US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by philipov » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:27 PM UTC

f00zz wrote: post #70

matheusmoreira wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Copyright law has a place, but as it currently stands, it doesn't protect independent artists sufficiently, while giving large media firms disproportionate power. This ultimately hurts small content producers a lot more than it helps them, because they have to compete with companies much larger than them that can afford to use their economies of scale to bully independent artists into submission.

The fact that it's so much hassle to buy something just goes to show that Google has no incentive to compete on product, where the product is the marketplace itself. Piracy is an indication that the market has failed to produce a satisfactory distribution mechanism, and allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses.

"Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell

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

#142

Post by loeg » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

rolph wrote: post #75

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…

at least wait until the material is being sold on disk, at that point any number of people can watch a single disk and the theatre has made its payday on screen when you copy theatre screeners or cam the movie thats poking a stick right in a sleeping bears eye

Aren't cams totally dead? This was mostly DVD prerelease, which happens long after the theatrical release.

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

#143

Post by bitwize » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

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…

Do you know anybody who works in the creative fields? I do. Nearly all of them -- aside from the programmers -- favor strong copyright and even DRM. And to them, large piracy networks are as much organized theft, and do as much harm, as the Mafia robbing banks. The MPAA and RIAA are not evil to them, either, at least not in the sinister cyberpunk megacorp sense favored by hackers. Creative people see them as the means to put food on the table by doing what they love. They see pirates as stealing food from the mouths of their children and themselves, and as vicious a criminal as any bank robber. U.S. law provides the means to prosecute them as such.

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

#144

Post by obmelvin » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #45

bluejekyll wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM? The thing here seems to be ease of access. Adobe products were at one point more easily gotten in pirated fashion than…

Do they also watch only one tv channel?

Comparing Netflix to a single cable channel is disingenuous. I can't the only one who feels that Netflix is "too much" and that the last thing I need is even more content for more money.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with subscribing to multiple services. But by the same token, there is certainly a market segment that is just going to buy a single service.

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

#145

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:32 PM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #106

breakfastduck wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true on a grand scale. It's been widely recognized that the majority of piracy is committed by people who would not spend the money on the item anyway, or in cases where it is actually difficult to buy the item. There's a reason cheap & easy access to media (streaming) has reduced piracy. People are willing to pay for something if it has value, is offered at a reasonable price and is easy to purc…

Industry groups like RIAA obviously massively overstate their case when they claim every pirated mp3 is a lost sale, but Napster et al. did cost the music industry dearly. If you look at a graph of music sales over time, you can see that the 1990s were a great time for the music business.[1] CDs brought in increasing revenue until the early 2000s, when they precipitously declined. Legal downloads did not make up for…

Was that not because people weren’t using CDs anymore and people didn’t want to rent music from a bunch of different places?

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

#146

Post by rolph » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #128

rolph wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least wait until the material is being sold on disk, at that point any number of people can watch a single disk and the theatre has made its payday on screen when you copy theatre screeners or cam the movie thats poking a stick right in a sleeping bears eye

What percentage of people who would watch a 'cam', but not watch the movie legitimately later, would have paid? If I had to guess I'd go What percent could, even if they wanted to pay, watch the movie legitimately in their country? Does it matter if you watch a cam if you're not even able to pay for the movie? The thing about movies is that they're also part of societal culture - in The West at least. In my personal…

camming is a concretely tangible theft.

when a movie is being sold on disk after theatre showings close out, there is already a return for investments and disk sales are just gravy.

disks are played many times lent out to family and friends watched in recap after the theatre and donated to thrift shops. a large group of people can "steal" by watching for free multiple times, but millions have been made in theatre wages paid and investors pacified.

when a movie is cammed this cuts into the revenue.

i believe in a co-existence being possible however thats short circuited by the one "free" view == one lost/stolen sale mentality.

