6 ms·

This feels... grotesque? The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to

by c3534l 2y ago

This feels... grotesque? The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.

tunesmith 2y ago
I think part of what explains that is that they aren't "competing" in sense of airing the same shows. It's the shows that get marketed, not streaming of generic entertainment.
aidenn0 2y ago
You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  All of this I think just serves to underscore the importance of piracy’s role in the debate — in a world where physical media isn’t rented or loaned out, piracy provides the needed pressure to keep rightsholders honest on price and terms.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    That’s only the case if more people pirate, as it stands it’s not enough pressure to do much of anything.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Another way to say that first part is that after a certain amount of time the government strips away your control over your own creation.
  - chgs 2y ago
    Nobody is taking away your copy.
  - justinsaccount 2y ago
    You say "your control" as if that current "certain amount of time" was not after you had already been dead for 70 years.
  - stubish 2y ago
    Yes, the copyright laws setup in the 18th century and since are all about protecting creator rights. But the other half of the equation is consumer rights. Consumer rights tend to get trodden down in the name of profit, so we now have the situation where you have to pay rent on your own cultural heritage. Or can't even do that, when creators or censors have removed or altered media that helped form your adolescent mind.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Yes. Is contributing your creation to society - something you live in and benefit from - something you don't like?
  - hn_acker 2y ago
    No, in the US the purpose of copyright is to incentivize creation of creative works for the long-term public benefit [1]. The rights to control what others do with your copyrighted works are a means to the end, a temporary price for future unexclusive public access. (The Copyright Clause gives Congress authority to pass copyright statutes, but the First Amendment theoretically "amends" the Copyright Clause and takes priority over any copyright statutes. In the US, fair use was a necessary common law measure made into statutory law to align copyright with the First Amendment.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
  - AndrewDucker 2y ago
    You only have that control because of the government. Without the chunk of the legal system devoted to it you wouldn't have any control of your own creation at all.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  You could also just...not watch it. You don't have a right to consume someone else's creations just because you want to.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Will the work be in the public domain after you die? Do they make more money per hour than you would make in a dozen lifetimes? Do they not currently offer the media? if you answer yes to at least two of these questions, then yes you do.
  - stubish 2y ago
    No, you can't not watch it. Popular media becomes part of popular culture. Your culture, my culture. It surrounds us and affects us, no matter our choice and even before we are of an age we can legally make such decisions. Mickey Mouse is in your head, and Disney controls Mickey Mouse, so Disney controls a part of you. Owns a part of you. A part that you need to keep locked away and only used with permission, because that T-shirt that makes you feel happy for no good reason needs to be blurred out when filmed to avoid a court case. And Gen X is still pissed about it because Han shooting first is part of their identity.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - harimau777 2y ago
    I think it becomes less black and white once something becomes part of culture (in the sense that works like Beowulf, Macbeth, and The Arabian Nights are part of culture, not in the sense that every published work is part of culture). I think that people have a right to their culture and therefore have a right to interact with stories that become part of their culture.
  - CatWChainsaw 2y ago
    Is this your stance on the creation of the datasets used for training of song-generating and image-generating models as well?
- bdw5204 2y ago
  Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition. Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer provided insurance through the tax code so nobody cares about controlling medical costs. Why is housing so expensive? Because local governments literally make it illegal to build housing infringing on the private property rights of landowners with idiotic "zoning" laws and by doing things like declaring run down parking lots to be "historic" parking lots that must be preserved. Why is the labor market so skewed against labor and in favor of capital? Because numerous government laws make it harder to start businesses than it should be and also because government subsidizes employers providing "benefits" through the tax code. Why did the railroads collapse and most of the US become dependent upon cars? Because the government regulated the railroads to death with the Interstate Commerce Commission and subsidized both cars and car infrastructure. You can keep going on and on with examples but the answer is almost always something that the government did to screw up the market.
  - nicoburns 2y ago
    While this can be the case, numerous of the examples you have given (medical costs and the labor market to name two) have fewer problems in countries with much stronger government intervention/regulation. If your government creates poor regulations then maybe that should be tackled directly (by electing less incompetent/corrupt officials) rather than concluding that regulation itself is bad.
    - dmix 2y ago
