Over 50% of Young Danes Have Streamed or Downloaded Content Illegally
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
More than half the times I’ve tried to find something it’s “oh, this isn’t available in your region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but you need a credit card from this region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but your email address is tied to an account in a different region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but only in low quality”. The unholy combo of “oh, this is available in your account’s region, and it’s available in the region you’re visiting, but in this region we can only show the content to people from this region”.
It’s no surprise that piracy/vpns are still widespread - streaming companies (really media producers) are blocking people from purchasing their services!!!
Show comes out, becomes a big hit in the US, everyone else thinks it looks good and wants to watch, the only place it's available is via pirating. And then TV companies are shocked at the level of piracy. What did they expect?
Btw recommending to ignore local laws and not pay tax and such seems like bad advice. If in doubt hire a lawyer
If a visitor on a Portugese IP with a Canadian credit card wants to stream my movie, is it my responsibility to uncover their identity? If I don't, under what law can I be proscuted? You say "local law", but I don't live within these places, so how can I be subject to them? How will they enforce them?
> selling an item
...
> If a visitor on a Portugese IP with a Canadian credit card wants to stream my movie, is it my responsibility to uncover their identity
IP or billing address etc. you should be able to show you do what's required to comply with local laws. When things are "not available" in some country it means the company is working through the legal system to make sure they don't violate laws.
> You say "local law", but I don't live within these places, so how can I be subject to them? How will they enforce them?
If you want me to tell you "it's OK to violate laws if I will not be punished" then nothing I say will matter. I know this attitude because I grew up in a country where many people thought that way. But if you want to do honest business and have clear conscience, yes you are still subject to local laws... it's never too late to start following them
I understand how you got there, but that's not what I meant.
I mean why would I be subject to local laws of a company I have no legal entity in and have never been to? e.g I'm not subject to Sharia law, because I don't live in a country where this is the case. Is it dishonest for me not to follow this law?
There are countries where holocaust denial is illegal. Aside from the poor taste of doing so, should I obey this law despite not being in a country with this law?
My point is that if I put something up on my web server I host in my country, it is not my responsibility to understand if the content is legal in every country in the world before doing so, despite some of them maybe having laws against it. Why do you believe this becomes my responsibility if I decide to sell the content?
Who the hell launches a brand new streaming service in 2022 without 4k or HDR support?
Even companies from outside the US go for "US first" from time to time...
Sure but it's made up of a lot of smaller parts. I guess there is some advantage in releasing to a population of 400 million mostly English speaking people first? At least for western companies, and/or at least they think so.
> I don't get why you'd limit the amount of people who can pay for your content by geographic area when there is nothing that would prevent you from releasing it to everyone.
For content at least, they normally sell the rights to other companies in those reigons. Whatever gets them the most money I guess.
For some reason the EC seems to have allowed this [1], but it seems an obvious failure to create a single market.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2015/05/17/ec-to-make-exceptions-fo...
This article is unintentional satire. It’s promoting as if there were huge steps made towards making a digital single market, but they only further codified local and fragmented digital markets, for no other reason than filmmaker profit. And fighting piracy that arises as s consequence of their failure to actually create a single market is perplexingly both in scope of, and a priority for, the commission.
Your bubble is watching USA content outside the USA and noticing it's made unavailable, but it's not like others don't region lock
I pirate all of my movies & TV because I've decided that I'm not going to play along with geo-blocking, exclusivity deals, platform fragmentation and other anti-consumer behavior.
Make it convenient for me to pay for the service and I'll gladly pay for it. The fact is that consuming content illegally can be a lot more convenient than doing it legally and this speaks volumes about the pathetic state of affairs in the industry.
You should consider that other people have different experiences before accusing them of being in a bubble
Like, my children are bilingual (italian, english), we live in Canada. One of the key things about this is being able to watch tv, read books and play videogames in native language.
It is really hard. A show is available in italy on Netflix, but in netflix canada is available in english and not italian. Disney+ has this problem with many of their classics!
Videogames are way better,this problem usually doesn't exist.
