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Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time. "For Canada to have an innova

Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time. "For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online" Hrmph. Citation required. Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside: * The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream. * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well. * Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It's basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney's latest remake is. Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.

gpm 5y ago
> Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? Read the longer version rather than the press release: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html d. clarify or strengthen rights holders' enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory "website-blocking" and "de-indexing" regime.
- cashewchoo 5y ago
  Ah, so nothing technical.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    That was my response when I heard about it “ok... how?” Not gonna ban VPN and everyone’s see about a million ads for them on YouTube now
loceng 5y ago
I can't wait until competent leadership who actually understand business, who are actual entrepreneurs, get into positions of power - like Andrew Yang with his policies. I keep saying this: I believe piracy is a valid counterweight mechanism to the capitalistic for-profit system that would milk society dry/fleece us year round until we die from the elements: charging us more than is reasonable so we'll so FU and pirate, or due to there being so much amazing content that you're competing for our time for entertainment because there's so much amazing entertainment to choose from? Likewise I believe a UBI lever, where $xxx is allocated/earmarked monthly towards different types of creative/content work (to be defined/determined) will be how you fund the industry and artists (once they reach a level of competency commanding whatever level of pay); they can live off of their general UBI, developing their talents, their health/self-improvement/knowledge and skill development, or raise a family - in the meantime. And then we'll also have content produced that better mirrors the likes/needs/desires of society; Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars voucher policy, every eligible getting $100/year to contribute to the political candidate of their choice falls is a similar/same mechanism but for different system - to break apart the duopoly - along with Ranked Choice Voting would compound powerfully; he wants to do this for journalism - "Journalism Dollars" - essentially to combat the duopoly (to create more than 2 core narratives that gets pumped out) but also the mainstream media/media industrial complex in general. Re: "Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint." Jordan Peterson's Rule 1 of his latest book - "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" - goes into this necessary balance in very good detail - I'd recommend reading it; "DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT"
- why_Mr_Anderson 5y ago
  Translated: I can't afford X so it's OK to steal it, because corporations are evil for being for-profit. Got it. re UBI: you don't have to wait to see how 'well' would UBI work in practice - ask anyone from any European countries about their Roma population and how effectively they use the 'subsidies' (not the right word, but I can't recall the right one) from government. So many enterpreneurs and artists ... (/s just in case)
FractalParadigm 5y ago
> * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well. What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action. It's a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0]. I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it. I'll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven't pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn't pirate a single movie- nobody I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I've been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I've caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15/month on Netflix, $12/month for Disney+, $10/month for Crave, $6/month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr/Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43/month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare). [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html
- II2II 5y ago
  > I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established. Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?
jwalton 5y ago
> The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream. The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.
- misterkrabs 5y ago
  Yeah, in practice.
- grecy 5y ago
  Tell that to the founders of the Pirate Bay who were continuously raided and eventually wound up in jail, despite not being American, and not being in America.
  - jkaplowitz 5y ago
    Oh, copyright law in general is present worldwide through multiple international agreements. Going after the Pirate Bay didn't have to rely on the DMCA. Even if it had needed to rely on DMCA-like concerns, over a hundred countries worldwide are party to the treaty which mandates a law addressing the scope of the DMCA, so enough other countries have such a law. (The details vary and not all such laws mandate a quick takedown of the allegedly infringing content.)
  - zshrdlu 5y ago
    Don't mind me, just big fan of yours! Can't wait to get your book!
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  It's an American law which implements a certain part of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which is indeed in force in Canada (since 2014) with a local implementing law, as well as in the European Union and many other countries worldwide: https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/ShowResults?start_year=ANY&end_year=ANY&search_what=C&code=ALL&treaty_id=16 https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/ShowResults?start_year=... With all of that said, Canada's legal analogue to the DMCA is a "notice and notice" regime, not a "notice and takedown" regime. The rights holder or their agent notifies the ISP, and the ISP notifies the user without necessarily taking down the content. A court order can be sought to force it offline, and I'd guess (but don't know) that some ISPs will voluntarily cooperate to some degree beyond the legal requirement.
avz 5y ago
> But country-specific things aside: * The DMCA already makes it easy enough to... DMCA is a country-specific thing. Moreover, it is specific to a country the article is not about.
- derefr 5y ago
  The DMCA is like the EU's GDPR: a law specific to affected countries, that nevertheless affects the entire world. In the GDPR's case, that's because every company wants to be able to have European customers. But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc. And sure, anyone could run a perfectly robust torrent tracker over Tor, that nobody could take down through DMCAing the DNS provider et al. But, without a large accessible market of people visiting to show ads, there'd be no economic incentive to do so — so nobody bothers.
  - jkaplowitz 5y ago
    > But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc. The DMCA doesn't talk about who can be traded with, in general. It mainly places obligations on companies which host third-party content if they want to receive liability protections beyond what the law previously provided. The payment processors may not want to participate to avoid secondary copyright infringement liability, but that's entirely unrelated to the DMCA. Similarly, the ad tech companies have their own separate reasons for not wanting to piss off the media companies, and the DMCA would not be triggered if the infringing content is not handled through those companies' services.
thinkloop 5y ago
The reason things like steam can "best" piracy is because piracy is so crippled by anti-piracy. Between sites disappearing, spotty content, abusive ads, viruses, malware, and risk of prosecution, it's not hard being better. Imagine if that weren't the case and the free experience were seamless.
- salawat 5y ago
  As soon as you build a business model capable of delivering a quality experience, the necessary logistical entanglements that facilitate your business are now directly targetable by legal systems everywhere. This is the soft power of the market at work. Short of refusing to create business presence or monetize, you'll never be able to get much of anything done. If anything is to be done to force providers to raise the bar above a compelling, high quality piracy alternative, it quite literally has to be out of the goodness of contributor's hearts. Which means it must be so easy to build, people don't mind spending leisure time on it. And assholes would still screw it up and ruin a good thing for everyone else. That won't ever change.
- katbyte 5y ago
  Are you kidding? Piracy has never been easier lol, gb internet and torrents for every popular show and movie on public trackers. The pirate bay is still around and going strong. I just don’t want my Goverment to waste money trying to stop the internet stoppable
  - thinkloop 5y ago
    It's a lot simpler than that. If one team has to pay artists, and another team does not, ceterus paribus the second team will win. Only by constraining the second team does the first team have a chance to play. If government didn't "waste" money constraining pirates then pirates will necessarily have an outsized presence in the space given their unfair advantage.
    - katbyte 5y ago
      silly. spotify killed music piracy not any government. Steam killed game piracy not any government. Netflix had killed movie piracy but with all streaming services making it annoying again piracy is back - despite all their efforts. notice how the government fails to move the needle at all?
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
PC piracy has been neutered by Denuvo, which is the most effective DRM the platform has ever seen, and has been embraced by almost all major publishers. Ubisoft embraced Denuvo for all PC product in 2017. Thereafter their PC sales revenue and PC's share of their total revenue has hit record levels. The other factor is that with the rise of Crypto, PC torrents are now filled with miners and other malware. The other factor is the largest games being online-only or having exclusive online functionality. Digital distribution (Steam) is an aged and established concept now. What Steam provides is not and has never been unique - they just had the best exclusives (Valve games).
- dannyw 5y ago
  Denuvo is being cracked by Empress, who is pretty legendary considering all scene groups gave up. Interestingly she has a habit of making controversial comments on gender identity on reddit.
  - drummer 5y ago
    Who is Empress? Have a link?

