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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

#141

Post by mindslight »

tptacek wrote: post #116
zarzavat wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really. So if I copy the credit cards out of a database and put them on Pastebin, I've done nothing blameworthy, so long as I myself don't try to buy anything with them? Do you have an argument against enforcing criminal copyright laws that would be persuasive to someone who doesn't believe that?

An exploit for a software security bug contains much more information, structure, and creativity than a 21 digit shared secret. If you're condemning the action of posting a simple number, then you must also condemn posting something more substantive with much wilder effects.

From the open society view that information wants to be copied, at this point the blame rests fully with the payment networks. Rather they just don't care, as they don't even pay for the sheer majority of fraud.

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

#142

Post by burnished »

aasasd wrote: post #58
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of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…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.

Yes! If you go out and get stabbed by a falling branch you've got no recourse. Of course, the argument you seem to be advocating for hinges on showing how a copy represents material harm. The usual argument is it represents a lost sale. Still not sure how you get sent to jail over that though, maybe the argument itself doesn't have much weight but the people invoking it can push their weight around.

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

#143

Post by burnished »

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…

Piracy is typically a service problem. You don't fix digital copying by sending people to jail, you do it by offering a compelling service.

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

#144

Post by alternatetwo »

pessimizer wrote: post #74
Sytten wrote: post #22

The claim that is caused tens of millions in lost revenue is always funny to me. It is the same argument used to push DRM everywhere. The fact is, a lot (if not most) people that downloaded the movies or shows would not have paid for it in the first place. So it is not lost revenue.

There's no doubt that SPARKS pre-releases cost the studios millions. When you release a terrible movie ahead of the opening weekend, the rumor spreads quickly that the movie is terrible. Normally, that effect would be part of (and swamped by) the 2nd weekend drop, but now it's part of your opening weekend. For good movies it probably doesn't make much of a difference. But most movies are not good. There's a huge gamb…

SPARKS was a retail group, they released DVD rips and BluRay rips - so their releases didn't impact theatrical opening weekends.

You can check some stuff they pred here: https://www.srrdb.com/browse/SPARKS/order:date-asc/1

As you can see (sorted by oldest because surprisingly many things have sparks in their name), it's mainly retail rips.

In fact, few scene releases before COVID would actually impact theatrical openings, since the movies only get released weeks/months later on phyiscal media/streaming. The only thing you get before are crappy camrips/telesyncs.

They do however usually manage to acquire the media a few weeks before the street date, which is why streaming releases are now a few weeks before the physical media releases.

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

#146

Post by tptacek »

mindslight wrote: post #141
tptacek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really. So if I copy the credit cards out of a database and put them on Pastebin, I've done nothing blameworthy, so long as I myself don't try to buy anything with them? Do you have an argument against enforcing criminal copyright laws that would be persuasive to someone who doesn't believe that?

An exploit for a software security bug contains much more information, structure, and creativity than a 21 digit shared secret. If you're condemning the action of posting a simple number, then you must also condemn posting something more substantive with much wilder effects. From the open society view that information wants to be copied, at this point the blame rests fully with the payment networks. Rather they just…

I'm not talking about exploits. I'm talking about credit card numbers.

If you want to put together a coherent world view that says it's fine to copy a thousand live credit card numbers to a public Pastebin page, that's fine. I'm not interested in litigating that with you.

What I'm interested in is whether you can then come up with an argument against enforcing copyright that doesn't produce that outcome, because I don't think very many people share the world view that it's just fine to traffic in unauthorized copies of other people's credit card numbers.

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

#147

Post by Lord_Baltimore »

andy_ppp wrote: post #117
aasasd wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, it’s absolutely not the same thing. How can you compare something that harms no-one, to something that should clearly be illegal due to likelihood of death and maiming?

The original argument is essentially "if this action is so easy then how can you make it illegal?" which is not a very good argument as pointed out. Your argument is about the morality of this action which is quite different.

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

#148

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

#150

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

foerbert wrote: post #97
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…

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…

Without copyright protections, everything on netflix is also going to be just as convenient to watch on youtube, but for free, meaning it's worth much much less to netflix. Extrapolating from netflix today to netflix without IP protections doesn't work.
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