Books are the worst of all: italian companies don't sell online to non italian credit cards more often than not, if they sell at all. Buying an italian paperbook is usually challenging and of course I'd prefer paper over digital.
Just a disaster.
A little bit of extra information in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756675
Because you didn't pay for the content.
Assuming it's analogous to the Dutch law, the tax compensates lost income from you being able to store publicly broadcast copyrighted materials, such as music on the radio or movies shown on TV. That's why it is taxed on storage devices and varies per device type.
You haven't gotten a license on every piece of music, software, and movie in existence. That would be great lol, I'd sign up for that tax. Essentially, that's what Netflix was for movies until Disney etc. decided they wanted not to participate and now we wonder why piracy hasn't died
This money, instead, goes to copyright holders. The amount is set to cover minor household use, like copying from a friend or a broadcast. It's not to absolve you from copyright law as an individual altogether and make you never have to pay for a movie in your life
If that's what you want, parliament is the assembly you will want to talk to, but I'm afraid that they're bound by international treaties and, even if not, the height of the tax that absolves you of all copyright ever would be more than you're willing to pay
I'm just explaining how the law works in my understanding (and, interestingly, not getting any upvotes for it. Usually accurate comments are upvoted but then, usually, people don't disagree with the law. People don't like this messenger!), not saying I agree with it
In some sense, this is a rent extracted by large IP holders, and consumers are getting the short end of the deal just as much as the artists. But arguably it's also a bureaucracy-minimizing and thus cost-minimizing approach at country scale: the alternative to a flat fee paid by some amount of commercial entities (and passed onto buyers through prices of hardware), would likely be dealing with individual-level enforcement, lawsuits targeting individuals and/or some other high-maintenance mess, all ultimately paid for by the taxpayer anyway.
I'm in France and you do actually pay for it through this tax since all the income goes to a private company like the RIAA.
Something I've never done and will probably never do. I also don't know of anyone who ever has. The fee should completely go away in the age of streaming services, but I doubt rights holders agree.
All this to say it was normalized in the US. I don't think it is stigmatized even today. More like we had about a decade of streaming services actually providing good value. But now the product managers and UX designers have their hooks so deep in it that it's becoming unusable.
The "upside" to this is that the surrounding laws allow us to make private copies for our own private use.
Those fees are here just to compensate the fact that you COULD copy your legally owned content and that it COULD represent a loss of opportunity for the rights holders mafia (because that’s what they are). Oh, and that compensation is calculated by an organization representative of … the rights holders.
Why the hell would I pay a fee for something I might do? I mean, what? How is that a thing?
My car can go 140mph. Does that mean I should be in jail for speeding?
And now there is an intense lobbying not to change things.
Do you know whether it's the organisation representing the artists (Coda here in Denmark) or the labels/movie studios that end up being the beneficiaries of the tax?
In Sweden it's legal. "Copying for private use" is excempt, and "private use" of such copy includes in the law's own words "family and one's closest friends". Literature is treated differently, allowing only partial copying instead of the complete print.
I would be surprised if this wasn't harmonized across the Nordics, like most laws here are.
In Sweden it is not allowed.
Edit: to be clear:
In Switzerland you can download movies legally without the consent of the copyright holder. In Sweden it is illegal.
https://www.svt.se/kultur/rattsexperten-det-far-du-gora-pa-i....
Actual government-issued writs (as opposed to Googled third-party summaries):
https://www.regeringen.se/rattsliga-dokument/statens-offentliga-utredningar/2022/04/sou-202220/
https://rkrattsbaser.gov.se/sfst?bet=1960:729Please cite what exception to upphovsrättslagen that gives me the legal right to download movies online directly because I could not find the exception for personal use in the 10s of pages of law text you posted.
What you ask for is right at the start of the document in the second link.
Verket görs tillgängligt för allmänheten i följande fall:
1. När verket överförs till allmänheten. Detta sker när verket
på trådbunden eller trådlös väg görs tillgängligt för
allmänheten från en annan plats än den där allmänheten kan ta
del av verket. Överföring till allmänheten innefattar
överföring som sker på ett sådant sätt att enskilda kan få
tillgång till verket från en plats och vid en tidpunkt som de
själva väljer.
