US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos | Hacker News Reader

US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

torrentfreak.com

243 pointsCantbekhan291 comments

I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobbies (which have a revolving door of former fed prosecutors as employees/lobbyists). The cases are more properly pursued in civil court where the pirates should be sued for the damages they cause (not agreeing with MPAA's damage assessment, that's for the judge/jury).

Mis-using international racketeering laws and cooperation agreements between agencies to pursue online software pirates is not what these systems were created for. Another example is Kim Dotcom. He may indeed be liable for significant damages (I don't know) but the MPAA designed their attack knowing that the prosecution itself would inflict massive punishment (ending the company, incarcerating or confining the execs) before it ever got to court. It's a clear abuse of the global justice system and a waste of its resources.

And all of that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs. Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers. And it's also been shown that the majority of users will pay reasonable prices for convenient media access via subscription or purchase (Netflix, Spotify, ITunes, etc). Despite "crying poor", the music industry is now back to making more than it ever did in the era of $18 CDs, with more (and happier) customers.

I’m not disagreeing in principle, but there are criminal statutes on the books put there by Congress for copyright infringement, and it is the Federal government’s job to enforce these laws.

I don't think New Zealand has a "Congress"?

You're not trying to say USA has the right to make laws in other countries are you?

I mean I know USA does this, but it seems indefensible?

The US (like every other country) negotiates agreements with other countries to handle crimes committed against persons or entities in their jurisdiction.

This is nothing new or unique.

According to the article, court documents list victims and crimes occurring in New York and New Jersey. Supposedly this group misled distributors there into giving them copies of movies which had not been released.

mrandish’s comment had three paragraphs, but I was mainly responding to the part of it that was concerned with US law, not the Kim Dotcom fiasco. New Zealand does however have a criminal statute on their books for copyright infringement for commercial gain, and an extradition treaty with the United States.

If your concerns are the activities of the American Federal government, you take that up with the US Congress for writing the law. If your concerns are the activities of the New Zealand government, then take that up with the New Zealand Parliament; but today’s news largely concerned a Trans-Atlantic multi-country operation and an indictment filed in the US Southern District of New York in which the acting authority is the United States, not New Zealand.

Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company. Their internal processes and procedures were designed to make it appear that they took down pirated material when informed of its existence while actually making sure it was still there and accessible via other links that the copyright owner had not yet discovered. They actually reprimanded employees if they actually took something down for real.

Go find the court papers for the indictment. They include a bunch of internal emails from Dotcom and other top executives that show how the place actually worked.

mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal.

I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotcom allegedly/apparently made.

Do you remember when Dotcom was pushing Russian propaganda? He (along with Assange) said he had evidence that it was Seth Rich and not the GRU that gave the emails to Wikileaks. Of course, he never released that evidence.

This is part of a counterintelligence investigation.

Why were Dotcom, Assange, Bannon, Manafort, etc carrying water for the GRU? I don’t know, but having an unrelated tax/copyright/fraud charge might get them to talk, or it might not.

This seems like a "conspiracy theory".

Which part? Dotcom claimed personal knowledge that Seth Rich gave the hacked emails to Wikileaks? Here he’s saying it [1]. That Assange did the same? Here he is alluding to it[2]. Mueller and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee Report said Seth Rich has nothing to do with it[3]. Or do you think the Seth Rich conspiracy didn’t come from the Russian state? Here’s a story pointing out that it came from the Russian SVR[4]. So now we are left with the question, why would Dotcom claim personal knowledge of a Russian State created conspiracy theory that provided cover for the Assange and the GRU? He sounds like a person of interest to me.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VFQgID8pZVw

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/mueller-report-julian-assange-...

[4] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/11/740608323/the-origins-of-the-...

As sibling comment indicates, someone like Dotcom will say anything at any time. He's kind of like CIA in that respect. I love the link to the M5M sock saying Trump has no chance in 2016, barely two months before he is widely believed to have won. Why is the name "Seth Rich" mostly brought up by "believe-the-dominant-narrative" cheerleaders? Are you guys feeling guilty about something? Why not just obey his parents' wishes? It's impossible to know for sure, but it's most likely that what you'd prefer to call a "hack" was actually a leak by someone other than Rich. [0]

NPR are run by John Lansing, previously responsible for external propaganda as head of "USAGM". Now he handles internal propaganda. It's funny to read that very detailed report, full of all sorts of picturesque details with no sources about those three hours in the dark. Oh wait, Deborah Sines had to go OTR to CYA her cold case. That was worth picking this scab, in 2019.

Liberal Democrats (as differentiated from actual progressives) don't have imaginations, so they assume any widely-held belief must come from somewhere specific. If it's a belief they don't like, they have to blame a nefarious source. People connected to the Clintons have been dropping like flies for decades. When Epstein died, the most commonly-searched phrase was "Clinton body count", even though Trump had "partied" with him too. (Trump can't hire assassins because they insist on being paid in full.) Nobody had to be told by Russians to blame HRC for the death of someone on her campaign. When coupled with embarrassing public leaks of DNC shenanigans, lots of people independently decided that Rich might have been connected. It's best to ignore Rich and pay attention to who says what, and how that relates to facts actually in evidence. (e.g. DKIM-verified emails.)

[0] https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-r...

Dotcom's troubles pre-date anything involving him with Wikileaks. He relocated to Hong Kong in 2003 (and again to New Zealand in 2009) precisely to shield himself from European and American prosecution, as he was starting Megaupload. He's been in the crosshair of copyright police ever since. Trying to "shake him down" by using charges he was clearly expecting for a decade, would be a pretty silly strategy.

As for anything he says or does, it should all be taken with a massive grain of salt. The facts, even before Mega, show him a lier, a narcissist, and a huge self-promoter. He's fundamentally just a scoundrel with no real ideological background beyond "anything that makes me money should not be illegal". Taking his word at face value is chasing shadows.

You're absolutely right that these two things can be true at once. I commend you for your level-headed evaluation and I wish there were more comments like yours.

>Go find the court papers for the indictment.

No i dont think i will. onus probandi, you'll need to cite your sources if you want anyone to take this seriously im afraid.

Dotcom was raided in new zealand with a guns out swat style team of tactical commandos and helicopters for what amounted to a civil court issue in his own county. his servers were illegally seized, his assets frozen, and then he was railroaded to the US and told to defend himself penniless despite overwhelming domestic controversy which inevitably led to political fallout for leaders in new zealand.

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

He cited a source, he cited the court documents...

> "if you want anyone to take this seriously"

I hope I'm not the only one finding irony in the total lack of punctuation and capitalization in here

> and then he was railroaded to the US

I agree that the treatment of Dotcom by the US is, essentially, legalized international extortion and the NZ government should have put a stop on it a long time ago... but he is still in NZ.

