For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.

I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?

So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.

[–] NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reminds me of the diagram Techdirt made a couple of years ago over available books on Amazon based on year written. There was giant dip at the point where copyright kicks in that only goes up again close to the current year.

Copyright on the scale of lifetime + 75 years only helps the publishers of the most popular creators. Everyone else get screwed over. Including the creators.

https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/03/why-missing-20th-century-books-is-even-worse-than-it-seems/

[–] arditty@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s a great article, I strongly agree.

I feel like copyright hurts competition and creativity by letting publishers and studios put out a relatively small number of successful works, and then ride that success for years.

If copyright terms were much shorter with no provision for renewal, it would spur a lot of creativity and competition between studios and publishers because they would effectively be forced to keep coming out with new, high quality content in order to stay relevant.

[–] NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I agree with you. A suggestion I've might have read on Techdirt is to limit copyright to 5 years with a one time option to extend it for 5 years. Most works lose profitability within 5 years so the only ones impacted would be the most successful and the companies. I'm totally ok with that.

Just imagine what public libraries and streaming sites like Netflix could/would look like if anything from ten years back would be free to share.