I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
TOR enables free communication and organization. Many non-legalists see that as something valuable, including the US government that helped create TOR.
I think China has a legitimate interest in stopping people from subverting its laws. I honestly see no meaningful downside to killing Tor and the like if we could. Like I said before, "legitimate users" are not a shibboleth. They are often either a distraction/excuse when the software in question is undeniably mostly used for illegal purposes.
You could always go for the root of the cause and ban binary.
Turn off the Internet. It's the only way to be sure.
If you think this is a joke, please explain why you would turn off bittorrent, Tor, etc, but not the Internet. After all, legitimate users don't count, right?
This whole argument sounds a whole lot like "As long as I'm not using it, go ahead and ban it."
Turn off the Internet. It's the only way to be sure.
If you think this is a joke, please explain why you would turn off bittorrent, Tor, etc, but not the Internet. After all, legitimate users don't count, right?
This whole argument sounds a whole lot like "As long as I'm not using it, go ahead and ban it."
Come on. I thi I anyone can see that the Internet has a large percentage of users that use it for legitimate things. BitTorrent or Tor? Legitimate users exist but proportionately, they are tiny. I don't think anyone can fail to grasp this distinction unless they are arguing in bad faith.
In which case, we're back to arguing over the arbitrary line of how many legitimate users versus illegitimate users there need to be for a technology to be considered okay. And what "legitimate users" even entails, given dissidents of oppressive governments apparently not counting. Leaving aside the fact that banning these technologies would do little but inconvenience those legiitmate users in the first place.
Turn off the Internet. It's the only way to be sure.
If you think this is a joke, please explain why you would turn off bittorrent, Tor, etc, but not the Internet. After all, legitimate users don't count, right?
This whole argument sounds a whole lot like "As long as I'm not using it, go ahead and ban it."
Come on. I thi I anyone can see that the Internet has a large percentage of users that use it for legitimate things. BitTorrent or Tor? Legitimate users exist but proportionately, they are tiny. I don't think anyone can fail to grasp this distinction unless they are arguing in bad faith.
In which case, we're back to arguing over the arbitrary line of how many legitimate users versus illegitimate users there need to be for a technology to be considered okay. And what "legitimate users" even entails, given dissidents of oppressive governments apparently not counting. Leaving aside the fact that banning these technologies would do little but inconvenience those legiitmate users in the first place.
Are you really arguing that BitTorrent and Tor are not mostly used for illegal purposes?
In which case, we're back to arguing over the arbitrary line of how many legitimate users versus illegitimate users there need to be for a technology to be considered okay. And what "legitimate users" even entails, given dissidents of oppressive governments apparently not counting. Leaving aside the fact that banning these technologies would do little but inconvenience those legiitmate users in the first place.
Are you really arguing that BitTorrent and Tor are not mostly used for illegal purposes?
Are you going to argue in the affirmative that Tor is mostly used for illegal purposes?
If so, I would like to see your evidence. I mean, you brought the subject up.
Actually, I how about you go ahead and show that TOR is used for piracy in any meaningful sense?
How about you show that the operators of TOR don't try to prevent p2p traffic when they can.
Guess what. P2P fucks actually TOR over. It means that 3-7 times the data being downloaded via p2p is being transmitted over the TOR network, which is so slow already that it makes makes downloading porn reminiscent of 90s dialup.
also, you are a shit American for wanting to limit freedom of speech and association, simple and incorrectly because you think it will protect the rights of IP holders.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
I figure I could take a bear.
+4
JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
The issue with copyright infringement is that trying to combat it with legislation instead of offering a superior product just ends up with the IP owner offering an inferior product for a higher price. Examples vary from games with DRM, movies with area restrictions and unskippable commercials/bullshit anti-piracy adverts etc., while all the superfluous crap is stripped from the pirated copies. Now add in the mix things like delayed releases for different parts of the world, distribution issues, prices, etc. and the legitimate supplier is offering an inferior product for a higher price than what the pirate gets. Inconveniencing the legitimate customer while having no effect on the pirate.
