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Comment by cheese_van | Hacker News Reader

Recently saw a movie, liked the soundtrack, and decided to buy the mp3 (On the Run - Naz Tokio). Found it, of course, on Amazon, good deal, and made the purchase.

Tried to download it after the purchase, but the mp3 was ONLY available in the cloud for various devices, not for direct download. There was language that might have implied this was the case, but it was not clear or I was oblivious, probably the latter.

I was refunded my $1.29 and went straight to a pirate site and got it for free. I would rather have paid. Occasionally, the availability of piracy is a check on bad ideas, in this case, cloud walled gardens.

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> There was language that might have implied this was the case, but it was not clear or I was oblivious, probably the latter.

For what it's worth, the language and layout was probably A/B tested and painstakingly tuned to maximise the probability of you making that mistake. Don't blame yourself when there's this unfair power imbalance, blame them for using their power against you maliciously.

> For what it's worth, the language and layout was probably A/B tested and painstakingly tuned to maximise the probability

This sort of belief (that corporations do extensive testing and tuning of language) seems quite widely held, but I've never seen much support for it.

I've frequently seen claims that Amazon must have "A/B tested and painstakingly tuned" the company name, whereas it was really just the founder's whim after watching a documentary, and never received any testing of any kind.

Sometimes this happens as a sort of 'evolutionary' process. If a dodgy company has better wording for a misleading product, its deception will work better, so you can have highly tuned wording without anyone having to run an explicit A/B test.

Good point :) I'm glad to be reminded of that framing: a/b testing is just evolutionary selection within the same company-shaped container, but it's happening in the larger ecology even if you're not trying to run it.

Have you ever worked at a large corporation like Facebook or Amazon? They have extensive internal A/B testing frameworks that record a wide variety of user metrics for arbitrary control and treatment exposures. It's very easy to set up an A/B test and pretty much necessary for almost all changes. Additionally, employees are expected to have concrete artifacts when they go up for promotion, and A/B test results are often a large part of that.

> Have you ever worked at a large corporation like Facebook or Amazon?

Employee #2 at amzn.

But sure, that doesn't count because I got out before the company hit 20 employees.

I don't doubt that large corporations with heavy technology dependence engage in what you're describing to cover some aspects of their operations. I do doubt that is covers all aspects, and in particular, I very much doubt if amzn A/B tested the language described in the GP for the purposes claimed by the parent of my comment.

EDIT: Given the comment @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29374358 I should probably just accept that for amzn at least, I'm just wrong.

That's pretty impressive! Having worked at Amazon much later, I do think that most copy changes do go through an A/B test. I remember an instance where we tested 20 different versions of a minor UI change. Interestingly, there was a wide spread in the performance of the different treatments.

Current amzn employee working on the retail website. Unless a team is jumping/ignoring all standard operation precedures, everything must go through an A/B test to prove that it works at increasing the revenue or whatever the KPI target is. This includes text that might need to go through legal in some cases

Fair enough then. I'm wrong, for amzn anyway.

I think to some extent you and the original post you replied to are both probably right.

There is not some painstaking language optimization designed to trick users. But there is not a filter for clarity either, so the A/B testing naturally favors "dark patterns" - it's not malicious design, it's just unintended consequences, and gives the impression that Amazon et al are deliberately hostile when they are really just ignorant

the A/B testing naturally favors "dark patterns" - it's not malicious design, it's just unintended consequences

Could there be such a thing as "meta-malicious design?" Bad consequences aren't executed directly, but conditions are put in place that cause the emergence of bad consequences.

I suspect, if AI ever does away with Homo sapiens it will be by convincing us not to breed by changing our incentive structures.

> I suspect, if AI ever does away with Homo sapiens it will be by convincing us not to breed by changing our incentive structures.

I think it'll be by just sitting back and waiting a few decades :)

I think it'll be by just sitting back and waiting a few decades :)

The sci-fi tinfoil hat interpretation of this: It's already here, or at least its cronies and enablers, and the plan has already been put into effect.

“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

— John Stuart Mill, 1867

I'm talking about the good people not even knowing what's happening, until they engage in data analysis.

