Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued.
Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting.
This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability.
Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.
I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.
I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
and one day, you're gonna get a knock on your door, and some law enforcement officers will ask you very nicely to install a backdoor or a wiretap onto your tor exit node.
I really wish there was a paradigm where we could track people down for death/bomb threats(/swatting)/CSAM, but where the police were genuinely prohibited from accessing the same information for anything less. I guess the missing link between CSAM and piracy is probably fraud/scams? It's pretty hard to argue that law enforcement should be allowed to track someone down for an implausible death threat but not for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a senior citizen, but then it's harder to establish a clear line between fraud/scams and piracy. I guess with fraud/scams you can just track the cash and not the other vectors?
I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.
Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on.
Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases.
Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over.
I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.
Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.
Are they likely taking excessive percentages of an artists sales? Yes. But- artists are also more able than ever to wing it themselves. AAA level recording studios may still be huge money- but Good Enough (equipment) can be had for less than a used Car.
I will agree that its better than the old days where just the tapes to hold an album's tracks cost more than a car.
> Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.
Recording used to require very expensive equipment to do things that can now be done with free software. Medium-quality microphones etc. are now a dime a dozen and reasonably high quality ones are well within the reach of any artist who would be making enough money to pay rent.
Distribution of music over the internet is, as close as makes no difference, free. A music track in lossless quality is on the order of megabytes. That amount of storage is completely negligible and transferring it would be fractions of a penny even at the extortionate bandwidth prices charged by EC2 et al. If you're charging $1/song that's a rounding error and if you're distributing music for free in order to sell concert tickets you can use P2P and the users will handle the distribution themselves. This used to be something that required pressing LPs or CDs and physically transporting them on a truck to thousands of records stores.
The "other costs" are mostly the problems the industry creates themselves in order to sell the solution. Monopolizing distribution channels so that only signed artists can get featured, payola, etc. The world would be better off if they would dry up and blow away.
I'm not so sure. Certainly that they get publicity is something special and very recent (almost post-2000's recent).
However, by far the largest change has been the removing three or four zeros from the capital costs of recording and small scale distribution. These days you can record and do $whatever for sub-$50 (sub-$100 at worst). It used to cost a few hundred dollars just for one 60 minutes track of studio/master grade tape (aka mono)- now the storage is so cheap its de minimus. And, its hard to find something incapable of playing it back (ESPs can push mono 16bit 44.1kHz out after reading it from USB mass storage or SDIO/SPI), distributing 700meg of PCM audio via AWS might be on par with producing stamped audio CD's- but it scales from $0 to infinity. And, good news: we don't distribute PCM anymore- at worst it's half that size, at best <8%.
I can go on.
What hasn't changed are venue fees, heck, ticket fees are worse than ever. Paid advertising has gotten worse over the past 20 years for audio artists (and probably others). And I've typed too much so I'm sure theres more.
Digital Content Creators: Produce and publish on digital platforms original entertainment or personality-driven content, such as live streams, short-form videos, or podcasts. For example: Streamer, online video creator, social media influencer, podcaster.
> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user.
Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!
Ah yes, in order to Get Things Done activists should read the room and... stop mentioning race? Because racists are in charge? I'm sure they'll manage great things and all of this social backsliding will just resolve on its own.
I would like the racists to not be in charge. I would also like for households that share internet connections, which we have just been told are disproportionately communities of color, to not loose access to the internet.
if you want racists to do something that benefits people, you can't tell them that people of color benefit too, worse that they are the primary beneficiaries. we have a tendency to cut of our nose to spite our face, and racists even more so.
The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege.
And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process?
I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.
It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society.
So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.
A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media
The freeloaders also include the copyright holders. Copyright was originally 28 years, but now it's life of the author plus 70 years, which from a consumer's perspective is effectively indefinite.