gpm 5y ago

> Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? Read the longer version rather than the press release: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html d. clarify or strengthen rights holders' enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory "website-blocking" and "de-indexing" regime.

cashewchoo 5y ago
Ah, so nothing technical.
- katbyte 5y ago
  That was my response when I heard about it “ok... how?” Not gonna ban VPN and everyone’s see about a million ads for them on YouTube now

loceng 5y ago

I can't wait until competent leadership who actually understand business, who are actual entrepreneurs, get into positions of power - like Andrew Yang with his policies. I keep saying this: I believe piracy is a valid counterweight mechanism to the capitalistic for-profit system that would milk society dry/fleece us year round until we die from the elements: charging us more than is reasonable so we'll so FU and pirate, or due to there being so much amazing content that you're competing for our time for entertainment because there's so much amazing entertainment to choose from? Likewise I believe a UBI lever, where $xxx is allocated/earmarked monthly towards different types of creative/content work (to be defined/determined) will be how you fund the industry and artists (once they reach a level of competency commanding whatever level of pay); they can live off of their general UBI, developing their talents, their health/self-improvement/knowledge and skill development, or raise a family - in the meantime. And then we'll also have content produced that better mirrors the likes/needs/desires of society; Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars voucher policy, every eligible getting $100/year to contribute to the political candidate of their choice falls is a similar/same mechanism but for different system - to break apart the duopoly - along with Ranked Choice Voting would compound powerfully; he wants to do this for journalism - "Journalism Dollars" - essentially to combat the duopoly (to create more than 2 core narratives that gets pumped out) but also the mainstream media/media industrial complex in general. Re: "Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint." Jordan Peterson's Rule 1 of his latest book - "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" - goes into this necessary balance in very good detail - I'd recommend reading it; "DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT"

why_Mr_Anderson 5y ago
Translated: I can't afford X so it's OK to steal it, because corporations are evil for being for-profit. Got it. re UBI: you don't have to wait to see how 'well' would UBI work in practice - ask anyone from any European countries about their Roma population and how effectively they use the 'subsidies' (not the right word, but I can't recall the right one) from government. So many enterpreneurs and artists ... (/s just in case)

FractalParadigm 5y ago

> * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well. What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action. It's a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0]. I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it. I'll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven't pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn't pirate a single movie- nobody I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I've been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I've caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15/month on Netflix, $12/month for Disney+, $10/month for Crave, $6/month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr/Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43/month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare). [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html

