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That is, a content producer cannot charge one entity one price, and another entity a different price, nor refuse to license it to another entity (in the same way that a store cannot charge one customer one price, while another customer gets a different price).

Compulsory licensing for mass-distributed media is a good idea. Ever since the Napster days I've wished the media market worked kind of like a spot electricity auction market, and any provider could bid on any show.

Aside from simpler billing, this would also encourage innovation in the tech space separate from the content space.

If I develop a service with a clever new gimmick-- a better recommendation algorithm, a clever social feature, improved accessibility, whatever, it's dead in the water today due to no content. I have to sell out to a big player to have any chance at traction. If I can just pay for a compulsory license, I can focus on the thing that makes my offering unique.

I also think compulsory licenses might provide a desirable social benefit-- separating the artist from their work in the public's eye.

Look how every election year you get the songwriters beefing and suing "I don't want campaign A playing song B". If everyone knows all content can be compulsory licensed, the air of endorsement is gone and nobody has to get inconvenienced or angry.

Specifically to the campaigns playing songs, copyright also has a concept of "moral rights", specifically one considered "right to integrity of the work". Where this lands on a technical legal standpoint I'm not qualified to speak to, but it's something interesting to read up on.

Not everything covered by copyright is a purely economic transaction. To varying degrees, some or most art is an expression of the artist and means something to them. There's more to seeing someone you disagree with use a piece you poured your heart and soul into than just an assumed endorsement.

Yeah, I'm thinking compulsory distribution for anything above a certain market reach is an easier sell than compulsory sync licenses.

Playback needs to be decoupled from licensing.

I want to pay CBS, Disney, ATT, Comcast ONCE for each license. If I sign up for DirecTV, Hulu, Prime, Netflix, Youtube how much content am I double or triple licensed for. By making everything a bundle with some exclusive content, they are triple charging the consumer. Prime and Roku are at least a little closer to reality, Movies Anywhere, Vudu, Roku, Apple and Amazon have made some progress here. Pay a CBS or HBO auth price, and it integrates into the interface. There needs to be a way to discount a service when youre already paying a content license elsewhere. (I've written more about how this discount should work before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21482394 )

No matter what playback app I want, once I'm licensed for it, let me play back anything I'm licensed for. I want one license manager. I register all my accounts or pay the license manager directly, and then I can sign into any playback platform with my single account, and that interaction determines what I can see. I can sign into a Roku, Firestick, or AppleTV with my Access Manager, without needing to reregister each account on each platform.

triple charging the consumer

Not really. Licensing fees end up being (more or less) tied to actual number of views. When a piece of content is licensed more broadly the views on any given platform will go down, so the fees will as well.

ASCAP/BMI currently works this way - songs are compulsorily licensed in the US, at least, and everyone gets the same deal.

It makes a lot of sense to prevent this kind of walled-garden approach and the incremental hassle of renegotiating licenses every time, but the licensing organizations aren't the most flexible or responsible, so it brings its own issues.

I fully agree with your proposal, but I want to highlight that the last sentence is in fact wrong (unfortunately, IMHO).

I suspect that physical stores usually charge the same price to every customer only for practical reasons, namely because they have to display a price. They use as many ways as possible however to override it and apply personalized prices: fidelity cards, coupons, happy hours, student and veteran discounts, partnerships with credit cards or airlines, private sales and so on.

My proposal is that everyone pirate the crap out of whatever they wish to watch, as the civil disobedience threat behind the happy facade.

Hopefully this will once again force content producers to consider the risks of prioritizing profits exclusively, at the cost of convenience and fragmentation. Worked 10 years ago, should work equally fine today.

If piracy becomes rampant enough, content producers may simply pull out entirely, or pivot to less desirable models. There is a reason why the Chinese gaming market is mostly grindy GaaS designed to lure in whales.

> There is a reason why the Chinese gaming market is mostly grindy GaaS designed to lure in whales.

and it's not because of piracy. It's because these games _do_ absolutely bring in more money, due to the way it's designed to fuel addiction.

There's plenty of games in the indie games market that are original and fresh. But the unfortunate outcome of those games is that they don't bring in as much money, and so any failure dooms the indie developer.

With how large the Chinese population is, even a small slice of that should be more than enough to sustain a thriving community of indie games. But China lacks any major non-GaaS companies.

I'd agree with the proposal, but I'm not sure it would work equally fine today. I'm starting to think that the advent of Netflix weakened piracy movements too much, at just the wrong time.

After all, media conglomerates have had 10 years to prepare and perfect their anti-piracy systems. What happens in an arms race if one of the sides stops innovating for a decade?

> perfect their anti-piracy systems

and yet it's trivial today to obtain any media you want to watch for free. popcorn time comes to mind, but there's countless others.

Fighting piracy is like trying to fight the tide.

My anecdotal experience suggests that today it is slightly more difficult to find pirated content than in "the golden age of Piracy" (namely the mid-noughties to mid-10s). My hypothesis is that having a critical mass of people willing to search, consume and generate pirated content is important.

But what about content quality? Movies are mostly rubbish at the moment. Either redone old stuff or comic related because of the torrent effect - it's the only way studios can make money.

