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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

#281

Post by pbhjpbhj »

CarbyAu wrote: post #257
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"The thing about movies is that they're also part of societal culture - in The West at least." This is an interesting point. Moral correctness aside... The content industries try as hard as possible to make their stuff "socially mandatory" via marketing. If they could make it law to consume their product they would. So, socially: For as long as there is such a social pressure, there will be people who try to fulfill…

Yes, this is why I think a copyright term of ~7 years fits (for mass media). It allows recrual of costs and it allows participation in media that's still culturally relevant. Further, it allows still culturally relevant works to be remixed, worked on, 'improved' by the populous.

Currently the long copyright terms are not encouraging innovation; the same works are being resold to the same people over and over.

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

#282

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rolph wrote: post #146
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wag…

>when a movie is cammed this cuts into the revenue. //

Is there proof of this?

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

#283

Post by antihero »

tanzann wrote: post #61
antihero wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It started like this! The first formal police force in Britain (and I think the world) was created to prevent theft at London docks. The first in the USA was born of people catching and beating runaway/errant slaves which were at the time considered capital.

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

#284

Post by antihero »

Nasrudith wrote: post #162
antihero wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That gets it wrong. Capital came far later as a goal over the literal strongmen involved with the monopoly of force. The reason they were treasured was because the capital specialists made more money by being taxed than flat out taking everything up front. Monopoly on force is brutally darwinian in that the emergent result of what it cares about it self-perpetuation. The real first layer is the enforcers to be kept l…

The first formal police force was created literally to protect capital at London docks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Police_Marine_Pol...

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

#285

Post by toyg »

onedognight wrote: post #54
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…

Do you remember when Dotcom was pushing Russian propaganda? He (along with Assange) said he had evidence that it was Seth Rich and not the GRU that gave the emails to Wikileaks. Of course, he never released that evidence. This is part of a counterintelligence investigation. Why were Dotcom, Assange, Bannon, Manafort, etc carrying water for the GRU? I don’t know, but having an unrelated tax/copyright/fraud charge migh…

Dotcom's troubles pre-date anything involving him with Wikileaks. He relocated to Hong Kong in 2003 (and again to New Zealand in 2009) precisely to shield himself from European and American prosecution, as he was starting Megaupload. He's been in the crosshair of copyright police ever since. Trying to "shake him down" by using charges he was clearly expecting for a decade, would be a pretty silly strategy.

As for anything he says or does, it should all be taken with a massive grain of salt. The facts, even before Mega, show him a lier, a narcissist, and a huge self-promoter. He's fundamentally just a scoundrel with no real ideological background beyond "anything that makes me money should not be illegal". Taking his word at face value is chasing shadows.

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

#286

Post by account42 »

Silhouette wrote: post #259
matheusmoreira wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this thread started with the blanket statement that we should all just steal it No, I said that the choice to "pirate" was always available and that the way the copyright industry was trying to remove that choice was problematic. > The less-than-optimal implementation of copyright doesn't justify theft. Copyright infringement is not theft. Prevention of copyright infringement doesn't justify abusive and invasive DR…

Copyright infringement is not theft. That's just a legal technicality. Either the viewer got to enjoy the work and the rightsholder got the corresponding money in their bank account, or they didn't. Whether a work was ripped before any payment was made, or the work was legally acquired but then the payment was stolen back from the bank account, the end result is functionally the same.

By that logic you should be able to sue people for lost sales because they were not interested in your product at all.

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

#287

Post by DanBC »

Silhouette wrote: post #259
matheusmoreira wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this thread started with the blanket statement that we should all just steal it No, I said that the choice to "pirate" was always available and that the way the copyright industry was trying to remove that choice was problematic. > The less-than-optimal implementation of copyright doesn't justify theft. Copyright infringement is not theft. Prevention of copyright infringement doesn't justify abusive and invasive DR…

Copyright infringement is not theft. That's just a legal technicality. Either the viewer got to enjoy the work and the rightsholder got the corresponding money in their bank account, or they didn't. Whether a work was ripped before any payment was made, or the work was legally acquired but then the payment was stolen back from the bank account, the end result is functionally the same.

> That's just a legal technicality.

No, it really isn't. The vast majority of copyright infringement isn't even a criminal offence. It becomes a criminal offence if you do it as part of business, or if you distort trade to a significant amount.

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

#288

Post by banannaise »

brigandish wrote: post #275
philipov wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes this OK and where does it end? What makes it okay is that intellectual property can be copied infinitely without depriving the original owner of it, and the fact that they refuse to sell it to you means you're not even depriving them of potential income, so there's no way of claiming there was any damage done. It ends when you start talking about actual property that has limited physical supply. Intellec…

Its market value should be whatever people in the market are willing to pay for it given that the owners are willing to sell it at that price. There are lots of things that have artificial scarcity through the simple act of ownership and this is one of them.

And artificial scarcity is just kind of... fine? We don't mind people intentionally destroying (or locking away) things just to increase the monetary value of other things?

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

#289

Post by colejohnson66 »

saagarjha wrote: post #148
scarface74 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...while keeping a copy for themselves. And then reselling that copy over and over.

It’s not the same; It’s profiting off someone else’s work.

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

#290

Post by [deleted] »

Nasrudith wrote: post #156
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…

Their collective delusions don't make them any less wrong. To call copying theft implies a spooky action at a distance to drain money from their account like a voodoo doll. Under that twisted logic if I have a sealed room and keep making copies of Harry Potter I can bankrupt JK Rowling! Hell it would be useful to test if it I can use it for superluminal communication. Magic snark aside they are literally in denial of…

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