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Why? Nobody _needs_ Mickey Mouse. If the price for Mickey Mouse is too high, just don't buy it.

That's not the point. The parent was saying "if you own content and display content, you must license it", not "the price needs to be reasonable".

Typically, there are ways to do this. One way is forcing a company's distribution and streaming to be separate, and this already exists in some other parts of the market.

So if Disney sells Mickey Mouse content $x to its own streaming service for $5, they have to do the same for Netflix. Disney can still set the price. It just has to pay it as well, and that reflects on its own balance sheet. The problems involved in regulating this have already been solved in other markets, it's a solved issue.

Now, you can typically enter volume sales agreements still. So Disney streaming can buy 100k 'streaming options' for $4 if they hit the volume. But that means the same agreement has to be available to, say Netflix.

Of course, the same will be true for any Netflix created content!

Nothing is perfect, but this is the sort of common carry stuff that separates out 'cable companies' from 'TV studios', and there's been loads of legislation about this over the years.



> That's not the point. The parent was saying "if you own content and display content, you must license it", not "the price needs to be reasonable".

Or perhaps creation and display/distribution cannot be done by the same entity / conglomerate.


  > Or perhaps creation and display/distribution cannot be done by the same entity / conglomerate.
So if I as an artist paint a painting, I could not sell it in my small personal gallery by the beach? That is ridiculous.


> So if I as an artist paint a painting, I could not sell it in my small personal gallery by the beach? That is ridiculous.

It is so ridiculous that it is how movies were made and distributed in the US for decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_system#The_end_of_the_s...


Everything like this has been worked out, handled, discussed, passed into laws, challenged by courts, all of it.

Typically, the size of the entity has some bearing on things. There are hundreds of pieces of legislation, which only affect companies (for example), with 50+ employees. Whatever complaint you have, or edge case you mention, it can be handled.

We are obviously discussing Disney here. So when people discuss Disney, and large-corp distribution, suddenly running in and applying the logic to a single person, is what is ridiculous.


FWIW, I think this is what led to the car dealership world we live in.


That is because cars require maintenance and parts, so laws were enacted which ensured that a liable party would be located in the end user's jurisdiction.

Streaming services are not critical infrastructure that require an active supply chain.




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