Also, humans are weird, so A/B testing, if taken to its logical conclusion, will produce surreal results. What makes a human buy something is really not that well understood, IMO.

For instance, I was in charge of design for a mortgage lender's web site. I begged my manager to let me try (for lulz) an A/B test replacing the photo of the woman call centre operator next to the quote form with a photo of a Labrador retriever wearing a headset (you knew he was a professional because he also wore glasses and a necktie). The dog form consistently outperformed the woman by 19% but we had to roll it back after a couple of weeks because.. well.. dog.

The other scenario is that that text is the first iteration and gave a positive KPI, if there are enough complains related to the structure of the text and is linked to increase in refunds, the team in charge would A/B another iteration targeting refund rate as KPI (although that might be difficult to correlate)

It's TRUE for all large web tech companies. Everything is launched via A/B tests. Your performance evaluation as an engineer is dictated by how much your teams goal metrics moved thanks to your changes(impact measured by A/B tests).

At any given time, a single engineer might have a couple of A/B tests running. That's the single biggest engineering change I have seen in the last 20 years.

A/B tests are now crazy simple to set up; just click a few buttons and decide how much traffic to send. The major con is that it leaves a lot of dead code behind when the best of N A/B test arms are launched; the (N-1) unsuccessful arms stick around as dead code.

Even the small startups I have worked for A/B test everything they can within inches of its life to eke out an extra penny and a half. This is standard operating procedure.

Every time I've seen this (and I agree that it's ubiquitous), it seems to make a ton of work that could be much better spent on making a better product that people actually want to use.

The last five companies I’ve worked for, three large, one tiny start up, and two msb’s, extensively used A/B and split testing to carefully fine tune every funnel and product to maximize conversion. Most of my job for the last decade has been moving split points around form flows and capturing metrics to show what caused a split to occur. I talk to less than more people that don’t use this practice.

I’ve run splits for everything from background colors to copy changes. If product management anticipates some facet could influence outcome, then it will be tested.

> This sort of belief (that corporations do extensive testing and tuning of language) seems quite widely held, but I've never seen much support for it.

I recall integrating with a beta AWS A/B testing sdk back in ~2015 (may be off on the year) and I'm certain that some the examples in the docs were along the lines of, say, testing two different wordings for a label in your app and measuring the change in engagement. But that's not inherently nefarious, it's just analytics. They ended up shutting down that SDK and the web dashboarding for it IIRC.

Now, A/B testing for the purpose of tuning languages towards deceptive dark patterns? It's harder to prove, but I think it follows that if they're A/B testing other changes, there's no reason that deceptive changes wouldn't also be A/B tested as a matter of course.

Bet your sweet ass they tested that smile in the logo.

By the time they switched to that logo, they may have been large enough and "focused" enough to do so.

But the initial amzn logo was picked merely on the whims of the founder and first two programmers. It was never focus-grouped or evaluated by anyone else.

I've personally worked at a large tech company and saw widespread A/B testing for things exactly as minute as this type of wording. It wasn't a constant dynamic A/B test that automatically selects the best results but rather a trial period and analysis for changes like this.

I obviously can't speak to this case in particular but for pieces of text that are part of the core user flow (not necessarily true in this case), I'd be shocked if A/B tests weren't going on at any large company.

It took me about half an hour of constant retries for the rented Apple TV movie I downloaded for offline use to play. Each time, for some reason or another, was blocked with the error message “This movie can only be played on displays that support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection)”.

I was on a plane with no internet, so troubleshooting the error was impossible. Furthermore, I can’t test playback of a movie in the future because doing so starts the three day expiration timer.

In the future I guarantee I’ll be torrenting.

Torrenting + crossing a border… Not a good idea. Even having “photos for personal use” while crossing the boarder isn’t a good idea. I’m so afraid of TSA…

"crossing A border" is not the same thing as "crossing the US border".

The TSA handles neither customs nor border patrol.

Right, but they do handle the security screening and it’s all DHS

I have Apple TV for the year because I got a new iPad and I still "pirated" Foundation because the Apple TV app for Roku isn't very good. I hate the interface, the playback skips (very infrequently), and the subtitle support is pretty bad.

There's no way Plex and Emby should be better than Apple's equivalent, but they are IMO.

