Filmmakers request identities of Reddit users to aid piracy lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Filmmakers request identities of Reddit users to aid piracy lawsuit

torrentfreak.com

36 pointsisaacfrond8 comments

If platforms such as Reddit really wanted to protect their users, they would try to avoid placing themselves in the position where even they can deanonymize their users.

Otherwise it's like Apple crying they're only complying with the law when the CCP makes them censor apps, when it was Apple who placed themselves in the position of inescapable censor for their users.

These sorts of disputes always amaze me. Reddit wants to make a stand without taking steps to actually protect users while the film companies push forward under the false pretense that the type of people who download their product would have paid for it save for a complicit ISP.

Fuck copyright

It's always sad to see this attitude. Copyright is pretty much the only tool that artists and software coders have to protect their rights and get paid. Do you think someone will pay large amounts for software if they can make a copy for free?

Now, you'll probably bring up open source. It's a great example, but it proves my point not yours. Copyright law makes all of the open source licenses possible. Without it, open source languishes and often fails.

So quit being a jerk. If you don't like some company's product enough to pay for it, don't steal it. Just go find some that's either free enough or good enough. Quit hating on the artists, the writers and the coders for wanting to eat and wear clothes.

Copyright may be a great tool for artists and software coders to collect rent off their creations, but it's not the only way for them to get paid. Patronage and commissions have supported artists since time immemorial. I'm sure companies will still need those people to code/write/film/edit/design/build their products and internal projects. And SaaS business models enable continued rent-seeking even if copyright vanishes overnight.

> Copyright law makes all of the open source licenses possible. Without it, open source languishes and often fails.

Eh, BSD, MIT and to a large extent LGPL are pretty close to "do whatever you want" and they're used by popular projects. And I see open source differently: It is a protest against copyright rent-seeking, by using copyright itself to ensure the code will not be locked up in copyright rent-seeking. So the very existence of open source software is a proof by contradiction that useful software will continue to exist even if copyright rent-seeking is abolished.

Yes, if we abolished copyright some commercial software development would probably cease. But not a whole lot. And we might see a resurgence in open source software, which would actually be aligned with the user's interests instead of working against them at every turn.

Artists and the audiovisual content market would probably see more turbulence, but consider the current situation. Piracy already enables people, in practice, to get whatever they want for free. Yet in spite of this, many people still paid for streaming services. Now that content is fragmenting and fees are going up, piracy is seeing a resurgence. In other words: Piracy is a service problem, and it is still possible to build a profitable business model when competing with free.

If we could reform copyright to a more reasonable e.g. 10y term and include mandatory FRAND licensing of all audiovisual content after 1y, then I'd feel much better about it. But a corporate-rigged system of effectively perpetual rents on all the cultural output of the past century is antithetical to the ostensible purpose of copyright itself "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". At this point, we might well be better off without it.

Fuck copyright.

You don't need to participate in the copyrighted world at all. Just do your own thing, release your own work for free and wait for those beaucoup patronage bucks to come rolling in. You can do it your own way and let those terrible capitalist copyright lovers die on the vine.

You keep talking about rent as if it's a bad thing. Why? It's the basis for all savings in the economy. You can't have retirement savings without rent. You can't have health insurance without a pool of savings. The only reason that construction workers build great homes is because someone will rent them (or buy them and effectively rent them to themselves.)

People would probably have a more positive view of copyright if it didn't last so ridiculously long.

But why do you care about some copyright of a book or movie? Do you shake your fist at carpenters because the ownership of their work product lasts forever? In pretty much every other part of the economy, the work product comes with ownership rights that last forever.

The real question is why should we stick it to the writers, musicians and artists by pulling the rug out from under them after so many years? I agree it's a practical solution, but it's definitely taking from them.

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