The purpose of copyright was to secure a limited monopoly so creators can profit off their works and be incentivized to create more. Nowadays, the copyright is no longer limited, and the copyright holders are most often not those creating the works. The social contract with copyright has long since been broken.
I think from an encouraging-the-arts perspective, the worst thing about the current crazy-long duration is that artists aren't free to react to and build on the contemporary influences of their youths. We're missing out on so much good stuff because artists can't go whichever way the mood strikes when they play with elements of works of the living artists that they enjoyed and admired and followed as they were developing. Copyright's so long that they can't too-closely engage with anyone's work unless the artist was dead before they were born. There's a latent, invisible whirlwind of creativity in the heads of writers, directors, et c., that they can't do anything with, and that we'll never get to see realized.
I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.
> FM broadcasters only became liable for royalties to artists this decade. Big bunch of freeloaders; but not as bad as the listeners.
Back in the 70s and 80s, I would look for the "promotional copy" of music to buy. These were specially pressed records that were free of bubbles and other defects sold to consumers. They were given away to radio DJs in the hopes that they'd get played on the radio and listeners would then buy the records.
This was viewed as an advertising expense by the record producers, not a ripoff.
Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that.
Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes.
IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way.
But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
>Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media,
Beg pardon, but society doesn't suffer from freeloaders of media. The flame of inspiration is passed from each, never diminishing it's brightness. Media though wants to control it's propagation into society such that it remains monetizable in spite of the fact we have a medium that sets cost of distribution/reproduction to 0.
The problem, it seems to me, is there's an awful lot of publishers/studios etc... who haven't/don't want to imagine a solution in which their control over media is diminished.
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
I'm curious about your moral justifications. Do you ever compensate creators for their work? Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort? Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
I'm a atheist and moral nihilist. "morals" literally don't play a role in that decision for me.
> Do you ever compensate creators for their work?
> Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
Yeah, all the time. I go to the cinema as often as i can find time, I go to concerts whenever i can, i tend to buy games on steam all the time, because i'm a linux gamer and pirating games is really annoying to do. I even have a Spotify premium account (though that will go away soon due to pricing increases). It's genuinely a matter of pricing and convenience.
I have the technical capabilities to enjoy whatever media I want whenever I want on devices without limitations for free. If some service believes that they can make me pay to make it less convenient for me than my private tracker does, they are mistaken. If a service offers value to me at a reasonable price and without massive restrictions, I'm open to pay for the convenience and Premium experience.
> Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort?
Sure, I even paid on kickstarter for movies to be made and tipped smaller movie creators that released movies as torrents because I enjoyed them so much. Just recently I watched "Tim Travers and the Time Travel Paradox" and was trying to find a way to pay for it because I liked it so much but it was unavailable in Europe. But this is mostly because I want that creator to make more content from that.
But let's be real, once a digital work has been created, the cost to make a copy is practically 0 or very close to it. Just this week I seeded roughly 800GB on a residential line. Cost me effectively nothing. That's the reality, any law or service that tries to artificially fight that reality is unjust and should be ignored. Let me give you an example to proof that this true. Here's a digital picture of the Mona Lisa[0]. Acquiring that cost literally nothing. Ordering a high quality poster print of it and getting a frame for it that mimics the original frame is propably less than 50 bucks these days. The copy is worth almost nothing, yet the original is invaluable. Digital works are just the extreme version of this, copies of it are perfect yet worthless.
There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
I'd say piracy is best fought with better service but draconian laws and enforcement would also work.
> There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
The fact that copying data is so easy means that any law trying to criminalize it is unjust by nature, that's my most important argument.
Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.
The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
It is complicated. Ultimately a 100-year-long government sanctioned monopoly on certain intangible things is unsustainable and piracy has long been the pressure-relief valve on it.
I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy.
edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.
And yet, in Germany like elsewhere, piracy spiked during COVID's lockdowns. Some places say greater than 180%. Showing that their enforcement alone, was not an effective tool.
