I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".
The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.
But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.
IMO both the patent and the copyright laws, at least in the US, are broken. The original goal was good: encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time. In the current system, "the whole society will benefit" part does not work because time limits are too high -- at the modern technology pace, in 20 years most inventions are obsolete.
I think the best way to fix it is to drastically shorten the time the invention is protected, which would require major compromises. Unfortunately, the discussion now seems very polarized: it seems to be "all information should be free" against "copyright everything and it needs to last longer, longer, longer" as major camps with little in the middle.
I know this is the common belief of the origin of patent law, but is there actually any evidence that this is the case?
As I understand patent law originated as a way for monarchy to maintain control over innovation and intellect:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8
Yes, patents existed before the US Constitution, but the reason the practice was formalized in the US was to promote progress.
"Patent" just means "open", in this case openly declared, not secret.
Ideally "patenting" an invention provides an alternative to an inventor hoarding a trade secret that dies with him or his company. The quid pro quo for the public good of making a technology open knowledge is a temporary government granted monopoly.
The ideal and reality seem to have parted company a long time ago...
I always imagined it was more along the lines of encouraging inventors to open-source their technologies, by giving them greater legal defenses for doing so.
To avoid the "apple does research, and archives it secretly, lost forever if it doesn't reach market" scenario; instead we now see Apple publishing anything and everything it thinks it can lay claim on, to tune of absurd claims today, but in (80) years, the research is still available to all
Patents are troublesome, in particular software patents, and in particular in the US due to the way patent trolls work.
But that is an entirely different discussion. Different groups and people behind it, different power struggle. Let's focus on copyright.
Copyright. The way the US enforces it and exerts influence over it--which is what the article is about--makes it a worldwide problem.
Another weird thing is, even from the "copyright everything" camp, it must seem that the US is disproportionately represented+enforced. But you don't hear them about that. There's a few reasons for that, larger non-US studios/distributors often have deals with US studios/distributors. But those deals are mainly with the US, so on the whole it is still disproportionately represented.
I kind of wonder, but have never seen any clear evidence for this so this is just speculation: Even outside the US, a very large percentage of media (pop songs, films, TV series) are of US origin. At least in the Netherlands: Domestic films are considered "niche", the hit charts are dominated by US pop songs and the majority of TV series broadcast and/or watched are US-based. Of course a large driving force behind this phenomenon is that (in NL) we all speak English, but how do you think it became that way? It's not education; We also learn German and French in school, but the Dutch people speak way better English than they speak the language of our neighbours (Germany), let alone French. And such is the case for a large part of Europe at least (I won't try to speak for places that I don't have much knowledge about).
That's some strong cultural influence. It is power. The US probably wants to keep it that way, it's an amazing way to influence thought in western culture everywhere. Anyway it is power, so there must be forces that want to keep it.
But the anti-piracy movements seem kind of antithetical to that, right? They are restricting distribution. So how does that add up? There doesn't seem to be a (public) fight between the "global cultural influence" forces in the US and the "content industry" forces. Again, I'm just speculating, but I can think of a few reasons: It's not about restricting distribution per se, it's about controlling distribution, and control is power. Another way is that by restricting supply (and with a lot of show), it is perceived as valuable, which legitimises. But that doesn't seem to be enough, considering the enormous amount of influence and power on cultures and thought all over the world, the US has control over. Restricting supply is just a trick and controlling distribution is not enough, there must be a force that pushes, too. But what is it? (I'm probably overlooking something extremely obvious because the alternative would be a world-wide psyops-campaign).
I mean, unless US pop-culture is just that much superior, that good, that everybody wants it, everywhere. But that also seems unlikely (and I don't mean that by hating on pop-music or anything, because non-US pop-music is really just as "shit", the "main stream" is still art IMHO, even when I don't like it myself, and that's a whole other discussion again).
Of course I understand the appeal of pirated content, sometimes it's the only usable way to get something, especially for some old movies/series. And it put pressure on large media companies for content delivery technologies etc. But it's not all fun and giggles, it's a complex issues requiring global discussion and compromises.
