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Netflix and the Rule of Law
Nigeria and Pakistan — combined population, 355 million souls — aren’t exactly places where people are known for buying legal editions of films and television. But thanks to Netflix Nigeria and Netflix Pakistan, that may be about to change. This is a new thing. And it’s a good thing.
Netflix Inc’s video-streaming service went live in more than 130 countries on Wednesday, covering almost the entire globe except China, in a huge global push by Chief Executive Reed Hastings to counter slowing growth in the United States. Shares of the company, whose popular shows include Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Daredevil and Narcos, jumped 9.3 percent to close at $117.68. India, Nigeria, Russia and Saudi Arabia were among the major countries where the service was launched, Hastings said at a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
I remember the early days of Hulu. Back then, I watched the entirety of the original Star Trek series through CBS’s streaming service, thanks to which commercials for Bertolli lasagna have been permanently imprinted onto my brain. At the time, I thought entertainment was becoming a free Internet thing, but it seems the free market had other ideas. I don’t blame it. But the market did make streaming cheap and convenient through services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. And they’re not just distributing content, but also generating it; indeed, the next Star Trek series will premier on CBS.com! (May it live long and prosper . . . unless it annoys me.)
That streaming services make content available at low cost to consumers is a good thing, and not just because it saves them money. It’s also good because it makes honesty easier. As a rule, it should go well for those who obey the law and poorly for those who don’t. The expense of obeying the law doesn’t excuse breaking it, but legality should generally be cheaper and more convenient than illegality.
A few months ago, hundreds of millions of people had three choices when it came to entertainment: Ignore the law (and almost certainly get away with it); give up watching most stuff; or pay a lot for content which was, ironically, available for far less in much wealthier countries. Thanks to Netflix’s expansion, that choice is a little easier, as those millions of people — billions in the nearish future, most likely — will turn to legal means more often than they used to.
It’s a small step towards establishing the rule of law in all of these societies. A small step, and not the only step needed.
But it’s a step, and that’s a good thing.
Published in General
I’m guessing that iTunes offering songs for 99¢ had the same effect on music piracy in the US. Make it cheap enough to be honest.
Indeed.
(Not that I think honesty needs cheapness. But, all the same, it should be cheap.)
Nope, streaming is still cheaper than buying. In that regard Pandora and Spotify are the heroes.
Pandora is FM radio without the annoying local DJs. It still has local targeted ads and it’s free.
I am a Pandora subscriber, so I don’t have to listen to the annoying commercials. But I still occasionally purchase a song or two from iTunes. Why? Because Pandora won’t allow you to control exactly what you can listen to. You can have a Beatles channel, and maybe half the songs, if that, will be Beatles songs. The others will be like the Beatles. Fun, that’s why I subscribe, but not always what I want to hear.
At which the IP holder gets nothing as opposed to a payment from Netflix.
Someone, at sometime will negotiate a worldwide rights fee.
It’s good to do that with taxes, too.
We still have a Netflix mail subscription which we haven’t been using lately. I used to order Russian films that way until they started disappearing from Netflix’s collection. The reason we first got it ten years ago was to watch foreign-language films, and then I got hooked on Russian film almost exclusively. But not much is available anymore. Mrs. Reticulator gets a Netflix movie once in a while.
So I haven’t even bothered with their online films. I usually watch the crappy YouTube versions of old Russian films, or similar. If anybody makes all the old stuff from Mosfilm, Lenfilm, and the new stuff from StarMedia available, I’ll subscribe. There have been a few moves in that direction, but not from Netflix last time I checked.
Reti, I sympathize. Even after German reunification, you could pick up inexpensive VHS cassettes (PAL system, of course) of East German films in Berlin, playable here on a multi-system VHS deck. Some of the DDR titles were quite good, and it got to be a regular shopping item.
Then the Progress Film Verlag and DEFA film catalogs sold their North American video rights to an understandably brief-lived distributor in Massachusetts who marketed the cassettes at $90 each, betting on their rarity and artistic quality. A laughable example of the “Lemonade, $100 a glass” fallacy (“But we only have to sell one glass!”). They might have made a modest sale to college libraries at $35.
But then, no one ever accused East Germans of marketing savvy.
I love to watch a good East German film.
Of course, the film watches you back.
Yeah. We still have a long way to go.
And on that long way what should we do?
Provisionally, I’d say two good (and bigger) next steps would be punishing more of the international piraters, and relaxing some of the US copyright laws; I think most things have to wait about a century before entering the public domain in the US, and I think that’s too long.
