'Terminating Internet Access over Piracy Claims Is Drastic and Overbroad'
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
It's so exhausting that we don't just commit to net neutrality. It's the obvious logistical answer to this with direct comparisons in telephone service. Should have been settled years ago, but for some reason were letting the corporate copyright class spend money to slow it down.
Realistically every time you see someone lamenting that telecoms aren't dropping scam callers and texts and policing that better, you're seeing an advocation against net/carrier neutrality.
I agree based on the strict definition of net neutrality but disagree based on implementation in practice. Spam can be made an exception to net neutrality laws.
I do think that phone service providers and internet service providers should be common carriers, but letting phone service providers drop spam callers is socially compatible with banning service providers from dropping calls from my hypothetical family member who is a terrorist on death row: some kinds of calls - such as phone calls from family members, work colleagues/managers, friends once removed, etc. - are the kinds of calls which people tacitly mutually agree to receive. I would want phone service providers to turn a blind eye to calls between people with a social relation. Spam calls, on the other hand, are unsolicited calls usually from strangers with no social relation to the receiver. (How to identify spam is a different question, but I'm only arguing about the motivating principles.) The same applies to fraud, which some spam is (your car's extended warranty, etc.).
With internet websites, the user usually wants the traffic they request from the website. So ISPs should not be allowed to voluntarily restrict such traffic, and government bodies should be prohibited (with very narrow exceptions) from making ISPs restrict traffic. Where government bodies could instead put penalties on users and website owners, governments should not also target ISPs. (Privacy-violating third-party elements such as ads are not always wanted by the user, but that can be solved with privacy laws rather than exceptions to common carrier laws.)
Sure, spam can be an exception. And so can fraud, and terrorism. And then so can piracy, and porn, and drug content. And once we're back into the exceptions for "immoral" content, the world is our oyster and nothing is off limits for the sake of the children.
For any neutrality to work it must be completely neutral with respect to 100% of content. If providers are not to be involved in regulating the content that goes over the wires they provide, that must be held to the furthest extent possible. Spam, piracy and everything else that society decides it doesn't like MUST be dealt with another way that is entirely divorced from requiring or allowing providers to get in the middle of it. Anything else isn't neutrality, it's just conveniently aligned with your current interests, which may or may not be a stable situation.
In this comment, when I say "net neutrality", I am referring to internet service providers, and internet service provided over cellular service but not the other aspects of phone service. I think that net neutrality should have a few specific exceptions, but spam is not one of them.
With the two exceptions I'll mention later, governments should not restrict access to websites if users request the content (most website visits).
Terrorism, piracy, porn, drug, and non-malware spam websites fall under this category for adults. (Children are a separate matter, but parents and caretakers bear the responsibility of managing childrens' internet and phone usage.) Porn is off-limits to government restrictions due to the First Amendment. In the cases of piracy, terrorism, illegal drugs, and non-malware spam, governments can target the website operators for their crimes (not for their websites, excepting CSAM) and shut down the websites directly without asking ISPs to do anything other than provide information in response to court orders. I'm not sure how to categorize fraud websites, but non-malware fraud can be corrected after the government deals with the fraudsters, so I'll lump non-malware fraud with these previous kinds of content. My model of net neutrality is that ISPs can look at the content, but they must turn a blind eye to the previously listed categories. Which data ISPs can collect, retain, and share with the government is something for privacy laws to decide. (No sharing with non-governmental parties.)
So governments should not be allowed to pressure ISPs to restrict traffic nor force ISPs to even identify it, except if the traffic in question goes to/from a website that spreads CSAM or tries to visitors' computers with malware. CSAM is firmly outside of the First Amendment (while terrorism-related speech is ambiguous in legality), and malware is much more time-sensitive than the above kinds of content. Governments should be able to force ISPs to report identified CSAM. Malware, I'm leaning toward otherwise because I don't know whether the federal government would bother telling affected citizens about it.
Regarding phone carriers:
Websites receive automatically and are quiet unless configured to be otherwise. The user requests a webpage, and the server sends it. Unlike websites, phone calls interrupt the receivers and force the receiver to check the caller. Spam calls are intrusive in a way that doesn't apply to spam websites, so I'm okay with government regulations of spam calls where I'm not okay with comparable regulations of spam websites.
