XQC (and other reactors) accused of copyright infringement, or stealing revenue from small creators

[Dutch_Master]

In the past Linus collaborated with XQC, so this does have some merit for LMG. As per the title, this "reactor" is now under heavy fire regarding his misuse of copyrighted material from small(er) creators, sparked recently by him watching a documentary in its entirety (90min) w/o any (meaningful) comments. This chap, a real life lawyer, has something to say about that:

 

The 2nd half (i.e. after the advert insert) has some legal explanations on copyright infringements.

 

My opinion: I never liked these cheap 'reactor' channels. Some are reasonably good and respect the work others put in, sadly most aren't. XQC is firmly in the latter group. Stealing money from other creators by playing their video in its entirety on your channel so you can gross in the ad-revenue instead of the creator that put a lot of work into said video is shameful at least and as explained, lawfully criminal and I hope someone takes these parasites to court over lost income.

[BrandonLatzig]

To be fair, this isnt anything new. People have been saying this since thr age of machinima

[itshurleytime]

I think it was appropriate to call Linus out by name after he opined on a plan to offer lifetime subscriptions to their creator-owned platform to boost numbers so they can sell it off.

[Avocado Diaboli]

I personally don't particularly care whether this practice violates copyright or any other law or not. The legality of the situation has no bearing on my opinion that anyone engaging in this kind of lazy reaction content should be shunned, for a couple of reasons.

 

For one, the obvious first reason is the ethical argument, that they're just taking someone else's work and barely add anything to it. Even if that were 100% legal, you're still an asshole if you do it. Never mind that this is all stream of consciousness stuff, so they're not reacting to a complete work, they're reacting to individual portions of a work. This leads to instances of someone reacting to a portion of a video under flawed assumptions and lacking context of what comes up later in the video. Trying to form a conclusion on something while you're watching it is nigh on impossible, so stopping every so often to share your thoughts is pointless when watching further could address the criticism someone just thought of. 

 

And lastly, I do have to wonder what type of person finds it appealing to watch other people react to something. I get watching someone's review of something (which is also just a reaction, after all), but that's content that requires a degree of mental effort to be spent on formulating a coherent opinion and backing that up with examples and other evidence. None of which happens with reaction content, meaning watching something and reacting to it live. My questions to people who watch this basically boil down to: Are you incapable of watching something alone and examining it yourself without guidance of a third party? Or is this just the communal aspect, watching something together with other people and only half paying attention, while participating in a chatroom of other people who lack friends they could invite to watch something together with? Because honestly, if I have the choice between watching a video and watching a reaction of someone of that video while it's playing in the background, I will always choose the former and I'd have to assume you must be some kind of magnificent troglodyte to prefer the latter.

[Kisai]

Listen, there is some value in "react" content, but it's limited to:

~ Videos that are in the public interest (eg breaking news, legal/government)

~ Videos that are basically ads (Trailers, superbowl ads)

- Videos that don't escape the original published source

 

So for the first two points, there is an implicit license that the rights owner permits this because they ads or raise awareness of a specific issue that would otherwise be disconnected from the streamer/youtuber's platform.

 

For the third, I'm talking about the piracy of videos to/from youtube, tiktok, niconico, bilibili, twitch, facebook, etc. 99% of the content on one platform will never be seen by the other, and the viewers will never seek it elsewhere.

 

To which, asking permission is generally difficult, or impossible due to lack of contact information, source information, or even language barriers.

 

I've seen on youtube videos that go viral, that there will sometimes be hundreds of "can I license/use this" comments, because there is a huge landgrab that happens where something goes viral, and then someone wants to take advantage of the virality to license it to big media.

 

React videos is just doing this without permission at all. But I'm going to flat out say, that there are some "creators", big and small add no value to the "react" element of the video, and are merely "group watching", and that's what audiences of xQc and SSSniperwolf actually expect. They are not coming to the user's channel for the user, they are coming to them because they are using them as a semi-curated "daily dose of internet" channel. What makes things insidious is that xQc will literately just play a video and do nothing. No commentary, just hitting play, or describing obvious elements of the video.

 

Now the flip side of this, and this has been a problem going back to the beginning of "TGWG" and similar content, where you could argue that there is a fair use element, but because of the egregious lawsuit-heavy way big media handles copyright, this has instead forced channels to migrate from stealing "big media" content to stealing "little media" content like Tiktoks, and laundering the content from social media platform A to social media platform B.

