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The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

wired.co.uk

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Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#41

Post by onli »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #37

OK , the argument is more or less that the technology to mass distribute content online for free has made the content industries as they stand today obsolete despite the piracy being illegal. As a thought experiment let's assume that technology appeared to develop a perfect cloaking device and a teleporter and these things could be made cheap enough to be affordable to 99% of the population. This would allow anyone t…

Your analogy is like almost all of them flawed, in that it is missing to contain the specific characteristics of the thing in question. You yourself state that, so what is the point? That not all possible things should be done and that's why the industry shouldn't have to change? Please.

But more importantly: that is not the main argument. The article, as i read it, is about the corruptness created by the refusal of industry to change. If the industry controls the US, and the US dares to control Sweden, and the justice-system is not working because of that control, than it is not longer about entertainment. It is about force and control. It's about

  If you don't give up before you're sued, they corrupt the legal system.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#42

Post by tikhonj »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #37

OK , the argument is more or less that the technology to mass distribute content online for free has made the content industries as they stand today obsolete despite the piracy being illegal. As a thought experiment let's assume that technology appeared to develop a perfect cloaking device and a teleporter and these things could be made cheap enough to be affordable to 99% of the population. This would allow anyone t…

It's a weird hypothetical, but I think it would: if you need something, just teleport and grab it. With the exception of personalized items (basically just my computer these days), I don't care much if somebody takes something I own given that I could get something equivalent easily.

As long as the technology was symmetric (that is, everybody had equal access to it), I think it would just make allocation of most items more efficient. Why should I own a hammer that I use once a year if I can just grab it from somebody who isn't using it at the moment? And then they could grab one from somebody else when the time came.

The issue with personalization actually has a parallel in the IP--there is copyright and then there is privacy; the two are different and it is eminently reasonable to support one but not the other.

Now, there would be some issues with your hypothetical world (e.g. who would produce stuff in the first place?) but I do not think they would be insurmountable. So yes, I think that would make owning small impersonal items obsolete.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#43

Post by eurleif »

kbolino wrote: post #38
eurleif wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between someone who's in your country but of a different nationality, and someone who's in a different country.

That's vacuous reasoning. I know the situations are different; I'm asking why one is ethically intolerable and the other is ethically acceptable to the point of making civil disobedience unethical (in freehunter's opinion, anyway). To put it another way, what about that difference justifies the discrimination?

IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies. Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#44

Post by cobrausn »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #39
cobrausn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, because their product is not up to your arbitrary set of demands, you feel justified in pirating it? Couldn't they meet those and you could just come up with more demands? I don't buy it. Hiding behind a list of demands that must be met in order for you to be okay with actually financially compensating the people who financially backed, created, and then distributed said content is just posturing. At least, that'…

I think these demands are reasonable, especially the geographical one since you can't buy something if it's not available for you to buy. The issue is that sometimes when you pay for something you end up with an inferior product, for example being required to install additional software that you either don't like or may not even be available for your platform. I think you can mitigate piracy a lot by simply providing…

I can always add one more reasonable demand to my previous list of reasonable demands to hide behind. The final one will be 'accept bitcoin payment' and then I'll never need to pay for anything again! Let's face it, they could charge 0.01 USD over the face of the globe and the only requirement would be paypal or credit card, and that would be too much for some people. Piracy would still run rampant, because piracy is easier than paying (to some people).

Cynicism aside, the geographical requirement is reasonable. I still won't pirate even if it's not available here unless there is some way to pay for it (damn my parents and their persistent morals) but I do see the argument for 'There absolutely is no other way for me to get it.' It's nearly impossible to argue against that one, especially considering any geographical restrictions are likely arbitrary. Though I fail to see why anyone would restrict themselves from a potential market, especially if your content is digital.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#45

Post by kbolino »

eurleif wrote: post #43
kbolino wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's vacuous reasoning. I know the situations are different; I'm asking why one is ethically intolerable and the other is ethically acceptable to the point of making civil disobedience unethical (in freehunter's opinion, anyway). To put it another way, what about that difference justifies the discrimination?

IP rights to the same work in different countries are sold separately, and can end up being owned by different companies. Also, different countries have different economies, which means it makes sense to manage distribution in separate countries separately.

I concur, and that's a succinct description of how this discrimination has been made possible, but it's completely orthogonal to my question.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#46

Post by drcube »

teamonkey wrote: post #31
drcube wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in luck: https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-doesnt-affect-us-... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3577076

Torrentfreak is not a reliable news source by any means. It has a strong agenda and that article spun the findings of the paper.

"Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent, and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy." (Italics are mine)

Here's a link to the actual paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1986299

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#47

Post by Gotttzsche »

tweak2live wrote: post #21

The question of intellectual property is moot. It is impossible to adequately police teh intertubes without outlawing encryption. Why do the media companies insist on continuing to attempt the impossible, instead of cutting their losses and investing in distribution infrastructure? By pursuing the kind of ham-fisted, extra-legal "piracy fighting" that the article describes, they are doing themselves a huge disservice…

i may be out of the loop, but... none of the popular ways of piracy are generally encrypted are they? if all the unencrypted ones were to be shut down, would it be possible to replace them with safe ones?

i mean with public p2p filesharing, you can always "spy" on the sharers. i mean it has the be decryptable for you to download it, right? and youll know who sent it.

and with stuff that hosted somewhere, whether it's some usenet provider or megaupload, you can always shut down the hoster.

people could still pirate by directly sending each other encrypted files, but you'd always have to know someone personally who has what you want. which would make piracy much harder.

why am i wrong? ;)

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#48

Post by cynicalkane »

freehunter wrote: post #20
vibrunazo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Purchasing and downloading apps could not be easier. I wouldn't be so fast here. The app store limits availability by country. For example, you cannot legally buy games here in Brazil on the app store [1]. Which is a huge market. I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to Weird Al Yankovic's songs (I spent months w…

>I pirate a lot of stuff, and almost all of it I couldn't possibly have legally acquired. If pirating didn't exist, I would have never listened to weird al's songs, nor watched movies banned in my country for political reasons. This still isn't a good argument. Justifying the means by which you acquired content still doesn't make it morally right or legal. "But I can't get it without piracy!" still doesn't give you a…

I hate that this is downvoted.

Content owners have the right to dictate, within the bounds of law, how their content is to be used. The only reason this is controversial is because music is usually owned and distributed by the Bad Guys. If this was a case about illegally using GPLed software, for example, there wouldn't even need to be a discussion.

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#49

Post by cynicalkane »

A while ago I realized something about piracy that disturbed me, and the more I think about it, the more disturbed I get.

Lots of money now days is going into things like webapps, app stores, Steam, DRM-encumbered streaming, enterprise software, other categories of stuff that can't reasonably be stolen. But this presents an encumbrance over information for which society would be better off if it were free in the informational sense, only free is hard to monetize in a world of Pirate Bay self-righteousness, where mass piracy is accepted and even praised. I'm told that Sirius XM already has a mathematical key revocation technique that's uncrackable, though I'm also told they haven't used it because a general crack to their radios isn't around yet.

We're approaching the world of Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read"[1]. A world in which piracy is acceptable isn't a world of free stuff for everyone--it's a world where content is locked down, or never made at all. A perfect content lockdown is theroetically possible and people are getting better at it all the time. Then it will be so long to fair use, to reasonable sharing, to grey-market cultural exports.

This world will happen because people want to buy the best, latest, greatest, biggest budget music, movies, apps, and so on. Confronted with this, piracy advocates theorize a Marxian post-scarcity paradise where all content creators do it for the love of content creation, where people have woken up and thrown off the shackles of capitalist big content. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Re: The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde: It's evolution, stupid

#50

Post by teamonkey »

drcube wrote: post #46
teamonkey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torrentfreak is not a reliable news source by any means. It has a strong agenda and that article spun the findings of the paper.

"Our findings indicate that, as a lower bound, international box office returns in our sample were at least 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. By contrast, we do not see evidence of elevated sales displacement in US box office revenue following the adoption of BitTorrent , and we suggest that delayed legal availability of the content abroad may drive the losses to piracy." (Itali…

Did you read the paper though?

"Taking this triple-difference [their metric for determining piracy rate] as a conservative estimate of the effect of piracy on box office sales, we infer that pre-release piracy causes the foreign box office returns for a movie to decrease by 1.3% for each week of lag between the U.S. release and the foreign release of the movie."

...

"We estimate that movies in our data would have returned a total of nearly $3.52 billion if not for piracy, implying that piracy caused films to lose $240 million in weekend box office returns in the non-US countries in our data during 2005. Thus we estimate that weekend box office returns in our data were about 7% lower than they would have been in the absence of pre-release piracy. This estimate may be conservative if the actual losses to piracy are greater than those suggested by our tripledifference estimate or if returns in the US box office are also reduced by piracy."

Also, the paper only talks about box-office sales, not even touching the DVD/Blu-ray/download market.

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