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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

#151

Post by aasasd »

burnished wrote: post #142
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.

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.

First of all, it doesn't follow in any way from my comment that I'm ‘advocating for’ that argument. You just extrapolated somehow onto the stock set of anti-copyright arguments and decided that I'm opposed to one of them.

Actually, I'm sorta happy that such kinds of blatant strawmanning and anti-copyright crowd being generally pretty obnoxious led to me thinking these things over for myself, instead of just accepting everything that gets passed around again and again. So I guess thanks for that.

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

#152

Post by m12k »

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of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favor…

Copyright was invented as a reaction to the invention of the printing press. Whenever technology threatens to commoditize something, there's hand wringing and pushback from those who benefit from that thing not being a commodity. What technology makes abundant, the law makes scarce again. Things should be easy they say, yes, but not so easy as to not involve them and paying for their services. TBH I'm just glad I live in a world where the runaway success of the IP lobby wasn't replicated by e.g. the whale oil industry or the ice block sellers.

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

#153

Post by andy_ppp »

tptacek wrote: post #132
andy_ppp wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as nobody uses the credit card information to steal money then fine, otherwise you’re obviously doing something illegal (facilitating theft). To be honest though even then I think we should at this point require some sort of 2FA, maybe if doing such things (putting credit card numbers online) wasn’t illegal better protections would have to be implemented…

Yes, the previous comment was clearly written and said the same thing. Hence my question.

You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying; of course there would be consequences for doing the stupid straw man you’ve suggested, I just don’t believe unless you can prove harm (and piracy doesn’t cause anyone harm) you should be put in jail, let alone extradited.

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

#154

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

FWIW, this model (via crowdfunding platforms) has been successful in funding quite a few creative works, including very expensive ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-funded_crowdfu... So the general principle is clearly workable.

Funding live action movies in this way is still not very popular, though. Arguably, the cost structure in this industry might just be too challenging to succeed in the first place. The fact that they do get funded by other means looks like a bit of a puzzle! It might even be more of a loss-leading, perhaps marketing-focused activity than anything aimed at directly making a profit.

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

#155

Post by andy_ppp »

tptacek wrote: post #146
mindslight wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

The credit card numbers is a really dumb analogy, we’re talking about piracy of software, audio and video. I can’t use a copy of a DVD to empty someone’s bank account (not that I should be able to steal from someone with security through obscurity either).

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

#156

Post by tptacek »

andy_ppp wrote: post #153
tptacek wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the previous comment was clearly written and said the same thing. Hence my question.

You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying; of course there would be consequences for doing the stupid straw man you’ve suggested, I just don’t believe unless you can prove harm (and piracy doesn’t cause anyone harm) you should be put in jail, let alone extradited.

That wasn't the argument made upthread. That argument was an appeal to the fundamental nature of data, that its nature is to be copied. That's true of all data, not just the data you want to see copied.

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

#157

Post by tptacek »

andy_ppp wrote: post #155
tptacek wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

The credit card numbers is a really dumb analogy, we’re talking about piracy of software, audio and video. I can’t use a copy of a DVD to empty someone’s bank account (not that I should be able to steal from someone with security through obscurity either).

I agree that it's dumb, which is my point: the appeal to the fundamental nature of data doesn't tell us anything about the legitimacy of copyright enforcement.

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

#158

Post by openfuture »

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…

Similarily $COUNTRY does not own my identity, and yet my passport is the property of $COUNTRY.

This fight reaches deeper than we think because any solution, that is an economic model where free software is valued correctly.. will be able to incentivice infrastructure, solve the tragedy of the commons, but if we do it with a central authority then we suffer from the computational complexity of prioritization and we are back to trying to break up the computation within the central authority.

Basically no matter what, we will have to solve the infrastructure problem in a distributed manner and fwict this comes down to replacing our various systems of evaluation with something more holistic that models reality well: probabilistic estimates of trust in information sources (identities) in a P2P network.

I believe the path is:

Authenticated datastructures can be used to build a societal "operating system" (version control, reproducible builds, digital currencies, name systems)

Slowly we start getting serious about cryptographic identities.

We start probabilistically evaluating trustworthiness of such identities (information sources) in a P2P network.

This social network starts becoming a sufficient way to manage society, some communities or developing countries report success stories.

Civil war in the west as the traditional governance is seen increasingly as a inferior means to organizing society but their hold on power is too strong for the transition to go smoothly.

Idk.. that's a rough sketch of where I see it going right now. It's really a race whether we can have the software ready before our civil liberties are eroded too much.

I have a telegram channel where we are thinking about how to go about this: @datalisp

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

#159

Post by johnchristopher »

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…

I don't think you own the bits on the disc, this is information and ideas and stories you don't have rights to make profit off,this is reserved to the authors who temporarily ceded them to publishers. You do own the plastic and dvd though which is what you are actually /selling. Which has the convenience of preventing you from enjoying the story (that you don't own) performed by actors and first encoded in images and sound and then in bits for practical purposes which are written on the plastic disc.

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

#160

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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.

Yet from a software perspective I always saw sales drop when a cracked version of my software was released and increases when I tightened the DRM. This is a niche product sold B2B.

Adding DRM has a cost and I'd rather not do it but it's quite clear to me that not having it would impact revenue.

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