Some companies deemed that wasting money on trying to combat piracy for hypothetical returns was sub-optimal in comparison with trying to offer a superior product. Hence many games are offered DRM-free, with some people opting to buy exclusively those. Combine this with all sorts of other incentives, be they community related(forum stuff etc.), physical goodies, interaction with the developers in some way, etc. and you get a product people will pay for over pirating it. Approaching the consumer base as potential customers instead of potential pirates endears you to them, and goodwill is a fantastic motivator in deciding whether someone will pay for the product or pirate it. Legislating for IP protections and treating the consumer base as filthy thieves does not engender positive feelings towards the IP-owner/developer, and won't help to reduce the numbers. Having the public good will on your side is the most effective deterrent to piracy and motivator for increasing sales.
Thomas Babington Macaulay put this in words already in 1841 regarding a limited length of copyright and its enforcement and the degree of public respect for those protections:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
You don't see the benefits with the protesters from the Green Revolution having Twitter as a good thing?
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
TOR enables free communication and organization. Many non-legalists see that as something valuable, including the US government that helped create TOR.
I think China has a legitimate interest in stopping people from subverting its laws. I honestly see no meaningful downside to killing Tor and the like if we could. Like I said before, "legitimate users" are not a shibboleth. They are often either a distraction/excuse when the software in question is undeniably mostly used for illegal purposes.
When the laws themselves are brutal and maintain a fascist government I cease to care about their "rules." Why did you put "legitimate users" in quotes? Do you think there are no innocent people on Tor? Not everyone is a pirate. They shouldn't have their activities interfered with for doing nothing wrong.
You should remember a couple axioms when trying to understand SKFM's views on things:
1. Might equals right.
2. Written down in the law ≡ Morally, unassailably right.
3. Rights of rich/powerful people/corporations trump the rights of the public if they are more powerful, refer to axiom 1.
4. If axiom 2 and axiom 3 clash, axiom 1 overrides axiom 2 until lobbying resolves the clash due to axiom 1.
The issue with copyright infringement is that trying to combat it with legislation instead of offering a superior product just ends up with the IP owner offering an inferior product for a higher price. Examples vary from games with DRM, movies with area restrictions and unskippable commercials/bullshit anti-piracy adverts etc., while all the superfluous crap is stripped from the pirated copies. Now add in the mix things like delayed releases for different parts of the world, distribution issues, prices, etc. and the legitimate supplier is offering an inferior product for a higher price than what the pirate gets. Inconveniencing the legitimate customer while having no effect on the pirate.
Some companies deemed that wasting money on trying to combat piracy for hypothetical returns was sub-optimal in comparison with trying to offer a superior product. Hence many games are offered DRM-free, with some people opting to buy exclusively those. Combine this with all sorts of other incentives, be they community related(forum stuff etc.), physical goodies, interaction with the developers in some way, etc. and you get a product people will pay for over pirating it. Approaching the consumer base as potential customers instead of potential pirates endears you to them, and goodwill is a fantastic motivator in deciding whether someone will pay for the product or pirate it. Legislating for IP protections and treating the consumer base as filthy thieves does not engender positive feelings towards the IP-owner/developer, and won't help to reduce the numbers. Having the public good will on your side is the most effective deterrent to piracy and motivator for increasing sales.
Thomas Babington Macaulay put this in words already in 1841 regarding a limited length of copyright and its enforcement and the degree of public respect for those protections:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months.
World of Goo and Demigod disprove your "customers will support the companies who don't use DRM" point. Second, the "t-shirt" argument has been flogged to death, and has a lot of evidence against it. Third, you competely avoid the pesky fact that a lot of people are making money off piracy - it's just that none of it goes to the people who create the content in the first place.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I think a lot of people pirate without realizing it, especially with video streaming sites (you aren't even downloading anything). If we can get rid of those sites, I suspect it would make a real difference. Sure, you can't stomp out all piracy, but if you make it less convenient, fracture user based, etc., then you help to mitigate the problem. But I would support an automatic warning followed by a suspension of Internet for one month if your ISP detects you using BitTorrent, Tor, etc. so I may have a different outlook from a lot of people here. Just use legitimate websites, openly and honestly and you should have nothing to fear.
