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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

#61

Post by opencl »

marcodiego wrote: post #36
randywaterhouse wrote: post #2

> "for his involvement in the Sparks Group, an international piracy group that illegally distributed movies and television shows on the Internet." (from the announcement) in case you were wondering if this was some "simple" torrent usage or what... > "In furtherance of its scheme, the Sparks Group fraudulently obtained copyrighted DVDs and Blu-Ray discs from wholesale distributors in advance of their retail release d…

I'd like easier to buy or rent DVD's. The DRM in it has been broken for so long that it is basically DRM-free and the quality is good enough for most of mine entertainment purposes. I fear streaming services will make buying DVD's harder. Are Blue-Ray as easily watchable as DVD's these days?

The DRM on blurays has been broken for over a decade now. The newer 4K blurays are a pain though, there are only a few drives that work and you will probably need to reflash the drive firmware.

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

#62

Post by tyingq »

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of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

>someone can get up to 5 years or more

I have a feeling it will be much more in this case. For example...

"The case is being prosecuted by the Office’s Violent and Organized Crime Unit."

I imagine they will find a way to file RICO charges too. Those are good for 20 years each.

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

#63

Post by smegger001 »

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.

Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.

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

#64

Post by chongli »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #41
chongli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the case for Hollywood blockbuster movies but it’s not true for TV shows, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams. People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the cont…

If the content were free to use however you wanted, what would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content or vice versa?

It's not hard to imagine a scenario where individual downloading is decriminalized but large-scale commercial piracy remains illegal. This would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content without a license but it wouldn't stop Joe Public from downloading Game of Thrones or what have you.

Such a regime would encourage content creators to make it more readily available so that users are willing to pay for the convenience, a la Netflix.

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

#65

Post by barbecue_sauce »

tzs wrote: post #55
azalemeth wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

That sounds more like a failure of marketing on Pixelmator's part.

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

#66

Post by gjsman-1000 »

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…

“ Doubleday doesn't own the pages of the books they sell me.”

But if you copy them you can still be taken to court and/or imprisoned, just like copying a disc.

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

#67

Post by kroltan »

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…

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. It was said in the context of video games, but I believe it very much well applies to other parts of the entertainment industry.

If people are pirating content, then consuming that content is not worth the hassle to obtain.

> If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

In that way, stamping out piracy is trying to address the symptoms, not the cause, and even if you are ultimately successful in eradicating piracy, then you'll likely still end up with a bunch of non-customers.

Anecdotally, the popularization of Netflix definitely greatly reduced piracy among my demographic, up until the point where every publisher decided to roll their own, often subpar, streaming service, each with different region-locking rules.

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

#68

Post by enkid »

sonicggg wrote: post #54
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.

Yeah, people should totally be able to kill someone than go back to their own country and never be held accountable.

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

#69

Post by trothamel »

intricatedetail wrote: post #51
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…

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.

Is there any business that isn't backed by state violence, to some degree? The computer you're typing this on is powered over copy wires, and those copper wires have value. What's to stop someone from just coming up and stealing them and everything else of value you own?

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

#70

Post by Chris2048 »

enkid wrote: post #68
sonicggg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, people should totally be able to kill someone than go back to their own country and never be held accountable.

Unless they are the wife of a diplomat?
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