 

The right solution to this is, also exists. ContentID, except in reverse. When you upload a video it will start  generating hash codes against the audio/video/subtitles/ASR'd audio, and then check against what videos out there contain these keywords in these quantities and then check for audio matches. The missing link here is having all the social media networks use the same algorithm so they can check against each other, and likewise big-media and small-media alike can then check, and maybe re-attribute the source and revenue where revenue was generated during the playback of that material.

 

I'm not suggesting stealing the revenue outright from under xQc, but if 50% of his content is just watching pirated video, then it would make sense to take 50% of the revenue generated while those videos are watched and pass it to who the origin creator. Easy to do when it's just ad revenue. Difficult when it's external revenue sources like contractually signing the streamer.

 

 

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

My questions to people who watch this basically boil down to: Are you incapable of watching something alone and examining it yourself without guidance of a third party? Or is this just the communal aspect, watching something together with other people and only half paying attention, while participating in a chatroom of other people who lack friends they could invite to watch something together with?

My guess is that it's a parasocial relationship thing. Watching a reaction video is to some people like watching it with a friend. I mean, it's not actually like that at all, but to the person who is in that situation it feels like it. 

 

I think it's also that young people look up to influences for guidance. They don't really have enough knowledge, experience or confidence to come up with their own thoughts and opinions, and they want to fit in and have the same opinion as everyone else, so they listen to what some older person says they think about something and mimics that. 

That say they can say and think the same way as the other people in their friend group and don't risk sticking out. 

[Arika]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I think it's also that young people look up to influences for guidance.

this worries me greatly.

[Middcore]

XQC was already well-known to be a shithead before Linus did the collab, I don't think this would stop LTT from working with him again if the views/revenue were there. Guy would probably have to kill someone to be off limits.

[aminit]

15 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

My opinion: I never liked these cheap 'reactor' channels. Some are reasonably good and respect the work others put in, sadly most aren't. XQC is firmly in the latter group. Stealing money from other creators by playing their video in its entirety on your channel so you can gross in the ad-revenue instead of the creator that put a lot of work into said video is shameful at least and as explained, lawfully criminal and I hope someone takes these parasites to court over lost income.

Your opinion isnt that much different from LMG, Linus always said that it is not a matter of "if" but "when" they will be subject to lawsuits, its just that the when is taking forever.

[wanderingfool2]

10 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

My questions to people who watch this basically boil down to: Are you incapable of watching something alone and examining it yourself without guidance of a third party? Or is this just the communal aspect, watching something together with other people and only half paying attention, while participating in a chatroom of other people who lack friends they could invite to watch something together with? Because honestly, if I have the choice between watching a video and watching a reaction of someone of that video while it's playing in the background, I will always choose the former and I'd have to assume you must be some kind of magnificent troglodyte to prefer the latter.

There's probably a lot of reasons why people watch it.

 

I know I've watched "react" content in the past...but that's also because it's a good compilation of clips and I know the creator has a similar enough humor as myself so the clips that are ultimately in the video are ones that I actually do want to watch.  The alternative would be for me to either no consume any of the content or scroll through pages of content I don't want to see to find a few gems (which I don't have the time for and don't wish to do).  Therefor the react content is good for me in that I get to see some things that I normally wouldn't.

 

There are other people as well who like to watch "with other people" because there is a certain amount of interaction you can get and the mood.  Imagine going to a football game where the crowd just sits there vs one where people are cheering.  It makes a difference, and some creators genuinely make the content better.  Or in the case of smaller creators where the chat is maybe a group of 5 - 20 people the is a sense of community (as people get to interact with each  other).

 

 

 

Now for react content, I think there is a very fine line with it and overall it's about what kind of content is reacted to.  (I preface this that someone who tries acting like they are innocent/trying not to infringe (eg MRxPlays) or someone will remove sources like snipper wolf are in the wrong no matter what)

 

The way I look at it there are a few different types of categories (most of which are still copyright infringement...but overall I do think IP rights haven't kept up with the time).

 

1) Getting permission, which is difficult to find sources or responses, but this really makes you most in the clear and is the best way (but also leads to not really being able to do much)...for this it's not really any issue though as you got permission

 

2) Reacting to things people posted, but on platforms and content that isn't meant for growth/monetization or it's content that's meant to be consumed by someone.  (Like a lot of tiktoks).  I think react content like this has the least impact out of everything.  There are lots of accounts where you see their content and you know they are hoping people will react to their content.  Still important though that links/sources should be shared (props as well for those who watermark the source in the video).  As an example someone who created a fan video of an among us game; and the people it covered reacting to it.

