It's dumb, but monopoly is another way to have everything available at the same place.
Because the companies that profit off our extremist copyright laws control the media, they don't talk about this very much, but copyright, as currently implemented, is extremely unfair for the consumer, to the extent that many consumers break copyright laws several times a day and often don't even know they've done anything illegal.
We need serious intellectual property modernization and reform.
Anyway, the alternative would be worse. If there was no reason to pick one streaming provider over another on the basis of content, one would quickly become a monopoly, which would be bad for both content creators and consumers.
This is addressed by something called the "first sale doctrine", which states that IP holders only have control over the direct sale between themselves and the other party, and cannot exert control over second, third, or later sales.
Tesla, of course, is not obligated to offer their cars for sale in any particular venue. They cannot, however, stop someone else who possesses a Tesla car from offering it for sale either as a private party or through a third-party dealer. This is why you can go to the Ford dealer and leave with a used Honda. Honda didn't give that car to Ford, but it legally came into the dealer's possession through an intermediary, and thus, the Ford dealer has every right to sell it on their own terms.
The difference here is that we're discussing direct physical goods that may contain intellectual property, whereas Netflix and the internet remove the necessity of the physical medium. This is really where our existing technology access laws begin to fall down. They just do not adequately contemplate a world that does not require transactions of hard physical tokens to exchange substantial sums of information. Of course, the very fact that computer networks don't require that is what gives them their power.
>Anyway, the alternative would be worse. If there was no reason to pick one streaming provider over another on the basis of content, one would quickly become a monopoly, which would be bad for both content creators and consumers.
I don't think this makes sense. Just the opposite is true. If everyone could license the content at a reasonable price and show it on their streaming service, the best streaming service in terms of actual quality would be able to win. Under the current regime, if you don't have both the capital and the clout to spend months in secret meetings with the big media companies, your video streaming startup will simply never gain steam at all. It's much better for the competitive landscape if everyone is legally allowed to show the content.
You are the one who is trying to mis-apply a legal doctrine developed for physical objects (first sale doctrine) to digital files.
The old adage is "possession is 9/10ths of the law". We need to think about how that applies in the digital age, when much of what we "own" is only represented by a relatively small handful of bits on a drive in a datacenter somewhere, and not in the legal owner's direct physical possession.
I have season pack DVDs and I have season packs I've bought on Amazon Video (I also have over 200 games on Steam, where this issue is probably much more salient). Ideally, the medium wouldn't matter, legally speaking; what would matter is that I owned a copy of something. As it stands, I have substantially more rights with a DVD than with a bit assigned to my user profile in Amazon's database somewhere. We need to find a way to port the first-sale doctrine to the digital world, and otherwise update our arcane technology access laws.
Separately but relatedly, we also need to weaken copyright protections substantially to grant a more even balance between the financial interests of the rightsholders and the cultural interests of the public at large, and to correct the economic inequities that flow from government's grant of a practically-eternal (since most copyrights that come into being today are not going to expire until most or all of us are dead), almost-unlimited (since copyrights allow the rightsholder to squash almost any use and since it requires millions of dollars to fight the media conglomerates and establish as valid just one single, isolated usage as legally fair) monopoly to the rightsholder.
You mean the public that still exchanges terabytes [1] of pirated content every month in the US alone that the rights holders are unable to stop?
1. Sandvine estimates single digit percentage of daily Internet traffic in the US is BitTorrent. That is huge in absolute numbers.
EDIT: Also, it's improper to classify all BitTorrent traffic as piracy. It was specifically designed to transfer large files. Applications like World of Warcraft use it internally to distribute game files.
> If everyone could license the content at a reasonable price...
...I think you're touching another precedent: compulsory licensing (or statutory licensing, in UK parlance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
This is an interesting idea, although it'd be tough to get the right people to agree to it. It also raises the question on just what streaming services would be competing on, if not content. UX, perhaps?
My guess is that under a scenario like this, the price for any one service would be substantially higher than what we're paying now for Netflix and competitors. I'd personally be just fine with a service that had, say, a $30-40 month range, even if it were partially supported by ads the way Hulu is (although it'd be nicer if, like Hulu, you could pay a little more to make most of the ads go away).