The issue with copyright infringement is that trying to combat it with legislation instead of offering a superior product just ends up with the IP owner offering an inferior product for a higher price. Examples vary from games with DRM, movies with area restrictions and unskippable commercials/bullshit anti-piracy adverts etc., while all the superfluous crap is stripped from the pirated copies. Now add in the mix things like delayed releases for different parts of the world, distribution issues, prices, etc. and the legitimate supplier is offering an inferior product for a higher price than what the pirate gets. Inconveniencing the legitimate customer while having no effect on the pirate.
Some companies deemed that wasting money on trying to combat piracy for hypothetical returns was sub-optimal in comparison with trying to offer a superior product. Hence many games are offered DRM-free, with some people opting to buy exclusively those. Combine this with all sorts of other incentives, be they community related(forum stuff etc.), physical goodies, interaction with the developers in some way, etc. and you get a product people will pay for over pirating it. Approaching the consumer base as potential customers instead of potential pirates endears you to them, and goodwill is a fantastic motivator in deciding whether someone will pay for the product or pirate it. Legislating for IP protections and treating the consumer base as filthy thieves does not engender positive feelings towards the IP-owner/developer, and won't help to reduce the numbers. Having the public good will on your side is the most effective deterrent to piracy and motivator for increasing sales.
Thomas Babington Macaulay put this in words already in 1841 regarding a limited length of copyright and its enforcement and the degree of public respect for those protections:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months.
World of Goo and Demigod disprove your "customers will support the companies who don't use DRM" point. Second, the "t-shirt" argument has been flogged to death, and has a lot of evidence against it. Third, you competely avoid the pesky fact that a lot of people are making money off piracy - it's just that none of it goes to the people who create the content in the first place.
And I can start quoting you examples of games that have been positively impacted by their handling of piracy to "prove" my suggestion. Which you also summarized in a way that loses part of the point. The point is that piracy is something that won't disappear, so the way it is handled should be the way with optimal consequences for the IP owner. By the "t-shirt" argument I suppose you mean bands selling t-shirts at a concert? Obviously different media requires a different approach to reduce the impact of copyright infringement. There is no magic bullet to solve the issue universally. Pretending that there is some sort of general solution that covers several media with different ways of functioning is ridiculous.
I avoided the pesky third fact of yours because it was not directly related to the point I was trying to make about the approach of companies towards the public. I was not responding to anyone either, so that issue is irrelevant to my post. It's a separate, if closely related issue. David Lowery seems to be talking about what you are talking about, specifically the issue of certain online delivery platforms raking in the advertising revenue instead of the artists, which is a separate issue worth its own discussion. Which I was not discussing in my post. Which I may comment on later.
Lowery also confuses patents and copyright in general as being equivalent due to both being under the umbrella of intellectual property. This alone makes his arguments shaky, as there are significant legal differences between the two, and falsely equating the two just shows his lack of understanding of what he is commenting about. I understand what he is trying to say, but he does come across as an insufferable snarky asshole due to having a corporate management-grade love for bullshit buzzwords. He is also exclusively complaining about the part of piracy crowd least likely to buy media regardless of its pricing/availability, and equating it as the entire population. That is patently ridiculous.
Yes, the issue of various entities (mainly corporations and companies of various sizes) are essentially diverting income from the artists to themselves, and the artists should be compensated for that. It is a separate issue from what I was trying to comment on, namely the appropriate response to mitigation of damages from piracy. Sadly, we cannot know exactly to what extent piracy is actually affecting sales of various media, due to next to no impartial studies being available. It is also a highly complex issue with many variables, and difficulty in data collection.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
I think a lot of people pirate without realizing it, especially with video streaming sites (you aren't even downloading anything). If we can get rid of those sites, I suspect it would make a real difference. Sure, you can't stomp out all piracy, but if you make it less convenient, fracture user based, etc., then you help to mitigate the problem. But I would support an automatic warning followed by a suspension of Internet for one month if your ISP detects you using BitTorrent, Tor, etc. so I may have a different outlook from a lot of people here. Just use legitimate websites, openly and honestly and you should have nothing to fear.
