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Comment by yRetsyM | Hacker News Reader

> Commenting on the release, Sebastian Haselbeck of Tarantino fansite Tarantino.info says that while he’s not a fan of piracy, he believes that a failure to serve the market is the real problem.

> “I strongly condemn piracy and find it generally damaging, but it is a symptom, not the source, of market failure,” he told TF.

That's it right there. Music piracy took a long time to sort out because it was inaccessible. Now through Spotify/Apple Music/Youtube I struggle to find anyone who pirates music in my peers (it was prolific). It's not perfect yet and I think there's still some change to come but it's certainly ahead of the film industry.

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Well, there are two issues as I see it:

1. Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore, so making people wait months to see a new film means they're going to try to find a way to see it sooner. If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.

2. People like me who are on extremely limited bandwidth connections can't watch anything in high fidelity via something like Netflix. Need a way to buffer the whole movie locally ahead of time. Let me queue it up the night before so I can watch it when I get home from work and you'll have my dollars.

> Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore, so making people wait months to see a new film means they're going to try to find a way to see it sooner. If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.

Aside: Saw Pets with my kids this week; Large Soda is now more than a Bud Light at a Football game ($8). Consider me among those who would gladly stop going to the theater.

It always amazes me how people talk about theater snacks like they're mandatory or something. How about just......don't buy them?

Well to be fair, I think many people consider the snacks (soda, popcorn, candy) to be part of the movie going experience so it's hard to resist the urge to splurge. You're not wrong but there is a lot of years of marketing and persuasion behind "lets all go to the lobby..."

Lots of people just sneak in their own sodas. This is discouraged by authority, but it doesn't seem immoral. At least, it isn't more immoral than going without soda entirely, so long as one doesn't throw the empties on the floor.

How about just......make that policy about not permitting outside snacks go take a hike?

People are made to throw food and beverages in the trash, if they haven't been purchased at the theater's concession stands.

When the ushers take your tickets, they make you throw away anything that's obviously not sold in the theater, thus monopolizing local refreshments.

Just find a theater staffed exclusively by bored teenagers who don't enforce the policy :)

That's my strategy..

I actually carry a big purse when I go to the movies to keep everyone's snacks and drinks from the dollar store down the street, just for this reason. If the movie theater's snacks/drinks were reasonably priced, I would consider forgoing the dollar store and just buy it there to save time.

Keep in mind some theatres threaten an up to $1,000,000 fine for bringing outside food into the theatre. Silly, but I guess they feel it undermines their services?

I'd love to see that hold up in court.

This is why I have the AMC MoviePass and go to theaters which don't care if I bring in a can of my own soda. Even the cheaper theaters want $5+ for the smallest soda. That's just ridiculous!

> Most people have no desire to go to a theater anymore

Box office sales have generally increased over the past 20+ years. Possibly people in your peer group may not, but this does not seem correct. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/ http://www.the-numbers.com/market/

According to your link to box office mojo, number of tickets sold peaked in 2002, and has been declining since then, even as population has been rising.

In 1995 0.20 theatre tickets were sold per person in the world.

In 2016 slightly less than 0.13 tickets were sold per person.

This highlights 3 things.

- In the grand scheme of things most people in the world don't go to movie theaters and never have.

- Less do than ever before both in absolute terms and proportionally.

It seems unlikely that steadily raising the cost of tickets and food is going to be a sustainable way to avoid falling revenue in the future.

The smart money ought to be giving people the movie experience they want at home and giving people a higher quality experience out with a higher price tag.

The former will obliterate a lot of theaters and the latter is a smaller scale demand than the existing industry.

> If they released streaming alongside movie theater releases I would imagine you'd knock out 90%+ of the piracy out there.

That's the problem that Sean Parker is hoping to address with his proposed streaming service[1]. At $50 a movie, that doesn't seem unreasonably priced. Until then, though, there's always the Prima Cinema option[2], but then you're looking at $500 a movie, plus $100k+ for the the initial setup, so it's not a great choice if you're impoverished.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/sean-parker-streaming-rental-... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/prima-movie-2016-4

Worth noting is that YouTube was (and is) piracy in many cases

yup, there are a lot of re-uploaded videos and also command-line tools for downloading youtube videos

> yup, there are a lot of re-uploaded videos and also command-line tools for downloading youtube videos

The former _may_ classify as copyright infringement. The latter definitely does not.

