The rise and fall of a Halifax man's illegal TV streaming empire
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
I'm not saying this guy is in the right. But neither is Disney or the motion picture association. Lots of wrongs adding up here.
And the store is price fixing with nearby stores.
I think theres a difference between opportunistic crime, and reasonably upstanding people being utterly frustrated with a market status quo.
If course there is a ton of piracy that is just straight up theft from perfectly convenient platforms, but the unacceptable, anticompetitive commercial platforms are the core that keeps the community going, I think.
With physical goods, if the store is utterly terrible, at the very worst someone can buy and resell the product at a nicer store. Intellectual property you are not allowed to do that. Everything is a vertically integrated monopoly.
The evidence says that piracy actually increases the value of the original as pirates spend more money on the media than they would without the piracy option
I don't agree. For many people, it's the only way to access TV. Wide access to broadcast media is a basic right, not a luxury. Some would say (me, for example) that it's neccesary for the proper functioning of civic society.
Meanwhile I note that free-to-air TV has been in decline for over a decade, at least in the UK. Cable and satellite services have been stealing the broadcasters' lunch. BBC News has an ever-shrinking circle of reporters (which they nowadays refer to as "editors").
I have no use for a streaming "package"; I don't watch sports and athletics, vintage sitcoms or new-release movies. I have a Sky dish and DVR, with the basic package. I gather Sky want to move me over to streaming, which would mean I'd have to upgrade my internet service.
Which seems like a very strong claim.
If anything I'm half-expecting the UK to start taxing individual creators who livestream on Twitch or YouTube (or perhaps to tax the platforms, or require the viewers to have a TV licence). That would indeed be egregious.
Do you not think that's true? Why do people steal merchandise and sell it on the corner?
You see an almost identical argument all the time wrt cigarette taxes - even though cigarette buyers have inelastic demand, there's a limit to how high you can raise the taxes, because eventually everyone will be buying smuggled cigarettes.
Whether he is in the right or not is decided in a court of law. However Disney et al have deeper pocketed lobbyists than municipal taxi companies.
There will always be a type of entrepreneur who flouts laws they don’t agree with, whether it’s copyright law or taxi regulations or whatever. The enforcement of those laws ultimately determines what the market looks like after the fact.
Legally, sure.
Disney is an awful company and anything people do that hurts their bottom line is morally right though.
Copyright law is BS and Disney is solely responsible for the BS. It's all a complete farce and Disney can take their all their propaganda, brainwashing, and whining about copyright and shove it. Nobody should be feeling sorry for this company at all.
It'd be great if there were something similar for TV and movies. The streaming landscape is too damn fragmented these days with confusing exclusivity deals, libraries shrinking, and prices rising.
It's better than cable was, no argument, but it's like we passed right through the bright future, ripe with possibilities, and landed at marginal improvement.
Streaming is a different kettle of fish. With streaming services I always expect my favourite content to disappear at random with no warning.
It took a minute, but the BBC themselves finally came through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BritBox
I'm pirating something that I would gladly pay for if they'd just let me. I'm not going to do a VPN; that would be more work than piracy in the first place (and besides, Channel 4 demands a UK address and even a UK credit card). It's downright ridiculous.
> In 2011, he said ATN had its best year, earning revenues of more than $26 million. That number plummeted to just $9 million last year due to a long, slow decline in subscribers.
> He said popular channels from overseas that ATN was paying high licence fees and royalties to broadcast in Canada were being pirated "left, right and centre."
> "Piracy became rampant from the year 2012 onwards, and in the year 2017 it spread like wildfire," he said.
That's a LOT of crying for an exec in an industry that's seen massive growth over the last decade+. I don't buy for a second that piracy has blown up since 2017. This sounds like a skill issue and way to cover his ass.
Piracy isn't as rampant as the Kazza/Limewire days but it seems to have taken off again in a big way.
Maybe splitting everything off in to 12 different services and plastering ads over the top of the lot wasn't the masterful MBA plan it first seemed.
I suspect they're still extracting more money from the population than they would have with the previous model. My impression is that many people are now paying 2x what a Netflix subscription for a single service that covers a fraction of the content, and many even have more than one service.
Piracy cuts into those profits but probably not enough to make up for the massive price increases and fragmentation.
Instead I get laggy replay functionality in their cloud that doesn't even work right and fails to record new episodes every so often.
And of course it prevents fast forwarding through ads, which I'm sure is why they went with this bullshit solution.
They can count how many people listened to each pay, and send payment per estimated listeners, and it's legal.
I can also buy sheet music for $popularsong, perform it in public. And if I pay mechanistic reproduction rights per listener, it's legal.
We need something similar for video content. That would allow a mega-aggregator to get everything, and pay royalties per play. And if they start charging stupid money, any new company can build it!
It is not something that the music rights owners voluntarily created.
Seesh. Rule 1 of comitting crime. Don't brag about it on the internet.
That means that the fees are too high and should be renegotiated.
The Feds eventually arrested him and took all his assets as restitution, and he got a 5 years sentence.
Ignorance of the law is no defense as he found out.
The US justice system have a very long reach - just ask the crypto bros who thought they were safe in some Eastern European country (i.e Andrew Tate) or some tropical island.
Probably the only safe heaven is Russia or North Korea.