 

3) Being a smaller streamer and reacting to content you know your community will like.  This one is difficult as I do understand it, and I do feel there are genuine kind of community aspect to this.  It is also "wrong" but at the same time I think it's kind of almost on a fringe wrong.  For myself I think reacting on content where the content has 4-5x your followers is generally more acceptable than equal followers.  If equal or less followers, then it should be reaching out for permission (doing a collab).  If you must though, then you really need to incentivize your viewers to watch it with you so the creators gets the views. (And not act like XQC where you do it just for the sake of viewership).

 

The example I like to use, a streamer I watch does react to Mr. Beast...but is a smaller streamer and we all like watching it together and making jokes/etc. (Lots of pausing and such).  With that said, we don't watch every video together but we often talk about "what happened".  In this example it is acquaintances who make the watching experience better...but overall Mr Beast does get less views (but given his size not enough where it counts)

 

4) Reacting to content which was meant to be actually consumed without "reacting".  The one XQC watched is a prime example of this.  Unless commentary is being added, permission was gained, or you ACTUALLY drive more traffic to them and encourage your followers to subscribe and watch then it's unacceptable.  (Like above, scale comes into play)

 

The streamer I would watch for example would start it all off by showing the YouTube page, telling people to subscribe (and occasionally checking the subscription and if it hasn't changed much telling people again).  There was also a decent amount of talking and pausing; and sometimes just leaving a video half watched saying to watch the rest.  Links always provided, and a general acknowledgement of trying to actually push traffic to the creator.

 

 

In general though sometimes react/compilations do actually help.  The only reason I initially followed Fuslie was because I found the guitar clip (popularized by Pewdipie or whatever his name is spelt like).  Without that I probably wouldn't have ended up really watching any of her content (admittedly I like her humor).  There's actually a handful of streamers I watch/watched where I had originally saw their stream because of other types of react/compilation clips that they were in.

 

The modern internet and YouTube has essentially been built on copyright infringement.  The biggest thing is where we draw the line in the sand

[BrandonLatzig]

1 hour ago, aminit said:

Your opinion isnt that much different from LMG, Linus always said that it is not a matter of "if" but "when" they will be subject to lawsuits, its just that the when is taking forever.

Well I think the when is taking forever because, if not done *right* they will effectively pull all of youtube gaming into the lawsuit as well, since *technically* most lets players are just providing commentary over the games they play (Note I do believe this makes them fair game, plus most game companies don't care since its free advertising)

[Sauron]

I don't have much sympathy for XQC specifically and what he does probably is illegal.

 

However, I also don't think copyright should exist so in moral terms I don't think what he did is wrong. And let's be honest, for every XQC who streams an entire movie with only a couple of comments there are dozens of streamers and youtubers that fall somewhere inbetween and, if this goes to court, will find themselves in a gray zone where they constantly need to worry about exactly how much commentary is enough to prevent a lawsuit.

 

Unfortunately I doubt copyright will be abolished soon, so here's my proposal for twitch and youtube to at least mitigate this issue: simply allow streamers and youtubers to embed the video or stream they're reacting to into their content so that the view is registered by both them and the original creator. It wouldn't be that hard to implement technologically (it could work in a similar way to the "hosting" feature on twitch) and all parties would be better off for it, with the original creator getting money for the extra audience and the "reactor" not needing to worry about copyright. It wouldn't address the issue with watching movies that are behind a paywall or on another platform but it would be something.

[aminit]

1 hour ago, BrandonLatzig said:

Well I think the when is taking forever because, if not done *right* they will effectively pull all of youtube gaming into the lawsuit as well, since *technically* most lets players are just providing commentary over the games they play (Note I do believe this makes them fair game, plus most game companies don't care since its free advertising)

Good point, Nintendo proved that lets players have no right over their contents with their creators program but ended up backtracking at some point.

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, Arika said:

this worries me greatly.

I should also add that this is not a new phenomenon.

 

Young people have always looked up to someone for what to think and how to act.

Before influencers it was TV, movie and music stars. The older kids at school have also always been a big inspiration.

 

Before the Internet, it was TV and music stars instead of influencers.

Before that, it might have been the older kids at school.

