Dutch Court of Appeals overturns Pirate Bay IP blockade
bureaubrandeis.com
bureaubrandeis.com
It is, after all, "common knowledge" distribution has shifted, and pirates use this at every turn to justify their actions.
>A copy is not theft, it is a copy, final.
>The money I didn't spend on this movie was already earmarked for another purpose; nothing changed.
There's a social aspect, too.
>All my friends are pirating, if I do not, I fall behind; there is no choice.
Like an empire or a dynasty, the entertainment business is simply too entrenched; disconnected from the real world, to realise they are the ones at fault. It's not a question of ethics (we made it, we earned it, abide by our wishes), it's a matter of majority opinion.
It's refreshing to see this result, I just hope it sprung from correct reasoning, blocking any form of information should be done under the harshest of scrutinies, which means not just for the sake of attempting the sate a billion-dollar industry.
Used to be a time, when capitalism meant keeping with the times or succumbing to it. This sometimes feels eerily reminiscent of what I was taught about Soviet Russia: keeping their factories and businesses going at all costs, because the 5-year-plan was more important than progress.
USSR did not need billions of buckets, we do not need billions of optical disks.
The blocking of TBP and all known proxy IP's was a huge stink. Persistent pirates will find it easy to circumvent this. They may even abandon public tracker torrents and flock to Usenet. I think the goal is to make the life of the common pirate more difficult. Many moms and pops only knew how to download a movie from TPB. Once they saw the "The court ordered us to block this page" they stopped watching movies or went back to ordering DVDs.
Just a few weeks ago BREIN send its threatening letters to amateur subtitle sites and their uploaders (for unlicensed derivative works). Piracy on the whole will not be hampered when pirates can't download the Dutch subtitles to an English movie. Just a few kids, deaf people and older folk who have trouble understanding English, or the few anime lovers who can't fully speak Japanese. So what _have_ they accomplished with this? A big stink. A nice report to give to those that fund them. Shown that they are willing to align themselves with Hollywood's agenda (I bet the idea to start going after subtitle sites originally came from there). Shown that they are deserving of (more) funds.
If we all agree that facilitating copyright infringement is against the law, then blocking sites that exist to facilitate copyright infringement does not seem too harsh or close to censorship to me. If you want to avoid sites being closed for being against the law, then lobby to change/overhaul copyright law.
This is probably the strongest incentive for piracy in a country like the Netherlands: if you don't, you cannot join in the next day watercooler/schoolyard talk about the latest episode of show X, let alone your global virtual friends on various forums and communities.
Stopping people from consuming your product without scarcity must be the most insane business model ever. At least the communist failure to deliver was a side-effect, not a deliberate strategy.
However, let's not pretend the entrenched entertainment industry is the only one making this mistake. Tech start-ups often fail to realize that they are launching in a global market from day one.
Fixed that for you. Music and movies are huge industries.
BTW, I think they are loosing. Sure, some laws are being passed, but there are several generations alive today that consider piracy something normal and natural. It's all a matter of who is in charge; today's leaders are old, they don't consider piracy to be good and normal. When we (our generation) become old and get in charge, we'll embed our worldviews in the laws.
I think there are valid questions about what happens when the bulk of consumers are people who aren't used to paying for media but in many cases there are alternatives.
There have been a great many times in history where, for instance, movies were going to be killed - the introduction of the TV, the introduction of the video recorder and so on - but they're still going strong. Cinemas got nicer, screens and sound better, the whole thing became more of an experience than watching the movie at home and people kept going to the cinema as a result.
Similarly the music industry has changed it's revenue model to focus on live performances and merchandising rather than album sales. Even if album sales fall significantly they're relatively well placed to cope.
There are valid concerns (I'm not sure what an author does if people stop paying for books for instance) but if the free markets most of these corporations regard so highly mean anything then surely if there is a demand for something (say books) which someone else wants to make (say an author) then the market will, if it's possible, make it happen.
And if it doesn't then maybe we just don't want it that much after all.