...
Framställning av exemplar för privat bruk
12 § Var och en får för privat bruk framställa ett eller några
få exemplar av offentliggjorda verk. Såvitt gäller litterära
verk i skriftlig form får exemplarframställningen dock endast
avse begränsade delar av verk eller sådana verk av begränsat
omfång. Exemplaren får inte användas för andra ändamål än
privat bruk.
The topic is piracy, not right clicking and downloading from your browser.
We can argue whether that's fair and appropriate, and I suspect we share an opinion there, but saying that never paying any artist in the world is fine because your local copyright authority was paid... that's quite dubious
A lot of what is being downloaded has already been broadcasted.
I suspect it'll amount to at least 50€/month (multiply by how many storage devices you buy on average per month) if the tax were supposed to cover all music and movies ever made, let alone software and other copyrighted works
Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go? I recall the pirate bay's domain was taken at some point and the hosting raided, despite not even hosting any copyrighted content but rather facilitating copyright infringement for the masses, so I presume copyright for individuals is still a thing there
Yes, a handful of times. It almost always ends bad for the pirate, because sharing like that is not private copying for private use.
I still buy albums on Bandcamp because they deserve it, but the rest is free as I already paid for it without my consent.
When it comes to series though;
They are either not available anywhere legally, not in my region, only available with some streaming service subscription were the rest of the catalog doesn't interest me. Disappear from the catalog etc. etc. etc.
I might've downloaded series because of it.
Give me a service were I can legally download .mkv files and I certainly will pay for it. Right now illegally downloading it is just far superior.
If there was a movie service that offered simply a paid download where I could browse a list of all movies ever made, buy a single file (let's say MKV) that contained the movie, my choice of audio stream(s), my choice of subs, that could be downloaded once and played any number of times, in any region, on any hardware, running any software, then you have my business! Figure that out, and then we can talk about price. Bandcamp mostly figured this out for music (except for the "all music ever made" part). How is it so hard for movies?
Also really tired of hearing the vague "licensing" excuses, too. "Oh, we can't do that because licenses!" This is an industry self-inflicted wound--one that they could fix if they really thought it was important.
Streaming services have crippled themselves (collectively) by hoarding content; you now need to sign up for several if you want access to everything.
And pay-per-movie (eg itunes) is just ridiculously expensive, $10/movie, that's a whole day's salary in poorer countries.
The industry needs to stop bleating about ordinary people 'stealing' from them, and come up with better business models/practices that match what people are willing to pay.
In the end it is less unfair to just download the movie you already paid for.
Distribution costs are a thing also via the Internet, so while they're close to zero per movie it still makes sense to have to pay. However, there is no mechanism to prove you have a license, so in that sense I see your point
Cost for single download of a movie now is going to be in fraction of a penny level of cost probably.
Then again, we might already have that. I vaguely remember talk about the fact that it is legal in Denmark to fetch a copy of movies and software you already bought.
That's if you can find a place where you can actually get it. As an example, a few years ago a study showed that Denmark had the second most expensive Netflix subscriptions, yet was second to last in the content available
Then there's a whole issue of localisation. Many of my foreign friends have had to ask for refunds when renting movies, because only Nordic subtitles were available for them
Piracy is simply easier and more reliable for a lot of people. Especially if you understand a little bit of tech and can setup Sonarr, Radarr, and Jellyfin
I was going to say I thought it sounds cheap, but when doing the calculations it turns out it has actually increased in price quite a lot.
If you're asking the millennial generation however, the numbers should be near 100%.
Reminds me of the time the prime minister of Sweden on TV said "well we can't prosecute an entire generation" when he was asked about his stance towards illegal downloading, about 16-20 years ago, when there was not a single soul among the youngs that hadn't downloaded (or watch someone else download for them) movie/music illegally.
Hell, most people bought a PC/connected to internet specifically to download illegally. Internet didn't have much else to offer to the non-techy person, except Wikipedia for cheating on home assignments
Why?
Because music doesn't do that much exclusives, so you can just choose a platform and you're ok. Whereas movies and tv shows are ALL exclusives now, so you have to subscribe to multiple places. It wasn't always like this as you remember, and that's why piracy died for a time.. you could just have one streaming service, and you're good.
