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Comment by andrewcamel | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand how they can have such a radical view... If the pirate bay were to be the only media distribution system left after all of the traditional "Hollywood" corporations went out of business (b/c of the pirate bay), there would be no more movies which the pirate bay could distribute. I don't know about you guys, but I do like my movies. EDIT: Please note this was just I thought an interesting topic to think about - I by no means think this is going to happen. TPB's statement gave me the feeling that they didn't want the traditional Hollywood to exist any longer, which is why I brought this up.

Call it what you want, but what a ton of people are doing in downloading movies off the pirate bay is taking something that they haven't paid for. Maybe one can say that isn't stealing, but I find it hard to call it anything else.

Maybe I'm missing something in their stance?

EDIT: I know we're talking about the middleman and not the producing companies, but the pirate bay is still facilitating the act of taking revenues away from producers, right?

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Most physical object businesses has a multi-tier process that, greatly simplified, can be described as:

(1) design -> (2) produce -> (3) distribute

This simplified traditional model can be directly applied to movies, games, books, etc.

For example:

(1) guy writes book -> (2) publisher runs the printing press -> (3) dude runs book store

Each of these steps can be greatly sub-divided. For example, someone needs to drive the truck full of books to the book store!

Furthermore, the line between each of these steps can be very blurry. An author could, for example, print his own book at home, if he were so inclined.

The big monkey wrench comes into things when you consider the most important missing element: MONEY! Where does it come from?

In the days of yore, if you wanted to produce a film, you'd have to go find backers, like you would for a startup business. Those backers could be friends, family, fools, professional investors, pre-order sales, etc.

More interestingly, one type of backer could be the production/distribution suppliers. They often have greater diversification, so they are more stable in the long term. As they grow more and more stable, they grow more and more rich. With their riches, they can go re-invest more and more of the supply and distribution chain. Once they own more and more of the supply and distribution chain, they can invest more and more in the design end of the process.

Now here's where things get rotton:

It is extremely difficult to profit from a movie these days which are not funded by the major studios. They simply won't run it in the theaters that they have exclusivity deals with! ie. most of them!

You're fucked.

This is true of a scary number of media empires! In addition to movies, think about TV, music, Broadway, books (especially text books). I'm sure I'm missing many.

It even is true of software! It may no longer true for boxed software at your local Compu R' Us store, but it still is for video games. You're simply not gonna make as much money if your game doesn't show up on the shelves at Walmart.

So while capitalism works pretty well in general, it's got a fatal flaw: it tends to generate monopolies. And monopolies are dangerous. If not presently malevolent, monopolies are like time bombs waiting to go off when new leadership steps in. I doubt the movie studios set out with the goal of controlling all media and public opinion. It just so happens that being good at making money makes you good at accumulating power. And power corrupts.

So now back to the question you asked: What is The Pirate Bay's stance?

Well.... I'd imagine that they view themselves as liberators from the tyranny of the production companies. If those companies went poof and disappeared tomorrow, films wouldn't disappear. I mean, just look at youtube.com/freddiew -- there are talented people out there who are figuring out how to fund things like they're doing with their VGHS film.

Surely, destroying the production companies would cause people to loose jobs and lots of great films to die on the planning desk. But people will overcome. The industry will find new ways of funding itself and the middleman will become less powerful. Sure, YouTube is huge, but that won't stop you from clicking a Vimeo link. The internet simply makes it too hard to get disgustingly rich from being a publishing or distribution platform. And if you do get disgustingly rich, you simply can't lock every movie theater into an exclusivity deal: anyone could run his own movie theater! And many other movie theaters are just a few keystrokes away! There are new ones every day.

Capitalism doesn't create permanent monopolies, government does. Capitalism tends to destroy monopolies. Just ask Kodak or AT&T or any other monopoly disrupted by innovative technology.

Anyway, Notch is making tens of millions of dollars on Minecraft, a video game sold directly to consumers.

Yeah, that's a great point about Notch. I think it goes along well with my point that theater-type production and distribution systems are reserved for the big guys. The smaller guys like Notch have their own channels and it has worked out very well for the most successful of them.

It is great that Mincraft is as successful as it is. But trying to say that gaming would exist as is without the backing of big companies as is is a joke. Minecraft caters to a niche market.

