European Commission Calls for Pirate Site Blocking Around the Globe
torrentfreak.com
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As it stands now the cost of rigging especially in the EU is extraordinarily cheap and effective.
Reminder: none of us have an obligation to you specifically. Be the change you want to see in the world… or stfu
If your only idea is parrot populist news propaganda just stfu
I might argue that the US's insanely long copyright lengths are the actual problematic policy, but that argument tends to fall on deaf ears when corporate bottom lines get involved
Imho it should be "50 years or 10 years after death of the author, whichever comes second" with some special mechanism for releasing abandoned works from copyright.
"The Statute of Anne granted publishers of books legal protection for 14 years with the commencement of the statute. It also granted 21 years of protection for any book already in print. At the expiration of the first 14 year copyright term the copyright re-vested in its author, if he or she were still alive, for a further term of 14 years."
There is no good reason for it to be any longer than that and certainly it should expire with the death of the author because the purpose of copyright is (or at least was):
" ... for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; ... "
and they can't do that after they have died.
What percent of art/media is even sellable or cared about for decades and decades, much less 100+ years?
99% of media is forgotten about after 20 years, but the rest makes up for that in profit. Of course for some of them you could argue that having the old stuff freely available would boost the popularity of the newer adaptations, spinoffs, reboots, etc. But I think that's rocking the boat too much to be viable, and some content does genuinely take years or decades to start to be appreciated.
Surely, the incentive to create all the content you mentioned is still there with a 10 or 20 year copyright. Some people might earn a few hundred million less, but not sure why it is in society’s interest to offer up the police and courts in upholding copyrights for 120+ years, and then turn around and pay extra for content that would have been made anyway if society only offered 10 or 20 years of copyright.
> some content does genuinely take years or decades to start to be appreciated.
Seems like an edge case that is not worth the cost.
No extra TV shows are going to get made because there is a chance that, 20 years down the line, the show is still making money. It's purely a financial gift to the large businesses that own old copyrights, at the expense of everyone else.
It might also have some unforeseen consequences on preservation, especially when the version of the work that gets released to the general public is of inferior quality to the master copy the remains hidden in the vaults (either due to limitations of the technology of the day, or because so far it wasn't supposed to have been released and all the public gets are some bootlegs of varying quality or even nothing at all)?
Without copyright, one likely major incentive for the continued preservation of those master copies disappears, especially if that master copy is held by some commercial enterprise which must make money in order to survive.
(With books that's less of an issue because it's easy to perfectly recover the original text even from a book with mediocre printing quality – with music and video on the other hand you're stuck with the limitations of the original publishing medium forever unless you can go back to the master copy.)
So on the one hand, yes, I do agree that life + 70 years is somewhat on the too long side, and all the more so for out-of-print, orphaned or otherwise once-published-but-now-unavailable works. On the other hand I've also been enjoying quite a few CD/digital re-releases of vinyl-era music as well as some releases of tracks that had remained officially unreleased for a few decades, both of which likely wouldn't have happened if those works weren't still in copyright (and therefore of commercial value) at that point.
The original draconian copyright policies came from the EU. Later, the USA aligned, and provided a longer term than Europe. Europe then aligned with the USA, again with a longer term. And so on.
That is far enough time to exploit anything.
Piracy simply offers a better product. You own the source material. Sell it. Make it available for streaming. Everywhere.
Extraordinary value destruction. There's even been a few things made and simply never released due to weird economic decisions.
No, I really don’t want “a better product”. I don’t want to be “sold” anything.
I made the choice long ago just to not invest in garbage media. It was easy when they made it cumbersome to get.
Instead of sitting around pouting, demanding the media corps behave in a not sociopathic way, I realized there are way better things to invest my limited life in than consuming propaganda
And looking back I cringe hard at how many grown adults can’t get off this tit no matter how unreasonable the supply chain is. But to each his own
Well yeah, something someone else made, but for free, instead of $4.99, that's a 'better product' for consumers ... until there exists non such products to buy.
It's an enduring bit of weird logic at HN, that somehow IP should not exist, 'because mega corps!'
