alt Hacker NewsHow can Congress make it any easier to access an audience? The Internet made it so there is zero friction between a media consumer and a media creator.
Having to compete with a billion other content creators (including hits from the past) is inherently hard. The most valuable service the big media sellers provide these days is curation.
Reducing copyright length would be the best thing to reduce the big companies’ power though. That way, they can’t sway buyers to their silos using content from the past, and therefore have to invest in the future.
Shortening copyright terms would reduce the power of any given media company; but I think it might disadvantage creators of new works overall. Right now each company has a smaller back-catalogue than they would under a shorter term regime, and so the relative value to them of new content is higher.
Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content), which would then reduce the number of buyers for new content, increasing the monopsony effects.