The full story, not without irony, is that the mansion Dotcom was renting was then purchased by a family whose entire business fortune evolved from the facilitating the mass production of plastic children's toys based on US movie IP.

> Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company

Can you claim that against any file storage and sharing company that won't look into the content to detect possible copyright violations?

The MPAA is no better.

How about similar aggression towards arresting and pursuing the people doing ransomware.

There was a big story a few months ago about the feds going after international phone scammer rings with a bunch of arrests. Also a big Nigerian scammer ring last year. They also include indictments of people mostly overseas.

I think you should be cautious about extending today’s pattern about piracy (ie they are already high consumers) to a scenario where piracy was easy and safe for distributors.

The piracy wac-a-mole game makes piracy somewhat difficult for an average person.

If it were as easy and safe as Netflix then everyone would pirate, and it would have a major impact on the entertainment industry.

I imagine piracy enforcement is done to keep it in check, not prevent it from happening at all.

> frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers.

aka those customers have money (and the MPAA and RIAA want to bleed them dry).

These are criminal cases. If you owned a software company and someone broke into your git repo and started selling your software as their own, would you want the police to be involved?

It’s not the same. It’s like you shipped your software to people and someone took the copy you sold them and gave to it someone else.

...while keeping a copy for themselves. And then reselling that copy over and over.

It’s not the same; It’s profiting off someone else’s work.

But it is not breaking and entering.

It’s still a criminal offense.

Do you know anybody who works in the creative fields? I do. Nearly all of them -- aside from the programmers -- favor strong copyright and even DRM. And to them, large piracy networks are as much organized theft, and do as much harm, as the Mafia robbing banks. The MPAA and RIAA are not evil to them, either, at least not in the sinister cyberpunk megacorp sense favored by hackers. Creative people see them as the means to put food on the table by doing what they love. They see pirates as stealing food from the mouths of their children and themselves, and as vicious a criminal as any bank robber. U.S. law provides the means to prosecute them as such.

That sounds right. There's some inside baseball to this, but DRM doesn't always fit neatly in the big-biz, small-biz dichotomy. The market power of the FAANGs is at least partly from strip-mining the fair use exceptions, and using data at an extreme scale without compensating creators.

And farmers thought the tarriffs would help them. I don't see what size has to do with their entitled delusions for unenforceable at scale laws.

Their collective delusions don't make them any less wrong.

To call copying theft implies a spooky action at a distance to drain money from their account like a voodoo doll. Under that twisted logic if I have a sealed room and keep making copies of Harry Potter I can bankrupt JK Rowling! Hell it would be useful to test if it I can use it for superluminal communication.

Magic snark aside they are literally in denial of objective reality including conflating a granted monopoly with physical property. There is a difference even if illustrations would have to be rather fantastic. If merpeople or aliens from Alpha Centuari were making copies of our goods they would not even be violating our laws because they wouldn't be party to any treaty with them and out of our jurisdiction. Not so with literal theft where a freight captain would be justified using force in self defense against sea people/aliens.

You're twisting the argument. Pirates aren't copying content in a sealed room, they are distributing it to people for free. If you kept making copies of Harry Potter and gave it to anyone for free, it's not delusional to argue that JK Rowling would be far poorer than she is now. Harry Potter is an exceptionally popular product so the reduced revenue may still be enough for JK Rowling, but less popular and more niche content may not work out well enough for their content creators.

And the content industry is massive, revenue wise, which explains why the government is expending such large resources to protect its interests.

is alleged to have caused “tens of millions of dollars” in losses

In short, a typical day for an investment banker. Odd how one is legal and the other one gets you an international secret police task force.

> Studies have shown that frequent pirated media downloaders are among the relevant industry's best, highest-spending customers.

Copy that. I never pirate and I hardly ever spend money on media.

> The cases are more properly pursued in civil court ... that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs

I don’t think it is possible to defer the moral and ethical question about the activities of these groups. Copyright holders have tried the civil option and it does not work. It is too expensive to pursue casual pirates, and too difficult to identify hardcore pirates without the investigative powers of a law enforcement agency. If you’re not okay with the criminal investigation, then I think you need to be okay with these piracy groups continuing to exist, rather than offering the civil courts as a moderate alternative.

Perhaps that should be taken as a sign that MPAA and RIAA are overstepping acceptable behaviour and should back off

... rather than abusing international laws intended for serious infractions

The rest of the world should say "did they shoot innocent civilians in a foreign country? ... no, oh well then we'll put it at the bottom of the pile and get back to it when you , the USA, have cleaned house on REAL criminal activity."

Just how screwed up does "justice" have to be to put corporate profits derived from rentseeking on digital goods over war crimes ... ?

"Bridi, 50, was arrested on Sunday in Cyprus on an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa, 36, was arrested yesterday in Olathe, Kansas, where he will appear in federal court. Ahmad, 39, was not arrested and is still at large."

An INTERPOL Red Notice! You'd think these are terrorists, human traffickers or drug lords. Nope, they share films before the films are supposed to come out.

I understand that one should not try to profit from piracy. I also understand that the people who are orchestrating the operations that lead to films being leaked ahead of time should indeed be stopped, but isn't this all a bit overly dramatic, when there are real problems to be dealt with in the world?

that's all well and good, but some very rich people could be even richer, and that's what is really important to law enforcement.

another substantiating example is here: https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft

How this works seems, at first approximation, pretty simple to me. The monetary loss (possibly quite large here) is the financial incentive to punish a crime. And the amount of money the affected person or corporation still has, after that, is the power they have to pursue punishment. Therefore, by the market incentives our society knows, loves, and endlessly promotes, extremely rich profiteers tend to get first and best justice, regardless of the social value of pursuing it. Here, I think it's negative social value to punish these people, although reasonable people can probably disagree on that.

An interesting corollary is that if a crime causes money to be transferred from someone with less power to someone with more power (power being generally approximated by wealth), then there will be an overall negative incentive to pursue justice, at least as far as those two parties are concerned. This certainly doesn't explain all criminal justice, there is some basic functioning of society to be upheld etc. But it arguably explains a lot of which injustices do and don't get punished that you can see daily just by reading the news.

It makes perfect sense when you realise that law enforcement's historical and primary goal, over and above protection of us, is the protection of capital.

Isn't that caused mainly by lobbying and so? Some context. Generally speaking money in practice means power just because it allows lobbying and hiring good lawyers. And power basically is ability to have someone else solving one's problems.

