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

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

#181

Post by philipov »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #175
philipov wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> I suppose I'm part of some irrelevant market segment they don't care about. So it's not just a service problem.

That is exactly what a service problem looks like. The service problem is caused by having strong copyright available to large corporations that can use it as a profit optimization tool. The role of copyright should be to protect small content creators, but that is not how it is implemented.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

eueueuerurru wrote: post #94
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…

>Enabling creators to pay their bills by charging money for data will have serious consequences for society in the long term. Grr, the idea of a society where creators get paid a fair amount for their content just makes me so mad. Won't anyone think of the pirates?!

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by kelnos »

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…

> "Piracy is a service problem." - Gabe Newell

Yup. I'd been a relatively happy HBO Now user for years, but just canceled because they recently inexplicably broke playback on Linux browsers (which had worked properly for years). I had a useless back-and-forth with a customer service rep about how increasing friction like this -- especially with someone who is perfectly willing and able to pay for the service -- just drives people to piracy.

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

#184

Post by fuzxi »

Absolutely ridiculous to spend so much time and effort prosecuting crimes that have, at most, a marginal effect on the bottom lines of AAA film studios. [1]

[1]: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s... (check the linked pdf for the full study)

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

#185

Post by matheusmoreira »

bitwize wrote: post #169
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…

Computing freedom is a hippie dream. The castle in the air of "open source" will come crashing down once courts and scholars realize that open source licenses are bare licenses under copyright law. As such, they a) are difficult to enforce; b) can be revoked at any time by the licensor, presenting considerable risk to anyone who uses software under such a license without having paid monetary consideration to the auth…

By computing freedom, I mean the ability to run whatever software we want on our machines. I didn't mean it in the free software sense.

> Even without that unfortunate legal wrinkle, the response by the industry has been to close down hardware platforms and transform their existing software into SaaS. In a few years, for instance, Macs will run only macOS -- enforced by hardware and the DMCA. I have no reason to believe PCs won't follow suit shortly thereafter.

That's exactly what I mean. I don't want such a future. I want open platforms that aren't owned by the manufacturer. We have free software because programming is an accessible activity: all we really need is git, a text editor and a compiler. Hardware is different: we can't fabricate our own computers and factories cost billions of dollars.

Free software is meaningless if the hardware doesn't allow us to run it.

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

#186

Post by kelnos »

eueueuerurru wrote: post #94
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…

>Enabling creators to pay their bills by charging money for data will have serious consequences for society in the long term. Grr, the idea of a society where creators get paid a fair amount for their content just makes me so mad. Won't anyone think of the pirates?!

I think the parent's point was that paying someone to copy and transfer bits of data from one computer to another is weird and impossible to fully control and enforce. Paying someone for the act of creation itself is reasonable. While the current system uses the former as a sort of proxy for the latter, that's not the only current system, and it comes with some really bad side-consequences, like ever-expanding copyright terms, corporations as gatekeepers to content (who often end up profiting far more than the actual creator), and DRM leading to forever-locked/disappearing creative works.

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

#187

Post by viraptor »

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?

Is a "digital content artist" and "gaming industry" even in the same category? This is an extremely large scope where I would be happy to see (for example) EA crash and burn, but do want creators to succeed. So generic an answers may be hard.

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

#188

Post by f00zz »

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…

I prefer to pay once for the finished product, as opposed to paying regularly through something like Patreon. Maybe I'm cheap.

Also, in the case of literature I'm not paying just the author. Editors and proofreaders make all the difference:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/why-i-do...

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

#189

Post by hesdeadjim »

Vast majority of comments here are hilarious. Piracy is a crime, deal with it. You don't have a right to content made for a profit without paying for it. If you don't agree with the price or the distribution method, don't consume the content, problem solved.

The argument that resources should be spent on "real crime" is equally silly. These organizations can and do put immense resources into all other forms of crime. They shouldn't choose to ignore one class of it because it's personally convenient to label it "harmless".

I'd suggest if you find yourself defending pirates that you actually go and create something worth pirating and see how you feel.

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

#190

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

saagarjha wrote: post #145
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

CD revenue declined dramatically, and nothing really made up for the decline until the 2010s, when streaming came along. Total revenue from music sales (including legal downloads and streaming) bottomed out at about half of what it had been before Napster.

The reason for the decline is pretty clear: music was free and convenient to get online, and CDs were expensive.

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