Torrents and copyright infringement is related, we can all agree on that. But I believe that pirating is related to a very fuzzy legal system regarding this topic and unfair treatment by the major movie studios & music labels. I'll try to explain as good as I can.
Being a european citizen, it is very frustrating knowing that pirating is illegal even though being a Netflix, HBO & Spotify customer. Pirating is a much bigger trend in EU & AUS than it is in the US, and I think that it mainly boils down to the US-based movie studios restricting and delaying access to content to non-US citizens. Some may think that this is acceptable, but I can't see how treating one customer differently from another is acceptable just because they have different nationalities. I'm paying exactly the same amount of money as the next US-citizen for the content, yet I am treated differently.
One other thing that troubles me is that there are higher quality content available via torrents than via the legal alternatives. Having invested in a 7.1 surround system and a 4K 3D Android TV, you would expect that the legal alternatives would have content available for such hardware, but they rarely do.
Personally I think it's absurd that the movie studios expect to be on the european market but treat those customers as second-hand customers, and I don't understand why the EU isn't doing anything about it. The EU and US relies on eachothers markets, yet music labels forces the Swedish-invented Spotify to restrict access to certain songs for non-US citizens.
I do acknowledge that some people are pirating because it's free, but I don't think that the general public does so. I'd be the happiest Netflix & HBO customer if I had the same content library as my fellow US friends.
The term "piracy" doesn't help the problems any---it's a smear term that tries to put downloading and sharing on the same level as murder and kidnapping.
As you mention, intent is not always to avoid paying. Some people may want backups, may have lost their copy after paying for it, may be frustrated by DRM-laced copies that don't work on their PC/devices, the reasons you mentioned, etc...
> As you mention, intent is not always to avoid paying.
Oh man, I used to have to reformat my computer regularly (like 3 times a year). There were several hardware issues, my house was struck by lightning, etc.
I swear every time I'd have to call windows, and be like "hey my key is not working" (I know it's because it was activated previously, but still). They would usually make me call and reset it or what have you.
Eventually, I just got sick of it. I torrented a cracked version and it worked like a charm.
I know people who do the same with video games. They'll get a "shared" copy first, then buy it if they like it.
Honesty, I'd argue most people would pay if they could (at a reasonable price), torrenting just makes all the barriers go away.
>The term "piracy" doesn't help the problems any---it's a smear term that tries to put downloading and sharing on the same level as murder and kidnapping.
Precisely:
>I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
-Jack Valenti (former president of MPAA for 38 years), 1982 congressional hearing
It's simply luditism. Their business model depends upon the constraints of obsolete technology, so they will resist every new innovation as an evil killer until their artificial monopoly finally bleeds out.
If "piracy" is too strong of a word "sharing" is too weak of a word. Clearly we must differentiate between legal sharing and non-legal. Piring? (it also sounds like peering which is very much in the spirit of p2p.)
To me it hasn't been proven yet how the argument for p2p copyright laws is any different than a hypothetical argument for let's say drinking, should we make drinking illegal because some people end up harming others because of it and hence any positive/neutral experience derived from it denied to us and overshadowed in the darkness of legality.
I also like "illegal sharing" for the description. Almost anyone can understand that with little, additional info. "Copyright infringement" is not something I can explain in 10 seconds. They'll probably remember it wrong over time, too.
No, because there's about five rights or so with considerations for hiw they're used. Whereas, "you can use whatever you buy but sharing the file or password is probably illegal" is easy for most people to understand and lets them avoid 99% of lawsuit risk. This is true whether copyright system is good or bad. Just simple, mental model.
Except that sharing is not illegal. The idea itself is absurd and sounds absurd when expressed. If you told people that sharing was illegal, the most common response you'd get would likely be, "lol, wut?"
Sharing what you don't own without owner's permission is either illegal or considered u ethical. Cant recall off yop of head. Buying copywritten works usually buys license yo use, not distribute (share). So, don't share the copywritten work seems like sane default if one wants to stay legal.
Whether or not copyright systems make sense or not is another discussion entirely. Irrelevant even given it has to be changed via Congress by strong, voter push and/or more bribes than pro-copyright groups. If talking laws and metaphors, I focus on what is rather than should be.
> Buying copywritten works usually buys license yo use, not distribute (share)
Under this definition loaning a book or movie to a friend is sketchy.
The sharing model is rampant as individuals, it only became a problem when the internet made it so strangers could share without much of a thought that they were even doing so.
But I seriously have to ask myself how borrowing a DVD from my friend differs from torrenting it instead. Perhaps the only difference is that only 1 copy can be watched at a time? Do we need a file loaning service?
"But I seriously have to ask myself how borrowing a DVD from my friend differs from torrenting it instead. "
I cant remember the specifics on loaning angle. I'd just not advertise that I did. Your comment reminds me that i need to fo a refresher on this stuff's grey areas in case the wording needs to be modified.
Owning what you don't possess sets you up for legal takeover. No one stops you from handing a book or disc to another person, in fact, entire governmental organizations exist to handle the logistics of freely sharing such artifacts.
You're again talking about unimplemented morals, which vary person to person, while Im talking about ways to describe actual law. A copywritten work cant be legally shared, displayed, or so on without permission of the owner. The laws have exceptions like fair use, first sale doctrine on individual copies, or libraries loaning them out. Past that, your claims of morals have no practical meaning in a country that enforces the opposite.
Such morals should instead incite those who possess them to act as a democracy to reform the complex and corrupt system. Like we did fighting thjngs like SOPA. So far, almost no action toward elected officials backing up alternatives you suggest people want while they put strong effort onto other issues. I think this means majority of the US just doesnt care that much. And quite a few oppose us hoping to be next to get rich with a monopoly or maintain good portfolios.
You brought up the topic of ethics. I am just explaining why the argument, "sharing is illegal", sounds absurd to many people.
As you noted, copyright laws respect many legally protected activities, like sharing media and holding local displays. The law is pretty clear and I think that is why we don't see many cases about the topic.
>As you mention, intent is not always to avoid paying.
Yeah, not always, but very often. Everyone here is trying to downplay this, but I would say >80% of people (disclamer: pulled from my behind) torrent simply because it's free and if they can easily obtain it free rather than paying, then they will. The argument that people pirate because the paid options are shit, and if they were as convenient as torrents people would just pay for them, is rendered moot with the Steam counterexample. Content distribution is much more well advanced and convenient in games compared to movies, and people still pirate en masse.
Of course, all of us are really just talking out of our collective asses until we can cite figures from a study.
Stop talking "out of your ass". I pirate an occasional movie for a friend, but I spend more time watching shows on Netflix. Why would I even pay for Netflix when I could get anything I want for free ? Because they have a really convenient UI and easy access to their content.
I recently purchased a Google Play Music subscription, despite having 10^6 "pirated" songs on my HDD. Why ? Because they have a reasonable price, cool UI and artwork, convenience of listening anywhere, and the AI bot that helps me find new music I might be interested in. All of those things dont exist in pirate land.
> Everyone here is trying to downplay this, but I would say >80% of people (disclamer: pulled from my behind) torrent simply because it's free and if they can easily obtain it free rather than paying, then they will. The argument that people pirate because the paid options are shit, and if they were as convenient as torrents people would just pay for them, is rendered moot with the Steam counterexample. Content distribution is much more well advanced and convenient in games compared to movies, and people still pirate en masse.
There is also the argument that a large portion of those people would never have paid for your content in the first place even if it wasn't available for free through piracy, that most of them shouldn't even be considered a part of your customer base to begin with because they simply aren't willing or aren't able to pay for it.
>There is also the argument that a large portion of those people would never have paid for your content in the first place
So? If you make a product you usually pay a lot of attention to price it in a way that your target market can afford. The people that can't pay for it aren't supposed to get it for "free" (if you everyone accepted this logic capitalism as we know it would crumble). I say this as someone who pirates something every now and then but I don't have to pretend that I'm somehow righteous when I do it. I do it for the same selfish reasons everyone else does even if they like to pretend otherwise.
I wasn't trying to justify piracy or suggest that people should be able to get things for free [1]. Rather that while piracy is an unfortunate reality of doing business selling digital goods, it probably doesn't have nearly as much impact on the bottom line as some might believe.
This is why companies like Valve practically ignore piracy altogether and instead focus on delivering as much value as possible to actual paying customers at prices they're willing to accept (focusing on exactly what you said smart businesses should). Contrast that to those companies that, blinded by the sheer number of people pirating their products, waste money and time in a futile effort to combat piracy by placing draconian DRM schemes on their products, that end up resulting in the pirated versions offering a superior user experience when all is said and done. A sweet irony if I ever saw one.
[1] I used to be a heavy pirate myself when I was in high school, but these days I regularly pay for content that's priced fairly and delivered in a way that's not user-hostile, and simply treat everything else as if it never existed in the first place.
capitalism wouldn't "crumble" if people who had no need for a product happened to have possession of it. If I had a free tugboat in my back yard, that does't alter the market for tugboat operators in any nearby port.
I thought that it has been economically proven that digital goods such as mp3 downloads have zero value, since each additional copy costs the manufacturer 0.
I think standard economic thought defines value in terms of preferences.
Such that the value that something has to me is the supremum of how much I value any of the things I would give up in order to have it.
