alt Hacker NewsNot attacking you in particular, but I've always hated how we talk about "licensing restrictions" as if they're some kind of vague law of nature, like gravity. Oh, Studio X can't do Y... Because Licensing. "Licenses" are entirely conjured up by humans, and if there was an actual desire by the people who make decisions to change something, those people would find a way to make the "licensing restrictions" disappear. Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses. It's not "licensing restrictions" that is stopping them.
Same always comes up when we talk about why doesn't Company X open source their 20 year old video game software? Someone always chimes in to say "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
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> Reality is, the people making these decisions don't want to change things, at least not enough to go through the effort of changing and renegotiating the licenses.
Which is a perfectly sensible reason for a business decision.
> "Well they don't because of 'licensing issues' with the source code." as if they were being stopped by a law of physics.
So laws should just be ignored? Issues created by human social constructs are very real.
I'm with you in spirit, but I think you are underestimating how wide and complex the dependency trees can be in content licensing. And simplifying those licensing structures often mean removing control from individual artists, which we tend to consider a Bad Thing.
The issue is that Netflix doesn't control those restrictions, the content creators (well, rights holders) do, and their incentives don't always align.
The discovery+ app is still operating in some regions because of licensing 3.5 years since all the discovery content got integrated into hbo-max.
Licensing is really complicated and requires lot of paper work. The best example is the music soundtracks of old TV series. They even get substituted if they don't get the proper license to stream them. So some old show get new soundtrack or background music and they don't feel the same.
Speaking as someone who once worked at a company where these were real issues that came up - it's very often the case that intermediate parties in the contracts have dissolved.
Renegotiating the contracts would require lengthy and expensive processes of discovering the proper parties to actually negotiate with in the first place.
Although the contracts that were already executed can be relied upon, it truly is a can of worms to open, because it's not "Renegotiate with Studio X", it's "Renegotiate with the parent company of the defunct parent company of the company who merged with Y and created a new subsidiary Z" and so on and so forth, and then you have to relicense music, and, if need be, translations.
Then repeat that for each different region you need to relicense in because the licenses can be different for different regions.
The cost of negotiation would be greater than the losses to piracy tbh.