These illegal offshore "IPTV" operators are taking over the streaming market in my area. They have succeeded in marketing themselves to ordinary people via word of mouth and local resellers, and have apparently built enough of a reliable platform that they keep customers.
This is also becoming and issue on the ISP side. These IPTV services are causing support calls for slow speeds and tv freezes when in reality it is just the pirate streams having issues.
A service I am aware of has HTTP streams. Video on Demand streams are rate limited by the server to a fixed rate, which is sometimes significantly under the peak bitrate of the file; and the recommended player device doesn't have a large enough buffer for that.
That's 100% a service provider issue.
Live streams have some issues too, but I haven't debugged those. On the other hand, ESPN+ live streams aren't exactly five nines of quality either.
yeah I've talked to those cell phone shop guys that sell them, just for fun to see how it works, and they definitely dont explain what it actually is to you
> Between 2010 and 2016, Engel Systems sold a range of devices that provided illegal access to pirated TV content. The business initially sold TV decoders reliant on card-sharing systems delivered over the internet, before progressing to pirate IPTV services offering access to around 1,600 channels.
>> Seven employees and managers of Spanish company Engel Systems SL received fines ranging from 540 euros to 7,290 euros for their part in the sale of pirate decoders, plus IPTV boxes and services, through their company over eight years ago.
540 euros? I've seen speeding tickets for more. I haven't gotten one myself but have been physically near to people when they have (sportbikes). Fines like this will do nothing to dissuade people. Imho, this is tantamount to decriminalization of piracy.
For all you know that's the fine their intern got who was making 250 Euro / month at the time and has been unemployed since. Also note this in the article:
> The company’s directors were disqualified for seven years, but after certain compensation was paid and the lengthy prosecution delay was factored in, none of those convicted received a prison sentence.
Sounds to me like "getting dragged through courts for 9 years" was factored into their punishment.
Fines/punishments for individuals handed out by courts are based on the personal situation of those individuals, the degree of their complicity, and many other factors. If you're wealthy fines are going to be substantially higher than if you're making minimum wage.
Also if you go in with an obvious and intentional disregard for the law because you do not care about fines, you're gonna wish you hadn't when the court is done listing the digits. Possibly they'll lock you up to boot.
I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it.
That tends to be where I draw the line (except for perhaps very extenuating circumstances). For me, piracy without profit motive is literally just knowledge / information sharing. I feel as though copyright basically shouldn't exist in cases where someone doesn't profit from reproducing / copying / distributing some kind of content.
As soon as someone starts making money with someone else's creation, it becomes a crime in my view.
I understand that there is nuance to this...what if someone runs a torrent site and needs funding to keep running the site, thus technically creating some kind of cash-flow / revenue stream. I don't really have the answer to that (except perhaps that we should all just use open-source DHT-based torrent searches, so no funding of centralised sites is needed?)
But yeah, in cases where someone is this blatantly operating an IPTV service, it's obvious why they got prosecuted.
I’ve felt the same since the time of CD burners. If someone gave me a blank disc I would burn whatever mix tape they wanted. There were kids charging $10-$15 per custom mix but I always thought it was not cool. Then when I saw one of the teen girls on trial for MP3 sharing I decided to keep everything for my self.
Pay for Plex schemes are similar to the CD selling of the 2000s.
> I wonder whether people who defend piracy also defend making money with it.
I don't really specifically defend those that make money from piracy as I generally view it as unethical but I do patronize them. Ironic? Maybe but it goes back to the old "service issue" thing. As an example, I've been trying to watch the NHL legally for years. I've gone back and forth between legal and pirate methods as either legal rules change, the service suffers in some way or regional blackouts become unworkable for me.
The biggest issue is the blackouts, which require a second service (VPN or otherwise) and a lot of hoops to jump through to even get that working.
The newest issue is that the NHL went from providing their own service to partnering with Disney/ESPN+. However, that resulted in degraded service because ESPN+ doesn't have rights to as much as the NHL service used to. National games are generally no longer supported. A game on ESPN is not on ESPN+.
Another issue is that I hate being funneled through an app that takes me 12 clicks to get to what I want so that I can be guided through a tour of other content I don't want but I deal with that as long as it works.
IPTV solved these issues for me. The problem the legal providers now have is that I know how easy it could be. They essentially need to provide me with and M3U and an EPG (or similar) for me to consider going back to them. Given that the direction they've been going seems to be away from that, I don't hold out hope that is on the horizon.
Copyright is an artificial monopoly. If someone doesn't believe in the validity of copyright, then it's no stretch of the imagination that they could feel ethical competing with it.
After all, it's not like rightsholders are actually going to make a competitive service from a vacuum.
This is my take, I have zero respect for the concept of intellectual property and care not at all if people make money from piracy. I don't think Disney is going to notice the lost subscription revenue from 50,000 people.
If someone made money from piracy, and this was made legal, would not market forces kick in and lower the market price to the cost of labour?
