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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

#71

Post by mannykannot »

bawolff wrote: post #47
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…

To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die. I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.

At first sight, this seems to be a common-sense response, but things get more nuanced when you consider it in depth.

Electronic media are a viable business as things stand, so you must be considering whether they would continue to be viable without the sort of laws being discussed here.

Whether any business model is viable is relative to the laws in effect. Without laws governing issues like property and contracts, a great deal of today's commerce would be infeasible. Without labor and fraud laws, all sorts of exploitation would be the norm. Without either, exploitative practices would be the only viable ones, but they would not be particularly productive - that is how things have been through most of human history, and continue to be so in parts of the world. There is a lot more at risk here than TV.

On the other hand, the current law in this case strikes me as excessive, reflecting the anti-democratic influence businesses have over legislation. My point is that there are no simple answers; the sort of economy that has brought a previously-unimaginable standard of living to a subset of the human race is a battleground of competing interests and trade-offs.

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

#72

Post by colechristensen »

hamburgerwah wrote: post #37

The US wants to have moral authority with scummy authoritarian governments throughout the world and then acts like a scummy authoritarian government. Do you want thriving dictatorships? This is how you get thriving dictatorships.

Eh, what happened goes beyond simple piracy. They were defrauding wholesale distributors so they could rip and share prerelease dvds. To me this crosses the threshold into reasonable prosecution and extradition isnt a crazy abuse.

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

#73

Post by colechristensen »

president wrote: post #59
hamburgerwah wrote: post #37

The US wants to have moral authority with scummy authoritarian governments throughout the world and then acts like a scummy authoritarian government. Do you want thriving dictatorships? This is how you get thriving dictatorships.

Agreed but can a utopia without a scummy authoritarian government exist? There are worse scummy authoritarian governments out there and I'm glad that our scummy authoritarian government is still better than those.

People on both sides of the political spectrum seem to very much want authoritarianism to enforce their viewpoints. You can’t have utopia without dealing with these people first.

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

#74

Post by pessimizer »

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.

There's no doubt that SPARKS pre-releases cost the studios millions. When you release a terrible movie ahead of the opening weekend, the rumor spreads quickly that the movie is terrible. Normally, that effect would be part of (and swamped by) the 2nd weekend drop, but now it's part of your opening weekend.

For good movies it probably doesn't make much of a difference. But most movies are not good. There's a huge gambling element to seeing a movie, and a leak gives away the outcome.

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

#75

Post by pessimizer »

wil421 wrote: post #35
blibble wrote: post #18

> Which Allegedly Caused Tens of Millions of Dollars in Losses so how many uploaded movies is that? 3?

> U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said: “As alleged, George Bridi was a member of an international video piracy ring that circumvented copyright protections on nearly every movie released by major production studios, as well as television shows, and distributed them worldwide on the Internet. Thanks to the assistance of our law enforcement partners, the piracy ring has been busted and Bridi is now in U.S. custody.” Soun…

And unusually, the press release/statement is not an exaggeration. SPARKS ripped so many pre-release movies that at some point they obviously scared themselves, and suddenly announced that they were going to stop for the studios' sake.

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

#76

Post by lvs »

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.

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

#77

Post by yissp »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #50
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…

The problem is excessively long copyright terms. 10 or even 20 years would be reasonable, such that incentives to pirate would be less and copyright enforcement would make sense.

I have no actual data, but I strongly suspect that recent content accounts for the majority of piracy. Just look at the seeder count for, say, The Mandalorian compared to the original Star Wars.

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

#78

Post by unraveller »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #40
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…

Should it be impossible to make a living writing books or recording music or movies? Because that's what it amounts to. Imagine writing a book, selling a copy for $10 to the first reader, and then the rest of the readers get it for free. Or printing a book and having a competing publisher type it up and sell it, taking all the profit.

Exclusivity of data presentation should depend on personal ability to keep it exclusive not state force in every digital nook of society where they can't be stopped from copying/writing to everything also. Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus wrote some of the best books and they were always meant to be mass redistributed for free like all common knowledge and recipes - recited from memory. You paid the scriber if you wanted it written out again.

Expecting direct payment for any knowledge product experience is a poor idea to carry on to extremes like plays & skits. If today someone finds a lost manuscript by a great ancestor author then they own the copyrights to it the moment they publish it. But we wouldn't have the Iliad without mass copying. In a way our imprisoned OP is a perfect reciter of plays who is doing his bit to ensure the plays that do get made remain true to human spirit not deepening state tentacles.

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

#80

Post by mattl »

new_guy wrote: post #42
chongli wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the case for Hollywood blockbuster movies but it’s not true for TV shows, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams. People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the cont…

> People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Except Netflix, Now TV and Amazon Prime etc DON'T HAVE any of the shows I actually want to watch. It's farcical. I want to pay them, I want to watch shows legally but I can't, so I end up watching them on the 'illegal' sites that do have them.

What shows or movies do you want to watch that none of them are on Netflix or Amazon Prime?
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