"Lobbying" just means presenting your position on an issue. Money can help with making a persuasive presentation, to a point, but lobbying per se is never the cause of the problem. You can blame that on the people with way too much power who listen to the lobbyists and do as they ask—instead of actually doing their jobs and representing the interests of all their constituents.

This is an extremely linear way of looking at public corruption.

It's all well and good to say that politicians should act morally, but if you don't do what you're told, you won't get the money, and you won't keep the job. You'll be replaced by somebody who does what they're told. We're filtering for trash.

It's weird that you're even combining this with a defense of cash payments to politicians from special interests. You characterize bad governance strictly as a moral failure, but defend bribes as an mostly irrelevant rhetorical addition to the persuasive presentation of one's position.

> … if you don't do what you're told … you won't keep the job.

Whether you keep your job is determined by who your constituents vote for, not by lobbyists. Perhaps voters are sometimes too easily swayed by campaign spending, but that's a separate issue from lobbying.

> It's weird that you're even combining this with a defense of cash payments to politicians from special interests.

You misread. Spending more on your presentation can make it more persuasive because (up to a point, as I said) the end result is better researched and more polished in general compared to what can be produced on a shoestring budget. I was not suggesting that lobbyists ought to bolster their arguments with cash payments to politicians. Frankly I don't really care whether bribes are exchanged so long as the end result serves the constituents as a whole and not just the lobbyists. Accepting a bribe to advance lobbyists' interests at the expense of one's constituents would be an obvious example of corruption. As would doing the same out of personal preference without any exchange of favors.

It started like this! The first formal police force in Britain (and I think the world) was created to prevent theft at London docks. The first in the USA was born of people catching and beating runaway/errant slaves which were at the time considered capital.

That gets it wrong. Capital came far later as a goal over the literal strongmen involved with the monopoly of force. The reason they were treasured was because the capital specialists made more money by being taxed than flat out taking everything up front. Monopoly on force is brutally darwinian in that the emergent result of what it cares about it self-perpetuation. The real first layer is the enforcers to be kept loyal. In a more complex system there are specialties and layers of dependency like needing to appease the manufacturers and maintainers of weapons to keep the enforcers using tanks and planes instead of sharpened sticks.

The first formal police force was created literally to protect capital at London docks.

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

at least wait until the material is being sold on disk, at that point any number of people can watch a single disk and the theatre has made its payday on screen

when you copy theatre screeners or cam the movie thats poking a stick right in a sleeping bears eye

What percentage of people who would watch a 'cam', but not watch the movie legitimately later, would have paid? If I had to guess I'd go <1%.

What percent could, even if they wanted to pay, watch the movie legitimately in their country?

Does it matter if you watch a cam if you're not even able to pay for the movie?

The thing about movies is that they're also part of societal culture - in The West at least.

In my personal opinion copyright is all kinds of messed up, and limiting the length of copyright terms (to say 7 years from public release) first would somewhat legitimise such harsh actions.

camming is a concretely tangible theft.

when a movie is being sold on disk after theatre showings close out, there is already a return for investments and disk sales are just gravy.

disks are played many times lent out to family and friends watched in recap after the theatre and donated to thrift shops. a large group of people can "steal" by watching for free multiple times, but millions have been made in theatre wages paid and investors pacified.

when a movie is cammed this cuts into the revenue.

i believe in a co-existence being possible however thats short circuited by the one "free" view == one lost/stolen sale mentality.

They paid for the ticket didn't they? And even if it was a projection room cam they could have offered a seat there and yet they didn't so no material loss to claim. You can't claim that my tree falling on your grass did damage to your hypothetical Porsche and claim losses of it.

They still got their share of the fixed pie. Theft isn't infringement.

no theft isnt infringement, the infringement happens when you distribute your product. the viewing experience is what is paid for by ticket, camming subverts the sale of the experience. if someone went into a strip club with a camera and recorded the live show thats theft as well. When the dancer produces thier own disk and distributes it thats in the same boat as a DVD release and any number of eyes can experience that video when the producer gets [guess ~ 50$- 100$] for a disk sale.

Theft almost doesn't seem like the right word for it. I'd compare it more like when someone sneaks into a movie theater without paying. You could argue about whether or not the people stealing these films ever intended to pay money to see them in the first place. Studios should figure out how much money they actually lost on ticket sales to pirates who would have paid for a ticket if they had no access to a cam version and then compare that to how much they spend in lawyer fees and IP firms trying to combat it. Considering how easy it is to find a copy, watch it, and suffer no repercussions, I'd say they either are wasting their money or not spending enough.

I don't buy that any significant population watched extremely low quality cams vs paying $10-15 for a theater ticket. I think it was mostly a stupid risky prestige thing for sceners.

Theaters probably "lose" orders of magnitude more revenue to teenagers watching 2-3 films after only paying for the first ticket.

>when a movie is cammed this cuts into the revenue. //

Is there proof of this?

"The thing about movies is that they're also part of societal culture - in The West at least."

This is an interesting point. Moral correctness aside...

The content industries try as hard as possible to make their stuff "socially mandatory" via marketing. If they could make it law to consume their product they would.

So, socially: For as long as there is such a social pressure, there will be people who try to fulfill that pressure at least expense.

And financially: In a world where you have increasing financial inequality, the balance of people for whom it is "worth their time" to find a cheaper way becomes greater.

So I don't think piracy is going anywhere, until the motivations are gone. For that, "all digital copies are free" is technically feasible.(Again, moral correctness aside.)

But I don't know what the commercial world would look like to allow that to happen.

Yes, this is why I think a copyright term of ~7 years fits (for mass media). It allows recrual of costs and it allows participation in media that's still culturally relevant. Further, it allows still culturally relevant works to be remixed, worked on, 'improved' by the populous.

Currently the long copyright terms are not encouraging innovation; the same works are being resold to the same people over and over.

I agree the current copyrights are stifling innovation, and largely leveraging branding.

Marvel, Star Wars, Star Trek to name a few. These things haven't died out because they have people invested in their brand and storyline.

But they also haven't done anything super cool because they don't want to take the risk they might damage their brand. They try to make"reliable blockbusters".

Aren't cams totally dead? This was mostly DVD prerelease, which happens long after the theatrical release.

you dont see many cams around due to the enforcement against in theatre camming.

even teleciene versions are few in number [a way of camming in your pirate loPHt]. it seems cams were a counting coup for scene credit and its now just looked at as dangerous.

actual copying of prerelease screeners is in the mire as well. screeners basically were watermarked and sent out as promotionals so a theatre location could judge if they wanted to show them or not, and as promos in store to encourage rentals.

The Telecine way does not involve a cam. I think you mean Telesync.