It violates YouTube's terms of service and hurts the artists.

> It violates YouTube's terms of service

Yes

> and hurts the artists.

Evidence required.

They get reuploaded to Facebook, where they go viral without crediting the author.

If you're a content creator trying to build an audience, it definetly hurts when people already saw your content elsewhere.

> reuploaded

To quote your ggp:

> [re-uploading videos] _may_ classify as copyright infringement. [downloading YouTube videos] definitely does not.

And your gp:

> [Downloading YouTube videos] violates YouTube's terms of service and hurts the artists.

And your parent:

> Evidence required.

So... why are we talking about re-uploading again as if downloading was the same thing?

I never said all downloads are hurting content creators. I am saying if it was not possible to download them, the creators would be better off.

Sure, and if companies wouldn't have to pay taxes, they would make more money.

If perfectly legal, permissible, expected and ethically justifiable behaviour hurts your bottom line, your business model is broken, not your customers.

No, because if it were not possible to download them, it wouldn't be possible to watch them in the first place.

@spiderfarmer, the author can credit himself, all he has to do is put a "follow me on twitter @author" or something like that.

Videos are edited to remove that information. "Freebooting" is the term that's used.

A Facebook group will find a popular video on Youtube, then either edit out all identifying information or just remake the video, then post it to their group to get the views and ad revenue.

What you describe here sounds like a real copyright piracy.

Most copyright laws make a distinction between copyright infringement done as part of trade and copyright infringement done for personal use.

EDIT: For fuck's sake, this is true, and follows from WIPO Copyright Treaty into the Copyright Directive for the EU and whatever the US equivalent is. Breaching copyright as part of trade turns it into a criminal offence, merely breaching copyright for personal use is a civil tort.

That's why in the various bit-torrent legal cases people who torrent are sued for loss by companies in courts, while people who run businesses running torrent sites are prosecuted by law enforcement.

Why does HN find it so difficult to understand such a simple concept? Obviously people will download it for free that otherwise would have paid for it.

Free streaming does not cut into artists' sales, but downloads will, because…?

> hurts the artists

, because?

Because people will download it for free, who otherwise would have paid for it. Why is this such a hard concept to understand?

> hurts the artists

... only if you use the version of youtubedl that comes with the knife-wielding robot.

Why wouldn't you? It's free.

> The latter definitely does not

Depending on what country you live in.

Uploading a video to Youtube if you don't have permission of the rights holders is a very clear breach of copyright.

Downloading that video (whether by watching it on Youtube or by using a tool to download the video to watch offline) is, if you don't have the permission of the rights holder another very clear copyright breach.

There's some narrow exceptions for free use, or public domain content.

I'm surprised you think it isn't. In what country would that be true?

E.g. in Poland. Don't be surprised, because it's not an absolute truth that you breach copyright watching something published.

Polish law is harmonised with the Copyright directive, which implements the WIPO treaty.

Watching a video on Youtube is only lawful if the rights holder has given their permission. Here, the rights holder hasnt given their permission and isn't getting compensation, thus it's not lawful in Polish law.

It might be useful if you provided a cite the the Polish law that gives this exemption.

The person uploading the video is clearly breaching copyright, and if they monetise the video that becomes criminal in most of EU. But the person downloading the video is also breaching copyright, albeit not criminally.

Watching already published videos is fair use in Poland.

Art 23 Ustawa o prawie autorskim i prawach pokrewnych

> 1. Bez zezwolenia twórcy wolno nieodpłatnie korzystać z już rozpowszechnionego utworu w zakresie własnego użytku osobistego. (...)

> 2. Zakres własnego użytku osobistego obejmuje korzystanie z pojedynczych egzemplarzy utworów przez krąg osób pozostających w związku osobistym, w szczególności pokrewieństwa, powinowactwa lub stosunku towarzyskiego.

translated:

> 1. Free usage of the already published work for personal use is allowed without a permit of authors . (...)

> 2. The scope of personal use includes the use of single copies of work by a group of individuals in personal relationships, in particular blood relation, kinship or a social relationship.

You've missed "within the scope of personal use" at the end of point 1 - which (IMO) means that you can only watch the video if it was posted by a friend/relative.

Personal use just means you can't give the downloaded video to somebody else, you can't buy a giant projector and turn your house into a movie theater, that sort of thing.

