Low marginal costs presents an economic conundrum in general: it's expensive to produce material and yet cheap to distribute it, so how do you fairly divvy up the cost? If each viewer only paid the marginal cost ($0.01), it no longer makes sense to invest in production; and in the success case, once the production money is recouped, one could certainly argue that charging $9.99 for a $0.01 stream is difficult to distinguish from price-gouging (or more formally, "rent-seeking" [0]).
One answer to this is "club goods" [1]: bundle large collections of content together for a fixed price so that per-unit access is zero-cost, but every participant pays their share of the whole; this is the model of both cable packages and streaming services. It's hardly perfect (especially in that it centralizes both data and power), but it's arguably a better win-win than arbitrary unit prices.
I do think it's shady that vendors are allowed to sell content using "buy" and "ownership" metaphors of physical goods, when in fact it's a limited license that can change or disappear at any time. I'd love to see some regulation in this space, to the effect that content can only be labeled "buy"/"own"/etc if the content is DRM-free and carries a permissive license for backups, remixing, transforming, etc.
And of course, there's an excellent case for reforming copyright laws more generally, such that content that has already had plenty of time to recoup its costs enters the public domain. I think the original duration (14 years) struck a reasonable balance; and on a cultural level, there's a great deal of value in each generation having unlimited access to the previous (still-living) generation's culture, in addition to culture of dead antiquity.
One answer to this is "club goods" [1]: bundle large collections of content together for a fixed price so that per-unit access is zero-cost, but every participant pays their share of the whole; this is the model of both cable packages and streaming services. It's hardly perfect (especially in that it centralizes both data and power), but it's arguably a better win-win than arbitrary unit prices.
I do think it's shady that vendors are allowed to sell content using "buy" and "ownership" metaphors of physical goods, when in fact it's a limited license that can change or disappear at any time. I'd love to see some regulation in this space, to the effect that content can only be labeled "buy"/"own"/etc if the content is DRM-free and carries a permissive license for backups, remixing, transforming, etc.
And of course, there's an excellent case for reforming copyright laws more generally, such that content that has already had plenty of time to recoup its costs enters the public domain. I think the original duration (14 years) struck a reasonable balance; and on a cultural level, there's a great deal of value in each generation having unlimited access to the previous (still-living) generation's culture, in addition to culture of dead antiquity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good