
Tubes vs. Torrents: The Ethics of Piracy - rbanffy
http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-of-piracy
======
AnthonyMouse
That blog has a surreal intersection with the issues people talk about on HN.

Put aside the politics of pornography. She's a content creator trying to make
a living, trying to have a reasoned discussion about how to make that happen.

But she can't get paid because we don't have easy, secure, anonymous payment
systems, and her customers won't trust small time studios with credit card or
personally identifying information because they don't want to get double
charged by unscrupulous bastards or end up in a database.

So customers don't have a good way to pay her which means her work is
inevitably going to get pirated more often than bought. At that point she
wants the rational next best thing, which is to distribute her work for free
to as many people as possible, because the only way to make money when only a
small percentage of people pay is to grow your fan base so that it's a small
percentage of many people. Which means that what she wants is a platform for
community engagement -- something like BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay which is
open to everyone and doesn't censor anything or divert your viewers to your
direct competitors. But those platforms and their users are under attack by
the aforementioned unscrupulous bastards and their extortionate "settlement
letters" that push users to their own streaming sites.

So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-
not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy
servers.

Which can only lead to the conclusion that this content creator would be
better off if the likes of Bitcoin, BitTorrent and Tor were more widely used.

Yet people keep saying that stuff is only useful to criminals.

~~~
Goronmon
_So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-
not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy
servers._

To be fair, I did see an ad for a Fleshlight product when I visited the page.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The ad and the nature of the site is obviously the reason the page is blocked.
But the page is still blocked.

If you mean to argue that this isn't a false positive, I disagree. It's just
an extraordinarily hard false positive to avoid. The post and the ad shown
contain no pornography but they're _about_ pornography and other content from
the same source might. None of the filters are that granular.

And that's the problem. Nobody's boss has any justifiable reason to allow
their employees to read HN but not the post in question, but the burden of
false positives doesn't fall predominantly on the company with the filter or
even its employees. It's a negative externality that harms the author of the
blocked content even though she has no ability to fix the filter.

So filters with false positives are a bug and anti-filtering proxies like Tor
are the patch. Which is why everyone benefits when they're more widely
deployed.

------
smcl
Just a heads-up, this appears to be _related_ to NSFW content. I say "appears
to be" because I got a nasty "you're trying to access some sketchy domain and
your admin has been notified" warning when accessing this through my work
computer. Nothing in the title or URL seems to suggest this so I figured I'd
share share in case anyone else may have a similar setup.

~~~
nsnick
Why would you work for a company that censors your internet?

~~~
Strang
I work for a great company and I'm happy with my job. They also happen to
censor my internet (very mildly, I should add). In fact, there are plenty of
sectors where all viable positions would include internet blacklisting. And
finally, plenty of people can't be so picky about their jobs to make litmus
tests out of relatively minor factors like this.

------
emehrkay
This was an interesting read. It is pretty crazy, and easy to parallel to
something like Youtube, how the Manwin empire is built on linking to work that
someone else produced and using the ad money to buy the creators of that work
out. I wonder if Manwin makes an effort to keep content that Manwin-owned
properties put behind a paywall off of the tube sites.

~~~
towelguy
Well they have a monopoly on tube sites, I don't think they'd care enough to
keep their content outside the few others.

BTW, CreativeCommons BY-NC-SA porn videos is a great move.

------
diminoten
Pulling a Louie, I see.

Good. More people should.

If this works out for Stoya like it did for Louie, you should see work from
new/upcoming artists coming from her studio soon after the business method is
validated.

Porn and comedy. Really the same, when you get down to it.

------
k__
In Germany you can get sued if you use Torrents, but you can't if you use a
streaming service, because your're not the distributor.

So many people stopped torrenting at all and started streaming all their video
needs.

It's also faster for smaller things, like those clips mentioned by her.

For this particular type of content it's simply the superior platform :\

~~~
weinzierl
That isn't wrong, but a bit oversimplified. The difference between streaming
and Torrents is that it's easy to get hold of the IP addresses of Torrent
users but difficult for streamers[1].

The situation is special in Germany because:

1\. It is possible go get the name and postal addresses if you have the IP
address. The lawyer just asserts infringement and the prosecutor will hand it
over.

2\. Legal fees for cease and desist letters are based on the amount in
controversy and to be paid by the addressee.

No lawsuit will be filed, just a cease and desist letter sent with a
fictitious amount. People will pay out of fear, it's border line extortion.

As far as I can tell, Torrents are dead in Germany.

[1] Assuming the copyright holders don't cooperate with the streaming
services.

