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Copyright hoarders (not necessarily content creators) consider anyone sharing the content they hold copyright to as competition and attack will full fury, destr

• aquadrop 9y ago
  It's not all black and white though. Pirating torrent site realistically don't care if pirated stuff is from copyright hoarder or content creator. It's easy to say "those corporate money grabbers are evil" but in reality nobody cares who to pirate from. I've seen one writer who was relatively popular, beg his readers to buy his books instead of pirating it, because publisher was going to end his contract, because it was just not very profitable with all the pirating. I fail to see glory for pirating in that. One programmer I knew decided to do shareware in early 2000-s. His program became pretty successful in several months (2-3x times larger revenue than average salary in the country at the time), he could live off it. First time he got cracked and program went on pirating sites his sales were damaged considerably, he added some protection, new features etc. After some time he got cracked again and sales were damaged again. This time he said "screw it", stopped working on the program and got regular job. I fail to see glory for pirating in that. Of course I understand the appeal of pirated content, sometimes it's the only usable way to get something, especially for some old movies/series. And it put pressure on large media companies for content delivery technologies etc. But it's not all fun and giggles, it's a complex issues requiring global discussion and compromises.
  • netzone 9y ago
    I agree. And this is why I no longer pirate stuff, if I can get it legally in a reasonable way. For me as a non-american though, there is a serious lack of content available to me, which means that if I want to watch something, sometimes the only available option is to pirate it.
    • barking 9y ago
      Or when the legal way is unpleasant. I couldn't watch GOT on sky Atlantic with its ad breaks every ten minutes.
      • delecti 9y ago
        That's a much less sympathetic position. It's one thing if there's literally no way to consume a piece of content. The copyright holders aren't losing money there. It's another if there's a perfectly viable method available but you want to put on your toddler voice and say "but I don't want it that way."
        • lovich 9y ago
          I wouldn't call forcing ads in as "a perfectly viable way" to watch something, especially on an already paid service. Is it a perfectly viable way to eat dinner at a restaurant if the chef takes your plate away from you mid bite several times so that you can listen to his friend try and sell you shit? If it's free + ads I could agree, but most content sellers are just trying to get paid twice
          • delecti 9y ago
            > I wouldn't call forcing ads in as "a perfectly viable way" to watch something, especially on an already paid service US Cable television already fits that description. Almost 100 million Americans pay a monthly subscription for television content which still includes ads. For that matter, HBO itself is already an extra additional fee on top of that prior subscription. Your restaurant comparison seems particularly disingenuous considering commercials are a pretty normal aspect of television consumption.
            • lovich 9y ago
              I don't know if you're aware, but cable was billed as an adless way to get the because you were _already_ paying for it. Then the companies flip flop Ed and started putting ads in. Just because they've gotten away with it for a long time doesn't make it ok. It's not ok for me to punch you in the face even if I've been doing it for 20 years with no consequence. If we take your argument as well, then piracy is perfectly fine because people have been doing it for a long time and it's become a normal aspect of the consumption.
  • Feniks 9y ago
    I've developed my own golden rule: if something is 5 years or older its public domain. TPB and digital piracy in general functions as a library of Alexandria. Nobody in our society gives a shit about keeping things available. It's all about NOW and MONEY. So much entertainment would be lost without the internet.
    • eli 9y ago
      Are there other areas besides digital media where you think it's acceptable to take copies or something to which you are not legally entitled?
      • tazard 9y ago
        Are there areas other than digital media where you can make copies so cheaply and easily?
      • JohnBooty 9y ago
        Does that question make sense outside the domain of media?
      • vanderZwan 9y ago
        > legally entitled? When discussing the validity of copyright laws, using legal entitlement as an argument is pretty circular, don't you think?
        • greiskul 9y ago
          Some people really don't get the distinction between moral vs legal. I have actually seen a law student say that they were against legalizing pot, because smoking it is immoral because it's illegal. And he couldn't see how that argument made no sense.
          • rcoveson 9y ago
            While that argument may make no sense to you or me, it makes just as much objective "sense" as any other moral basis. Some people are strict utilitarians, some people have a deontological code, some people's morals come out of a holy book, and some people equate moral with legal. None of them are "correct" or "incorrect," and they absolutely do not make "sense."