Some do, some don't.
I don't doubt your anecdotes, but I doubt it's true as a pattern.
Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.
The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?
If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge). For two reasons: He wouldn't have read as much as he did, and he couldn't have borrowed as much as he did for his works.
We want some kind of middleground. Creators should be compensated, but complete all-encompassing DRM means only a fraction of people would've watched Game of Thrones to discuss it at the water cooler, Kanye West (regardless of what you think of his music) wouldn't be able to release most of his music, etc.
TPB and digital piracy in general functions as a library of Alexandria. Nobody in our society gives a shit about keeping things available. It's all about NOW and MONEY. So much entertainment would be lost without the internet.
This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.
So Hollywood would love a non-neutrality network. It would give them greater power to block BitTorrent, VPN services, etc. They might complain about the fees being charged for priority access, but they would rather deal with that problem than with the impact a neutral network has on their business.
They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. It adds up really quickly when any video will quickly get hundreds of thousands of views, multiplied by the number of episodes, multiplied by the number of shows.
Pirating content is serious business. It can also be free and makes no money to the site owner but that's usually not how it's done.
Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users.
== Edit ==
Some responses, since I'm rate-limited:
>In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.
Two points.
1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal.
2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband.
>If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?
Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society.
And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.
Why should an individual be treated so differently to what a company would? When was Youtube's office raided? To this day, Youtube holds immense collections of music for which nobody has bothered to file even an automated takedown notice.
The point that the parent made is that copyright is only criminally enforceable if held by the moneyed few. The power that has been handed to large corporations by the back door is immense and there is very little symmetry; even when the magnitude of the damage is orders of magnitude greater.
In the UK they have effectively been granted the power to block domains for customers of the ISPs that represent a significant majority of the UK market. This is in a court that routinely allows pre-hearing legal costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Unless you work for the media companies and have insider knowledge, how can you even be so sure that the media companies are not acting with the complete contempt of due process that they have repeatedly demonstrated.
> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.
Only fairly recently, and not without controversy from the people that observed it.
> What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.
Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.
My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either.
Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
This can even be a gray area for content creators who care about copyright, but only for their own profession.
I regularly see stories of famous musicians improperly lifting photographers' work for their marketing or social media efforts.
I also see professional photographers using unlicensed music for slide shows.
It's really quite bizarre to see content creators fighting each other for not respecting each other's copyrights when they themselves should know better.
In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.
That is exactly the weird paradox that has been going on, especially with the infamous Pirate Bay.
The users think they are a super server with super hero admins that "give back to the man".
The justice system thinks some super tech criminal is earning millions. They think that, because organisations like the MPAA give out an estimate on what "could have been earned if all those people would actually pay full price for the content they are now consuming".
Numbers are magic.. especially if there's a currency sign before them.
i.e., messing up their business model
> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.
Sure, but there's a strong case that copyright infringement shouldn't be felony.
> ...the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy.
If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?
I don't think he should go to jail, but this is an odd rebuttal. If I steal your car and sell it for $300, because I don't really need more money, will you claim just that amount as your loss?
Obviously copyright law pushes up the price, by introducing scarcity, but that doesn't really have anything to do with how much he made.
What are you actually arguing, other than pointing out that he was acquitted? A jury's determination of a person's guilt in a particular case doesn't tell you what the law is, or what it ought to be.
Edit: gnode, that’s not true. Only determinations of law, which are only made by judges, are precedent. A jury verdict, which only determines questions of fact, is not precedent at all.
Oh yes? Copyright infrigement is pretty much a victimless crime - nobody is removed from any of their property - at most they might be losing some monetary compensation, but that's something that can be evaluated and compensated if that is the case.
Not sure how you can justify putting folks in jail based on that fact.
"But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society".
Remember Aaron Schwartz?
I didn't know the guy but I'm not sure that using his name to stifle debate is the best use of his legacy.
While we're here, I happen to disagree with what he did. I believe that publicly funded research should be publicly available but he went a lot further.
What was done to him was heinous and a terrible abuse of the US criminal justice system. And it rightfully brought it into disrepute. But it's going too far to say that it's the last word on the principle of criminal justice.
