It's always great to read about how the people the own the means of distribution aquire also the means of production, trying to create a meta-monopoly. /sarcasm
I'm rooting for someone on the regulary side disliking all the crap that Netflix produces, and just shuts the whole thing down. Those 5 billion they'd have to pay for a breakup fee in that case would have me feeling better that I couldn't cancel their service, since my family pesters me to keep it.
If this goes like all the other media mergers this year, the only regulatory scrutiny will involve Netflix allowing the executive branch to install a censor / ombudsman that has final say on their news and documentary content.
Technically, you're right. I feel like there needs to be new terms to describe though the staleness of the industry. "Oligopoly" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Monopoly is that word. "Pure Monopoly" is the term for the platonic ideal that people like to insist companies don't live up to and so aren't at all monopolistic.
How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
If you as a hypothetical video content creator want to get your content distributed to a wide audience, you have five companies to go to, you can publish it to any of the video on demand services, try to monetize it through ads on YouTube, etc.
We aren’t in the 30s anymore where the only way you could see content was by going to the movie theater.
Before HBO Max was a thing, they were already selling distribution rights of content to Netflix. No one said that was a monopoly.
> How many competitors do you need? Apple, Disney, Netflix, Comcast, and Paramount are five major competitors.
I actually already agree that the number is not the problem. I can't articulate better, but somehow these don't actually feel like "competitors" in the classical market sense, but rather as stars orbiting the same center, as they're all moving in the same direction, and from time to time merging with one another.
Not really. At that point TV was competing with cinema for attention, and each needed to provide something different. Now the mediums have merged as well.
The legal definition of monopoly in some jurisdictions means anyone with a large enough of a market share able to influence pricing, etc in a market. A market share as low as 25% can be called a monopoly. Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
But none of the streaming services are competing because they don't offer the same products, by design. Nobody is switching from Apple TV to Netflix because they don't share any shows - they buy both.
So? I also go to two different restaurants to buy different food, or two different websites to buy two different things, or fly two different airlines to go to two different places, etc.
Not the same, those directly compete. We all know IP doesn't work like this.
If you say you want Mexican food and I say Restaurant X is closed but we can go to Y, that's probably fine.
If you say you want to watch ratatouille and I say no, but we can watch ratatouing, which is 2 bucks at the DVD graveyard bin at Walmart, you'll say no.
> Does HBO+Netflix have a 25% share of the streaming market? I've no idea, but possibly.
No, not even close. According to Nielsen from this year, Netflix has only 7.5% of total TV hours and "Warner Bros + Discovery" clocks in at 1.5% ("HBO" as an independent entity is not tracked), for a total of 9%. A whopping 16% to go before crossing that 25% threshold.
Those percentages are of total TV hours, which isn't quite what I was talking about. Still though if you include YouTube (I personally wouldn't as I don't think they're providing a directly comparable product) they're still below 25% which is interesting.
There are only 4 major streaming services (Netflix, Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu), and only 5 major film studios, of which WB is one and it represents on its own 13% of the theatrical market. The combination of Netflix + WB + HBOMax likely represents well more than 25% of the entire market (when you combine streaming and theatrical).
True, but Youtube is not quite the same category since it's UGC. It's not a distribution channel for mainstream feature films or TV. At least not a primary distribution channel.
> IMO I think we are going to see Paramount, STARZ and AMC bought up soon.
You do know that David Ellison (Larry Ellison's son), through his Skydance Media, acquired Paramount Global (including its parent, National Amusements) in a merger completed in August 2025.
"Defeatism" is yet another shibboleth for people who refuse to accept reality. Wasting your money on things you can't change when you could be spending it on things you can is true "defeatism", as it accomplishes nothing.
> "Defeatism" is yet another shibboleth for people who refuse to accept reality.
Sometimes you'd be right, as some people use this as a shield to do whatever naive thing they want, and build sand castles. But I don't think this is the case here. Society needs some level of potentially useless effort, otherwise the things that are barealy possible are never attempted because they are so close to the line.
There's also plenty of causes for which people can mobilize themselves, we don't all need to jump on the ones that are highly likely to succeed.
I don't care about most ridiculous "battles" people are trying to wage, let alone this one, I was bluntly saying there are better things to spend money on if you do wish to "win battles". You're allowed to criticize things without offering a solution, especially if you don't care all that much about the topic at hand.
As a sidenote, Regarding your comment on my perceived lack of pragmatism, I'd point you to a definition: "dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations", which I'd say my comment very much was. Winning against a company that has succeeded in part due to government favouritism isn't realistic.
> In which case: maybe take your own advice and give up on changing anyone's mind?
I post on HN because it is a public forum and I wished to share my thoughts, not to change people's minds.
Sure, history matters, but I'll return the burden on you to argue why Israel/Palestine matters specifically in this context. Otherwise, it's irrelevant noise to the topic at hand.
Modern inflation punishes wage earners much more than capital earners, as the second category is closer to the money printing machine, and benefit better from it.
A deflationary policy would hit capitalists a lot more than wage earners, since it's basically a wealth tax.
I don't understand how deflationary policy is a wealth tax. The wealthy wouldn't lose anything, would they?