On the other hand, I was actually impressed, that Apple TV appeared on Android TV in the first place and that it is actually decent (at least on Nvidia Shield).

My only nitpick is, that for some reason the default subtitles are "language + SDH" and not just "language".

> I hate the interface, the playback skips (very infrequently), and the subtitle support is pretty bad.

Yeah. The video player straight up sucks. We had better software than this decades ago. There's just no way these things will ever be able to compete with something like mpv but we're forced to use them because it's the only legal way to watch something.

> Plex and Emby

Also Jellyfin, the FLOSS Emby fork that has taken on its own life and has recently gotten a lot more stable

Plus if you go on holiday for a few days, you will likely have crappy wifi, and you don't know in advance what movie you will be in the mood to watch. These streaming services just do not work for me.

I’ve stopped relying on offline downloads (on netflix) since upon crossing national boundaries, the offline content is deleted. As an expat who travels back to India once a blue moon (and has shitty internet back home), I now pirate any content I plan to see during my vacations.

Wow, that's terrible.

To paraphrase Chris Rock talking about OJ, "now I'm not saying you should have pirated... But I understand!"

I've hit this myself as well. I no longer purchase streaming media, but instead, I buy Bluray's or DVD's. I rip them to H.264 with Handbrake and use those for travel. Yes, it's a bit annoying, but much less annoying than the "convenience" of streaming video and offline downloads.

Caveat: this is probably still not legal. Just a comparison / thought experiment.

Are you planning on keeping the Apple TV subscription? Are you only going to to torrent something that is currently running on Apple TV while you have a paid for subscription?

If so, what would really be so different from you "taping" something on regular TV back in the VHS days? (apart from it nowadays probably not being legal - go figure).

>went straight to a pirate site

Pirates rob ships in the see and use guns for that purpose I presume. What a web site providing access to the music has to do with it?

The whole 'buy mp3' idea always have been troubling for me because I can't figure out exactly what I actually buy there. What is it I purchase?

The right to listen for some composition?

The right to listen it in that specific mp3 format ?

The right to listen it more then one time because I have access to the file?

What do I actually possess after the purchase that I didn't possess before?

If it's my property then what is it? Is it a property at all if the usage of it is limited? For instance it belongs to me but somehow there are some limits to play it in my own restaurant, isn't it?

It's all presented as you buy something and it's clear what you buy. But if you are trying to think about it's more and more unclear.

It looks more like some bully simply blocks access to something he got using some leverage over the author then sells you 'unblock' feature while author is stripped away from any rights by the same bully and have no ability to sell it directly to you. Isn't it a case now days of redundant MIM?

Another issue is with how long it is blocked by paywall. The initial idea was how much? 10 years ? 15 years? How come that let's say Beatles are still protected from public? How that even possible and why nobody rises the issue of abusing initial idea?

> Pirates rob ships in the see and use guns for that purpose I presume. What a web site providing access to the music has to do with it?

"Piracy" has been a term of art in the copyright world for over 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyrightpirates.jpg

> Is it a property at all if the usage of it is limited?

If you buy a copy of a book, you are not eligible to reprint that book and sell it yourself. There are limits on what folks can do with copyrighted works they buy.

It might be worth reading, for instance, about the American concept of first-sale doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

"Piracy" has been a propaganda term in the copyright world...

FTFY

Piracy implies theft and sounds more serious; where as copyright infringement does not sounds as exciting...

(from wikipedia...)

Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright law without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works

Theft is the taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.

The correct term is probably greed: not giving back to the author of music, movie, software you use. But greed is also the foundation of our economy, so copyright owners had to come up with a different word.

Copyrights have very little to do with paying content creators. From the very first copyright law (the Statute of Anne) it was about securing profits for the industry, who invariably give only a tiny slice of those profits, if anything, to the content creators. Hollywood studios are famous for trying to screw actors, screenwriters, and others out of their share of blockbuster movie profits. Likewise with the music industry -- most musicians do not make anything close to enough money on record sales (or the modern equivalent) to live on, even as the studios themselves bring in vast sums of money.

So in a sense you are right, "greed" is the operative word -- not on the part of people who download, but on the part of the people who benefit most from the copyright system.

