Live data from Hacker News

Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

881–890 of 960 posts

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The secrecy exists precisely because once information is out there there is no way to control what will be done with it. Contrast that with copyright: the monopolists want to distribute the information world wide and simultaneously fully control what people do with it. The tyranny necessary to enforce such corporate control is utterly unacceptable. The idea wouldn't exist if such tyranny didn't exist in the first pl…

> Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later. Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that. Anyway, I'll go ahead and expicitly pick the latter over the former. I would rather have the nonexistence of ideas over infinite mono…

>Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that.

Let's focus on the overall idea. IP. not the instantiations of the idea like patents and copyright. You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust. Additionally entire businesses and corporations building civilization changing technologies ONLY exist because of IP.

>Also, nonexistence of ideas is incompatible with human nature. People will create, profit or not. They must. The creative output will significantly decrease but it will not be wiped out. As a free software developer, I am living proof.

Human nature is prehistoric instincts for hunter gatherers. Capital, profit, business and centralization of power is responsible for the ideas responsible for human civilization as we know it.

How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747 which is unionization of multitudes of people crystallizing ideas and focusing human effort to creating a feat of an idea that no single human can create? Capital and centralization of power.

You need to pay people, you need to take advantage of their need to survive and get a living wage to motivate such endeavors. You need the incentive to make them rich to have a person coordinate others into creating things like spaceX or google or openAI.

Obviously I am talking about the non-existance of MANY ideas. Not all ideas. And those "many" ideas make up almost all of human civilization itself.

You are a free software developer. You live off of charity. You're fringe. You're a side effect. Business engines drive profit and people get paid and that excess money is charitably given to you. If the business engines didn't exist you wouldn't. You are the exception to the rule. A massive exception, don't get me wrong, but still an exception. Open source would not exist were it not for closed source.

>I am not as strongly opposed to patents as I am to copyright. Unlike copyrights, patents actually expire in reasonable timeframes. Patents have none of this lifetime plus a trillion years nonsense. They also typically apply to physical goods and inventions.

In principle they are the same. Medicine that saves lives wouldn't exist if it wasn't for patents. You tolerate patents but the essence is you think it's wrong, that is the issue I am addressing. If patents didn't exist most big pharma medicines wouldn't exist.

Do you tolerate the non-existence of life saving technologies created by big pharma in order to satisfy their own human greed? Covid for example. Think about the thing that drove big pharma to create these vaccines. 80 to 90 billion in profit is what drove these companies to develop these things at a speed and scale that won't exist without closed source.

What mobilized the smartest minds to work together in such synchrony to produce the vaccines? You think patreon could do it? You think a future surviving off of donations from patreon would motivate all the smartest minds to spend years on training to develop the expertise necessary to stop the pandemic and then finally come together for patreon? lol.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#883
post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how come a month ago you were talking about preventing zero-days from stealing files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44578850 ?

This is the worst no you I've ever seen. I'm not concerned about my files being leaked because that's stealing. I'm concerned because they hold sensitive information that can be used for actual stealing, like for example with money. Malware isn't bad because it's stealing. That's stupid. I know you know it's stupid, so I don't know why you said it.

The point is that earlier you described a zero-day copying files as stealing the files, but now you say that copying data cannot be theft.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#884
post #877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument is completely unpersuasive. These are not the same things at all. In multiple ways. First, there is no way do duplicate bank account contents. Bank transfers are transactions : adding to your account subtracts from mine. The bitcoin ledger is infinitely copyable but doing that gives no one extra bitcoins. Contrast that with intellectual property which is the complete opposite: information can be lossles…

So now we have established that not all numbers are "just numbers" that can be copied victimlessly. Consider that maybe it is because some numbers represent something more than just numeric values. Maybe they represent economic value . Said economic value having been generated by your hard work. Now maybe you can see how that line of thought leads to the concept of intellectual property. Information covered by IP is…

We've established nothing of the sort. Secrets can be copied just as trivially as any other information. That's why numerous measures are taken to avoid their revelation.

If I tell people my bank credentials, I have nobody but myself to blame when money is transferred out of my accounts.

If I upload my secret encryption keys to some cloud service, I have nobody but myself to blame when others gain the ability to decrypt my data.

Yet I'm expected to feel sorry for would be monopolists who publish works and expect to dictate what you do with them? No.

The effort invested into creation of value is often completely irrelevant, even in copyright law. Many countries do not subscribe to the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, USA included. The ones that do seem to reserve its application for specific contexts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

Originality is the key factor in copyrightability, not the effort required to generate the content. The number must be unique and not derived from other numbers.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, humanity (aka the actual "we") has picked the former over the later. Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that. Anyway, I'll go ahead and expicitly pick the latter over the former. I would rather have the nonexistence of ideas over infinite mono…

>Did humanity really pick that? I doubt it. Copyright infringement happens too often and too normally for me to believe people care about copyrights. Politicians bought and paid for by lobbyists picked that. Let's focus on the overall idea. IP. not the instantiations of the idea like patents and copyright. You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP. It's encoded into t…

> You're against the very idea of ideas as property. And YES humanity chose the concept of IP.