There's an argument that music has gone downhill also because of it. You either do well as a band with the first two albums and translate that into tour money or you are gone. I can't imagine that a lot of artists that don't make tour money like Enya would ever emerge these days - no matter how good their studio stuff is.

Quality series creation driven by money flowing from streaming services is one of the few bright sparks in quality entertainment these days other than gaming. If everyone decides to pirate the crap out of that we end up essentially with middle of the road rubbish as we basically are at the cinema now.

I get the frustration about needing to have so many services, it feels like we have just uninvented cable to reinvent it again (I'm waiting for places to start selling packages of streaming) but the benefit at least has been in programming.

10 years ago pirates complained about cable packages that forced them to buy a whole bunch of channels they didn't want. Instead they wanted a la carte choices.

Now pirates complain about "convenience and fragmentation." Saying they want a service with everything all in one place.

The truth is that pirates want content for free. Which is fine. I get that. But don't try to package up this belief as some kind of principled "civil disobedience."

You want to watch other people's stuff for free. Own it.

I mean Spotify has completely eliminated my desire to pirate music. I did when I was younger but $10/mo easily worth the price.

If such a thing existed for TV and movies it would be a no-brainer too. And Netflix was that for a while. Sure, it didn’t have everything but it had enough that I had more good content than I could watch. It’s not that it’s fragmented, it’s that too expensive to maintain 7 streaming service subscriptions. So most people seem to pick one or two, account share to get coverage, and then pirate what still isn’t available.

"I pay for what I feel like paying for and then I steal the stuff I don't feel like paying for" kind of proves my point.

Piracy is cheap, and that is appealing, granted. But first and foremost, it's easy and has the best availability/catalogue bar none. I decide what I want, I go to a torrent site, between a few minutes and an hour later I have it. Done. This workflow hasnt changed in 20 years either. For me, that is the appeal.

actually that's not quite true. you can easely find recent or popular stuff, by anything older is really hard to find, or the torrents are dead.

Not in my experience.

mind sharing your sources? :-)

if i sign up for any streaming service now i still have to pay for channels i don't want. same problem really. we don't have a la carte choices yet

Your reasoning is incorrect, and frankly quite insulting. I never pirate music anymore, because there is a service available that provides everything I want with no need to do a wild goose chase half the time I want to listen to something new. Time and attention are the important ingredients, not money.

Ditto for computer games, as everything I care about is always available on one of the three (!) services I use: Battle.net, Steam and GOG. That's an example of low fragmentation. I gladly spend hundreds a year on this. I never have to worry that my favorite game will disappear from my catalog. Never have to worry about DRM servers shutting down and making my purchases worthless.

The same is not the case for movies and series, as the movie industry in particular is still digging its heels and refusing to build something that properly serves its prospective customers. Multiple examples of DRM servers shutting down. Weekly examples of content disappearing from a particular platform, or changing its licensing terms to make it unavailable in my location. You'd have to be a chump to accept these terms.

The alternative should be obvious.

> I would propose that all content producing companies have to license their content to anyone who is willing to pay, at the "same" price (per user? per year? etc? this is something yet to be decided).

What economic problem are you trying to solve? These companies make an optional entertainment product. Why shouldn’t they be able to sell it to whoever they want? Especially today now that the Internet has destroyed any sort of market power based on distribution channels.

Doesn't this just entrench walled gardens? That is, your apple/googles of the world have their huge user bases and they are guaranteed access to content at the same price as everyone else, ergo nobody has any real reason to buy outside of those walled gardens because nobody can offer you anything different or cheaper than google/apple.

> in the same way that a store cannot charge one customer one price, while another customer gets a different price

A business can still be selective over who it serves though. If company X is caught doing shady, yet legal shit (say, “donating” millions to a political campaign that goes against my interests) I want the right to not license my works to them.

> I want the right to not license my works to them.

and i don't want you to have that right. Unless said company is proven to have broken the law, this is how you end up with political divides.

You already have a political divide by not wanting him to have that right.

That's a political disagreement. Political disagreements are good and proper.

A political divide is more like old Dutch pillarisation, where you have some people who read the red newspapers and listen to red music and work for red businesses and go to red schools (and live in red towns), and others who read blue newspapers and list to blue music and work for blue businesses and go to blue schools (and live in blue towns), and very little purple beside.

Purple media is a good thing. You don't have to be a moderate to agree with that.

I'm torn on this, given that I may also want to exercise this right as a creator, but ultimately, I would probably side with those who want to get rid of this right. In a society increasingly divided along party lines, the logical conclusion of this right would be that creators on each side deny businesses on the other side (and, consequently, the people on the other side) to consume their content. Hence there would be no more opportunities for shared cultural experiences. This would expedite the partisan divide even further, which is bad because we rely on some shared culture to keep our institutions functional and legitimised.

(Side note: In retrospect, this reads like I'm talking about the US society, but I'm not from the US. You can see the same rifts opening in other Western countries, although probably slower on most of them.)

The problems with exclusivity are clear, but we also must realize that lots of things were produced simply because you can just get everything. Netflix shows have been great sometimes, and they wouldn't have a happened otherwise.

I not sure if there is a 'fix' for this other then reducing copy right.