law trumps physics, sometimes. storing and streaming digital works is so much cheaper in real resource terms than maintaining a library of DVDs you phyically ship. and yet. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html?unlocked_article_code=SHhC1zCbybhNFFee1y2yE7uXqng9k_IfnWuZkvknItNyMGa8BjDb1bXtRT0vokzjJaZZ4n4b5tyDwKHX_OKblh5-fgx1H7U_y940V0RgncogyolvY7rx8-IY95ySMtAVyUXnSCINtoXVM-oHLsNncfS2VAmgWe5FGNQlJzFNLs7K-66gISBTvh364RoH3jmjvdf704Eoq-qNuSQEBshAMCUANLHBkCI9sJKVgDaiOsJwhoCfC2QXb5Kj7uwSQN78xBz6_V4R-HISPaCICnwsD-nwEhWDA0cxHLsC6PWPeRa_hhNetXGpM0wml5p0AqvzzAZ8idCCbUc-qcV9IuZ04aw92MN5ogprGrzF4bSZcBdsGFka7hzM13MxzQ&smid=url-share via @carlmalamud
@interfluidity @carlmalamud I simply do not understand the economics of this. Shouldn't 50 year old movies cost them pennies to license compared to modern blockbusters? I feel like that would be an easy, cheap win for customers.
@interfluidity @carlmalamud For old classics? Yeah, I buy that story.
But what about the B-roll? The movies that never really hit and became classics? The cheap films made to follow a cinematic trend? The shoestring budget horrors?
I feel like there should be a lot of older content out there that would be dirt cheap.
I would think that maybe they don't want to do it because of quality control, but then again, I've seen some of the garbage on their platform, so...
@LouisIngenthron @carlmalamud i don’t know, but i think the flaw here might be imagining independence of these decisions. if some aging producer owned the rights to some 60s B horror flick, sure, why not. but those rights were probably rolled into a large portfolio, managed by financial and legal specialists whose role in life is to extract value from the legal fictions they own. 1/
@LouisIngenthron @carlmalamud if you are a portfolio owner of B horror, you know each film individually is near worthless, but you also know that in aggregate you control a corner of the culture a lot of people value. so you don’t license a la carte. you wait for someone to pay up for the use of the full library. until then, just say no, what you control is lost, a black hole in our nostalgia, until/unless the ransom is paid. 2/
@LouisIngenthron @carlmalamud plus, they get clever in ways we wouldn’t easily guess. recently platforms have been taking down shows for the tax write off — if you have the thing valued on your books at more several times the capitalized subscription loss you’d experience from pulling it, you earn more declaring it worthless and reducing your liability to Uncle Sam. 3/
@LouisIngenthron @carlmalamud the more games like this there are (and probably we don’t know more than a sliver of them), the more likely there are or there is the prospect of better alternatives than licensing a la carte films for the pittances they would individually command. /fin
@LouisIngenthron @carlmalamud every still-under-copyright film is a monopoly of the licensor, who apparently earns more (likely over a large portfolio) from pricing restrictively and charging the occasional taker a lot than by licensing cheaply to attract all who might be interested. there’s option value in hoarding something someone might come to desperately want, and you get to be a playah. the deep public interest in comprehensive access to our own culture only encourages them to hold out.