It's unclear why 'monopoly over making copies' is called in your comment by confusing term 'copyright'. Why something that is not 'right' and cannot exist as 'right' called by this strange term? How one can have 'right' over what others do? May be you can explain also that?

If such 'right' even exist then it belongs to people who wish to make copy of something isn't it?

It's hard to see why how and who on earth is entitled to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy as long as a person who makes copy doesn't present such copy as original.

Copyright is as much a "right" as mineral rights are a "right." It is just a system for regulating a particular industry. Don't make the mistake of thinking that all "rights" are "natural rights."

No rights are "natural rights".

> It's hard to see why how and who on earth is entitled to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy

The how and who are easy: the Constitution[0], and the American government.

The why is trickier, but the idea at least is that restricting copies means more people buy the "real" thing, which means more money goes to the owner, and creators are therefore more incentivized to make and copyright things in America.

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

The "why" is that distribution is always cheaper than production of creative works. In other words, people who make new works are stuck with all the costs, while people who sell copies get all the profit. This also tends to be an asymmetric relationship: creators tend to be individuals while publishers tend to be large corporate enterprises with the ability and know-how to bury you. Copyright exists to force publishers to negotiate with creators that would otherwise have no leverage[0].

The idea that copies are supposed to be scarce is an invention of Disney marketing, and I'd argue contrary to the spirit of the law. The stated purpose of copyright is to increase the amount of works on the market (by giving creators some negotiating leverage with publishers), not to make individual copies more valuable. That's just a side effect, one that is supposed to be bounded by limited term lengths[1].

[0] For those wondering, this is also what drove copyright harmonization over the last century. Any difference in law between countries creates an avenue for publishers to find a way to cheat creators. Before the era of international copyright it was quite common for publishers to race creators to foreign markets, since translation was not yet an exclusive right of the creator and most countries did not recognize each other's copyright interests.

[1] Please stop laughing. I know life+70 is practically forever.

>Copyright exists to force publishers to negotiate with creators that would otherwise have no leverage[0].

In my experience when I was thinking to publish something on phtostock I was presented with automatic contract stripping me from all of my "leverage" and if I disagree? it's their way or highway. Of course I could not agree to that. So experience was rather short as you might guess and no live person was even involved on their behalf.

So in my experience it seems that you need some other "leverage" to force publishers to negotiate with creators.

>people who make new works are stuck with all the costs, while people who sell copies

I wasn't talking about 'selling copies'. I was talking about right of making copies. Selling copies is something else I think.

"[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

From the same source: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

I can see here mention of "exclusive Right".

Can't see there man in the middle having exclusive Right though who also allowed to strip all the rights from the Authors and Inventors. Can't see there any "copyright". Can't see there entitlement "to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy". Selling copy is something else. But who can prohibit making copy?

If you read this text you have copied it to your brain from the 'screen copy' of 'memory copy' of 'web response copy' of data stored on server which is 'copy of what I wrote' . There are more stages that I've mentioned of course and each of them produces copy.

>the idea at least is that restricting copies means more people buy the "real" thing

I do not see how current system is in the spirit of [0] and I do not see how current system is even in the spirit of what you've described. It's broken and works for other purposes. Doesn't "promote Progress of Science and useful Arts" it seems.

This is the last time I'll reply, your comments are admittedly going off the rails now.

> Can't see there any "copyright". Can't see there entitlement "to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy". Selling copy is something else. But who can prohibit making copy?

17 U.S.C.§106 - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

You also take umbrage with the fact that "copy" is fairly ambiguous. You can find the legal definition of "copy" in 17 U.S.C§101: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101. It's fairly cut and dry.

>This is the last time I'll reply, your comments are admittedly going off the rails now.

It is your choice of course but please try to understand that I was not even trying to be on any rails there as I am questioning the logic and ideas behind the current laws because I observe inconsistency of current laws with initial idea of promoting progress in Science and Arts by giving exclusive Right to Authors and Inventors. Not some man-in-the-middle by the way. Authors and Inventors. Where ever I go I do not see copyright belonging to Authors, all I see is someone else who took all rights from those Authors and Inventors. Even if we accept such exclusive Right I do not see why such exclusive Right should be transferable as it is obviously would be abused and we observe that in reality.

