Re: Dec 23 WAN show and AI podcast autoparse.

asquirrel · December 24, 2022

I fundamentally disagree with you that using an AI to bookmark and cite podcast / long format content is a bad thing. The fundamental fear of LMG is that this makes monetization difficult. I argue that this technology is essential to preventing monopolies, and for that reason alone, it is imperative that it continue to exist, rather than to try and stifle it with childish 'muh copyright' or 'muh license' nonsense. By far, the biggest issue is monetization of copyrighted works. That's a huge hairball and worthy of discussion, but that discussion keeps not happening, because nobody wants to learn the uncomfortable truth that the price the market will *actually* bear for their content is 25¢ when they think it should be $10.

The LTT store is an example that if you make a quality product, you get sales. Gamer's Nexus employs around 10 people with mostly store sales and a few sponsored videos here and there. People are more than willing to spend their money on products worth owning. If the movie industry, for example, would sell a 4k HDR .mkv version of their new movies, without DRM, for $12 (the cost of a matinee ticket), and then release that .mkv the same day that the movie released in theaters, two things would happen:

1. The theater industry would largely die off

2. Nobody would see a particular reason to pirate movies, because the movie industry would be offering the same thing the pirates do, with probably as good or better quality, in a timeline the pirates can't compete with.

This is the Steam/Valve approach to movie content. Netflix tried to change that model, and go to one where you could stream any content that you wanted to see, collect one monthly fee, then pay that fee out as a royalty to the rights holders. The problem was they tried to coerce rights holders into accepting that their content was worth X, when all the right holder had to do was act like a toddler and throw a tantrum while saying "no! My content is worth y!" and suddenly, content started flying out of Netflix's catalog. Well, that, combined with everyone realizing that what Netflix was offering was not particularly complicated to setup.

If I were to truly try and work through all the nuance of the 'monetize royalty' problem in this post, it would be close to 20 pages long. But, instead, let's cherry pick an example. You make a new Marvel movie. As part of the copyright on that movie, you declare the royalty is $10. So the matinee tickets are set to $12; $10 to Marvel, $2 to the theater (this is actually better than theaters get now). When the blu-ray comes out, I can buy that blu-ray, rip it, encode it as an MKV, and sell it for $11.50. $1.50 to me, to run the server and pay for bandwidth, and $10 I MUST sent to Marvel as their copyright cut. But, as long as they get their $10 cut, and I distribute it in a way that I can keep count of sales, we're good. And anyone who fails to pay is accountable for the $10 per 'copy' they made to another person. "Legally unenforceable!" Not any more enforceable than trying to say AIs aren't allowed to parse video transcripts.

Now, the problem with this model is Marvel has an incentive to set that fee to be so high that nobody would pay it. "$11.50 for a .mkv download, 6 months after theater release? Screw that!". But 25¢? For 25¢, I doubt anyone would fail to pay that. Heck, even $1-5 would probably be acceptable. And so you end up with the reality being that you need a model a lot closer to whomever is making the copies MUST pay a royalty to the creator, but whatever they charge as that royalty must be clearly set aside as such. "Well then it's a race to the bottom and the people who can make the best copies as fast as possible win!" Yes, it is. In fact, we have a word for that industry: manufacturing.

The manufacturer who can copy a product in the most efficient manner wins. AIB partners for Nvidia, blu-ray and CD printers, vinyl record makers, CNC parts manufacturing, on and on the list goes. These companies copy goods, tack their costs onto the cost paid to the IP holder, and the final sales price is a result. The problem with digital goods has always been that the limiting factor on cost is electricity and physical floor space for the server. IE: very very tiny. And charging 0.00001¢ per copy never made much sense to anyone. (or closer to maybe 40¢ in the case of a 8GB movie). {40¢ is not made up, it's based on AWS Ohio 'Data Transfer OUT From Amazon EC2 To Internet' pricing as of 12/24/2022}

And so we come to podcast content. LMG, probably Joe Roegan, and others view this auto-citation robot as an existential threat which will decrease their revenue. In reality, the revenue they are due is whatever the market will bear, and as this technology exists to circumvent things consumers do not like, the rights holders should be in no position to say 'no! We don't like that!'. The customer is always right, and in this case, the customer is saying that your value is whatever they choose to give you, not whatever you can squeeze out of them. It's an unfortunate truth to realize that your ability to 'hold people accountable to pay you' is little more than trying to enforce the age old ideal of 'might is right' by proxy. "I say my content is worth $1! and I can get a man with a gun to talk to you if you disagree!" No. Why do we tolerate this? Embrace the change, make content people are willing to pay for, and live off what you get. Embrace capitalism, not authoritarianism. Be a leader in a new form of copyright where anyone can pay you a set fee per copy, and as long as that money comes in, you're considered square. If you set that fee well, you'll make money. If you're greedy, you won't. Simple-as.

TetraSky · December 24, 2022

1 hour ago, asquirrel said:

2. Nobody would see a particular reason to pirate movies, because the movie industry would be offering the same thing the pirates do, with probably as good or better quality, in a timeline the pirates can't compete with.

Nobody would have any reason to buy it when someone can just leak it and make it available to everyone.

You seems to greatly underestimate humanity's unwillingness to pay for something if they can get it for free just as easily.

Just have to see GoG as an example. They are not profitable.

Yet they offer DRM free products, what gives? Well, why would someone pay for a game on GoG when they can just get it off some torrent site.
For example, Cyberpunk

Spoiler

Just these 4, account for a little under 150k downloads, on that one website. At the current $30 price, that's nearly $4.5 million in revenue they could've used. Which would've made GoG more than profitable.

1 hour ago, asquirrel said:

This is the Steam/Valve approach to movie content.

But it's not. Every games on Steam are subject to a license agreement and if you break it, you can have your account banned (more specifically VAC protected games, you're not allowed to do whatever you want with those). Yes they offer a quick and easy service, but considering you disregarded copyrights and licenses in your introduction... Yeah it doesn't apply. The only game store this would apply to is GoG, since that one doesn't have DRM and is just as easy as Steam to get games. And it's not profitable.

1 hour ago, asquirrel said:

The customer is always right

All this mentality does, is create entitled Karens. Please stop thinking this way. It was just a marketing slogan from a company long ago in an attempt to get customers. It was never intended to be taken literally.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-customer-is-always-right.html

"What they were attempting to do was to make the customer feel special by inculcating into their staff the disposition to behave as if the customer was right, even when they weren't."

1 hour ago, asquirrel said:

Embrace capitalism, not authoritarianism.

But it IS capitalism to not want others to get access to your stuff for free/cheap and keep profiting off it. Authoritarianism would be if the gov came and did this for them to protect their vested interest. But private individuals/companies are in it for the money.

Overall, you are basically arguing it should be free or super cheap because that's what the market is willing to pay for. But it IS already super cheap and the target market is already willing to pay for it. They are either paying nothing and watching Ads or paying a monthly subscription to whatever service has the podcast and have access to a ton of other content.