The funny thing is that many anti-piracy types are such massive hypocrites. The whole fiasco about having used pirated music for those "You wouldn't steal...blah blah" ads just showcased it.
And generally ISPs don't want to have to monitor their customers too much, since it actually requires more effort and costs money, as well as potentially being illegal(depending on the locale) in addition to being horrible for the ISPs reputation. In places where there isn't an ISP monopoly, being outed as using those sorts of tactics would see the ISP losing a ton of custom. And rightly so.
Where should the compromise be between IP laws and privacy laws? Which should trump which, and to what degree and in what situations? Why should the IP owner be allowed to break wiretapping laws (even if by proxy) to enforce their IP? It really comes down to whether one values personal rights and freedoms over (most often) corporate interests.
Hell, even when it comes to enforcing IP, a singular artist will find it an extremely difficult fight to get their due if wronged by a more powerful entity(a corporation, a significantly richer guy, etc.).
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Why does it matter at all how likely someone is to buy media. If they don't pay for it, they don't have the right to consume it. Full stop.
Is anyone in here seriously arguing that BitTorrent isn't primarily a platform for piracy because Blizzard uses it? That reeks of bad faith. If we ban BitTorrent, Blizzard will need to spend more money on proper distribution infrastructure. Ironic to see the pro-piracy crowd defending corporate profits.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living in states like China or Iran or the Arabian Peninsula ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority. I don't understand how anyone could believe that there was an inherent wrong in Rosa Parks' bus boycott or in abolitionists helping slaves escape their "owners."
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
So breaking the law is only inherently wrong if you don't intend to get caught? Why is that the deciding factor? Something like helping slaves escape or hiding Jews in the attic might be a better example, then, as illegal acts like those are done in secrecy. Extreme examples, but nonetheless illustrative of how divorced legality is from morality.
When criticizing the ruling class/party/whatever is forbidden, what recourse do people have other than to talk in secret? What would you do if you lived in a state that prohibited any criticism of government policy? Going to jail is cool and all, but I'd probably confer with like minded people via an anonymous internet service in order to organize and hopefully effect change.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
It takes a bold thinker to come out against the criminals in the French Resistance.
Do what you can to elect Harris/Walz and downticket Dem candidates in your area by doorknocking, phonebanking, or postcarding: https://www.mobilize.us/
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
0
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
The issue with copyright infringement is that trying to combat it with legislation instead of offering a superior product just ends up with the IP owner offering an inferior product for a higher price. Examples vary from games with DRM, movies with area restrictions and unskippable commercials/bullshit anti-piracy adverts etc., while all the superfluous crap is stripped from the pirated copies. Now add in the mix things like delayed releases for different parts of the world, distribution issues, prices, etc. and the legitimate supplier is offering an inferior product for a higher price than what the pirate gets. Inconveniencing the legitimate customer while having no effect on the pirate.
Some companies deemed that wasting money on trying to combat piracy for hypothetical returns was sub-optimal in comparison with trying to offer a superior product. Hence many games are offered DRM-free, with some people opting to buy exclusively those. Combine this with all sorts of other incentives, be they community related(forum stuff etc.), physical goodies, interaction with the developers in some way, etc. and you get a product people will pay for over pirating it. Approaching the consumer base as potential customers instead of potential pirates endears you to them, and goodwill is a fantastic motivator in deciding whether someone will pay for the product or pirate it. Legislating for IP protections and treating the consumer base as filthy thieves does not engender positive feelings towards the IP-owner/developer, and won't help to reduce the numbers. Having the public good will on your side is the most effective deterrent to piracy and motivator for increasing sales.
Thomas Babington Macaulay put this in words already in 1841 regarding a limited length of copyright and its enforcement and the degree of public respect for those protections:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months.