The OP has the key–conservatives understandably bristle at the idea that a price “ought” to be anything other than what the seller will take for it. But people who have no technical barriers to theft will only be honest if they feel that the price is “fair”–human nature that can’t be talked away. As much as I resist the overreach of the Jobs cult, Steve Jobs’ fame, and fearsome reputation as a negotiator, were responsible for the uniformity of that 99 cent price, low enough to keep the customers honest, and forced on an artistic industry that preferred to do their own pricing. At the time, few thought that paid music could be saved.
I’m not sure how big a market there is for the really old stuff, so I’m not sure how important that is. Happily, Clinton seems likely to be better than Obama on trade, albeit not much so, which means that the international trade bureaucracy seems likely to continue doing a great job at improving enforcement and compliance, as it has been doing on a continuous basis for decades (with the notable hiccup at the end of the Cold War).
It’s shameful that this election the Dems are more conservative than the leading Republicans on trade, but since the Dems seem likely to win, I guess it’s better that way. Great post.
I like it. After 50 years (so I’ve been told) anything becomes public domain. There are a lot of movies 50 years old that are worth watching, and they’re better if they’re free.
Good news overall!
Gee, stop making me depressed.
Wait, though. Sanders is worse on trade than either Trump or Cruz, right?
And do you really think Cruz is worse on trade than Hillary? (It’s not a Cruz issue I’ve followed.)
Thanks.
I knew it was only a matter of time before someone pointed that out; I just assumed it would be one of our Canadian members. :)
A thousand times, yes.
And as Reticulator pointed out, it applies to a wide swarth of matters, including taxes. When un-compliance is — on the whole — easier and/or less expensive than compliance, it’s inevitable that you’re going to get more law breaking than law abiding.
You can try to solve that either by increasing the costs of non-compliance or by making it easier to comply. Unless someone is getting hurt by the activity, it’s generally far better to go with reducing the costs of compliance.
Beautifully put! I’m pretty sure I agree. (But I do think people are hurt by many, probably not all, violations of copyright law.)
More like 150. We’ve had these discussions before. Thanks to creative lawyering complete films that were once in the public domain have been clawed back into corporate ownership.
As I have said in the past, I am of two minds on this. One says indefinite copyright is wrong. A nation’s cultural heritage doesn’t belong in a vault. Market it or lose it. On the other hand, the idea that a stable of beloved cartoon characters falling into perversion doesn’t thrill me, either.
I meant outside the US. (And I’m only repeating what I was told.)
(Nice comments. I’m afraid I have no other reply at this time. Hopefully someone else will!)
But it obviously does thrill some people.
Sure, but they’re not the films that drive the market. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be nice for people like you and me.
Heck, yes.
It’s not clear. Sanders wouldn’t sign new trade agreements, and he wants all sorts of legal reforms that involve reviewing current agreements, but it’s not clear if he still supports withdrawal from GATT (now the WTO), as he did in the 1990s, nor even if he’s serious about withdrawing from current trade agreements. When he can, he promises instead to stop future ones from passing. That’s probably inferior to Trump, who promises short term tariffs to bully our trade partners into various concessions, but who favors passing more trade deals (now negotiated by Trump, classier and more luxurious than current trade deals).
It’s probably superior to Cruz, though, whose tax plan would return our tariffs to 1964 levels and prevent essentially any future trade agreement involving America from passing. He’d end the AGOA and other programs by which the US provides aid to poor countries by allowing their goods tariff free entry. He falsely claims that trade agreements are corrupt and supports conspiracy theories about them. It’s one of Cruz’s ugliest features. On the plus side, as with Ron Paul (who was also protectionist on every issue he ever voted on), when he talks about free markets in the abstract, unconnected to any specific policy, he supports them. A year ago, he still claimed to be supportive of the TPP (he wrote a pretty famous op-Ed with Paul Ryan in support of TPA). Two years ago, he definitely looked like a supporter of free trade. Heidi Cruz has a record of support for it. It’s possible that he’ll flip back again.
It’s not close. Cruz is more protectionist than Hillary to a similar degree to Clinton being more feminist than Cruz. He’s competitive with Pat Buchanan and other single issue free market phobes. But, again, that’s just his position today.
Having to spend a buck on the single offering you want is lots better than buying an album of merde to get a single song.
(If you want the explanation for that word, it can be googled.)
Didn’t you ever find yourself liking every song on the album more than the one you bought it for? I’m old and in my looong album buying period, this really broadened my appreciation of a lot of musicians.
Indeed.
I don’t know enough about these specifics, but in general that sounds pretty depressing.
(I sure hope that if you’re wrong some better informed Cruz fan jumps in to defend him here.)
There were some albums, Sgt. Pepper and Who’s Next, where virtually every song is great. Then there were albums where the song writer or the band managed to get a great song in an otherwise largely invisible album. Its been a long time and I haven’t a clue what an album costs any more, but if those songs are individually available at $1.00 apiece, well 12 * $1.00 = $12.00.