      Most of those countries such as Canada made certain markets like health insurance public, where it was deemed for the publics benefit not to be run for profit as there's far too many externalities and moral issues. We made the same choice with police and public attorneys. Sometimes, in very rare cases usually invoking peoples health and safety, it makes sense for it to be public. What doesn't make sense to me is that massive meddling western governments do to prop up these monopolies. Copyright is a perfect example. Or just look a Boeing in 2024 or many Wall St orgs after 2008, special treatment and artificial barriers to completion is a huge and ever growing problem. And these debates always just dismissed and downplayed because all context gets thrown out and it turns into vague gov regulations vs markets fights, as we see here in this thread. The cyberpunk future of megacorps ruling the planet will be the result of gov interference in the vast majority of cases. And only a small amount due to lack of any monopoly antitrust enforcement. But both have the same root cause of forever expanding gov technocracy->megacorps define the rules and buy politicians->no one wins.
- khazhoux 2y ago
  I must be the only one that is not bothered by Disney having a permanent monopoly over Disney characters. They created the characters, they nurtured them, and they maintain their image to this day and this is their business. I am not at all compelled by someone who feels it’s now right, because Mickey is part of American culture, to make their own commercial products with that IP. Design your own damn characters.
  - saurik 2y ago
    To checksum, do you also believe that The Little Mermaid should still belong to Hans Christian Anderson?
    - khazhoux 2y ago
      No, and Mickey does not belong to Walt Disney either. If Hans had created a business that sustained to this day, then that would be different situation.
      - CyberDildonics 2y ago
        https://www.amazon.com/Little-Mermaid-Christian-collection-illustrations/dp/B0C63RPP7V/ https://www.amazon.com/Little-Mermaid-Christian-collection-i...
      - saurik 2y ago
        So you don't mean a "permanent monopoly" without any considerations or constraints, then? More of a "use it or lose it" situation?
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > having a government enforced monopoly on their content Sure, but they're just the only company selling Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Someone else is selling DC, Illumination, and Star Trek content. They're all competing in the entertainment space, so it's not a real problem for pricing. If Disney opened a $2500 per night Star Wars hotel, I'm pretty sure you'd see market forces react.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    I'm not sure that there's any way that the market could react. It's Star Wars that's a major part of American culture, not whatever alternative a competitor comes up with. It would be like if a single corporation owned King Arthur or Journey to the West.
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      At some point you get "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin."
  - salawat 2y ago
    No they wouldn't, because no one else can open one without parasitic drag from Disney.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruise...
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong. Why? What an individual provider wants to optimize is (number of customers) * ((average) profit per customer) Depending on the market circumstances either lowering the price to attract more customers or increasing the price to increase "(average) profit per customer" can be the business strategy to choose. The economic concept that you are looking for to decide of these two options is the right one is called "price elasticity of demand": > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
geodel 2y ago
Marketshare at any cost sounds like startup bullshit to me.
- 486sx33 2y ago
  In manufacturing we called it “dumping”
alephnerd 2y ago
> competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+ That assumes you can substitute goods. And trust me, you can't substitute Paradise PD for Gravity Falls. This is why market segmentation exists.
hiddencost 2y ago
Meant to? By whom? Who makes sure the system operates that way?
- stubish 2y ago
  A free market just works this way, and various regulations exist to keep it a free market by stopping things like collusion, corruption, fraud and monopolies. However, in order to protect creators rights, other regulations we call copyright grant monopolies. So the 'free market' is not really a free market. An actual free market per your economics text book is a rare thing.
- harimau777 2y ago
  That's the pitch that's generally given by advocates of the free market to justify their position. They tend to do so because "the free market" isn't something that is near universally viewed as an inherent good, so it's necessary to convince people that it's existence results in other goods.
nicoburns 2y ago
> The free market ... feels like something has gone terribly wrong. Well yes. It has done for several decades at this point. It's a classic case of Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In this case the measure is the market price of a good/service and/or the profitability of a business. It is assumed by free-market capitalism to be a good measure of societal value, and it was, more or less. But over time that's become less and less true as people over optimise for the metric.
pushupentry1219 2y ago
> The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. > it feels like something has gone terribly wrong. I don't meant to be rude, but I am going to be: have you had your head in the sand for the last.. decade and a half? Something has gone terribly wrong and it's late stage capitalism.
gruez 2y ago
>If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong. wait till you hear about luxury brands
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
In Monopoly, you win the game when every other player is in a state of permanent poverty/precarity and can never break your power. Don't ever be duped into thinking Monopoly, The Real Life Game, has an end goal that differs in any meaningful sense.