So, if I am willing to purchase an mp3 for $1, then I value it at at least $1. If I would also be willing to purchase it for $2, then I value it at at least $2.
If I value it at $2, and it is for sale at $1, then I would gain $1 of value in that transaction.
If the seller is willing to sell it at any price over $0.50 , then that is how much they value (not) selling it.
So then, in this transaction I would gain $1 in value, and they would gain $0.50 in value.
I think this is the standard way to think about it.
Digital goods don't have zero value. We know this because people are willing to pay for them. They just have very little cost to reproduce/transport which results in easy sharing. They're not even unique in this regard - you'll find the same easy reproducibility in books, architectural plans, art, simple circuits, manufacturing techniques, algorithms... any idea that can be expressed and transmitted easily. The problem isn't that those things are worthless (they're not), it's that knowledge can't be "owned" like physical items.
>The argument that people pirate because the paid options are shit, and if they were as convenient as torrents people would just pay for them, is rendered moot with the Steam counterexample.
Steam is usually used as the example of how better distribution results in less pirating...but not all games are available through Steam or "as easily" obtained as through Steam.
Netflix is also a good example. Most people I knew who used PTP were:
1) In regions Netflix doesn't support or doesn't "properly" support (see: UK above)
2) Watching movies that weren't even available through Netflix.
With the death of "game demos" I pirate most of my games. I also purchase most of those games. If game demos were such a thing - the games I did not purchase were games I'd never have bought. Which is very consistent with the "typical pirate argument of trying to make themselves feel righteous".
There are (of course) people who will download for free because they can but the pirates who actually talk about pirating seem to always have other, "reasonable" motives. Bypassing DRM limitations, removing ads, to demo something/see if it is worth paying for, or because pirating is the only way to even obtain the material. They don't even have the option of paying for it if they wanted to.
How could pirating hurt sales if the person pirating can't even purchase the damn thing?
Well, your statement is tautological, since those are two terms for the same thing :)
The real question is how "bad" we should consider copyright infringement to be. For many of us, copyright law has lost its moral footing with draconian DRM, extreme examples of RIAA / MPAA litigation, insane Disney-fueled copyright terms, and a corresponding erosion of the public domain. It may not have lost its legal footing, but legality is not morality, and to call something "bad" because it is illegal is disingenuous.
Or should I remind you how many of our modern societal / legal norms were once illegal?
> Well, your statement is tautological, since those are two terms for the same thing
They mean the word choice, not the act it's describing. "Piracy" smears it as a terrible thing (you're a pirate!), but "sharing" frames it as a good (What do you mean, I was only sharing the movie). The GGP comment switches one biased term for another biased term.
Copyright infringement is to artists as H1-B Visa abuse is to programmers. Both make it harder to earn a living and depress wages/destroy jobs in their respective fields. Both tend to hit the individual or little guy harder than the big company/rockstar-copyright infringement can siphon enough sales from small presses or independent artists to make it no longer profitable to operate.
Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators, so it seems moral to them to more or less destroy their wages, force them to make money not off of creating, but touring, beg for tips via Patreon, etc. If the same thing was done to them, they'd be howling how unfair it is. How about your job pays you little to nothing and you need to advertise and get people to support you monthly on a crowdfunding site just to make ends meet in your field?
Copyright infringement is to artists as H1-B Visa abuse is to programmers. Both make it harder to earn a living and depress wages/destroy jobs in their respective fields.
See, here's the biggest problem with "copyright infringement" as a term; it's too broad. It covers $random_co using your stuff commercially, but it also covers your gran downloading songs from sketchy websites in Russia.
I don't think even the most die-hard of $(insert favorite adjective form of term under discussion) would excuse the first, but quite a few normal, reasonable people would excuse the second, in part, because the economic "harm" is unambiguous in the first case, and impossible to quantify (possibly negative) in the second.
Large multibillion dollar organizations suing grandmothers, printers, and dead people, and claiming $(insert noun form of term) is responsible for $dubious_bignum in "lost sales" isn't helping.
It's not unambiguous. If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same, or if anything worse because they are distributed and impossible to stop, where as repurposers can be at least targeted. If you own a physical goods store, shrink is shrink...a professional thievery team vs 100 grannies and kids shoplifting results in the same loss, but if anything, it's easier to watch out for and stop the team.
Problem is distributed theft is a new thing for us as people, and it seems to be very hard for us to stop or deal with.
The ambiguity comes because laws are supposed to be a reflection of morals, not the other way around, and a very significant chunk of society, myself included, doesn't see downloading a file from the internet without the author's blessing as a wrong.
If enough grannies decide to pirate goods (edit), the effect is the same
I question whether this is a thing that significantly exists in the real world, especially given a number of studies [1] that show "pirates" purchase significantly more media (numbers ranging from 30% to 300%) than non-"pirates". If you have numbers on "losses" that don't come from sources that invent numbers out of whole cloth [2], I'd love to see them.
You can't simply treat an unauthorized copy as a lost sale [3]. And for the sake of pete, stop calling it "theft", or at the very least stop making flawed analogies to physical goods.
> Many programmers seem to have no real care for creators
Programmers are creators of lots of copyrighted works. Claiming that programmers just want to dismantle somebody else's livelyhood is misguided when we use on the copyright system heavily in our work as well.
On another note, I'm sad to see you downvoted. Your point of view is widely shared by the public and if we're going to enact any change, we as a community should listen to and think about how to address your points.
It is copyright infringement, but calling it that carries moral stigma, even though "copyright infringement" has no actual ethical meaning, only a legal one.
What you're saying is akin to entering a conversation about the value of cannabis and saying "Let's just call it what it is. Criminal production, distribution and possession of a controlled substance".
I find your perspective interesting. When I mention copyright infringement to friends I get blank stares. So, my experience is that the term has no stigma, people simply don't understand what it means.
A lot of the infringement is of works that have been stolen from the public domain by copyright term extensions. This theft has gone unpunished for decades.
I pay these content companies so much money across a multitude of services, and yet I still can't watch much of anything that's worth a damn. Their whole business model is hostile to their own customers and remains broken even in the Netflix era.
I'm disagreeing with the anti-social philosophy, not the legality (though it'd be nice to see the latter change to accommodate what the issues I mentioned).
I'd argue that copyright infringement is: making a derivative work of something and selling it for a profit; or stealing an idea outright and profiting from it.
But you also have to allow for the idea that you are doing harm to the creator if you are making it available for free even if you don't profit from it.
No, I don't allow that idea. If anything, I'm helping the creator by getting one more set of eyes and potentially word-of-mouth advertising out there that wouldn't have happened otherwise. If creators believed their product actually had value, they'd offer a 'try-before-you-buy' option. When they paywall & DRM it, my automatic assumption is that they know it's crap and they'd get nothing for it if they were dealing openly and honestly with people.
When they paywall & DRM it, my automatic assumption is that they know it's crap
Then obviously this isn't a primary concern of yours, because why would you rip off crap?
How would you execute "try before you buy" for a novel? You can already get free previews. For a movie? You can view a trailer. You can view reviews. You can rent it, but not for free. I don't see how letting you watch it then deciding if you want to buy it or not will work. How many movies do we keep permanent copies of so we can view them repeatedly? Not many adults I know do this very much.
There are honest complaints about DRM. My gripe with it is that I don't want vendor lock-in on the reading devices. My gripe with research paywalls is for research paid for with public funds. But I have no problem (morally) with the Washington Post asking for a subscription.
To take it when it's not yours is stealing, pure and simple. If it has no value for you then don't take it, and certainly don't redistribute it.
Someone creates something, they set the rules. End of story. Don't like it? Don't buy. But don't steal, also. If you don't like the price of a shirt and don't like the security in the shop, do you just grab the shirt and leave? Oh, and the store is supposed to thank you, because after all you're going to wear the shirt in public and get a ton of free publicity for the store? Puh-lease...
There's nothing inherent in nature that gives a creator any control whatsoever over others' use of their ideas. In the absence of a system of copyright, every audience member at a concert would be free to hold their own concert the next day, singing their remembered versions of the same songs. This is how culture actually worked for ages.
Copyright is a legal fiction, created by governments and enforced by the threat of violence. It is often a useful legal fiction, but absolutely none of it justifies the selfish and self-righteous "MINE!" attitude you seem to espouse in your confusion of physical theft with duplication of ideas.
That's an interesting perspective that we've lost through time as a result of our laws.
This is why DRM scares me so much. What will our society be like when culture says that it's ok that we don't get to tinker, that we don't actually own anything, etc.
All laws are fiction by your account. Why is violence illegal? Why can't bigger/more skilled people just beat up the weak and take their stuff? That's how things were for tens of thousands of years. Prohibiting that is a legal fiction.
Torrenting a movie does not fall into the category of "theft of ideas." It is falls into the category of stealing a work.
As for the argument that things would be made/written etc. anyway, you can still find that. It's out there. If it was better, you would be hearing the music all over the radio. You would be seeing the productions all over TV (because there's no royalty to pay, right?). You do hear and see some, but it's no way for a lot of to make a living. It's not enough. There's no way to take a year off and write that novel that you aren't going to get paid for. So you write a blog instead.
No, some way to protect the work of the people who do it is needed. I appreciate your opinion, but I don't think it's the right answer here.
