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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

#61

Post by tanzann »

antihero wrote: post #53
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…

It makes perfect sense when you realise that law enforcement's historical and primary goal, over and above protection of us, is the protection of capital.

Isn't that caused mainly by lobbying and so? Some context. Generally speaking money in practice means power just because it allows lobbying and hiring good lawyers. And power basically is ability to have someone else solving one's problems.

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

#62

Post by rbecker »

bleepblorp wrote: post #60

19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history. It was the destruction of a warez group. In the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, the most important thing on the DoJ agenda was not to follow up on any of the numerous intelligence leads warning that Islamist terrorists were planning…

> has never been demonstrated to harm anyone

More than that, it later was demonstrated to not harm anyone: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

(Technically, the study merely failed to find any impact. But that failure put a low upper bound on the impact, so it's inaccurate to say "The study didn't find anything".)

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

#63

Post by mattacular »

bleepblorp wrote: post #60

19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history. It was the destruction of a warez group. In the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, the most important thing on the DoJ agenda was not to follow up on any of the numerous intelligence leads warning that Islamist terrorists were planning…

This is the natural outcome of prioritizing capital above all else, including human life. And the examples of this priority are, sadly, very numerous in the world we all live in.

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

#64

Post by prh8 »

nimbius wrote: post #57
tzs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Go find the court papers for the indictment. No i dont think i will. onus probandi, you'll need to cite your sources if you want anyone to take this seriously im afraid. Dotcom was raided in new zealand with a guns out swat style team of tactical commandos and helicopters for what amounted to a civil court issue in his own county. his servers were illegally seized, his assets frozen, and then he was railroaded to th…

> "if you want anyone to take this seriously"

I hope I'm not the only one finding irony in the total lack of punctuation and capitalization in here

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

#65

Post by bleepblorp »

hogFeast wrote: post #9
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…

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…

A basic principle of economics is elasticity of demand, which means that people will buy more of something if it's cheaper and less of something if it's more expensive.

Piracy "loss" estimates from publishing cartels pretend that elasticity of demand does not exist and assume that anyone who would copy an intangible good at a price of $0 would pay whatever price the publishing cartel demanded if the $0 option was not available. While this may be true in the very narrow case of monopoly software products used by businesses in their line of trade, it's absolutely not true for commodity consumer goods.

Very, very few people who have collected a few thousand movies (etc), at a price of $0, would have anywhere as large a collection if they were forced to pay cartel prices for each title.

At the absolute best, the cartel belief that they are entitled to full profits from every copy made is in complete ignorance of several hundred years of economic theory. At worst, it's a lie.

Anti-piracy enforcement is not about profit. It's about being vindictive for its own sake.

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

#66

Post by Melting_Harps »

bleepblorp wrote: post #60

19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history. It was the destruction of a warez group. In the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, the most important thing on the DoJ agenda was not to follow up on any of the numerous intelligence leads warning that Islamist terrorists were planning…

> It was the destruction of a warez group.

Funny, one of my current tabs was the wiki entry for Razor 1911 for some reason, where it states that the DOJ claims it to be the oldest Warez group in operation (circa 1985).

> Putting the factually contraindicated feeling of the software publishing cartels that they're somehow losing money above the actual lives of actual people is a very f'ed up choice of priorities.

What you wrote was pretty sobering, especially with COVID and mass unemployment hanging over our collective heads... it is sad but somehow entirely predictable, the emergence and wanton profiteering from the Warfare State and Surveillance Economy was what was needed in further inflate and increase the IC's budgets after the end of the cold war.

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

#67

Post by matheusmoreira »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #46
toyg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal. I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotco…

Let me say as an artist who has watched his hard work being openly pirated, I disagree. Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. If these cretins want to distribute art for free, they can get off their butts and make their own. No one is stopping them. The world needs more voices, but piracy encourages these loafers to do nothing.

> Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative.

So what? Let them be destroyed.

I'd rather sacrifice some jobs than watch gigantic media conglomerates take over the computing industry and destroy our computing freedom with their DRM. There is no other way for them to enforce copyright in the 21st century so that's exactly what they'll try to do. They won't rest until every computer available to the public is locked down like a video game console. That will of course spell the end of playful hacking as Hacker News knows it. Not only that, this sort of control over what software our machines may or may not run will be a stepping stone towards greater governmental control over key technologies such as effective free software encryption, paving the way for total population surveillance. Non-essential jobs are nothing compared to these important issues.

The copyright industry wants to sell what's essentially huge numbers to the public. That's how ridiculous copyright is. It's the 21st century, the age of information. Instead of worrying about job destruction, better to abolish it straight up so that people will be forced to figure out a new business model.

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

#68

Post by RandomBacon »

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…

> frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers.

aka those customers have money (and the MPAA and RIAA want to bleed them dry).

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

#69

Post by Loughla »

holidayacct wrote: post #56
curryst wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's out of the realm of possibility. Iran-Contra seems like a much bigger issue in terms of the CIA and finding. I haven't seen any evidence, though, and OP doesn't seem to be forthcoming with any.

There is plenty of evidence, look at the lives of nearly anyone who has been suspected of online piracy. You're going to see a very strange pattern where something catastrophic happens to them and their lives fall apart in a nearly impossible series of events. I personally know dozens of people this has happened to, there was an entire floor of RIT engineering students who were running piracy servers out of their dor…

Care to link to any news stories about the countless people? Or even just those engineering students? Surely one or two of them made the news in their descent into madness.

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

#70

Post by f00zz »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #67
xhkkffbf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me say as an artist who has watched his hard work being openly pirated, I disagree. Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. If these cretins want to distribute art for free, they can get off their butts and make their own. No one is stopping them. The world needs more voices, but piracy encourages these loafers to do nothing.

> Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. So what? Let them be destroyed. I'd rather sacrifice some jobs than watch gigantic media conglomerates take over the computing industry and destroy our computing freedom with their DRM. There is no other way for them to enforce copyright in the 21st century so that's exactly what they'll try to do. They won't rest until every computer available to the public is lock…

Eh, artists have bills to pay. I try to buy e-books to support my favorite sci-fi authors, but it feels a bit silly that downloading the epub from libgen is literally less hassle than buying it on Google Play.
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