The music and movie industries have tried their best to make it as hard as possible to consume legally bought media on anything other than what they want you to watch it on. Some of this is due to piracy concerns, some due to various contracts (you will only allow this movie on Starz for the first 6 months), but all of it is in their control.
Conversely, downloading a movie via bittorent will play on anything powerful enough to process an HD movie; downloading some MP3s will play on any device thinkable. The files require no complex codes to put into crazy websites, no additional software to install, no additional devices to buy. Being free is just icing on the cake.
Case in point: I bought Pacific Rim on blue ray when it was released a few months ago. Waited for it to arrive in the mail. Defeated its stupid plastic wrap. Popped some popcorn, turned the lights off, put the disc in my PS3 (the only blue ray player I own) and... nothing. It could not play the disc without connecting to the internet to download some new blue ray decryption keys or whatever. Never had this problem before, and sadly my PS3 is not connected to the internet. This disc was useless to me. Enraged, I downloaded an 18GB HD rip of it and had it playing on my $35 raspberry pi in an hour. Has this experience soured me on buying blue rays? Of course it has.
To me it sounds like a PS3 specific thing, rather than a problem with Bluray. I get that to you the experience is poor regardless but the problem to me sounds like Sony rather than Bluray.
I don't know how this is handled on older, unconnected players.
Part of getting maturing and growing up almost always includes a changing of worldviews as we gain more experience in the world.
THings like piracy - which once seemed perfectly acceptable when you are younger - can begin to seem a lot more like 'not paying for the work of the people that went into it'.
This is particularly true as people enter the workforce from school and over time begin to appreciate the actual value of what they produce, and its real-world implications.
I can't count the number of comments I've seen in recent years that start with a variation "I used to pirate..."
From my personal observations, this is the only thing that's changed. As the copyright industry is so eager to make examples of those they deem worse than murderers, sharing is driven underground, folks use VPNs, darknets and private trackers, but are they really sharing less?
http://bitshare.cm/post/2082365481/the-film-industry-is-big-...
Disney's studio arm pulled in just shy of 6 billion last year. Parks and Resorts brought in 14 billion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company#Revenue...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Law_in_The_Nethe...
As a consequence, blocking or limiting Bittorrent traffic is not allowed.
Perhaps you could say it's an attack on TCP/IP.
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-censorship-judge-is-corru...
It has been around 200 years, and society has changed for the better by it. Every time government trail away from it, especially in punishment, it seem to be caused by corruption. Good that the Court of Appeals of The Hague can recognize and see it.
While there are cases of people maintaining hard-line statements, it seems to be less common than in normal US discourse.
While Dutch politics is still, well... politics, it seems like there is much more of a pragmatic approach. People expect the government to be effective. "Is policy X working or not?" is a common theme on the news, there are lots of statistics and reports, and politicians aren't trying to always spin their way out of them (though it certainly still happens, just less).
The whole society is a lot less concerned with black and white framings like grand economic theories, philosophical stances on law and order, or enforcing morality. They're more concerned with things working.
There are very few things that you will find a straight majority for in parliament, so hard-lining will get you nowhere.
https://1-media-cdn.foolz.us/ffuuka/board/q/image/1365/86/13...
The only result (according to the judge) is that less frequent downloaders look for alternatives.
PS. Still glad that something like this just happens. Entertainment industry allowed firms like Netflix to rise because of their lack of vision, it's easy to blame the internet...
legal and cheaper. The entrenched publishers of yesteryear's media still makes their products available at outrageous prices. I m glad netflix exists, but the media companies don't like the way technology is making distribution a commodity (where they extract their value from).
It makes me angry when I travel to Spain for business or vacation and suddenly all my devices want to connect to the local stores (even though i'm Dutch, I pay in NL etc) and serve me crap in Spanish. Ever watched a dubbed UK/US thriller dubbed in Spanish? It's painful. Not too strange my UK colleagues living there all have proxies and there are thriving proxy and 'torrent setup box' businesses popping up all over the place.