Apple is sued for telling you that you're “buying” movies

- The catalog is enormous, you can almost always find what you want.

- There is robust software that can pull down the latest episode of the tv shows you want.

- There is similar software that can pull down movies based on public lists (e.g. IMDB top 100), so discovery is pretty great.

- All the above can be done on public trackers. Private trackers are even better.

- Many have a community of people who are into the content, and curate their own lists.

- There is software for a home media server so you can flip through all your content. Its also just one interface... no flipping through hulu/netflix/amazon/apple/google.

- That same home media server software can host all videos, so downloads from youtube, family videos, etc... all in one place as you see fit.

- I get to know that know one out there knows what I'm watching or when I'm watching it.

- Backup is easy, with offsite services running ~$0.005/gb/month, so pennies per movie per month. This way I know I'll always have it regardless of what happens with streaming services.

Getting it up and running takes some customization but it is _really_ great. I would gladly pay for such a service, even the typical ~$20/movie price.

I suppose that's the $LARGE_AMOUNT question, isn't it?

As a personal opinion, I think copyright is OK as an economic incentive unless and until we find something that works better, but the protection should be determined by what makes it economically reasonable for people to create and share useful works, taking into account all the circumstances and over the long term. There is clearly no single duration of protection that is even close to that benchmark for all situations, because something like a blockbuster movie or smash hit video game might make several times its production costs back within months of initial distribution and that might be a large majority of the revenue it will ever make, while those small, niche-content creators I talked about before might not break even for a decade or two. As ever with debates about alternatives to current copyright, things start to get sticky when you try to figure out a reasonable way to estimate the effects of any proposed change without actually making it and then waiting a decade or three to see what happens.

I like the idea of shortening copyright protection but at the same time considering other rights to protect things of value that are, sometimes incidentally, protected by copyright today. For example, I have no problem with the requirements that exist in some places to credit the creators of a work, as an entirely separate matter from copyright. I think there is also a lot of room to explore safeguards against intruding on a larger creative effort too soon, such as where an author has put considerable effort into world-building and is continuing to produce successful new works set in that world, in which case allowing poor-quality fan fiction to flood the market as soon as the copyright on the first work in that world expires could sharply devalue the overall creative effort for the author and so result in fewer or lower quality works subsequently being produced and shared by that author, which is a harm to society as well.

In short, I don't think you can reasonably draw a single line with anything resembling our current copyright system. I think there should probably be several lines, in each of several colours, and some of them should be circles and triangles. But then given how difficult enforcement often is already and how widespread misunderstandings about the existing law are, that might not be practical either. Economics and intangible goods are a tough combination.

By this definition, any online locked down device (not just the software on it) can only be licensed or rented. Why should any online platform be treated differently from iTunes?