My ideal would be for phone carriers to do block spam calls voluntarily, but that hasn't worked out so far. So my idea is to force phone carriers to identify spam numbers (of both spam callers and spam texters) and to give users the option to delegate blocking of spam numbers to the phone carrier. If the user doesn't want the carrier to block spam, then that's that, though the user can still rely on third-party spam services such as Google's.
On the other hand, I believe that the principle of net neutrality should extend to US governments: for the most part, governments should not be allowed to restrict internet traffic or internet access.
1. Internet traffic is speech and expression. The First Amendment makes freedom of expression the default.
2. Internet access is increasingly necessary for work, school, politics beyond a local level, and getting internet access. See appendix A for bonus information.
3. Internet users and websites usually are the people who decide what traffic the users see, government interventions over the content (regarding such as CSAM and copyright infringement) should directly sue users and website owners (and not ISPs), because lawsuits to ISPs rather than to ISP users are less visible to those users and therefore less likely to attract the users' opposition.
4. Letting a government block internet access even for a reason like copyright infringement is a slippery slope toward willful blindness to false positives and excessive punishments. See appendix C for bonus info.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
Everything below this line is bonus.
Appendix A: Regarding my earlier claim that Internet access is "increasingly necessary": Seeking a sufficiently paying job, never mind working, is hard without internet. Students need internet to get emails, use online learning management systems, collaborate, video call, etc. Fact checking what you read/hear offline or see/hear via internet-less TV about politics beyond a local level is impossible. (Asking a friend to do it for you on the internet is not allowed in this thought experiment.) Getting internet access requires contacting an ISP in the first place, and getting the phone number without visiting the ISPs website is hard without internet.
Appendix B: The net neutrality debate in 2017 was actually a debate about the FCC's entire authority to protect consumers in the internet access market [B1].
> A big part of the FCC’s plan involves rolling back the FCC’s tailor-made authority over broadband providers, then shoveling all remaining government oversight to an FTC ill-equipped to handle it.
> Why is that a problem? The FTC has no rule-making ability, and can only move to protect consumers after a violation has occurred. And that action can only occur if it’s painfully clear that an ISP engaged in “unfair and deceptive” behavior, something that’s easy for an ISP to dodge in the net neutrality era, where anti-competitive behavior is often buried under faux-technical jargon and claims that it was done only for the health and safety of the network.
And let's be clear, internet access remains mostly the same since 2017 (deceptively priced, overpriced, slow, not fiber, data capped, not available in rural places) because states passed net neutrality laws [B2].
[B1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/yw5d5g/net-neutrality-big-te...
[B2] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/01/28/courts-again-shoot-down-...
Appendix C: Orrin Hatch wants to destroy the computers of people who commit copyright infringement [C1]. (I kept the Wikipedia bracket citations in the quote so that you can control-F for each paragraph in the original article.)
> Hatch was long a proponent of expanding intellectual property rights and in 1997 introduced the Senate version of the Copyright Term Extension Act.[89] Hatch believed that intellectual property laws should, in general, more closely mirror real property laws, and offer greater protections to authors and creators.[89]
> Hatch caused an overnight controversy on June 17, 2003, by proposing that copyright owners should be able to destroy the computer equipment and information of those suspected of copyright infringement, including file sharing, he stated that "This may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights."[90] In the face of criticism, especially from technology and privacy advocates, Hatch withdrew his suggestion days later, after it was discovered that Sen. Hatch's official website was using an unlicensed JavaScript menu from United Kingdom-based software developer Milonic Solutions. Milonic founder Andy Woolley stated that "We've had no contact with them. They are in breach of our licensing terms." Shortly after the publication of that story in Wired magazine, the company that runs Hatch's website contacted Milonic to start registration.
[C1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_prope...
My hunch is that these accounts would be exempt from certain actions compared to residential accounts.
You might even have crappy situations due to people not understanding what they are buying (or other weird reasons) where 2 ISPs share 1 LEC circuit, e.g. a single physical fiber line.
But anyway, a provider cutting you off permanently is more than an outage. You need to get another ISP.
I haven’t specifically looked into internet but I’d be surprised if they were unable to provide care with a down internet connection.
Imagine a similar scenario but it involved the power being cut, or the water?
Sure hospitals have backup generators that doesn't mean that they should be used for instances like this.