Some more details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying).

telesync uses an audio channel, telecine is just video and uses an electronic photomultiplier array as a sensor to convert the light of each frame on acetate to a bitfield frame, its not a camera but done properly it can be high quality. its not a cam its more like scanning each frame of film. the thing is about 20 years ago there was a lot of cams and TKs and TSs, now that streaming is the thing its not very common to see these and you know they are very old compared to the usual transcoding and wrapping nowadays

I was curious, so I went and looked up what a Red Notice is:

> What is a Red Notice? [...] Information related to the crime they are wanted for, which can typically be murder, rape, child abuse or armed robbery. [1]

Using it to go after people who share movies for free seems like a gross abuse of the system.

[1]: https://www.interpol.int/en/How-we-work/Notices/Red-Notices

Nonsense. If you read your own link red notices are simply issued for wanted criminals likely to flee to another country; what crime was committed is largely irrelevant.

This is opposed to yellow notices, which are for missing persons.

Also important to add that red notices themselves are not arrest warrants. People get that confused.

According to the rules of Interpol, it should only be used for serious crimes. There should be some kind of non-exhaustive list, but it's probably not public.

Article 83 @ https://www.interpol.int/en/content/download/5694/file/24%20...

Fans of government enforcement always find this surprising. "We should pass this law so the government can stop child abusers! If we restrict it to child abuse it can't be used. We will trust the enforcers.". Some time passes and then the surprise "Wait, but all that guy did was smoke weed / share a movie / connect to a WiFi access point. Why is he being prosecuted under this law?". Typical, repeatable, thoroughly enjoyable to watch in its predictability. If only there was a way to profit off it.

Another example for funsies: https://rsf.org/en/news/romania-tries-use-gdpr-force-journal...

19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history.

It was the destruction of a warez group.

In the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, the most important thing on the DoJ agenda was not to follow up on any of the numerous intelligence leads warning that Islamist terrorists were planning to ram multiple airliners into multiple buildings, but rather to shut down an organization whose chosen line of activity has never been demonstrated to harm anyone.

Putting the factually contraindicated feeling of the software publishing cartels that they're somehow losing money above the actual lives of actual people is a very f'ed up choice of priorities.

> has never been demonstrated to harm anyone

More than that, it later was demonstrated to not harm anyone: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-...

(Technically, the study merely failed to find any impact. But that failure put a low upper bound on the impact, so it's inaccurate to say "The study didn't find anything".)

This is the natural outcome of prioritizing capital above all else, including human life. And the examples of this priority are, sadly, very numerous in the world we all live in.

> It was the destruction of a warez group.

Funny, one of my current tabs was the wiki entry for Razor 1911 for some reason, where it states that the DOJ claims it to be the oldest Warez group in operation (circa 1985).

> Putting the factually contraindicated feeling of the software publishing cartels that they're somehow losing money above the actual lives of actual people is a very f'ed up choice of priorities.

What you wrote was pretty sobering, especially with COVID and mass unemployment hanging over our collective heads... it is sad but somehow entirely predictable, the emergence and wanton profiteering from the Warfare State and Surveillance Economy was what was needed in further inflate and increase the IC's budgets after the end of the cold war.

And lots of articles this summer about shark attacks too....

> 19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history.

>It was the destruction of a warez group.

In Germany, we have something similar, although with two orders of magnitude less deaths. The conservative Berlin Interior Senator Frank Henkel and his top officers decided in 2016, right in front of the election, to move spies from observing Islamist terrorists to observing a couple of left-anarchist "occupied houses". The result? One of the Islamists was Anis Amri, who half a year later infamously murdered twelve people at Breitscheidplatz: https://taz.de/Anis-Amri-und-die-Rigaer-Strasse/!5510622/

The priority setting of interior politicians seems to be ... messed up across the globe.

This feels like one of those "mind blowing" factoids. I mean, nobody had 9/11 on their calendars (aside from literally, I guess). I suppose you could argue that the U.S. should have gotten obssessively involved with the middle east before 9/11 ever happened, but I personally think that's a nutcase position.

And let's address this counterargument: "Regardless of 9/11, why wasn't the DOJ doing literally anything else?"

I mean, the DOJ is a department. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it's not just a single boardroom stocked with sneering capitalists plotting to get back at software pirates.

Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty big department, I don't doubt that this evil boardroom probably actually exists in some capacity. I just also happen to think that is... kind of normal? Would you prefer if the DOJ didn't enforce laws? It seems like putting the cart before the horse when one criticizes the executive for executing instead of criticizing the law itself.

Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain?

If anything, they're doing the media companies a service, free viral campaigns. Without pirated content, a lot of people would never hear or care about their movies, TV shows, music. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it anyway.

Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?

All for the risk of being accused of fraud, causing "massive losses", and prison time. I guess sticking it to the MAFIAA feels nice, but is it worth the risk?

A good deal of it is status, like being involved in the most prolific group etc. But also the way "The Scene" works is almost gamified. Groups battle each other to obtain pre-release material and then race each other to disseminate to the sites they affiliate with. If you are first you win the PRE and your releases is the only one accepted by the whole scene. It becomes addictive.

Secondly money is involved, less scrupulous sites run pay to leech servers where people pay for slots and some groups are donated hardware etc for access. Also there are connections to various forms of cyber crime from contacts you can make from being involved.

There's likely also the sharing is caring aspect, millions of people really appreciate their efforts - and they're aware of that.

On the flip side some people really doesn't appreciate it, which makes it even more fun I guess (unless you get caught).

Yep, the loss to these companies is not the price of the movie. It is not the tens of millions of dollars quoted. If you pirate a movie, the person buying it is rarely someone who would pay full price. I would be surprised if the actual loss was anywhere near the amount it cost to run the investigation.

Also, there really isn't a massive amount of sophistication when it comes to distribution. Most of the media business still feels stuck in the 90s, definitely changing but still "business as usual" (for example, the English Premier League...probably the most valuable sports league in the world, same distribution since inception in the early 90s) thinking whilst the sand is shifting beneath their feet (if you look at the late teen-early twenties demo, much of the media business is already irrelevant). But yeah: spend your time chasing down people for a few hundred thousand bucks, that will work.

Yeah, you are basically forced to pirate movies if you want it in good streaming quality.

Most of the 4K HDR movies on Netflix are just available as 1080p SDR even with a 4K subscription, to get 4K HDR Atmos quality streaming you gotta pirate them. It's so damn dumb.

Not against pirating in the least bit but you can’t say you have to pirate to get the best 4K it’s just easier and cheaper. Disregarding the not available in my region argument. The Blu-Ray is still available for purchase in most regions.

The people in the article were not ripping streaming services they were ripping unreleased DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Blu-Ray is not an option, I'm talking about streaming here.

