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If you want to have the conversation that there should be laws breaking up creation and distribution and making exclusive distribution illegal, then go ahead

There are laws for this in some industries in the United States.

Movie studios aren't allowed to own theaters anymore. Beer companies aren't allowed to own bars anymore. Car manufacturers aren't allowed to own auto dealerships. Most television shows are decoupled from the distributors, which is why you see things like a big extra Sony or CBS Television Distribution logo at the end of a sit-com rerun.

I'm not sure that what's happening with audiobooks rises to the level of the problems we used to have with "tied houses" (bars only allowed to sell a certain brand of beer), or movie company vertical monopolies of the past.

> Movie studios aren't allowed to own theaters anymore.

Apparently this rule was just governed by a consent decree, which never covered Disney and is being removed by the current DoJ:

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/11/paramount-consent-decrees-...

> Beer companies aren't allowed to own bars anymore.

I thought it was the opposite, where breweries can sell for on premise consumption, but not off premise?

It used to be that breweries would own chains of bars in the United States. Similar to the way you can only buy Exxon gas at an Exxon station. That was made illegal.

I don’t think there are any laws that say a brewery can only sell to on-premise accounts but not off-premise.

There are often laws regarding how many locations a brewery can own themselves for on-premise sales that is usually tied to some production cap.

These laws vary from state to state.

> Car manufacturers aren't allowed to own auto dealerships.

Tesla has been working on changing / getting around this.

If that applied to the internet, then the first order of business would be to decouple ISPs, media distribution and content creation.

Unfortunately, ISPs can have a streaming television services that are exempt from data caps while customer access to netflix is capped.

That said, I think a lot of netflix shows do show up on DVD.

I saw a box for Stranger Things that was actually really cool -- the dvds were packaged in a giant VHS box. :)

> Yeah right, please show me where I can buy Tiger King on DVD? I didn't think so.

Netflix has released dvds for many of its original shows, house of cards, Orange is the new black, stranger things, etc. They haven’t released a dvd for tiger king, but may eventually.

I'm pretty sure Netflix didn't release any of those. If DVDs exist, they are published by the studio who made the show. For example, I just looked at HoC season 1, and it is released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

https://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Season-Kevin-Spacey/dp/B0...

The Stranger Things DVD set comes in a giant VHS box, pretty cool.

> How is this any different from series that are exclusive to Netflix?

Netflix is a subscription, but Audible sells things: their subscription provides credits that can be used to purchase audiobooks below list price, but you don’t lose access if you discontinue the subscription.

As this is a purchase-like transaction instead of a broadcast-like transaction, it’s reasonable to assume it should work like other purchases. That includes the right to transfer ownership to someone else, either temporarily (loan) or permanently (gift/sale).

That isn’t really the case with any digital purchases is it? Or very few.

That depends on what you consider a digital purchase. DVDs, CDs, and game cartridges are nothing but physical manifestations of digital data, and everyone was allowed to loan or resell those. Books arguably are, too, and have hundreds of years of established legal precedent.

Why should this newcomer (downloads) be treated differently without specific legislation?

Not sure about US, but for EU (and IANAL):

In case of physical manifestations, there is an ownership of the physical medium, and copyright rights are 'subservient' to ownership transfer/loan of mediu through 'first sale' doctrine.

For intangible copyright works (e.g. downloadable software), it is just contract and there is no transfer of ownership.

There is specific legislation that establishes 'first sale' doctrine for intangible software, but not for other copyright works.

See https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=449a705d-d76a... (or http://archive.is/GZ6mX )

The current situation is similar in the US, except for the extra enabling legislation. Copyright law was never intended to completely prevent the secondary market, because nobody envisioned technology that would make ownership transfer impossible without making copies— a consumer would always have an “original” that the author was paid for and could be given away freely.

> but Audible sells things

they also have Audible Originals, which you don't need to buy but can access while on subscription

One major ideological difference between Netflix' 'Tiger King' and the Audible exclusives is that the 'Tiger King' wouldn't exist without Netflix' funding. The Audible exclusives would have; were already written by the time Audible threw money at them.

Yes it would exist because netflix acted merley as the distributer for Eric Goode's docu series which he started filming in 2014. So not so much difference after all.

My impression is that Audible does explicitly fund some exclusives. This is especially the case for "Audible Originals" which are a sort of gray area between Audible Exclusives and podcasts.

Time to cite sources, because neither of those sound like they're true? Tiger King would have been made by HBO, or Amazon Video, or etc. (Tiger King was not commissioned by Netflix, it was pitched to Netflix).

Similarly, I'm pretty sure Audible commissions plenty of works rather than only reaching exclusivity agreements about already published works.

> If you want to have the conversation that there should be laws breaking up creation and distribution and making exclusive distribution illegal, then go ahead

To begin that conservation, briefly, let me propose that the law should say that once annual sales of a media work are less than, for example, 10% of the peak number of annual sales for that work (in any year so far), any exclusivity deal should become void.

How that would apply to media works that are locked to a specific format (i.e. console games) is less clear. Perhaps if you are porting a game from Nintendo to PC, you should have to change all the trademarks, so that any bugs introduced by the port are associated with the PC version rather than reflecting badly on Nintendo.

There would probably also have to be very careful accounting of how much money went into the creation of a media work, so that a fair price could be set for an independent distributor buying the rights to distribute it.

> There would probably also have to be very careful accounting of how much money went into the creation of a media work

Probably won’t be a big issue because (for example) the film industry is known for being very transparent with its bookkeeping processes.

Netflix exclusives do get released on disk eventually. Maybe not all of them, but I found e.g. Lillyhammer and House of Cards on Amazon.