> And I don't understand why they wouldn't to make more. In the long run, the industry as a whole might make more money, but it's certain that each individual

> And I don't understand why they wouldn't to make more. In the long run, the industry as a whole might make more money, but it's certain that each individual company wouldn't. As you say, investigations into collusion and price fixing are substantially more rare than they should be. If Big Media loses the ability to refuse to grant parts of their catalog to one distributor or another, enough distributors to matter can easily band together to force reductions in media licensing fees. > I'm looking at it simply from perspective of potential creator. Ah. Well, that (in all seriousness) is a useful and valid conversation to have, but you asked why a site that streamed media controlled by Big Media wouldn't do the obvious thing and let you download what you stream. The answer is that Big Media won't let them; sometimes under any circumstances, other times unless the site pays a lot more than they pay for just streaming rights. I agree that the state of Big Media's licensing regime is really rather bad for society overall, but it's fantastically good for Big Media.