7 ms·

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans. I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws. Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels. Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.

bonoboTP 7y ago
> Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.
juliendorra 7y ago
In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law. Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM. So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  > In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
  - phicoh 7y ago
    The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose. Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators. Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get. As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is. In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law. For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dariosalvi78 7y ago
> In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country that is exactly what brought me back to piracy. I am not a heavy downloader, and I would welcome a legal way of accessing films paying a reasonable fee. I thought Netflix had (partially) fixed it, but I happen to live abroad and I can't access films in my native language. Not even subtitles, and sometimes not even in English. This is so stupid and frustrating, and it's entirely the fault of the film industry. Torrents here I come.
Zhyl 7y ago
On a related note, I haven't seen any publisher or content producer sell "licence only" i.e. I pay them for the right to be able to own/view the content. This could either be a "buy direct, acquire elsewhere" or "pirate first, pay later". In theory this would be a major win for the content creator. 100% revenue going directly to them with no overhead for distribution, infinitely scalable (to stress: _in theory_, I am aware that this would play out differently in practice).
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Microsoft (via a very respectable local retailer) used to sell Office keys which I could only use with Office OPK ISO I could only find available for download on ThePirateBay. As for efficiency (no overhead for distribution etc) I don't really understand why do companies waste resources on technical measures of copyright protection in the first place. Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/keygen anyway, almost every movie is ripped anyway, business users (pirating is more dangerous for them + they often need support) pay anyway (even if the activation form would accept any random string for serial), most of the users who download pirate copies would not buy a legal one (usually because it's hard for them to afford it) anyway (and that's how software like MS Windows and Office monopolize markets in developing countries where everybody just uses a pirate copy). So why to invest so much resources in DRMs, activation, genuine disks etc?
  - xzcat 7y ago
    I'm under the impression that massive investment in DRM is more of a way to satisfy tech and (pirate) culture-illiterate humans while making deals for content. Even Steam needed to nominally do something and Gaben's position on piracy/drm is very well-known.
    - mietek 7y ago
      Why should such humans be satisfied?
      - 7y ago
Benji_San 7y ago
The "copying fees" on storage (this includes harddrives/SSDs, phones, CD/DVD/BD or pretty much any storage medium in some countries) is actually a fee for "private copying" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy) not pirate copying. Historically these fees were introduces with cassettes as it was possible to obtain private copies by recording radio broadcasts and by copying a cassette. I suppose it did make sense 40 year ago as private copies of e.g. songs wasn't usual before cassettes. The fucked up part is that these fees still exist today when it is generally not possible to easily create private copies due to DRM. I can only assume that politicians who signed of and keep supporting on these laws are either bribed or brain dead. E.g. CopySwede(https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the-private-copying-levy/reporting/ https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the...) is the Swedish lobbying organization which collects and lobbies for the fees in Sweden.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  Nice explanation, thanks. Nevertheless some countries have just introduced these laws recently and there probably are more countries to follow.
wtmt 7y ago
> That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. Are you really fulfilling your duty if you just buy content with a poor user experience without letting those who you pay know how bad it is? Would they know or have any incentive to fix the system if everybody bought things and still pirated them?
speeder 7y ago
I am brazillian. Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original. The reason is convenience and good service. When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get: often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style) easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff). sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better optimization settings during compile time). Translated to portuguese. Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even for software that has no manual at all. Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience. EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it. Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America, sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP rights from publishing here. This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought... Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online, leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't play legally here.
- xzcat 7y ago
  Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.
Cyph0n 7y ago
> even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country This baffles me, especially for Netflix original content. Is it because they think the UI would get cluttered?
- thfuran 7y ago
  If that's their concern, maybe they could free up space by not constantly recommending to me things that I've already watched and rated on their platform.
ElFitz 7y ago
> Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. We have that over here. Said taxes also apply to hard drives, iPhones internal storage, etc BUT it isn't meant to compensate for illegal downloads (the music & film industry tried, but I believe it was the EU that told them that was illegal). It's supposed to compensate for the supposed loss occurred from people's right to make private copies of legally obtained copyrighted materials. It's whacked and non-sensical, but still. We are after all the country where you have to pay artists copyright associations for playing copyleft music in your shop.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Zelizz 7y ago
I'm constantly turning my Netflix profile language to Korean so that I can get Korean subtitles for my wife. It's an annoying workaround, but it often works.

bonoboTP 7y ago

> Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.

juliendorra 7y ago

In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law. Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM. So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.

qwerty456127 7y ago
> In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
- phicoh 7y ago
  The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose. Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators. Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get. As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is. In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law. For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dariosalvi78 7y ago

> In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country that is exactly what brought me back to piracy. I am not a heavy downloader, and I would welcome a legal way of accessing films paying a reasonable fee. I thought Netflix had (partially) fixed it, but I happen to live abroad and I can't access films in my native language. Not even subtitles, and sometimes not even in English. This is so stupid and frustrating, and it's entirely the fault of the film industry. Torrents here I come.