Hospitals can work without water, electricity and sewage ... but not without internet. Well, it's possible, but at 50% or so capacity (and I'm sure that number is going up)
A hospital filled up assuming 100% capacity that falls back to 50% capacity, however is going to be VERY tough to keep running for the doctors.
Perhaps I’m biased in this regard, not really sure how the law shakes out. I will say that Grande was an amazing ISP. I had them for probably 8 years before I moved out of Texas, and my boss for several years was a former Grande employee. Everyone had great things to say about them. One time, our internet went down during a historic flood, and they ended up flying a fiber line across the flooded river using a drone to get service back to everyone. It was entertaining to follow that.
I’ve heard they’re owned by someone new now; not sure if they’re still good.
Governments and private individuals already produce plenty of news without relying on income from copyright. The BBC is publicly funded.
Would you also complain that someone doesn’t understand bombmaking because they aren’t using it for their livelihood?
“Because I think people should work for free to entertain me”
People pirate because they want content that other people produced with the expectation of getting paid.
People like getting paid for their work. I suspect you do, too, but you think that people who do creative work don’t deserve to be paid because you are the consumer.
For movies: here is one (a Megaman fan film):
> http://bluecorestudios.com/videos/?watch=videos_10_megaman-f...
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcLqmH77g_s
See also https://megaman.fandom.com/wiki/Mega_Man_(Fan_Film)
It’s fascinating to see people in this thread pretend like art exists in a vacuum and act like the people who created it shouldn’t be involved in the equation at all.
Something tells me those same people would get very upset if we suggested their own work, code, or labor should be freely used by anyone who wanted to, including their employer. I’m guessing they like to be paid for their work. They just don’t like paying other people for their work.
> Should we fully subsidsize anyone who calls themselves an artist?
Why are you trying to talk about subsidies and how people identify?
You’re throwing out straw man arguments to try to distract from the real point: People get to decide how much to charge for their work. If you don’t want to pay that amount, you are not entitled to receive it for free.
The way some people are pretending like they have a moral entitlement to the labor of other people in this thread is wild.
> Something tells me those same people would get very upset if we suggested their own work, code, or labor should be freely used by anyone who wanted to, including their employer. I’m guessing they like to be paid for their work
For the record, I think it should work like this: I'm an artist. You want art from me. You tell me what you want, I create it, you pay me. This is straightforward and obvious.
> People get to decide how much to charge for their work. If you don’t want to pay that amount, you are not entitled to receive it for free.
It costs many dollars to make copy 1 of Y. You worked, you should get paid for copy 1.
It costs 0 dollars to make copy 2 of something. Anything you think you should receive above 0 for copy 2 is only justifiable with moral entitlements to the money of other people.
Yet another strawman! Nobody demanded ownership forever, but some form of compensation for things you enjoy.
> For the record, I think it should work like this: I'm an artist. You want art from me. You tell me what you want, I create it, you pay me. This is straightforward and obvious.
What you describe isn't art, but the service of creating an artwork on demand as a service.
> It costs many dollars to make copy 1 of Y. You worked, you should get paid for copy 1.
If we were doing that, society would be at a net loss, because pretty much nobody was able to pay the cost for an artwork upfront - a single movie costs up to several hundred millions of dollars to manufacture. This leads to a world where most media simply wouldn't exist. I doubt that's the one you'd prefer living in.
Instead, by spreading this amount over consumers, we can have accessible content for most people, and a way for artists to make a living from creating artworks as a service.
> What you describe isn't art, but the service of creating an artwork on demand as a service.
Not a strawman (and also relevant to copyrightable art) while copyright is able to used to enforce royalties. Fair compensation is 1 work = 1 payment, not 1 work = pay over 100+ years.
(Related aside: Private entities have the right to enter into contracts they wish (e.g. if you personally want to pay an artist over and over during your lifetime, fine), but when it seeps into law that enables third parties to sue, then it is no longer a private matter.)
> If we were doing that, society would be at a net loss,
> Instead, by spreading this amount over consumers, we can have accessible content for most people
Mass media dilutes art, makes it impersonal, limits attention span by encouraging a "fad/fashion" approach to creative works, and forces art to be subservient to things like advertising. You sure it wouldn't be a net gain?
It does make artists lives more difficult, but things that are more important to society are difficult as well, such as being a doctor, so ... no sympathy.
For things requiring lots of research and development, I think some mechanism should exist to document and extend the period, or "pay per year" scheme, but no longer than 30 years.