Yeah, all laws are inventions of people intended to express shared morals in a way that prevents vigilantism. I did say copyright is often a useful fiction. But it goes way too far in its present form of 120 year terms and conflation with physical property. As just one hypothetical, we could easily have a system of patronage with a pseudomarket that determines where the patronage is applied, and creators would still get paid, without having to sue single moms and college students.
You're still using words like "theft" and "stealing". Those terms confuse duplication with deprivation. If we had a magic ray gun that could make a copy of any car on the street for basically zero cost, without affecting the original owner of the car, you'd better believe people would use that, and they definitely wouldn't call it stealing.
So when discussing how to reward creators of intangible products for their work (but only if it's actually good -- nobody "deserves" extra money just because they want it), talking about "theft" and "property" is not helping.
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Added in edit:
> You would be seeing the productions all over TV (because there's no royalty to pay, right?).
I don't think we can reasonably use our current reality as proof that it's the only possible reality. We see talented people gravitate toward the available market for their talents, yes, but in the absence of that market I don't see how their talents would just evaporate.
Besides, most of us who oppose current copyright aren't talking about total abolition (at least not until society is completely post-scarcity). We want an acknowledgement that current works stand on the shoulders of past works, and that future works should be allowed and encouraged to do the same, as well as an acknowledgement that technology is changing and the conveniences of that technology should be embraced, not hindered with crap like DRM and oppressive lawsuits.
Then maybe we're not that far apart. I believe that the term is too extendable-it should be shorter (maybe even non-renewable). But I'm standing on "stealing." Once everybody duplicated that first car, who builds the one that makes it better? She's only going to sell one. So, yeah- torrenting hurts.
Well, this is true in Capitalism as we know it. But, truthfully there is a deeper relationship to the things we create and the people we share them with. What is the end goal of creating art or new scientific discoveries? If it's money alone, well, that's a problem. Ideas need to be shared whether art or science. Just think how we use Arabic numerals.. Every day. Should we be paying someone for that privilege?
What if there were no copyrights. Would people still create things? Damn right they will. At least the skilled and the curious people will.
However, the digital world is a changing landscape. Consider how technology replaces humans in the workplace and displaces jobs. No matter what, change causes collateral damage and the reality is this time it's hitting the bottom-line of the wealthy studios. If they can't afford to come up with a brilliant technical solution to the problem then they are SOL. :)
The wealthy studios are least hit, to be blunt. Generally the more wealthy the content creator, the better they adapt. James Patterson doesn't suffer from piracy as much as the B or C list author who can't get signed or make back his advance. Blizzard doesn't suffer, it's the small indie PC dev.
I think the ebook market is a good example. The big companies can absorb ebook piracy just by raising prices and relying on print sales and a large stable of works to deal with weak sales of easily pirated things. But the small presses and indie authors are starting to dry up because piracy tends to hit them much harder as they have less print options (indie authors never get traditional shelf space) no stable of books to offset risk, and a much smaller window when their book is viable.
There's a good argument that creative destruction favors the rich more than the poor, I think.
However, that has always been the case even with piracy aside: when have publishers not squeezed the profits from the artists of the world? Or what about Walmart running small companies out? Spotify paying peanuts to musicians? That's certainly been a trend of capitalism for a long time.
The companies that have means to invest lots of legal and technical resources in developing DMC and help track down those torrent hubs have a lot of money. They are trying to shut them down to protect their bottom-line, not the content producers. It's a business after all.
How about we call it what it really is, Broadcast.
There's a distinct difference between sharing a couple of mixtapes with your friends at school, to broadcasting it all over the internet for millions of your "neighbors" to see.
I agree that the term "piracy" has been redifined to be a crime inline with rape or murder, which sucks; but let's not kid ourselves that publishing a public torrent for everyone to see is just "sharing".
The difference between sharing a half dozen copies to thousands/millions, is indeed broadcasting/publishing, and that IMO is the distinct difference that's conveniently overlooked in these debates.
I think many of the copy-protection systems during the times of CDs & VHS were made exactly to prevent you from _sharing_ content with your friends & neighbors. I remember times when you couldn't use your own VHS to record television shows because they crippled the signal somehow. That was usually for your personal use only, and still, they called it "piracy" and "copyright infringement".
While putting it all under the label of "sharing" might not be 100% precise, this whole thing was a "problem" long before we could even dream about broadcasting anything.
> I don't understand why the EU isn't doing anything about it
The problem is that right now the EU isn't one copyright market - each EU country is a separate market, with a tonne of legacy exclusive distribution deals in place. If the EU was a single market, it would be the same size or bigger than the US market and would probably get better attention.
The EU is working on it, it just moves at the speed of bureaucracy (and of course each country has lobbyists in the local media which has those legacy exclusive distribution deals resisting it)
Wouldn't making EU single market and getting rid of geoblocking pretty much remove regional pricing? The piracy then would surge even more, because in Eastern Europe you can't expect people to spent 10% of their salary on a new videogame.
> Wouldn't making EU single market and getting rid of geoblocking pretty much remove regional pricing
Yes, it would. That's the whole point of the Euro currency and the long-term goal of the EU.
And that's the main reason a lot of people thought the quick expansion of the EU towards the east (or even the south) was a mistake - if you have a common market and a common travel area, but wildly differing economies, you create strife.
Well then they should just give everyone the cheap price. I don't see why Hollywood is entitled to x% of my salary. If it means they have to spend a few mllion dollars less on advertising Captain America 4 or Star Wars 8 or Fast and Furious 8 then so be it.
Or you could just not watch those movies. Hollywood is not entitled to your money in the same way that you are not entitled to free or or "cheap" access to their products.
Be that as it may, a consequence of piracy is that Hollywood is forced to the bargaining table. Protesting against that feeling of entitlement to better prices is a common theme on HN, but it ignores the (current) reality that if someone wants to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster for free, there is nothing to stop them from doing so.
If that were true, everyone would be using the cheaper spotify prices some countries have in Europe, which almost doesn't happen.
The problem is that they require a payment method from a country by having residence there, that alone prevents abuse in the overwhelming majority of situations.
For the record, I am one of those cases (technically I'm a resident in three countries, potentially 4 next year), so I'm pretty much aware of the details of it.
While I think that's part of it, I also don't think that the movie and record studios are really pushing for a reform either.
The largest studios could, in theory, go to the EU with a proposal for how they would like a single market for movies and music to work. They won't because they like the ability to have differentiated prices. Having to sell a movie in Sweden for the same price as in Slovenia translates directly to lost profit. Selling in Slovenia at Swedish prices results in lower sales figures and more piracy. So I doubt the big players are all that interested in help the EU on this one.
Getting 27 countries to agree on something sounds like bureaucracy nightmare to me :)
So, I just looked up the word "bureaucracy" in a dictionary and it says "a system of government in which most of the important decisions are made by state officials rather than by elected representatives.". I always thought that was what a technocracy was.
The secondary definition is "excessively complicated administrative procedure, seen as characteristic of bureaucracy" which is the only usage I can remember seeing.
Bureaucracy comes from the French word "bureau", that means office. It names the way things are organized in an office, and was created for private offices, only adopted for governments later.
The French "bureaucratie" was coined in the 18th century by French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, from French "bureau" (office/desk) + Greek "-kratia" (power of), as a criticism of how government over-regulation can stunt commerce.
It came into English in the early 19th century, carrying a similarly negative connotation. The connotations have shifted back and forth somewhat since then.
Still, it seems that it's never been primarily used to talk about private offices in English or French; the primary use has always referred to governments.
Agreed, but making things available and advertising them are different things. You can hold off advertising them until you have a dubbing or subtitle available, but people who want to watch it anyway can go ahead and find it with a direct search. In several EU countries, a majority of the population is already English-fluent (or can get by with English subtitles), and those realities aren't reflected by the market.
It's worse as a Chinese citizen, buying is still an option, we have none, even through technical workarounds.
I used to be a Netflix/Hulu subscriber before they've banned proxy access to their content. Lately I tried to buy various TV streaming services but they did a great job in banning VPNs. This is where I stopped believing they have a good faith.
In most cases enrich is a more correct word than support in these cases. Also replace creators for owners. Individuals and small companies I support well (buy every blue ray, CD and t-shirt they sell), large media conglomerates I do not.
Some torrent search/index sites and torrent trackers may be blocked, but torrent traffic itself is not blocked in China, at least on the domestic ISPs I've used. I can download a debian image over bittorrent, without VPN, without a problem. In fact, it can be faster than download directly over http, as the traffic has more potential routes.
Also the netflix catalog is not as big as people claims it is (I live in france). There are many movies missing from the 2000-2010 period (and more when you go beyond).
There also are many smaller details that makes torrent more attractive, like being able to watch the movie offline, HD with low bandwidth, subtitle choice, etc.
Netflix is a good step, and of course the movie industry will use it as "no excuse" argument against piracy. Meanwhile you still have other issues about net neutrality and people using VPN when they can.
Haven't the media conglomerates made it clear you pay to access the content rather than purchasing it. So pay the lowest rate you find fit the content and acquire it as you please, eg torrent + subtitles + dub that you want. Surely that's entirely consistent with their position morally?
> Haven't the media conglomerates made it clear you pay to access the content rather than purchasing it.
