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UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

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Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#51

Post by intricatedetail »

rebelos wrote: post #14
ssklash wrote: post #12

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits , I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people. The timing is likely not coincidental either. E…

Any business can be viable if it is backed by state violence. If it can't survive without violence then in my opinion should be allowed to perish.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#52

Post by [deleted] »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #40
ssklash wrote: post #12

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits , I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

Should it be impossible to make a living writing books or recording music or movies? Because that's what it amounts to. Imagine writing a book, selling a copy for $10 to the first reader, and then the rest of the readers get it for free. Or printing a book and having a competing publisher type it up and sell it, taking all the profit.

[deleted]

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#53

Post by guerrilla »

bawolff wrote: post #47
crazygringo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What business model would you suggest, that is capable of financing the TV and films we like to watch? I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal. (Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.) And copying the music…

To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die. I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.

And if people love it enough, they will find a way.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#54

Post by sonicggg »

prima-facie wrote: post #13

The extradition treaty is a disgrace for the UK, completely imbalanced in favour of the US. - https://blog.6kbw.com/posts/this-lopsided-treaty-is-the-us-u... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK%E2%80%93US_extradition_trea...

I find it quite disgusting countries that agree to extradite their own nationals, it smells like subservience.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#55

Post by tzs »

azalemeth wrote: post #49
rebelos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people. The timing is likely not coincidental either. E…

Piracy, when casually undertaken by 50-70% of the population does not harm or even mildly helps sales, as found in a suppressed EU-wide report [1, 2] that you can read in detail here [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/…

Are you taking into account the effects on sales of substitute goods?

If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite.

But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would have turned to a less expensive solution, such as Pixelmator Pro which is $40 and I can afford.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#56

Post by [deleted] »

ssklash wrote: post #12

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits , I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

[deleted]

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#57

Post by jstrH »

rebelos wrote: post #14
ssklash wrote: post #12

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits , I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people. The timing is likely not coincidental either. E…

Open information; music, books, code, science, videos; threatens their entire business model.

Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts.

It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming!

Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega millionaires; their figurative identity obsession is not any more important than rest of ours, except due to political protectionism. Our doing human shit empowers these specific people; they can lose an order of magnitude in wealth to honor that.

As a result we’d be able to bolster health, education, and infrastructure everyone relies on. Deference to their wealth literally causes us to screw ourselves out of the time for such things.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#58

Post by aasasd »

ssklash wrote: post #12

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits , I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

> If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits, I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen.

Exactly! If you exist in the universe where things can poke other things, don't get grumpy when you walk out the door and get stabbed. Should've sat on your ass at home.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#59

Post by president »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #37

The US wants to have moral authority with scummy authoritarian governments throughout the world and then acts like a scummy authoritarian government. Do you want thriving dictatorships? This is how you get thriving dictatorships.

Agreed but can a utopia without a scummy authoritarian government exist? There are worse scummy authoritarian governments out there and I'm glad that our scummy authoritarian government is still better than those.

Re: UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

#60

Post by HotHotLava »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #40
ssklash wrote: post #12

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits , I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

Should it be impossible to make a living writing books or recording music or movies? Because that's what it amounts to. Imagine writing a book, selling a copy for $10 to the first reader, and then the rest of the readers get it for free. Or printing a book and having a competing publisher type it up and sell it, taking all the profit.

Even in that strawman version of the argument, competing publishers would not be able to "steal" all the profit because they also could only sell the books more or less at cost. The price floor for physical books in such a world would, I imagine, be set by some chinese on-demand printing factories. Business models for authors would shift towards patreon supporters, subscription fees for periodical releases, signed collectors editions of books, live book tours, etc. etc.

Some people also manage to extract millions of profit from Youtube and Instagram channels, despite all of the content being free. Books are not that different from any other medium.

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