Internet Archive's big battle with music publishers ends in settlement

I've noticed similar false economy in some sports, where the holder of the rights is so strict that even famous pundits can't use footage (even a few seconds) or risk consequences. It seems highly detrimental to the sport itself, and perhaps even the rights holder due to the reduction in free advertising.

I wonder if this quirk is caused by the concentrated interests of rights holders' internal legal departments, where, in eagerness to keep their jobs or demand higher salaries, they pursue breaches of broadcast rights hyper aggressively, well past the point of optimal benefit to the rights holder.

I've worked in a large government bureaucracy before, and I've repeatedly encountered a particular breed of bureaucrat that has no idea of what the organization is trying to accomplish (or, actively doesn't care) and has taken it upon themselves to enforce policies in their role as strictly as possible, sometimes even to the point of delighting in the power that they wield to stop people from trying to do their jobs and do good things.

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”

There are essentially two schools of thought when it comes to rules.

The first is "rule of law" where it's important what the rules are. You need good people with knowledge of what's actually happening on the ground to be the ones who make the rules, and then the rules are strictly enforced and if that leads to a bad outcome it means the rules are deficient and there is a meaningful process for addressing that, which results in a change to the rules to prevent the bad outcome from happening in the future.

The second is "CYA" where the purpose of rules is to make prohibitions as many and broad as possible so that if anything bad happens or you have a dispute with someone you can pin a violation on them, and then the rules are ignored whenever that isn't the objective.

The best organizations use only the first system, but this is rare. If you make rules according to the first system and the way you enforce them is according to the second system, you have a minor problem with under-enforcement. If you use the second system entirely, you're going to have major problems with office politics and morale. But the worst is when the people at the top are making the rules in expectation of using the second system without noticing that someone in the middle is actually enforcing them.