If I were a German, this would piss me off more than anything: A lobbyist organization from another country managed to successfully manipulate the court of my home country.
Apologies from the USA. We don't support the RIAA.
Apologies from the USA. We don't support the RIAA.
The law firm (Rasch) in this case is also no stranger to copyright and piracy dealings. If you search for its name you find websites dealing with their "Abmahnungen" (roughly Cease & Desist) [2, German].
[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2016/05/18/das-hamburger-mon... [2] https://www.abmahnung.org/rasch/
Unfortunately, we do. Year after year, we collectively allow and enable these ravenous corporate interests, and their lobbyists and spooks, to further capture our institutions and strongarm smaller economies around the globe. I wish we didn't, but we do.
I'm a big believer in intellectual property rules and I hate piracy. These actions don't strike me as "censorship" because my enforcement of IP doesn't stop you from expressing yourself in any way. Oh sure, it stops you from pirating me, but that's not censorship. That's me stopping you from being a plagiarist and a copycat.
If anything, tough enforcement encourages people to actually express themselves because they can't just pirate someone else's hard work and pretend they did something of value for society.
Quit reading this. Go make your own content and enjoy all of the power that the Internet gave you. Then enjoy the control over your hard work that IP laws give you.
/me gets popcorn
You do know that most of the people here make their own IP every day, right?
This is a super slippery slope and we're sliding fast
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/texas-republican...
Attempting to conflate copyright with property and property crimes is not only illogical it is highly immoral
copyright may be worth defending, in a very limited way, but it certainly is not on the same level of property nor should it be considered such.
Copyright to the extent it is worth defending should be returned to the original US Constitutional limits and applicability, and returned to the timespan of the original copyright law (14 years, and 1 extension of a human author of 14 years.. meaning corporations get 14 years, humans can get upto 28 years and no more. and All copyright ends at death of the author. )
When I get tired of my video host or get locked out of my account, I should be able to download all of my own videos to put them on another host, regardless of whether the old host chooses to make that easy.
Journalists should be able to download every video of a politician making a false statement so they can play it back in a year when the evidence of that lie becomes better established.
Works by US Government entities like NASA are in the public domain. Anybody should be able to do what they like with them.
These things are distributed on the same services as anything else. A download tool can't evaluate the copyright status of a work or make a fair use determination. Prohibiting the tool is prohibiting all of the uses that should be allowed.
Stop giving your rights away! You do have those rights, until you agree to give them up.
The third-party who uploaded the video already waived their own rights, and by accessing the site, the journalist also agreed to be bound by the T&Cs.
What is your solution here for the average schmoe who isn't tech literate but is potentially a citizen documenting corruption?
Sure, there's secure drop software etc, but do you really think the average person is going to be able to do that in the field from their cellphone? Also consider the footage that comes out of warzones on YT.
We need to stop pretending that these so-called "agreements" are good faith meetings of the mind negotiated between parties of roughly equal power. The consumer's only options are take it or leave it. There's a huge power imbalance and no ability for the powerless party to negotiate. That's not an agreement, that's a unilateral policy.
I see this as the very definition to entitlement; that you must be allowed to use something, even if you don't want to use it the way the owner of the thing wants you to use it.
We are talking about intangibles here (often described by the politically and philosophically loaded term intellectual property) I find it unreasonable to treat them as private physical property. It restricts the true potential of the digital, i.e virtually zero distribution costs.
In my view, digital content resembles a ’commons’ in their use and cultural significance. I believe the interest of IP-holders should take a back seat to the far more important free flow of information.
”Intellectual property” has always been stolen and copied and I would argue that the world is better of that way. So much of our art and technology would not exist without these ”thefts”. Intellectual property is only property because a state uses its monopoly on violence to enforce someones monopoly on an idea/concept/information. It is not because of any divine right of an owner to restrict what others do with intangible objects of information.
Also, there is a spectrum. No one would think it just if the Fourier transform was subject to licensing.
Consider the case of VCRs/DVRs: the cable companies said "this is for live viewing", but people wanted to record video. There was big pushback, but it was ruled that people have the right to use the video that way, even if television channels don't want them to.
We don't have a right to the labor of someone else, but if we're consuming the fruits of that labor, there's a case to be made that we should be allowed to do so how we see fit.
For instance, your current fork is "if you don't like the company's terms, don't use the company's products". Another fork that we could use might be "if companies don't like the users' consumption practices, they can exit business or change their product".
I dispute that I agreed to any such thing.
It's weird to me that folks now feel entitled to content in the way that piracy allows. The concept that you simply cannot watch a show or movie if you haven't paid for it is genuinely foreign to many people, but it is the only reality that results in those shows in the first place.
Content has to produce revenue for its creators, or they're not able to create that content, or as much of that content, or as high quality of that content.
I don't "hate" piracy, and I don't think it even cracks the top 1000 problems in the world right now, but to think it's morally justified seems silly to me.
