I've scanned this whole thread and there's not a single post that is at all critical of the intentions behind Popcorn Time. I guess you're all okay with a world where content creators don't eat.
Or do you have a better idea than copyright? If so, by all means let's hear it. I promise you that the person who solves that problem in an accessible way will be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or at least Tim Berners-Lee. Every single artist, musician, movie studio, and producer in the world will beat a path to your door, frantically scrambling for their checkbooks and trembling as they hover over a check with the pen asking "how much?!? how much!??" They will break into your house and shove cash down your throat while you sleep.
I know a good number of writers, artists, and musicians. Do any of you six-figure-earners have any idea how insanely hard it is to even make a living doing anything "creative?" I mean a basic living: food, shelter, occasional transportation. Nothing infuriates these people more than clueless techies with (to them) unimaginable earning power braying on about how they should live off charity or touring revenues so "information can be free." You try it, and no open source does not count. Open source is a resume item that helps you land your next six-figure gig, not to mention the fact that it can be monetized in other ways... ways that unlike tip jars actually work. (Services, training, dual-licensing, etc.)
Oh sure, yeah, the record industries and Hollywood make more than the artists. Everyone knows that. In the past, the record company or the studio made most of the money and the artist got too little. But now with piracy the artist gets zero. Is that a step in the right direction? We've gone from artists having to suck up to shady promoters to artists not even having shady promoters to suck up to.
Why is there so much crappy music on the radio? Because the people who like it are either too young or too dumb to pirate it.
And this is coming from someone who's written peer to peer apps. I am pretty liberal in this area. I do not believe a technology should be interfered with just because it could potentially be used for piracy. If we did that, we'd have to shut down the whole Internet. But there's a difference between designing an app that can be used for piracy and designing one whose entire focus and modus operandi is to promote piracy front and center. It may not be illegal but it's a dick move. Let's see you work for "voluntary contributions," assholes.
To add douche to the nozzle, there's people in here congratulating the Popcorn Time authors on how brilliant they are by leveraging this for publicity. That's wonderful. Now these folks who did little more than hack together some node.js scripts with a front end will go out and make well above $100k while musicians struggle to pay rent for tiny closets in the ghetto. So the MPAA might have harassed them. Boo hoo. Go blow your nose into your hordes of cash.
Maybe the end of copyright as we know it is technologically inevitable. But in the meantime it shows more than a little bit of ignorance, naiveté, and douchebaggery to congratulate each other on destroying peoples' livelihoods en masse. Maybe instead all you hackers could bend your considerable intellects toward trying to solve this problem in a productive way that actually helps creators get paid while also making it easy for people to enjoy their work. You'd be loved, not to mention wealthy and historically legendary.
Now lets talk about why most artists are starving.
These creatives are in the entertainment niche.
Which is very different from the problem solving niche.
1. Entertainment is not a necessity, it is a luxury
2. Entertainment is a low-cost luxury[1]
3. This is a lot of competition in this niche. Remember how I said there are two types of products: Problem solving and Entertainment? Well the problem solving products only compete with other products that solve the same problem. In the entertainment niche, you are competing with every single other entertainment product. Your dopey little fantasy novel is competing with Call of Duty, 50 Cent, Angry Birds, Reddit, Flappy Bird, Facebook, Hacker News, and sex.
* 4. Given points 1 and 2, that means to make money, you HAVE to scale and be popular to many people[1]. Considering point 3, you have to have great content at the very least.
So I hope you can see why most content authors are starving is due to economics and their value creating ability, and not torrenting or spreading of knowledge.
I'm sure you know that the entertainment industry is a feast or famine one. The people on the top make all the money, and the people on the bottom make very little, simply because the barrier to entry for peoples attention is very high and only the best will get it (point 3).
If you're going to sell music, don't quit your day job unless you're sure you're going to be on the "feast" side of the equation.
*[1] Not necessarily. There is a growing model where you give content for free / low cost, then sell high priced ($1000+) goods to your rich, loyal fans (e.g. exclusive signed CDs, etc.).
