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It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a m

It is insane to me that someone can get up to 5 years or more for using one of the fundamental mechanisms of digital technology. If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits, I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Instead of accepting the reality of digital communications, the MPAA, RIAA, and the like lobby to have the law protect their outdated but favorable business model instead. I will never buy the idea that once they have sold a digital product, the seller somehow maintains a claim on its existence. Doubleday doesn't own the pages of the books they sell me. Lionsgate doesn't own the the bits that make up the DVDs they sell me either, even if that fact is rather detrimental to their bottom line.

rebelos 5y ago
It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people. The timing is likely not coincidental either. Expect to see more of this as content once again fragments across providers, reanimating the traditional package TV structure in fresh form.
- foota 5y ago
  In fairness, crowd funding and or altruistic consumers could theoretically sustain content production.
  - skeeter2020 5y ago
    in reality this isn't the choice; it's typically private enterprise vs. public (government) broadcasters. Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.
    - foota 5y ago
      Does PBS make content people want to watch?
    - account42 5y ago
      > in reality this isn't the choice In the reality with excessive copyright terms, yes. > Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding. Are government grants for the arts a bad thing now?
  - esyir 5y ago
    The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. That maintainers are often poorly supported implies what I suspect we're all trying not to acknowledge.
    - foota 5y ago
      I think an interesting counter-counter point is the seeming success of video and board games crowdfunds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars seem to be fairly regularly collected, not that that rivals the scale of movie production.
    - account42 5y ago
      > The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. The current state of OSS exists in a world with copyright. If you want to extrapolate that to a world without copyright you better have a good argument why the incentives for OSS funding would not change.
- chongli 5y ago
  That may be the case for Hollywood blockbuster movies but it’s not true for TV shows, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams. People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the content creators actually made them available. People go crazy for Disney+ because everything is on there for one monthly fee.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    >Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. I download every single video on youtube that I think there's any chance I'll want to watch again. When I look at my playlists, so many of the videos have been deleted. Even if I paid for youtube I wouldn't be able to watch them again.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    If the content were free to use however you wanted, what would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content or vice versa?
    - chongli 5y ago
      It's not hard to imagine a scenario where individual downloading is decriminalized but large-scale commercial piracy remains illegal. This would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content without a license but it wouldn't stop Joe Public from downloading Game of Thrones or what have you. Such a regime would encourage content creators to make it more readily available so that users are willing to pay for the convenience, a la Netflix.
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
        I imagine this taking the form of individual copying being okay while distribution is illegal. That would probably have to be regardless of scale and price/commercialization.
- unity1001 5y ago
  Record industry does not support content production at all. Less, artists. They are one of the biggest scams on the planet. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-accounting-how-to-sell-1-million-albums-still-owe-500000.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-a... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-claims-that-it-is-standing-up-older-musicians-that-it-actually-left-to-rot.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-c... ... That industry should be killed with fire.
  - Joakal 5y ago
    Easy way to kill distributors AND support creators with this small change: Have copyright return to creators after a period of time, ie 20 years. Billions of dollars will be spent fighting hints of this suggestion.
    - gruez 5y ago
      How does this work for cooperative works?
- mistrial9 5y ago
  after thirty years of being in this debate, I tend to agree with the down-voted parent. In the West, there must be a source of payment to artists, production houses, management and legal.. its a tragedy when that fails, because it is the artists that lose the most, the quickest.
- DennisP 5y ago
  So change the business model. In the words of Robert Heinlein: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Heinlein.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Hei...
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    What business model would you suggest, that is capable of financing the TV and films we like to watch? I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal. (Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.) And copying the music streaming business, where convenience is worth a low monthly subscription, doesn't work for TV/film. Producing a TV show is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than an album.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die. I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        And if people love it enough, they will find a way.
      - smegger001 5y ago
        Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Piracy, when casually undertaken by 50-70% of the population does not harm or even mildly helps sales, as found in a suppressed EU-wide report [1, 2] that you can read in detail here [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-sales-impact.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
  - tzs 5y ago
    Are you taking into account the effects on sales of substitute goods? If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite. But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would have turned to a less expensive solution, such as Pixelmator Pro which is $40 and I can afford.
    - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
      That sounds more like a failure of marketing on Pixelmator's part.