. . .it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”
So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...
I was pleasantly surprised that my Prime subscription might actually still be useful for something.
I've never understood why so many people feel that they have to see every superhero movie or every Blockbuster.
Register an account in a different country, pay for a gift card in another currency, suffer international transaction fees + currency conversion rates, then manage multiple accounts with different balances depending on when iTunes has juggled around it's regional stores.
Or just visit pirate bay.
And as a side note it could open you up to getting your main account blocked by Apple if they start cracking down on that.
Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.
Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.
I'm curious about this - does it mean hosting in a country that "doesn't care", or is there some other option that I'm unaware of?
>At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers.
>All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...
I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.
So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?
How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?
And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights.
That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it.
Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?
As a creator as well, I am aware that my software is out in the wild and people are using it for free and so far I've yet to notice any harm coming from it, quite the contrary. Even if we live in a connected world, we still don't live in a fair world, having a credit card or a PayPal account is still a hard thing to obtain in quite a bit of countries and so it happens that from time to time I receive emails of users that are using cracked version of my software offering to snail mail me checks or asking me for alternative payment methods, in these cases me knowing that they get enough joy of my apps is payment enough.
In my case I do believe this is free marketing, in the end a good chunk of users come back and buy the apps if it's truly useful for them and counting the others that wont buy it as lost sales is stupid as they would not spend the money anyway.
No doubt you can back up this assertion that the pirate Bay diverted all or at least the majority of movie sales.
There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.
I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.
I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.
The fact that the US has so much control over international copyright law enforcement is a big deal.
The fact that a site that does not host copyrighted material was taken down in the name of copyright law is a big deal.
I wouldn't fully agree with that, but his question is quite clear, imo.
* Copyright infringement case assigned to that many officers? Unheard of. High profile murder investigations don't get that many.
* We have this peculiar law, that ministers are NOT TO meddle in the running of government agencies. Yet, this is what we got.
* From cautious "see what happens" attitude among prosecutors with regards to copyright infringement and copying for personal use - to a big leap: not only an attempted (though only partially successful) witch hunt of Pirate Bay founders, but also inventing a whole new crime, called "accessory to copyright infringement".
Not that I don't agree that what Pirate Bay did was at times shady, but the whole thing made me believe without a doubt a few things:
- US as a case of "wag the dog". The trade associations (RIAA etc) in the US can easily make the state do their bidding. And the US state as an institution is quite weak, when it does these things so quickly. What that implies, is that there is no thinking things through. No serious cost/benefit analysis can possibly have been made. "How much ill will from foreign countries is this move worth? Fuck that, do it now."
- That Sweden would be pushed around so quickly. I must have been naive, but it was surprising how not even a symbolic attempt at saving face was made here. Our domestic response was decisive and swift. Can't help but make you wonder what we could be made to do to ourselves over something more serious than fucking copyright infringement. Dance, monkey, dance.
I relayed this information to the case handler, and yet immediately after I get a form response of "We've shut this case down since it's obvious there's no way to solve it".
We only needed the report to get our money back through insurance, but it really pisses me off that the police doesn't have resources to solve a case that I have solved for them, yet can spend _65_ officers on a political sham.
Booking a flight seems like it's something that's very easy to track down who benefits, doesn't it?
Source: https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2016-12-10/tre-poliser-istallet-f...
Edit: though now we are talking about current situation anyway, I feel there is a chance to turn things around for the better. But it would probably involve many very big adjustments, one being massively higher salary for police officers. (Like 30% more.)
I have seen up and coming politicians in Norway basically become big media's mouthpieces over this topic, because otherwise their political carer is toast.
Damn it, when the law was up for review. The panel had strict rules about what parts of the law they could recommend changes for. Effectively they were only able to consider of the copyright duration should be extended or not.
Laws should apply to their own countries. If a foreign business can influence how the law is applied, it should be perceived as the US doing things that should be out of its reach. That's something empires do, and if they keep doing it, it will taint a bad image on the US.
In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)
How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to trackers I download from or ISP monitored?