Yeah, that was more than a decade after the fines were noticeably capped and fees limited to < 1k€. I remember during my school years when there were lawyers giving talks to us and classmates getting fines in the 10s of thousands of euros.
The perfect solution to all crimes, totally out of scale punishments for every infraction! If we just charge people 10,000 euros per km/h over the speed limit, we could do away with speeding! Stop crime forever by bankrupting everyone who does anything bad!
>
IlikeKitties 2 hours ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
> while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action?
I'm not calling for that, you are misreading my post. Because irony hardly translates to the internet let me spell it out for you:
* Piracy is an option because the punishment for it is low and enforcement not very effective. Even in Germany where law firms can punish you for it without government involvement (i shit you not private companies send you fines you HAVE to pay) using a VPN is enough to pirate as much as you want
* Piracy could be curbed by massively out of scale punishments and total constant scanning and enforcement of the internet. I've seen the scared people here in Germany talking about it to this day. Fear causes compliance. To argue otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.
* I'm making fun of the fact that copyright owners would still call for stronger punishment until executions are on the table North Korean style ("Only then will copyright holders be safe again.")
My personal opinion is that piracy is the logical result of the fact that once a digital work has been created the cost to copy it is practically zero. Laws that try to deny that reality are by their nature unjust and should be abolished. To truly enforce them, even the death penalty isn't enough (see NK).
Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.
I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.
I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
and one day, you're gonna get a knock on your door, and some law enforcement officers will ask you very nicely to install a backdoor or a wiretap onto your tor exit node.
They wouldn't need to. They'd ask his residential ISP to monitor him instead.
If you're using Tor, take it as a base assumption that the exit node is logging your traffic, or even modifying your http traffic.
Tor's value is in concealing the association between your visible access of an entry node, with visible activity on an exit node.
I really wish there was a paradigm where we could track people down for death/bomb threats(/swatting)/CSAM, but where the police were genuinely prohibited from accessing the same information for anything less. I guess the missing link between CSAM and piracy is probably fraud/scams? It's pretty hard to argue that law enforcement should be allowed to track someone down for an implausible death threat but not for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a senior citizen, but then it's harder to establish a clear line between fraud/scams and piracy. I guess with fraud/scams you can just track the cash and not the other vectors?
I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.
The principle in question here is very different; the ISP itself has been found liable for contributory infringement.
Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on.
Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases.
Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over.
I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.
Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.
Are they likely taking excessive percentages of an artists sales? Yes. But- artists are also more able than ever to wing it themselves. AAA level recording studios may still be huge money- but Good Enough (equipment) can be had for less than a used Car.
I will agree that its better than the old days where just the tapes to hold an album's tracks cost more than a car.
> Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.
Recording used to require very expensive equipment to do things that can now be done with free software. Medium-quality microphones etc. are now a dime a dozen and reasonably high quality ones are well within the reach of any artist who would be making enough money to pay rent.
Distribution of music over the internet is, as close as makes no difference, free. A music track in lossless quality is on the order of megabytes. That amount of storage is completely negligible and transferring it would be fractions of a penny even at the extortionate bandwidth prices charged by EC2 et al. If you're charging $1/song that's a rounding error and if you're distributing music for free in order to sell concert tickets you can use P2P and the users will handle the distribution themselves. This used to be something that required pressing LPs or CDs and physically transporting them on a truck to thousands of records stores.
The "other costs" are mostly the problems the industry creates themselves in order to sell the solution. Monopolizing distribution channels so that only signed artists can get featured, payola, etc. The world would be better off if they would dry up and blow away.
It is hard to overstate the impact of social media here. There are acts making a go of it which were unthinkable back in the day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Sabbath
This is far from the weirdest band these days touring. I love it.
I'm not so sure. Certainly that they get publicity is something special and very recent (almost post-2000's recent).
