Stop us if you’ve heard these: piracy is driving artists out of business. The reason they are starving is because no one pays for things, just illegally downloads them. You wouldn’t steal a car. These arguments are old and being dragged back out to get support for rules that would strangle online expression. And they are, as ever, about Hollywood wanting to control creativity and not protecting artists.
When it comes to box office numbers, they’ve remained pretty consistent except when a global pandemic curtailed theater visits. The problem facing Hollywood is the same one that it’s faced since its inception: greed.
From the fever-pitch moral panic of the early 2000s, discussions about “piracy” disappeared from pop culture for about a decade. It’s come back, both from the side explaining why and the side that wants everyone punished.
Illegal downloading and streaming are not the cause of Hollywood’s woes. They’re a symptom of a system that is broken for everyone except the few megacorporations and the billionaires at the top of them. Infringement went down when the industry adapted and gave people what they wanted: convenient, affordable, and legal alternatives. But recently, corporations have given up on affordability and convenience.
The Streaming Hellscape
It’s not news to anyone that the video streaming landscape has, in the last few years, become unnavigable. Finding the shows and movies you want has become a treasure hunt where, when you find the prize, you have to fork over your credit card information for it. And then the prize could disappear at any moment.
Rather than having a huge catalog of diverse studio material, which is what made Netflix popular to begin with, convenience has been replaced with exclusivity. But people don’t want everything a single studio offers. They want certain things. But just like the cable bundles that streaming replaced, a subscription fee isn’t for just what you want, it’s for
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