Giving stuff away can be a fabulous way to garner publicity, and people have every right to do it. I'm just saying that if everything is free and always free, art becomes nothing more than a hobby.
The trouble with that is that great art takes a lot of time to produce. If it involves more than one person, which means pretty much any film and most recorded music, then it also costs money or many peoples' time. So if people cannot make a living off it, then they cannot dedicate that time. You will not have any great art.
One irony of all this is that pirates often talk about how they're sticking up for the little guy and sticking it to the big multi-millionaire artists. But that's not how it works. The little guy -- the indy band, the small film studio -- is part of the long tail. When you subtract across the board, the long tail gets hit harder as a percentage of its total income than the big guys.
Edit: realized that the reason the MPAA are the most insane about this is probably because major movies are really big-ticket investments. The risk is a lot larger, and to more people.
To add even more irony, books are among the least pirated things and Kindle is one of the most successful for-pay art markets on the 'net. Yet books cost less to produce than recorded music and much less than movies. Go figure. Even weirder, Kindle uses DRM and yet nobody seems to care.
> To add even more irony, books are among the least pirated things and Kindle is one of the most successful for-pay art markets on the 'net. Yet books cost less to produce than recorded music and much less than movies. Go figure. Even weirder, Kindle uses DRM and yet nobody seems to care.
That is interesting. I would've figured after Movies and Music, Books would be the most pirated things. Sources please? I would like to know more about this.
Cool it with your anti-"techie" ranting. I don't think I've ever met anybody that pirates as many movies as just about any film student. Literally terabytes of movies, before terabytes or multi-GB HD movies were cool. "Forever minus a day" copyright terms hurt artists too.
It's a profoundly non-technical problem, I think. People who care about content creators get screwed over by DRM and complain loudly. People who don't care about content creators take advantage of the lack of DRM to pirate stuff to their heart's content. You have this vicious three-way cycle that forms among pirates, fans, and creators.
Then there are the assholes who claim that if you don't torrent your films and games you're not enough of a 'hacker', or that there's no problem with piratical torrenting at all because all the people who torrent would never have purchased the album/film/game legitimately if the torrent hadn't been available (as if even a small fraction of those people would willingly admit otherwise).
I don't know what the solution is. If I ever became rich (not going to happen), I would seriously consider becoming a patron of the types of arts that I enjoy. But that's a pipe dream, and even if it did happen it wouldn't scale.
> Maybe the end of copyright as we know it is technologically inevitable. But in the meantime it shows more than a little bit of ignorance, naiveté, and douchebaggery to congratulate each other on destroying peoples' livelihoods en masse.
Let's say we roll the clock back to before DRM was enshrined in what used to be general purpose computing hardware. Let's say we had the option to refuse it. Would you rather have DRM and movies on your now not-quite-personally controlled computer, or would you rather have one less threat vector for pervasive surveillance?
That's the choice. You can hand over control of part of your computer to some very sketchy people and have movies, or you can make the relatively small number of artists who make a living off recorded performances find a different way to monetize.
No, that's a false alternative. The third option is to invent something that has not been invented yet-- something neither DRM nor Popcorn Time.
If I had the time to dedicate I would start with the idea that creative works are non-random pieces of unique valuable information. Then I would delve heavily into information theory, byzantine agreement, crypto currencies, and similar areas and see what I could come up with.
What about a hybrid torrent blockchain that bounties to people who register a high traffic bitstream rather than proof of work for math in a number space?
So you make your product, upload it to the Popcoin swarm, the more people who download it as a percentage of the total traffic in that class (1080p hd movies competing with other 1080p hd movies for example, rather than books. If this turns out to be infeasible some other metric for how popular a given piece of entertainment is), the more the address registered for the bitstream receives from the block reward.
Popcoins trade on an exchange for real cryptocurrencies and thus have a market value, artists that make and register content get paid. The more popular and prevalent the distribution mechanism, the more the participants get, so there's incentive to make it viral.