"[...] with a heavy fine."
Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")
As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the ISP side.
There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-tra...
Insane, you can get a good VPN from TorGuard, PIA or NordVPN for 10x less than half of an episode!
I don't know if this has changed in recent years, as I haven't heard anything about it recently.
See https://ictrecht.be/featured-2/torrents-wat-mag-en-wat-mag-n....
They settlement demands have been between 500€ and 3000€ and they have usually been lowered in the cases that have gone to court. A few have however ended up footing legal costs in the tens of thousands.
ISP's only hand over data by court order but in the past few years, court orders have granted this right to pretty much every request from the copyright holders. ISP's are now contesting this and there were two recent judgements in the courts to allow ISPs not to hand over the data. See this [0] (in Finnish).
So the situation is now better in Finland, partially because the predatory abuse from copyright holders' law firms sending out tons of "fines".
[0] https://www.turre.com/operaattori-voitti-oikeudenhaltijat-tu...
Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.
Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.
Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...
In Blockbuster's heyday their revenue alone surpassed American box office sales.
Oh and merchandising... that's a big one!
It's underestimated since it's a global business, plus they there's a very long tail for every movie to turn a profit, DVD/BR releases, TV, and online reselling, renting, etc... and the fact movies remain their property for 75 years+, and for some companies like Disney they retain the copyright forever, and keep sellings goods like cupcakes as well.
This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.
This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.
Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.
But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.
And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
This is because copyright relates to stuff that's usually intangible. People easily grasp the idea of theft when it comes to tangible, physical stuff.
>> And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.
True, but digital copies are for the most part still stored on media that can degrade, break or malfunction. In the context of places like TPB, digital copies are indeed degraded as they are often uploaded with lossy compression to reduce file size.
That's a large industry definitely and a powerful one.
But movies are part of Intellectual Property, which is the US's biggest export (in real dollars).
(edit: spelling)
That this passed without causing a conflict of interest is astonishing. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate...
Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful. Thank you, job well done. https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-p...
In recent news, the chair of Swedens Supreme court judge Stefan Lindskog has been implied in shady financial transactions, and is under investigation by the police. The belief we once had that Sweden had a low level of corruption can be put to history. And of course even having a low level still means there is some corruption. https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-doms...
YMMV.
Can you blame them? Thanks to that case the guy got a lot of experience in the area of copyright violations and online piracy, that's valuable knowledge to have and they could use someone to advise them.
You're implying that he did it for the cushy job he got for it, but I have my doubts. Maybe if you can prove he got the offer before the investigations started?
Corruption by big corporations and similar things is usually another thing (although if things are corrupt in the low level, they will for sure be in the higher levels).
Typical, not so subtle, blackmail.
One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him...
(From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)
From Wikipedia's "1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état":
"[..] The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been affected by the end to exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz in 1952; although the operation was quickly aborted, it was a precursor to PBSUCCESS."
Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.
(1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
If I'm not mistaken the first permanent "embassies" were set up by the Venetians (mostly) and the Genoese, and their role was essentially just that, i.e. protecting the economic interests of their "home" entities. It so happened that most of the time protecting the citizens who happened to reside in foreign countries also meant protecting their home-city economic interests, but that mainly happened because the citizens involved were traders themselves. So, in a way, you could say that what the Department of State is now doing is just the continuation of the initial idea of a "foreign embassy".
Well, of course.
It has degraded a bit but essentially it works fine most of the time.
Eh, f--- Pirate Bay and everyone else who makes a living stealing the efforts of others.
(And F-you too if you're a supporter/user of theirs.)
Of course the various governments were stupid, clumsy, ham-fisted, and in the pockets of corporations. So what else is new?
How does that make it OK to steal stuff?
People want to talk about what total hipocrite jackasses they are (which is true) to deflect attention from the fact that they are casually and constantly taking stuff they don't have a right to (also true, come on why don't you want to talk about that?!?).
If you don't like the terms, prices, availability, etc, of the Taxi reruns they are selling, well, then, don't watch the Taxi reruns. Trust me, despite Danny Devito, you aren't missing much. Likewise for all the pop music, old software, movies and virtually all the other content people are stealing through PB and similar.