There are many 4K rental options available but at $6.99 or so a pop means pirating is cheaper and easier once again. Cross platform sharing of rentals or digital purchases is crap, pirating is again easier.

It is also way easier to access and (often) faster...or so I am told. We are in 2020, and some guy in his mother's basement with a PHP site is able to provide better service than multi-billion dollar media companies...

...maybe if they didn't spend all their time suing people.

In fairness, the average user and use case is very different. Pirating is less instant gratification since you have to wait on the download. Pirates are also generally okay with having the only peer be someone uploading at 5KB/s. Trackers go down with relative frequency.

None of that would fly on a paid streaming site.

I have wondered why no streaming service uses or offers some sort of P2P. I would think it would be great for popular releases, and you could shift some of your bandwidth costs. It also helps get you around ISPs who want you to pay for interconnects.

Maybe they're just concerned about delivering it in a raw format? I would've expected they could put some DRM on it

Spotify started P2P, but moved away from it. The rest of what you're saying is hilariously inaccurate, you don't have to wait for downloads, if you want to pirate-streaming of 4K HDR Blu-Rays you just get Real-Debrid and TVZion for example.

>I would be surprised if the actual loss was anywhere near the amount it cost to run the investigation.

That is true of lots of crimes, but it's not reasonable to then conclude we should not prosecute those crimes. Prosecution does have a deterrent effect. See [1] for a good overview of the field.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/449268

Yeah putting people in jail for pirating movies will definitely make them and the world better.

You wouldn't steal a car...

I remember those. If anything I think they turned people on to piracy, not off, because the general sentiment upon seeing it was "...but I would totally download/duplicate one!"

I’d think from what they quoted, that they were speaking for the general case. I’d have made the same argument and I think that the whole MAFIAA is toxic and a stain.

Your sarcastic comment implies there is no pirate whose imprisonment would add value to society.

Some groups pirate for profit. Is that still ok in your view?

Some groups use the profits to fund terrorist and drug activity. Is that ok?

Some use it along with human smuggling, racketeering, loan-sharking, prostitution, contract killing, and more (see [1]). Are these ok?

So is it possible there exists a pirate whose jail sentence may make the world a better place?

( I know the pop hacker belief is this doesn't happen, but I've yet to meet a hacker that has reviewed the peer reviewed literature on it, so don't retort without checking empirical evidence. I'll post but one paper below).

The reason various mob like groups turn to piracy is that pirated products have value and have very often have high profit margins, so piracy becomes a very profitable business. A group willing to do this illegally is often willing to do other high-profit risky and illegal activity.

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9417.html

> Some groups use the profits to fund terrorist and drug activity. Is that ok?

Some people use the profits from taxi companies to fund terrorism. Is that ok?

Nope.

But it's intellectually dishonest to equate a legal activity tied to breaking the law with illegal activity tied to breaking the law, especially when the illegal activity helps break further laws.

People don't go into taxis to make profits by breaking the law. If they did break the law while securing taxi profits, then that becomes prosecutable, and should be pursued.

People do pirate material because by breaking that law, they can obtain profits not possible without breaking the law.

They also screw over consumers by selling such products on Amazon and elsewhere, and many times when a consumer needs help, or a return, or thinks they have a warranty, the fake goods screw them over. Note nearly every product cloned with a software component is a copyright violation, most anything with a logo is a trademark violation, etc.

The OP implied that there is no benefit to ever jailing a pirate.

So instead of inaccurate metaphors, do you think there is ever a case to be made for jailing a pirate?

That's a silly question. Of course I think there are situations where a taxi driver should be jailed. For example, when they commit terrorism.

Being a taxi driver does not justify immoral acts. That would be absurd. Illegal acts, however, don't need to be justified. The fact homosexuality was once illegal should be proof enough that doing something illegal is not a sufficient condition for deserving punishment.

> They also screw over consumers by selling such products on Amazon and elsewhere, and many times when a consumer needs help, or a return, or thinks they have a warranty, the fake goods screw them over. Note nearly every product cloned with a software component is a copyright violation, most anything with a logo is a trademark violation, etc.

Trademark violations may also be called "piracy", but they have about as much to do with copyright violations as copyright violations have to do with theft.

>The fact homosexuality was once illegal should be proof enough that doing something illegal is not a sufficient condition for deserving punishment.

That there is an example of a thing is no argument that all things follow that pattern. So what if some past law was bad. That is not evidence a current one is also bad. By that simplistic reasoning, if I pointed out a law in the past was a good law, I could then conclude this particular one was good too. But that's just as ludicrous as going the other direction.

Edge cases, by definition, don't apply broadly.

And as far as the law goes, yes, something illegal does mean something deserves punishment, under the law. You and I and our grandmothers may not feel our flavor of "deserves" is the same as the legal one, but that is the benefit of having laws - we don't all get to impose our feelings on each situation.

And, if society someday thinks some law has outlived it's usefulness, then society can change that law.

That you personally don't think this particular case deserves punishment is irrelevant to whether or not these people are punished, just as someone who wants to punish them even more than the law allows will not get their way.

>but they have about as much to do with copyright violations

Ignoring that lots of items that are counterfeited are also copyright violations? Anything copying custom code is a copyright violation, and a massive amount of products now have some programmed component.

> as copyright violations have to do with theft.

Nowhere did I make such equivalencies. Please stop with the dramatic metaphors - they're not relevant to the discussion.

> That there is an example of a thing is no argument that all things follow that pattern.

Of course not. Nowhere did I argue that there are no good laws. Every law should be evaluated on its own merits.

> And as far as the law goes, yes, something illegal does mean something deserves punishment, under the law.

Under the law. The law is the opinion of the state. If something deserves punishment under the law, the state believes it deserves punishment. That doesn't mean it actually does.

> Ignoring that lots of items that are counterfeited are also copyright violations? Anything copying custom code is a copyright violation, and a massive amount of products now have some programmed component.

Then why did you bring trademarks into this? They're separate issues, even if they can occur at the same time.

> Nowhere did I make such equivalencies. Please stop with the dramatic metaphors - they're not relevant to the discussion.

Absolutely not. I'll continue to express my opinions and arguments the way I see fit.

I wonder who produced that paper(i.e who sponsored it). How easy and convenient to link pirating to terrorism, don't you think? What's next? pirating and WMD?

>> A group willing to do this illegally is often willing to do other high-profit risky and illegal activity.

A law abiding citizen is just a docile citizen if he abides by wrong/unjust laws. If you were a jew in Nazi Germany a law abiding citizen would have given you in to the Gestapo while a "pirate" would have taken the risk to give you shelder.