II2II 5y ago
> I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established. Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?

jwalton 5y ago

> The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream. The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.

misterkrabs 5y ago
Yeah, in practice.
grecy 5y ago
Tell that to the founders of the Pirate Bay who were continuously raided and eventually wound up in jail, despite not being American, and not being in America.
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  Oh, copyright law in general is present worldwide through multiple international agreements. Going after the Pirate Bay didn't have to rely on the DMCA. Even if it had needed to rely on DMCA-like concerns, over a hundred countries worldwide are party to the treaty which mandates a law addressing the scope of the DMCA, so enough other countries have such a law. (The details vary and not all such laws mandate a quick takedown of the allegedly infringing content.)
- zshrdlu 5y ago
  Don't mind me, just big fan of yours! Can't wait to get your book!
jkaplowitz 5y ago
It's an American law which implements a certain part of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which is indeed in force in Canada (since 2014) with a local implementing law, as well as in the European Union and many other countries worldwide: https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/ShowResults?start_year=ANY&end_year=ANY&search_what=C&code=ALL&treaty_id=16 https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/ShowResults?start_year=... With all of that said, Canada's legal analogue to the DMCA is a "notice and notice" regime, not a "notice and takedown" regime. The rights holder or their agent notifies the ISP, and the ISP notifies the user without necessarily taking down the content. A court order can be sought to force it offline, and I'd guess (but don't know) that some ISPs will voluntarily cooperate to some degree beyond the legal requirement.

avz 5y ago

> But country-specific things aside: * The DMCA already makes it easy enough to... DMCA is a country-specific thing. Moreover, it is specific to a country the article is not about.

derefr 5y ago
The DMCA is like the EU's GDPR: a law specific to affected countries, that nevertheless affects the entire world. In the GDPR's case, that's because every company wants to be able to have European customers. But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc. And sure, anyone could run a perfectly robust torrent tracker over Tor, that nobody could take down through DMCAing the DNS provider et al. But, without a large accessible market of people visiting to show ads, there'd be no economic incentive to do so — so nobody bothers.
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  > But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc. The DMCA doesn't talk about who can be traded with, in general. It mainly places obligations on companies which host third-party content if they want to receive liability protections beyond what the law previously provided. The payment processors may not want to participate to avoid secondary copyright infringement liability, but that's entirely unrelated to the DMCA. Similarly, the ad tech companies have their own separate reasons for not wanting to piss off the media companies, and the DMCA would not be triggered if the infringing content is not handled through those companies' services.

thinkloop 5y ago

The reason things like steam can "best" piracy is because piracy is so crippled by anti-piracy. Between sites disappearing, spotty content, abusive ads, viruses, malware, and risk of prosecution, it's not hard being better. Imagine if that weren't the case and the free experience were seamless.

salawat 5y ago
As soon as you build a business model capable of delivering a quality experience, the necessary logistical entanglements that facilitate your business are now directly targetable by legal systems everywhere. This is the soft power of the market at work. Short of refusing to create business presence or monetize, you'll never be able to get much of anything done. If anything is to be done to force providers to raise the bar above a compelling, high quality piracy alternative, it quite literally has to be out of the goodness of contributor's hearts. Which means it must be so easy to build, people don't mind spending leisure time on it. And assholes would still screw it up and ruin a good thing for everyone else. That won't ever change.
katbyte 5y ago
Are you kidding? Piracy has never been easier lol, gb internet and torrents for every popular show and movie on public trackers. The pirate bay is still around and going strong. I just don’t want my Goverment to waste money trying to stop the internet stoppable
- thinkloop 5y ago
  It's a lot simpler than that. If one team has to pay artists, and another team does not, ceterus paribus the second team will win. Only by constraining the second team does the first team have a chance to play. If government didn't "waste" money constraining pirates then pirates will necessarily have an outsized presence in the space given their unfair advantage.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    silly. spotify killed music piracy not any government. Steam killed game piracy not any government. Netflix had killed movie piracy but with all streaming services making it annoying again piracy is back - despite all their efforts. notice how the government fails to move the needle at all?

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

PC piracy has been neutered by Denuvo, which is the most effective DRM the platform has ever seen, and has been embraced by almost all major publishers. Ubisoft embraced Denuvo for all PC product in 2017. Thereafter their PC sales revenue and PC's share of their total revenue has hit record levels. The other factor is that with the rise of Crypto, PC torrents are now filled with miners and other malware. The other factor is the largest games being online-only or having exclusive online functionality. Digital distribution (Steam) is an aged and established concept now. What Steam provides is not and has never been unique - they just had the best exclusives (Valve games).

dannyw 5y ago
Denuvo is being cracked by Empress, who is pretty legendary considering all scene groups gave up. Interestingly she has a habit of making controversial comments on gender identity on reddit.
- drummer 5y ago
  Who is Empress? Have a link?