311–320 of 509 posts
This title is misleading: > The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services. The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate s…
- Everyone discussing this law should really read the text The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday, at 2PM Members of Congress got 5000 pages of bill dropped on their desk with a vote call at 4PM. The whole thing needs to be much more transparent.
I have no idea if this happens in practice, but if I was put in this situation, I’d employ my staff. Give each person 50 pages and regroup in an hour. Since most of the bill is presumably the same as earlier drafts, we’d be mostly just looking for red flags. Heck, in theory you could even run it through a diff tool!
Gabe Newell (of Steam fame) has it right: Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem. Offer your digital goods packaged in a good service, and people will buy them (see: Netflix). Make it annoying to get your digital goods (through hostile "anti-piracy" software, bad UI, paltry device support, etc), and people will pirate instead. I'd argue the current trend towards exclusives / market fragmentation on vid…
Netflix is draining of quality content and people still pirate memberships. Not a good example. If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers. You undermine your own argument by saying > Piracy is not a price problem, it's a service problem and then say > for free.
Deciding to buy Netflix is a one-time decision, and then you have access to the full catalog, without any friction. I added "for free", meaning that I don't have to decide whether or not I want it enough to pay, and then enter my payment details, manage an account & password, etc.
When Netflix was the only game in town, it actually made a measurable dent in pirate traffic; a fact which was widely reported at the time. Now that content owners want to have their own Netflix (thus draining its catalogue), piracy rises again [1].
It's true that there's a certain limit the "it's not a price problem" statement. I'm perfectly willing to pay up to a certain amount per month on entertainment services (and I do), but at some point, enough is enough. That certain amount will vary from person to person, the industry just needs to find that sweet spot and stop trying to turn potential clients into criminals.
[1] (https://www.sandvine.com/inthenews/netflix-falls-to-second-p...)
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This appears to be correct from reading the (very short) text[0]. Everyone discussing this law should really read the text instead of reading whatever nonsense the media is spinning. Here's the full text of what is being prohibited: > PROHIBITED ACT. > — It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service…
Sounds like if I, e.g. have a podcast where I play and review songs (without permission), I can be charged with a felony if I, say, take paid ads on the podcast. Perhaps simply a monetized streaming channel where I dance to the current hits is enough to put me in jail... it’s certainly seems enough to at least put me on trial. I think you have to wonder: what’s insufficient about the civil and criminal laws? What is…
I'm disgusted by the comments on HN every time media theft is mentioned. It costs money to make movies, TV shows, and music. There are millions of people whose careers depend on it. Most of the people involved make less than your average HN media pirate. Yes, like everything else, the people at the top make more. Yes, there are shitty UIs, DRM, and absurd rules preventing fair and convenient use of media even if you…
I agree though it's one of the most genuinely unpopular opinions on the internet. People will contort themselves into knots explaining why it's perfectly OK to consume a product without paying for it - in fact, they assure us, they are doing the producers a favor. I find it pretty disheartening. Pirating is a minor vice in the grand scheme of things but something about the self-righteous defense of it suggests how ea…
Fuck them, and fuck anyone else defending them.
Can we please stop posting proposed legislation with highly editorialized titles? Most proposed legislation, even "bipartisan" will not go through are end up so diluted that it won't matter. Not that it's not worth fighting but this is clearly an attempt to garner clicks/votes and we should be fighting back here.
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The whole problem is enormous "conglomerate" bills in the first place. It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. How much political BS is hiding in these massive bills, quid-pro-quo, back scratching, intentionally opaque text that nobody can understand the implications of until long after it's been jammed through... its disgusting…
> It's absurd that everyone is forced to evaluate and have a single opinion/vote on all these completely separate issues as a unit. They aren't forced to, except by their own (collective) consent. They could vote to split the bill, propose smaller bills and vote down the bigger ones in preference, etc. Conglomerate bills are a tool to reach mutually tolerable compromise.
This title is misleading: > The Protecting Lawful Streaming Act would apply only to commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services. The law will not sweep in normal practices by online service providers, good faith business disputes, noncommercial activities, or in any way impact individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Individuals who might use pirate s…
- Everyone discussing this law should really read the text The difficulty in doing so is a big part of the problem. As per AOC's comments on twitter yesterday, at 2PM Members of Congress got 5000 pages of bill dropped on their desk with a vote call at 4PM. The whole thing needs to be much more transparent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that If it's a peer-to-peer streaming service where media consumers also serve media to other users, then the argument could be made that users themselves are providing the "digital transmission service". There may not even be an identifiable, centralized "platform".
> has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected This seems tailored to kill PopcornTime.