U.S. Anti-Piracy Symposium Emphazises Need for Site Blocking | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Anti-Piracy Symposium Emphazises Need for Site Blocking

torrentfreak.com

30 pointsgslin14 comments

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem" - Gabe Newell, owner of Valve, the most profitable per employee company.

They don't need to block anything, they need to stop screwing over consumers.

they will get the goverment to spend your money to block sites. What do they have to lose?

Hundreds of millions in lobbies ought to do it.

current rate is more like 65k for something so small and with think-of-the-children election upside

Yep, I pay about as much for my setup as I would be paying for a single streaming service (and they can only dream about me ever falling into the unused subscription trap), but I get much better quality, I don't have to juggle subscriptions, I don't have to figure out where anything is, I don't have to plan what I'm going to watch in 3 months when I cancel Prime and subscribe to Max, I know I won't lose access to the series half way through, I know content won't be retroactively censored, I don't have to deal with all their crappy apps, or be subject to their invasive data collection, or advertising, or DRM ... the list could go on.

The article itself is terrifying.

But also, what’s happened to Torrent Freak? I think of them as having a pro-freedom anti-restrictions stance, and they pretty uncritically reported a deeply alarming conference. Has there been a shift in leadership or priorities? Or has this been happening for a while and I missed it?

I first noticed this on a different torrentfreak article the other day, but this one is off the charts. It's basically just fawning over this industry narrative that something must be done to put the personal computing genie back in the bottle. We've already got the draconian anti-due-process takedown regimes (DMCA and its outgrowths), but these people continue to want ever more automatic enforcement for their government-granted revenue streams. A perfectly fine alternative is of course to not keep piling more totalitarian solutions on, and just accept that the content cartels just have to actually compete with the superior piracy UX.

Frankly the (proto-)trend makes me wonder if TF got bought out by the content cartels to serve as astroturf.

"Site blocking" here seems to be an rightsholder term that covers every technical way they can think of to block access to a service, from DNS/IP blocks to DPI.

The sort of meat of this article is that they're pushing for it again in the USA, and they want it to be responsive enough that it can be instantly updated by the rights holder to cover services that quickly switch domains.

...and punitive damages for incorrect blocking, right?

Right?

This pearl clutching over piracy is extremely ironic in the age of AI. For years it's been said that piracy is akin to stealing money from creators of all sorts. And ostensibly to protect the rights of those creators we've had various laws and tech solutions like DRM in place. Those tech solutions are supplemented by further laws that make it illegal to break DRM even on content that you paid for and own. Apparently preventing people from breaking DRM on stuff they paid for, protects the rights of content creators somehow.

Yet in the midst of all this, AI companies can train their models on any and all content, with zero attribution let alone compensation to the people that created that content, and then rejoice at the number of those people that they'll put of a job. So it's a crime to pirate a movie to watch with your family, but take petabytes worth of data from millions of people to train an AI that you will monetize, and that is perfectly legal.

Pursuing piracy claims against a multi-billion dollar corporation with armies of its own legal sharks and also political lobbying connections is much harder than going after rando sites and casual users of piracy. Ergo, it gets sidestepped.

I have my serious quibbles on how piracy and infringement should be defined. However, as they're often currently defined by those seeking sanctions should mean that organizations like OpenAI would absolutely be considered guilty with their scraping. Yet, they get away with it with essentially no legal sanction. Also, shame you were downvoted for your perfectly reasonable observation of a major hypocrisy.

The law shouldn't be about who can afford the most lawyers. It naturally consolidates power which is pretty dangerous to democracy.

I agree that the law shouldn't be about that. I'm just pointing out how it apparently is when it comes to legal claims and charges of infringing behavior.

Same exact thing that happened with united healthcare: it's a crime only when poor people do it.

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