    - account42 5y ago
      If I download the GIMP, should that count as a lost sale to Pixelmator. Should the law somehow protect them from that?
  - mortehu 5y ago
    This "study" is a survey. No experiment was undertaken to actually determine a casual relationship.
- intricatedetail 5y ago
  Any business can be viable if it is backed by state violence. If it can't survive without violence then in my opinion should be allowed to perish.
  - trothamel 5y ago
    Is there any business that isn't backed by state violence, to some degree? The computer you're typing this on is powered over copy wires, and those copper wires have value. What's to stop someone from just coming up and stealing them and everything else of value you own?
  - rebelos 5y ago
    This is certainly possible. Watch all of your content in theaters with all copies of the content as heavily secured as possible (physically and digitally)
- jstrH 5y ago
  Open information; music, books, code, science, videos; threatens their entire business model. Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts. It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming! Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega millionaires; their figurative identity obsession is not any more important than rest of ours, except due to political protectionism. Our doing human shit empowers these specific people; they can lose an order of magnitude in wealth to honor that. As a result we’d be able to bolster health, education, and infrastructure everyone relies on. Deference to their wealth literally causes us to screw ourselves out of the time for such things.
  - account42 5y ago
    fyi, your post was [dead]
- kroltan 5y ago
  As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. It was said in the context of video games, but I believe it very much well applies to other parts of the entertainment industry. If people are pirating content, then consuming that content is not worth the hassle to obtain. > If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. In that way, stamping out piracy is trying to address the symptoms, not the cause, and even if you are ultimately successful in eradicating piracy, then you'll likely still end up with a bunch of non-customers. Anecdotally, the popularization of Netflix definitely greatly reduced piracy among my demographic, up until the point where every publisher decided to roll their own, often subpar, streaming service, each with different region-locking rules.
- loxias 5y ago
  Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? I've always thought and argued that while money might be part of the motivation for digital piracy, ease of access and user experience is also a large component. 10 bucks a month to stream anything, without commercials, was great! For those few years I didn't download anything, because I didn't have to. It wasn't the path of least resistance. Now I have to deal with a half dozen streaming platforms, some of them don't work on my laptop (Peacock), others which are spotty (Disney+) and others which insist on wanting me to see commercials, despite taking my money (Hulu). With increasing fragmentation and a decreasing user experience, the path of least resistance has gone back to downloading and I expect it to increase. :/ I wonder how long until the industry re-invents cable packages. It might work if Netflix handled the tech, though I admit that would never happen in the real world.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Disney is already pushing a package of Hulu+Disney+espn. My family wants both Hulu and Disney+ but no one cares about espn. They are already starting and it’s only a matter of time until hbo is $15 or $14 when bundled with peacock (or whatever).
  - ndesaulniers 5y ago
    > Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I have all the streaming services, and yet now I find that most of what I want to watch is not licensed to any service! I'm constantly using justwatch.com and yet still many famous movies aren't being licensed by any of the services I have (at least in the US). Piracy it is then, and I guess it's time to start canceling these subscriptions to services that no longer license the kind of content they used to.
    - toast0 5y ago
      I have a heck of a time finding the content I want to watch on (paid) streaming services. I, like Pepperidge Farm, remember when Netflix had tons of stuff I wanted to watch, but now I can only find it on janky free channels that can't even figure out how to slot ads into spots where ads should go. To be fair, some of the low tier broadcast subchannels haven't figured that out either. But if I'm going to watch ad supported tv, would it kill people to not cut to ads 15 seconds before the break, then show that 15 seconds and then the stunning conclusion which sometimes has a bit of a recap? Also, I don't know why switching from programming to ads needs to retrigger HDCP negotiation, and it seems like the ads have stricter settings, because I'm more likely to get a fail screen when it goes to ads than when it goes to content. I just want to watch 80s action garbage like the A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGyver. I'd pay $5/month for an 80s service, I already got suckered into Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon; something that has the low class stuff I want would be an easy sell. Edit: fixed spelling of MacGyver
- prepend 5y ago
  > You cannot have both Yet, we do have both. We are at both peak piracy and peak revenue for digital content. I think it’s false that people state that these things are exclusive.
  - rebelos 5y ago
    Please feel free to read the next sentence.
    - prepend 5y ago
      Your next sentence is as baseless and incorrect as the one I quoted. I’ve been hearing this chicken little shit for 30 years and every year piracy is so bad that the end is near. I think it’s more likely that piracy drives and improved digital sales. That’s just my hunch, but it’s based on my experience of everything going digital, companies making more money on it than ever, and piracy greater than ever. Philosophically, I think piracy is a more future oriented and likely successful than the alternative. I fear for a future when we are digital beings having to subscribe to Apple Music in order to remember a song and play it in my “mind.” Piracy today is peace of mind tomorrow.
      - rebelos 5y ago
        If you think there's no level of piracy as a fraction of total consumption that would destroy the economics of content production, then I'm afraid you're too unreasonable a person for me to engage with successfully.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. The idea behind a copyright is to have The People temporarily forfeit their innate right to communicate art, ideas, and stories in order to stimulate an industry of artists and scientists. If the business model depends on people not copying your data then you can always sue for relief in the courts. Get damages, hooray. But criminal copyright infringement seems like a big stretch. Maybe worthy of fines or public service but imprisonment? Extradition to another country for potential imprisonment? Seems totally backwards.
