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Goodbye Popcorn Time

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Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#241
post #93

> Piracy is not a people problem. It’s a service problem. I'd say its a pricing problem. Right now 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is available from Amazon Instant Video at $20. On your popular torrent site virtually the same product is available for $0 + (riskOfGettingCaught * $1,000,000 fine) = $0.000001 ? You can either try to increase the riskOfGettingCaught or decrease the legal price. I think the industry should do w…

Well, will the Amazon Instant Video be possible to archive and playable without DRM support and offline? If not it's not the same product. Is it available to me (Norway)? No, so it's not the same product.

I think pricing is a separate, but related concern. I paid ~17 USD to watch Gravity in theatres once, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay anything to watch "the Wolf of Wallstreet". I might watch it for free, though. So in this case, if I were to pirate WoWst -- that wouldn't be a lost sale. It'd be free marketing (if I recommend it to others), or well, nothing I guess. Not a lost sale, because buying wasn't considered.

The thing is, people have different tastes, and for someone that's a die-hard De Caprio fan, WoWst might be worth $20. I might be willing to buy some film others think is crap etc. Now, had I watched an unlicensed copy of WoWst and thought it was ok, I'd probably recommend it to someone who really liked Leo -- even if I wouldn't consider it a great movie. And if did consider it a great movie I certainly would.

I think we're seeing (and have been seeing) a disturbing shift around the ideas of laws with regards to content: anti-piracy (anti-usability ;) groups seem to argue that people want to steal, and only enforcement keeps them from stealing. This disregards the idea that laws are a form of consensus -- there's not a law enforcement department in the world that can work without citizen support. Laws that are regarded as unfair and unwarranted will be broken.

I feel that in general arguing piracy kills music and film, is like arguing libraries kills books.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#242
post #10

It's better that the Popcorn Time developers leave now than later. By leaving now they can take advantage of all the attention and get a great fork going.

Probably what their initial intention was from the beginning. 1) Build something incredible. 2) Get a ton of cred for it. 3) Release it to the masses via open source. 4) Wait for the lawyers to roll up en masse. Then simply flee the scene, avoiding any legal entanglements and with steadfast assurances what you've created will now go on without you, and most likely morph into something even more incredible. Genius I t…

I'd call that move the satoshi if it weren't too soon.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#243

There's a saying that goes : Don't buy fish in the ocean. Studios and all assume that people are thieves. There are a number of cases to think of: Tim Ferriss teamed with.. BitTorrent to distribute his latest book (4 Hour Chef). He wrote a detailed article on his experience and the correlation between BitTorrent downloads and sales (number driven he is, he tracked that real-time). The model was the second-shareware m…

You've really just illuminated what the MAFIAA doesn't want us to understand: that it is empirically false to state that people aren't supporting the arts. But let's not use their loaded propaganda bullshit terms when we're talking about these things. Sharing media isn't stealing. People who share music and movies online are not the same as armed robbers attacking a ship at gunpoint. If we are to win this war--and let's not delude ourselves, it's a war that the traitors started against us--then we must refuse to think the way they tell us to. These people screw over the creative folks who earn them record profits on a daily basis and they will cling tightly to their monopolies by purchasing more laws unless we stop them.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the plaintiff should be required to contribute all the legal fees for the defendant (up to a maximum). If the defendant loses the lawsuit, he must pay the plaintiff back for his own legal fees in addition to the damages that he must pay.

That would be great except the defendant still has to pay up front.

Actually it's not great since a disproportionate part of the outcome of legal proceedings is luck, just like all of life.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#245
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Without your comment I wouldn't have seen that Veronica Mars was released! I was also an early contributor but ignored most of their mails since they have a tendency to spam... (which is okay since that's what kickstarter is about). So thanks for your comment, I'm just gonna torrent the movie instead of using my flixster code. edit: I'm streaming in in Flixster right now, I had no problem (didn't have to downloa…

If you ignored the emails (like I did), you might not have noticed that you're probably also entitled to some stickers, and a T-shirt (if you pledged at the $35 level).

well, I did receive that T-shirt and was very surprised!

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#246
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. And then if you're Hulu, start cramming ads back into paying users' faces. I miss the days when people threw sledghammers into giant TV screens to free us from this hell. Or was that a movie?

I don't know about the timelines in the US, but I do know that here in Australia, cable TV initially had one major thing going for it: you didn't get ads during a show. You'd get ads between shows to round out the minutes, and usually not for commercial products, but not during the show. It didn't take long for them to stop that practice, which perplexed me - what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package the…

> what was the point in getting a basic cable TV package then?

Because people would still pay for it.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#247
post #108

I've scanned this whole thread and there's not a single post that is at all critical of the intentions behind Popcorn Time. I guess you're all okay with a world where content creators don't eat. Or do you have a better idea than copyright? If so, by all means let's hear it. I promise you that the person who solves that problem in an accessible way will be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or at least Tim Berners-Lee. Every s…

It's a profoundly non-technical problem, I think. People who care about content creators get screwed over by DRM and complain loudly. People who don't care about content creators take advantage of the lack of DRM to pirate stuff to their heart's content. You have this vicious three-way cycle that forms among pirates, fans, and creators.

Then there are the assholes who claim that if you don't torrent your films and games you're not enough of a 'hacker', or that there's no problem with piratical torrenting at all because all the people who torrent would never have purchased the album/film/game legitimately if the torrent hadn't been available (as if even a small fraction of those people would willingly admit otherwise).

I don't know what the solution is. If I ever became rich (not going to happen), I would seriously consider becoming a patron of the types of arts that I enjoy. But that's a pipe dream, and even if it did happen it wouldn't scale.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would lawyers be toasting champagne? They could have made money from a lawsuit.

Proof that their intimidation 'services' work will sell more intimidation services.

good riddance to those people who would then pay for said intimidation service, the find out that it doesn't actually work.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#249

There's a saying that goes : Don't buy fish in the ocean. Studios and all assume that people are thieves. There are a number of cases to think of: Tim Ferriss teamed with.. BitTorrent to distribute his latest book (4 Hour Chef). He wrote a detailed article on his experience and the correlation between BitTorrent downloads and sales (number driven he is, he tracked that real-time). The model was the second-shareware m…

You've really just illuminated what the MAFIAA doesn't want us to understand: that it is empirically false to state that people aren't supporting the arts. But let's not use their loaded propaganda bullshit terms when we're talking about these things. Sharing media isn't stealing. People who share music and movies online are not the same as armed robbers attacking a ship at gunpoint. If we are to win this war--and le…

> loaded propaganda bullshit terms

Totally.

> MAFIAA

> If we are to win this war

> traitors

Oh, I see. This only applies to them.

Look, your basic point is solid but your presentation could use a little work.

Re: Goodbye Popcorn Time

#250
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll spend more time watching the locked content before the show for most DVDs than it takes to download.

Challenge accepted. Will try to find a DVD with some of that stuff tomorrow (it's 3:18am, parents would not appreciate). Edit: Does searching a dvd count as time spent before being able to watch the movie? Since you can't, ahem, copy dvds to your NAS (they're encrypted with CSS to prevent yarr pirates y'know).

Are you implying CSS is any more secure than a wet paper bag?
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