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

Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

bandaancha.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 482 posts

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#421

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lxgr wrote: post #188
em-bee wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care. for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it. among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are ac…

> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care. As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so. > for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country,…

> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.

Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.

They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#422

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Pay08 wrote: post #127
scotty79 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens. It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.

That would be an absolute disaster and basically destroy European democracy.

The way this works best is that you have a federal system that sets out what the member states can't do (e.g. block internet, censor speech, ex post facto laws, trade barriers) and then the central government exists only to enforce those constraints on the member states, who choose whether and how to do any of the things they are allowed to do.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#423

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Aurornis wrote: post #144
llbbdd wrote: post #30

Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.

> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their…

> It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles

The question is, how does this happen? Which brings us back to the "it's a service problem" thing.

If your company is using intrusive DRM, lobbying for draconian laws, violating antitrust, filing menacing lawsuits against individuals or smaller companies etc. then it's not hard to see how a lot of people could conclude they have a moral obligation to never pay you a cent. And the same sentiment can affect the whole industry when companies in a position to don't push back against other companies doing those things, since the stink spreads to anyone using the same laundromat.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#424

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Manuel_D wrote: post #403
necovek wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not the same until you test the effect of illegal copies of games not having any DRM protection at all (easy to copy/use illegally) on sales. Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific. If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a…

By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this. The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales. I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a bett…

> By definition, illegal copies of games don't have DRM protection. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.

This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.

In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.

In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.

Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#425

Post by jimbokun »

nubinetwork wrote: post #304
artyom wrote: post #244

If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense: - Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway. - There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN" - Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours. - There's not really huge internet companies there that…

> they're watching the match Isn't that part of the problem? Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters. There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.

Or maybe people just like watching football?

I live in the US and just finished watching a recording of Atletico vs Barcelona in the Champions League and it was incredibly entertaining.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#426

Post by jimbokun »

scotty79 wrote: post #81
petcat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there need to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?

Basically EU should step in whenever country level government doesn't do a good enough job for its citizens. It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.

So Spanish people are too stupid to vote for their own policy preferences?

How do you know the EU is guaranteed to do a better job than national governments representing the desires of that nation’s citizens?

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#427

Post by jimbokun »

quacked wrote: post #159
Aurornis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their…

It's a service problem. Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when, deal with their bullshit when they add ads onto an ad-free plan that you bought only because it was ad-free, yadda yadda yadda. The suits could have had 10x as much money out of…

I feel your frustration however the charge per episode/song/article etc plans I believe all failed.

Early on Apple sold individual songs and leaned hard into selling individual TV episodes for a $2 (if I remember correctly). It was unpopular and people flocked to the lines of Netflix and Spotify instead.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#428

Post by jimbokun »

necovek wrote: post #324
Manuel_D wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the contrary, there is evidence that DRM increased sales. Researchers analyzed data on sales before and after cracks for video games shows up to 20% lost sales of a game is cracked quickly: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...

It seems hard to take that interpretation at face value (20% seems to be an effect of a week 1 crack post-release with total revenue lost estimated at 25%; week 3 crack has estimated total losses at ~12%, and week 7 crack at less than 5% of total revenue loss..., ~0% for week 12+ cracks). This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into w…

Those goalposts way over there are looking very tiny.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#429

Post by necovek »

otterley wrote: post #375
necovek wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent the bulk of my career being paid to write software that was published under open source licenses. I was paid to write exactly the software the business needed to be built, with software being the tool for the business to provide value to their customers and not a money extracting scheme. I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs…

Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy. > Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their sof…

You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build.

My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

To give you another example, Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

Just like authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#430

Post by otterley »

necovek wrote: post #429
otterley wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, most software engineers aren't fortunate enough to be insulated from the impact of copyright infringement. The reality is that a lot of us--maybe not you personally, but possibly even your friends and neighbors--put food on the table via our intellectual efforts, and that deserves respect. Try to have some empathy. > Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their sof…

You missed my argument: sw engineers are largely being paid for the labour we put in, and I am saying that we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone did legally (open source) or illegally have access to the software we build. My company has a ton of patents (which are public) and cares about copyright deeply, but that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than poten…

> we still would be paid for the same labour even if someone...illegally have access to the software we build.

Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from the licensing of the software. If everyone is pirating the software, there’s no market for it, nobody’s going to buy it, and there will be no money to pay for your salary.

> that does not mean that it would be significantly affected financially (other than potentially in stock price, which is an entirely different social aspect).

Stock prices aren’t a “social aspect.” They are a financial instrument that reflects the expected future earnings of the company. Companies aren’t going to form and employ people if they can’t sell their stock because their product has no value in the marketplace.

> Windows source code leaked 10 years ago or so. Did it slow down Windows?

You’re asking the wrong question. That leak, in and of itself, didn’t impact the market for the software. Nevertheless, massive piracy of any software would harm the economy. The fact that most people respect others’ labor is what keeps the market functioning.

> authors (owners of copyright) aren't negatively affected if someone creates a copy they would never have paid for.

We don’t know who never would have paid for a copy of software at any price. And there is a difference between knowing that infringement exists and making excuses for it. The question isn’t whether some people do it and the market is still healthy; it’s whether or not we should condone it so that nobody should feel compelled to follow the law. Because, following your logic, nobody should pay for software. If that happens, tremendous economic harm will follow.

Post reply on HN