Torrent Site User Who Transferred 120TB of Pirated Content Avoids Prison
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Spoiler: nobody, nothing, and no.
Obviously it's good that this person was not sent to prison but it's only because this person plead guilty (read: was coerced into a guilty plea for fear of being sent to prison) of doing something that caused no practical harm.
If one would like to provide a different perspective, this is where I get hung up: Is there any evidence-backed reason to believe that there was actual harm done rather than that there might have been actual harm done? If no, why is any punishment justified? If yes, what is that (evidence-backed) reason?
Should we not punish people who drive at excess speed on empty roads, or embezzlers who steal money but later return it, or drug dealers who sell only to moderate users?
IMO: No.
Do you think at least some of the content that was shared would have been purchased otherwise? We can't measure the impact directly but it's odd to assume that pirating content somehow does not affect the wellbeing of creators and other participants of the market.
I can say anecdotally with 100% confidence that when I can't easily find a freely available copy of a movie to watch online I pay for it.
There are probably other reasons but I would be really surprised if my behavior was an exception. I can pay for movies but it's more convenient not to (sometimes).
I already pay for Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+, but their content libraries are smaller outside the US by some margin.
I pirate HBO and other services since there is no legal pathway to stream it where I live, and I’m not forking out to get it from whichever shitty local service bought the rights.
Happy to pay once they actually offer it worldwide as a first party option!
1. Last Sunday I streamed a movie called Stutz (2022) for free instead of purchasing it from Netflix. That's a loss of $16 for the industry (1 month subscription, but I am not interested in anything else from their catalog).
Someone was distributing that movie for free because the movie did not have value in a market.
If an artist digitally releases a music album for free - it's worthless? Meaning it has no value? Let's break this down. If I construct a physical object and sell it - it has worth because you can hold it in your hands. If I record an album and release it digitally - it's worthless, despite costing me 100x more than the physical object I created. And despite you appreciating the music 100x more than my physical object. So what defines value? Then physical aspect only? I guess that's a theory, doesn't help to navigate the world increasingly dominated by intangible things, but okay.
That is my intended meaning, though it doesn't need to be released for free, only digitally. If the album is a series of mp3 files in a zip archive why would one pay for it when they could just get a perfect copy from their friend (who got it from a friend, who got it from a friend, who got it ...)?
I do know the answer to this question: kindness (Patreon and similar). I don't know market forces to be particularly kind, however.
In the economic pricing models, free is counted separately as any other kind of pricing.
This debate has been settled for more than a decade, major copyright holder conglomerates have tried their best and poured a lot of money to try to demonstrate losses and they have failed.
Digital media to some extent, and the public internet to a greater extent, broke copyright. To your point, it makes sense to prevent someone from trying to start a business using a bunch of stolen creative work, but this person's behavior was not to seek profit.
Anyway, those first two examples are very good to demonstrate your point (I don't want to get into it because it's off-topic but I don't think the drug dealer example works as well as the other two). I do find myself thinking that punishment is still deserved in those cases for exactly the reason you suggest.
[0] Specifically talking about the sharing of data, not how the data was initially acquired to be shared ("hacked" Netflix employee credentials). This person is not being prosecuted for how the data was initially copied, only for continuing to copy it.
e.g. in English law, the offense of "indecent exposure" (i.e. showing your genitals in public) used to require that this cause "obstruction, annoyance or danger" to at least one person - it was a result crime.
The law was subsequently changed because I guess they decided it wasn't really necessary to have the prosecution carry the burden of proof on that; so it became a conduct crime.
It seems to me that I fundamentally disagree with this idea of a conduct crime. Prosecutors should be expected to prove the harm that was caused by the actions for which a person is having criminal charges pressed against them. (I don't know of anything like this in American law; per my understanding, if you do the thing that's written down as not to do, you did bad.) If it's expected that it will be obvious what the harm is, then it can be expected that proving it (or convincing a judge of it) will be easy.
Anyway, maybe I'll be able to come up with a counter example but I'm coming up blank currently.
I can say anecdotally with 100% confidence that when I can't easily find a freely available copy of a movie to watch online I pay for it.
Why are we assuming there's a viable market? People are trying to sell something that's worthless[0] and they're whining when other people offer it for free. I get that someone had to go through the trouble -- admittedly it's usually a fair amount of effort -- to make the thing that others want but, unfortunately, they didn't make something from which they can expect to profit. I think many people would prefer that to be different but that is just how it is (from my perspective).
[0] This is controversial, and thus the likely point of disagreement for most. If the only thing I need is 1 copy of The Little Mermaid (and a computer) to make 1e9 copies of The Little Mermaid, then The Little Mermaid doesn't have value as a thing to be sold.
Why does digital duplication make any difference? When you are buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process. So the remaining part of the cost - writer's check, publisher's check, etc - is what you should be paying for when consuming things digitally (plus the cost of streaming, storage and whatnot).
> Why are we assuming there's a viable market?
Because there is? There is a proven, big, viable, essential market for creating and distributing ideas.
This person did not have this barrier to entry and therefore they did not see value in selling what they copied. The work does not have value in a market unless the value is propped up artificially as is currently being done by copyright law.
> I am sorry, I am not sure this is a genuine argument.