I'm somewhat surprised you and DanBC show that deep understanding of Polish law despite of not living here, judging from your names.

I'm Polish and live in Poland, funny to hear my name doesn't sound Polish though :)

youtube-dl has actually been really useful for backing up my own channel. Simply passing it a channel url and it will download everything in the best quality available.

Shouldn't you already have the source videos for you channel?

Backing it up from Youtube is likely a better solution since he doesn't have to upload everything twice on a (probably) slow uplink ADSL line.

Oh I have gigabit, so that's not an issue. But I can totally seeing that being an issue.

For most of them no. A lot were school projects that only existed on youtube or smaller things that were uploaded from my phone etc.

Google Takeout downloads the originals, which is better than the highest quality reencode.

I had no idea about that, thats awesome, thanks!

Ooooh wow. That's a lot of diskspace...

To me, the only enticement of torrenting a movie is that it will be DRM-free.

Please note that I don't mind DRM when used in streaming but I find it onerous when I "purchased" something.

I go out of my way to buy DRM-free. I buy on Humble/GOG over Steam (and often filter games my DRM-free), I prefer bandcamp and buying real physical CDs at bars.

eBooks are problematic because finding DRM-free stores for current titles is near impossible and I hate that my notes and the book are tied to a B&N/Google/Amazon account unless I use tools to extract them (books + notes). I'm essentially paying near the same price as a used copy of the physical book, but I'm renting the book. If Amazon of Google ever give up their books service in a prolific blaze of fire, customers lose all those purchases.

Yup. I just bought a 4k TV, and I bought a 4k switching receiver last year. I'm not about to spend $800 on a 4k/UHD BluRay player only to find out that I can't play content because my virtually-brand-new top-end receiver doesn't support HDCP 2.2.

> If Amazon of Google ever give up their books service in a prolific blaze of fire, customers lose all those purchases.

I highly doubt Amazon would delete all the books off my Kindle if they were shutting down. I wouldn't be able to re-download them if I lose my device, but then again Barnes and Noble doesn't ship you a new book if you leave it on the bus.

This is why there needs to be a law requiring sellers to support their DRM systems for a required number of years (after last using it making a sale). Either that, or require them to unlock the DRM for affected customer.

As it stands now, sellers can sunset a DRM system with no consideration of its users.

I am also a big fan of digital comics. I have an account of Comixology but I limit myself to the DRM-free books. Luckily, most of the comics I buy are from Image Comics and Fantagraphics; and they offer their books DRM-free.

However much i do not like to spoil your party due to sharing the sentiment; please note that your example is an pyrrhic victory.

Sure, services who uphold basic principles such as listening to a market demand and adjusting prices to it exist nowadays; yet the root of the problems; it being impossible to define a marginal price; still exists. Some of the monopolistic effects are not felt by the masses, yet they surely do exist. Think about market entry for example, virtually impossible. We have to raise the level of the debate i'm afraid....

>> I struggle to find anyone who pirates music in my peers (it was prolific)

Music piracy is still huge. Any top 40 album is going to have THOUSANDS of seeders, who knows how many people have downloaded from them.

If you meant thousands literally, I think it's a relatively low number. There's always going to be a large group of people seeding popular files to improve their ratio on a specific tracker. They're probably not even interested in those specific files. It's just for better reputation on the site.

> who knows how many people have downloaded from them

BT trackers do. And with enough seeds / pretend-seeds you can get a fairly precise numbers of downloaders.

There's still a number of countries where Spotify is not exactly cheap. Or where you can't get easy access to a permanent connection for streaming. But those places aren't huge record label customers either.

One could say that piracy's biggest effect is indirect - by changing the power dynamic in the industry - most users choose ad-based music services.

Thousands is not much.

The top movies are getting ten of thousands of seeders. They get thousands in each of their localized version (French, German, Spanish...).

Go to one of the "current-best-streaming-site-of-the-moment.inwhatevercoutry" [1]

Some of the streaming sites publish the "views per video" (or downloads per video for DDL site). The top 10 videos are all in the hundreds of thousand of views.

The English streaming sites are in the millions of views per top video. They get more audience because of the language.

In comparison, it seems to me that music is not very popular for streaming/DDL/torrenting. If anything, it should concentrate all the views in a few places only because songs exist in a single version in a single language.

[1] easy to find in the "top 100 most visited site per country" with alexa.com :D

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