  • croon 9y ago
    > It's not all black and white though. Pirating torrent site realistically don't care if pirated stuff is from copyright hoarder or content creator. It's easy to say "those corporate money grabbers are evil" but in reality nobody cares who to pirate from. Some do, some don't. I don't doubt your anecdotes, but I doubt it's true as a pattern. Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales. The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow? If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge). For two reasons: He wouldn't have read as much as he did, and he couldn't have borrowed as much as he did for his works. We want some kind of middleground. Creators should be compensated, but complete all-encompassing DRM means only a fraction of people would've watched Game of Thrones to discuss it at the water cooler, Kanye West (regardless of what you think of his music) wouldn't be able to release most of his music, etc.
    • aquadrop 9y ago
      > Some do, some don't. I've never seen a torrent site which wouldn't let torrents because "oh, it's individual developer's program, we don't allow those". I would say that overwhelming majority of people who created pirate sites (or created/sold illegal compact discs before that) didn't care about who to pirate from. And practically all shareware developers felt it. > Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales. I've never said it did, and of course it doesn't. And I think pretty much everyone here understands it. I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply. > The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow? I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy... And there's a lot of areas where it's hard to pin point the exact place for some dividing line, but everyone can see the difference between entities: like where you put exact line between colors on a rainbow? But you know that green isn't yellow and red isn't blue, you don't need to know where that line is exactly. > If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge) I don't how that would make Shakespeare read less, since he couldn't download a book on his phone anyway, and he probably read many books which weren't owned by him, since they were pricey and that price was mostly behind materials of the book and work to create this physical object. But he might or he might not exist, it's hard to say. It's not certain that writing would be less developed, if there were more effects of copyright. Being able to benefit from writing more could motivate more people to write, so it's hard to say what would have happen. Would we will be on the same level of technical progress if there were not patents (yes, there's a lot of ridiculous and bogus things about it now, but I'm talking about history) in previous 200-300 years, when inventors were motivated to create new things by legal protection of the right to benefit from it? Hard to say with certainty (though I incline to the "less advanced" answer).
• otakucode 9y ago
  I've always found it interesting that part of the issue gets ignored. Those people who are running around online downloading and uploading? They're beating the copyright holders at their job. The primary purpose for existence of publishers for centuries was to master the problem of distribution. Now, any clever 12 year old can run circles around these huge organizations in their spare time for fun. It's like if tomorrow kids became able to slap together Lambourghinis in their backyard. Except if 90% of our economy was based on producing Lambourghinis. Because distribution was the problem that drove the global economy. It was the reason why factories won out over village craftsmen. It's the reason we live in cities. It's the reason we educate our kids the way we do, why we structure companies the way we do, etc. Solving the problem of distribution was basically what our economy existed for for a century. And now... it's literally child's play. This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.
  • dpc59 9y ago
    So how do we bring back money to production of media then, ensuring that the people who spend time producing it can afford a decent standard of living?
    • otakucode 9y ago
      Prior to YouTubes efforts to destroy it, the model they were using is a great one (although there are substantial problems with its implementation). Patreon is emerging as a great way to support creators. People are more than willing to pay for the creation of media and that has not changed. What has changed is that there is no reason to enrich the people who distribute the media. Distribution was a Big Deal. It was the primary driver of the entire global economy for a century. Every big company fundamentally solved the problem of distribution. Sometimes they did other things, but it was all ancillary to distribution. Now, distribution is a solved problem. It's a commodity. Anyone can do it, and because newcomers don't have the burden of overhead and infrastructure and entrenched contractual entanglements that the old guard have hanging around their necks like a noose, newcomers can run circles around those giant companies. And if they had the integrity to stick to their claimed love of the market they held for so long, their companies would shrink dramatically. The Internet makes it possible for creators to have a decent standard of living. A tremendous number of them can have that decent standard of living. As opposed to a handful of owners of distribution companies living in opulence. An entirely capitalist redistribution of wealth on a large scale. That is viscerally disgusting to many who see those very large companies as the pillars holding our society aloft. To them it looks like rats chewing through the pillars.