Humanity chose the fruits of intellectual property. More books. More movies. More music. More art. More inventions. More technology. More everything. Humanity chose wealth.

Time limited monopolies were merely the means to bring about such wealth creation.

Monopolies are universally understood to be a bad sign in every economic sector. They were grudgingly implemented in this specific area only because nobody managed to come up with a better idea. Even then, laws were made so as to contain the damage as much as possible by limiting the duration of the monopolies.

It was absurd but it was the only way. People took care to ensure the nonsense did not last even a day longer than necessary.

It is now the 21st century. Humanity must evolve past this.

> It's encoded into the laws of government which people trust.

Laws that were pretty much written by industry lobbyists. Anyone who trusts that is foolish.

Intellectual property is supposed to be a time limited monopoly, yet copyright is functionally infinite in duration because the industry kept lobbying for extensions.

The people were systematically robbed of their public domain rights. Seriously doubt the people chose that.

> How do you mobilize thousands of humans to create a boeing 747

By actually manufacturing and selling aircrafts to airlines? 747s are not infinitely copyable. Discussion has now shifted from ideas to tangible objects.

> You are a free software developer. You live off of charity.

I don't work in the software industry. My aversion to intellectual property and licensing is a big reason why.

> You think patreon could do it?

Remains to be seen. There should be no functional difference between raising hundreds of millions from venture capitalists or crowdfunding. We just need to find ways to raise these platforms to the billion dollar scale.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched the PAL edition and I don't remember those artifacts, but it was a million years ago so my memory could be wrong xD

The PAL release was an NTSC>PAL conversion, so throw upscaling artifacts onto the pile as well. e: Actually thinking back on it, it may not even have been PAL at all, but 480i/60hz Region 2/4. There's a good chance you watched it on a CRT given that even on a flat panel LCD fom the late 2000s the low vertical resolution was quite noticeable (effectively ~272p, not counting deinterlacing artifacts from it being source…

I remembered that I borrowed the collection from my uncle and he still has it. I will ask him for pictures of the box, maybe it was the "updated" editions.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.

It's not really possible for MP games, and it's increasingly hard and also dangerous to pirate an SP game. Idk who still does this. And Spotify is way cheaper than iTunes, which is cheaper than CDs. Neither of them created piracy, but they did have it as leverage.

>Idk who still does this

Not my fault you're out of the loop.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#888

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

I have a Plex/Radarr/Sonarr setup on my home server. I've made a landing page so it's extra easy for my parents and friends to add media.

It's been really wonderful, everyone knows everyone by one degree of separation (me) and are adding to the library like a sort of group project. You can just hop on and see a somewhat currated library in the sense that someone you'll probably run into IRL thought this was worth watching.

So just to add to your point, you can't get this with a streaming service.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PAL release was an NTSC>PAL conversion, so throw upscaling artifacts onto the pile as well. e: Actually thinking back on it, it may not even have been PAL at all, but 480i/60hz Region 2/4. There's a good chance you watched it on a CRT given that even on a flat panel LCD fom the late 2000s the low vertical resolution was quite noticeable (effectively ~272p, not counting deinterlacing artifacts from it being source…

I remembered that I borrowed the collection from my uncle and he still has it. I will ask him for pictures of the box, maybe it was the "updated" editions.

The re-issues used the same masters.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone’s work We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept. Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers . All information is a sequence of bits, and all sequences of bits are numbers. All numbers already exist. Humans performing intellectual work are merely discovering those numbers. The entire set of laws supporting intellectual property boils down to making knowledge and…

>We don't recognize ownership of ideas as a legitimate concept. Who is this "we" you're referring to? As far as I know it's you and your 2 or 3 online pen pals because the rest of the world recognizes it as a legitimate concept such that it's been encoded into law and billions and billions have been invested into said said ideas on the assumption that those laws will provide the idea creators with "ownership" of said…

Copyright abolitionists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_abolition

I have no "pen pals" from this site. Anyone replying to you is doing so independently.

Recognition of intellectual property is just an illusion. They have vested interests, of course they're going to recognize it. Doesn't change the underlying absurdity of the system. Doesn't change the fact they constantly run smack into reality on a daily basis. "Their" works are mercilessly copied, "their" inventions are reverse engineered, AIs are trained on "their" creations, generic versions of "their" drugs are made... It's a constant unceasing fight against reality, completely senseless, and they still can't stop any of it. Because it's not actually real.

Post reply on HN