Inflation + capital gains tax is effectively a wealth tax, but deferred until the gains are realized. And it's possible to avoid realizing gains, e.g. by dying.
> I don't understand how deflationary policy is a wealth tax. The wealthy wouldn't lose anything, would they?
Wage earners would always receive "fresh" money, so their relative purchasing power grows compared to someone that just sits on their shrinking money. The money supply is a zero-sum pie. You actually can get richer if you're income stays the same but others have their net worth shrinking.
I still don't think it's a wealth tax. I guess you could say deflation is less good for the wealthy than inflation, but it still doesn't result in the wealthy losing anything, so I wouldn't call it a tax.
If the deflation rate is lower than typical stock market returns, the wealthy would keep their money in stocks, and their wealth would increase faster than a wageearner's wage. If the deflation rate is equal to or higher than typical stock market returns, the wealthy would keep their money in cash, and their wealth would increase at the exact same rate as a wageearners' wage.
The big downside of deflation is it discourages spending and investing. In "The Miracle of Worgl" it sounds like it solved their problem by encouraging spending and investing. If spending and investing is discouraged, the economy grinds to a halt, and unemployment rises. Instead of using some money to create a new business and hire people (aka investing in a new business), people are encouraged to just hold the money in the bank. That's why unemployment rises.
I have been using inheritence for 15 years, and have sometimes regretted it and sometimes loved it.
It does have actual benefits if you can limit its usage, and don't use the full insanity that languages like C++.
I generally dismis people that tell you to always use composition over inheritance without first understanding the problem space, and how it could be modeled.
I don't think it helps if you're arguing their position. We don't want to allow them to upsell. They're crossing the line into social ostracization grounds.
At this point, their destruction of social trust is so severe that simply boycotting is not enough, just like you don't just boycott a company that's doing environmental destruction. They simply need to be stopped, regardless of their goals.
HN is a niche forum that is all about making things that scale. Most human interactions shouldn't scale, there's no space for them to be absorbed except by other humans.
Only the very top should scale down, and that can be done in more ways, some more ethical than others.
The big copyright cartels are the only copyright holders out there. The people you refer to think they hold copyright on some work or another, but unless another plebe infringes on them, they'll never get a remedy for that.
You think I'm wrong, but if you wrote a song (for instance) and some jackass restaurant was playing it as muzak, ASCAP takes the license money for that. They don't send you a cut. I'd say you have second class rights, but you don't even really have those.
Criminal piracy is commercial piracy, which not even the people suing AI companies are accusing them of doing. Note the very first line in your court opinion:
> After selling 100 "bootleg" DVDs
But that's a fair point. I probably should have specified.
I couldn't quickly find a definition of "commercial piracy", so I will assume it doesn't have a specific technical meaning.
Facebook is a commercial company, so if you're working for Facebook doing piracy, that would be commercial piracy.
If I go by piracy as "the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or conception especially in infringement of a copyright", and if Facebook is infringing on copyright in using these books (which the article alleges), then it follows that Facebook is engaging in piracy.
So it looks like Facebook is partaking in piracy of a commercial flavor.
I don't know why distributing bootlegs to people on the street would be worse than distributing PDFs within a company, but let's say it it. We are talking about 100s of cases vs millions. Is distributing on the street really 10000 times worse?
It would have to be even more than that. Because millions of copyright infringement within a company apparently has no punishment, but 100's on the street has prison. So, if you go by the punishment, 100's on the street is way worse.
Seems you keep repeating the same stance all over thread, without a single explanation why your opinion should be a valid one.
Not really a fruitful discussion and not a way to change anyone's opinions (maybe apart from the idea that copyright owners push their rather despised agenda via artificial accounts also on HN), care to improve this?
On summary judgment too, which means the plaintiffs really had no case. Not surprising because it's the most obvious fair use ever under transformative work. So obvious that I have a hard time taking arguments to the contrary seriously and just assume they are driven by bitterness. Not that anything I have ever heard on that side actually rises to the level of an argument. Your opinion, and everyone else on this thread that agrees with you, falls under your own statement:
> Seems you keep repeating the same stance all over thread, without a single explanation why your opinion should be a valid one.
I'm actually fine with almost all the decisions that Rust made in terms of logic and concepts, but specifically don't like the synthax itself: the symbols, keywords like the consonant-only "fn" instead of "func" for instance, the fact that || {} starts a lambda instead of || -> void {}, the fact that you can return things by simply having them in an if branch. It's the main reason I don't use the language.
Most of those are a matter of preference, implicit return is just plain better, and it would be absolutely insane if closures required the return type to be specified. I do agree that the toilet bowl `|_|()` syntax is ugly, though.
Again, I think JS/Typescript has a better syntax, since the implicit syntax is better when unbranched, like x => expression, but it's harder to read the more branches there are, since it's hard to visually scan where results can be located.
I really dislike them. Makes me wonder if you just got distracted and forgot to finish the function. Be explicit, don't make me have to spend time figuring it out.
Meh, if these are the main reasons you don't use the language, I don't know what to tell you. I get having preferences, but whether the keyword is `fn` or `func` is such a banal, trivial thing that doesn't matter at all.
reply