However, by far the largest change has been the removing three or four zeros from the capital costs of recording and small scale distribution. These days you can record and do $whatever for sub-$50 (sub-$100 at worst). It used to cost a few hundred dollars just for one 60 minutes track of studio/master grade tape (aka mono)- now the storage is so cheap its de minimus. And, its hard to find something incapable of playing it back (ESPs can push mono 16bit 44.1kHz out after reading it from USB mass storage or SDIO/SPI), distributing 700meg of PCM audio via AWS might be on par with producing stamped audio CD's- but it scales from $0 to infinity. And, good news: we don't distribute PCM anymore- at worst it's half that size, at best <8%.
I can go on.
What hasn't changed are venue fees, heck, ticket fees are worse than ever. Paid advertising has gotten worse over the past 20 years for audio artists (and probably others). And I've typed too much so I'm sure theres more.
Looks superficially similar to Green Jellö?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Jell%C3%BF
Green Jello Sucks!
A reframe is the only solution.
I.e. consider the recording as advertising for the band. Then, charge for live performances.
There's an impending "no tax on tips" rule that may benefit artists going direct to fans.
Artists are not classified as a typically tipped job, so they do not benefit from this.
Artists with a podcast for fans might benefit, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupation...
> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user.
Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!
Ah yes, in order to Get Things Done activists should read the room and... stop mentioning race? Because racists are in charge? I'm sure they'll manage great things and all of this social backsliding will just resolve on its own.
I would like the racists to not be in charge. I would also like for households that share internet connections, which we have just been told are disproportionately communities of color, to not loose access to the internet.
if you want racists to do something that benefits people, you can't tell them that people of color benefit too, worse that they are the primary beneficiaries. we have a tendency to cut of our nose to spite our face, and racists even more so.
The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege.
And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process?
I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.
It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society.
So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.
A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media
The freeloaders also include the copyright holders. Copyright was originally 28 years, but now it's life of the author plus 70 years, which from a consumer's perspective is effectively indefinite.
The purpose of copyright was to secure a limited monopoly so creators can profit off their works and be incentivized to create more. Nowadays, the copyright is no longer limited, and the copyright holders are most often not those creating the works. The social contract with copyright has long since been broken.
I think from an encouraging-the-arts perspective, the worst thing about the current crazy-long duration is that artists aren't free to react to and build on the contemporary influences of their youths. We're missing out on so much good stuff because artists can't go whichever way the mood strikes when they play with elements of works of the living artists that they enjoyed and admired and followed as they were developing. Copyright's so long that they can't too-closely engage with anyone's work unless the artist was dead before they were born. There's a latent, invisible whirlwind of creativity in the heads of writers, directors, et c., that they can't do anything with, and that we'll never get to see realized.
I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract.
Yeah, why don't FM radio listeners or OTA programming watchers pay up!!!!
FM broadcasters only became liable for royalties to artists this decade. Big bunch of freeloaders; but not as bad as the listeners. :p
> FM broadcasters only became liable for royalties to artists this decade. Big bunch of freeloaders; but not as bad as the listeners.
Back in the 70s and 80s, I would look for the "promotional copy" of music to buy. These were specially pressed records that were free of bubbles and other defects sold to consumers. They were given away to radio DJs in the hopes that they'd get played on the radio and listeners would then buy the records.
This was viewed as an advertising expense by the record producers, not a ripoff.
Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that.
Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes.
(* Check out the official guide on what services have the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...)
IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way.
But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
>Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media,
Beg pardon, but society doesn't suffer from freeloaders of media. The flame of inspiration is passed from each, never diminishing it's brightness. Media though wants to control it's propagation into society such that it remains monetizable in spite of the fact we have a medium that sets cost of distribution/reproduction to 0.
The problem, it seems to me, is there's an awful lot of publishers/studios etc... who haven't/don't want to imagine a solution in which their control over media is diminished.
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
I'm curious about your moral justifications. Do you ever compensate creators for their work? Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort? Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
> I'm curious about your moral justifications.