Zhyl 7y ago

On a related note, I haven't seen any publisher or content producer sell "licence only" i.e. I pay them for the right to be able to own/view the content. This could either be a "buy direct, acquire elsewhere" or "pirate first, pay later". In theory this would be a major win for the content creator. 100% revenue going directly to them with no overhead for distribution, infinitely scalable (to stress: _in theory_, I am aware that this would play out differently in practice).

qwerty456127 7y ago
Microsoft (via a very respectable local retailer) used to sell Office keys which I could only use with Office OPK ISO I could only find available for download on ThePirateBay. As for efficiency (no overhead for distribution etc) I don't really understand why do companies waste resources on technical measures of copyright protection in the first place. Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/keygen anyway, almost every movie is ripped anyway, business users (pirating is more dangerous for them + they often need support) pay anyway (even if the activation form would accept any random string for serial), most of the users who download pirate copies would not buy a legal one (usually because it's hard for them to afford it) anyway (and that's how software like MS Windows and Office monopolize markets in developing countries where everybody just uses a pirate copy). So why to invest so much resources in DRMs, activation, genuine disks etc?
- xzcat 7y ago
  I'm under the impression that massive investment in DRM is more of a way to satisfy tech and (pirate) culture-illiterate humans while making deals for content. Even Steam needed to nominally do something and Gaben's position on piracy/drm is very well-known.
  - mietek 7y ago
    Why should such humans be satisfied?
    - 7y ago

Benji_San 7y ago

The "copying fees" on storage (this includes harddrives/SSDs, phones, CD/DVD/BD or pretty much any storage medium in some countries) is actually a fee for "private copying" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy) not pirate copying. Historically these fees were introduces with cassettes as it was possible to obtain private copies by recording radio broadcasts and by copying a cassette. I suppose it did make sense 40 year ago as private copies of e.g. songs wasn't usual before cassettes. The fucked up part is that these fees still exist today when it is generally not possible to easily create private copies due to DRM. I can only assume that politicians who signed of and keep supporting on these laws are either bribed or brain dead. E.g. CopySwede(https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the-private-copying-levy/reporting/ https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the...) is the Swedish lobbying organization which collects and lobbies for the fees in Sweden.

qwerty456127 7y ago
Nice explanation, thanks. Nevertheless some countries have just introduced these laws recently and there probably are more countries to follow.

wtmt 7y ago

> That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. Are you really fulfilling your duty if you just buy content with a poor user experience without letting those who you pay know how bad it is? Would they know or have any incentive to fix the system if everybody bought things and still pirated them?

speeder 7y ago

I am brazillian. Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original. The reason is convenience and good service. When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get: often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style) easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff). sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better optimization settings during compile time). Translated to portuguese. Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even for software that has no manual at all. Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience. EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it. Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America, sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP rights from publishing here. This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought... Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online, leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't play legally here.

xzcat 7y ago
Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.

Cyph0n 7y ago

> even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country This baffles me, especially for Netflix original content. Is it because they think the UI would get cluttered?

thfuran 7y ago
If that's their concern, maybe they could free up space by not constantly recommending to me things that I've already watched and rated on their platform.

ElFitz 7y ago

> Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. We have that over here. Said taxes also apply to hard drives, iPhones internal storage, etc BUT it isn't meant to compensate for illegal downloads (the music & film industry tried, but I believe it was the EU that told them that was illegal). It's supposed to compensate for the supposed loss occurred from people's right to make private copies of legally obtained copyrighted materials. It's whacked and non-sensical, but still. We are after all the country where you have to pay artists copyright associations for playing copyleft music in your shop.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Zelizz 7y ago

I'm constantly turning my Netflix profile language to Korean so that I can get Korean subtitles for my wife. It's an annoying workaround, but it often works.