
Why this Silence About The Pirate Bay as a Distributor of Culture? - Pr0
http://torrentfreak.com/why-this-silence-about-the-pirate-bay-as-a-distributor-of-culture-121230/
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rayiner
It's entertainment, and who says entertainment has to be free? My local strip
club doesn't let people watch for free (even though each additional person
costs them nothing). Where is the big outcry over that?

Some of the rationalizations around Pirate Bay are just awful. I don't watch
movies, play games, or buy albums anymore, largely because I don't have that
kind of time. I don't feel "disconnected from society" because I can't "share
in that culture."

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coliveira
Excellent comment. People in tech seem to believe that access to Hollywood
productions is a right of humanity. On the contrary, it should be paid, and it
should be quite expensive, because it is not culture, it is just
entertainment.

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rayiner
I think it's very much the demographics of people in tech, and I mean that in
a cynical way. 10-15 years ago, if you were in tech, you wrote software to
sell to people. Back then I don't remember much righteous indignation about
the morality of copyrights. Today, working in tech often means working at a
"middle man" place like Google or Netlfix or Amazon, which profit by being
gateways to other people's content. It's unsurprising that these folks may
have different views on copyright.

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vy8vWJlco
"10-15 years ago, if you were in tech, you wrote software to sell to people.
Back then I don't remember much righteous indignation about the morality of
copyrights."

People didn't have nearly as much access to the Internet then, and the
implications of copyright enforcement were much less pronounced (and more
endurable). It was a time when 90% of Windows installations were unlicensed.
It was also an economic boom (and Microsoft in particular was on fire). Now
the Internet touches much more, and enforcing copyright laws among other
things (increasing surveillance, etc), feels suffocating. Most countries are
in a recession, for one reason or another...

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jokermatt999
I notice a lot of hostility towards "entitlement of culture" on Hacker News.
While it sucks that artists aren't always being fairly compensated, I think
there are some other factors to consider, starting with one major question:
Would the people pirating these works have bought them in the first place?

This article focuses on the sheer "access" aspect, because that's the most
noble. If you can't legally buy a work, you aren't going to pay for it. If
ever the word "entitlement" should be used in these debates, I'd say it's
here. For people who aren't able to legally access these culturally
significant works, I'd say yes they are entitled to be able to access these in
an illegal manner and experience our culture. Note _culturally_ significant.
I'm not talking about the _artistic_ merit of Hollywood blockbusters and the
top 40 here.

Similar to the "access" argument, there's the "exposure" argument. How many
works have been pirated simply because they were free, but not something you'd
be willing to risk ~$10+ on? Piracy enables people to get a taste of genres
and styles they never would otherwise experience. I grew up in the age of
Napster, and I was in middle school going to high school when Limewire was
getting big. I listened to a much wider range of music and watched movies I
never would have otherwise because they took almost 0 effort to acquire. I am
a rather different person than I would have been without piracy. I look at my
music library and my taste in movies, and realize almost all of that is
because I was able to pirate them. I think the fact that older people tend to
be more hostile to piracy isn't only because of ingrained habits, but partly
because they weren't shaped by its effects.

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npsimons
My biggest issue with "entitlement culture" is the phrase itself: it's loaded
language, thinly veiled propaganda to make opponents look bad. The
creationists and NeoCons use the same tactic all the time (and freely admit to
it being a tactic they use on purpose; look up their policy documents
sometime). "Death tax" instead of inheritance tax, "taxpayer money" instead of
public funds, etc, etc. "Framing" is another good topic to look up along these
lines.

What I want to know is why creators of content feel "entitled" to get paid?
Sure, it'd be nice to get paid every time you do work, but that's not how the
world works. Getting paid every time someone makes a copy (where virtually no
work is done, these days) was a fluke of history that people shouldn't rely on
either. Note that I'm not justifying copyright infringement ( _not_ "piracy",
another loaded term), but "intellectual property" has no basis in reality, and
a very thin one in what we jokingly call law these days. _If_ a creative work
is so important, then it's important enough to preserve, and that just about
requires unfettered access, especially since there is no requirement to submit
a non-DRM'ed copy to the copyright office anymore.

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nathan_long
>>...it's loaded language, thinly veiled propaganda to make opponents look
bad. The creationists and NeoCons use the same tactic all the time...

...along with pretty much anybody with an agenda. "Pro choice" and "pro life"
are both terms designed to sound good, for example. Who wants to be anti-
choice OR anti-life?

Of course, a less cynical viewpoint is that both terms are designed to express
what that side believes is the most relevant issue.

