Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy

justice.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 198 posts

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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

lvs wrote: post #76
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.

Or they're already making money from the pirates. Case in point, some streaming services don't support linux and some Android devices because of Widevine DRM problems. So it creates the perverse situation in which (expensively) paid content is harder (impossible) to access vs the same pirated content.

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by account42 »

crazygringo wrote: post #34
DennisP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So change the business model. In the words of Robert Heinlein: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange…

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 aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years.

We have had legally enforced copyright all this time so why would any company take the risk and try out another business model. That we did not see one does not mean one is impossible.

The money spend on copyrighted content would not just disappear without copyright and could be funneled into content by patrons or via grants. Big-budged productions are also already getting funded by product placment and other sponsort-type deals.

Then there is also a cultural aspect: The existence of copyright creates a society where sharing is often not seen as a good thing. Where people are less willing to pay for the creation of something if that would mean that freeloaders could then get it without paying.

And last, I don't agree with your implication that the current big-budget films and TV are something that needs to be protected. Yes, changing funding models might change what kind of content is produced, but never in human history has there been a lack of demand for entertainment or lack of entertainment to fill that demand.

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

#173

Post by enkid »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #170
enkid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people should totally be able to kill someone than go back to their own country and never be held accountable.

You mean like the American citizen who ran down and killed a British teenager and will never face anything remotely close to justice for it? I’m usually quite an Atlanticist but even I think these extradition treaties are awful.

Hold on, the above comment was about extradition as a concept, not a specific implementation. Surely you can agree the idea of extradition is a good one if you think it should be done in that case.

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

#174

Post by account42 »

tzs wrote: post #55
azalemeth wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy, when casually undertaken by 50-70% of the population does not harm or even mildly helps sales, as found in a suppressed EU-wide report [1, 2] that you can read in detail here [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/…

Are you taking into account the effects on sales of substitute goods? If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite. But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would hav…

If I download the GIMP, should that count as a lost sale to Pixelmator. Should the law somehow protect them from that?

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

#175

Post by account42 »

esyir wrote: post #102
foota wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this.

The current state of OSS exists in a world with copyright. If you want to extrapolate that to a world without copyright you better have a good argument why the incentives for OSS funding would not change.

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

#176

Post by account42 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #45
foota wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> in reality this isn't the choice

In the reality with excessive copyright terms, yes.

> Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.

Are government grants for the arts a bad thing now?

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

#177

Post by account42 »

jstrH wrote: post #57
rebelos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Open information; music, books, code, science, videos; threatens their entire business model. Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts. It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming! Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega…

fyi, your post was [dead]

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

#178

Post by account42 »

elif wrote: post #87
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 agree. US intellectual property law is anachronistic and at odds with the evolution of modern technology. More permissive ip countries will leave us in the dust.

> More permissive ip countries will leave us in the dust.

If only the US hadn't used unconsititutional backdoors to ram similar laws into most other countries.

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

#179

Post by wyldfire »

dendriti wrote: post #129
wyldfire wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 copyin…

If you actually read the link, Strauss is not being "extradited to another country for potential imprisonment" just for criminal copyright infringement.

The imprisonment bit comes if he's convicted in the US.

From 17 U.S.C. 506(A) & 18 U.S.C 2319:

> . A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).

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

#180

Post by piva00 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #130
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?

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…

My credit cards in Sweden have a form of 2FA through 3-D Secure + BankID, if a purchase for some reason scores poorly on fraud detection (large amount, unusual purchase, etc.) it will trigger a 2FA request on my BankID that I have to approve.
Post reply on HN