At first sight, this seems to be a common-sense response, but things get more nuanced when you consider it in depth.
Electronic media are a viable business as things stand, so you must be considering whether they would continue to be viable without the sort of laws being discussed here.
Whether any business model is viable is relative to the laws in effect. Without laws governing issues like property and contracts, a great deal of today's commerce would be infeasible. Without labor and fraud laws, all sorts of exploitation would be the norm. Without either, exploitative practices would be the only viable ones, but they would not be particularly productive - that is how things have been through most of human history, and continue to be so in parts of the world. There is a lot more at risk here than TV.
On the other hand, the current law in this case strikes me as excessive, reflecting the anti-democratic influence businesses have over legislation. My point is that there are no simple answers; the sort of economy that has brought a previously-unimaginable standard of living to a subset of the human race is a battleground of competing interests and trade-offs.
> Electronic media are a viable business as things stand, so you must be considering whether they would continue to be viable without the sort of laws being discussed here.
I'm responding to the parent post who is arguing we must have current laws because otherwise tv would not be viable.
The current laws might make sense. They have problems, but i'm also not super sympathetic to people who resell the work of others without adding anything to them, for commercial gain. However i dont think, without law X, industry Y wouldn't exist is ever a sufficient reason in and of itself. If that's the only reason we have for a law, then the industry is not worth it.
I take your point, though there may be cases where the greater good is served by intervention (vaccines for an emerging disease?) I agree that TV and movies do not fall into this category.
Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.
I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.