If anti-piracy did not exist within regular countries, then literally zero content that required investment would get made, it's that simple.
If people can trivially access content 'for free' they generally will do that.
For music, it's not so bad, it just so happens most of the best music is cheap to make and niche artists couldn't command a high price anyhow, ergo the long-tail slot on Spotify has some efficiency to it.
But there are innumerable productions which we all enjoy which require investment and without some kind of rights management, those literally disappear.
It's all theoretical until you make something that is 'stolen' and it hits home pretty fast.
Some arguments could definitely be made that the long-tail of piracy is actually beneficial, even to content producers, as it leaks content to areas wherein individuals couldn't afford to buy it, but that's a specific argument.
It's a bit ominous for countries to be blocking other countries etc. but this issue likely has to be looked at somehow. If 'piracy' is below certain thresholds they should just not worry about it, but that may not be the case.
Steam already proved that.
Spotify already proved that.
The netflix of 7 years ago proved that.
Best sellers such as witcher3 that had no DRM what so ever also proved that.
It's not about long tails or any other argument, it's much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work.
A Pirate website is never going to be more accessible than an official one always because of funding to do proper UX, so, even if all kinds of DRM were forbidden, actual legal services would always have the upper hand, and the better their service the less of a need for piracy.
When steam started getting traction, PC piracy plummeted. When spotify became available, same thing happenned for music. When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling. Witcher 3 was a best seller on PC (and this is an AAA game, not a 5$ indie) when you could just copy paste your friends installer instead of buying.
Everything is so goddam simple, provide good service, good value, and only people that don't actually have the budget to buy your stuff will pirate.
Piracy is like union strikes, yes they are annoying and bring profits down, and it's bullshit that I have to wait 5 hours for a train because of a strike. But it is a necessary mechanism of power balance.
> If people can trivially access content 'for free' they generally will do that.
"trivially" is not so simple. what about app store access in every device? from tv boxes, phone to PC. what about shared settings, data etc between them? there is no success pirate story on that, only techies that have such hobie have something compared to an actual nice setup. It's the "why dropbox" comment. Pirates can't get enough money or legal ground to build something comparable to what a legal company can build. This means it's ok if it is forbidden to block bullshit practices like DRM and remote deletion, if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you.
Paid streaming sites are just often not that good, loading slower, harder to view and sort their full catalogues, and often lack anything but the most basic features.
Whereas even booting up Netflix, and trying to find something to watch in their limited catalogue (I am in Australia), is a lot more hassle than just typing what I want into a torrent site and downloading it.
> When each film studio didn't have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling.
On top of this, something my co-workers and I were talking about some time ago: We were all several times more likely to pay for something than we were to sign up for something free. Being able to just pay for something without having to create an account and a subscription - like how physical media works - would probably also help.
The examples you listed are (were) all centralized places where the account creation is a one-time thing, and when streaming fractured into so many places that model broke. Now you need to sign up for each of them, which adds a lot to the friction.
Spotify only came to exist because of the massive piracy problems of MP3 - it was all available there for sale, but people wouldn't pay.
Spotify just provides a model that will work in the age of privacy, aka 'next to zero pricing' aka 'ad supported unlimited streaming' which sucked the money out of the business.
Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out.
This is 100% about a game of laws, DRM, 'accessibility' and price.
'Piracy' is absolutely unnecessary for the market to operate effectively, the evidence for that is all around you: physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.
"if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app/website can compete with you. "
Again, a fallacy, Netflix provides a great service, they already face 'piracy' of people sharing logins, and if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws etc. it'd be the #1 site the the world, bigger than Google, the UI would be irrelevant.
You could make some arguments about broadcast TV, which is abysmal, and the ultra high prices for sports these days when some people just want to watch a game or two, but for most media it's very simple: people don't want to pay.
By "Just Fine" you mean there's currently a hullabaloo about what can legally be called Milk? In a story of naming rights and lawsuits, various non-dairy milks have come to market, and the traditional dairy farmers, unable to hack it, have taken to the courtroom instead of actually competing. Sound familiar?