But people got greedy. They saw what Netflix had, and wanted it for themselves.. not realizing what that would mean
The problem is -- from the content companies' point of view -- that if there is one streaming service and multiple content creators then the steaming service will make the lion's share of the money.
So the big content companies all want to have their own streaming service.
This of course drives people back to the pirates.
With TV and movies it’s highly fragmented. So I think people just don’t sign up to certain services, chop and change services, or resort to piracy. Or possibly the younger generations put the time into YouTube & TikTok.
When I explain to them how piracy works now, how automated and easy it's become to use (setup is another thing), they are shocked. Basically piracy took a kind of microservice approach, where one app does downloading, and another set of apps (each specific to a type of media) handle finding that specific thing, sending it to the download client, and then moving, renaming, when it's done. All you do is use an app of your choice to say I want this, and everything else goes to work .. then when you want to watch it, its streamed wherever you want by another app of your choice.
Sounds difficult but the actual use of it is very very simple. Gone is the manual searching, moving, checking, etc... Heck I don't even manually find and fix subtitles anymore.
The UX in streaming services gets worse with every update, to say nothing of the constant catalog changes. I do want to dip my toes back into the piracy world. What makes me nervous is how to remain anonymous. I know a few people who got hit with torrent warnings. Is it all still newsgroups? What's the state of the art in home piracy setups now?
But there is something you touched on, how the UX gets worse... The UX of piracy keeps getting better.
Also, side note... Why can't streaming services just have ALL the subtitle languages? You can get around this with a VPN, so they have the license... Why not just let us chose? Why have only a couple languages to chose from at best.
And for bad quality yeah shady basic web streaming sites exists though. Keep in mind they are packed with unstoppable video ads and malware js though. I don't poke them with a 10 foot pole usually.
I sub to Apple TV btw. Some originals are very good. UX works for me.
Any VPN service will be sufficient to cover your tracks and avoid those warnings, e.g. Mullvad.
Once Internet advertising made marketing campaigns international, this suddenly ran into problems. Australia - usually amongst the last English-speaking countries to see Hollywood films - suddenly saw what Americans were seeing, and what they wouldn't see for the best part of a year. Many films went to DVD in America - and therefore the piracy networks - before getting to Australian cinemas.
This specific problem has been solved now that films are distributed on optical media and hard disk drives, but torrenting remains very popular in Australia.
When we talk of protecting copyright holders, the film studios are often blamed. However, this distribution system was set up by a network of separate distribution companies. A century ago, they provided the solution to a genuine logistical problem; now, they seek rent for solving a problem that no longer exists.
People seem to be united in their condemnation of wage theft where businesses don't pay their workers properly. And most people think restaurants should pay their waiters properly instead of relying on tips. I just think it's really analogous that if an artist makes some content then you should pay them for it.
(And don't complain to me about the corrupt film or music industry. It's a simple moral choice by the individual)
For example, early 2000 you couldn't (even if you wanted to pay) get access to Japanese Anime. And even if you did pay to get access (satellite TV) they didn't have subtitles so you couldn't really watch it. So fan-made subtitle and fan-supported illegal sites was your only option outside Japan. (except for a handful of shows)
It would've all been solved if the close-minded Japanese publisher cared to put some effort to make it available globally but they didn't.
And hence there wasn't really ANY money lost in the process, because they didn't even sell it to the people outside Japan downloading it.
One can even argue (but publisher will fanatically oppose you) that illegal downloading did lead to profit; anime was a subculture outside Japan that is now a global money making industry. It didn't just randomly out of nowhere spur because "industry finally acted" but because it already had a strong following that amplified it as soon as it got available on major platforms.
Putting all illegal download under one umbrella and judging it in a moral white/black, is a narrow view.
Sometimes the only way for an individual to access some content is for them to steal that content. And that person can choose to steal or not watch the content.
How is that not a simple black and white moral choice.
You have no right to see something just because you really really want to.
How's that white horse treating you?
