111–120 of 198 posts
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In fairness, crowd funding and or altruistic consumers could theoretically sustain content production.
in reality this isn't the choice; it's typically private enterprise vs. public (government) broadcasters. Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.
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In fairness, crowd funding and or altruistic consumers could theoretically sustain content production.
The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. That maintainers are often poorly supported implies what I suspect we're all trying not to acknowledge.
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I'm not sure Netflix would agree that a low monthly subscription is not enough to fund TV and movie development, but regardless... Fairly recently I saw a very interesting proposal for this. The basic idea was to base it off of how artist commissions work, and combine that with crowdfunding. A creator can decide how much they need to make a thing - including both costs and how much profit they need to find it worth d…
Netflix is funding TV and movies through massive amounts of debt; not subscription revenues. It’s unclear if Netflix will ever make that money back since they can’t stop making content.
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These people are accused of fraudulently obtaining the bits that they copied, which suggests that your whole argument would apply just as directly to credit card numbers, which are also just bits, amenable to the fundamental mechanisms of technology. As for the sentencing, as always: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
This is a fantastic read. The sentencing process has always been a black box in my mental model of the world, and this was enlightening.
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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…
I'm not sure Netflix would agree that a low monthly subscription is not enough to fund TV and movie development, but regardless... Fairly recently I saw a very interesting proposal for this. The basic idea was to base it off of how artist commissions work, and combine that with crowdfunding. A creator can decide how much they need to make a thing - including both costs and how much profit they need to find it worth d…
Okay, and what stops my competing company from running a subscription service, where I take all the shows that Netflix funded, and streaming to my customers for lower monthly price than Netflix’s, which I can do, as I don’t spend a dollar on content creation and acquisition? Oh, that’s right, copyright stops me from doing that.
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These people are accused of fraudulently obtaining the bits that they copied, which suggests that your whole argument would apply just as directly to credit card numbers, which are also just bits, amenable to the fundamental mechanisms of technology. As for the sentencing, as always: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
There's nothing wrong with copying credit card numbers, people used to do that all the time with the manual credit card machines. What is wrong is stealing money.
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.
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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…
> You cannot have both Yet, we do have both. We are at both peak piracy and peak revenue for digital content. I think it’s false that people state that these things are exclusive.
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…
The idea behind a copyright is to have The People temporarily forfeit their innate right to communicate art, ideas, and stories in order to stimulate an industry of artists and scientists.
If the business model depends on people not copying your data then you can always sue for relief in the courts. Get damages, hooray. But criminal copyright infringement seems like a big stretch. Maybe worthy of fines or public service but imprisonment? Extradition to another country for potential imprisonment? Seems totally backwards.
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This is a fantastic read. The sentencing process has always been a black box in my mental model of the world, and this was enlightening.
The important thing to take away from it is that the DOJ deliberately misrepresents sentences in press releases, presumably for the deterrent factor. But you can just download the sentencing guidelines and follow the charts to get a likely range of actual months (it's interesting! I recommend it!) and they're virtually never anything like the DOJ's claim.