6 ms·

The film industry made a record-breaking $100 billion last year - https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-film-industry-made-a-record-breaking-

The film industry made a record-breaking $100 billion last year - https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-film-industry-made-a-record-breaking-100-billion-last-year/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-fil... The fault lies with us. Do you pirate? Abstain from entertainment media? Or do you fund lobbying efforts to keep circumvention illegal? The numbers in the Forbes article suggest most do the latter.

jedberg 5y ago
This isn't really a good argument though. We live in a society and society is defined by our shared cultural experience. For better or worse, these media companies in large part define our cultural experience. Humans are social creatures, and naturally want to participate in a shared cultural experience. Asking people not to consume media would be like asking them not to converse with other humans or not have sex. Sure, you can survive without those things, but it's not really a life worth living.
- car_analogy 5y ago
  Then pirate. Call it "civil disobedience" if you're the type that enjoys flattering euphemisms.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Some people believe that part of living in a society is following its laws and using lawful means to change the law.
    - noasaservice 5y ago
      Laws != ethics And simply put, my vote does not matter. The similar chucklehead gets put into office, and does the will of the monied elite. And yes, I do vote, as little as it matters. https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explained https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-... I'm not a millionaire. I have no PAC's to my name. I do not hire or otherwise fund lobbyists. So, my only time to exert any sort of control on this system is to vote. And congress (state AND national) has only about a 3% parity with what I vote. Had I been in the monied interests category, I would get about 75% of what I wanted. So indeed, piracy it is. Reverse engineering and talking how I did it is. Sharing "illegal number" it is. I have no other course of action.
      - rayiner 5y ago
        Convince yourself that consuming for free a completely optional entertainment product that someone else created from their own labor is “ethics.”
        car_analogy 5y ago
        Media conglomerates don't concern themselves with ethics when they lobby to strip you of more of your rights. But they're grateful that you continue funding their efforts in the name of ethics.
        tptacek 5y ago
        s/lobby to strip you of more of your rights/set their own terms on how they want to sell the products of the labor they acquired. Pirates are empirically no more merciful of content distributed on more egalitarian principles and outside of "major label" distribution channels. The root of the phenomenon is acquisitiveness, not ethics. It's just fun to back-rationalize the behavior, especially in places (like HN) where the audience is largely dismissive of the underlying ethics.
        car_analogy 5y ago
        > s/lobby to strip you of more of your rights/set their own terms on how they want to sell the products of the labor they acquired. Their "terms of sale" include legally prohibiting you from unlocking your own property, even for otherwise legal purposes. Sorry, did I say terms of sale? I meant law, that applies to you whether or not you buy anything from them. There is not even the fig leaf of "you agreed to the EULA".
        tptacek 5y ago
        You say it's "your property". They say that your argument is no different from walking into a movie theater with a camcorder. Most people don't want to argue about the distribution terms of a movie; they just want to make a decision about whether it's worth $19 to watch now, or whether they want to wait until it's $1.99 instead. Media companies are right to want to serve those kinds of customers --- the majority of customers --- and are within their rights to set terms that enable them but don't enable you to create a permanent, redistributable library of their content. You'd have the moral high ground if you were boycotting content distributed on those terms. But that's not what we're talking about. The high-horsing on piracy threads is farcical. Before it was tenable to set the kinds of terms you're upset about, studios simply didn't make content available the way it is now. We have never had more, faster, and better access to content than we do now, and it's in spite of, not because of, piracy.
    - car_analogy 5y ago
      Then you're left with only one option, aren't you? Continue doing the same thing, hoping for the opposite result it has had so far.
- rayiner 5y ago
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Actually what I said was telling someone who enjoys sex to not have it makes their life miserable.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Why am I not surprised you don’t have any actually arguments left and resort to Reddit tier nonsense.
- tptacek 5y ago
  This seems like such a weak argument. Life is full of shared cultural experiences that people don't have free access to. We talk about restaurant meals, about attending concerts, about attending sporting events (or watching them on PPV), about seeing plays, about fashion. These things all have equal or better claim to cultural importance than an MCU movie, but we all understand them to to cost money --- for some of them, like the theater, it would be deeply problematic if they didn't cost money: that's how people survive while continuing to produce the culture. To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a right to Mrs. Eaves or Chaparral, or any kind of cultural deprivation for not being able to typeset their zines in Nueva or Myriad, but they're pirated just like everything else. They're so relentlessly pirated that it took well over a decade to get most "commercial" fonts on the web at all, and even today, using them is a mess, because we can't trust people not to pilfer them while writing comments about how they're striking a blow for open culture. The reality --- and I think we all understand this in our viscera --- is that things get pirated when they're easy to pirate. People do it because they can, and then rationalize it back to "ethics" so they don't have to confront the fact that in some small way (often, very small, but not always), they're inflicting harm on other people. At the very least, they're inflicting harm against the concept of ethics. Do it if you want! I can't judge! I once wanted to watch The Muppet Movie ahead of its release, so I torrented it. I felt bad and bought the pre-release on iTunes at the same time. Something snagged in Apple's backend, and for the next 8 years or so iTunes haunted me continuously to redeem the pre-release, but errored when I tried to so as to make the popup disappeared. I deserved it, and (a little) more.
  - LocalH 5y ago
    To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a right to Mrs. Eaves or Chaparral, or any kind of cultural deprivation for not being able to typeset their zines in Nueva or Myriad, but they're pirated just like everything else. They're so relentlessly pirated that it took well over a decade to get most "commercial" fonts on the web at all, and even today, using them is a mess, because we can't trust people not to pilfer them while writing comments about how they're striking a blow for open culture. In the US, typeface design is largely not copyrightable, however the TrueType font format is, as it contains actual code within it. If a font is redistributed in a pure data format, or as an image specimen, then within the jurisdiction of the US, there is no legal protection unless one has a design patent.

