I'd even argue that its counter-effective to progress. Instead of punishing people for making more efficient systems, we should reward them, and try to integrate.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
An unthinkable amount of money has been spent and made from the drug war for highly questionable ROI to the public.
What type of reduction in police work would take place if the drug war was ended today? 20%? 30%?
The war on drugs is a job machine. DEA agents fly around like international playboys from the books I've read. Plus international governments get tons of money from the US to run their own interdiction programs.
There has to be some level of influence to keep the 'war' going from these perverse incentives.
Only if you exclude people working for the public sector from you know, the public.
Those things create jobs for voting constituents. That's the main ROI here. Reduction in crime, drug use and increased security are just beneficial, but not necessary side effects of these initiatives.
How about the fire, police, schools, environmental protections, consumer protections, and court system? How big is the military defending your patch of land?
I admit there are problems, but I'm always amazed when people say the government doesn't do anything, then take a car to work on public roads, listen to the radio (FCC), eat food (FDA), etc.
he did make those roads... he paid taxes in gas, insurance, purchase of a car tax, license plate tax... all that do indeed sponsor roads he drives on!
as of military defending his patch of land, hard to argue. Africa is much bigger than USA -- how much they spent as a continent on defense? Bet 1000th of what US does. Other than that, he might choose to protect his own land with the second Amendment and keep military out of it, no?
I was saying the government does lots of work. It doesn't always function great, but it does a lot right too.
while OP is right -- this doesn't seem to serve majority, the truth is that the system is rigged and this supposed to serve a few multinational corporations that feel their profits are severely cut due to copyright infringement, meanwhile posting record earnings.
it is still mind-boggling to me that this non-US human being doing allegedly non-violent crime will probably end up serving 25 years in american prison (wire fraud is a magic word in LE indictments) for a bunch of bits being configured the way to organize in magnet links that sharing of - as far as I know, similarly to URLs, had been found in courts around the world as a non-infringing act.
Ignore that the system is rigged for the moment. I think it is safe to say these companies really like making more money. I have always wondered why then, they spend so much effort enforcing copyright laws rather than trying alternative methods to solve the problem and make more money.
E.g I know a lot of people who have some unblocking service and Netflix. Now they could increase prices for Netflix, so we wouldn't need the unblocking, but that's not on the cards. They would rather spend their efforts blocking me.
Is this purely to satisfy contractual obligations? I'd assume that any existing contracts must be in place for such a long time that making changes can't be done for quite a few years into the future and there is no realistic way to amend existing contracts. The contracts would have to cover new productions too.
Otherwise, this whole thing makes no sense to me. They appear to be giving up revenue, for no benefit to themselves.
I'd have thought they also pay lump sums to get the streaming rights per territory.
Also I am proposing the subscription increases to get access, possibly per territory you want access to.
For one example of what we do know: House of Cards is not available on Netflix in Europe [1]. I'm sure Netflix is not happy with the situation but we can only guess as to what it would have cost them for the rights.
[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-subscribers-eu...
That almost sounds like a Bernie Sanders level paranoia of words profits and corporations. Honestly share-worthy content exists because of these entities in first and I will never fault HBO, Adobe or Microsoft going after those who are pirating their software. I think it is government who is going after someone who cant defend himself and just pretending to have done something.
That can mean very different things depending on your definition of 'going after'. If they chose to engage someone in a civil suit and could prove realistic damages, then in principle I wouldn't have a problem with them attempting to protect their IP.
But using the force and authority of the United States government (Homeland Security involved in enforcing IP infringement? Really?) to extradite a foreign national on criminal charges? That is in no way proportional to any of their perceived damages, and it goes to show just how bluntly the government is used as a tool by those with money and influence.
Homeland Security is in the copyright infringement business now. They've been added to the standard FBI warning at the beginning of all movies, probably as a way to make themselves feel better after all those mean TSA groping memes made people laugh at them.
