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US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

torrentfreak.com

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Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#31

Post by wil421 »

kristofferR wrote: post #28
wil421 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not against pirating in the least bit but you can’t say you have to pirate to get the best 4K it’s just easier and cheaper. Disregarding the not available in my region argument. The Blu-Ray is still available for purchase in most regions. The people in the article were not ripping streaming services they were ripping unreleased DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Blu-Ray is not an option, I'm talking about streaming here.

There are many 4K rental options available but at $6.99 or so a pop means pirating is cheaper and easier once again. Cross platform sharing of rentals or digital purchases is crap, pirating is again easier.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#32

Post by Broken_Hippo »

mc32 wrote: post #30
mensetmanusman wrote: post #22

Would be interesting if our justice system spent as much effort on white collar crime, insider trading, financial misengineering, price fixing, etc.

Isn’t this an example of “white collar” crime albeit perhaps a low level one?

Kind of - technically - but realistically no. The government is treating it more akin to theft than copyright infringement.

If an artist steals another's work and makes some money off of it, the federal government isn't going to step in and help. It'd be up to the artist (or copyright holder) to sue for damages. Assuming the case is clear, the artist would get money from the offender. The offender rarely goes to jail. If the offender instead stole the art from the artist's home, then they might get criminal charges.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#33

Post by a5withtrrs »

bserge wrote: post #4

Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain? If anything, they're doing the media companies a service, free viral campaigns. Without pirated content, a lot of people would never hear or care about their movies, TV shows, music. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it anyway. Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're mak…

The why?

For fame, for glory, to chase the adrenaline rush that comes with being the first in a race to release something everyone else is trying to do? To feel like you have reach over millions of people who will eventually download your release...

A few groups tie back to 'organised crime', in that they cut the releases back to DVDs for sale at markets for the less technologically literate. But I'd say by and large the people in 'the scene' are doing it for the love, whatever that love happens to be.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#34

Post by hogFeast »

kristofferR wrote: post #10
hogFeast wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the loss to these companies is not the price of the movie. It is not the tens of millions of dollars quoted. If you pirate a movie, the person buying it is rarely someone who would pay full price. I would be surprised if the actual loss was anywhere near the amount it cost to run the investigation. Also, there really isn't a massive amount of sophistication when it comes to distribution. Most of the media busine…

Yeah, you are basically forced to pirate movies if you want it in good streaming quality. Most of the 4K HDR movies on Netflix are just available as 1080p SDR even with a 4K subscription, to get 4K HDR Atmos quality streaming you gotta pirate them. It's so damn dumb.

It is also way easier to access and (often) faster...or so I am told. We are in 2020, and some guy in his mother's basement with a PHP site is able to provide better service than multi-billion dollar media companies...

...maybe if they didn't spend all their time suing people.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#35

Post by throwaway77384 »

"Bridi, 50, was arrested on Sunday in Cyprus on an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa, 36, was arrested yesterday in Olathe, Kansas, where he will appear in federal court. Ahmad, 39, was not arrested and is still at large."

An INTERPOL Red Notice! You'd think these are terrorists, human traffickers or drug lords. Nope, they share films before the films are supposed to come out.

I understand that one should not try to profit from piracy. I also understand that the people who are orchestrating the operations that lead to films being leaked ahead of time should indeed be stopped, but isn't this all a bit overly dramatic, when there are real problems to be dealt with in the world?

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#36

Post by tzs »

mrandish wrote: post #23

I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobbies (which have a revolving door of former fed prosecutors as employees/lobbyists). The cases are more properly pursued in civil court where the pirates should be sued for the damages they cause (not agreeing with MPAA's damage assessment, that's for the judge…

Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company. Their internal processes and procedures were designed to make it appear that they took down pirated material when informed of its existence while actually making sure it was still there and accessible via other links that the copyright owner had not yet discovered. They actually reprimanded employees if they actually took something down for real.

Go find the court papers for the indictment. They include a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other top executives that show how the place actually worked.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#37

Post by 0x262d »

throwaway77384 wrote: post #35

"Bridi, 50, was arrested on Sunday in Cyprus on an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa, 36, was arrested yesterday in Olathe, Kansas, where he will appear in federal court. Ahmad, 39, was not arrested and is still at large." An INTERPOL Red Notice! You'd think these are terrorists, human traffickers or drug lords. Nope, they share films before the films are supposed to come out. I understand that one should not try to profit…

that's all well and good, but some very rich people could be even richer, and that's what is really important to law enforcement.

another substantiating example is here: https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#38

Post by libertine »

mc32 wrote: post #30
mensetmanusman wrote: post #22

Would be interesting if our justice system spent as much effort on white collar crime, insider trading, financial misengineering, price fixing, etc.

Isn’t this an example of “white collar” crime albeit perhaps a low level one?

This isn't done for financial gain (or at least it didn't use to be done for financial gain).

It's basically a game.

In my youth I was drawn to it and tried to be a racer to gain access to top sites.

The rush was basically to be one of the first to have your hands on something, even if it was just to prove that you could. Like just get it to show off that you had it before any tracker had it - kids stuff.

For these guys it used to be about releasing before any other group (that wouldn't be nuked, for example, if a crack didn't work).

Nowadays if they are using bribery for access, or are being paid to dump it on sites, then yeah, I guess it would fit in financial gain, therefore white colar crime.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#39

Post by Hitton »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #22

Would be interesting if our justice system spent as much effort on white collar crime, insider trading, financial misengineering, price fixing, etc.

There is no motivation for that. White collar criminals, especially the big ones are generally well connected, have powerful acquaintances, often know dirt on other people and mostly steal from either little fish and government (if they steal from corporations, there is often fault on the side of the corp. too and no one wants it to be very public so stocks dont fall even more) and their crimes usually benefit other rich/powerful people (often stockholders), it would be rather inconvenient to air such dirty laundry. On the other hand pirates have no noteworthy connections whatsoever and mostly damage big corporations who have money to lobby for their punishment.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#40

Post by 0x262d »

0x262d wrote: post #37
throwaway77384 wrote: post #35

"Bridi, 50, was arrested on Sunday in Cyprus on an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa, 36, was arrested yesterday in Olathe, Kansas, where he will appear in federal court. Ahmad, 39, was not arrested and is still at large." An INTERPOL Red Notice! You'd think these are terrorists, human traffickers or drug lords. Nope, they share films before the films are supposed to come out. I understand that one should not try to profit…

that's all well and good, but some very rich people could be even richer, and that's what is really important to law enforcement. another substantiating example is here: https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft

How this works seems, at first approximation, pretty simple to me. The monetary loss (possibly quite large here) is the financial incentive to punish a crime. And the amount of money the affected person or corporation still has, after that, is the power they have to pursue punishment. Therefore, by the market incentives our society knows, loves, and endlessly promotes, extremely rich profiteers tend to get first and best justice, regardless of the social value of pursuing it. Here, I think it's negative social value to punish these people, although reasonable people can probably disagree on that.

An interesting corollary is that if a crime causes money to be transferred from someone with less power to someone with more power (power being generally approximated by wealth), then there will be an overall negative incentive to pursue justice, at least as far as those two parties are concerned. This certainly doesn't explain all criminal justice, there is some basic functioning of society to be upheld etc. But it arguably explains a lot of which injustices do and don't get punished that you can see daily just by reading the news.

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