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They prefer it this way.

Ultimately an intellectual property based economy leads to this without proactive measures limiting IP.



Circa 1980 there was a panic over color movies fading that was spearheaded by people like Richard Scorsese who saw it as a huge cultural loss, but a major factor was that home video could turn movies like the old Wizard of Oz into gold.

At the time they tried bad preservation idea such as dividing the colors up into separate reels before they realized even relatively fugitive dyes would hold up for centuries if you keep them in a dry freezer.


You could just have a land tax, as copyright is land.

Let companies value their copyright, and let them pay the cost to maintain that copyright (say a 2% per year cost), and let someone buy that copyright from them at the price they value it at.


Copyright, unlike the land comparison, is not physically limited in nearly the same way. There is a limited amount of land, but ideas are nearly infinite.

I genuinely think if a company has piece of media X that they make a decision to not distribute, it shouldn't be piracy. Things like Nintendo sitting on titles teasing a fat "maybe" of bringing a subscription based access model to on limited hardware isn't cool.

These games sold their last physical copy decades ago, long before an online store. They took them off the market, so fair game. There's zero difference from Nintendo's perspective, of buying a used game vs playing a rom on an emulator.


It's the reverse. Copyright is the tax we pay for future forever access to IP.




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