The market for Milk, like most other things works perfectly fine - like any other market.
The mental gymnastics going on here is like Cirque Du Soleil.
People don't want to pay and that's that.
'Anything' that you like, given the choice to have 'for free' , well, people will 'get it for free' if that option is available.
And that's it.
Yeah, but... imagine your Milk could be pirated - some friendly alien civilization drops by to say hi and leaves 8 billion - one for each human - of matter transmuters behind. These contraptions tap into universe's dark matter supply through a micro-wormhole and are able to materialize anything the user wants, seemingly out of nothing (there's a lot of dark matter out there). Would my Milk and Cereal producers, along with the whole economic environment they inhabit, still be able to run on the pre-transmuters rules and principles?
Whether something can be replicated for near-zero cost or not is such a huge, vast difference that trying to apply rules that work in either case to the other cannot possibly yield good results.
Also, if those could be pirated we had the solution to hunger, I think solving that is way better than some profits.
Same applies to any kind of good. If it's easily recreated at home, wouldn't it be nice? The possibilities for humans would be utopian.
But obviously that can't apply to digital goods right? Money/capitalism should be about _generating_ value, not _capturing_ value. They are very different things. I'm pretty sure that the Mafia does indeed have some benefits, but they are still keeping the population hostage. Same applies to digital goods, to IP, to Copyright. No doubt there are benefits, but in the current landscape, we are just "serfs" of proprietary software, DRM, closed AIs, etc. All about moats and value _capturing_. Thank god for lock in!
Netflix is extremely profitable, its stock price droppings are due to our current system of expecting never ending growth, not on business model sanity. It is way more threatened by having to produce its own content, or its new found shitty business practices (that tend to pile up) than account sharing.
> Consider if all films had to try the 'Spotify model' which is to say it's all free with a few ads, the industry would be wiped out.
or maybe not. Why would it? Blockbusters/Pop would survive because merchandise pays much more than tickets, it could even be better for them.
More alternative stuff always had to deal with less funding, and limitations are what brings art forward.
> if those movies were available at 'piratedmovies.com' without any IP laws
the bad pirate bay still has an enormous catalog. And i never mentioned any ablishment of IP laws, just new laws to forbit DRM and its equivalents of restricting usage. I'm okish with mass sharing websites being forbidden, I'm not ok with a random joe not being able to share with his friends or have local copies. Or because of some stupid DRM, gets his SDD worn out, or not getting full quality on certain un"protected" OS/browser/cable.
> people don't want to pay
People pay for actual convenience, always did, always will. If you can't provide better service that a random project that can't even get funds legally, what does it tell about your business? Checkout icloud, plenty of profits, but you could just have your 2TB network disk at home, much cheaper overall, dropbox proved the concept, it just lacked integration, and it all rests on one thing: convinience.
> physical goods can generally not be pirated! How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.
it's about reproduction cost. digital goods are almost free to distribute in a small scale.
> How does the 'economy' work for your Milk and Cereal producers? Just fine.
So fine that without tax payers money they go broke. So fine that they have to destroy the goods to keep prices and subsidies where they want them. Nothing as cool as throwing away milk to not crash the market while getting subsidized to produce more milk. Food industry is the one most reliant on tax payer money and you dared to use it as an example. If media and entertainment are so goddamm important that you have to put so much effort protecting their ventures with DRM and lots of other bulshit, maybe just apply what we do with those "working economies": subsidize.
Non violent civil disobedience vs abstract entities (ie corps, agencies, governments) is more than ok, most of the time is the only way, and power must be kept in check.
1) Netflix UX is perfectly fine. You see the film, you click play - that's it.
There is no argument to be made that a) it's bad or b) pirate.com couldn't duplicate it.
The business model fluctuates but they and Disney+ will eke out a profit - but only because of anti-piracy.
2) "Why would it? Blockbusters/Pop" - it's completely glib to suggest that investors would back films with $100M price tags (or any price tag) if the films were available at 'pirate.com' for free, at any time.