jedberg 5y ago

This isn't really a good argument though. We live in a society and society is defined by our shared cultural experience. For better or worse, these media companies in large part define our cultural experience. Humans are social creatures, and naturally want to participate in a shared cultural experience. Asking people not to consume media would be like asking them not to converse with other humans or not have sex. Sure, you can survive without those things, but it's not really a life worth living.

car_analogy 5y ago
Then pirate. Call it "civil disobedience" if you're the type that enjoys flattering euphemisms.
- jedberg 5y ago
  Some people believe that part of living in a society is following its laws and using lawful means to change the law.
  - noasaservice 5y ago
    Laws != ethics And simply put, my vote does not matter. The similar chucklehead gets put into office, and does the will of the monied elite. And yes, I do vote, as little as it matters. https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explained https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-... I'm not a millionaire. I have no PAC's to my name. I do not hire or otherwise fund lobbyists. So, my only time to exert any sort of control on this system is to vote. And congress (state AND national) has only about a 3% parity with what I vote. Had I been in the monied interests category, I would get about 75% of what I wanted. So indeed, piracy it is. Reverse engineering and talking how I did it is. Sharing "illegal number" it is. I have no other course of action.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      Convince yourself that consuming for free a completely optional entertainment product that someone else created from their own labor is “ethics.”
      - car_analogy 5y ago
        Media conglomerates don't concern themselves with ethics when they lobby to strip you of more of your rights. But they're grateful that you continue funding their efforts in the name of ethics.
        tptacek 5y ago
        s/lobby to strip you of more of your rights/set their own terms on how they want to sell the products of the labor they acquired. Pirates are empirically no more merciful of content distributed on more egalitarian principles and outside of "major label" distribution channels. The root of the phenomenon is acquisitiveness, not ethics. It's just fun to back-rationalize the behavior, especially in places (like HN) where the audience is largely dismissive of the underlying ethics.
        car_analogy 5y ago
        > s/lobby to strip you of more of your rights/set their own terms on how they want to sell the products of the labor they acquired. Their "terms of sale" include legally prohibiting you from unlocking your own property, even for otherwise legal purposes. Sorry, did I say terms of sale? I meant law, that applies to you whether or not you buy anything from them. There is not even the fig leaf of "you agreed to the EULA".
        tptacek 5y ago
        You say it's "your property". They say that your argument is no different from walking into a movie theater with a camcorder. Most people don't want to argue about the distribution terms of a movie; they just want to make a decision about whether it's worth $19 to watch now, or whether they want to wait until it's $1.99 instead. Media companies are right to want to serve those kinds of customers --- the majority of customers --- and are within their rights to set terms that enable them but don't enable you to create a permanent, redistributable library of their content. You'd have the moral high ground if you were boycotting content distributed on those terms. But that's not what we're talking about. The high-horsing on piracy threads is farcical. Before it was tenable to set the kinds of terms you're upset about, studios simply didn't make content available the way it is now. We have never had more, faster, and better access to content than we do now, and it's in spite of, not because of, piracy.
  - car_analogy 5y ago
    Then you're left with only one option, aren't you? Continue doing the same thing, hoping for the opposite result it has had so far.
rayiner 5y ago
- jedberg 5y ago
  Actually what I said was telling someone who enjoys sex to not have it makes their life miserable.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Why am I not surprised you don’t have any actually arguments left and resort to Reddit tier nonsense.
tptacek 5y ago
This seems like such a weak argument. Life is full of shared cultural experiences that people don't have free access to. We talk about restaurant meals, about attending concerts, about attending sporting events (or watching them on PPV), about seeing plays, about fashion. These things all have equal or better claim to cultural importance than an MCU movie, but we all understand them to to cost money --- for some of them, like the theater, it would be deeply problematic if they didn't cost money: that's how people survive while continuing to produce the culture. To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a right to Mrs. Eaves or Chaparral, or any kind of cultural deprivation for not being able to typeset their zines in Nueva or Myriad, but they're pirated just like everything else. They're so relentlessly pirated that it took well over a decade to get most "commercial" fonts on the web at all, and even today, using them is a mess, because we can't trust people not to pilfer them while writing comments about how they're striking a blow for open culture. The reality --- and I think we all understand this in our viscera --- is that things get pirated when they're easy to pirate. People do it because they can, and then rationalize it back to "ethics" so they don't have to confront the fact that in some small way (often, very small, but not always), they're inflicting harm on other people. At the very least, they're inflicting harm against the concept of ethics. Do it if you want! I can't judge! I once wanted to watch The Muppet Movie ahead of its release, so I torrented it. I felt bad and bought the pre-release on iTunes at the same time. Something snagged in Apple's backend, and for the next 8 years or so iTunes haunted me continuously to redeem the pre-release, but errored when I tried to so as to make the popup disappeared. I deserved it, and (a little) more.
- LocalH 5y ago
  To me, the farce is laid perfectly bare by the fact that people pirate fonts. Fonts. Different fashions for the shapes of letters. Nobody can reasonably claim a right to Mrs. Eaves or Chaparral, or any kind of cultural deprivation for not being able to typeset their zines in Nueva or Myriad, but they're pirated just like everything else. They're so relentlessly pirated that it took well over a decade to get most "commercial" fonts on the web at all, and even today, using them is a mess, because we can't trust people not to pilfer them while writing comments about how they're striking a blow for open culture. In the US, typeface design is largely not copyrightable, however the TrueType font format is, as it contains actual code within it. If a font is redistributed in a pure data format, or as an image specimen, then within the jurisdiction of the US, there is no legal protection unless one has a design patent.