Not really. You kind of missed my point. There is no DRM in my iTunes music, but I paid for it. Apple takes ~30% of iTunes though, so it still stinks, but at least the artist gets something. Part of why I use iTunes is that most of the research I see shows that buying music there or through similar classes of digital music services (and movies, etc., I get those there too) sends a greater amount of revenue to the artist than Spotify and other streaming stuff. I also use Kindle, which has DRM but it's apparently fairly easy to strip off as most DRM is. DRM is kind of a red herring.
All I was saying is that creating an app that explicitly works to make piracy as easy as possible and to throw as much pirated content as possible at the user is kind of a dick move. It's doubly a dick move if they end up profiting from it. When money gets involved in piracy I think any grey area that might be there goes away. Now it really is stealing, plain and simple. It's worse than any sketchy lawyered-up studio exec.
>Apple takes ~30% of iTunes though, so it still stinks
How exactly does it stink? Apple provides a service and a platform for selling music, and they take a cut so they can continue to provide said service, which obviously isn't free to run.
And if you're unhappy with the size of the cut they're taking, it's not like you don't have options - Bandcamp (my favorite digital music store simply because they have no region locking bullshit and default lossless with a whole bunch of other format options for one price, the same which unfortunately can't be said of most legal digital outlets) only takes a 10% cut, and if you want, you could always sell directly on your website with the likes of Stripe and such (but even then you're going to be paying some fees). Of course, the last one requires the most work on the artist's part, but that's how it goes - you either pay someone else to do it for you (the cuts on iTunes, Bandcamp, etc) or you do it yourself.
Before iTunes there was Napster. Without Napster I very much doubt iTunes would ever have evolved. Maybe Popcorn Time is the first step to getting a truly decent movie application that people can purchase through?
I agree with you, artists should not starve and deserve our appreciation. Even with piracy, Beyoncé, Jay Z, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lawrence, Steven Spielberg, Justin Bieber, R. R. Martin and many, many other artists and creators are pretty safe from starvation though. Actually, if "to not starve" means being as wealthy as them, I'd say more than 95% of the world is starving right now.
Copyright is making a very privileged portion of the world very, very rich. That's completely unecessary. Artists should earn their living, sure. But they don't need to be filthy rich. To be filthy rich isn't really a "need" for anyone, in any time.
Ever seen the credits for a movie? Hundreds of people. Yeah, hes talking about those people. Lets lookup some numbers. BMI lists around 500,000 composers/songwriters/music publishers. The NEA lists around 2.1 million people employed under the artist category (Actors,Directors,Authors, Musicians, Photographers,etc,etc)
Lets take a nice round number. One Million. How many "rich" artists can you name? 500? 1000? 10000? Thats still 0.01%.
>Artists should earn their living, sure. But they don't need to be filthy rich.
The cost of making a film is getting lower as are P&A expenses required to release them. This disruption is imminent but we shouldn't go around studios -- we need to work with them to develop an alternative to theatrical releases.
Capitalism. Pay for scarce goods and services on an open market. Since movies / music / etc are digital, and that is a number, and numbers are information, you don't restrict information. Instead, you let the free market handle it - in the absence of copyright, people still want movies, and music, and new creative feats. And those creators want to live off of creating their works.
Hint: keyword is creating.
So as a creator you come before the masses and say "I want to make X, but I need to eat to do so, and you want X, so let us have a mutually beneficial voluntary exchange and I'll make it".
The only other thing you need is some kind of restitution system (I think) to artificially increase confidence in creators, or you end up with a reputation based insular ecosystem of the first few to meet the demand finding all the investment. It could be through investor like protection for failed projects, or it could be some program where the state provides you some stipend to attempt creative endeavors and they can deal with the arbitrage over failed works.