by c3534l 2y ago

tunesmith 2y ago

I think part of what explains that is that they aren't "competing" in sense of airing the same shows. It's the shows that get marketed, not streaming of generic entertainment.

aidenn0 2y ago

You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?

mikepurvis 2y ago
All of this I think just serves to underscore the importance of piracy’s role in the debate — in a world where physical media isn’t rented or loaned out, piracy provides the needed pressure to keep rightsholders honest on price and terms.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  That’s only the case if more people pirate, as it stands it’s not enough pressure to do much of anything.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Another way to say that first part is that after a certain amount of time the government strips away your control over your own creation.
- chgs 2y ago
  Nobody is taking away your copy.
- justinsaccount 2y ago
  You say "your control" as if that current "certain amount of time" was not after you had already been dead for 70 years.
- stubish 2y ago
  Yes, the copyright laws setup in the 18th century and since are all about protecting creator rights. But the other half of the equation is consumer rights. Consumer rights tend to get trodden down in the name of profit, so we now have the situation where you have to pay rent on your own cultural heritage. Or can't even do that, when creators or censors have removed or altered media that helped form your adolescent mind.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Yes. Is contributing your creation to society - something you live in and benefit from - something you don't like?
- hn_acker 2y ago
  No, in the US the purpose of copyright is to incentivize creation of creative works for the long-term public benefit [1]. The rights to control what others do with your copyrighted works are a means to the end, a temporary price for future unexclusive public access. (The Copyright Clause gives Congress authority to pass copyright statutes, but the First Amendment theoretically "amends" the Copyright Clause and takes priority over any copyright statutes. In the US, fair use was a necessary common law measure made into statutory law to align copyright with the First Amendment.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
- AndrewDucker 2y ago
  You only have that control because of the government. Without the chunk of the legal system devoted to it you wouldn't have any control of your own creation at all.
gamblor956 2y ago
You could also just...not watch it. You don't have a right to consume someone else's creations just because you want to.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Will the work be in the public domain after you die? Do they make more money per hour than you would make in a dozen lifetimes? Do they not currently offer the media? if you answer yes to at least two of these questions, then yes you do.
- stubish 2y ago
  No, you can't not watch it. Popular media becomes part of popular culture. Your culture, my culture. It surrounds us and affects us, no matter our choice and even before we are of an age we can legally make such decisions. Mickey Mouse is in your head, and Disney controls Mickey Mouse, so Disney controls a part of you. Owns a part of you. A part that you need to keep locked away and only used with permission, because that T-shirt that makes you feel happy for no good reason needs to be blurred out when filmed to avoid a court case. And Gen X is still pissed about it because Han shooting first is part of their identity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- harimau777 2y ago
  I think it becomes less black and white once something becomes part of culture (in the sense that works like Beowulf, Macbeth, and The Arabian Nights are part of culture, not in the sense that every published work is part of culture). I think that people have a right to their culture and therefore have a right to interact with stories that become part of their culture.
- CatWChainsaw 2y ago
  Is this your stance on the creation of the datasets used for training of song-generating and image-generating models as well?
bdw5204 2y ago
Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition. Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer provided insurance through the tax code so nobody cares about controlling medical costs. Why is housing so expensive? Because local governments literally make it illegal to build housing infringing on the private property rights of landowners with idiotic "zoning" laws and by doing things like declaring run down parking lots to be "historic" parking lots that must be preserved. Why is the labor market so skewed against labor and in favor of capital? Because numerous government laws make it harder to start businesses than it should be and also because government subsidizes employers providing "benefits" through the tax code. Why did the railroads collapse and most of the US become dependent upon cars? Because the government regulated the railroads to death with the Interstate Commerce Commission and subsidized both cars and car infrastructure. You can keep going on and on with examples but the answer is almost always something that the government did to screw up the market.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  While this can be the case, numerous of the examples you have given (medical costs and the labor market to name two) have fewer problems in countries with much stronger government intervention/regulation. If your government creates poor regulations then maybe that should be tackled directly (by electing less incompetent/corrupt officials) rather than concluding that regulation itself is bad.
  - dmix 2y ago
    Most of those countries such as Canada made certain markets like health insurance public, where it was deemed for the publics benefit not to be run for profit as there's far too many externalities and moral issues. We made the same choice with police and public attorneys. Sometimes, in very rare cases usually invoking peoples health and safety, it makes sense for it to be public. What doesn't make sense to me is that massive meddling western governments do to prop up these monopolies. Copyright is a perfect example. Or just look a Boeing in 2024 or many Wall St orgs after 2008, special treatment and artificial barriers to completion is a huge and ever growing problem. And these debates always just dismissed and downplayed because all context gets thrown out and it turns into vague gov regulations vs markets fights, as we see here in this thread. The cyberpunk future of megacorps ruling the planet will be the result of gov interference in the vast majority of cases. And only a small amount due to lack of any monopoly antitrust enforcement. But both have the same root cause of forever expanding gov technocracy->megacorps define the rules and buy politicians->no one wins.
khazhoux 2y ago
I must be the only one that is not bothered by Disney having a permanent monopoly over Disney characters. They created the characters, they nurtured them, and they maintain their image to this day and this is their business. I am not at all compelled by someone who feels it’s now right, because Mickey is part of American culture, to make their own commercial products with that IP. Design your own damn characters.
- saurik 2y ago
  To checksum, do you also believe that The Little Mermaid should still belong to Hans Christian Anderson?
  - khazhoux 2y ago
    No, and Mickey does not belong to Walt Disney either. If Hans had created a business that sustained to this day, then that would be different situation.
    - CyberDildonics 2y ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Little-Mermaid-Christian-collection-illustrations/dp/B0C63RPP7V/ https://www.amazon.com/Little-Mermaid-Christian-collection-i...
    - saurik 2y ago
      So you don't mean a "permanent monopoly" without any considerations or constraints, then? More of a "use it or lose it" situation?
dehrmann 2y ago
> having a government enforced monopoly on their content Sure, but they're just the only company selling Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Someone else is selling DC, Illumination, and Star Trek content. They're all competing in the entertainment space, so it's not a real problem for pricing. If Disney opened a $2500 per night Star Wars hotel, I'm pretty sure you'd see market forces react.
- harimau777 2y ago
  I'm not sure that there's any way that the market could react. It's Star Wars that's a major part of American culture, not whatever alternative a competitor comes up with. It would be like if a single corporation owned King Arthur or Journey to the West.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    At some point you get "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin."
- salawat 2y ago
  No they wouldn't, because no one else can open one without parasitic drag from Disney.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruise...