Is this the stuff you really what you want to sell your integrity out for? Think about it.
If you all were mainly -- well, even just somewhat sporadically -- taking enlightening, high-quality stuff with an ounce or 1/2 of cultural importance that was otherwise too expensive, then I might be able to understand. But no. You're just mainly swiping bad superhero movies and video editing software that you'll never learn to use.
I think we need to proceed on all the right paths here:
1. yes, the governments and their associated law-enforcement, and regulatory bodies are a-holes who are beholden to petty, stupid, obsolete, obnoxious corporate ip holders.
AND
2. Stealing is wrong (and that doesn't change if you are stealing from 1.)
If I spend a million dollars inventing a nice car that can be freely replicated I don't have to sell it for a million dollars to break even. I could sell a copy of it to 1100 people for $1000 each and everyone wins: Nice cars are inexpensive for everyone and I make a living, so I can keep inventing nice things.
But if there are 200 pirates among the 1100 who take a copy of the car but don't pay the $1000 things are different.
Now I'm selling 900 cars and losing money so I have to do something. Such as:
* charge $1200 per car. Pirates win but car buyers lose, to the tune of $200 per car. Don't call it stealing if you don't want to, but your pirates are getting something and someone else has less money as a result. And of course you can't simply raise the price without losing some customers, so this can only go so far.
* invest less to make up the difference (making a crappier car). Pirates win and car buyers lose. The pirates don't win as much, though, since they have to drive the crappy cars too.
* enact stringent anti-copying mechanisms to try to precent unauthorized copying by pirates. This costs money, raising the price of the cars and is inevitably user hostile. So, again pirates win and customers lose. But again, the pirates don't win as much because they have to deal with the user-hostile anti-copying features as well.
Note this is a vicious circle. As piracy makes the product more expensive and crappier, more people will be motivated to pirate rather than pay, causing the product to get even crappier or more expensive. And anything that makes buyers lose also makes my car company lose, with fewer sales at lower prices to less satisfied customers.
* Ultimately, I might find I can't make money doing this at all: that there isn't a price high enough to make up for the piracy and low enough that anyone will pay for my crappy cars and I just stop making things altogether. Here pirates lose, buyers lose, and, of course, I lose.
Don't call it stealing if you don't want, but you are getting something without paying for it and it is costing other people more money as a result. Not only is your piracy making stuff more expensive for everyone else, it's also making it crappier for everyone and ultimately lead to less nice stuff being available at all.
So do filmmakers make movies or an implementation of the bittorrent protocol?
That analogy is terrible.
One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started:
* Njalla (https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service
* Flattr (https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators
* A VPN service - https://ipredator.se/
Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay...
https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8118457/TPB.AFK.2013.1080p....
While I do recommend adblock, there is no reason to be afraid of the site, or of torrenting this copyleft material.
He never gets mentioned much for some reason*
* Because of his far right connections
Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1]
Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse.
[1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.
If I sell some object and my logistics is that I sell 3 per months, then I manufacture 3 objects per months and wait for customers to buy them. If someone steals one, then I've only 2 remaining objects. I've the choice between telling the 3rd expected customer that I'm out, or to manufacture one extra, which in any case result in a direct loss of money. I'm a victim of theft.
If I'm a film producer and my logistics is that I sell N viewings per month, and someone pirates the movie, then this doesn't interfere with my ability to sell the N viewings to my expected customers. So this isn't theft. Of course, I would like the pirate to be my customer so that I can step up to N+1 viewing per month, but if I want to enforce that I need to turn to who made the copy available to the pirate, which is counterfeit.
Beyond that, there is a hatred toward piracy that is arguably worse than that of theft.
Fighting this propaganda-fueled nonsense is difficult, because piracy, on the surface, is a choice to not pay rightsholders, which is, on the surface, bad.
As soon as one digs beneath the surface, however, it is easy to find many neutral, or even good reasons to "pirate" content.