[BrandonLatzig]

4 hours ago, aminit said:

Good point, Nintendo proved that lets players have no right over their contents with their creators program but ended up backtracking at some point.

because everyone and I mean EVERYONE hated them for it. Because there isn't a good reason to punish people for playing a game with commentary over it. Anyone who wanted to play it, will play it. anyone who didnt, was never going to.

[BrandonLatzig]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I should also add that this is not a new phenomenon.

 

Young people have always looked up to someone for what to think and how to act.

Before influencers it was TV, movie and music stars. The older kids at school have also always been a big inspiration.

 

Before the Internet, it was TV and music stars instead of influencers.

Before that, it might have been the older kids at school.

the only thing that really changed is that the people who are older aren't caring as much about what they do. at least imo

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

On 9/24/2023 at 10:54 AM, Kisai said:

Listen, there is some value in "react" content, but it's limited to:

~ Videos that are in the public interest (eg breaking news, legal/government)

~ Videos that are basically ads (Trailers, superbowl ads)

- Videos that don't escape the original published source

I agree.

 

A solution could be that any video that uses more than X% (E.g.10%) of third party content is not monetizable. It would balance very well how cheap is react content compared to original content. Creators would have to use their own content and B-Roll for 90% of the vide, and carefully choose the 10% third party content to use to be elegible for monetization

 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

I agree.

 

A solution could be that any video that uses more than X% (E.g.10%) of third party content is not monetizable. It would balance very well how cheap is react content compared to original content. Creators would have to use their own content and B-Roll for 90% of the vide, and carefully choose the 10% third party content to use to be elegible for monetization

 

Setting an arbitrary % is probably the wrong direction and doesn't really pass the fair use test.

 

To paraphrase what LegalEagle said "If it rips the heart out of it, it's probably not fair use"

 

To a lawyer, they smell blood in the water to squeeze React streamers/youtubers, they just need to find an example where xQc, SSSniperwolf or some other dingbat with a large audience who is making an effort to hide the source, and then have the source want to sue for damages.

 

Now from a practical sense, I can also tell you how this would shake out:

a) copyright infringer deletes the video, against the advise of their lawyer to try and say they have no idea what video they are talking about

or

b) copyright infringer's lawyer makes an offer to license the single video the lawsuit is about. Because this is what big media does when they steal something. At least one youtuber found their face in a big media's film in a screenshot, in the trailer no less.

 

And to be perfectly blunt, if you stream a youtube video on twitch, nobody is coming after you. If you stream a youtube video on Youtube, the contentID algorithm will come after you for "reused content", and if you google search this, you will come up with 100's of videos of how to circumvent this by voicing over, or using a TTS + chatGPT to mechanically add nonsense to it.

 

Solving the wrong problem there guys.

 

Let's say, I want to react to videos about tesla coils. 99% of these videos are niche, and use copyrighted music (in midi form) It's very hard to "comment on" music in a way that doesn't disrupt the music or tear the heart out of it. Yet, who do you get the claim from? Well that depends, most of the time you will get a content ID claim from the original video on youtube, which would be fine, but then you will also get an additional claim from the copyright holder of the music, which is not fine, because the nature of the music was already transformed by the video, so in a sense, "someone else" is profiting off my reaction to the video rather than source of the video.

 

Now, if that was some other piece of content, like reacting to someone reacting to a movie trailer, then I should have just reacted to the movie trailer on it's own, and take the content ID claim itself. Remember the Mario Movie trailer? Even reacting to 2 seconds of it, will get you several content ID claims, because the rights owner is trying to protect itself from PIRATED copies of the film, not the trailer.

 

I already explained how I'd solve the problem previously, but here's an alternate take, as I've often suggested this every time copyright issues get explained and people whine-bitch-moan about how unfair contentID is.

 

Allow youtube to act as a licensing intermediary. They clearly have the means to do it. Instead of slapping people with ContentID claims and calling them thieves (which is what ContentID is saying)

Take note of the third icon "I gave credit to the copyright owner", so youtube is straight up saying not to give credit to the copyright owner so you can dispute it.

 

Which if you know one of the grounds for fair use is about not being a shitty person...

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

 

Take note of "acknowledgements can backfire", particularly right now with AI "singing" voices being stolen and used to make no-effort covers of commercial music.

