Because that’s not what copyright is for. It exists to give the creator exclusive rights over distribution. That’s it. So unless the company is planning to distribute the work and they obtained a copy willingly and legally distributed to them, then copyright is the wrong law to lean on.

I mean, it’s in the name. The right to make copies. Not to be glib, but it really is

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.

You may notice a conspicuous absence of control over how a copied work is used, short of distributing it. You can reencode it, compress it, decompress it, make a word cloud, statistically analyze its tone, anything you want as long as you’re not redistributing the work or an adaptation (which has a pretty limited meaning as well). “Personal use” and “fair use” are stipulations that weaken a copyright owner’s control over the work, not giving them new rights above and beyond copyright. And that’s a great thing. You get to do whatever you want with the things you own.

You don’t have a right to other people’s work. That’s what copyright enables. But that’s beside the point. The owner doesn’t get to say what you use a work for that they’ve distributed to you.

Training literally is consuming. A copyright license doesn’t get to dictate what computer programs the work is allowed to be used with. There’s a ton a entertainment mega corps that would love for that to be the case, though.

You’re saying that you’re not allowed to do a statistical analysis on a copyrighted work. It’s nonsense. It’s well-established that copyright does not prevent that kind of use.

Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed. “Personal use” just means that you can’t turn around and redistribute a work that you’ve obtained. Not that you’re not allowed to consume it in a corporate setting.

DVDs (how many people even still own a player?) are not a real alternative to streaming for a number of reasons. Nor is “just watch something else on another platform.” Or, at least, if your claim is that entertainment is interchangeable then you’ve got no real complaint about YouTube. Hell, YouTube has its own ad-free subscription. By your own logic, the ads can’t be enshittificantion because you can just pay more to avoid it!

The enshittification of Netflix goes beyond just charging more. It’s any decision the company makes to make the user experience worse so they can make more money. That’s things like hiding your list and your recently watched shows so they can make you scroll through more recommendations. So then they can autoplay the content they stuck in your way. Recommendations that, like YouTube, are more concerned with what they want to monetize than what you actually want. And it’s restricting the way you used to be able to use the service, like on multiple TVs even within the same house, to get you to wade through a bunch of payment plans.

But my point still stands. Enshittification doesn’t require them to become a monopoly and start producing nothing but reality TV. It just describes the strategy shift that these companies inevitably make from making the platform better to attract more users, to making it worse to extract more money from the user base they’ve built up.

Eh, people have their own tastes in TV. Streaming companies buy exclusive rights to certain content and if that’s where your tastes lie, you’re pretty SOL. It’s about as close to “lock-in” as you can get.

Your definition of enshittificantion is also far too strict. It’s just the shift that companies inevitably make from trying to attract new users quickly by providing a great service, to trying to extract maximum profit by degrading the service quality and cramming in as much revenue generation as they can.

Fired up