Regardless of how you go about it, the concept is the same - stop the doublethink. Information isn't scarce. In the past, making it more scarce had value because it was still somewhat scarce. Today, information is no longer scarce. I have the means to transmit lifetimes worth of information in months / weeks / days / hours / minutes / seconds depending on your connection speeds. And I think there is something fundamentally different between the inception of copyright (make scarce information slightly more scarce to promote its creation because its creators have to endure the upfront costs of infrastructure to account for the medium scarcity of the end product) and modern information (which isn't scarce, has no investment costs besides the scarce resources that go into creating an original instance of it, and has no deployment expenses).
This doesn't happen today because the short term demand for information creation is satiated by media purchase, because funding new open media would be a long term purchase. So when people have to choose between new media now or new media later, they bend over for copyright. If their choice was free media now and paying for the media they want to see made later, there wouldn't be a choice, and all that capital would (mostly)flow to content creators.
: yes, it is likely in the absence of an artificial market propped up by copyright that, due to subliminal mental effects of marketing and appeal, and the fact hairless monkeys don't make entirely rational purchasing decisions, some of those funds would be redirected towards other immediate scarce goods and services rather than potential future information creation. That only reflects how bad our current system is, though - it means people overspend on media because of the existence of copyright, not through rational process, but because they are manipulated into redistributing their funds through manipulation.
If you want an example of this system, look at the gooseberry movie project. Exactly how the future should be.
>It could be through investor like protection for failed projects, or it could be some program where the state provides you some stipend to attempt creative endeavors and they can deal with the arbitrage over failed works.
Well you say the solution is Capitalism but a government paying you a stipend is the exact opposite of free market capitalism. And so is any investor protection mechanism/regulation.
The system you're describing could exist under any economic model. I don't see how capitalism is relevant here.
What about FOSS licenses, anyone can simply ignore what for example GPL says and do as they please with the code without copyright. There is simply no case there to fight if it were to happen.
But it would also mean they couldn't control the compiled binaries. It takes the profit motive out of software development - you just have to be vigilant enough to make sure you can retrace the source of the software you use.
I'm one of the people that uses the GPL because copyright exists. Without copyright, companies lose the incentive to close their source, because the binaries aren't restrictable anyway so they can't profit off that. It just means they shoot themselves in the foot by not showing the source to others for auditing purposes. It would also mean decompiling binaries would be perfectly legal, and distributing the results of that would be legal too.
I'd rather live in a world where nobody can tell you how to distribute information than one where I can try (and personally wouldn't be able to fight jack in court enforcing it without the FSF's help) to force openness on others for the sake of freedom while international companies profiteer off artificial scarcity.
On the contrary I think that's an even higher incentive to close source, obfuscate binaries and add DRM etc. And while someone may be able to copy the binary, they can not create derivative work from it.
It's still going to be a fight, but it will be fought outside of the court rooms without support of the law. To me that sounds like a step backwards, because even more than today that's a fight where a resource heavy megacorp will have an upper hand.
I don't like the idea of someone that creates something great without compensation, put it out for free, only to have the work taken by some large corporation that manages to profit from the work due to large marketing budgets, sales channels and existing customers, while the author remains uncompensated. So it's not an incentive to open source and share personal projects either.
You can easily decompile it, and without copyright nobody can tell you want you are allowed to do with it.
> only to have the work taken by some large corporation that manages to profit from the work due to large marketing budgets, sales channels and existing customers, while the author remains uncompensated
How would you profit from the work if you can't "sell" the work? At best they could seek funding to create derivatives of the work. But this does point out a major reason copyright is broken now - in how many other disciplines do you expect compensation for finite effort for infinite time? It should be that your finite work is compensated for finite money during a fixed time period (in my examples, the development of the work).
I'd like to think you could extend plagiarism in the absence of copyright to cover all ideas - ie, you can freely modify, reproduce, or redistribute a work, as long as you aren't falsely claiming it as your own, and upon inquiry you truthfully say where it came from. That is peripheral to actual interactions with information, it is about how you present yourself in relation to them.
