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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Now bittorrent has one of the greatest catalogues of films available to the public. You can find many rare and obscure films that are unavailable elsewhere.

For example, I heard that Stanley Kubrick's student war film he made was actually pretty good. But it wasn't available for sale or stream from anywhere. I found it almost immediately on a (public) torrent site with a decent quality. I've had this experience on a couple of occasions.

It's too bad that Netflix doesn't keep a backlog of old films plus a rotating selection of newer films. But I guess their licensee's business models comes before their customers wants.

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I firmly believe that one the best things we could do for copyright (besides shortening the terms) would be a use it or lose it clause, where a product loses its copyright if its not available to the general pubic in a meaningful way after 5 or 10 years. AKA, the copyright owner doesn't want to go to the effort of digitizing that movie and putting it on amazon/itunes/whatever, then it becomes public domain. Of course there needs to be a way to avoid the problem of the million dollar movie domain, where you can view the movie/book for some amount that results in 0 sales per year.

The idea is great, but such a radical change it probably has no chance of being realized.

Perhaps a less disruptive change would be to maintain copyright protections the way they are, but attack this at the penalty level: basically enshrine the idea that

> "X was not available for purchase or streaming in a DRM-free format in my country at the time I got a copy of it from a torrent."

Would be a valid defense for personal use, capping penalties at 1$ or so, without opening the public-domain box and opening the field to companies instantly cropping up to snipe a 5-year-old TV show the day it goes free, and resell it.

That's a good idea. Similar to 'probable cause' but from the citizens perspective or the various legal tests created by courts to ascertain guilt.

Basically that the consumer went to reasonable lengths to purchase the product legally and wasn't able to as a legal defense. If the owner doesn't make the content reasonably available than they have no claim that it shouldn't be consume by other grey-market means.

As easy as torrenting is, it's still not ideal to just watching it one Netflix or Prime. There are real incentives to not pirate assuming the content creator utilizes these (mainstream) options.

This creates market incentives to maximize the return on the copyrighted content and still forces the bigger distribution platforms to follow the rules.

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