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

#147

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:36 PM UTC

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…

Something tells me that if the fictional Star Trek "replicator" would suddenly be invented today, with the ability to copy any physical item, we'd see a similar story. Imagine, the removal of goods scarcity. Feed everyone on earth. Everyone could have anything they want just constructed out of thin air for them! It would be a utopia. But the same people would make the same argument against that utopia: "What about jobs? You can't just copy someone's hard work without paying for it!" They'd get the government to ban replicators and criminalize their use. Or, they'd only allow certain, licensed companies to use replicators, maintaining an artificial scarcity so that things could still be sold. We'd toss away world-changing technology in order to maintain the status quo where people had to work and pay for scarce goods.

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

#148

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #81

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…

These are criminal cases. If you owned a software company and someone broke into your git repo and started selling your software as their own, would you want the police to be involved?

It’s not the same. It’s like you shipped your software to people and someone took the copy you sold them and gave to it someone else.

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

#149

Post by megous » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #107

rbanffy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is one of the key selling points of piracy - having the product you want easily available while the other options (physical disk, download) may not be available in your region.

Yeah, no. When I was a teen and wanted pirated games I had to put a lot of time into it (downloading/getting the CD's) then hunt for working cracks and then later deal with the consequences of installing cracks. My time was free but as an adult now I could never justify spending evenings to make pirated games work. Today's piracy is way more easier than piracy 15 or 25 years ago. The key selling point of piracy is th…

Even in the days of MS-DOS games, I could just buy a CD for $2 from a contact (he'd ride his bike to me and deliver them), it would be full of games that you could just extract and play, no installer involved.

It became slightly harder for a period of time when CD sized games became common, and Internet speeds have not yet caught up.

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

#150

Post by matheusmoreira » Wed, Aug 26, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

thinkloop wrote: post #131

matheusmoreira wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which single person is going to pay $1M or $50 million for a song or movie? Why not crowdfund those amounts instead? That way, all creators get paid before the work even starts and the result can be safely released into the public domain. We need to develop alternative business models like this in order to replace copyright. Cultural works must be treated like an investment.

> Why not crowdfund those amounts instead? That way, all creators get paid before the work even starts and the result can be safely released into the public domain. Then shouldn't every business have to follow the same rules? Making a "copy" of an iPhone costs $20 or $30, should Apple have to crowdsource their factory and IP then sell iPhones by weight or value of raw material? Why do content creators get screwed bec…

> Then shouldn't every business have to follow the same rules?

No. Physical goods are actually scarce. Making copies costs lots of money and finite resources. Making copies of data is as easy as copy paste.

Copying data actually does cost money due to electricity, storage and bandwidth costs but this is so widely distributed over the general population it might as well be zero.

> Making a "copy" of an iPhone costs $20 or $30

I thought electronics factories cost billions of dollars to set up and operate.

> Should Apple have to crowdsource their factory and IP then sell iPhones by weight or value of raw material?

Not at all.

> Why do content creators get screwed because physics doesn't let them attach an atom to their creation?

Because data is really just a number. Like all numbers, all creations already exist. The creator just happened to somehow find the exact sequence of bits that represents the picture or music being imagined. All intellectual work boils down to this. Even programming.

Trying to sell data is like trying to sell numbers. It just makes no sense.

> The vast majortiy of what you pay for in any product is the creation, not the material.

Yes, but physical products actually lend themselves well to being sold in a free market since they're actually scarce. This allows companies to recoup the costs associated with intellectual work.

This model breaks down when people want to do nothing but intellectual work and sell the resulting data as if it were a physical good. That's when people start coming up with insane ideas such as intellectual property, copyright, patents and god knows what else. It actually worked well for centuries... Until people invented computers, a technology that trivialized the copying and worldwide distribution of data.

We have computers in our pockets and homes which can copy and distribute data worldwide with zero effort and cost on our part. Data simply isn't scarce. Maybe one day we'll invent Star Trek replicators and making physical copies of iPhones will be similarly trivial.