 

To that end, absolutely zero game footage is ever in the clear for copyright. At best, companies that make free-to-play games encourage people to do this, because it gets more people interested in it, and they have to spend less on influencers to play it. You'd think that "Raid Shadow Legends" was popular because it's good, but no, damn near every single influencer big and small has been paid to advertise or play it. Is it good? I don't know. But knowing how much ad spend must have been pushed on everyone to advertise it, and I've yet to see any influencer actually play it beyond the mandated contract, maybe it isn't. A contract to play the game on stream with permission however is valuable, because it does protect you from being copyright claimed by them.

 

But you have to either be big, or have connections to get such permission to play a game on stream. Nintendo's answer is "absolutely no permission will ever be given at any time, for any reason" 

 

Nintendo does literately the most insane Japanese company thing ever, which is why we hear about Nintendo being aggressive about copyright far more often. Remember it's not about YOU, it's about THEM wanting control.

 

I'd argue that that creators scheme thing they rolled out before was actually giving blanket permission to actually use Nintendo's IP in videos and streams, but they probably found the average video resulted in paying out lots of under-1 dollar paypal transactions which meant that they were probably paying far more in fees to paypal to have the scheme in the first place than any money made on the videos, because big creators aren't going to play their games under that tyranny.

Hilarious.

 

I'm gonna say it was probably the right idea, but done in the most boneheaded way. Instead of throwing contentID claims at people and calling them thieves, actually give the user the option to either:

a) license this, here's the price 

b) dispute this, as per what you can do already, and copyright claims will sit there for a year or more (yes I know this for a fact)

Presumably, because youtube hasn't put some auto-expire mechanism in for some content ID claims. A bunch of videos I have have nonsense claims for white noise, ocean sounds, etc yet the game came out before the claimed "music" did.

c) Mute/Edit out the claimed portion

 

Incidentally, "mute" doesn't work all that well, because it still requires you to manually select it. That creates endless work if a game provides no means of turning the music off. One of the reasons I stopped doing videos on one channel is because a certain Japanese company stopped doing the english version of a Free-to-play game, and then flagged every single video of that game for copyright against the Anime. Lesson learned, don't play Japanese Free-to-play games. When the developer inevitably decides to release an anime, and shut the game down, it will nuke your channel.

 

A repeated problem with playing certain games, is when their OST is the same as the game music, and you get claims for the OST. These claims would be valid if not for playing the game. To date, I haven't seen any good reason why a game dev should be claiming videos for OST usage, and instead I think the OST claims are coming from the likes of Warner/Sony's music label side without communication from the game. As opposed to claims for licensed music (eg Life is Strange, Grand Theft Auto, etc) 

 

At any rate, I feel that game footage has a better claim for fair use starting from the fact that you are playing a game and it doesn't play itself. A claim is better made against footage that does NOT change with every play, like pre-rendered cutscenes or game footage that has been edited to remove most of the "gameplay" to focus on just the cutscenes.

 

But react streamers, good grief, they often aren't even playing the thing. They're reacting to someone else playing something, and because it's not clear who is actually playing it, the attribution is missing or hidden.

 

A technical solution is also viable here that requires little change from how anything works. So for Twitch, it's possible to automatically have clips on Twitch, upload to youtube with the channel name in big, impossible-to-remove-by-zooming-in watermarks. This is what TikTok should also be doing when videos are in 9:16 aspect ratio. Better yet, a QR code. Tiktok could change their app/website so when a user is not logged in, it shows the QR code to the video in the player, and when they are logged in, it additionally contains a "reference" ID so anyone who scans the QR code tells the tiktok/youtube site what influencer watched the video to attribute it.

 

Good luck trying to convince anyone this is a good idea though, privacy rights always run into a brick wall when it comes to money.

[Spindel]

I think the only "reactor" I've watched more than just by accident is Charismatic Voice, but Elisabeth actually says some interesting things and do some analysis of the content she watches. And somewhere I feel that people that do like her actually add some value. 

 

But in general I don't get "reactors" on the other hand I don't get "let's play" content or streamers in general either. I guess I'm just too old. 

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Spindel said:

But in general I don't get "reactors" on the other hand I don't get "let's play" content or streamers in general either. I guess I'm just too old. 

 

Sometimes you just need something to pass the time while you are at work/school/doing-mind-numbing-programming/drawing/etc cause sitting in silence makes time pass slowly, and watching netflix or disney+ this way often distracts you from what you are doing rather than the "react/let's play" which might be something you're interested in, but don't have the time to play yourself. Many RPG games are like like this, where you can easily spend 200 hours on it (eg Skyrim) and not actually push the plot forward.