Pure straw man argument.
Nobody is talking about “automatic compensation”. Nobody is getting paid for putting “one make on a paper” if nobody wants to buy it.
People get to price their works. If you don’t like the price or don’t think it’s worth it, you don’t pay for it. Nobody gets “automatic compensation” if nobody wants to buy their work. These are such obvious ground truths that you’re ignoring for the sake of trying to make a strained point.
Sorry, you’re not entitled to the output of other people’s labor for free, just like I’m not entitled to the output of your labor for free.
Lots of drugs cost little to manufacture but lots to develop. Ideally the costs for robust research and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals would be shared by all people equally because we all benefit from improving the human condition... But they're not. And since pharmaceutical companies can't just blow a whole bunch of money on research for things that will bring them no money, they charge enough for the pill to make their money back, and unfortunately, usually, far beyond that until it's able to be made generically. I believe that windfall profits from prices that keep people from treatment are wrong. But allowing everyone to make new drugs developed by other pharmaceutical companies to sell at generic prices would just mean those companies wouldn't research new drugs... Win? Not without a way in-place to replace that research. And anyone considering some glib argument questioning the value of new drugs, you're full of shit. Not every new drug is a Viagra knock-off.
Lots of people in the tech crowd have adopted this convenient romantic notion that real art must be non-commercial, and that all real art is made by people toiling in obscurity, driven solely by the need for self-expression and the distant hope that they'll someday be discovered, become famous, and have their name in art history books... Or even that hobby art could replace professional art. That, of course, is complete bullshit. Art is no different than any other intellectual pursuit and equating VFX artists for AAA game titles and professional session musicians to weekend basement studio oil painters and people with hobby bands is like equating immigration attorneys writing depositions and technical writers to people who are serious about their personal fanfic blogs.
Saying we need to abolish copyright means the things that are copyrighted have enough value to want; demanding we do that without first demanding an alternate way to support people who do intellectual work is a self-absorbed demand for free stuff. Saying they should get another job and continue to produce that valuable work for free— like a public slave in ancient Rome— is not an answer any ethical adult could entertain in good faith.
Copyright (and patents) are a limited monopoly granted by the state, thus they are inherently immoral, as everything that any government does, as they do that by the use of force.
Other way to look at it is that ideas are not scarce at all and it's copyright/patents/the government that creates scarcity where there's abundance.
In contrast, perhaps the average videogame might need only five years of copyright to sufficiently incentivize their production. Hypothetically. In such a scenario, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, so we need a different system than just a flat copyright duration.
[1] https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fable...
I'd also say that durations should be shorter than the original terms, due to the much higher volume of works produced today and greater accessibility of those tools. 5-10 from publication at the most.
After all, a massive supply of something with a relatively static demand simply means it has a lower value than it once did.
Same for movies. It's going to be slim pickings when only people who can afford to and desire to make movies to give away for free actually make movies.
I give away my stuff for free online, but do sell paper copies of books for profit. (People can print their own personal copies cheaper if they want.)
That said, I'd be FUCKING PISSED OFF if other people who did nothing were making all the money off my stuff and I were making nothing. Because that's some unjust bullshit right there.
I think the copyright term should be dropped to 14 years plus an optional one-time 14-year renewal. Or, to simplify the paperwork, just a single 28-year term. I'd also support no corporate ownership of copyrights, but I haven't thought that through yet.
And without refund.
The studios can so easily kill all piracy, and they just about did it with Spotify and Netflix. But no, the greed made them split up into a dozen different services nobody wants, and here we are again.
I don't disagree about the greed part, but I guess fragmentation is almost inevitable until the profit margin is driven down to near zero. Shortsighted, probably, but it would essentially require all the producers to back (and therefore yield profit to), one or two Netflix/Spotify type entities.
The fact that there are penalties for stealing physical goods does not imply that just any penalty is fine. The analogy doesn’t work. Removal of Internet access in 2023 is debilitating. Punishments are supposed to fit the crime, and the complete loss of access to what has become a fundamental point of access does not fit the crime.
And there’s also the very old arguments that I won’t rehash here about the clear difference between digital copies of content and physical items.