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CJefferson
I always mistrust discussions of the legal content on the pirate bay as a
defence. Doing something legal does not defend illegal activities in general,
and the pirate bay is, by any measure, predominantly copyrighted material
whose owners do not want their material on TPB.

The other argument, that TPB helps distributes culture so is a public good,
it's a much better argument. It is however hard to know if it is overall
better for society.

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vibrunazo
> It is however hard to know if it is overall better for society.

Really? Have tried to stop and think about the pros vs cons? I would be
surprised if someone did, and didn't conclude it's heavily in the pirate bay's
favor. The pros are it makes it easier for people to access art. The primary
con would be one weaker revenue channel for some artists. But there are so
many means to fund arts. Specially in the kick stater era. Arts are still
being funded, not only that. Are finding new brilliant ways to get funded. And
on the other side, accessing art is easier than ever.

It's just an obvious smashing win for the pirate bay. I mean, just look at how
easy it is to access art today. Versus I don't think anyone would argue it's
any harder to create arts today. Quite the opposite.

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Brashman
I'm not sure that blockbuster-type movies could get funded using kickstarter-
type funding. Even if they could receive the needed funding, I don't entirely
like the idea of moving to that model. Currently, producers front the initial
money (and thus carry the risks and rewards) of the movie. After it's made, I
can then decide based on trailers and reviews whether I want to spend money on
it. Instead, with the Kickstarter approach, I need to front the money based on
some short trailer and description for a movie that may or may not be finished
and which I have very little information on whether I'll like the end product.
I've mentioned movies here, but it extends to music, TV shows etc. I like the
idea of Kickstarter and crowd funding, but I'm a bit too risk averse to fund
many things.

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polshaw
_> I'm not sure that blockbuster-type movies could get funded using
kickstarter-type funding._

I agree (for now), but i'm not sure this would be a bad thing. You might not
be able to make Transformers 3, but you could make most (all?) of Hitchcock's
movies.

Extravagance is a fairly recent trend in movies, and-- whilst i love some of
the high budget movies-- i'm not at all certain it provides a great deal of
benefit as a whole; the story trumps the effects.

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tzs
> I agree (for now), but i'm not sure this would be a bad thing. You might not
> be able to make Transformers 3, but you could make most (all?) of
> Hitchcock's movies.

In addition to "Transformers 3", we also might not have:

WALL-E: $180 million

Toy Story 3: $200 million

Up: $175 million

How to Train Your Dragon: $165 million

Could these same stories be told more cheaply? Sure...but I think they would
have just been good stories then, not masterpieces.

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vibrunazo
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting>

Again, you'd have a hard time coming up with empirical data to support the
hypothesis that Hollywood movies wouldn't exist without copyright enforcement.
That's speculation with zero evidence.

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tzs
Lets do a quick back of the envelope guesstimate. Around 450 people worked on
WALL-E. These movies take years to make, but I'd guess that many of those
people are only in on part of it, so I'll guess that at any given time, only
1/4 of those people are working on it. Figure that an employee costs $100k per
year in pay, benefits, and overhead (I expect that is a low estimate on
average). That gives $11 million per year, just for having the necessary
employees. I believe these movies take about 4 years, so that brings WALL-E to
an estimated $44 million, just for employees.

I suspect I underestimated pay, but I may have overestimated the fraction of
that 450 working at any given time. Anyone in the industry reading this who
can give better data?

Now throw in equipment, facilities, promotion, and so on, and it is not hard
to believe pretty big legitimate budgets.

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mtgx
In a way this seems like the discussion about whether to eliminate patents for
cancer drugs or other drugs for lethal diseases (like it happened in India),
and therefore decrease the price of such drugs by 10-1000x, and help maybe
tens of millions of people, or allow companies (foreign companies even) to
keep charging whatever they want, and _also_ have a monopoly on that type of
drug.

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npsimons
One of the interesting factoids I came across a while ago was the assertion
that 85-90% of pharmaceutical companies' expenses were marketing. Perhaps if
they didn't spend so much on marketing, they wouldn't need to have patents for
so long or charge so much?

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apaprocki
The themes in this post relate to the Internet as a whole and are not specific
to TPB. If TPB went offline for good, everyone using it would simply shift to
preferring a different default site for their searches. You could rewrite this
exchanging Napster for TPB and roll the date back 10 years and it would still
seem valid.

I'm sure I know what the answer would be if the MPAA/RIAA were asked if they
are ok with distributing works for free only to those in countries where it
would otherwise be unavailable commercially. The phrase "shut up and pay me"
comes to mind.

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frooxie
In related news, you always hear about drug-related violence but never about
all the drug-related kisses and hugs.

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xradionut
TPB is a distributor of culture just like graffiti tagged freight trains are a
distributor of art.

