I’m not sure I buy it. Just because content producers wall+jerk themselves off doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning. Besides, Netflix already became a content producer themself partly as an answer to that.
doesn’t mean you have to enshittify your own product, not when you are winning
Since Netflix is a publicly traded company now, they pretty much have to.
Gotta pursue that infinite stock growth…
This is it. The stock market is pretty much the reason everything goes to shit. It’s run in rampantly criminal fashion in the first place, just a meat grinder for money, and if our legal system weren’t run in such a fast and loose, revolving-door echo chamber fashion, someone would have clamped down on it years ago. Why this isn’t more obvious to people is stunning to me.
It’s like religion. It corrupts you, makes you angry, sanctimonious and blind, and hence stupid. Avoid it like the plague it is.
Maybe it’s not even the stock market, but the laws surrounding it. To the best of my knowledge, a company’s primary legal obligation is to maximize shareholder value. Ethics and maintenance seem to be secondary as a result. There needs to be legal ways or more incentives for companies to be satisfied with their progress and seek stability/maintenance, and keep their stock price stable.
People wouldn’t care nearly as much about password sharing crackdowns and random limitations if Netflix had a complete content library. Netflix with their originals aren’t going to match Disney’s decades-long catalog of content regardless of how much money they pour into it. Tack on Paramount, NBC, and Warner Bros, and that task becomes impossible. Piracy came back because people couldn’t get the content they wanted on Netflix or Hulu, and they couldn’t get that content because producers got super greedy.
TBH they could just have kept streaming their archived copies of that content (they did make backups, right? They work on IT, they would have known how important it is to have backups). If Disney or someone complains, let each side just pick their lawyer staff and toss them together at a mud cage match with wet T-shirts, for a couple of years, maybe a decade. They have way over good amounts of money to waste on that, and people would have kept enjoying a good alternative to piracy in the meantime.
Netflix would lose that lawsuit almost immediately.
EDIT: To explain further, it literally doesn’t matter if Netflix has copies of that media. If Netflix loses the rights to distribute that media, they can’t distribute that media. If Netflix continued to distribute said media, they would not have a case in US courts. When people in the US buy physical media, they only receive a license (intangible) and a copy of the media. With some exceptions, people have to adhere to the terms of that license. Even if ripping for personal use is allowed, you can’t buy a DVD, rip it, and then pass the DVD to a friend to keep because you transfer your license to use that media onto a friend.
