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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

#171

Post by creato »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #85
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…

Uh, arresting Kim Dotcom has absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of DRM. If anything, successful prosecution of illegal file-sharing operations reduces the economic incentives to put DRM in place.

Exactly. If you dislike DRM, you should be cheering operations like this. I'd much rather see piracy fought by pursuing egregious offenders, and not crippling consumer hardware or suing randos using napster for $5k a pop.

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

#172

Post by airstrike »

johnchristopher wrote: post #163
airstrike wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but as an adult now I could never justify spending evenings to make pirated games work. Side note: I agree entirely but I do miss those evenings! Even legit games were such a chore to install that when they finally worked, you were swept by a wave of pure joy. Looking at you, Little Big Adventure 2! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Big_Adventure_2

That's one thing that was bugging me. I used to wonder why I missed playing video games and at the same time very few games were entertaining to me anymore. I think it's because what I am missing is the evening of care-free tinkering, of having good time with friends, of having a wide horizon ; I am missing that mood and ambiance, not the gaming part, I miss how I was looking at the world.

Couldn't have said it better – I feel as if I wrote the very comment I'm replying to. My solution has been to play old classics that transport me back to those times and those are so much more enjoyable than most new titles.

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

#173

Post by fxtentacle »

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…

is alleged to have caused “tens of millions of dollars” in losses

In short, a typical day for an investment banker. Odd how one is legal and the other one gets you an international secret police task force.

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

#174

Post by Nasrudith »

drtillberg wrote: post #154
bitwize wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean…

That sounds right. There's some inside baseball to this, but DRM doesn't always fit neatly in the big-biz, small-biz dichotomy. The market power of the FAANGs is at least partly from strip-mining the fair use exceptions , and using data at an extreme scale without compensating creators.

And farmers thought the tarriffs would help them. I don't see what size has to do with their entitled delusions for unenforceable at scale laws.

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

#175

Post by matheusmoreira »

philipov wrote: post #141
f00zz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> Copyright law has a place

Yes, in a pre-computer and pre-internet society. It has no place in the 21st century.

> allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses

You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright.

Every day I log into Netflix and search for something I want to watch, Netflix autocompletes the movie's name and yet it doesn't actually show up in the results. It's there, just not available to me. I lost count of the number of lesser known works I wanted to view but couldn't because they aren't popular and therefore not profitable. I don't even try to find them anymore.

Somehow, copyright stops the service from offering the content to me. I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem.

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

#176

Post by kristofferR »

curryst wrote: post #51
hogFeast wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In fairness, the average user and use case is very different. Pirating is less instant gratification since you have to wait on the download. Pirates are also generally okay with having the only peer be someone uploading at 5KB/s. Trackers go down with relative frequency. None of that would fly on a paid streaming site. I have wondered why no streaming service uses or offers some sort of P2P. I would think it would be…

Spotify started P2P, but moved away from it. The rest of what you're saying is hilariously inaccurate, you don't have to wait for downloads, if you want to pirate-streaming of 4K HDR Blu-Rays you just get Real-Debrid and TVZion for example.

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

#177

Post by rolph »

Nasrudith wrote: post #166
rolph wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wag…

They paid for the ticket didn't they? And even if it was a projection room cam they could have offered a seat there and yet they didn't so no material loss to claim. You can't claim that my tree falling on your grass did damage to your hypothetical Porsche and claim losses of it. They still got their share of the fixed pie. Theft isn't infringement.

no theft isnt infringement, the infringement happens when you distribute your product. the viewing experience is what is paid for by ticket, camming subverts the sale of the experience. if someone went into a strip club with a camera and recorded the live show thats theft as well. When the dancer produces thier own disk and distributes it thats in the same boat as a DVD release and any number of eyes can experience that video when the producer gets [guess ~ 50$- 100$] for a disk sale.

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

#178

Post by matheusmoreira »

f154hfds wrote: post #164
matheusmoreira wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eh, artists have bills to pay. So? That doesn't change anything. The needs of creators cannot override our need for computing freedom. Enabling creators to pay their bills by charging money for data will have serious consequences for society in the long term. If they have bills to pay, they can find something else to do. Ideally, they should get paid for the act of creating rather than the final result. > it feels…

In your view, how do digital content creators such as artists make a living? I am honestly curious. Are you saying that the entire gaming industry should be open source and sustain itself purely on peoples' charity?

I don't claim to have an alternative, just that the copyright model is broken. Perhaps crowdfunding and patronage will be the answer. Services like Kickstarter and Patreon.

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

#179

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Fans of government enforcement always find this surprising. "We should pass this law so the government can stop child abusers! If we restrict it to child abuse it can't be used. We will trust the enforcers.". Some time passes and then the surprise "Wait, but all that guy did was smoke weed / share a movie / connect to a WiFi access point. Why is he being prosecuted under this law?". Typical, repeatable, thoroughly enjoyable to watch in its predictability. If only there was a way to profit off it.

Another example for funsies: https://rsf.org/en/news/romania-tries-use-gdpr-force-journal...

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

#180

Post by viraptor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #134
f00zz wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Eh, artists have bills to pay Indeed, and we should support those who create the works we enjoy, but consider that the model of buying individual works from a publisher is rooted in the obsolete requirement to create a physical good upon which the work is distributed. Given that we now live in an age where the cost of distribution is effectively $0, perhaps we need to find a new model for compensating creative work…

The fun thing is that's pretty much how the classical composers worked in the past, just with a single/few rich patrons per artist rather than a number of people chipping in.
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