> You can easily decompile it, and without copyright nobody can tell you want you are allowed to do with it.
Easy to decompile, is not the same as easy to deobfuscate, understand and create deriviative work from. The entire point of GPL or any license is to tell what's allowed to do, that means you can share source code, and have legal means backing you up.
> How would you profit from the work if you can't "sell" the work?
You are the one who say that you can not sell the work. Of course you can, but it may not be relevant to the question of profits here since we are talking about source code, it may be incorporated in an existing system or service or even in a hardware product just to give some examples.
> in how many other disciplines do you expect compensation for finite effort for infinite time?
It's not infinite, it is restricted to a finite time. You do not get compensation unless you sell a product, selling that product it self takes work and investments. The amount you get paid, and if there are any reoccuring payments depends on the terms you are able to negotiate with who ever it is you sell to. It has nothing to do with copyright.
Problem: Industry/Record Labels/Hollywood
Resolution: Take the Entertainers away from them, and they stand at not being in business.
Explanation: The record industry/Hollywood wouldn't be in business if it wasn't for the actors/artist w/e you wanna call them. So if they are "Taking too much" then it's up to the celebs to call it quits or go on strike.
Starving? Lol ya get real buddy. Live within your means. Most of well actually lets be honest here, every last one of you make in 2 years more than most Americans make there entire life. If musicians are struggling to pay rent, then move like the rest of us, or stay in your tiny closet and stop complaining. And an fyi, sometimes the ghetto isn't so bad either.
To put it bluntly. I don't feel one once of remorse for any one in the movie industry, music industry, or any one famous celebrity that charges retarded prices for the work they dare present to us.
Selling albums with 2-3 good songs and 12 garbage ones and then expect us to pay 15 dollars in the 1990s was a rip off, thats 5-7.50 for the 2-3 songs, now you have iTunes, and Google play store averaging .99 - 1.25 for each song. That's reasonable.
Movies you have to pay for, get 2-5 days to watch it, then it's gone... Really? Why should I pay 3-7 dollars for a movie and HOPE I like it, and then it disappears automatically (for those that don't know what to do to prevent this)? Then you pay for it to keep it if you like it, now we are up to $20 for the same movie. Again, back to the 19-25 bucks per movie/vhs/dvd in the 1990s... Sorry but again I don't feel bad. We have been getting ripped off since the beginning, and now you are mad because we are lashing out back at the studios and industry. Get over it. Now if only we can figure out how to lash out against the Gas companies I would be all for it too.
We aren't asking to be wealthy historically known or to be a legend. We want better lives, ease of use, and not be charged an arm, leg, and our unborn child. If it happens by chance or fate then so be it if we accept it. We want to see content when it's released not years or decades later. We want the truth and information at our reach not hidden behind closed doors and manipulated before we see it.
The costs are so high because the studios know they can charge the prices, California movies arent even created anymore because of costs, celebs know this and ask for more cause studios are getting more, and at the end of the day its all greed and we the consumer get boinked at every turn for everything, and you dare condone us for pirating? Hell TV Shows that are great are being cancelled because of your outrageous prices, and the consumer gets screwed out of a showed they spent time watching and now dont see it because its cancelled due to budget issues. Excuse me but if it wasn't for us you as entertainers would have no job, no career, no word of mouth, and guess what, if it wasn't for our word of mouth you wouldn't even be as popular as you are now. You are naivete and ignorant to not think that without us there is no you. And without you there is no studio lol. It all begins and ends with us. Without us you have no paycheck, and that forces you the entertainer to produce quality work that we will WANT to buy with our hard earned dollars. Your hard earned dollars is for what a mere 3-6 months of work a year if you total up the hours of actual working. Ours is week in and week out for the mass majority of us.