There is zero difference between a digital and physical item if you are the producer. A digital good has the cost of production front loaded, it just has next to zero marginal cost. That may be the cost of education and experience, for example. If you make something of value, you absolutely have the right to choose how you are rewarded - if the buyer decides that choice isn't right for them, you can either change the offer or you look for your next customer. You may choose to give it away, if your reward is the satisfaction of someone using it, but that is your choice, not the consumer's.
There's absolutely a difference. If you produce a physical good, and somebody takes it, you no longer have it. If you produce a digital good and somebody copies it, you still have the original, you're still free to use and enjoy it as you see fit.
Fundamentally property rights are a negative right: you have the right not to have your stuff taken. Negative rights don't conflict with eachother, that's why they make a good basis for society. Intellectual property is a positive right: you have the right to control how other people use their property, which conflicts with people's right to use their property as they see fit.
You can absolutely argue that IP law is cynically applied, but in principle it protects high capital and low operating expense businesses from those who would like to do the low operating expense part without bothering about the high capital part.
We need to collectively stop using these kinds of physical goods analogies in discussions about piracy. To claim that there is no difference is a fundamental miscalculation.
To be clear, I do not condone piracy. I purchase the content that I view. But these kinds of fallacious analogies are misleading and dangerous to Internet freedom.
Fundamentally, it's the same problem - producers have to adjust their prices to reflect the threat to their income. If I produce something, and I forecast X% of my overall market to be stolen, I have to adjust my selling price according. It doesn't matter if that something is physical or digital.
If I produce something that is digital I have the luxury of being able to reduce the cost as low as I like to capture as much value as I can, but that is still my choice as the producer.
The bottom line is it there is a lot of nuance here, and simple analogies that make one act appear to be the same as the other lead to some reductionist conclusions that have been repeatedly taken up by lawmakers who do not understand these nuances.
-[0] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-downloading-ethics-digital-pir...
I’ve been transitioning away from a career in tech into creating educational content for a niche I love, and I’m sensitive to the need for recourse. At the same time, I think I’m far less likely as an individual creator to have much recourse because I don’t have a team of lawyers.
This is the other aspect of these piracy discussions that always bothers me. It’s really the behemoths vs. individuals, which to me points at very misaligned thinking when it comes to the resulting policy/laws.
Digital goods have far more legal protection against this than physical ones.
They are not the same.
Perhaps similarly, people convicted of internet piracy could be required to operate with their torrent ports blocked, or with some sort of nanny state spyware installed on their devices.
I think it’s extremely problematic to compare piracy to drunk driving, and to model a punishment for piracy on the punishment for drunk driving for the reasons stated above.
I'm not trying to take a position on this either way, but within the context of 'internet piracy causes some sort of damage' I don't think the comparison is particularly problematic.
My point was that comparing this to a crime that kills people by the tens of thousands every year seems very stretched.
So we need a pirate registry? And if you're convicted of 'internet piracy' (a term that is an excellent example of propaganda) then you forfeit any rights you have protecting your privacy and shielding you from warrantless government searches. Doesn't sound like an appropriate punishment for the offense to me.
Precisely. You can't just take stuff people made at cost, that's violating copyright! You need to instead be a megacorporation that competes so brutally on intermediating yourself in the pipe that profit is driven towards zero, so you can't afford to pay any artists!
That's the legal way to screw over creators.
If everyone is doing it then it does seem pretty normalized, but if everyone is doing it then your presumption as to society's values seems flawed.
In reality these media producers seem to be making healthy profits so perhaps internet piracy is not as normalized as you think.
There is no scarcity in digital media. Supply and demand will inevitably drive down the price to near zero.
Look at how much control media companies have exerted over pretty much everything. Look at all the anti-piracy stuff with HDCP, or the DRM stuff in browsers, and how some services don't allow you to watch high-definition streams with some browsers. And unskippable ads on DVDs, ultimately enforced by the movie industry.
Also, look at how music files are treated so differently from regular files on iOS. And copyright strikes and demonetization on youtube and others, the Sony rootkit scandal, the list goes on.
These people have inserted themselves into every aspect of our digital lives, and (along with advertisers) basically ruin everything or at least make everything more complicated just to protect their revenue streams.
Edit: Wait, a decade is only 2013? How did that happen. Make that two decades.
Don't get me wrong, copyright enforcement has degraded many things, but the old internet wouldn't be significantly different today if all other variables remained static.
https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
Though I haven't really bothered joining a larger network yet.
