If we think about classic monopolistic behavior, if one studio can dictate all the rules of an art format, there's certain things that are going to be told and aren't going to be told.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Peter Labusa.

Peter is a lecturer at San Jose State University, and he's currently writing a book about

the history of entertainment law in Hollywood.

Peter wrote a great op-ed for the LA Times recently, talking about the effects of streaming

like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, things like that on the film and television industries,

but also, you know, the culture that we consume every time that we watch these platforms,

how it's changing the type of film and television that actually gets made and gets put in front of us.

I've been writing about the topic of streaming and how that's affecting the film and television

industries for a couple of years now. And so when I read this piece by Peter, I said,

this is the perfect opportunity

to talk to someone with this historical knowledge about the industries, about what's happening

right now to kind of put it in a good context, but also to understand what it's doing on the

culture side of things, which has been harder for me to explain. So I was really happy to talk to

Peter about this, and I think that you're

really going to enjoy our conversation. At the end, we have, I think, a little bit of a disagreement

about the role of public funding in the film and television industries. And I think Peter makes a

really good point that it's really difficult to see how this could happen in the United States right now

just because of the way that the political system operates. And I would note that from my

end, the interest in public funding looks at, you know, what's happened in Canada and Europe

over time and how we do have these traditions not only of public broadcasting, but of public funding for film,

television, and, you know, other forms of art.

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