I'm pretty sure Notch couldn't have cranked out Skyrim on his own, and WoW wouldn't have been developed by a small group of people as a hobby project on their own time. Large and complex games and systems and the like take lots of money to produce a product people will want to play, and without big backing these type of games wouldn't exist.

Notch, among others, is the exception that proves the rule.

Thanks so much for the lengthy response - really cleared a lot of things up, but I had a few things to ask about:

1) So the main issue that we all have with these big production companies is that they make it difficult for small guys to get in on the movie game? But isn't that what things like Youtube and Vimeo are for? Distribution systems for the little guy?

I don't really think it's practical to want to put a significant amount independent developers into theaters. The reason the production companies are really oligopolists (few in number, but relatively great in power) in the industry is that is the best way to actually make the industry work. For example, it's not a very good idea to have 100 different power companies where you live because it is much more efficient and therefore better for society to have only one company. Similarly, it really isn't a great idea to have hundreds if not thousands of movies playing across the country at the same time - it brings up huge issues with coordination, advertising, movie quality, etc. These big production firms don't have the problems that you would have with having hundreds of smaller independent firms.

The smaller guys should be going for the distribution channels made for the smaller guys because that's how those channels were designed. The whole construction of the network of theaters around the world wasn't designed to have thousands of movies playing at the same time - it was designed to have a few big movies playing at the same time. And the only way you're going to get a few big movies is if you have only a few firms that are able to make these big movies.

2) Just as a quick point on economics, capitalism doesn't create monopolies. It's the part of our economy that isn't capitalistic that creates monopolies. We obviously don't live in a purely capitalistic society as a whole - it's more monopolistically competitive and in some parts, oligopolistic. It is oligopolistic in those parts where it is most efficient to do so (like in the big name movie production and distribution industry).

If it's more efficient, how come they are complaining so much about how they're struggling to make money? P2p is way more efficient than what they want (build+power+staff theatres, rental stores, retail stores, manage supply chains, etc.)

The Internet wins and will always win.

It isn't about efficiency. It's about giving stuff away for free versus charging for it.

As one guy above put it, if you lay out a bunch of hotdogs on a table and let people take them for free, you'll give out a whole lot more than the guy next to you who is charging for them and handing them out one by one.

Youtube and vimeo probably weren't originally designed as "distribution systems for the little guy", so much as "I want to share this cat video/student film". The point being that they weren't meant to be a distribution system any more than a DVD in and of itself is a distribution system. They're a type of media which makes the work of distribution systems easier. Blogs were, at the time, the distribution system, and youtube/vimeo were a new, easy to use media that made distributing to a wide audience easier (no more 'codec' issues, etc.)

The fact that they have become distribution systems in their own right is a testament to the fact that content creators will always create, and will try to distribute their creations in any way that they can. People will often use something counter to it's original design, and it's smart companies that can recognise that use and restructure their operation around it.

The problem isn't that only the big guys get into the cinemas - in a free market, that might still be the case. The problem is that the little guys can't get into the cinemas, no matter how high the quality of their product. The only way that they can is by bowing down and paying fealty to the big studios who didn't actually contribute anything to the production.

The problem that the big companies are encountering now is that new media has been showing up which works without their tightly controlled distribution methods. Want to make a TV series? You no longer have to sell it to a studio or be stuck on some form of local station. You can distribute it yourself, to more people than the traditional methods would ever allow, and you can do it easier. The problem that the studios have is that you no longer need to be on a TV show or in a cinema to get seen. They're not entirely irrelevant yet, but they're no longer the only way to view content.

The problem with piracy is that people are taking the job of distribution out of the hands of the people who either created or paid for the rights to distribute it. It's a big blow for companies that add no real value other than distribution, which is why they're claiming massive losses and jobs lost. They can't reconcile the idea that you can make as much money (if not more) by selling the same product at a lower cost to a wider audience. The pirates saw an opportunity and stepped in. Once the big companies can figure out how to adapt their business models to meet what consumers actually want, they'll start to make a profit, and everyone will be all the better for it.

The last thing that this opening of the market (and that's what this internet revolution is) means is that quality will increase. Once distribution isn't a case of "You get what you're given, and you'll thank us for it", then the producers of content will have to start competing not in price but in quality for the consumer's dollar. People can pick what they want to watch when, now. They don't have to catch it at the cinema or have to go without until it makes it to DVD. To make them want to watch something at the cinema, then the product actually has to be worth watching at a cinema. If you want someone to pay money for your DVD box set, you have to make it worth spending money on. If there's something getting produced which you can get for cheaper, in a way that's more convenient to you, then the content would have to be amazing to get you to pay for the more expensive option.