  - dendriti 5y ago
    If you actually read the link, Strauss is not being "extradited to another country for potential imprisonment" just for criminal copyright infringement.
    - wyldfire 5y ago
      The imprisonment bit comes if he's convicted in the US. From 17 U.S.C. 506(A) & 18 U.S.C 2319: > . A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).
  - bserge 5y ago
    Eh, people sit in jail for not paying bus fares lol
- ksec 5y ago
  Well the key word here would be threatens and rampant. Which is sort of the absolute of extreme end of the augment. For example Adobe and Microsoft has turned a blind eye on piracy for years. I believe it was Steve Jobs who had the gut to point out the obvious, Student on campus just pirate their Photoshop. For content, you could derive additional revenue from non-content product like merchandise or other form of cross-industry IP sharing. You cant have these sort of deals without getting significant mindshare of the public. And for some piracy is part of it. Think Game of Thrones. The most pirated TV shows on the planet. And is the same with Music. Most artist dont earn much with licensing, streaming or disc sales any more. It is about live performance tours and merchandise. Streaming Music isn't doing as well as most media would like you to believe, such as back to to the peaks of 90s without accounting for inflation and population difference. That is why I sort of think in the future some content could end up going the freemium model. Just like how mobile games are doing.
- bserge 5y ago
  Never in my life have I heard of it deterring people. What deters them is platforms being taken down.
- burnished 5y ago
  Piracy is typically a service problem. You don't fix digital copying by sending people to jail, you do it by offering a compelling service.
dogma1138 5y ago
This isn’t someone who torrented game of thrones, he was part of a scene/warez group called SPARK.
firecall 5y ago
They literally said that about the printing press!
jdavis703 5y ago
This seems to be an argument that humans are incapable of using tools without breaking the law. We make this assumption for tools like cars and guns by requiring licensing. Should internet access also require a license?
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
Should it be impossible to make a living writing books or recording music or movies? Because that's what it amounts to. Imagine writing a book, selling a copy for $10 to the first reader, and then the rest of the readers get it for free. Or printing a book and having a competing publisher type it up and sell it, taking all the profit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- HotHotLava 5y ago
  Even in that strawman version of the argument, competing publishers would not be able to "steal" all the profit because they also could only sell the books more or less at cost. The price floor for physical books in such a world would, I imagine, be set by some chinese on-demand printing factories. Business models for authors would shift towards patreon supporters, subscription fees for periodical releases, signed collectors editions of books, live book tours, etc. etc. Some people also manage to extract millions of profit from Youtube and Instagram channels, despite all of the content being free. Books are not that different from any other medium.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    Definitely not looking forward to the day of ad-supported ebooks. "Sponsored" paragraphs injected into the middle of a chapter? Or maybe flashy banner ads alongside? Sounds like a nightmare.
    - andy_ppp 5y ago
      “Don’t forget to click [Subscribe] and tick the annoy me whenever I release content icon”…
      - HotHotLava 5y ago
        Which is, realistically, a pretty small price to pay for free high-quality content. Most of the higher-end channels also have the option to get an ad-free and nudge-free version if you're willing to pay. Honestly, I'd much prefer that model for books over the forced Adobe DRM or vendor-specific stores that the industry seems to be trending towards.
deleted 5y ago
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aasasd 5y ago
> If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits, I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Exactly! If you exist in the universe where things can poke other things, don't get grumpy when you walk out the door and get stabbed. Should've sat on your ass at home.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  No, it’s absolutely not the same thing. How can you compare something that harms no-one, to something that should clearly be illegal due to likelihood of death and maiming?
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    Because they are making a disingenuous and foolish argument.
  - Lord_Baltimore 5y ago
    The original argument is essentially "if this action is so easy then how can you make it illegal?" which is not a very good argument as pointed out. Your argument is about the morality of this action which is quite different.
- burnished 5y ago
  Yes! If you go out and get stabbed by a falling branch you've got no recourse. Of course, the argument you seem to be advocating for hinges on showing how a copy represents material harm. The usual argument is it represents a lost sale. Still not sure how you get sent to jail over that though, maybe the argument itself doesn't have much weight but the people invoking it can push their weight around.
  - aasasd 5y ago
    First of all, it doesn't follow in any way from my comment that I'm ‘advocating for’ that argument. You just extrapolated somehow onto the stock set of anti-copyright arguments and decided that I'm opposed to one of them. Actually, I'm sorta happy that such kinds of blatant strawmanning and anti-copyright crowd being generally pretty obnoxious led to me thinking these things over for myself, instead of just accepting everything that gets passed around again and again. So I guess thanks for that.
tyingq 5y ago
>someone can get up to 5 years or more I have a feeling it will be much more in this case. For example... "The case is being prosecuted by the Office’s Violent and Organized Crime Unit." I imagine they will find a way to file RICO charges too. Those are good for 20 years each.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
“ Doubleday doesn't own the pages of the books they sell me.” But if you copy them you can still be taken to court and/or imprisoned, just like copying a disc.
- ssklash 5y ago