World of Goo and Demigod disprove your "customers will support the companies who don't use DRM" point. Second, the "t-shirt" argument has been flogged to death, and has a lot of evidence against it. Third, you competely avoid the pesky fact that a lot of people are making money off piracy - it's just that none of it goes to the people who create the content in the first place.
And I can start quoting you examples of games that have been positively impacted by their handling of piracy to "prove" my suggestion. Which you also summarized in a way that loses part of the point. The point is that piracy is something that won't disappear, so the way it is handled should be the way with optimal consequences for the IP owner. By the "t-shirt" argument I suppose you mean bands selling t-shirts at a concert? Obviously different media requires a different approach to reduce the impact of copyright infringement. There is no magic bullet to solve the issue universally. Pretending that there is some sort of general solution that covers several media with different ways of functioning is ridiculous.
I avoided the pesky third fact of yours because it was not directly related to the point I was trying to make about the approach of companies towards the public. I was not responding to anyone either, so that issue is irrelevant to my post. It's a separate, if closely related issue. David Lowery seems to be talking about what you are talking about, specifically the issue of certain online delivery platforms raking in the advertising revenue instead of the artists, which is a separate issue worth its own discussion. Which I was not discussing in my post. Which I may comment on later.
Lowery also confuses patents and copyright in general as being equivalent due to both being under the umbrella of intellectual property. This alone makes his arguments shaky, as there are significant legal differences between the two, and falsely equating the two just shows his lack of understanding of what he is commenting about. I understand what he is trying to say, but he does come across as an insufferable snarky asshole due to having a corporate management-grade love for bullshit buzzwords. He is also exclusively complaining about the part of piracy crowd least likely to buy media regardless of its pricing/availability, and equating it as the entire population. That is patently ridiculous.
Yes, the issue of various entities (mainly corporations and companies of various sizes) are essentially diverting income from the artists to themselves, and the artists should be compensated for that. It is a separate issue from what I was trying to comment on, namely the appropriate response to mitigation of damages from piracy. Sadly, we cannot know exactly to what extent piracy is actually affecting sales of various media, due to next to no impartial studies being available. It is also a highly complex issue with many variables, and difficulty in data collection.
Again, saying that piracy will never be eliminated is a red herring - yes, you will never be able to eliminate piracy completely. But you can mitigate it, and in doing so protect your ability to earn revenue. Furthermore, considering how much of modern piracy is built around for profit models, if we break those models, a lot of the casual piracy we see today would go by the wayside. Which leads to the other red herring, about DRM not working. This is only true if you define "not working" as "can't keep piracy from happening ever". But as it turns out, the goal isn't "stop it from happening ever", but "preserve the key sales window right after release". And in that goal, DRM does work well.
And no, you can't divorce the fact that modern piracy is just as much about money as its ever been. One, it changes the moral calculus dramatically, especially considering many pro-piracy advocates try to portray themselves as supporting the creators. Second, it shows that there is actual value in these works.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
Why does it matter at all how likely someone is to buy media. If they don't pay for it, they don't have the right to consume it. Full stop.
Is anyone in here seriously arguing that BitTorrent isn't primarily a platform for piracy because Blizzard uses it? That reeks of bad faith. If we ban BitTorrent, Blizzard will need to spend more money on proper distribution infrastructure. Ironic to see the pro-piracy crowd defending corporate profits.
I will not argue that a significant use of BitTorrent is piracy. I will, however, strongly defend the existence of BitTorrent because it does have legal and legitimate uses. We both live in the USA, where one of the central tenentof governance is "Innocent until prove guilty". Take a slash'n'burn approach to BitTorrents (or anything else) shows a flagrant disregard for this tenent.
And let's not forget that bands like Metallica never would have become popular if people hadn't been distributing pirated copies of their cassettes back when they first got started.
0
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
+1
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
This answer has nothing to do with my post.
It has absolutely everything to do with your post. You look rather silly trying to portray the scenario as "Big Media beats up on individual users" while ignoring Big Tech sitting on your side, and their willingness to reshape laws to suit them.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
Yes, and I will go to jail, and when I get out I will be more radical.
Posts
You could always go for the root of the cause and ban binary.