1) Copyrights can only be owned by natural persons and can not be transferred. They can be licensed, but the physical creator of a work always owns the copyright. Disney can't own copyright, only it's artists and animators. They have to negotiate a license to distribute with everyone. The idea here is that if an idea continues to have value for a company, then it continues to have value to the person who created it. And if Disney or whoever decides that something isn't worth having anymore, the creators are free to go out and find someone who does value it.
Immediate concern here is how messy this gets deciding what anyone actually owns. Do animators own the copyright to a character jointly? Separately? Do they only own the copyrights to their specific drawings and a character is then inherently uncopyrightable? Joint ownership seems obvious, but then how is that any better for the individuals than Disney having exclusive ownership? It only takes one to prevent you from making money on your work. Separate but equal ownership seems interesting, but how much do you have to contribute to get that? Does everyone who ever drew a sketch for Lilo and Stitch now own the IP rights to the entire character? Likewise how would you keep licensing agreements from looking like convoluted versions of modern copyright anyway? I guess that's more on the unions and guilds but if every employee signs a 200 year exclusive license, that's not any different from what we have today really.
2) Trademarks can not be sold. A trademark's purpose is to assure a buyer of the source of a given good. The whole reason we protect them is because if I buy a product with Apple's branding on it, I want to know I got it from Apple, not from "Bob's Fancy Electronics Shack and Bait Shop". Problem is, if you can sell a trademark, you've changed who is actually the source of the good, but the consumer may not know that. Food items make a good example here. "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" might be a small company, but when Kraft buys them out, it's not Uncle Roger who's selling it anymore, it's Kraft. And Kraft may change that recipe, or otherwise make decisions that Uncle Roger wouldn't. A consumer should know it's no longer "Uncle Roger's Superior MSG" they're buying, it's now "Kraft MSG" and while it might be based on Uncle Roger's recipe, it's not from Uncle Roger and Kraft should have to rebrand it and fight for brand reputation all over again. Zombie brands are another example of this. Whoever is making Craftsman tools isn't Sears and Roebuck anymore, and they're not the same, and shouldn't be sold as the same.
Again there are some immediate concerns that come to mind. Part of the value of buying a company is that trademarks carry the reputation of the company. Distinguishing between a change of owners as part of the course of business and a change of owners as in a sale of the whole company is also difficult. I don't think if "Uncle Roger" and "Auntie Helen" split and the 50/50 ownership structure becomes 100% ownership, does that require a rebrand? Probably not, but then what are the limits of this? If Kraft sells Uncle Roger a 0.0001% ownership in Kraft, does that also mean there's no need to rebrand?
It never was. Sears, even many decades ago, always contracted other vendors to make their products, just like Costco does with their house brand now. The product numbers even used the first three digits to identify the vendor.
A Kenmore appliance would be made by Whirlpool, Maytag, LG, Samsung, whatever. It would be a distinct product, with its own exterior design and feature set (rather than just changing a logo). It definitely was worth finding out who made which, to favor manufacturers like LG over Whirlpool.
Craftsman was made by the Stanley/Black&Decker/DeWalt corporation for a long time before they finally bought the brand during the final Sears collapse a few years ago.
Here's the prefix list for appliances, but there are larger ones for all products: https://www.applianceaid.com/sears-manufacturing-codes.php
I recall seeing references to companies like "Tandy" for some electronic products, which should indicate that this practice goes back well into the 70s and 80s...
This is, as I understand your idea, the situation that actually exists in Germany in the Urheberrecht. Here, two concepts exists:
- Urheberschaft (authorship): the property of being the author and be attributed as such; cannot be sold.
- Nutzungsrechte (usage rights): these can be sold
Piracy was naturally on a decline as streaming seemed to be settling on Netflix + a couple premium/niche providers, in much the way that mainstream music piracy is largely dead today. Now, it's on the rise again as people are tired of being nickel and dimed by Peacock, AMC, Max, Disney+, Prime, Netflix, Hulu, ESPN+, Fubu, CBS All-Access, etc.
Piracy is not theft.
Piracy is when I walk out of a store with 8 apples and the store has 0 fewer apples.
They are mathematically different concepts.
Dystopian ideas such as ownership of ideas should not be tolerated.
Piracy laws aside, I don't see why BT counting as uploading is ridiculous; you are aiding in the distribution of the content just as much as if you had setup a public FTP server with the content on it.