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> rent for data that's otherwise freely available

That seems like it breaks down when you consider that revenue from the streaming services is funding the creation of new shows?




I can admit that it is not necessarily rent-seeking (I've seen some cartoons from the 90s / 00s on streaming services, which were in mind when for that comment) but it still seems to me that it is a problem with the business model. It's the business owners' fault that they ran out of money and can't produce any more shows because they tried to make a broken model work especially if the reason they couldn't gather revenue is that people were simply able to bypass their attempts at doing so.

(So a restaurant is unable to gather revenue when people "simply bypass" their attempts with a dine-and-dash. Not sure how I feel about that, to be fair.)

Similarly, I don't really think people who pirated cable TV a decade or two ago were freeloading. As soon as it's being delivered directly to my living room via speed-of-light communication, and I have control over the machines that perform the delivery, the product is practically worthless. Comparing that to feature filmmakers who sell licenses to movie theaters, where I would need to physically tamper with machines I don't own in order to obtain the video data, there's a not-explicitly-for-the-sake-of-the-business reason for me to fork up money for the movie ticket. (Granted, they could give me the video data directly, but they don't.)




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