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by ubernostrum 3669 days ago
I don't think it makes sense to force business plans on companies.

And yet we've done it multiple times in the US. We routinely encounter situations in the media industry where a new medium is hated/feared by the entrenched players who try to use refusal to license content as a way to kill the new medium before it takes off. Up until very recently, the standard solution to this, in order to not have artifically-granted monopolies on content stifle technological innovation, was for Congress to impose mandatory licensing schemes on the copyright holders.

That's how cable TV originally got off the ground, for example; over-the-air broadcast networks didn't want to license their content to cable, but Congress imposed mandatory licensing on them. Result: brand-new multi-billion-dollar industry that kept those networks alive a while longer.