Legally, I think they usually make a stricter claim than that: You are purchasing access to the content, but only using the method that you paid for. If you buy the DVD, you aren't licensed to rip it and play the content from files (unless you live somewhere with medium-shifting laws that provide that right).
Further, say that you own a copy in some format, and you torrent an equivalent quality copy. What they'll actually go after you for is the redistribution of tiny chunks of the file to other people in the torrent swarm, because it's easier to prove that you took part in unauthorized redistribution than to prove that you didn't have the right to access the content in the format that you torrented.
Yep. Lack of availability is about the only reason I torrent anymore. It's more convenient for me to watch on Amazon or Netflix (fuck Hulu and it's commercials) or HBO than it is to torrent and manage my Kodi library.
Oh, and the ability to keep my kids tablets in airplane mode (triple the battery life!) and still let them watch their favorite shows/movies on a long road trip is definitely worth the extra effort.
Even in America, at this point most people consider themselves lucky if they find any movies worth watching on Netflix, especially anything fairly recent. Netflix's strength is its TV catalog.
> you would expect that the legal alternatives would have content available for such hardware, but they rarely do.
Nope, wouldn't expect that. It'll come slowly, and apparently very grudgingly. It took a decade or more to be able to get flac downloads commonly available. For years music downloads were low bit rate crap mp3. Pirate it or buy the CD were the only options for quality. It was like they actively wanted us to be searching for torrent sites.
"I'm paying exactly the same amount of money as the next US-citizen for the content, yet I am treated differently."
Nope, it is even funnier because most probably you're paying more than US citizen. 1eur>1usd on exchange market (and it is a long trend) and - correct me if I'm wrong - price levels are the same for US and EU (ie. 9usd in US, 9eur in EU)?
No because what we pay in tax we get back in other forms. The US citizen will have to pay for college (instead of being paid to attend), healthcare, court costs, retirement pension, unemployment, etc.
Don't count the taxes as part of what you're getting back, it's very different and beyond the scope of this article :)
> Federal Pell Grants are limited to students with financial need, who have not earned their first bachelor's degree, or who are enrolled in certain post-baccalaureate programs, through participating institutions.[1]
CSN money is not conditional based on your family's income, has no relationship with the military, and is not earmarked for any particular purpose. The only requirements are that you can't get more than 6 years total (a relatively recent restriction), that you pass 75% of your courses, and that you don't personally earn more than ~160k SEK/year (the exact amount varies, but has an inverse proportion to how much your study).
During high school you get a smaller amount, but then it's only conditional on attendance, not your academic results.
Pell is also not earmarked to a particular purpose and has no relationship with the military, as far as I know. It seems like both programs have a different set of restrictions (Pell does not care how old you are, for example), but CSN is probably more generous overall.
Denmark. Technically you don't get paid to attend, you get a stipend to help pay your living expenses while you're studying. I know it's similar in other places too.
On one hand, I understand the frustration, and I think that copyright holders and policymamkers would be wise to keep this frustration in mind when they make and enforce copyright laws.
On the other hand, however, I don't see how this frustration can serve as a justification for copyright infringement. This seems to flow from one of two premises: 1. the studios made it, therefore I have a right to watch and enjoy it or 2. the studios have made something available to some people, therefore I have a right to see it too. And I don't see how either is even arguably true from either a moral or legal perspective. After all, we're talking about movies and TV shows here, not food and water. (It would be different, of course, if the studios were targeting traditionally disadvantaged minority groups. But I don't think there's any credible argument that there is something akin to, e.g., racial discrimination going on here.)
I do understand that it is not a justification, and I don't justify that as a reason for torrenting content that are unavailable via the legal alternatives due to geo-restriction or geo-blocking. What I am saying is that I believe the torrenting trends in the EU & AUS is mainly due to this very reason.
And let's not kid ourselves, the copyright holders are not stupid. They are very well aware that this is a problem, maybe not the reason, but at least a problem. Yet they keep up with these practices, throwing millions at copyright organizations such as MPAA & RIAA every year to build up some form of scare tactic against normal, law abiding citizens across the globe and creating lots of unnecessary tension between ISPs, governments and enterprises like Google instead of addressing the problem at hand.
There are of course edge cases where I think torrenting copyrighted content is OK. For example, my PC doesn't have a CD reader and I bought the game "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" years ago, still have the CD but no way to install the game on my PC, so... I torrented it.
> treat those customers as second-hand customers...
If I look at content available at these services, I feel more of a third or fourth hand customer. And that is the reason I have left them for good. Scorched earth is what is left for me.
But you would not even have to go to these streaming "services". I really love my classic tv shows. Take for example "Quincy, M.E.". I love this show and would pay good money to have it available at home (in DVD or BluRay format). And for my significant other have the synchronized version. The whole series was synchronized for German TV. But is it available as DVD? No it isn't.
Our only chance i to wait for the reruns on any network, program our HDD recorder and ripp the low quality TV stream.
If I would still be illegally downloading, I would already have the whole show at home, with self printed DVDs and such. But being a good and law abiding citizen I am pretty much fed.
The big issue is that it both is and isn't their fault, in a sense. I believe a lot of the hold-up comes from who owns the distribution rights for various locales, stuff that was determined years ago before online distribution was considered feasible. Odds are they'd gladly have you as a customer and sell you content, but they themselves are unable to because of previous deals. They still get a cut either way, so the studios ultimately aren't worried too much...
> I'm paying exactly the same amount of money as the next US-citizen for the content, yet I am treated differently.
Netflix' official standpoint is that you are paying for access on n screens at a time at x resolution (e.g., FullHD), not for the content.
This is of course complete nonsense — of course we are paying for content — and I have no qualms whatsoever in downloading something available on Netflix US via some torrent if it is not available in my local Netflix catalogue.
>Torrents and copyright infringement is related, we can all agree on that.
I don't and neither does Bram Cohen. Regardless, I agree with your overall notion. The times have changed and customers want a better solution to quality entertainment. Restricting access and content will lead to piracy. Vice-versa will lead to less overall piracy.
I'd happily bet big money that orders of magnitude more people are pirating because it's free than because they'd invested in 7.1 surround system and a 4K 3D TVs.
Everyone I know who pirates is doing it because it's free. Although almost all of them pay for something (Netflix, Amazon Prime or Nowtv), they just don't pay for all of them. And these are all grown adults in their 30s.
Say you pay for Netflix and Amazon, but they don't have everything. So GoT has to come from somewhere... And movie releases are still over-delayed to streaming services. You see a DVD in the shop? You can stream it for free rather than wait 6 months more for it to maybe turn up on Netflix.
Cost is an issue, although I wonder how many people pirate movies ans shows because it's "really" too expensive for them. If you want to watch the movies you want, and you're not so rich, it certainly is going to cost you more than a netflix account, but I don't think everyone is doing it because of the cost, they also do it because it's easier. It's hard to beat the torrent catalog.
Also if you enter the argument of entertainment being a luxury, and that a DVD should cost around $15, you will have people pirating because they certainly don't want to spend so much for watching a movie at home. There will be people arguing over the holywood money machine and how much a movie really is worth.
The explanation is that distribution rights are sold by territory because most old school distribution channels are by territory. And content is usally financed by the sale of rights (usually before anyone has seen anything).
But streaming is becoming more and more important and those deals will be reviewed.
To give you an example, when Netflix opened in my country, House of Cards wasn't in the catalogue. That's a show produced by Netflix.
But that was because Canal + Afrique held the rights.
A few months ago, it was added. Most likely because the contract expired or because they renegociated.
The fact that there is an explanation for this geoblocking doesn't mean that we aren't being treated differently.
Fortunately, Netflix is putting a lot of effort in their own content to prevent exactly this quagmire of regional licensing. They are well aware that it is one of the biggest complaints their customers have.
Oddly enough, the new Star Trek series will actually be on Netflix worldwide except for North America — usually it is only the other way around except for the local-language content.
I am worried though about Netflix (and any competitors) assembling catalogues for each separate country based on what people in that country like on average. I didn't sign up for Netflix to get Dutch soap opera's and reality shows, and I do not like being limited to a catalogue focussed specifically on what the average Dutchman wants. There is whole world out there; so what if I want to watch Austrian cooking television or Japanese game shows? Just fix the damn licensing mess already!
> usually it is only the other way around except for the local-language content.
I personally don't think this is true. There are significant amounts of content on Netflix that are only available in regions such as NLD and GBR that are not available in USA / CAN (Orphan Black comes to mind off the top of my head).
I would give up those few titles if that means getting access to the US (or even Canadian) Netflix library. It's also important to mention that those TV series are actually aired on TV in the United States, here in the Netherlands we have to hope that some TV picks up the rights in a few years (instead of airing endless Bones/CSI/House reruns) if it's not on Netflix.
USA: 4100 films, 1154 series
Netherlands: 1475 films, 382 series¹
It really doesn't compare. In the US Netflix works as a back catalogue for older films as well. Sure, not everything is there, but compared to what we get…
"Torrents and copyright infringement is related, we can all agree on that": torrent is a technology to share files while copyright infringement is an action that violates the copyright. What is the relation between them??? Then according to you, emails and copyright infringement is also related (I can send a mp3 song via emails). Or the steel industry and crimes are related because steel is used to make knives, guns ... used to commit a crime.
