That's easy. With commercials alone or with retransmission consent royalties alone, most pay TV channels can't pay the bills to produce original programming. Only the combination of both provides enough revenue. If pay TV channels relied exclusively on retransmission consent royalties, every channel would be as expensive as, say, HBO, and many channels that aim for a more niche audience would go out of business.

The difference between satellite television and satellite Internet is that satellite television is broadcast with conditional access and satellite Internet is unicast. The limited throughput of a satellite's transponders causes each customer to pay several dollars per GB of transfer (source: exede.com) to reserve time on the transponder to bounce the signal. Netflix over satelliet would quickly run you into your monthly quota.

A lot of people have satellite TV because they live outside the service area of cable TV. What would you do in such a situation?

Facts don't get butts in seats and ads in front of eyeballs the way commentary does.

In other words, the only thing "fair and balanced" about FOX News Channel is that it balances out MSNBC.

Many other art forms do indirectly. Movies, for one, have a problem because they contain music. So do video games.

Likewise, George Harrison registered the songs on All Things Must Pass. Yet Bright Tunes Music successfully argued in court that Harrison's registered copyright was invalid because "My Sweet Lord" had unlawfully used a snippet from the song "He's So Fine".

The problem with iPhone, iPad, and the game consoles is that you can't self-publish. The retail devices will outright refuse to execute code that isn't digitally signed by the device's manufacturer.

Except for customers living in areas whose incumbent home ISP has decided to "slow-lane" any traffic that doesn't pay the prioritization toll. See previous stories about Comcast's "congestion by choice".

How can someone usefully publish any application at any time for an iOS device without the blessing of Apple, or any application at any time for a game console without the blessing of the console's manufacturer?

If the gatekeeper model has "been discarded", then why do iOS and the game consoles still use it? And why haven't end users "discarded" them en masse in favor of Android and living-room gaming PCs? I think I know why: consoles are easy.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to jump in and reap benefits without running the risk of being bankrupted or worse. For example, I don't want to write a song and then get hit with a $150,000 copyright infringement lawsuit for having accidentally recreated something from decades ago.

More than likely, in a world without PHP, another language with similar benefits and drawbacks to PHP would likely have been invented.

Not if you have to pay hush money to copyright trolls who claim that your work is a derivative of theirs. And not if a monopolist gatekeeper or a cartel of gatekeepers controls the means of distribution of your art to the public, such as Apple or the major video console makers.

Perpetual exclusive rights in a trademark cannot be used to extend the theoretically limited term of any of the exclusive rights under a U.S. copyright. Dastar v. Fox.

Even if I create my own things, how can I be sure that I haven't accidentally re-created someone else's things?

The US Supreme Court has consistently deferred to Congress on the question of whether "it is designed to satisfy that goal."

Let me rephrase Ol Olsoc's question: How much of a royalty does the Bach family deserve from Claudio Arrau and his label?