  Yes, but the analogy here is making it illegal to give or donate the book once you'd already bought it. There is no other way to transmit electronic data other than copy it. You can't even access it without copying it, under normal circumstances. This is my issue.
tptacek 5y ago
These people are accused of fraudulently obtaining the bits that they copied, which suggests that your whole argument would apply just as directly to credit card numbers, which are also just bits, amenable to the fundamental mechanisms of technology. As for the sentencing, as always: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
- zarzavat 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with copying credit card numbers, people used to do that all the time with the manual credit card machines. What is wrong is stealing money.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Really. So if I copy the credit cards out of a database and put them on Pastebin, I've done nothing blameworthy, so long as I myself don't try to buy anything with them? Do you have an argument against enforcing criminal copyright laws that would be persuasive to someone who doesn't believe that?
    - andy_ppp 5y ago
      As long as nobody uses the credit card information to steal money then fine, otherwise you’re obviously doing something illegal (facilitating theft). To be honest though even then I think we should at this point require some sort of 2FA, maybe if doing such things (putting credit card numbers online) wasn’t illegal better protections would have to be implemented…
      - tptacek 5y ago
        Yes, the previous comment was clearly written and said the same thing. Hence my question.
        andy_ppp 5y ago
elif 5y ago
I agree. US intellectual property law is anachronistic and at odds with the evolution of modern technology. More permissive ip countries will leave us in the dust.
- account42 5y ago
  > More permissive ip countries will leave us in the dust. If only the US hadn't used unconsititutional backdoors to ram similar laws into most other countries.
amarshall 5y ago
You may find “What Colour Are Your Bits”[1] an interesting read. [1]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
29athrowaway 5y ago
Many serious electronic crimes can be described as copying bits. Like illegally exfiltrating and distributing PII, credit card info, etc.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  I still think those shouldn’t be crimes, stealing money (or causing money to be stolen) should be a crime.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    Or stealing things valued in money, like films and TV shows. By accessing the content you are agreeing that the content is valuable to you.
chokeartist 5y ago
Like, does anyone buy your bullshit? For real. I torrented the shit out of movies back in the day, but I clearly know I was stealing shit. You can jack off to infinity with regard to the wording ("stealing") - but the reality is I knew I was getting something I didn't pay for. Dancing around the obvious is intellectually insulting. Grow the fuck up.
pidminusone 5y ago
Companies after selling your data to 3rd parties: "We just allowed bits to be copied lol".
- hattar 5y ago
  Yes, this is pretty much what they do.
  - pidminusone 5y ago
    Sure. I'm just noting that owning data is not an absurd idea, as OP implies. Another case that comes to mind: spreading child porn should be punishable. Imagine if pedophiles could claim they were "just copying bytes". I guess what I want to say is: there are valid reasons to be against IP. I don't like IP and I would like IP laws to be seriously revamped. But "bytes are meant to be free" is just a naive argument, as copying bytes can clearly be harmful to others in ways most societies consider criminal.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
m12k 5y ago
Copyright was invented as a reaction to the invention of the printing press. Whenever technology threatens to commoditize something, there's hand wringing and pushback from those who benefit from that thing not being a commodity. What technology makes abundant, the law makes scarce again. Things should be easy they say, yes, but not so easy as to not involve them and paying for their services. TBH I'm just glad I live in a world where the runaway success of the IP lobby wasn't replicated by e.g. the whale oil industry or the ice block sellers.
openfuture 5y ago
Similarily $COUNTRY does not own my identity, and yet my passport is the property of $COUNTRY. This fight reaches deeper than we think because any solution, that is an economic model where free software is valued correctly.. will be able to incentivice infrastructure, solve the tragedy of the commons, but if we do it with a central authority then we suffer from the computational complexity of prioritization and we are back to trying to break up the computation within the central authority. Basically no matter what, we will have to solve the infrastructure problem in a distributed manner and fwict this comes down to replacing our various systems of evaluation with something more holistic that models reality well: probabilistic estimates of trust in information sources (identities) in a P2P network. I believe the path is: Authenticated datastructures can be used to build a societal "operating system" (version control, reproducible builds, digital currencies, name systems) Slowly we start getting serious about cryptographic identities. We start probabilistically evaluating trustworthiness of such identities (information sources) in a P2P network. This social network starts becoming a sufficient way to manage society, some communities or developing countries report success stories. Civil war in the west as the traditional governance is seen increasingly as a inferior means to organizing society but their hold on power is too strong for the transition to go smoothly. Idk.. that's a rough sketch of where I see it going right now. It's really a race whether we can have the software ready before our civil liberties are eroded too much. I have a telegram channel where we are thinking about how to go about this: @datalisp
johnchristopher 5y ago
I don't think you own the bits on the disc, this is information and ideas and stories you don't have rights to make profit off,this is reserved to the authors who temporarily ceded them to publishers. You do own the plastic and dvd though which is what you are actually /selling. Which has the convenience of preventing you from enjoying the story (that you don't own) performed by actors and first encoded in images and sound and then in bits for practical purposes which are written on the plastic disc.
tsukikage 5y ago
> "Doubleday doesn't own the pages of the books they sell me." This may be a surprise to people born in the digital era and thus unused to such obsolete technology, but photocopying books is also illegal.