A group willing to torrent Game of Thrones is not often willing to do terrorism, you poor little ....! They just want to watch a fucking movie and decide to torrent it because:

a) they don't have the money to buy it

b) they can't buy it because some stupid executives believe some people should watch it 20 years after it's released in x country.

c) they can't watch it on the device they want/when they want because of the excellent DRM laws that you praise and I assume you abide of(i.g their HDMI cable is not version 2.0a it's just 1.4b

d) they are humans

Before hunting "Game of Thrones" pirates can we please do something about all the big guys such GS [0] that steal billions from poor people, some of them unable to pay for that Game of Thrones movie they pirate? I mean something more than a handshake for returning a part of the money when they get caught.

If you want to stop crime you should invest in education and provide opportunities for a decent life.

Either way, jailing your neightbour for pirating movies will not make him a better neightbour. Most likely will turn him/her into a real criminal vengeful on the system/society.

Btw, good job with Aaron[1]! You've done the "right thing", right? So much justice that makes me sick to my stomach. All this to make the few wealthy and privileged wealthier and the lives of the poors more miserable!

When I read your comment your attitude remembered me of a quote from Cloud Atlas[2]: "There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well. "

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53529075

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lxumQYpBzr0

A basic principle of economics is elasticity of demand, which means that people will buy more of something if it's cheaper and less of something if it's more expensive.

Piracy "loss" estimates from publishing cartels pretend that elasticity of demand does not exist and assume that anyone who would copy an intangible good at a price of $0 would pay whatever price the publishing cartel demanded if the $0 option was not available. While this may be true in the very narrow case of monopoly software products used by businesses in their line of trade, it's absolutely not true for commodity consumer goods.

Very, very few people who have collected a few thousand movies (etc), at a price of $0, would have anywhere as large a collection if they were forced to pay cartel prices for each title.

At the absolute best, the cartel belief that they are entitled to full profits from every copy made is in complete ignorance of several hundred years of economic theory. At worst, it's a lie.

Anti-piracy enforcement is not about profit. It's about being vindictive for its own sake.

> Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?

The thing here seems to be ease of access. Adobe products were at one point more easily gotten in pirated fashion than legitimate. The same was even true for MS products.

Once both companies adopted new distribution models, the pirated software was no longer the easiest option. Additionally, while costly to some, the ease of upgrades and getting patches became easier by using the legitimate channel. This is important for professionals.

The media companies appear to recognize this at this point, but they fear losing control of the distribution model. They don’t want to cede that all to Netflix, but this seems like it might be a losing option for all but the biggest media companies (like Disney). It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, since most people are not going to want to purchase single media channels, and will generally want a single source like Netflix. Until this becomes simpler for consumers, pirating for some is the simplest means of getting access to the content.

> but this seems like it might be a losing option for all but the biggest media companies (like Disney)

Only because our system allowed purchase of Fox. And content/distribution conglomeration. A mistake.

Do they also watch only one tv channel?

Comparing Netflix to a single cable channel is disingenuous. I can't the only one who feels that Netflix is "too much" and that the last thing I need is even more content for more money.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with subscribing to multiple services. But by the same token, there is certainly a market segment that is just going to buy a single service.

>> Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain?

That's what I was wondering. Do they monetize the activity with ad revenue? Other than that I cant think of any motivation other than some kind of status seeking.

> Do they monetize the activity with ad revenue?

They aren't allowed to. In general, releases are nuked [0] if they don't follow certain rules [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuke_(warez)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#What_is_defin...

The why?

For fame, for glory, to chase the adrenaline rush that comes with being the first in a race to release something everyone else is trying to do? To feel like you have reach over millions of people who will eventually download your release...

A few groups tie back to 'organised crime', in that they cut the releases back to DVDs for sale at markets for the less technologically literate. But I'd say by and large the people in 'the scene' are doing it for the love, whatever that love happens to be.

>> Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?

I pay Netflix in the country I live, but I can't find content in my native language, so, guess what? I get pirate movies. Similar reasoning applies to some old films: very hard to find online in any legal way or at a reasonable price.

I'd love to pay a fair price to get access to films, but the industry makes it very hard for me. So thank you pirates, you make my life easier.

>I pay Netflix in the country I live, but I can't find content in my native language, so, guess what? I get pirate movies.

Are most of the movies you pirate in your native language?

Yes. I don't have problems with other languages, but it's for my daughter. I want to watch movies with her in my language so that she gets used to it. Audio is cheap, I don't know why they don't include all languages the movie was translated to.

Would be interesting if our justice system spent as much effort on white collar crime, insider trading, financial misengineering, price fixing, etc.

Isn’t this an example of “white collar” crime albeit perhaps a low level one?

Kind of - technically - but realistically no. The government is treating it more akin to theft than copyright infringement.

If an artist steals another's work and makes some money off of it, the federal government isn't going to step in and help. It'd be up to the artist (or copyright holder) to sue for damages. Assuming the case is clear, the artist would get money from the offender. The offender rarely goes to jail. If the offender instead stole the art from the artist's home, then they might get criminal charges.

I don't get what you mean when you say "technically no", since you pretty much made the case for the point.

The govt is accusing them of fraud (a kind of theft) in how they acquired the movies initially. This is indeed a white collar crime.

This isn't done for financial gain (or at least it didn't use to be done for financial gain).

It's basically a game.

In my youth I was drawn to it and tried to be a racer to gain access to top sites.

The rush was basically to be one of the first to have your hands on something, even if it was just to prove that you could. Like just get it to show off that you had it before any tracker had it - kids stuff.

For these guys it used to be about releasing before any other group (that wouldn't be nuked, for example, if a crack didn't work).

Nowadays if they are using bribery for access, or are being paid to dump it on sites, then yeah, I guess it would fit in financial gain, therefore white colar crime.

There is no motivation for that. White collar criminals, especially the big ones are generally well connected, have powerful acquaintances, often know dirt on other people and mostly steal from either little fish and government (if they steal from corporations, there is often fault on the side of the corp. too and no one wants it to be very public so stocks dont fall even more) and their crimes usually benefit other rich/powerful people (often stockholders), it would be rather inconvenient to air such dirty laundry. On the other hand pirates have no noteworthy connections whatsoever and mostly damage big corporations who have money to lobby for their punishment.

What kind of people are you talking about?

Thank you torrent freak for putting the legal documents directly linked at the bottom. I'm not sure why some news outlets don't do this.

Ironic that a site called 'Torrentfreak' is more reliable than most news sources.

This comment pops up now and again, but they are the single biggest news site for piracy and filesharing related things. I’ve been reading them since they started (I even have a T-Shirt) and they turned from a small-ish blog to a professional news site.