>It's fairly cut and dry.

In the context I've described above while I am thankful to you without any irony for providing useful links to the current laws and definitions I am still more interested about ideas behind them rather then current implementations.

>You also take umbrage with the fact that "copy" is fairly ambiguous.

I would not use word 'umbrage' but when one questioning ideas behind certain definitions every term becomes open for interpretations and the current legal definition is just one of them.

The default in the USA is that nobody has the right to make a copy of something created by someone else. The right to make copies is limited to the creator of the work. We say "the creator owns the copyright".

Since the legal system in the USA (and elsewhere) has "evolved" to consider copyright to be property in most of the same senses as anything else you can own, it follows that copyright can be transferred to others.

You are welcome to disagree with either premise ("no copying of someone else's creation", "right to copy is property") but that's the situation at present, and it's not obviously wrong unless you adopt some philosophical positions that the USA (and most of western Europe) does not (in aggregate) hold.

"right" is the right word, the point here is that it is *exclusive.

Speech rights and copy rights are both rights. Great that speech rights are universal in most democratic countries. Awful that copy rights are exclusive.

It is called "Intellectual Property Rights", and has been defined for centuries as exactly sets of prohibitions against anyone having a right to make a copy (even if not presented as original).

The entire point is to encourage creative endeavors, whether by patents for inventions or by copyright for the arts. The ability to restrict trivial copying has been essential for the advancement of arts & sciences.

So, no, making a copy and giving it to your friend is technically against the law, but in a practical sense, unless you are doing it at scale, it is legal in a practical sense.

That said, the systems of both copyrights and patents are massively forking broken. And abused.

So, the need for overhaul is massive, but to act like it is some alien concept with no possible worth is not helpful to the discussion, merely disingenuous or ignorant.

>"Piracy" has been a term of art in the copyright world for over 100 years.

So if it's long enough it assumes it's correct? Hard to see logical connection there.

In our power to reconsider false and confusing terminology.

> So if it's long enough it assumes it's correct

Sure, that's a good enough of a descriptivist basis for a definition to be "correct."

I'd wager most folks on here don't see the name "The Pirate Bay" and question what it has to do with literal seafaring scallywags.

counterpoint. I do. every time. Using the term "pirate" or "piracy" for copyright infringement annoys the hell out of me.

You don’t question it because of actual confusion. You’re questioning it because you want to question it each time you come across it. Makes sense. It is an issue for you.

>So if it's long enough it assumes it's correct? Hard to see logical connection there.

Well... Yes? That's how words work, really. If enough people agree a word means something, then it does.

When healthy discussion is needed wrong terms do not help because they become propaganda terms masking the real meaning. In that case they should be reconsidered and corrected for discussion to have any chance for success.

No, that's how words lose their meaning: when they are used in inappropriate context to describe something completely unrelated.

Another modern example of a word that rapidly loses its meaning is "fascism": these days it is used as a general term for any policy not supported by the person that uses it. BLM fascists, left fascists, ultraright fascists, antifa fascists. On the subreddit about new Apple "Foundation" show someone described the depicted Empire as fascist. Everybody are fascists, especially the US who have fascias everywhere in state imagery!

I hate what you refer to too, it's essentially changing the meaning of a word with political intent. It also happened with "tolerance", went from enduring something you don't like to not caring about it in the first place.

But all that does it make words mean different things at different points in time, which is still just how words work. The meaning of the word "gay" is pretty different now than what it was, "meat" used to refer to all solid food, not just muscle and organs, "tweeting" is, at this point, more used as a reference to an internet service than to birds.

We didn't get to learn a final and set version of our languages, we just got the current one, they all keep changing nonstop and words changing meaning is just one of the ways in which that happens.

But in our case, "piracy" has exactly same meaning as it did 400 years ago: attacks on sea vessels, plunder of wealth and kidnapping of people for ransom or for sale.

It has precisely zero relation to copyright infringement, and should not be used to denote the it.

> In our power to reconsider false and confusing terminology.

Is it? Framing a conversation through word connotation is a very powerful, and oft used, political tool. It isn't necessarily within your power to control it when stronger political and social forces are pushing it in other directions.