rebelos 5y ago

It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. There is some critical mass of piracy that would in fact destroy the economics of the content production model. The industry has to work to deter that by periodically making examples of people. The timing is likely not coincidental either. Expect to see more of this as content once again fragments across providers, reanimating the traditional package TV structure in fresh form.

foota 5y ago
In fairness, crowd funding and or altruistic consumers could theoretically sustain content production.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  in reality this isn't the choice; it's typically private enterprise vs. public (government) broadcasters. Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding.
  - foota 5y ago
    Does PBS make content people want to watch?
  - account42 5y ago
    > in reality this isn't the choice In the reality with excessive copyright terms, yes. > Even PBS with lots of supporting patrons can't make it without significant government funding. Are government grants for the arts a bad thing now?
- esyir 5y ago
  The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. That maintainers are often poorly supported implies what I suspect we're all trying not to acknowledge.
  - foota 5y ago
    I think an interesting counter-counter point is the seeming success of video and board games crowdfunds, where hundreds of thousands of dollars seem to be fairly regularly collected, not that that rivals the scale of movie production.
  - account42 5y ago
    > The current state of oss would be a counterpoint to this. The current state of OSS exists in a world with copyright. If you want to extrapolate that to a world without copyright you better have a good argument why the incentives for OSS funding would not change.
chongli 5y ago
That may be the case for Hollywood blockbuster movies but it’s not true for TV shows, YouTube videos, or Twitch streams. People would much rather pay Netflix a small monthly fee for unlimited access to all the TV shows they watch than hunt them down online. Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. Honestly I think even movies could work similarly if the content creators actually made them available. People go crazy for Disney+ because everything is on there for one monthly fee.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  >Nobody at all bothers to download YouTube videos or Twitch streams since the content is free anyway. I download every single video on youtube that I think there's any chance I'll want to watch again. When I look at my playlists, so many of the videos have been deleted. Even if I paid for youtube I wouldn't be able to watch them again.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  If the content were free to use however you wanted, what would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content or vice versa?
  - chongli 5y ago
    It's not hard to imagine a scenario where individual downloading is decriminalized but large-scale commercial piracy remains illegal. This would stop Netflix from serving Disney's content without a license but it wouldn't stop Joe Public from downloading Game of Thrones or what have you. Such a regime would encourage content creators to make it more readily available so that users are willing to pay for the convenience, a la Netflix.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      I imagine this taking the form of individual copying being okay while distribution is illegal. That would probably have to be regardless of scale and price/commercialization.
unity1001 5y ago
Record industry does not support content production at all. Less, artists. They are one of the biggest scams on the planet. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/23482610186.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-accounting-how-to-sell-1-million-albums-still-owe-500000.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-a... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-claims-that-it-is-standing-up-older-musicians-that-it-actually-left-to-rot.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140425/07192227027/riaa-c... ... That industry should be killed with fire.
- Joakal 5y ago
  Easy way to kill distributors AND support creators with this small change: Have copyright return to creators after a period of time, ie 20 years. Billions of dollars will be spent fighting hints of this suggestion.
  - gruez 5y ago
    How does this work for cooperative works?
mistrial9 5y ago
after thirty years of being in this debate, I tend to agree with the down-voted parent. In the West, there must be a source of payment to artists, production houses, management and legal.. its a tragedy when that fails, because it is the artists that lose the most, the quickest.
DennisP 5y ago
So change the business model. In the words of Robert Heinlein: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Heinlein.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Quotes/Popular/SciFi/Hei...
- crazygringo 5y ago
  What business model would you suggest, that is capable of financing the TV and films we like to watch? I'm not aware of anything that works in practice, except for legally enforced copyright for at least a handful of years. And enforcing copyright means making torrenting etc. of infringing material illegal. (Of course, whether it should be 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 years is a separate matter.) And copying the music streaming business, where convenience is worth a low monthly subscription, doesn't work for TV/film. Producing a TV show is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than an album.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    To play devil's advocate, if there is no business model capable of supporting something, it should die. I like tv as much as the next person, but its hardly sacrosanct.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      And if people love it enough, they will find a way.
    - smegger001 5y ago
      Perhapes a crowd funded subscription model. Where television and cinema lovers pay a service to create films and showes based on the interests of their subscribers. while we are at it perhapes we could stream then to those subscribers so they don't have to store them locally where storage is limited. Oh look we recreated modern netflix.
azalemeth 5y ago
Piracy, when casually undertaken by 50-70% of the population does not harm or even mildly helps sales, as found in a suppressed EU-wide report [1, 2] that you can read in detail here [3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798879 [2] TFA: https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-sales-impact.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-09-22-eu-suppressed-study-pira... [3] https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59ea4ec1-a19b-11e7-b92d-01aa75ed71a1 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/59e... or https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/2017/09/displacement_s...
- tzs 5y ago
  Are you taking into account the effects on sales of substitute goods? If I pirate say a $500 graphics editing suite I can easily believe that does not represent a lost sale to the maker of that software. There is simply no way I'd buy a $500 graphics editing suite. But it might represent a lost sale to Pixelmator, because if I could not pirate the $500 graphics editing suite and could not afford to buy it I would have turned to a less expensive solution, such as Pixelmator Pro which is $40 and I can afford.
  - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
    That sounds more like a failure of marketing on Pixelmator's part.
  - account42 5y ago
    If I download the GIMP, should that count as a lost sale to Pixelmator. Should the law somehow protect them from that?
- mortehu 5y ago
  This "study" is a survey. No experiment was undertaken to actually determine a casual relationship.
intricatedetail 5y ago
Any business can be viable if it is backed by state violence. If it can't survive without violence then in my opinion should be allowed to perish.
- trothamel 5y ago
  Is there any business that isn't backed by state violence, to some degree? The computer you're typing this on is powered over copy wires, and those copper wires have value. What's to stop someone from just coming up and stealing them and everything else of value you own?
- rebelos 5y ago
  This is certainly possible. Watch all of your content in theaters with all copies of the content as heavily secured as possible (physically and digitally)