~~~
Kenji
You are mistaken. In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn between
uploading and downloading copyrighted material, and some allow downloading
because otherwise clicking on a link might already incriminate you. What k___
is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves people away from
torrent.

~~~
weinzierl

        In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn 
        between uploading and downloading copyrighted material,
    

Not true in Germany, as far as I know.

    
    
        Nach aktuellem Urheberrecht stellen sowohl Download als 
        auch Upload eine Urheberrechtsverletzung dar und sind 
        als solche prinzipiell auch strafbar. [1]
    

My translation:

    
    
        Under the current copyright law both download 
        as well as  upload are copyright infringement and
        as such, in principle, punishable. 
    
    
    
    
    
        and some allow downloading because otherwise clicking 
        on a link might already incriminate you. 
    

In Germany it does. The most prominent case, so far, was when in 2013 the law
firm Urmann + Collegen sent a large number of cease and desist letters to
people that used a popular adult video portal. They obtained the IP addresses
from ads they allegedly published themselves. This was major news in Germany.

The reason it doesn't happen more often is that going against Torrent users is
much easier and less risky for the law firm. Urmann + Collegen went bankrupt
in 2014 from the fall out of this case, but this is the exception.

I don't have a number for 2013, but in 2011 the mentioned law firm alone sent
70000 cease and desist letters amounting 90 million Euro.

    
    
        What k___ is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves 
        people away from torrent.
    

I understood, but that's not relevant for Germany. Even if it was true it
wouldn't matter, because the two points I mentioned give the cease and desist
lawyers (Abmahnanwälte) a much easier way to go against downloaders.

[1] [http://www.rechtsanwaltskanzlei-
urheberrecht.de/news/Abmahnu...](http://www.rechtsanwaltskanzlei-
urheberrecht.de/news/Abmahnung_Download_Uplo)

------
Padding
I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst
things someone can do. It’s also why I was at least a little bit glad when the
megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be
made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn’t legitimize anything.

Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there
is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don’t seem to feel a need to
attend it. As Valve’s founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service
problem and not a pricing problem".

Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles
available? Is there any service out there that let‘s you watch without having
your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere
people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for
getting the latest "fappening" leaks?

Hence piracy.

Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given
that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of
it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content
creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control
over the contents can be retained?

The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you
want HQ videos, don’t mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then
torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something _right now_ ,
don’t have much bandwith or storage and don’t care much for quality, a
steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some
unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents
containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in
similar behavior as streaming services.

------
towelguy
> Long term crew members have found themselves replaced by inexperienced
> people willing to do their jobs for lower pay. The quality of videos made
> under these conditions tends to suffer.

Do people care that much about video quality in porn? Hopefully the people
gone can use their experience and go to higher payed industries.

~~~
emodendroket
Like what? I mean, the problem that people with expertise are being replaced
by people without it but who will work for less is not a phenomenon unique to
this industry, in the first place (look at the rise of services like MyGengo
or Mechanical Turk or TaskRabbit or or or), and, besides that, if a whole
industry's worth of filming people are suddenly unemployed how can the other
industries (which are presumably already well-staffed) really absorb them all?

~~~
prawn
"people with expertise are being replaced by people without it"

Worth noting that the replacements presumably lack expertise _initially_ but
inevitably improve along the way. Being paid to learn isn't all bad and is
better than occurs for many trades.

~~~
emodendroket
Yeah but it's an ever-rotating parade of amateurs and since the road to
advancement is gone they don't stick around to build up the expertise. When I
was young you'd walk into a place selling hi-fi stereo equipment and the guy
there had worked in the field for decades and had some appreciable knowledge
of it. Does the guy at Best Buy do that?

~~~
cmdrfred
Best buy will never pay more than a few dollars above the minimum wage, thus
best buy has decided that the guy behind that counter will be pulled from the
lowest acceptable pool of candidates. I'm sure stores that have knowledgeable
people for that type of thing still exist, you just have to pay more for that
service. Myself, Ill just read the reviews on Amazon.

~~~
emodendroket
> Best buy will never pay more than a few dollars above the minimum wage, thus
> best buy has decided that the guy behind that counter will be pulled from
> the lowest acceptable pool of candidates. I'm sure stores that have
> knowledgeable people for that type of thing still exist, you just have to
> pay more for that service.

And so this brings us back to my initial contention. Yes. That's true. The
problem is that this sort of "good enough" stuff makes being an expert an
untenable position and those stores are pretty much just gone, even if you are
willing to pay (the pool of customers who are is too small to support it).

------
runn1ng
WiggleYourIndex, you are hellbanned, just fyi

------
fr0ggerrr
"Appears"?? I don't appreciate having fleshlight ads displayed on something I
read at school.

~~~
coldpie
Please install adblock plus.

~~~
Goronmon
Why? I have no problem with people trying to monetize they content they
generate.

------
dsjoerg
I wish I could write like that.

~~~
prawn
I checked the index to see what topics she typically covers and found a story
which I thought was well-written (NSFW for prudish workplaces; no
inappropriate images though) -

[http://graphicdescriptions.com/27-mitcz](http://graphicdescriptions.com/27-mitcz)

------
davidslv
why couldn't you put a NSFW tag? is that asking too much? Thanks for the
awkward office moment.

------
rythmshifter
tl;dr

I worked for a company that got screwed by shrewd business tactics. don't give
money to that company.

~~~
Goronmon
Not only is this not really a summary of the article, the little that is
there, is wrong.