3) "If you can't provide better service that a random project that can't even get funds legally, what does it tell about your business?"
I don't think you're grasping the premise here: the 'cost' of the business is mostly the cost of content. Netflix has to pay for content, 'pirate.com' does not.
It's a total misunderstanding of the economics to suggest that Netflix should be able to 'compete with pirate.com or die'.
Getting Mp3s from iTunes was highly convenient - people preferred to not pay and so, the market for Mp3 evaporated, much like the market for films would evaporate.
4) "So fine that without tax payers money they go broke."
Again, a complete misunderstanding of the analogy: markets for physical goods work mostly fine - your arguments about 'subsidies for milk' are completely besides the point.
The point is: if physical goods could all be arbitrarily stolen, even at no cost to the producer, there would be no sales, and therefore no business. DRM enables content business to exist, otherwise, for the most part they would not.
5) "Non violent civil disobedience vs abstract entities"
And there it is: it's ok to steal stuff because 'Social Justice'!
You're just protecting yours and other people's rights!
This is actually the moral flatulence at the heart of the argument, and it exemplifies the ridiculous hoops people will jump through to justify it.
In IP culture, it's a theft of sorts, it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of content if there are no regs there.
As far as we know - there are zero economies that product good content without some form of IP regs - until someone comes along and proves otherwise, this is roughly how we need to do it.
Hopefully the EU will not lose their marbles over it.
Piracy does not offer a better product because it's free. Pirating is actually an awful experience for most people, involving shady sites, malicious ads, and a serious risk of malware. Once you get through all that, however, you've got a video file of whatever quality you prefer, that you can play in whatever way you prefer, that won't disappear based on some contract you are not party to.
Some people pirate media because they don't want to spend any money on it. You're not going to get those people to pay. Lots of other people are willing to spend money on media. For those people either the product they want is not for sale, or they are punished every step of the way for their willingness to pay.
In the days of DVD it was unskippable anti-piracy warnings, only seen by people paying for DVDs. Now it's the proliferation of streaming services with different exclusive content. It's their unavoidable software that's somewhere between bad and thoroughly broken. It's limiting video quality to 720p/480p on platforms that aren't sufficiently infected with DRM. It's content getting deleted from streaming services, either because of their license expiring or the service deciding it doesn't want to pay residuals anymore. It's the fact that DRM-free media is not for sale in the first place.
Yeah, it sucks. It's a pain in the ass and does cost some money, plus time. But it solves 3 problems for me:
1) Material can't disappear. I even "pirate" YouTube videos, for this reason.
2) Everything's in one place with a consistent UI.
3) I have access to several things that aren't available to buy or rent, period (and if I'm having to set things up to serve this material, anyway, the marginal cost of pirating more isn't that high)
Fix those and, my god, I'd gleefully decommission my pirated-stuff server. Really, fix 1 and 3 and it wouldn't be worth it to keep doing it just for 2.
The way some people distribute media, you'd have to outright pay me to accept it in some cases.
Conversely, getting movies via eg torrents is extremely convenient, and I don't have to worry about DRM, license retraction, or other forms of loss-of-access. I'm just sad there's there is still no easy way to pay for this kind of service for movies at least (at least not without subsidizing predatory behavior) .
Netflix and Steam sort of head in the right direction, but are (occasionally) still stymied by DRM, spyware, and loss-of-access at times.
GoG.com covers many of the bases, so GoG definitely gets money from me from time to time.
Now you have a group of people who want to watch. Some of them can afford to watch and pay for it. Some of them can't and won't see it. Some of them can but it's not available so they pirate. Some can but will pirate because it's easier or cheaper.
This are all caused by the demand the movie creators paid for. Don't create demand and gaslight people when they want to watch it by saying it isn't necessary for survival. People want to see it because the movie creators are telling them to and they spent money to get people who can't afford or won't pay to want to see the movie
Private collectors don't and have more valuable pieces.
