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Comment by throwaway77384 | Hacker News Reader

"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?

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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.

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...

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

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...

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...

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.

"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".

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?

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

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