsofpulp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> then they don't need to buy as much new content to satisfy their customers, and total spending on content will go down.

Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns, which everyone else also offers? Streaming only old content will be a very, very low profit margin business.

> Nobody is picking Spotify over Apple Music or Youtube Music due to exclusives, because there are none; so putting the content into the public domain is hardly going to change things.

Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved.

But, also, people have to pick only Spotify/Apple/Amazon/Alphabet and a couple others because of excess copyright terms. All the old hits people want are controlled by Universal, Sony, and Warner, and so if your audio streaming business does not contract with those 3, then you’re dead in the water. Which means every audio streaming business, and hence every audio streaming customer, is always paying rent to those 3 businesses that own copyrights.

That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming.

	▲	brainwad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Why would they have customers in the first place if all they offer is reruns You can ask the same question for cable TV, but it's not dead. Netflix also started as purely "reruns" and was still quite popular. > Creating and streaming audio is not a comparable business to creating and streaming video, due to the vastly different sums of money, and hence risk, involved. If anything that extra risk should make studios more shy of investing in new content vs just serving up old hits. It's noticeable that film leans way more heavily on franchises and remakes already, which agrees with this hypothesis? > That means there is less money available for new audio creators. And this holds true for all rent seeking. If it weren’t for excessive copyright, there could be much more variety in audio streaming. You assume this, but I really don't think it's true! Most people don't seek out new music; their tastes are set in their youths and then they happily listen to the same music for the rest of their lives. The choice is to make them pay to listen, generating at least some stream of royalties, or let them listen for free, in which case they will be happy to.