I'm a atheist and moral nihilist. "morals" literally don't play a role in that decision for me.
> Do you ever compensate creators for their work? > Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
Yeah, all the time. I go to the cinema as often as i can find time, I go to concerts whenever i can, i tend to buy games on steam all the time, because i'm a linux gamer and pirating games is really annoying to do. I even have a Spotify premium account (though that will go away soon due to pricing increases). It's genuinely a matter of pricing and convenience.
I have the technical capabilities to enjoy whatever media I want whenever I want on devices without limitations for free. If some service believes that they can make me pay to make it less convenient for me than my private tracker does, they are mistaken. If a service offers value to me at a reasonable price and without massive restrictions, I'm open to pay for the convenience and Premium experience.
> Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort?
Sure, I even paid on kickstarter for movies to be made and tipped smaller movie creators that released movies as torrents because I enjoyed them so much. Just recently I watched "Tim Travers and the Time Travel Paradox" and was trying to find a way to pay for it because I liked it so much but it was unavailable in Europe. But this is mostly because I want that creator to make more content from that.
But let's be real, once a digital work has been created, the cost to make a copy is practically 0 or very close to it. Just this week I seeded roughly 800GB on a residential line. Cost me effectively nothing. That's the reality, any law or service that tries to artificially fight that reality is unjust and should be ignored. Let me give you an example to proof that this true. Here's a digital picture of the Mona Lisa[0]. Acquiring that cost literally nothing. Ordering a high quality poster print of it and getting a frame for it that mimics the original frame is propably less than 50 bucks these days. The copy is worth almost nothing, yet the original is invaluable. Digital works are just the extreme version of this, copies of it are perfect yet worthless.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mo...
Then we agree. Piracy is a service issue.
There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
> Then we agree. Piracy is a service issue.
I'd say piracy is best fought with better service but draconian laws and enforcement would also work.
> There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
The fact that copying data is so easy means that any law trying to criminalize it is unjust by nature, that's my most important argument.
Piracy is a service problem.
Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.
The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
It is complicated. Ultimately a 100-year-long government sanctioned monopoly on certain intangible things is unsustainable and piracy has long been the pressure-relief valve on it.
I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy.
edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.
And yet, in Germany like elsewhere, piracy spiked during COVID's lockdowns. Some places say greater than 180%. Showing that their enforcement alone, was not an effective tool.
Yeah, that was more than a decade after the fines were noticeably capped and fees limited to < 1k€. I remember during my school years when there were lawyers giving talks to us and classmates getting fines in the 10s of thousands of euros.
The perfect solution to all crimes, totally out of scale punishments for every infraction! If we just charge people 10,000 euros per km/h over the speed limit, we could do away with speeding! Stop crime forever by bankrupting everyone who does anything bad!
[flagged]
Why are you, in one post, talking about how you will never stop pirating, while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236861
> IlikeKitties 2 hours ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
> while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action? I'm not calling for that, you are misreading my post. Because irony hardly translates to the internet let me spell it out for you:
* Piracy is an option because the punishment for it is low and enforcement not very effective. Even in Germany where law firms can punish you for it without government involvement (i shit you not private companies send you fines you HAVE to pay) using a VPN is enough to pirate as much as you want
* Piracy could be curbed by massively out of scale punishments and total constant scanning and enforcement of the internet. I've seen the scared people here in Germany talking about it to this day. Fear causes compliance. To argue otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.
* I'm making fun of the fact that copyright owners would still call for stronger punishment until executions are on the table North Korean style ("Only then will copyright holders be safe again.")
My personal opinion is that piracy is the logical result of the fact that once a digital work has been created the cost to copy it is practically zero. Laws that try to deny that reality are by their nature unjust and should be abolished. To truly enforce them, even the death penalty isn't enough (see NK).
Ah I see! Yeah, sorry about that, I completely missed the irony
EFF, the force that wants good but creates evil