If they are getting an extra $6 per month from the 12 M subscribers who do streaming + DVDs, that's $72M.

Losing 1M subscribers (it's from the DVD only and Streaming only categories) is a loss of $8M.

4/5 of the lost customers were from the DVD only side, the more expensive business they are trying to sideline.

I don't want them to go streaming only. Netflix killed the mom and pop video store in my town that carried a giant library of obscure films for 20 years. Netflix streams a tiny percentage of the movies on my 'to see' list.

But I don't think is a good way to persuade them to reverse course.

A number of positions held by Economists are rejected out of hand by most outside the discipline.

Free trade is beneficial on net. Price floors cause shortages (and the minimum wage is a type of price floor). Bangladesh has as much to fear from rising energy prices as from rising sea waters.

Please argue with any of these (intentionally provocative) positions, so as to illustrate my main point: there are plenty of experts you disagree with too.

(Yeah, but those experts are WRONG!)

Says you. We all pick and choose.

This case raises two really interesting undecided questions in fair use which I've heard batted around.

1.

Some friends of mine who are media law defense attorneys always insist that Fair Use is not a "defense," because the phrasing surrounding fair use is always "a fair use IS NOT infringement" rather than the typical language of affirmative defenses, which would say, "an infringement is PERMITTED(/not actionable/shall not result in damages) given fair use." This means that it is the plaintiff's obligation to establish the use was not fair as a very element of the underlying claim. In turn, a judge can independently find this element lacking and deny a copyright claim without the defense ever being raised.

The media law Plaintiff's attorneys I know all disagree, of course, citing common practice, and the fact no judge would actually do that. Well, here we are. And the underlying theory that "fair use is not a defense", while a bit unorthodox, seems to bear at least basic textual scrutiny. I'm not saying it's decided, but there's a prima facie case to be made. I never thought it would be put to the test, but hopefully we get an appeal on this and a judge up the chain explicitly says, "Yes, judges can do this, because a fair use is never an infringement," or "No, this must be raised as a defense."

2.

Some* have noted that the common law fair use considerations are clearly not meant as an exhaustive list in Folsom v. Marsh. As codified in the statute, it appears like an exhaustive list, but the existence of 17 USC 107 does not preclude the possibility of a common law principle which reaches even farther in categorizing some uses as fair. 17 USC 107 does not explicitly preempt the further development of Folsom v. Marsh. In other words, the judge could find that any use by a non-profit organization is fair, on some completely novel grounds, like non-profits promote the public good so we will give them a pass. (I don't think such a broad ruling is likely, I'm just illustrating how a new type of fair use could be created.)

*Specifically, I'm lifting this from some comments Fred von Lohmann made in Kansas City a few years back. Apologies if I misrepresented his position. Also note that I'm not even sure he's committed to this, he may have just been tossing it out as an interesting idea.

To be fair, "reasonable expectation of profit" also gave us Bangkok Dangerous and Disaster Movie.