All of your questions have to do with copyright, which has little to do with the format of the thing you're purchasing (an mp3).

We travel in ships, further than most

Raiding and pillaging, from North to South coast

We steal only metal like guns, tanks and toasters!

We melt them all down, and make .. roller coasters!

-anonymous

"The whole 'buy mp3' idea always have been troubling for me because I can't figure out exactly what I actually buy there. What is it I purchase?"

You purchased convenience -- not having to deal with filesharing systems that are polluted with various misidentified files, not having to try to figure out if the thing you are downloading is actually malware (for non-technical users this is often a challenge), not having to correct / create tags for the MP3 (artist/album/etc.), not having to guess at the quality of the audio (sometimes "lossless" actually means "preserved loss from some other format"), etc. For most people the convenience justifies the price.

I think the parent meant something a bit different than "what are the pragmatic advantages of buying an mp3 as opposed to piracy" - rather, they wanted some kind of handle on what - legally and/or ethically - has actually been purchased.

Culture and language evolve, an pirating became meaning getting authorized works without compensating the copyright holders. Apprently this usage dates back to the 1600s.[0]

>What is it I purchase?

Something that's legal according to your region's laws, copyright laws and the EULA. In case of unDRM-ed downloadable files, you most likely purchase the right for personal enjoyment or private screening of the media contained within the files, and of course the store often provides the files themselves too.

As you noted, the legal part is often murky. In case of Hungary, you're permitted for example to back up your legally owned media, so you can legally rip your CDs for yourself. But this is not true for all regions.

The copyright of the composition, the right the redistribute, or usage in a commercial environment is most often excluded when you just "buy and mp3". These are special cases where you need a different legal instrument, like a contract or license, and to pay way more than €1 per track.

Now, onto the dark patterns. The media industry is rife with this. The first is that often you can read "buying", but it's way more restricted legally, and sometimes, the media itself is crippled with a mechanism that tries to enforce some legality[1] - this would be the DRM. Region locking, unskippable anti-piracy segment on the DVD, files that "stop working" after a while, media that's encrypted from file to display, albums/games disappearing or downgrading from your catalogue, there's a lot. Meanwhile you're often presented with how easy and cheap all this is, and how much in control you are - no you're not. If you feel angry or betrayed, that's because you're realizing the con.

What can you do about this? Pirating is fine as a fuck you to the industry, but the creators of all the enjoyable goodness deserve compensation just like everyone else who does good work. So you can look for ways to support them that's more direct than licensing their music from a streaming giant. Bandcamp[2], for one, is quite excellent towards users and artists alike. And also, there is a lot of people who is not content with the current state of copyright - so many that Wikipedia had to open a page just for this issue[3]. So you're certainly not alone in your questioning.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-t...

[1] https://www.defectivebydesign.org/

[2] https://bandcamp.com/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright

I recently bought some hardware which came with license for software ( vst plug-ins).

After registering the hardware, then making an account with the third party who provides the software, I was able to download a demo version which I should then have been able to unlock into a full version using the serial number and license file provided to me...but this was not the case.

After about an hour of tinkering, restarting, and googling, I decided to try and pirate a copy of the software that I was entitled to the full working version of.

Took about two minutes to download and have it running.

How are you liking cubase?

maybe somebody returned the hardware but kept the license?

We just need the technology improved slightly to solve this problem.

Artists should be seeding high quality files to the torrents themselves, in formats that are signed and include a crypto wallet for sending "donations". Then the playback software just needs to check the signature to ensure you're giving money to the actual creator and not some imposter if you want to throw money their way, through a payment ui the players conveniently make available to you.

There's just no need for the middle-men who make it all miserable, and exploit control of the audience for their own gain via advertising/"recommendations"/propaganda etc. Torrents have fixed the distribution problem, and no consumers are really interested in depriving their favorite artists from making a living. It's just a glaring omission that the torrent system doesn't incorporate a reliable artists compensation circuit, like it's just unfinished.

That's a very interesting thought, but the one thing I think would be a problem is fake torrents with other parties bitcoin wallets embedded.