Now you are just playing plain stupid, and won't contribute anything of value to a serious discussion about the problems with legal alternatives over torrenting.
I can't see how you can imagine that having a discussion about this with someone high up in the movie industry acting like you do would do any good. You'd just be shunned. It's better to be realistic and acknowledge the fact that the majority of torrent traffic is related to copyright infringement, and that it is a problem and the only way to solve it is to make the legal alternatives better and more attractive to the general public. Of course, the BitTorrent protocol is not and should never be illegal, but you have to acknowledge that it is the protocol that currently plays the biggest part in infringing copyrighted content.
Pirating is absolutely LEGAL in my country, and covered under fair use. I can make a copy of any audio/visual copyrighted material and give it out to my friends and family, I am also free to download whatever I want (audio/visual, no software) from the internet. Uploading/sharing outside of my close circle of family&friends is illegal tho (no torrents).
It's about updating torrents via DHT mutable items. Meaning that torrent sites could share their public key and simply seed an .rss file containing their indexed torrents (a mapping of infohash -> descriptions). When they want to share new torrents, they simply update their torrent to a new .rss file and consumers will hop on that new swarm.
We need more support to get this into a standard BEP and also into torrent clients.
I know there are other networks (IPFS, I2P, Freenet, ZeroNet, etc..) that do this, but BitTorrent is the most widely used and I think implementing functionality in the torrent ecosystem itself would have much more effect.
The real value of sites like TPB and KAT is the community upvoting/downvoting torrents to only keep the correct torrents, and people commenting about actual quality, pointing the problems of encoding or language... This can't be provided by your proposals or anything that relies around an RSS feed, unfortunately
Trusting the entity that they're not updating the torrent with spam is the first step. Discussions about the quality of torrents is a different matter which I think neither TPB and KAT have solved - spam accounts could invade such centralized services and downvote quality content. In my opinion a "community" is better built out of a network of trusted public keys.
The reason piracy is so popular is because it is free and because it's incredibly convenient, in that order.
The convenience factor is basically, if you want some content (movie, game) it's a simple search and download away (streaming torrents seem to be gaining traction). No legal alternative offers this level of convenience.
I suspect piracy will become harder for the average user due to three letter agencies making life harder for pirates, but it won't stop the determined ones.
Speaking of determined torrenters, Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB had something interesting to say about torrent aggregators being shut down [1]. The idea is that even though downloading torrents itself is p2p, finding the magnet links is still centralized and that is an area that needs to be decentralized.
It's much, much more than that. It's the only way to get an acceptable product.
I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently.
DVDs included region forcing, and forced, unskippable adverts and copyright notices. Netflix, .mkvs and .mp4s just have the programme and titles.
Usually someone, somewhere, has put effort into making a good quality rip saving me the time doing so, along with synchronised and corrected subtitles.
For games, the major studios still feel annoying and restrictive copy protection is the way to go. I don't want a £30 game that requires me juggling collections of plastic disks, or an always on net connection to a licensing server they may turn off in a year or two anyway. So the noCD, no licensing server release is a necessary download for me. I tend to mostly buy GOG and independent studios putting out DRM free things these days. EU IV being about the only exception I can think of in the last 2 years.
I'm not a fan of being data mined on how often and how far I read ebooks, listen to audiobooks. So first thing on buying a new ebook from Amazon is rip the protection to read it on my non-amazon reader. First thing to do with an audible book is convert to mp3. If either of those became unfeasible or impossible I would stop buying.
Finally for music, we've had attempts with copy protections and Sony rootkits, but mostly my music collection is complete and they gave up on silly DRM attempts. I only need to rip new stuff that's not available in FLAC.
> I have ALSO pirated everything I ever bought until very recently.
Pirating helps to sell their products, think of it as free advertisement, this is the thing movie studios, music producers and book publishers don't understand. I know folks that for each pirated book they keep buy a physical one, also friends that pirated some movie and by a word of mouth advertise to go and see it in the cinemas, music to buy and go to the concerts etc. If you can't see the product how would you know if it's worth buying? Therefore someone who pirates would never pay anyway and chasing them would make you less money not more!
The legal alternatives just don't have the content I'd like to see. The Netflix catalog for example contains maybe one out of ten movies I'm looking for, whereas it is easy to find even obscure movies using torrents. If you like older or less popular movies you're generally out of luck. At best you can find a DVD, but that won't work for movies that weren't even released in your region.
I don't understand why it is so hard for the studios to offer their whole catalog online and let me download a movie for a buck or two. Add the possibility for user-submitted subtitles and you have an excellent competitor to piracy.
Torrent sites have huge advantage over streaming services is that they can distribute all content.
If streaming services had everything, people would pick one based on price and quality of the actual streaming gladly pay more than current prices are. There is no change in hell that customers pay for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon at the same time.
There is obvious business solution for this. Content producers should provide their shows and movies for all streaming services for same price. Streaming services would just exist to stream data and distribute payments from customers.
Current business model of streaming is working against "the internet" and torrents are way to get around it.
No idea if that is true or how many people are putting that much money for contents on monthly basis. Compared to the streaming services this is quite much and with that money you could get a monthly subscription to several services.
Convenience is definitely a factor. We pay for cable TV, Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime (with video). I recently bought a nice big TV for my basement den and while it has Netflix and Amazon apps built-in, Comcast blocks you from authorizing the AndroidTV HBOGo app so I need to cast from my phone to watch that. And for cable shows, I'd need to rent another shitty cable box that doesn't work worth a damn anyway.
So instead if it's not on Netflix or Amazon (god their TV app just got even worse) I often just fire up the VPN and stream a torrent. I've paid for the shows but I just don't want to rent another cable box or deal with casting from mobile. Programs like Popcorn Time are great in that you can bookmark your favorite shows, see which episodes you've already watched, search for new shows from a Netflix-type interface, and watch in 720 or 1080 on demand.
If there was a legit option like this from Comcast (heh, that'll be the day) I'd gladly pay double what you pay to rent a cable box. It's really just that simple and it works much better than any Comcast gear despite being a hacky program with several forks and questionable approach.
I don't hold any illusions about my entitled attitude. I understand that my convenience and preferences don't get to dictate the business policies of content creators and distributors and I know that just because I pay for stuff doesn't mean it's legal to violate copyright in this manner...
...but I don't feel that what I'm doing is particularly immoral even if not particularly legal. At some point I just take stock of how I do things and keep an eye out for better ways to do them. If I can find a way to improve my spare time and how I spend it, I don't mind finding my own ways to do so.
I'd say the opposite with regards to convenience, but maybe I've been away from the scene for a few years now
Nowadays it seems more of a hassle to pirate content, especially here in the UK with torrent sites getting blocked by ISPs (necessitating a need for VPNs or proxy services) along with having to constantly find new sources for torrents as authorities crack down on sites like KickAssTorrents.
I find it easier to just subscribe to Netflix and Spotify, but maybe I have more disposable income now that it doesn't bother me.
I used to have a Spotify subscription. Then I moved out of Sweden and lost half my playlists. Never subscribed again.
I never had a Netflix subscription because I don't have a good enough connection to stream high quality videos - Additionally, I rewatch some series a lot. It's simply more convenient to have them on my hard drive.
The US gov is running around the internet policing copyright for very specific companies, acting like they're doing the world a favour. Calling everybody thieves. Threatening people with fines and prison. "You can just pay for a Netflix/Spotify subscription"... well, no, not everywhere and it's certainly not as convenient for everyone.
Sidenote: Spotify's content bootstrapping was a dump of music from TPB. If it weren't for piracy, we wouldn't have spotify. The system is broken.
You would think music, film, and games would be comparable, but I find that these fall into distinct categories for me.
I am totally okay with paying a monthly flat fee for films and series (mostly watch once and be done with it).
I am also okay with paying once for a game and not keeping the downloaded files around after I finish it. Rather, I let Steam or the HumbleStore handle that, and if these go belly-up one day, I don't feel like I've lost much; the value I get in hours of entertainment is in balance with what I spend there, and I am okay with the limited risk of losing access to some games.
For music on the other hand, I absolutely want the files on my hard disk. Music is replayed over and over, and losing access to what is essentially the soundtrack of your life is something I would like to avoid. I'd love a service that allows me to download, say, up to 8 hours of music (any genre, in an open lossless format) a month from a universal catalogue for a reasonable flat fee (like Netflix), but this simply doesn't exist. It is either streaming or paying way more than I find reasonable.
Interestingly, for games the existence of reliable, affordable legal channels for digital delivery means that I have not felt the urge to illegally download any game at all for over a decade, and the same seems to hold true for many colleagues and friends. People are totally fine with downloading films, series, and music for a variety or reasons, but why bother with games? The money you pay, say, Steam or the HumbleStore seems to flow back to the developers in a fairly fair fashion, there are good deals to be had, and it is all very convenient — for games it just seems like a solved problem.
Games are essentially solved as far as consumption goes. There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority.
However, they aren't solved when it comes to archival. It's getting constantly worse with the rise of online-only games with closed source, undistributed servers. A subject for another day, though.
Fair point. The archival question is complex because of the inherent difficulty in keeping old software running on modern operating systems. At some point it doesn't pay to keep supporting newer operating systems even if you still have sales; only for the really popular titles. Perhaps containers would work?