If you think this is a joke, please explain why you would turn off bittorrent, Tor, etc, but not the Internet. After all, legitimate users don't count, right?
This whole argument sounds a whole lot like "As long as I'm not using it, go ahead and ban it."
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
Come on. I thi I anyone can see that the Internet has a large percentage of users that use it for legitimate things. BitTorrent or Tor? Legitimate users exist but proportionately, they are tiny. I don't think anyone can fail to grasp this distinction unless they are arguing in bad faith.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Blizzard_Downloader
Then again you think dodging the laws of oppressive governments isn't legit, so I'm not sure we have much common ground here anyway.
Are you really arguing that BitTorrent and Tor are not mostly used for illegal purposes?
If so, I would like to see your evidence. I mean, you brought the subject up.
Actually, I how about you go ahead and show that TOR is used for piracy in any meaningful sense?
How about you show that the operators of TOR don't try to prevent p2p traffic when they can.
Guess what. P2P fucks actually TOR over. It means that 3-7 times the data being downloaded via p2p is being transmitted over the TOR network, which is so slow already that it makes makes downloading porn reminiscent of 90s dialup.
also, you are a shit American for wanting to limit freedom of speech and association, simple and incorrectly because you think it will protect the rights of IP holders.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
Some companies deemed that wasting money on trying to combat piracy for hypothetical returns was sub-optimal in comparison with trying to offer a superior product. Hence many games are offered DRM-free, with some people opting to buy exclusively those. Combine this with all sorts of other incentives, be they community related(forum stuff etc.), physical goodies, interaction with the developers in some way, etc. and you get a product people will pay for over pirating it. Approaching the consumer base as potential customers instead of potential pirates endears you to them, and goodwill is a fantastic motivator in deciding whether someone will pay for the product or pirate it. Legislating for IP protections and treating the consumer base as filthy thieves does not engender positive feelings towards the IP-owner/developer, and won't help to reduce the numbers. Having the public good will on your side is the most effective deterrent to piracy and motivator for increasing sales.
Thomas Babington Macaulay put this in words already in 1841 regarding a limited length of copyright and its enforcement and the degree of public respect for those protections:
You should remember a couple axioms when trying to understand SKFM's views on things:
1. Might equals right.
2. Written down in the law ≡ Morally, unassailably right.
3. Rights of rich/powerful people/corporations trump the rights of the public if they are more powerful, refer to axiom 1.
4. If axiom 2 and axiom 3 clash, axiom 1 overrides axiom 2 until lobbying resolves the clash due to axiom 1.
World of Goo and Demigod disprove your "customers will support the companies who don't use DRM" point. Second, the "t-shirt" argument has been flogged to death, and has a lot of evidence against it. Third, you competely avoid the pesky fact that a lot of people are making money off piracy - it's just that none of it goes to the people who create the content in the first place.
I recommend you read David Lowery's piece "Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss?", which does a good job explaining what the real complaint is.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
And I can start quoting you examples of games that have been positively impacted by their handling of piracy to "prove" my suggestion. Which you also summarized in a way that loses part of the point. The point is that piracy is something that won't disappear, so the way it is handled should be the way with optimal consequences for the IP owner. By the "t-shirt" argument I suppose you mean bands selling t-shirts at a concert? Obviously different media requires a different approach to reduce the impact of copyright infringement. There is no magic bullet to solve the issue universally. Pretending that there is some sort of general solution that covers several media with different ways of functioning is ridiculous.
I avoided the pesky third fact of yours because it was not directly related to the point I was trying to make about the approach of companies towards the public. I was not responding to anyone either, so that issue is irrelevant to my post. It's a separate, if closely related issue. David Lowery seems to be talking about what you are talking about, specifically the issue of certain online delivery platforms raking in the advertising revenue instead of the artists, which is a separate issue worth its own discussion. Which I was not discussing in my post. Which I may comment on later.