We aren't destroying livelihoods, we are bettering our own and the mass majority. The rich celebs you speak of aren't the masses, or the majority, and you have your money and should live within your means, and maybe even perhaps getting with your rich studio executives and figure out a way to bring content to EVERYONE and not just the select few countries with a retarded delay on other countries and everywhere else, AND come up with an affordable REASONABLE price to make content digitally available for download for keeps not temporary, and that way there wouldn't need to be this issue.
We aren't ruining lives, maybe a shady business here and there, maybe cutting into those pockets of those who are making far too much as it is already, but that can all be avoided with affordable reasonable cost for content to be purchased for keeps.
As for congrats on making this public... Well you know what I am happy they did. It makes the studios go back to the drawing boards on re-thinking about all the high end prices they charge for movies and such. Maybe now they will see the wrath of those in other countries not able to see a movie until years-decades later and release content to every country everywhere and not just a select few. Maybe now we will see artist in the US that are well known in other countries and those other countries will see our artist and they can generate more fame and "fortune". It's a two way street. There is always a positive and negative side to everything. This I see only the positive side. You like the movie you buy it after seeing it risk free. If it's a crappy movie you didn't waste your hard earned money and can choose something else. If you were too broke to ever see a movie well now you can. Can't see this movie in your country, well now you can. Win, Win, Win.
Also don't dare say 3D, and blue-ray discs are affordable. That is grossly over priced. I can go on and on, but I will stop here.
Point is make it affordable for purchase and reachable and accessible to everyone or you deserve everything coming your way and then some. We The People deserve to be informed and entertained as much as the next person. This is only the beginning.
Or do you have a better idea than copyright? If so, by all means let's hear it. I promise you that the person who solves that problem in an accessible way will be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or at least Tim Berners-Lee. Every single artist, musician, movie studio, and producer in the world will beat a path to your door, frantically scrambling for their checkbooks and trembling as they hover over a check with the pen asking "how much?!? how much!??" They will break into your house and shove cash down your throat while you sleep.
I know a good number of writers, artists, and musicians. Do any of you six-figure-earners have any idea how insanely hard it is to even make a living doing anything "creative?" I mean a basic living: food, shelter, occasional transportation. Nothing infuriates these people more than clueless techies with (to them) unimaginable earning power braying on about how they should live off charity or touring revenues so "information can be free." You try it, and no open source does not count. Open source is a resume item that helps you land your next six-figure gig, not to mention the fact that it can be monetized in other ways... ways that unlike tip jars actually work. (Services, training, dual-licensing, etc.)
Oh sure, yeah, the record industries and Hollywood make more than the artists. Everyone knows that. In the past, the record company or the studio made most of the money and the artist got too little. But now with piracy the artist gets zero. Is that a step in the right direction? We've gone from artists having to suck up to shady promoters to artists not even having shady promoters to suck up to.
Why is there so much crappy music on the radio? Because the people who like it are either too young or too dumb to pirate it.
And this is coming from someone who's written peer to peer apps. I am pretty liberal in this area. I do not believe a technology should be interfered with just because it could potentially be used for piracy. If we did that, we'd have to shut down the whole Internet. But there's a difference between designing an app that can be used for piracy and designing one whose entire focus and modus operandi is to promote piracy front and center. It may not be illegal but it's a dick move. Let's see you work for "voluntary contributions," assholes.
To add douche to the nozzle, there's people in here congratulating the Popcorn Time authors on how brilliant they are by leveraging this for publicity. That's wonderful. Now these folks who did little more than hack together some node.js scripts with a front end will go out and make well above $100k while musicians struggle to pay rent for tiny closets in the ghetto. So the MPAA might have harassed them. Boo hoo. Go blow your nose into your hordes of cash.
Maybe the end of copyright as we know it is technologically inevitable. But in the meantime it shows more than a little bit of ignorance, naiveté, and douchebaggery to congratulate each other on destroying peoples' livelihoods en masse. Maybe instead all you hackers could bend your considerable intellects toward trying to solve this problem in a productive way that actually helps creators get paid while also making it easy for people to enjoy their work. You'd be loved, not to mention wealthy and historically legendary.