Yeah, emulation or containerization works nicely for old games. However, newer games have server components which are required to run the game and/or have any content. When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.
> When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.
IIRC, the cracks for the old always-online UPlay DRM basically contained a MVP implementation of their servers.
And of course, you have MMORPG "emulators", but those take a lot of effort, only come out for ridiculously popular and lasting games, and end up rewriting most of the game logic based on speculation. So the end result is more like Minetest vs Minecraft than cracked Assassin's Creed vs legit Assassin's Creed.
Sidenote2: Hollywood got started because of a move from NYC to get around having to pay licenses to Edison. Hollywood exists because they wanted to infringe the protections without paying.
Hmm ...this is really interesting, I didn't know about 'Hollywood built on piracy' story at all. I did some research and found this interesting comment in one of the articles, which does seem to make sense.
"The proponents of this myth seem to want to suggest an analogy: Hollywood was built by “outlaws”; now Hollywood has become the incumbent, seeking to stop the next generation of “outlaws”. But this is a false equivalence. The Pirate Bay (or Megaupload, etc.) isn’t producing its own movies. Recognizing exclusive rights to a creative work doesn’t prohibit anyone from creating their own works. Stopping someone from offering copies, especially complete, verbatim copies, of a work is not anti-competitive."
That's some impressive variation from how I remember reading it, though you'll note I said licensing not piracy. If memory serves it was equipment licensing that was the issue - rental of cameras, projectors and such.
I don't know enough of the period to know who's right, but looking at the about page tells me all I need to know about the independence of view: "... representing creators across the spectrum of copyright disciplines. He represents the Copyright Alliance in all copyright and related policy issues in a variety of forums". So choose your preferred flavour of spin?
It's well known Edison was an evil bastard for instance. You've only to read a little, especially on Tesla, to realise that. So there's little doubt that moving to Hollywood and escaping Edison's thugs was a good thing. The fact remains he had the movie industry of the time tied up with patents. I think it was actually Edison who pirated a movie, and ended up putting someone out of business in the process.
I am not aware of any write-up, but I was an early beta user and can confirm that you could enter names of release groups into the search field and get hits back then.
Initially I believed in streaming my music, but when they went public I lost half my playlists and has gone back to "files on disk" ever since. It is remarkable how difficult it is to pay for music, I wish we would see more sites like Bandcamp.
It can be free but not that convenient. Pirated content needs to be checked to make sure it's not fake nor malicious, not to mention the technical downsides of the torrent protocol (large bandwidth consumption, insecure, easy to block, slow speed on non port-forwarding routers etc)
It's much easier to buy and download games on Steam or watch movies on Netflix nowadays.
For movies you can find on Netflix that's absolutely true. The difference is that effectively anything can be found via torrent or nzb, while the catalog of any single paid provider, even netflix, is relatively limited. You might get reasonable coverage (although still not as complete) by combining a number of subscription services, but the 'ease' advantage quickly disappears.
I would happily pay a significant multiplier on what I pay for Netflix in order to legally stream any reasonably popular movie released within the past few years, plus a decent selection of older ones. IE, roughly what you would find at your average Blockbuster 10 years ago. (A similar selection of TV shows would be nice too.) Things may be improving, but they're definitely not there yet.
In this thread why are the rental options like iTunes not being discussed? Those distribution channels have the convenience of streaming, and a deep catalog. Is it because everyone wants all the movies for $10/mth or less rather than $5 a show?
Yeh, iTunes and similar options have a pretty good selection, in both SD and HD. It doesn't suffer from the same pains that DVDs had (ie. no advertisements before the movie starts). It is more convenient than torrenting.
So, it strikes me as odd that people here only consider pre-pay streaming options and ignore other viable options as they rant about their rationalization for torrents.
I checked last 10 movies I saw. 2 aren't available on Netfilx at all. Of remaining 6 aren't even available in US. None is available in my country. I think I'll stick to torrents.
>TFW your children won't experience having access to all the software, music, and other content they could ever want just by knowing how to use a computer better than most people
Feels bad man. Having access to a cracked version of Photoshop at 13 years old changed my life.
Same here. I wonder whether this experience with the free cracked version helped make Photoshop any more popular. If it was only used in the legal sense, costing hundreds, would it be so popular?
At one point, I developed a hypothesis that for a big software vendor, turning a blind eye to piracy was like a form of "dumping" on the market. Consider a vendor like Microsoft. They could make their money selling legit copies to businesses, and through package deals on new computers.
Meanwhile, anybody who tried to sell a simpler or even better product at a lower price was forced out of the market by the "free" copies of Microsoft that were widely available.
The same "free" software gave Microsoft an advantage in the platform wars (e.g., Windows vs Mac) as well. Though most of the mainstream software was available for both platforms, people would buy a computer that could run the software that they could get for "free," often by copying the disks at work.
I remember a conversation with a friend. He was buying a new PC. I suggested getting a Mac (around 1996). He said: "The Mac doesn't run AutoCAD." I suggested that he couldn't afford AutoCAD anyway, and he just gave me a wink and laughed.
I don't know how this applies to movies and music, i.e., what a "cheaper alternative" looks like. When I was a kid, we would never see a first-run movie. Instead, we'd have to wait until it showed up at the discount theater, where we could see it for a buck. Today, there may be no reasonable business model for providing a lower priced channel for content, because content competes with pirate content.
> At one point, I developed a hypothesis that for a big software vendor, turning a blind eye to piracy was like a form of "dumping" on the market. Consider a vendor like Microsoft. They could make their money selling legit copies to businesses, and through package deals on new computers.
I have anecdata to support this, actually, though I won't name names. The company in question prided itself on the fact that bootleg copies were being sold for something like $5USD in (I think) Romania, whereas their competitors software was being sold for a few dollars less. For comparison, a single commercial license could set you back over $1000-$4000.
The way I see it, it's the same as offering free or next-to-nothing licenses to students. Not only can students not afford the software, you're competing for the mindshare and the number of people who put "I know how to use this software" on their resume.
Heh, i have a lovely anecdote about those student discounts.
The only guy i knew that had heard anything about Apple before the iPod craze was a hobby musician i grew up alongside. Once he reached college the first thing he did was buy himself a Macbook using the student discount.
I could have sworn that MS had to be dragged into strengthening their anti-copying measures from XP onwards by the BSA.
Never mind that MS tries to argue that their products have a lower total cost of "ownership" for businesses, as potential employees are familiar with MS products by having used them already. Thus they require less training if hired.
I think there is even a statement from Bill Gates somewhere about how he would rather see people use unlicensed MS products than FOSS alternatives.
Autodesk (maker of AutoCAD) gives out several thousand dollar pieces of software to anyone with an .edu these days. That's totally the strategy behind it.
I swear there is a line from Bill Gates about how he would rather see people used unlicensed copies of Microsoft products than look into FOSS alternatives.
Never mind the number of companies that maintain steep student discounts. It sure has hell is not because of the goodness of their hearts.
There are still thousand other ways to get what you want. Usenet/Private Trackers/xdcc/FTP/OCH for example.
Filesharing will never die, but the easiest available ways will always be a target of the copyright cops.
What do you need a blockchain for? Storing millions of no more seeded torrents?
There are already magnet links and DHT which is distributed shared database. The only issue is a search function, which is much easier to implement and works much faster when it's done in a centralized form.
For distributing all those magnet links of course. Yes, it will be a huge morgue of dead magnet links but not being able to remove them is a required feature. And more importantly it needs to store ratings and not be gameable, or it will be taken over for malware and spam and die a quick death. Which is going to take some thought.
I still don't see how blockchain helps with distribution and what incentive would be to store huge loads of this type of data locally.
Ratings are important indeed, but blockchain doesn't make them not gameable. For this you need some working web of trust and oh how I wish we had one already (yes yes I know the technology is there and it 'works', but it must work like an e-mail works for an average user to really be popular, I want to be warned not to buy from given ebay seller because friend of my friend of my friend had a bad experience and because I assign high weight to this friend opinion, well that went OT a bit..). On torrent sites there's a thin web of trust of website owners moderators and then trusted uploaders, we could do so much better.
Not to make a separate post, small ask HN: any interesting active projects trying to build such user friendly distributed WoT?
In the context of something like the warez scene the ratings system can be read only to end users.
When releases are made to the decentralized torrent repository they are signed by the release group.
Whether or not a particular signer is an official member of The Scene is decided by consensus of The Scene. The web of trust is very small. Everyone involved is tech savvy, motivated, and already knows each other.
From time to time updates to the list of known groups and their keys may be posted, authenticated by a multisignature scheme.
Then clients can automatically discover who's trustworthy and filter on that. No technical skill or effort required of the general public.
Torrents are ephemeral. The persistence provided by a blockchain is totally overkill and comes at a very high cost in resources. Blockchains also don't inherently provide strong sender anonymity. That would have to be built on top.
I think Riffle may be the most sensible option I've seen for sharing magnet links or torrent files. In theory, Riffle doesn't require a large number of servers and doesn't demand unreasonable client bandwidth to deliver protection against a very powerful adversary.
It's just an academic system with a basic proof of concept implementation. Quite a bit of work needs to happen to turn it into a usable system.