jstrH 5y ago
Open information; music, books, code, science, videos; threatens their entire business model. Not content to physically own the planet, they seek to own our emotions through expropriation of our agency in all contexts. It’s a managed economy of legal allowances, policed by an unelected minority beholden to no one. Hmm… where have I seen this before? No one saw it coming! Tax the billionaires until they’re merely mega millionaires; their figurative identity obsession is not any more important than rest of ours, except due to political protectionism. Our doing human shit empowers these specific people; they can lose an order of magnitude in wealth to honor that. As a result we’d be able to bolster health, education, and infrastructure everyone relies on. Deference to their wealth literally causes us to screw ourselves out of the time for such things.
- account42 5y ago
  fyi, your post was [dead]
kroltan 5y ago
As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. It was said in the context of video games, but I believe it very much well applies to other parts of the entertainment industry. If people are pirating content, then consuming that content is not worth the hassle to obtain. > If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. In that way, stamping out piracy is trying to address the symptoms, not the cause, and even if you are ultimately successful in eradicating piracy, then you'll likely still end up with a bunch of non-customers. Anecdotally, the popularization of Netflix definitely greatly reduced piracy among my demographic, up until the point where every publisher decided to roll their own, often subpar, streaming service, each with different region-locking rules.
loxias 5y ago
Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? I've always thought and argued that while money might be part of the motivation for digital piracy, ease of access and user experience is also a large component. 10 bucks a month to stream anything, without commercials, was great! For those few years I didn't download anything, because I didn't have to. It wasn't the path of least resistance. Now I have to deal with a half dozen streaming platforms, some of them don't work on my laptop (Peacock), others which are spotty (Disney+) and others which insist on wanting me to see commercials, despite taking my money (Hulu). With increasing fragmentation and a decreasing user experience, the path of least resistance has gone back to downloading and I expect it to increase. :/ I wonder how long until the industry re-invents cable packages. It might work if Netflix handled the tech, though I admit that would never happen in the real world.
- prepend 5y ago
  Disney is already pushing a package of Hulu+Disney+espn. My family wants both Hulu and Disney+ but no one cares about espn. They are already starting and it’s only a matter of time until hbo is $15 or $14 when bundled with peacock (or whatever).
- ndesaulniers 5y ago
  > Remember that narrow window of time when Netflix had All The TV and was the only streaming platform, which you could access for a low monthly fee? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I have all the streaming services, and yet now I find that most of what I want to watch is not licensed to any service! I'm constantly using justwatch.com and yet still many famous movies aren't being licensed by any of the services I have (at least in the US). Piracy it is then, and I guess it's time to start canceling these subscriptions to services that no longer license the kind of content they used to.
  - toast0 5y ago
    I have a heck of a time finding the content I want to watch on (paid) streaming services. I, like Pepperidge Farm, remember when Netflix had tons of stuff I wanted to watch, but now I can only find it on janky free channels that can't even figure out how to slot ads into spots where ads should go. To be fair, some of the low tier broadcast subchannels haven't figured that out either. But if I'm going to watch ad supported tv, would it kill people to not cut to ads 15 seconds before the break, then show that 15 seconds and then the stunning conclusion which sometimes has a bit of a recap? Also, I don't know why switching from programming to ads needs to retrigger HDCP negotiation, and it seems like the ads have stricter settings, because I'm more likely to get a fail screen when it goes to ads than when it goes to content. I just want to watch 80s action garbage like the A-Team, Knight Rider, and MacGyver. I'd pay $5/month for an 80s service, I already got suckered into Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon; something that has the low class stuff I want would be an easy sell. Edit: fixed spelling of MacGyver
prepend 5y ago
> You cannot have both Yet, we do have both. We are at both peak piracy and peak revenue for digital content. I think it’s false that people state that these things are exclusive.
- rebelos 5y ago
  Please feel free to read the next sentence.
  - prepend 5y ago
    Your next sentence is as baseless and incorrect as the one I quoted. I’ve been hearing this chicken little shit for 30 years and every year piracy is so bad that the end is near. I think it’s more likely that piracy drives and improved digital sales. That’s just my hunch, but it’s based on my experience of everything going digital, companies making more money on it than ever, and piracy greater than ever. Philosophically, I think piracy is a more future oriented and likely successful than the alternative. I fear for a future when we are digital beings having to subscribe to Apple Music in order to remember a song and play it in my “mind.” Piracy today is peace of mind tomorrow.
    - rebelos 5y ago
      If you think there's no level of piracy as a fraction of total consumption that would destroy the economics of content production, then I'm afraid you're too unreasonable a person for me to engage with successfully.
wyldfire 5y ago
> It's not hard to see how piracy threatens the entire business model. You can have rampant piracy or you can have financially sustainable content production. You cannot have both. The idea behind a copyright is to have The People temporarily forfeit their innate right to communicate art, ideas, and stories in order to stimulate an industry of artists and scientists. If the business model depends on people not copying your data then you can always sue for relief in the courts. Get damages, hooray. But criminal copyright infringement seems like a big stretch. Maybe worthy of fines or public service but imprisonment? Extradition to another country for potential imprisonment? Seems totally backwards.
- dendriti 5y ago
  If you actually read the link, Strauss is not being "extradited to another country for potential imprisonment" just for criminal copyright infringement.
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    The imprisonment bit comes if he's convicted in the US. From 17 U.S.C. 506(A) & 18 U.S.C 2319: > . A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3).
- bserge 5y ago
  Eh, people sit in jail for not paying bus fares lol
ksec 5y ago
Well the key word here would be threatens and rampant. Which is sort of the absolute of extreme end of the augment. For example Adobe and Microsoft has turned a blind eye on piracy for years. I believe it was Steve Jobs who had the gut to point out the obvious, Student on campus just pirate their Photoshop. For content, you could derive additional revenue from non-content product like merchandise or other form of cross-industry IP sharing. You cant have these sort of deals without getting significant mindshare of the public. And for some piracy is part of it. Think Game of Thrones. The most pirated TV shows on the planet. And is the same with Music. Most artist dont earn much with licensing, streaming or disc sales any more. It is about live performance tours and merchandise. Streaming Music isn't doing as well as most media would like you to believe, such as back to to the peaks of 90s without accounting for inflation and population difference. That is why I sort of think in the future some content could end up going the freemium model. Just like how mobile games are doing.
bserge 5y ago
Never in my life have I heard of it deterring people. What deters them is platforms being taken down.
burnished 5y ago
Piracy is typically a service problem. You don't fix digital copying by sending people to jail, you do it by offering a compelling service.