Maybe it’s the “someone else's creation” bit that bothers you? But that is begging the question! If copyright were to be eliminated, it would not be, by definition, someone else’s creation. The actual creators may have the right to be associated with (i.e. be credited as the creators of) the original work (eliminating plagiarism and making fraud even more illegal), but the work itself could be monetized in whatever way anyone sees fit, by anyone.
It's a gray area, no matter what you think about it. Modding a console? Paying someone to do the same mod for you?
When it gets to "becoming a company providing similar services" is across the line; if that is legal then there's nothing stopping YouTube from just ripping all content forever and profiting?
What if the company is selling hardware that is obviously used for pirated content? How would this apply to things like the iPod?
In general, what we have is that big players in the piracy profit area get taken down, small to tiny players do not.
Sure, and using them can enable great things like home-brew games, etc.
But let's not pretend that the vast majority of modchips and such aren't used to play pirated games, which is where charging for them becomes an issue.
Especially when you can still find modded xboxes on eBay today that brag they're coming with lots of "downloaded games".
Bongs have been freely sold for decades despite being used for something illegal >95% of the time.
You can't make it illegal or restricted to sell something purely because it is primarily used for illegal behavior. Or well, you can, but liberal societies generally don't.
Note that there are good reasons to restrict sales. Enabling dangerous behavior would be one, which is why we restrict or outright ban the sale of some guns, chemicals, cars, etc.
Agreed; and if you're selling bongs as they normally are, you get a pass. Same with selling mod chips or modded consoles.
It's when the bong is pre-loaded with the goodshit and the console has 2 terabytes of pirated media that you've clearly crossed a line.
The gray area comes when you're doing the first, but "wink wink, nudge nudge" letting people know where to get the second.
Which I don't really think you can effectively stop, but you can at least not be blatant about it. See Dolphin compared to Yuzu - for me, at least, the line is somewhere in between.
Though - to be fair - I could also see a strong argument for full copyright abolition.
> It's when the bong is pre-loaded with the goodshit and the console has 2 terabytes of pirated media that you've clearly crossed a line.
Definitely. I am very libertarian in that I think bongs should be able to be sold with whatever goodshit, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion :+). Selling a console pre-loaded with pirated content is a no in my book too though.
> The gray area comes when you're doing the first, but "wink wink, nudge nudge" letting people know where to get the second.
AFAIK Yuzu never did this. But they provide a way to decrypt (read: circumvent) Switch software protections in a way that according to Nintendo requires some of their intellectual property. Although I personally suspect that Yuzu became too good too soon, where Nintendo is losing an appreciable amount of both Switch and Switch game sales to Steam Deck + emulators.
> Though - to be fair - I could also see a strong argument for full copyright abolition.
As far as art goes, I’m fine with copyright for.. say.. 25 years. Maybe the natural life of the artist? I feel that 25 years is good enough though. If you haven’t made significant money off of your property by then, its very likely you never will.
Software copyright is another beast entirely, with a lot of complex drawbacks.
Maybe in theory there is a gray zone, but in practice I don't know any examples where you'd be hard pressed to say wether they crossed the line or not.
My opinion on the whole subject of piracy has changed really radically since I was younger. I'm not really a fan of it at all, even without making money, and with making money I think it's definitely not a good thing.
The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated.
In an economy that is increasingly dematerialized, this is a recipe for extreme wealth disparity and a return to feudalism. Only the owners of physical property would have any ability to earn anything outside service labor. You'd have landlords, large capital-owning corporations, banks, and low-paid no-upward-mobility service jobs.
In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor.
It also incentivizes locking everything up in the cloud. You can't pirate things if you never have them. Some of this may happen without piracy, but piracy makes it virtually impossible to run a business in any other way. It makes businesses that give you access to data or empower you to run your own software impossible.
P.S. The worst form of piracy is the kind that is perpetuated by gigantic corporations. IMHO a lot of the AI revolution is being powered by huge scale piracy. AI is cool but the people providing the training data need to be compensated, especially if their stuff is used to train models that are paywalled and never released. Don't misinterpret my defense of copyright and payment for intellectual labor as a blanket defense of the status quo. A big problem we have is that copyright law effectively no longer binds the largest players.
I think the type of industry/market is a huge decider on what makes piracy moral. TV/Movies? hugely exploitative industry where you have nearly zero effect on the people who do a majority of the work. They've already been paid, the media most likely made the investment back(i know, exceptions), the rest is media landlording, owning the rights to a majority of the work's profit. Same thing with music. Musicians see almost nothing from their sales/streams. Most of the money made is to repay the labels costs, then once again, landlording by the label. Many musicians, especially indie musicians, will be pro-piracy if that means their fans can appreciate the work, since the label won't send them much anyway.
In the digital age, a majority of copyright is just digital landlord behavior. There's other things, like artist commissions, one-man dev shops(the software Transcribe! has a fair price, is fairly unique, stupid easy to crack, but why bother), and patreon feeds, which all actively fund the person doing the creative work and allows them to continue the work, without the feudal contingencies of traditional distribution.