I would really like all news sources to link their sources at the bottom of the article.

For anonymous sources, make a document detailing the source and publish a hash at least, and promise to reveal the source in 1/5/10/50/100 years.

It's not provided on purpose. Go search for Jeffery epstein flight logs. You will see tons of news articles talking about them and a few of the people flown. It's difficult to find the actual log or a list of all people.

They don't publish the full lists because they don't know which reptiles on those lists their bosses don't want to piss off.

SAPRKS is a huge loss. All of the groups that were named were quite prolific and released exceptionally high-quality files, but SPARKS especially.

Just goes to show how utterly broken and cross-contaminated the copyright and justice systems are. These groups should be lauded as heroes, not hunted down like criminals.

> All of the groups that were named were quite prolific

Anecdotal, but: I've certainly heard of SPARKS, but literally never heard of GECKOS, DRONES, ROVERS or SPLINTERS.

Pirates should be lauded as heroes? Take that to /r/im14andthisisdeep

There is only one reason that I've ever had to use bittorrent. It turns out that some musicals are not available through streaming because the copyright assignment wasn't set up correctly and nobody has been able to come to an agreement on how to split the revenue.

Movies from My Fair Lady to Bullets Over Broadway are affected. You can go onto Netflix, Amazon, and so on, and none can let you watch. They can only ship you a DVD.

After literally failing to find anyone who could take my money, I went to bittorrent. (And had to VPN to pretend not to be in the USA.)

Leaking pre-release movies is just a dangerous thing to do, and even a hypothetical producer/distributor's organization with the weakest stance on piracy one could imagine would go after them. Obtaining copies of unreleased media involves a direct attack to compromise people connected to a company. Even from my anti-copyright position, it's exactly the same as infiltrating a company to find out trade secrets or things that may influence future stock movements.

And there's no doubt it is damaging. So many movies are overbudgeted garbage, and are going to recoup as much as they are going to recoup during their first weekend, before the word gets out that the movie is terrible. All the marketing (which as a rule of thumb costs as much as the film) is focused on that weekend, including getting friendly reviews published, or deciding on a strategy of keeping the film from reviewers altogether. A credible rumor getting around a week before the release that the movie is crap means $10s of millions in losses, and layoffs.

I don't believe in copyright, but this is getting employees of a company (or its contractors, or those who have signed agreements with it in order to get screeners) to steal from the company. This is good when it is internal whistleblowing on crime or corruption, even better when it is government and the only reason for secrecy is to avoid embarrassment or accountability. There's very little detectable public good in exposing an X-Men movie a week before it hits the theaters.

As per your 2nd paragraph, the public good is that a lot of people might be saved from spending money to see a crap movie.

The justice system is complete crap, the US government doesn't have the ability to deal with piracy because it is international.

This doesn't work the way people think it does, there is literally no justice involved. The CIA is used to using movies and television as a pathway for manipulating the American population. There is a very long history of this happening and the people they use (yes use) to do this aren't making the revenues they are used to making.

As a result they are resorting to ugly tactics like taking over companies to play psychological games with people in online piracy and gaslighting people who run piracy servers. Several people who run piracy sites have been gaslit to the point of suggestibility and that usually ends in the person committing suicide or dying in strange ways. Deimos (the founder of demonoid) and Aaron Swartz were targets of this kind of treatment and almost none of the people who know them are aware of this because it is all psychological.

The way this is handled in reality is brutal psychological operations (triggering schizophrenia, learned dependency, triggering PTSD, gaslighting, etc), never believe anything you hear about the American government prosecuting crimes like online piracy, it is not handled in the courts. When you see someone who was perfectly normal and has their life fall apart out of nowhere until they are worn down physically or psychologically it is almost always the US government in one form or another. Sometimes it is intentional and sometimes it is unintentional (i.e. some part of the government gets tricked into running a psychological operation on someone), this isn't conspiracy it is being done in broad daylight everyday all over the country because it only has meaning to the person being targeted.

Are you suggesting the CIA uses movies as a revenue source to fund other operations?

I'm not suggesting anything, that's exactly how it works.

I wouldn't say it's out of the realm of possibility. Iran-Contra seems like a much bigger issue in terms of the CIA and finding.

I haven't seen any evidence, though, and OP doesn't seem to be forthcoming with any.

There is plenty of evidence, look at the lives of nearly anyone who has been suspected of online piracy. You're going to see a very strange pattern where something catastrophic happens to them and their lives fall apart in a nearly impossible series of events. I personally know dozens of people this has happened to, there was an entire floor of RIT engineering students who were running piracy servers out of their dorm in the late 90s and had their lives torn apart with psychological operations. I tracked all of them over the past 20 years and it becomes deadly obvious this happens all the time if you start paying attention to anyone who was involved in online piracy or was friends with anyone in online piracy.

In particular, take a look at anyone connected to Efnet and Freenode IRC networks.

Care to link to any news stories about the countless people? Or even just those engineering students? Surely one or two of them made the news in their descent into madness.

Anything to read up that?

(citation needed)

> it is being done in broad daylight everyday all over the country because it only has meaning to the person being targeted.

I'm guessing you also believe that "gang stalking" is a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking#False_claims_of_stalk...

Didn't eBay execs gang stalk a journalist? I'm not saying your point is invalid and I'm not validating gp, but I'm sure evidential gang stalking can exist outside of delusion.

That's a fair point about the eBay employees[1]. I think that the "gang stalking" theory becomes delusional when the supposed target is someone who isn't a threat to a multi-billion dollar company (or government), and when the supposed target claims that their harassers are using mind control and other pseudo-scientific means.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/15/21291666/ebay-employees-a...

You're delusional if you think individual people aren't threats to governments of multi-billion dollar corporations.

There are people with information that no one wants leaked because the information is incriminating without proper context or someone may have made a massive mistake and not known what the consequences were at the time. There are people all over the place that have to make decisions where both choices might be illegal.

There are powerful CEOs and politicians who are afraid of being outed for not being what they say they are. Some of them are simply paranoid that they will be outed as incompetent. You'd be shocked at how many CEOs are terrified of people finding out they just got lucky and applied for the right jobs at the right times. They walk around in complete and total fear that someone will find out they don't know a single thing about how their company is run or that they are banging half the people in their company.

There are startups that are essentially cults and the founders use cult tactics in order to keep an entourage of employees who are loyal to the point that they will sacrifice their dignity and personal safety for the company. If you don't believe in the founder and the company they purge you because they are afraid someone is going to figure out their business may border on illegality. These guys do the same thing, their employees run around harassing anyone who doesn't believe in their company and the founder.

This happens all the time.