I do profit from it from time to time to reach for very old clips, lives or albums that you cant find. It doesnt really hurt business if they dont sell it.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...
You can't really blame America. They've decided their jurisdiction extends to the entire planet. And, rather, than argue the point, the rest of the world just bends over and adopts the position. When faced with such supine sycophancy, why would America not keep acting this way?
I have utter contempt for Poland on this [and similar] case/s. What a contemptible lick-spittle, a once fiercely independent nation has become!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold
outside of the US. seems plausible.
Besides, everything is just bits! If you represent the whole monorepo as a single integer, denying people access to it would be akin to patenting a natural number!
For example we have private electricity providers, but the prices are regulated and capped. Private companies can't just do whatever they want when it concerns things we consider to be people's fundamental resources.
The very latest content does get artificially restricted due to various business reasons (licensing deals, etc.) and I suspect that will change over time to go to an instant-release model. Ditto for fewer geo restrictions. We're starting to see these changes more and more. For music, there are far more options available: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, etc. where one low monthly fee lets you play almost anything you want.
However, despite all this incredible ease for lots of different media, people still want content for free. Maybe the solution is to combine enforcement with an educational campaign so that people are aware of the myriad legal options available to them.
We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business model. It's hard to say what is fair in every case. What I feel is not fair is throwing the book at all of these site owners, especially when the laws are written in the U.S. but are somehow stretched to where they apply to people who never set foot there.
In 5-10 years, they could still be in jail while technology remakes itself to the point where either distribution and payment has finally started working gain, or torrenting has gotten to the point where it's nearly impossible to trace the activity to any one person. Neither option seems unlikely, and punishing people now for something that doesn't hurt anyone too much does not seem like it's worth it.
My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime have them. Meanwhile, a quick search on a torrent download site gives me access to hundreds of mainstream films dubbed in Portuguese.
Torrents allow me to watch anything, anywhere, with minimal hardware. I don't need to buy DVDs or DVD players. I don't have to work out which subscription I need to use to watch the latest episode of a program. I have downloaded torrents for which I already own the Blu-ray DVD, but it's in a box somewhere and I can't be bothered to find it.
So yeah, there are lots more use cases for torrents than just wanting to be a cheapskate.
Cheers and abraços
But not films like Toy Story.
Of course that may be a tortuous infringement. In the UK we briefly had a right to format shift but the media corps managed to kill that breakout of common sense pretty quickly.
We're in a pretty ridiculous legal situation again now, https://torrentfreak.com/itunes-is-illegal-under-uk-copyrigh... - ripping a CD you own is considered copyright infringement. It's moronic, there's no way the public would ever vote for this situation.
If such format shifting were to happen, I don't see what could possibly considered morally wrong about it?
For other people, like me, it's the lack of a reliable, convenient, well done solution. I won't touch iTunes with a 50 feet pole. All the on demand services I've tried have a limited catalog, reliability problems, stupid policies, try to push a bunch of stuff down my throat.
The torrent flow is perfect. Type the name of almost anything, wait 5-15min for it to download. Quality is amazing, no commercials, no bullshit.
I would gladly pay $100/month if I could go to IMDB and have a one click, 1080p download button on everything. Seriously.
> it will be in better quality than the torrent which was ripped off some TV broadcast and re-compressed
Sorry to say, but that is very out of touch.
I've lived in South America for quite some time, and paying $20 for a movie is completely out of the question for 95% of people. Piracy is completely open here, everywhere you have shops burning and selling bootleg DVDs for around $1.
The solution is not to educate the public, but to fix the distribution model.
No way to get the english dub even anywhere close to release in Germany, so the only solution was such a streaming site.
And now with the VPN ban, Netflix is useless, too. There's no realistic alternatives.
This is simply not true. In my experience, only the most mainstream content is available legally on portals like itunes or netflix. If you want to watch something more rare (art film, old foreign film, film with subtitles in different language) you can try to buy very expensive DVD+shipping and wait few weeks for it to arrive or you have to use illegal sources.