Also some bands don't want to operate on "donations" and want to set a price for the download. I wonder how that would work to be able to set a price.

Of course you could avoid this by only getting the torrent from the official band's website, but fakes would certainly be a problem.

Trent Reznor started doing that 15 years ago.

Really? Strange that none of the torrent-sourced NIN albums in MP3 format I have contain anything like a crypto wallet in the id3 tags...

But it really isn't sufficient for the artist to just stick a wallet address somewhere in files seeded, and hope for the best.

The format needs to formalize support for it, my players need to verify and make that information conveniently accessible to me, preferably in a one-click-to-tip-artist using my configured crypto wallet kind of fashion.

For me this is one of the actual legitimate use cases of cryptocurrency. These microtransaction kind of business models where folks like artists are happy to receive tiny amounts like tips if they can get it repeatedly from all their fans globally, passively, just by having created their art and putting it out there where it's all effectively "long tail" revenue, stacking as they produce more work, ad infinitum.

Pitch this to some dapp/crypto vc. Maybe @ the kid who made Ethereum. Great idea

And the problem with downloading using cloud is you have to use their apps and requires them to supply your phone data forever which is no no in my book. Imagine the dystopia there would be if there were no piracy.

You got refunded but in my country many sites have implicit rule "Once you purchase it, we can't return it back".

>You got refunded but in my country many sites have implicit rule "Once you purchase it, we can't return it back".

Do they specify what you actually purchase, I can't figure out what is it you purchase in such cases.

Don't they have your data as part of the Amazon account anyway? Why does that even matter?

Gabe Newell: "Piracy is an issue of service, not price."

THIS! I had similar problem with watching a movie trilogy on Google play movies. The movie won't play on my computer but only played on android app (no i didn't have any firewall or special ad blocker on my PC). I called google customer service and asked them to fix, it took them 3 days to get back and the problem was still not fixed, needless to say I was mad and they refunded instantly. Next thing I just downloaded it....

I'd have loved to pay but if movie studios (or whoever is responsible for this sh#tshow) will go out of their way to not give me a mp4 or similar device/service independent playable format then I couldn't care less about their loss.

Absolutely. I am a chronic expat, and frequently move countries. Due to ridiculous restrictions, I am unable to get movies and TV shows, in English, with English subtitles. Most of the time it is dubbed in $native_language without subs.

I want to pay for my media. But it want it in English please, with subs. The copyright lobby won’t let me, so I grab torrents. For free.

Same with Formula1. I had a annual subscription to watch races online, in English, until they made some deal with some local broadcaster, meaning I need to sign up to the local broadcasters’ service on terrestrial, cable, or satellite (the ‘90 called, they want their broadcasting model back) and have commentary in $native_language.

- I have disposable income - I’m happy to fork some of this over to the media companies - I consume media on an industrial scale - They refuse to provide a product that is consumable for me

So, thanks, IPTV and torrent sites!

I mean if you would rather have paid you could have left the money to the author and pirate the mp3 anyway.

I do wish all artists had a donate page. Most do not.

How much of that money goes to the author instead of amazon?

Why’s that relevant? The payment is divided by the terms of the agreement with the author and associates. It was mutually agreed by everyone in writing.

Not the customer. Should they be able to pirate/donate and feel ethically okay?

How could it not be? I want to pay the creators, not some useless middlemen who only exist to solve the problems created by copyright.

I’ve taken this approach in the past.

It's insane how these companies get away with this. Nobody is "buying" anything, they're licensing the content and that comes with a ton of restrictions. This should be considered false advertising at the very least.

Had a similar experience recently. Tried to buy 3 songs from a particular artist on Apple Music and for some reason, my Mac got the downloaded music and can play it but my iPhone refuses to recognize any of my purchases tracks despite being logged in the same account. Ended up pirating then tracks even though I had also paid for them already.

I’m surprised to hear this. I thought that Amazon had moved to offer all mp3 music as DRM-free. I’ve bought a lot of music from them and never been unable to download anything so far.

How long ago was this? I bought an mp3 from Amazon (The Touch - Stan Bush) in 2019 and I’m still able to download the mp3.

Also try to buy some J-Pop only available on www.amazon.co.jp. :p

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