I hope you're not this naive.

Gang stalking is a real thing, when I was a child people used to call each other up to and gang stalk anyone who had just moved into the neighborhood just for shits and giggles.

It was just a bunch of kids who would call their next door neighbor to let them know someone we didn't know was walking around. The game was to walk outside of your house and just stare at the person as closely as possible as they walked by and then walk back in. Individually its not a big deal but when you walk through a neighborhood and hundreds of people walk out of their home one at a time just to stare at you and they never say a word it makes the person walking around hyper paranoid.

People do this sort of crap all the time for many reasons including extortion, they text message networks of people to follow an individual person around as part of targeted harassment. If the person doesn't pay up in the form of shopping at the right places they just keep following the person around. It's illegal but hard as fuck to prove.

Vast majority of comments here are hilarious. Piracy is a crime, deal with it. You don't have a right to content made for a profit without paying for it. If you don't agree with the price or the distribution method, don't consume the content, problem solved.

The argument that resources should be spent on "real crime" is equally silly. These organizations can and do put immense resources into all other forms of crime. They shouldn't choose to ignore one class of it because it's personally convenient to label it "harmless".

I'd suggest if you find yourself defending pirates that you actually go and create something worth pirating and see how you feel.

A huge number of the people on this site, myself included, already voluntarily donate huge amounts of time and money to free and open source software and hardware- they are already choosing to give away for free what others might otherwise pirate.

No one is disputing that piracy is a crime. They are pointing out the difference between the fact of what is, and their opinion of what ought be.

> No one is disputing that piracy is a crime.

Then why can I scroll up the page and find multiple instances of people saying it isn't?

> Piracy is a crime, deal with it. If you don't agree with the price or the distribution method, don't consume the content, problem solved.

Sure, or I can just pirate content. That's another way to deal with it.

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to have a problem because you're trying to keep your bytes a secret. Pretty much everyone has accepted that you can't stop piracy, at least once the content is available on p2p.

This article is about topsites that were probably involved in hacking into content sources directly. That's a much bigger deal than everyday civil copyright infringement.

Some of us actually do want a future where you can download a car.

If you don't feel like paying for HBO, why should you have a right to watch Westworld?

I'm not claiming a right. I'm claiming an opportunity. Those bytes are just sitting there waiting for me to click download.

I think the better question is: what are you going to do to stop me from downloading whatever I want?

I imagine these people under indictment thought the same way as you.

No, that's the distinction I'm trying to draw here. Lots of people, like you and me, routinely consume pirated content. It's not always torrents either, tons of unlicensed stuff shows up all the time on youtube. Do you validate all copyrights on all services before you watch?

The people under indictment wanted to have reputation in the scene, so badly that they were willing to commit a lot of crimes that are way more severe than watching pirated content.

I think the takeaway is that if you're torrenting content, you're probably fine. But if you're running a pre with unreleased content, the law takes that pretty seriously.

I am paying for Westworld but you know what I am not willing to pay for? Scientific articles. That's because in a lot of cases, taxes have already paid for the grants or sponsors/donors decided to support the research.

Blood sucking journals in between science and the public are overdue for dying off.

> Piracy is a crime, deal with it.

It shouldn't be. Deal with it.

Is this anything other than neo-colonialism? How can the power of the US copyright lobby extend quite so completely into Europe. Imagine Norway wanted a bunch of US kids arrested due to their, or their lobbyists, pet peeve.

I used to be passive about it now I am anti-copyright, that has been the effect of the overreach by the copyright lobby, they have hardened me against them.

Absolutely ridiculous to spend so much time and effort prosecuting crimes that have, at most, a marginal effect on the bottom lines of AAA film studios. [1]

[1]: https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s... (check the linked pdf for the full study)

Are these scandinavian countries cooperating with the U.S. media mafia on this? How did they get names and locations?

Most certainly. As would probably every other country in Europe. You should know that media piracy is on the same level as terrorism.

Judging from the terms some pirates are sentenced to, I'd say the legal system considers piracy to be much worse.

It probably violates the laws of these countries as well, and international cooperation on such cases is common.

The us and eu are basically one entity when it comes to international crime (with some exceptions)

To be honest, I don't feel bad for these people at all. Film studios, the MPAA, RIAA, etc. are pretty scummy, but the overwhelming majority of pirates are there to get the latest Disney / Marvel movie without having to pay. And these groups are serving that interest.

I'm sure there will be plenty of comments here calling out ethical gray areas or valid cases for torrenting a movie - those no longer for sale, etc. But you're kidding yourself if you think this is the motivation behind most illegal downloads.

At the end of the day, these studios are spending enormous sums of money to produce content and they deserve the copyright and distribution rights that are being egregiously violated. Unless you have a good reason, you should be paying it own/watch it and the government is in the right for enforcing it.

Is there substantial "no IP whatsoever" constituency somewhere? Is there a movement or party advocating this? Are there jurisdictions with essentially this framework in place?

I'm curious to see what it looks like.

I have trouble imagining the internet tolerating any other configuration 100 years from now.

Another article at TF:

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-mep-elected-vice-presi...

If we ever colonize Mars, it might become one for a little stretch of time. Just like America was at the beginning, China not long ago, etc.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy[0] goes into minute detail of the politics of colonising Mars.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

There was a wave of Pirate Parties about a decade ago, but they never gained even as much traction as the Greens. Onerous enforcement of intellectual property is just one of the many issues we face with the Internet today, next to the colossal monopolization of social media platforms, internet service providers, and browser vendors. Not to mention severe invasions of privacy driven primarily by global imperialism (alphabet soup intelligence agencies) and surveillance capitalism (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit et. all).

The Internet is undergoing the same process of enclosure and capital accumulation as the rest of the world we live in. This is the fate it is consigned to, as long as people are unwilling to question the economic assumptions we take for granted. All of these decisions which negatively impact the Internet are made for one of two reasons: Accumulating capital, or protecting capital that has already been accumulated. Therefore, a broad anti-capitalist front is the only way something in opposition to this will have any teeth.

There is simply no way for a political movement focused on a specific niche issue like like net neutrality or free exchange of information to stand on its own, or make the state face any consequences for malfeasance. For the same reason we don't have a significant political party of librarians, even though it would really kick ass if we did.

Here are the direct links to the 3 indictments:

https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-George-Br... https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-Umar-Ahma... https://torrentfreak.com/images/1-20-cr-00018-US-v-Jonatan-C...

TorrentFreak messed up, here's the indictment for Umar Ahmad:

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.542945...

>Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what >they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. >I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all ... >after all, we're all alike. -The Mentor

Imagine if governments put even a fraction of this kinda effort and resources into solving real problems?

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