 

The "content theft" angle has a lot more to do with the youtuber or streamer basically relegating themselves to "show host" while they just rebroadcast someone elses content they didn't license.

 

[Spindel]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

Sometimes you just need something to pass the time while you are at work/school/doing-mind-numbing-programming/drawing/etc cause sitting in silence makes time pass slowly, and watching netflix or disney+ this way often distracts you from what you are doing rather than the "react/let's play" which might be something you're interested in, but don't have the time to play yourself.

My go to has always been music.
 

But if music isn’t peoples thing why not instead listen to an audiobook or podcast or are people afraid of maybe learning something?

[CotyTernes]

I really loved the shots fired at Linus in this video for his take on Nebula.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 9/24/2023 at 1:31 AM, Avocado Diaboli said:

 Or is this just the communal aspect, watching something together with other people and only half paying attention, while participating in a chatroom of other people who lack friends they could invite to watch something together with?

This is your answer. Mostly this. It's a huge market. Hard to say how much is people unable to make friends, how much is people whose friends have other things in common but not online media, and how much is people stumbling upon streamers and online "communities" before other relationships are formed, thus having reaction content "already filling that role". But that's the end result.

 

That's why the "stealing money" argument is as debatable as the "you wouldn't download a car": a large portion of the audience is rewatching with the streamer, even spamming to get the streamer to play the video they've already watched, just to get the "shared" experience. And then there's the people who routinely tune to a stream as some form of parasocial relationship, not to watch a specific reaction but rather whatever the streamer clicks on. These are people who may or may not watch the original video if it wasn't for the reaction, but they are certainly not choosing among alternative ways to watch a video: they are choosing among alternative streamers, or among alternative uses of time more generally.,

[Avocado Diaboli]

6 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

This is your answer. Mostly this. It's a huge market. Hard to say how much is people unable to make friends, how much is people whose friends have other things in common but not online media, and how much is people stumbling upon streamers and online "communities" before other relationships are formed, thus having reaction content "already filling that role". But that's the end result.

 

That's why the "stealing money" argument is as debatable as the "you wouldn't download a car": a large portion of the audience is rewatching with the streamer, even spamming to get the streamer to play the video they've already watched, just to get the "shared" experience. And then there's the people who routinely tune to a stream as some form of parasocial relationship, not to watch a specific reaction but rather whatever the streamer clicks on. These are people who may or may not watch the original video if it wasn't for the reaction, but they are certainly not choosing among alternative ways to watch a video: they are choosing among alternative streamers, or among alternative uses of time more generally.,

Which then raises the issue why the communal aspect would require someone hosting something for profit. If you just want to watch something together with others, fine, I invite people over to watch movies together too. But I'm not charging them for it, I'm not asking sponsors to finance the presentation and I don't run ads in my living room that I got paid to place there.

 

Not to mention the fact that while you can show media you've bought to others in a private setting, doing so on a massive scale of even just dozens is usually off limits, never mind hundreds or thousands. The obvious solution to that problem is that reaction streamers should license the media they redistribute, like everybody else. But that seems anathema to a generation that has been condition to just take everything they want and repurpose it. While I generally agree that copyright is far from perfect, until broader measures like universal basic income find serious traction, you can't even begin thinking about abolishing it, because it will be a race to the bottom. There's little incentive to produce anything if someone can literally just syphon off all of your income using it as the basis for a lazy byproduct that takes very little effort to create and seems to be much more appealing than the original content to begin with.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

3 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Which then raises the issue why the communal aspect would require someone hosting something for profit. If you just want to watch something together with others, fine, I invite people over to watch movies together too.

But the whole point is that the people, the place, or both aren't available, and certainly not available an impulsive click away. You made that argument yourself. I mean, not everyone who steals does it because they're broke, but to those who are broke, saying "I also want things, I just go and buy them" doesn't make much sense.

 

 

8 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

But I'm not charging them for it, I'm not asking sponsors to finance the presentation and I don't run ads in my living room that I got paid to place there.

As I said, providing people what they crave (or, rather, providing functional brain-chem-inducing substitutes for what they lack) is a very, very lucrative business (think of the simps, for instance, but also the dopamine hook of social platforms). At young enough ages, it's just fishing in a barrel.

 

 

7 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Not to mention the fact that while you can show media you've bought to others in a private setting, doing so on a massive scale of even just dozens is usually off limits, never mind hundreds or thousands

Well, that's a different topic. You were wondering where the audience is coming from in the post I replied to, so that's what I addressed.