If it helps, these markets were clearly viable when certain resources were required to copy and distribute works. The difference with today is the public internet and the proliferation of personal general-purpose computers that people like to keep on themselves at all times. It's new and it's causing market disruptions.
Finally, I'll say that many people will choose to give money for things even if they aren't otherwise required to pay: Humble Bundle, Patreon, Youtube, Twitch, etc. People donate to the Wikimedia Foundation only because they are asked, to the point that that the organization now has an order of magnitude more money in the bank than Wikipedia's annual operating costs (recent funding controversies aside, they donate because they think it helps keep around something they'd like to see stick around).
Please don't condescend.
> Yes it's "free" to make a digital copy, but that ignores the cost of producing content.
I am not ignoring the cost, I am simply not respecting it. They are trying to run a business; the costs of doing so are their problem. If they cannot capture revenue to offset the mentioned costs, then they do not have a viable business. Currently, copyright law is required for the revenue to be captured, thus the business is not viable.
It is unfortunate, but I don't see how I am mistaken (I can understand disagreement that copyright law is broken, but it would be disagreement).
I don’t respect the bakery down the road and will steal their products. Yes it’s protected by laws, but I don’t respect that either. It’s unfortunate, but it’s their own fault for not creating a viable business.
Nobody is being deprived of anything. If I buy a pastry from the bakery and then use a machine I own to materialize perfect copies of the pastry, what did I steal? Certainly not anything that needs to be replaced.
Plus, what about used physical media? Do you think if I bought a used Beatles cd, I should be mailing a $20 bill to Paul McCartney? Am I stealing from Paul when I listen to that CD for free from the library? Or when I borrow my friends CD? Should the FBI come a knocking if my friend remixes it into a mixtape? Absolutely not. So it shouldn't be considered stealing when someone passes me a digital file that came from someone down the line buying the album.
Not since Covid. Lots of headliner-class bands have cancelled their tours the last few months.
A market that relies on government granted monopoly is not a market.
> buying a physical book you are not paying just for the paper and the printing process
But it should. Books should only be priced the cost of the paper and ink.
The very first Nobel winner Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. If it is in the best interest to have lighthouses, or firemen, or media, they should fund the creation themselves and everyone should be able to enjoy the results.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson
[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph
The simple fact that people want to pirate a thing means it has value.
The items still have value, and now larger total value than before.
You're sinking your own argument.
What I mean to say is that the thing has no value in a market where it's being sold digitally. If it's so easy for a person to make copies of something and share it with their friends then some people will make every copy they can and give it to whomever asks. In this world of proliferated general purpose computers and the public internet, it turns out people can make infinite copies and give them to everyone. I 1) do not think it's necessarily wrong for someone to choose to do that and 2) do not agree with where the line has been drawn for when it is considered wrong. In this case, the person downloaded 100TB and uploaded 20TB and we're saying it's wrong enough to be 5 times more receptive than giving that we threaten prison.
All that being said, I see a situation where someone thinks they have something they can sell, but then it happens that anyone can indiscriminately make and share copies of the thing so it's not actually worth buying. The producers of the thing then start whining about people making copies and those people who choose to do that get thrown in prison. It's very hard for me not to see the people being imprisoned as the victims when the people alleging harm have done fuck all to prove that they were caused any harm.
Again, yes it does. If it had no value no one would buy it. If it had no value people would not pirate it. People would not hoard it.
And even marginal value is not zero. For someone to make a copy costs some input (time. energy, desire), and they do it because it has value.
I think you have a really bad handle on the meaning of value. All of your misunderstandings seem to be trying to rationalize taking things others created that do have value (both to them and to you) without exchanging value to them.
If it didn't have value, don't copy it. If you take the time and effort to copy it, it has value. Everything else is trying to rationalize taking something you do value at the expense of the creator.
So sure you can wish everything were free to take or copy. But fortunately society does realize there is value in getting people to create things we can all enjoy, even if you decide in your world it's ok to take enjoyment from the labor of others without returning value to them for it. Thankfully the rest of the world doesn't see it that way, otherwise there would be an awful lot less stuff to enjoy.
I fundamentally disagree: things have value since people want them.
Ease of copying doesn't absolve them from obtaining value at the creators expense.
we live in an age where the barrier to content creation is next to nothing. For music production (an area I'm fairly knowledgable) we have a plethora of free DAWs, free incredible instruments, very affordable recording hardware, excellent sub $200 microphones and so on. The explosion of creator content is incredible.
It's almost not necessary to listen to something more than twice in this day and age, as just when you've finished listening to today's hype, tomorrow's hype is around the corner.
If i use bandcamp's recommended album pricing of USD$7 and round to $10 (im from AUD) for some easy maths. Say i am exposed to 10 albums a day which frankly is very easy...that's $100. If I'm exposed to 10 albums per day, 7 days a week, that's $700. If i multiply this by 52, that's $36,400 per annum. That's more or less minimum wage.
You might think "10 albums a day is ridiculous", so - i'll half it for you...is $15,200 a year for digital files - a good value proposition, assuming I will listen to these files probably 3 times each? Max?
If the artists creating this kind of content cant afford to pay for it themselves to get the inspiration required to create it...who does this model work for?