aleph_minus_one 2y ago

> The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong. Why? What an individual provider wants to optimize is (number of customers) * ((average) profit per customer) Depending on the market circumstances either lowering the price to attract more customers or increasing the price to increase "(average) profit per customer" can be the business strategy to choose. The economic concept that you are looking for to decide of these two options is the right one is called "price elasticity of demand": > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

geodel 2y ago

Marketshare at any cost sounds like startup bullshit to me.

486sx33 2y ago
In manufacturing we called it “dumping”

alephnerd 2y ago

> competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+ That assumes you can substitute goods. And trust me, you can't substitute Paradise PD for Gravity Falls. This is why market segmentation exists.

hiddencost 2y ago

Meant to? By whom? Who makes sure the system operates that way?

stubish 2y ago
A free market just works this way, and various regulations exist to keep it a free market by stopping things like collusion, corruption, fraud and monopolies. However, in order to protect creators rights, other regulations we call copyright grant monopolies. So the 'free market' is not really a free market. An actual free market per your economics text book is a rare thing.
harimau777 2y ago
That's the pitch that's generally given by advocates of the free market to justify their position. They tend to do so because "the free market" isn't something that is near universally viewed as an inherent good, so it's necessary to convince people that it's existence results in other goods.

nicoburns 2y ago

> The free market ... feels like something has gone terribly wrong. Well yes. It has done for several decades at this point. It's a classic case of Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In this case the measure is the market price of a good/service and/or the profitability of a business. It is assumed by free-market capitalism to be a good measure of societal value, and it was, more or less. But over time that's become less and less true as people over optimise for the metric.

pushupentry1219 2y ago

> The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. > it feels like something has gone terribly wrong. I don't meant to be rude, but I am going to be: have you had your head in the sand for the last.. decade and a half? Something has gone terribly wrong and it's late stage capitalism.

gruez 2y ago

>If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong. wait till you hear about luxury brands

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

In Monopoly, you win the game when every other player is in a state of permanent poverty/precarity and can never break your power. Don't ever be duped into thinking Monopoly, The Real Life Game, has an end goal that differs in any meaningful sense.