Lowery also confuses patents and copyright in general as being equivalent due to both being under the umbrella of intellectual property. This alone makes his arguments shaky, as there are significant legal differences between the two, and falsely equating the two just shows his lack of understanding of what he is commenting about. I understand what he is trying to say, but he does come across as an insufferable snarky asshole due to having a corporate management-grade love for bullshit buzzwords. He is also exclusively complaining about the part of piracy crowd least likely to buy media regardless of its pricing/availability, and equating it as the entire population. That is patently ridiculous.
Yes, the issue of various entities (mainly corporations and companies of various sizes) are essentially diverting income from the artists to themselves, and the artists should be compensated for that. It is a separate issue from what I was trying to comment on, namely the appropriate response to mitigation of damages from piracy. Sadly, we cannot know exactly to what extent piracy is actually affecting sales of various media, due to next to no impartial studies being available. It is also a highly complex issue with many variables, and difficulty in data collection.
This answer has nothing to do with my post.
The funny thing is that many anti-piracy types are such massive hypocrites. The whole fiasco about having used pirated music for those "You wouldn't steal...blah blah" ads just showcased it.
And generally ISPs don't want to have to monitor their customers too much, since it actually requires more effort and costs money, as well as potentially being illegal(depending on the locale) in addition to being horrible for the ISPs reputation. In places where there isn't an ISP monopoly, being outed as using those sorts of tactics would see the ISP losing a ton of custom. And rightly so.
Where should the compromise be between IP laws and privacy laws? Which should trump which, and to what degree and in what situations? Why should the IP owner be allowed to break wiretapping laws (even if by proxy) to enforce their IP? It really comes down to whether one values personal rights and freedoms over (most often) corporate interests.
Hell, even when it comes to enforcing IP, a singular artist will find it an extremely difficult fight to get their due if wronged by a more powerful entity(a corporation, a significantly richer guy, etc.).
Is anyone in here seriously arguing that BitTorrent isn't primarily a platform for piracy because Blizzard uses it? That reeks of bad faith. If we ban BitTorrent, Blizzard will need to spend more money on proper distribution infrastructure. Ironic to see the pro-piracy crowd defending corporate profits.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
This is the mentality of a bully - "if I can't convince you, I'll force you."
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
When criticizing the ruling class/party/whatever is forbidden, what recourse do people have other than to talk in secret? What would you do if you lived in a state that prohibited any criticism of government policy? Going to jail is cool and all, but I'd probably confer with like minded people via an anonymous internet service in order to organize and hopefully effect change.
It takes a bold thinker to come out against the criminals in the French Resistance.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Again, saying that piracy will never be eliminated is a red herring - yes, you will never be able to eliminate piracy completely. But you can mitigate it, and in doing so protect your ability to earn revenue. Furthermore, considering how much of modern piracy is built around for profit models, if we break those models, a lot of the casual piracy we see today would go by the wayside. Which leads to the other red herring, about DRM not working. This is only true if you define "not working" as "can't keep piracy from happening ever". But as it turns out, the goal isn't "stop it from happening ever", but "preserve the key sales window right after release". And in that goal, DRM does work well.
And no, you can't divorce the fact that modern piracy is just as much about money as its ever been. One, it changes the moral calculus dramatically, especially considering many pro-piracy advocates try to portray themselves as supporting the creators. Second, it shows that there is actual value in these works.
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
I will not argue that a significant use of BitTorrent is piracy. I will, however, strongly defend the existence of BitTorrent because it does have legal and legitimate uses. We both live in the USA, where one of the central tenentof governance is "Innocent until prove guilty". Take a slash'n'burn approach to BitTorrents (or anything else) shows a flagrant disregard for this tenent.
And let's not forget that bands like Metallica never would have become popular if people hadn't been distributing pirated copies of their cassettes back when they first got started.
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
It is exactly the opposite. It is restoring the ability to do something that would have been stopped through force
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
It has absolutely everything to do with your post. You look rather silly trying to portray the scenario as "Big Media beats up on individual users" while ignoring Big Tech sitting on your side, and their willingness to reshape laws to suit them.
Yes, and I will go to jail, and when I get out I will be more radical.
No, it's saying "I will force you to bow to my will." It's the dark side of digital determinism.