Anyway, this has been a long, rambly rant. I'm hoping that I didn't cloud issues too much, or tangent too often, or outright contradict myself. Every word I wrote, I meant at the time I was writing it.

> The whole construction of the network of theaters around the world wasn't designed to have thousands of movies playing at the same time

You're presupposing that the traditional movie theater is an enterprise that has an inalienable right to exist.

It doesn't :-)

Disruptive technology is called "disruptive" for this very reason.

Thanks to cheap big screen TVs and digital distribution, the movie business is being disrupted.

Near me, lots of theaters have gone out of business recently. Other new ones have popped up that are now selling beer and food during the film. Still others are showing fewer blockbusters, but more classics and inviting directors, actors, and other crew to hold QnA sessions after the screenings.

In the short term, damage is done, jobs are lost, businesses fail. In the long term, scar tissue forms and society rebuilds, better than it was before. It's all a bunch of grand experiments. Who knows what will stick?

> capitalism doesn't create monopolies

It most certainly does create monopolies AND oligarchies. Just look at history. Some other reply to me suggested it was government's fault. Yeah that too. Also see history :-)

> For example, it's not a very good idea to have 100 different power companies where you live because it is much more efficient and therefore better for society to have only one company

This is a pretty different discussion.

In terms of ideology, I'd consider myself a social libertarian. I believe that the government should do only really two categories of things:

1) Act as a check/balance on businesses (ie. make sure my food is safe to eat & that no one organization goes around destroying the greater good for personal gains)

2) Provide municipal services where there is either (A) conflict of interest (eg. health insurance) or (B) unsatisfiable constraints to sustain business (eg. no one will deliver mail to a 10 person town; or road construction)

However, the problem is that when technology changes, government needs to be able to rapidly evolve it's involvement in both areas. Sadly, it seems incapable of rethinking any idea without a full reboot (cough bloody revolution) or a fist full of lobbying dollars.

For example: Today, I support the government's control of road construction. If teleporters are invented tomorrow, I would demand that the government immediately develop a plan for reducing and ultimately eliminating their involvement in transportation.

This answers deserves a good article on its own.

I'll sidestep the tired but true arguments about why copyright infringement isn't stealing, and take a more pragmatic approach:

First off, even if your assumption is true, it would only mean there would be no more movies created in the way Hollywood creates movies today. There would still be movies created by passionate filmmakers. Secondly, I think your assumption is wrong anyway. Hollywood could make movies that would get people in theaters. It would require better movies and probably better theaters. Pirates will have a hard time competing with a good theater experience.

Remember, home video was not an original part of Hollywood's business model. Cinemas were. In fact, they have fought every new form of home media, heralding it as the end of their business, and then eventually adapting and making tons of money from that new media. It takes time, and they haven't quite managed to pull it off yet with today's new home media: high speed Internet access.

Could you please explain exactly why copyright infringement isn't stealing? I really don't understand any of the past arguments. Someone places a price on something that they paid money to create. Instead of paying that price (fair or not), you choose to obtain that something for free. That is, by definition, stealing. You are taking something that belongs to the creator of that something without the right to do so. -- http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/steal

I am not saying that Hollywood is going to be completely killed - I was just speculating as to a possible (albeit unlikely) future scenario. The reason for my doing this is that TPB's statement gave me the feeling that they didn't want the traditional Hollywood to exist anymore.

Sorry - what exactly are you getting at with the comment about them being so hypocritical about everything?

The key word here is not "stealing" but "right" as in "the right to do so".

See also: "makes a copy" vs "removes original"

Creators need to be paid, and I see lots of passionate creators being paid despite, or even with the help of this "stealing" (SEO guys and gals call it "free PR".)

What do you mean by your first sentence? Didn't really understand.

Regardless of whether you make a copy or remove the original, you are taking the property of another party without its permission to do so. That, by definition, is stealing. (see first entry in dictionary.com link)

Free PR makes up for lost sales, but would you choose 100 sales or 100 people that got your product for free, but might go tell other people about it?

> you are taking the property of another party

Making a copy is not "taking".

icebraining: You copy something. You have taken it. It still exists where it originally did, but you still took it because you now have it in your possession. You can't keep justifying taking something without paying for it (stealing) with semantics.