The abuse by rightsholders, organizations, and even government in the name of protecting copyright is bad, and not simply on the surface. It is a deep-rooted, malicious system, and people ought to understand that whatever hatred they have toward piracy, they should have ten fold toward anti-piracy.
I'm tired of the same conversation for the last 20 years.
We are talking about Sweden.
Illegal is even a stretch here: thepiratebay.org did not, and does not, host copyrighted content. It hosted torrent files, and now hosts magnet links.
I mean, this is known point of vulnerability.
Maybe it's because owners of popular bittorrent software don't want that feature?
btdig seems better as it doesn't have annoying pop ups, which are constantly brought up on btdb, even with ublock origin and noscript. I would not be surprised that btdb is buying ads from an ad provider that sell js injections to a MPAA operated third party.
btdb is nice because you can sort by seeds, you cannot with btdig.
To be honest I stopped using classic torrent indexers entirely since I started using DHT indexes. They have much larger choice. The issue is that you cannot "post" magnets links on the DHT automatically (I think you cannot), so the DHT works as long as people are finding magnets or torrents elsewhere. It's bringing more decentralization, which mean more chaos but much less traceability.
Very large portions of the US economy are dependent on international enforcement of copyright and patent law. If the US isn't using its leverage over other countries to make them enforce intellectual property laws, then it is failing to protect its citizens' economic security.
So this is not so much about claiming the US is doing something against the interest of US citizens. This is about other country politicans/judges/police being corrupt, taking benefits from USA and acting against the best interests of the people they promised to defend.
"2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."
The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person.
By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs.
Weak redacting?
This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.
[1] http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html
[2] http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...
The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.
While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats.
When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up.
If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere.
What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing.
When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant.
Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.
So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.
It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.
Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health.
The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.
The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.
“However, it is not clear to us what constraints Sweden and even U.S. authorities would be under in pursuing a case like this when the site is legally well advised and studiously avoids storing any copyrighted material.”
A focus by the prosecutor was the claim that the founders did not have well legal advice. The idea was to prove to the court that the accused did the infringement knowingly and was aware that what they did was illegal. Here we can read that this supposedly obviousness of wrong doing was not so clear to the very high paid lawyers arguing it.
"Both Bodström and Eliasson denied any direct involvement of the Justice Ministry with the work of the police and prosecutors in the Pirate Bay case."
That they surely did. It is very illegal for them to directly act in any specific legal case. If it ever was proven it would directly end any political carer. When similar document was earthened it was said that just because the US believe they influenced Swedish politicians it still doesn't mean that they did it, so no proof of foul play has been made.
You can harp on how there’s no accounting for taste, but the truth is that the industry this sort of thing protects certainly does account for taste, and only invests in the kind of lowest-common-denominator/mass-appeal trash that makes them the most money.
And so, we are left to suffer the guilt trip that because we don’t adhere to an honor system of donating funds for better artists (paying and not pirating, copying, stealing, sharing, music and movies), we get the artists we deserve. But that’s clearly not true, because the money made off the garbage produced today, doesn’t make it into any kind of honor system that benefits the interests of better artists.
How about producers of bad music and movies demonstrate that they are willing to donate into the honor system first?
The profits that the industry sees are not reinvested. The artists, mysteriously, continue to worsen.
The industries formed by these government-granted and defended monopolies have removed most of their limitations and keep growing. We see the benefit to them. They make big blockbusters that people enjoy watching, so we see that benefit.
The costs keep growing too, such as this article and the deprivation from the public domain of nearly a century of work. Meanwhile, technology has lowered the costs of production and distribution, making investment for most works unnecessary, obviating the need for a monopoly.
Have the costs grown to outweigh the benefits? The monopolists' power can maintain the monopolies past when that point so it's hard to tell, and people with different values will disagree, but this article points in that direction.
I'm from the generation that grew up with digital piracy. I am accustomed to have all media available. From nineties anime shows to strategy guides for videogames.
Is this undercover, spy-type work as opposed to public, legal actions carried out by a legitimate government agency?
Not necessarily proud of this, just something I've noticed.
I don't think improvement is quite the right word.
