I think what upsets me the most isn't that companies do this, it's that no government seems to have any interest in stopping them.

To me, it should be a fairly easy, short, and extremely popular law that if you say you are 'selling' someone something, with a time-frame extremely clearly specified in a simple way, at least the same size as the price (say), you can't take it back later without giving a full refund. If they want to offer a multi-year rent, call it rent.

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piltdownman 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The US Government - the de facto licensing wing for the Western World - enables it as it positively impacts the US balance of trade in the exploitation of copyrighted works.

So long as lobbying by the Disney Corporation and others is allowed, the concept of the Public Domain is vilified to the point of felony; whereas the likes of Eldred v Ashcroft call it out for what it is - corporate welfare at the expense of public utility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft

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hgomersall 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The trivial fix to this is to allow breaking of DRM.

	▲	spwa4 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The trivial fix is to put the US government for an impossible choice: "uncopyright" all Disney movies by taking the stories and make better versions of each and every one of their movies with AI. NOT to do it once, but to create a mechanism to do it 100 times if necessary. Because, once, they can just cheat in a court case (sorry I mean "explain the impact this would have to the judge"). And make sure to publish the algorithm. And if there are 100 versions, with version 101 easily produced ... Then the US (and other) governments have to choose: either say AI produced works are not copyright-free, which will be a VERY serious problem for AI, or rights holder companies become worthless. Either of those represent incredible losses for the US government, as well as for other governments that also haven't behaved very well at all. To some extent this has already happened: commercial music providers (for supermarkets and ...) have all switched to AI "totally not based on copyrighted works" songs.