Here's another argument for you. When a producer sells a piece of content, it is selling you a copy. You are paying for a copy. If you choose to not pay for a copy, you are effectively stealing a copy from the producer.

I reject that notion that you can own an idea. The arguments for physical property simply don't apply to ideas, and I've never heard a sound and compelling argument for why ideas should be ownable. This is especially true for software and digital media, since they are literally integers. Owning a piece of software is equivalent to owning an integer, something that I claim is ludicrous.

When you talk about "obtaining something" for free, what you're really doing is creating a copy of something. Everyone on both ends of the copying gives their consent: e.g. for Bittorrent, uploaders and downloaders are both freely offering the bandwidth they have paid for. Unless the original uploader

Basing an entire industry on the faulty analogy of creative works as property is, in my opinion, foolish and unworthy of legal support.

Let's go with a movie as an example. I agree with you - you cannot own an idea, but a movie that took a hell of a lot of time and money to make is not an idea. And if you want to have further justification for this, a movie is a physical thing. It actually exists, albeit in the form of ones and zeroes on a hard drive, but it does actually exist. If you are obtaining these ones and zeroes that someone invested a lot of capital to make without paying for them, you are stealing! Those ones and zeroes belong to the company and you have to pay the company to get a copy of the ones and zeroes. This isn't my definition of stealing; it's in the dictionary.

It doesn't make a difference at all whether or not you are copying something or actually removing it from its original place. If you are going with your argument, any company that makes software should only be able to sell that software once and after that, anyone should be able to copy it. Every person that uses the software is getting the value of the software that the original person put capital into creating and you should have to pay for that, not get it for free.

> Those ones and zeroes belong to the company and you have to pay the company to get a copy of the ones and zeroes.

They certainly own the ones and zeroes on their own hard drives, but they don't suddenly own the bits on my hard drive if they happen to fall into the same arrangement.

What I always resort to arguing is that ideas and creative works are not property and it doesn't make sense to apply property rights to them. Think back to why physical theft is immoral: it's not because the owner put time and effort into making or earning the property, it's because you can't take the property without depriving the owner of it. That isn't the case for an arrangement of bits on a hard drive, and that's why I don't think copying is immoral.

> If you are going with your argument, any company that makes software should only be able to sell that software once and after that, anyone should be able to copy it.

Any company that relies on selling something that can be effortlessly copied and obtained for free on the Internet, and then lobbies the government to create and enforce increasingly strict rules specifically designed to prop up your business model that is not profitable on its own, does not have any "right" to profit. Note that this is not a dismissal of software-for-profit: there are plenty of profitable software companies that either avoid piracy by providing non-copyable value or by thriving despite piracy.

"[H]e who lights his [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me."

http://movingtofreedom.org/2006/10/06/thomas-jefferson-on-pa...

I dont understand this. if the hollywood corporations are unable to make something that anyone wants to pay for, why should they be in business?

if they die out, its because their business model is broken. if their business model is broken, they deserve to die out. why should the government protect them?

separately, if movies stop getting made that will because nobody is willing to fund them. surely that means that they should die out? if enough of us who like our movies (I am one) continue to fund movies, then they will not die out.

again, why should the government have an opinion on any of this?

  > there would be no more movies which the pirate
  > bay could distribute

That's not the case. I remember someone once mentioning the Nigerian film industry as an example. Everything there is pirated, but they make their movies with the expectation that they have ~2 weeks to make their money before piracy becomes rampant.

I'm sure that large $100-million movies won't be made in such a world, but I've never really heard anyone respond to whether or not that is a good or bad thing. Do we really need huge blockbusters like that to truly tell a compelling story?

Why should piracy just be expected and accepted to the detriment of an industry?

You don't need a huge budget to make great films, but why encourage an environment in which there is no choice but to make low budget ones?

1. I'm presenting a counter-point to the idea that 'no movies will be made.'

2. The idea that 'if piracy becomes rampant, then there will be no $100-million movies' usually comes up in piracy discussions. I'm asking whether or not we really need $100-million movies. Would the world be that much worse off without them? This is not a side of the issue that I've seen come up in these discussions, so I'm posing the question.

You imply that everyone that pirates doesn't buy. And you imply that people who pirate would instead buy if they couldn't pirate. I never seen proof to any of those two assertions.