I would not mind, and do not mind, other people using my work, that's why I have a bunch of open source work.
You can bet you ass that if I were touring the world giving sold-out concerts to 50k people at $200/ticket, 4 times a day, 4 days a week, I would not care if some bunch of random teenagers -that would have never paid for my music in the first place- download it off some torrent site.
They now know I exist, and if they're still fans when they grow older, they might come by and pay $200 to see me when I'm doing my 'legacy' tour in 30 years (hello Maroon 5).
If you do have the money, and you don't pay for the music, that's just sad, so now I've been a happy Spotify subscriber for years (and Apple Music, and Amazon Prime :eyeroll:).
I have no problems screwing over the middlemen By vast majority they are shitty, predatory companies that abuse the position that they're in to screw over both consumers and creators, and probably avoid taxes too. But I'd rather pay people that actually made the stuff I enjoy because I want more of it.
> You can bet you ass that if I were touring the world giving sold-out concerts to 50k people at $200/ticket, 4 times a day, 4 days a week, I would not care if some bunch of random teenagers -that would have never paid for my music in the first place- download it off some torrent site.
That only because the losses are insignificant if you have enough money to not worry about money. It's different thing for smaller creators.
Not paying taxes is wrong and theft. Peoples willingness to pay taxes depend on how much trust they have in government. A government that is general corrupt, do not represent the people, will result in people seeing tax collecting as wrong and theft. Not paying taxes is thus morally right and the self defense. The whole definition of right and wrong, theft, morality in general, depend on trust and the social constructs. One can not discuss morality of choice without talking about morality,
Viewing theft from a grocery shop as morally good necessitate that a person view the existence of the shop to exist outside of the social bonds and constructs of society. A modern approach to crime reduction is to increase the social support and social connections for people in high crime areas (the social part of social economic status). As is often found, harsher punishment for crime do not often reduce crime, which is partially explained by the social economic status model.
Viewing copyright violations are morally good only necessitate that a person view the current implementation of copyright to exist outside of the social bonds and constructs of society. I see maximalists of copyright as to be extremists that lives way outside of social norms. That those maximalists happen to have deep enough pockets to bribe politicians, and politicians are morally bankrupt to accept the bribes, is just that. Somewhat it is actually a simple moral choice, and those choices were wrong and made by people who should have known better.
The longer and more complex answer is to raise people to respect of copyright law. What should society expect in return for giving individuals and companies a time limited monopoly? A mandatory license given to libraries would be appreciated symbolic gesture. Different categories could also have longer or shorter duration depending on that markets needs and requirements, and government could measure the market impact that such time limited monopoly has and see if the benefits of market intervention is greater than the drawbacks (just like any other market regulation). Marketed products towards children and young adults could get additional regulated in order to reduce the differences in access to culture between the poor and rich.
Such changes are however extremely unlikely to happen due to extensive overlapping international agreements that has cemented the long copyright terms of 75+ years after the author death.
And how do you feel about this conversation? Are your words influencing me to perhaps walk back from my stance of, "Don't watch if you don't pay"? Are you causing potential harm to the content creators if you convince me?
And how do you know that you wouldn't pay for the content in the future?
Like take Northern Exposure, a huge hit TV show in the early 90's. It's not available anywhere except out of print DVDs because it features a lot of music, and the license for that music needs to be renegotiated. So it's lost to time basically. This is just one example, there's countless others.
Not to mention all the older films/tv shows that no streaming company wants because they don't think it would attract anyone.
Piracy is actually keeping this content alive... It's nuts.
In the meantime, I just paid 200€ in sales taxes to Universal/Disney for my ssd where I only store VM images.
If I get bored before this sting less (unlikely, but still), I'll just pay 10 euros/month to set up a seedbox with real storage and write an interface for my family to use it at will, by pure pettiness.
Tbh it's often easier to find what you want in pirated form than streaming. Your services might have taken off the thing you want to watch, or you might not have the service that has the thing you want.
Downloaded a movie that's not available to buy anywhere via P2P? That will be $10.000.000 due to lost potential revenue. Seems fair.
I'll go spend my time and money on industry or products that don't actively hate their customers.