Of course, there's always the same model other people use: If a cabinet maker wants to make money they have two options: They can find someone who wants something made, tell them the price and if they pay that price make it. Or they can take a long look around and say "you know what, I think people would like to buy chairs. I'll make a chair and put it up for sale" - note that the second option doesn't have any guarantees. If someone takes a look around the shop, decides to not buy the chair and instead makes one themselves that's absolutely okay.
Copyright is an anomaly, not the rule. Most people can only sell something once.
If Avengers is available for everyone on pirate.com the day it comes out, then Avengers will make only a few million, not enough to pay for all the costs ... and so it will ever not get made.
The same goes for many productions.
No revenue -> No production.
The amount of upsidedown and sideways logical contortions going on here to avoid that reality is definitely odd - a perpetual feature of HN, I can't fathom exactly what it is but it's predictable.
Spotify too has a hissy fit every time I lose wifi connection, I'd keep all my songs locally if I weren't listening to new music every week.
Etc. Etc. While it's true that the cost is a problem to consumers, most won't jump through the hoops for it alone. I try to teach my friends to pirate things as much as I can, and they never want to because they don't want viruses or to go to "sus websites".
Consumers in general don't want to break the law. Only the most dedicated ones with time and knowledge to spare will really go through with it.
Also Gen Z that might at most have a laptop (for school), but spends most of their time on mobile devices are definately not pirating anything, nor do they know how to.
Anyone with some savviness will of course go on a private tracker or simply pay for access to one of the many usenet providers with 10+ years of retention.
Or just use a free DNS provider to negate the "block"
I pirate books more through the browser on my phone than I do anywhere else. 10x as much as all other places combined is a conservative estimate.
Video and music is done on a desktop, though, sure.
That is exactly what many people believe.
If it ever becomes the primary method of piracy (granted, unlikely), it won't be any problem to simply ban the protocol/implementation. It's client-server, identifying the operators of those servers is trivial, and the legislation to allow the blocking will be uncontroversial and bipartisan.
Given that it's all pay-to-play, I doubt that it will turn into a game of whack-a-mole like it is with Z Library.
Bittorrent has a little more cover, in that one could make a case that it is used for legitimate purposes occasionally. But they'll probably just outlaw the VPNs that make it safe from litigation.
If it's legal to ban usenet, then that'll get translated into banning encryption eventually. Right? It's a slippery slope at the very least.
Banning a protocol that is 100% used only for piracy will have not nearly enough sympathy among the public or the government for the solution to remain unimplemented. The only thing protecting it is that it's such a shitty protocol and so completely paywalled that most people don't want to use it. Should that ever change...
Many Usenet providers offer their NNTP protocol through TLS on port 443.
If you "simply" block all TLS connections on port 443 some other things might break on the internet.
The typical workaround is that scientific research is usually exempt from copyright. If you train a model for research, and then use that model for your business, your business didn't take part in the violation step.
Unless the model you trained is a derived work, of course. If it is, you need to pay for every scrap of copyrighted work you use, same as with music samples (fair use probably doesn't apply here but IANAL).
There are two American lawsuits about this going on at the moment that I know of. I think the lawsuit against the stable diffusion people can bring the clearest answer to this question, though I wouldn't be surprised if the case goes through various courts because of the implications for the AI industry as a whole.
Actually having to pay for the stuff you use would ruin a lot of AI startups. Then again, having to pay for the stuff you use also ruined Napster.
So when someone knocks on your door and accuses you of illegal streaming, just tell them you "trained an AI" on it ;-)
Is it? Everywhere?
One could argue that people ingest copyrighted content too and spit it back out too.
Well then we should be allowed to store entire movies, since we can memorise just like hard drives do.
Meanwhile our rights are being whittled away worldwide and the left of all groups seems to be cheering it on. When did the rebellious supporters of change become the cheerleaders of the state? How does it feel when your rebellion is just fashion and your substance is that of a government tool?
Meanwhile I can't be bothered to pirate games anymore because steam and GOG on linux are just too damn convenient.
this is actually a thing. Piracy declined once Apple Music, Spotify and Netflix appeared, because they were more convenient than handling a torrent client.
Now that every single studio seems to want to build their own streaming service, usability declines and piracy will increase again.