I am talking about one movie. If a pirate pirates a movie, it is incredibly unlikely that he/she is going to then go buy the movie.

And yes, I do imply (and even say outright) that people who pirate would buy if they couldn't pirate, but not all of them. Probably only a very small proportion of them would buy a movie if they couldn't pirate it. However, if only one person would buy the movie out of the hundreds that pirate it, it would net the producing and distributing companies a loss, which is all that would need to happen for my argument to have sound backing.

There are some movies and TV shows being funded now without the 'majors', but the funding model hasn't really figured itself out yet.

See Pioneer One for a self/crowd funded 'TV' show which was released under the Creative Commons licence (and distributed legally via pirate bay, etc.). Sure the quality isn't 100% top notch, but the point is that it's starting. It's slow, but the ball is rolling now.

There's not a single thing I've downloaded over a torrent I'd have ever paid for without first getting it via the torrent.

Why would you do that to yourself? You're illegally downloading content. It's really cool and good and all that you're making up for your illegally downloaded content by actually purchasing the movie afterwards because that is what matters, but you could still have to pay huge fines for doing that if anyone wanted to make you.

The other thing is that I think good natured people like you who want to pay for movies after watching them are very rare. The majority of pirates don't follow by your way of thinking, I would guess.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...

You know why? Because there's so much shitty content out there. Bad TV shows that have one good episode. Bad albums with one good song. I'm sick of buying stuff and then later discovering I was simply a victim of a marketing campaign. That's not fair.

So I will see if it's any good, THEN I pay you. That's how it should work, just like it does in a restaurant: you consume their content, if you're unhappy with the product, it's acceptable behaviour to complain and not pay. Why should I pay them to waste my time?

Stop buying their stuff and you will force them to change.

That's why you need new models to promote and monetize movies. Piracy without compensation is of course not viable, but so is not the current "overcharge for zero-cost-digital copy so we can pay exorbitant promotions for mediocre movies" (e.g. avatar's 1/3 of the cost was promotion)

You can't think that you are paying for a no-cost digital copy. You are paying for a copy of a production that took over a year and millions of dollars to create! You wouldn't argue that you should only have to pay half-price for milk because half of the milk company revenues were spent on advertising, right?

if you're a consequentialist then you only care about outcomes. Every economic analysis I've seen indicates piracy rate does not affect the returns to creators.

I'm sure the economic analyses are well thought out, but isn't it just common sense that some proportion of those people who download content for free would have purchased that content had they not been able to download it for free? That would obviously mean decreased revenues for the content creators...

The main reason I brought up the end game stuff was because the article gave me the feeling the TPB doesn't want Hollywood to exist any longer. They are talking about the people that allow Hollywood to make money as if those people are criminal scum that are just selling plush toys and anorexia. Just thought it was an interesting scenario to consider given the apparently largely negative feelings toward Hollywood's existence.

> but isn't it just common sense that some proportion of those people who download content for free would have purchased that content had they not been able to download it for free?

Probably some portion very close to 0%. It's a hard problem to define without having unfiltered access to everyone's mind. Regardless of what measurement you use, I suspect things like DRM, slow download speeds, slow shipping, bad cinema experiences, etc. have caused more loss in revenue than piracy. I also suspect that for many forms of media (particularly music and software), piracy has been a significant contributor to many producers' success.

That's a really interesting take on it - thanks so much for responding. I never thought about how all of the issues with trying to stop piracy could have decreased revenues as well.

Really wish we could get some numbers on this to see if your arguent has backing.

It's true that some pirates would have paid if they hadn't been able to pirate. But that's not the whole story: sometimes getting media for free makes people more inclined to buy it or related media later. I've heard on Hacker News that free music distributions can create an audience for live concerts. Another example is "freemium" software and services. At least one study (that I'm too lazy to look up) found that some people will pirate music to try it and then buy it if they like it. So you can't determine from theory whether piracy leads to less or more revenue; you need real data.

I really like that argument and actually hope it would prove to be true - would completely change a significant part of the industry.

However, it is by definition of US law illegal to pirate copyrighted content, so regardless of whether or not we think it is a benefit to content production and distribution companies for us to pirate their content, it is always going to be illegal.

> it is always going to be illegal.

No, it will be illegal only as long as the majority is of the opinion that it should be illegal.

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