This is essentially the ridiculous copyright laws backfiring.
The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.
What part of that is about "ridiculous copyright laws backfiring", though?
It seems like it's copyright laws working as intended. (I may not love that I have to pay to access a 25 year old movie legally, but it hardly feels objectively unfair or ridiculous that I have to do that.)
The unfairness comes from the fact that society is paying to enforce those copyrights via expenses on judges, lawyers, police etc, but society is not getting a commensurate return on investment.
The purpose of copyright is to incentivize creativity, but society does not need to pay for 180 years of monopoly protection to incentivize creativity.
I'm quite sure that the tax receipts from the sale, rental, and performance of the copyrighted material more than adequately covers the portion of those costs borne by society. (In fact, that's probably a fair part of the reason that government is willing to support lengthy and obstructive copyright protections: because it adds government revenue far in excess of the cost.)
I don’t know how one would tease that out of any tax receipt date, compared to economic loss due to suboptimal allocation of society’s resources.
Suppose copyright law was 15 years instead of 100 years or whatever. Society still gets the tax receipts and benefits from creation of the media, but the shareholders who own the media do not get to collect a price premium from the extra 85 years. That money can now be spent by consumers elsewhere as opposed to supporting media owners who already had sufficient incentive to create the media.
The question at the end of the day is, does a 100 year copyright term incentivize the creation of media with so much utility compared to copyright term of 15 years such that it makes sense for society to transfer extra resources to the media owners for an additional 85 years? Amongst other externalities to consider.
The entertainment market is stagnating (if not quantity, at least quality-wise) because the copyright laws stiffle innovation instead of fostering it. Early-comers (Hollywood & co) are comfortably sitting on their stash of content, content with rehashing the same franchises. New-comers are forced to low-risk - low-quality content, sprinkled with anything they can get their hands on from other sources.