dogma1138 5y ago

This isn’t someone who torrented game of thrones, he was part of a scene/warez group called SPARK.

firecall 5y ago

They literally said that about the printing press!

jdavis703 5y ago

This seems to be an argument that humans are incapable of using tools without breaking the law. We make this assumption for tools like cars and guns by requiring licensing. Should internet access also require a license?

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

Should it be impossible to make a living writing books or recording music or movies? Because that's what it amounts to. Imagine writing a book, selling a copy for $10 to the first reader, and then the rest of the readers get it for free. Or printing a book and having a competing publisher type it up and sell it, taking all the profit.

deleted 5y ago
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HotHotLava 5y ago
Even in that strawman version of the argument, competing publishers would not be able to "steal" all the profit because they also could only sell the books more or less at cost. The price floor for physical books in such a world would, I imagine, be set by some chinese on-demand printing factories. Business models for authors would shift towards patreon supporters, subscription fees for periodical releases, signed collectors editions of books, live book tours, etc. etc. Some people also manage to extract millions of profit from Youtube and Instagram channels, despite all of the content being free. Books are not that different from any other medium.
- lolinder 5y ago
  Definitely not looking forward to the day of ad-supported ebooks. "Sponsored" paragraphs injected into the middle of a chapter? Or maybe flashy banner ads alongside? Sounds like a nightmare.
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    “Don’t forget to click [Subscribe] and tick the annoy me whenever I release content icon”…
    - HotHotLava 5y ago
      Which is, realistically, a pretty small price to pay for free high-quality content. Most of the higher-end channels also have the option to get an ad-free and nudge-free version if you're willing to pay. Honestly, I'd much prefer that model for books over the forced Adobe DRM or vendor-specific stores that the industry seems to be trending towards.

deleted 5y ago

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aasasd 5y ago

> If you put out a product on a medium whose design is fundamentally based on copying bits, I don't know how you can expect anything else to happen. Exactly! If you exist in the universe where things can poke other things, don't get grumpy when you walk out the door and get stabbed. Should've sat on your ass at home.

andy_ppp 5y ago
No, it’s absolutely not the same thing. How can you compare something that harms no-one, to something that should clearly be illegal due to likelihood of death and maiming?
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  Because they are making a disingenuous and foolish argument.
- Lord_Baltimore 5y ago
  The original argument is essentially "if this action is so easy then how can you make it illegal?" which is not a very good argument as pointed out. Your argument is about the morality of this action which is quite different.
burnished 5y ago
Yes! If you go out and get stabbed by a falling branch you've got no recourse. Of course, the argument you seem to be advocating for hinges on showing how a copy represents material harm. The usual argument is it represents a lost sale. Still not sure how you get sent to jail over that though, maybe the argument itself doesn't have much weight but the people invoking it can push their weight around.
- aasasd 5y ago
  First of all, it doesn't follow in any way from my comment that I'm ‘advocating for’ that argument. You just extrapolated somehow onto the stock set of anti-copyright arguments and decided that I'm opposed to one of them. Actually, I'm sorta happy that such kinds of blatant strawmanning and anti-copyright crowd being generally pretty obnoxious led to me thinking these things over for myself, instead of just accepting everything that gets passed around again and again. So I guess thanks for that.

tyingq 5y ago

>someone can get up to 5 years or more I have a feeling it will be much more in this case. For example... "The case is being prosecuted by the Office’s Violent and Organized Crime Unit." I imagine they will find a way to file RICO charges too. Those are good for 20 years each.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

“ Doubleday doesn't own the pages of the books they sell me.” But if you copy them you can still be taken to court and/or imprisoned, just like copying a disc.