They shouldn't, but that is not at all what this case and discussion are about.
The scenario here is an unrelated third party being accused of being complicit in a crime merely for hosting a general-purpose tool that could be used for piracy but can be used for many other things.
The equivalent analogy would be if Home Depot is convicted of being a participant in every home burglary in their area simply because they sell sledgehammers and drills and other tools that could conceivably be used by someone to break into a house.
If you're genuinely curious why this view tends to be "so negatively moderated", it's this ridiculous notion.
Lots of people want to listen to good music, watch good shows, and read good books. Some people are capable of producing those things. Supply, meet demand. You think that without IP everybody is just going to give up on making art happen? Even expensive, large scale art? It's absurd, and it's propaganda.
Technological advancement has made this the best time in history for patronage of the arts. Subscription services would be perfect for this. Subscribe to get a vote on what gets made; subscribe to have your review of it count after it's done. Subscribe for ease of access.
I don't know if these industries shrink (or even grow) with the elimination of IP. But the notion that any product people enjoy today just stops getting made at all is crazy.
The only reason you're able to pirate in the first place is because you rely on other people not to pirate, so the artist still gets paid. That seems to be working out, which is why I really don't see piracy as a meaningful problem, but if the scales tipped to where most people were obtaining content in violation of IP laws, then you would absolutely see a strong chilling effect on content creation.
It's the underlying premise of capitalism; I focus on making art in exchange for a shared currency I can then use to buy housing and food from people dedicated to those things.
Without the ability to depend on others to provide those services, artists will have to do other things besides create art to convince the people creating food to give them some.
But why? Why full stop? There's no argument here, just an assertion. I want artists to create things. I will pay them to do it! There are many others like me in this regard!
> It's the underlying premise of capitalism; I focus on making art in exchange for a shared currency I can then use to buy housing and food from people dedicated to those things.
Yes, we agree there. You should make art in exchange for currency. You should not make art and then try to extract currency from people for looking at it.
In an alternate reality, Netflix produces shows that it streams to its subscribers. Subscribers review those shows which influences which shows continue to be developed. Just like in our reality, some people are "freeloaders" who watch the shows without paying for them (but it's not illegal). Still, many people subscribe because it's broadly understood that shows only get made if people subscribe.
In this reality (much like our own), production houses release pilots. If nobody wants to watch the show that would follow the pilot, then it's a sunk investment. But if they do, then they have to pay for it to get made (which they do, because that's how capitalism works). The rest is just a coordination problem, which the Internet trivializes. Need $5 million to make a season? Don't make the season until you've got it. If you're on the other end of the transaction: Do you want that season to get made? Then do your best to get it paid for.
I'm happy to listen to an argument for why this model would result in a smaller industry, and a subsequent argument about why a smaller industry is so unacceptable that we need IP law. But I won't accept proclamations like "...cannot creeat the content you love, full stop." The market is not so totally uncreative that it can't match up broadly distributed demand (I want to watch good TV) to concentrated supply (I can make good TV).
https://www.businessinsider.com/super-troopers-2-crowdfundin...
That seems to come from a viewpoint of "everything must be controlled in order for things to work properly".
The reality of the world is that it's messy, and it actually tends to work better for everyone when it's not overly controlled.
Trying to be a control freak about things often just leads to bad outcomes for everyone involved. Both the people doing it, and the people on the receiving end of the control freak. :(
Ironically though, control freaks still seem to blame everyone else but themselves after things turn to shit.
Have seen this happen multiple times, unfortunately.
I'm certainly not arguing otherwise. However, I am arguing that things like YouTube-DL have legal and legitimate uses. Assuming that even its primary use is for piracy is a pretty huge assumption.
BUT yeah the issue is how people use the tool, not the tool itself, and this is for sure a huge overreach by the RIAA.
To repeat, this would mean the innocent have to go through the trouble to prove their innocence in the face of bullies who are given maximum leeway instead of the watchdogs having to thoroughly substantiate their claim to demand removal in unclear cases.
It makes the watchdogs de facto sovereign censors of the Internet, and turns any idea of due process into a pleasant fiction for most people.
It's also worth noting that ISPs are pretty low on the internet services stack, and as such should be much closer to a water or electricity company than to a newspaper.
OK fine ... but then there's a non-insignificant amount of responses, indicating genuine engagement with OP's position.
Now you have to squint to read the greyed-out post if you're interested in what the discussion is about, and likewise with your response, which is again well-expressed if not popular.
IMO, moderation should exist to keep discussions within HN guidelines, which these posts clearly follow. Instead it's plainly "I don't agree with you so I'm going to try to vote your view out of existence", which doesn't even work as folks still engage/respond.
Is there any way out of this? HN is famously the best-behaved discussion site on the internet, but this seems to be an unfortunate tendency that happens fairly often.
He violated no IP because he didn't download, he just wrote a program to store data that already is on your computer.