For the data itself Riffle is too expensive. Something with a weaker threat model that costs less resources is needed, such as Aqua or Herd. Those systems are also academic at this point.
There are 3 other issues: hosting the UI, DNS, and monetization.
You can get away with hosting a client-heavy JavaScript interface on ipfs as well, but the URL will be ugly making you reliant on Google not dropping you (central point of failure).
And then there is incentive - even if you manage to anonymously take Bitcoin for ads or what have you, someone will eventually take all the work and strip them. The whole thing will have to be a labor of love. Any lovers out there?
Yes that's true, and given that torrenting is generally reliant on installed software as well, it shouldn't heavily impact adoption.
I did think of another issue: search, sort, voting, etc. Ethereum is too expensive, too slow, and possibly not capable of that kind of large data set computation - not aware of any capable alternative.
The first thing that got me to pirate movies was that DVDs did not work because of their DRM after I installed Linux. I had plenty of legally bought movies that just did not work on my computer until I found the right Gentoo packages (libdvd-css or something)... I never tried Netflix because it took so many years for it to work with Linux. Being a free software user, it is easier to pirate stuff than to buy the content. If companies just gave me access to a DRM free .avi/.ogv download for a decent price, I would buy the damn movies.
> If companies just gave me access to a DRM free .avi/.ogv download for a decent price, I would buy the damn movies.
A million times this. The music industry figured out how to sell DRM free music files years ago and ever since then I haven't pirated a single album. If the video entertainment industry would do the same, my torrenting days would be over.
The thing that gets me is that everyone's fine with libraries and used book stores, as well as sales of second hand games and DVDs, none of which send profits back to the creators or rights-owners.
But digital piracy, that's amoral. Sigh. I like seeing the contortions of logic people pull off to try and explain how these things are different.
With the recent shut down of KAT, we're kind of in a "low phase". It always has been a game of cat and mouse, but now, we've sadly lost two big mouses. I hope someone will quickly take up the torch.
It's not really set in stone, from here[0], for instance - "Technically, since "mouse" is an acronym for "manually-operated user-select equipment," it could probably be pluralized as "mouses." But since hardly anyone is aware of the word's etymology, and because it sounds less awkward, most people pluralize it as "mice.""
It's a tricky business running a torrent site. Unless it is fully decentralized, it can be shut down fairly easily.
Starting a torrent site using the HTTP & DNS protocols is a lost cause. HTTP can be worked around, but DNS is very problematic. I think we'll see more and more torrent sites show up that leverages IPFS[1] or ZeroNet[2], but the second the main browser vendors adds support for something like IPNS (decentralized alternative to DNS), torrent sites will have won the battle with MPAA, RIAA and other IP and DMCA enforcers. Considering the grip that the movie studios has around the vendors, it is very unlikely that it will happen.
Don't forget Freeenet https://www.freenetproject.org/, which has the goal of anonymity. IPFS isn't anonymous and the IP address of users pinning the content is easily discoverable.
Freenet has at least one site that lists magnet hashes and inserts some of the torrent content directly into the network.
I believe the main problem is how the site owner can remain anonymous and still collect the advertising revenue. The hosting does not seem to be so big issue, since these well known sites have been running for quite a while.
Yes it is decentralized, but it relies on central authorities to work, which in turn relies on a stable, cross-border legal system - which many believes is currently not in a good state (see Freak_NL's response for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12230903 ).
People have different views on this of course, but I think we all can agree that it needs a major overhaul to make the majority happy (the legal system that is).
Since Mozilla didn't shy away to include Adobe Binaries in Firefox to decrypt Movie-Streams, i'm pretty sure for IPNS we're going to get a unmodifiable Blacklist so "Bad"-Sheep can be blocked.
It's getting harder with Google though, as their algorithms seem to be tuned against it. I'm prety sure torrents of very popular things like current movies and music etc. are still easy to find just due to overwhelming popularity, but it's the more "fringe" stuff that has really suffered in accessibility over the past few years --- the stuff that you can't even easily find or purchase a physical copy of.
The double standard is incredible. Google would be well served defending the open web by supporting sites such as torrentz (via legal resources or otherwise), its unfortunate that the PR aspect prevents such a thing.
How would assisting copyright infringement benefit the open web?
I see the mention of double standards but it seems very odd to me that someone would support copyright infringement (grabbing films etc.) and deem it acceptable yet we'd balk at someone either:
a) not paying for software we were selling, or
b) not paying for a software service we were selling.
The law is not stupid, if 90%+ of what you do aids illegal activity you're going to feel the heat. Google's proportion is much lower. It's not a double standard as much as a subjective demarcation. No one would take down a torrent site with 90% legal material and processes to remove offenders.
Why would that benefit Alphabet/Google? They have been working hard at their image of a service provider friendly to the needs of copyright owners (think of how Youtube handles DMCA requests and performs geoblocking based on IP licensing).
YouTube goes above and beyond the law in favoring copyright holders. Historically, it doesn't take notices with any legal force to get videos removed or forcibly monetized, just an (often automated) entry in YouTube's system; an appeal against a copyright claim (whether fair use or pure bogus) is decided by the claimant; and (for a long time, but I think not anymore?) claimants kept the money earned while their claim was active, even if it was rescinded.
Are they going to come after the private trackers after this? The numbers are relatively very small though. I would hate if that happens.
I pay for content whenever I can but those trackers provide me with stuff I mostly never get anywhere else (and in the format and size I want) even if I want to pay.
so if you are running a torrent aggregation service its illegal.. but if you are running a torrent aggregation service along with a regular web search service it becomes legal? maybe there is an opportunity for pirates here...
looking at google (and any other web search engine)
It's amazing that even on HN, the conversation is no longer moored to the past.
Copyright in America has been extended beyond reasonable restriction, driven by the MPAA and RIAA who began chipping away at the net as we knew it, and continue to do so today. All of this at the behest of firms which continue to use the most interesting of accounting techniques to show losses, while simultaneously doing everything in their power to make it harder for people to comfortably and easily access media (starting from the time of CDs to today).
All this on top of the fact that studies show that torrenting movies don't indicate lost sales and actually working as a signal to indicate the popularity of a product.
all this on the forum where it's reasonable to expect people to know the value of the network effect.
Here's an interview question I might pose to candidates (for a coding job):
"Which torrent site with access to popular songs and movies over the past 5 years has been the best, meaning the one you use most?"
My candidate responds and says "Pirate Bay" or "Kat".
If I have several candidates, this guy will be the last possible choice if every candidate is qualified because I'm assuming he's okay with using copyrighted works without paying.
Consider these scenarios -- stealing in your opinion?
- go to a restaurant, eat a meal, then leave without paying (you enjoyed something you were supposed to pay for but you did not pay)
- use public transit and not pay for the ride
- hail a taxi then run away when you arrive at the destination and not pay
If I asked a candidate "would either of these 3 scenarios above be okay?" -- would they expect me to hire them if they said one or more would be acceptable?
If I asked the candidate "how many times have you enjoyed a copyrighted film or recording -- and not paid?" -- 99.99% sure that every candidate would say 'never' even if they'd done so dozens of times.
Why would they lie to me about that? "If I tell the hiring manager I watch, listen to copyrighted stuff without paying, he might think that was wrong and not hire me, so I have to lie."
"It's not stealing, I just disagree with copyright laws/distribution channels/etc."
Even as a hypothetical, it is an example so laden with meaning and implication that the only true measure of your argument will come when you actually apply it during a recruitment drive. Please go ahead and discuss this with a recruiter and see what they say.
More cynically put; what matters is if you are perceived as a facilitator of copyright infringement and a threat to the business models of corporations willing to spend a lot of money on shutting you down.
Regardless of whether what Torrentz was doing legal or not; what you do doesn't even have to be actually illegal to be shut down if your opponent has bigger pockets.
Intent matters. The vast majority of people that buy a gun do not murder people. The vast majority of people that download iron_man.torrent only intend to do one thing with it.
That's completely false. I own multiple guns for target shooting and hunting and have no intent on ever using them to shoot at people. I don't even keep them in a convenient location to use for self defense.
I suspect the poster's only experience with guns is their portrayal in the media. Spending more than 10 minutes in a mountain town in the US would make you quickly realize how many people have guns with no intent to use them on people.
I just believe that there is a bigger discussion to be had with we mean with facilitating. There is an attempt by the copyright industry to expand and stretch the definition of "facilitation" to those who don't have the intent. Much like the whole gun discussion...
I agree, but the case with torrents and trackers is such a gray area. Shouldn't routers be illegal since they help facilitate crime? If not, why should trackers?
I'm just playing with thoughts, interested in seeing what people think.
This question was actually addressed in the EU copyright directive:
Article 5
Exceptions and limitations
1. Temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable:
(a) a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or
(b) a lawful use
of a work or other subject-matter to be made, and which have no independent economic significance, shall be exempted from the reproduction right provided for in Article 2.
.. explicitly exempts the copies made by routers in the course of their operation.
Trackers in general aren't illegal. You can host a tracker with legal content. You can't host a tracker that serves up zero say scene releases. Just like a router in a sever farm that serves cp is part of an illegal operation.
There is a gray area where you'd host a tracker that serves legal content but some copyrighted material gets through. The DMCA safe harbor should take of that. But most of these torrent frackers are so obviously designed to host pirated stuff that dmca won't cover them.