ssklash 5y ago
Yes, but the analogy here is making it illegal to give or donate the book once you'd already bought it. There is no other way to transmit electronic data other than copy it. You can't even access it without copying it, under normal circumstances. This is my issue.

tptacek 5y ago

These people are accused of fraudulently obtaining the bits that they copied, which suggests that your whole argument would apply just as directly to credit card numbers, which are also just bits, amenable to the fundamental mechanisms of technology. As for the sentencing, as always: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

zarzavat 5y ago
There's nothing wrong with copying credit card numbers, people used to do that all the time with the manual credit card machines. What is wrong is stealing money.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Really. So if I copy the credit cards out of a database and put them on Pastebin, I've done nothing blameworthy, so long as I myself don't try to buy anything with them? Do you have an argument against enforcing criminal copyright laws that would be persuasive to someone who doesn't believe that?
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    As long as nobody uses the credit card information to steal money then fine, otherwise you’re obviously doing something illegal (facilitating theft). To be honest though even then I think we should at this point require some sort of 2FA, maybe if doing such things (putting credit card numbers online) wasn’t illegal better protections would have to be implemented…
    - tptacek 5y ago
      Yes, the previous comment was clearly written and said the same thing. Hence my question.
      - andy_ppp 5y ago

elif 5y ago

I agree. US intellectual property law is anachronistic and at odds with the evolution of modern technology. More permissive ip countries will leave us in the dust.

account42 5y ago
> More permissive ip countries will leave us in the dust. If only the US hadn't used unconsititutional backdoors to ram similar laws into most other countries.

amarshall 5y ago

You may find “What Colour Are Your Bits”[1] an interesting read. [1]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

29athrowaway 5y ago

Many serious electronic crimes can be described as copying bits. Like illegally exfiltrating and distributing PII, credit card info, etc.

andy_ppp 5y ago
I still think those shouldn’t be crimes, stealing money (or causing money to be stolen) should be a crime.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Or stealing things valued in money, like films and TV shows. By accessing the content you are agreeing that the content is valuable to you.

chokeartist 5y ago

Like, does anyone buy your bullshit? For real. I torrented the shit out of movies back in the day, but I clearly know I was stealing shit. You can jack off to infinity with regard to the wording ("stealing") - but the reality is I knew I was getting something I didn't pay for. Dancing around the obvious is intellectually insulting. Grow the fuck up.

pidminusone 5y ago

Companies after selling your data to 3rd parties: "We just allowed bits to be copied lol".

hattar 5y ago
Yes, this is pretty much what they do.
- pidminusone 5y ago
  Sure. I'm just noting that owning data is not an absurd idea, as OP implies. Another case that comes to mind: spreading child porn should be punishable. Imagine if pedophiles could claim they were "just copying bytes". I guess what I want to say is: there are valid reasons to be against IP. I don't like IP and I would like IP laws to be seriously revamped. But "bytes are meant to be free" is just a naive argument, as copying bytes can clearly be harmful to others in ways most societies consider criminal.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

m12k 5y ago

Copyright was invented as a reaction to the invention of the printing press. Whenever technology threatens to commoditize something, there's hand wringing and pushback from those who benefit from that thing not being a commodity. What technology makes abundant, the law makes scarce again. Things should be easy they say, yes, but not so easy as to not involve them and paying for their services. TBH I'm just glad I live in a world where the runaway success of the IP lobby wasn't replicated by e.g. the whale oil industry or the ice block sellers.

openfuture 5y ago

Similarily $COUNTRY does not own my identity, and yet my passport is the property of $COUNTRY. This fight reaches deeper than we think because any solution, that is an economic model where free software is valued correctly.. will be able to incentivice infrastructure, solve the tragedy of the commons, but if we do it with a central authority then we suffer from the computational complexity of prioritization and we are back to trying to break up the computation within the central authority. Basically no matter what, we will have to solve the infrastructure problem in a distributed manner and fwict this comes down to replacing our various systems of evaluation with something more holistic that models reality well: probabilistic estimates of trust in information sources (identities) in a P2P network. I believe the path is: Authenticated datastructures can be used to build a societal "operating system" (version control, reproducible builds, digital currencies, name systems) Slowly we start getting serious about cryptographic identities. We start probabilistically evaluating trustworthiness of such identities (information sources) in a P2P network. This social network starts becoming a sufficient way to manage society, some communities or developing countries report success stories. Civil war in the west as the traditional governance is seen increasingly as a inferior means to organizing society but their hold on power is too strong for the transition to go smoothly. Idk.. that's a rough sketch of where I see it going right now. It's really a race whether we can have the software ready before our civil liberties are eroded too much. I have a telegram channel where we are thinking about how to go about this: @datalisp

johnchristopher 5y ago

I don't think you own the bits on the disc, this is information and ideas and stories you don't have rights to make profit off,this is reserved to the authors who temporarily ceded them to publishers. You do own the plastic and dvd though which is what you are actually /selling. Which has the convenience of preventing you from enjoying the story (that you don't own) performed by actors and first encoded in images and sound and then in bits for practical purposes which are written on the plastic disc.

tsukikage 5y ago

> "Doubleday doesn't own the pages of the books they sell me." This may be a surprise to people born in the digital era and thus unused to such obsolete technology, but photocopying books is also illegal.