That being said, taking someone's work and selling it for profit is basically the only scenario I think copyright law should apply to. No individual should ever be sent to prison or bankrupted for copying a file. The power imbalance is staggering for an overall anti-artist industry.
I don't think it's that deep. I am in the Gabe Newell camp that believes making things difficult to access leads to increase in piracy. Nobody pirates music anymore because most of it is available on a couple of platforms and more importantly there is none of the exclusivity stuff that exists with VOD providers.
Wow, this is a great way to think about it, and helps describe how copyright is losing some legitimacy among the general public. Copyright is supposed to be about providing incentive and rewarding people who actually create things. But the way it's actually implemented is exactly media landlording where the lions share of reward is going to parasites whose only accomplishment is "owning IP".
I hope you don't mind if I pirate the term Media Landlording and use it myself. It perfectly describes the ugly world of intellectual property.
> In other words I started to see piracy as an assault on the middle class, almost a tool to bust wages and disempower labor.
The middle class don't significantly own any intellectual property, it is owned by the huge corporations they may be working for.
It is also mostly the middle class that gets fleeced in schemes where they don't actually own the things they buy with their money due to copyright, from bought content disappearing to the ether, devices being illegal to repair or modify, devices spying on you etc.
This is why huge corporations are the ones bribing politicians^H^H lobbying for outrageous copyright laws and spreading pro-copyright propaganda^H ads and completely organic think-pieces in the media.
Wallace: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.
Malik 'Poot' Carr: What?
Wallace: Mm. Muthafucka got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. 'Til he came along, niggas been chewin' on drumsticks and shit, gettin' they fingers all greasy. He said, " Later for the bone. Let's nugget that meat up and make some real money."
Malik 'Poot' Carr: You think the man got paid?
Wallace: Who?
Malik 'Poot' Carr: Man who invented these.
Wallace: Shit, he richer than a muthafucka.
D'Angelo Barksdale: Why? You think he get a percentage?
Wallace: Why not?
D'Angelo Barksdale: Nigga, please. The man who invented them things? Just some sad-ass down at the basement at McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.
Malik 'Poot' Carr: Naw, man, that ain't right.
D'Angelo Barksdale: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, "Hey, Mista Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"?
Wallace: Shit.
D'Angelo Barksdale: Man, the nigga who invented them things still workin' in the basement for regular wage, thinkin' up some shit to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe.
Copyright is a solution for generating value for creative labor. But we stopped at this and access problems are still unresolved (not always caused by the copyright holder). The market is still being defined by North America and West Europe in a lot of cases (content are gatekept and geo locked). I don’t know how we can solve this (without a lot of good faith involved) but piracy is the current solution to being (culture/information)-deprived.
We are incredibly far from the kind of society you're imagining.
What I think you have to ask is: if we get rid of copyright now, today, in this economy and society, what will the result be?
The result would be large corporations that own channels like Amazon Prime, Netflix, YouTube, AI companies, etc. just strip mining everything and sell it back to people for subscription fees and paying creators $0. The end. (Yes this already happens, but it would happen a lot more and there would be no recourse.)
This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think.
> This is the same mistake college Marxists and libertarians make. You can't imagine some kind of idealized society, cherry pick principles and ideas from it, plop them into the real world, and then expect it to magically turn out the way you imagine. The result is almost never what you think.
Keeping everything as it is, never even imagining change, is just as bad though - because eventually change will come and then it will just steamroll over everything.
The current best example of such an outside change is AI technology - no matter its dubious origins (=widespread scraping of content), it is hugely disrupting already. And prior to that, we had Covid and the resultant drop in office rents that led to urban planners and CRE investors being in a really massive clusterfuck.
basically agree here in California -- the economics from the point of view of an author or artist, are often ignored in the enthusiasm for information access..
> The thing that really changed my mind was realizing that the phrase "information wants to be free" just means "intellectual labor will be free." In other words a world where there is no copyright and piracy is standard would be one in which no form of intellectual labor can be compensated.
This phrase has its roots in anarcho-communism that was pretty widely spread in hacker communities back in the day I think. Which means that its not really surprising that intellectual labor will be free, all labor should be free under such an ideology. Not debating the merits or demerits of anarchism or its flavors, but I think your view is a bit more on the side of reality.
> Has anyone asked information if it wants to be free?
Asked rhetorically. Of course information can't reply, right?
There's substantial context that this quote is often dislocated from of disempowered groups. Parties are unable to negotiate when power, power of self sovereignty or awareness of choice, rests with only one.
You absolutely can ask information if it wants to be free. It is a fundamental fact of our universe that classical information is perfectly copyable and un-scarce. Information doesn't just "want" to be free, information MUST be free, and changing that reality takes EXTRA effort and work and artificial constraints.
All they have to do is say the copyrighted media is just training data for an LLM and it should be 100% legal.... if I were to believe the average HN post.