Maybe they ran out of sufficient advertisers with low enough morals to advertise on their site? Torrent sites are full of the worse ads and abusive javascript.
This seems to be happening since the Popcorn Time days. The projects get shut down and nobody ever knows why and how it happened. Quite strange indeed. They may have figured out how to threaten these guys effectively.
No @kinleyd is not the admin, I AM :p
This project was developed the next day after we knew KAT was taken down, it's very very new, and we are a very small team, so you won't find anything about it on the Internet, especially when we never promoted it decently
We only intended to make simple products that everyone can enjoy, we don’t make bucks out of it, and thus we promise no annoying pop-up Ads.
Regarding the server-never-go-down thing, the server provider we chose will protect our servers even from hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear bombs…Honestly idk how they are capable of that, sounds pretty badass.
It does appear to require Javascript for something as simple as search, that's disappointing. Allowing Javascript can be iffy on most sites these days, but torrent sites are one category I refuse to whitelist, so that's a deal breaker for me.
KAT and torrentz were both usable without Javascript, let's not take a step backwards in usability.
Yes, that's right. It's worked for me as a reasonable replacement for kat for now. Also, the site isn't anywhere near as good as kat but I'm sure given a little more time they'll improve. Or someone else will come up with something even better - I'm sure these folks will have learned alot about what to do or not do when running such sites.
Just few years back torrentz was still serving magnet links (just the hash, without trackers embedded), so you didn't even have to visit the torrent sites.
Is even that illegal? Publishing hashes of copyrighted material?
In jurisdictions friendly to the US anti-pirating effort, they've largely adopted a legal standard of "I know pirating when I see it" rather than following the strict definition outlined by the law. "Making available" has come to be interpreted as "telling someone who to ask about what a pirated (whatever) looks like so you can find it yourself".
It was a dynamic website, mirroring it wouldn't be a trivial task, and a snapshot of a site that adds new stuff every day will become useless with time
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12230914 and marked it off-topic. If you're right about the account being a troll, then this is feeding it. If you're wrong, it's off-topic.
You are correct it is not. However it is not baseless in this case. You create a brand new account, called "provoc“ then make a deliberately provocative statement. You are a troll perhaps you just haven't realised it yet.
I agree, and I have no problem with people having different opinions and stating them. However it is a brand new account and the handle is "provoc“ so I think I am pretty safe in my assertion that this account was created to troll.
Are you aware that the authors are the least privileged in current copyright laws ?
Where I live the state even invented a special tax on digital supports (USB, Hard Drives, etc...) to "favor the authors" because of "piracy". Never met a single author that benefited from that. And trust me I know a lot of them.
Copyright laws were made, and exist, to privilege the industry (which does include authors, at the bottom, if you scrap hard enough).
Just read through the legal code of your country and try to place the "so many" who "work so hard on their craft" along the lines.
Well yes, the storage device is legal. If you meant that this tax legitimised the process of unlicensed content reproduction: You'd probably be better off by lowering your expectations in law makers consistency.
It must be comfortable to judge people from comfort of a couch in 1st world country, right? What about point in constitution of many countries about free access to culture?
Music stars make most of their money out of concerts anyways, and selling music is actual way to make money by huge labels. But you surely knew that only 10% of each CD goes to actual performers.
And tbf - the only reason I am using torrents here in Europe is because there is no alternative. Netflix is 1/4th of what it is in US, there is no other services that would have huge library of movies and despite looking many times torrents are still the only option for someone who likes to see huge catalog of movies on demand.
A constitution cannot grant you rights over things in another country. I am granted freedom of speech in the US but that doesn't permit me to paint crude depictions of 'the prophet' Muhammad in the UAE.
Yeah, you need to obey your jurisdiction. I am not in US and my home country guarantees free access to culture. Thats enough for me to actually be OK with torrents. Dont get me wrong, I pay for premium DI.fm when needed and go to cinemas, but the problem here is lack of resources that paid options provide you. I am forced to either not watch it/listen to it, or to use torrents. As simple as that. And because of constitution - if there is no alternative to torrent, I feel it is OK to use it.
Copyright infringement, not theft, not stealing; not simply sharing either. By labelling it 'theft' you are applying a rhetorical device created explicitly to discredit the act of copyright infringement on moral grounds before even considering any of the justifications held by the infringer.
This isn't a black and white scenario like stealing a car is (and even then there are nuances); the mere fact that millions of people engage in copyright infringement every day without any scruples whatsoever, is an indication that there is a disconnect between the law and reality, and between supply and demand.
Your standpoint can be better presented without the weasel words; it prevents being downvoted as a troll too.
Yup, except piracy always had a good impact on creators, sure it may hurts the big companies but it's the best way to promote non mainstream artists. If you download an album you weren't going to buy anyway it may incite you to go to a concert you wouldn't even consider before. The same thing can be applied to any pirated content.
Look at Game of Thrones, it's one of the most pirated content of all time. It's also one of the most popular and lucrative, book sales have skyrocketed, there is a lot of tie-in products and even HBO subscriptions have gone up. All while, and probably because, the show is so much pirated.
Sure piracy is stealing, legally, but it boosts the industry and really never hurts the creator, the only people saying that are big media companies that play victims while making bigger and bigger profits.
No, this is nonsense. As I keep posting here - I personally know of music plug-in makers who dropped out of the industry because piracy killed their revenue stream.
Piracy very much hurt the creators in those examples. It also hurt buyers, because good products disappeared.
Your post is just another version of the "Work for nothing for exposure" bullshit. It's not the George R.R. Martins and the Kanyes who are hurt by piracy - it's the niche start-up artists on (e.g.) Bandcamp who produce quality music without the backing of a huge media corp, and will give up if not supported.
Torrents are filling the gap where the traditional media companies are still failing. Here in NZ there are 7 different streaming services that I can immediately think of, each with exclusive rights to some content. I'm not paying $80 a month to sign up to each so I can watch their popular "exclusive" show they own the rights to.
If the rights-holders made their content accessible and at a reasonable price to consumers, torrents would disappear.
> theft of service is that you simply don't want to pay
Prices in Norwegian kroner (NOK)
Apple Music 99 / 149
Spotify Prem. 99
iTunes Movies 49 to rent 24 hours
159 to buy (~same as DVD in supermarket)
Netflix 79 99 129
HD? x y y
Nr screens 1 2 4
I don't know how much these services think I can spend on entertainment every month, they are all priced as though they are the only service in the market and like I have nothing else I want to spend money on. The film prices on iTunes are mental, I can buy a DVD from as little as kr79, so 49 to rent one seems excessive (also aware that Apple are not solely responsible for setting prices here).
As an anime fan too, torrenting is literally the only way to obtain content. THE ONLY WAY. There are 2 good free streaming sites I can think of that are not blocked in my region, and one of them daisuki.net doesn't support flash on Linux (groan) so I have to use the 'wrong' PC at home for that.
The state of legal streaming and content availability was a laughable disaster 5+ years ago. Now it's a case of being indignant and feeling righteous about giving these idiots the middle finger. The entertainment distributors are their own worst enemy.
DVDs and Blurays are region locked. I can buy the DVD, but I'm not allowed by law to modify my DVD player to change it from my current region to a region free device.
This is one of the problems with copyright laws - creeping scope to make normal sensible actions illegal. Why is it illegal for me to modify my DVD player to play a DVD I've had to import (at great personal expense) and that is not available (and probably won't ever be available) in my region?
Shipping and not being able to preview any of the series makes buying everything a very expensive lottery. Who buys random series of TV shows they have never seen even a single episode of?
GOOD RIDDANCE. The example of Zuckerberg stealing the idea for Facebook and getting rich has contributed to the foolish belief that it's okay to "enjoy the benefit of something that was SUPPOSED to be paid for -- and NOT PAYING".
"I didn't steal any copyrighted material, my site just helped people who WANTED to enjoy the benefit of copyrighted material that was SUPPOSED to be paid for but didn't pay. So I'm in the clear!"
NO. Torrentz "Drove the getaway car", taking thieves to where the crime was committed.
Being a european citizen, it is very frustrating knowing that pirating is illegal even though being a Netflix, HBO & Spotify customer. Pirating is a much bigger trend in EU & AUS than it is in the US, and I think that it mainly boils down to the US-based movie studios restricting and delaying access to content to non-US citizens. Some may think that this is acceptable, but I can't see how treating one customer differently from another is acceptable just because they have different nationalities. I'm paying exactly the same amount of money as the next US-citizen for the content, yet I am treated differently.
One other thing that troubles me is that there are higher quality content available via torrents than via the legal alternatives. Having invested in a 7.1 surround system and a 4K 3D Android TV, you would expect that the legal alternatives would have content available for such hardware, but they rarely do.
Personally I think it's absurd that the movie studios expect to be on the european market but treat those customers as second-hand customers, and I don't understand why the EU isn't doing anything about it. The EU and US relies on eachothers markets, yet music labels forces the Swedish-invented Spotify to restrict access to certain songs for non-US citizens.
I do acknowledge that some people are pirating because it's free, but I don't think that the general public does so. I'd be the happiest Netflix & HBO customer if I had the same content library as my fellow US friends.