alt Hacker NewsShortening 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.
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I don’t see how this can be true. Reduced copyright terms mean price for old stuff goes down (to however much hosting and bandwidth costs). This means more funds are available for new content.
Currently, people give a ton of money to Comcast/Disney for stuff made decades ago, which in turn gives Comcast/Disney more power, since people are far likelier to stay within those silos.
If friends/seinfeld/whatever could be accessible via multiple sources, then other groups of content creators could emerge, offering $15 to $25 per month of new stuff, rather than compete for a smaller portion of the budget since the old content takes up so much.
The creators of new work don’t earn much from 130 year copyrights anyway, to fund any decent production, they will need outside investors such as Disney or Apple or whoever to make the gamble. In exchange, Disney and Apple are going to want the ability to sell it for 130 years, but few if any new content creators is able to negotiate gross royalties, those days are long gone.
>Also, shorter terms would presumably lead to more consolidation between media companies (as there would be less differentiation via exclusive content)
This is the opposite of what would happen. If everyone can sell the popular reruns and holiday movies, then they stop being exclusive to Disney and Comcast and Warner Bros and so the only thing they can compete with is new stuff, forcing then to invest in new stuff.
The vast majority of money for any given copyrighted work comes within the first few years of its existence. (This is extra true for things like video games.)
Furthermore, current copyright terms are decades past the death of the creator.
You seem to be thinking of copyright purely in terms of vast media conglomerates, but it affects literally every work created by every human in the country. That includes these HN discussion posts!
Additionally, I find it hard to see how your second paragraph holds. If the amount of exclusive content a given entity holds affects their odds of being bought by a larger conglomerate, I would think it would be in the opposite direction: having more exclusive content would make them more likely to be a target for acquisition, so that the larger company could then hold all of that exclusively.
If everything older than, say, 35 years were suddenly in the public domain, available to be distributed by any of the distribution companies, and Hypothetical Media Corp had half the back catalogue that they used to, then surely that would make big conglomerates less interested in buying up Hypothetical Media Corp?