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European Commission Calls for Pirate Site Blocking Around the Globe
- Sakos 3y agoI call for them to overhaul the insanity that is IP/copyright law in the west. That would actually do us all good instead of just protecting entrenched businesses.
- given 3y agoThey don't understand that every block will just attract attention and will be circumvented one or the other way.
- malermeister 3y agoUgh. I like a lot of what the EU is doing, but its anti-piracy and pro-surveillance efforts are super messed up.
- karlkloss 3y agoInterestingly, a study launched by European Commission came to the conclusion, that online piracy doesn't cause any damage: https://netzpolitik.org/2017/eu-kommission-versteckte-unbequeme-piraterie-studie-zwei-jahre-vor-der-oeffentlichkeit/ https://netzpolitik.org/2017/eu-kommission-versteckte-unbequ...
- fsflover 3y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701785.
- pelorat 3y agoThis silliness is lobbyist driven.
- fsflover 3y agoIf you want to fight against it, consider supporting https://edri.org https://edri.org, which lobbies for the people, not corporations.
- mistrial9 3y agono, it is a cover for all-the-time passive record keeping for all network activity. Similar to roads, license+checkpoints => control.
- goethes_kind 3y agoSuperfluous when talking about the European Commission. That's literally all they do. Should be called the Business Lobby instead.
- pubkeypvtkey 3y agoI wish I could take the general public more sincerely and seriously, but their continued existence within learned helplessness, braying like goats stuck in mud rather than… you know… getting off their asses trying something else… really just makes the public look like disingenuous phony’s and gold diggers. Reminder: none of us have an obligation to you specifically. Be the change you want to see in the world… or stfu If your only idea is parrot populist news propaganda just stfu
- dav_Oz 3y agoI've heard a joke somewhere, I'm paraphrasing: If European taxpayers could directly offer all the lobbyists residing in Brussels double the money for not doing what they are being paid for, now, it would be one of the most profitable things and by far and large the greatest deed for all its citizens. As it stands now the cost of rigging especially in the EU is extraordinarily cheap and effective.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y agoI've been saying the same thing about the US for years. The true hell of it isn't that we have naked corruption in the form of unlimited PAC-driven campaign contributions, it's that you can buy races for relatively so little.
- euroderf 3y agoYes, the ROI is superb.
- bigbacaloa 3y agoUnfortunately the consequences aren't silly. No more scihub will be a problem.
- suddenclarity 3y agoThat's an incorrect summary of the report.
- dingledork69 3y agoGo on.
- fsflover 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35702258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35702258
- realusername 3y agoLike any serilus study before during the past 30 years came to exact the same conclusions, it's not a surprise, those laws are drafted by lobbyists.
- zeta0134 3y ago> The European Commission has published its biannual list of foreign countries with problematic copyright policies. ... Interestingly, the EU doesn't mention the United States, which is arguably the most significant country yet to implement an effective site-blocking regime. I might argue that the US's insanely long copyright lengths are the actual problematic policy, but that argument tends to fall on deaf ears when corporate bottom lines get involved
- Pxtl 3y agoSadly because of trade harmonization that "US insanely long copyright lengths" are now everywhere's "insanely long copyright lengths". Imho it should be "50 years or 10 years after death of the author, whichever comes second" with some special mechanism for releasing abandoned works from copyright.
- dageshi 3y agoI think europe had longer copyright terms before the US?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWhy should it be that long? Why not 10 or 20 years? What percent of art/media is even sellable or cared about for decades and decades, much less 100+ years?
- wongarsu 3y agoThe streaming rights for Friends, South Park or Big Bang Theory seem to still be a big deal, and their first episodes are 29, 26 and 16 years old respectively. Breaking Bad is 15 years old, one year older than Avatar (the James Cameroon one, Last Airbender is 18 years old). And then of course there are classics like Star Trek (TOS is 58 years old, TNG is 36 years old) or Star Wars (Episode IV is 46 years old). 99% of media is forgotten about after 20 years, but the rest makes up for that in profit. Of course for some of them you could argue that having the old stuff freely available would boost the popularity of the newer adaptations, spinoffs, reboots, etc. But I think that's rocking the boat too much to be viable, and some content does genuinely take years or decades to start to be appreciated.
- utucuro 3y agoIt is disheartening to see what is essentially a tool of censorship sponsored by supposedly free countries. The stated purpose is irrelevant, it is naive to assume any tool of surveillance, once created, will be used solely as intended.
- rndgeneration 3y agoRegulatory superpower
- throwawayadvsec 3y agoHope the list of blocked sites is made available somewhere so we can know which websites we should never visit :)
- LatteLazy 3y agoThe US position on copyright makes a self-serving sort of sense to me: Hollywood etc are big exporters, the US wants to protect it's assets, jobs, trade balance etc. But I've never really understood why the EU takes it so seriously. Not from a self-interest point of view of it's members at least.
- fulafel 3y agoRegulatory capture. Policymakers are informed by well paid & organized imaginary property lawyers and lobbyists, who keep whispering that draconian enforcement is needed because EU too is in a post industrial development phase and the future is living off information feudalism.
- pelorat 3y agoThis is just for show, because it's not actually preventing piracy, but I guess the commission can tell their lobbyist friends "look at what we did, please give us more money". Also Gen Z that might at most have a laptop (for school), but spends most of their time on mobile devices are definately not pirating anything, nor do they know how to. Anyone with some savviness will of course go on a private tracker or simply pay for access to one of the many usenet providers with 10+ years of retention. Or just use a free DNS provider to negate the "block"
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoUsenet does not have any utility beyond piracy at this point, and hasn't for a long time. If it ever becomes the primary method of piracy (granted, unlikely), it won't be any problem to simply ban the protocol/implementation. It's client-server, identifying the operators of those servers is trivial, and the legislation to allow the blocking will be uncontroversial and bipartisan. Given that it's all pay-to-play, I doubt that it will turn into a game of whack-a-mole like it is with Z Library. Bittorrent has a little more cover, in that one could make a case that it is used for legitimate purposes occasionally. But they'll probably just outlaw the VPNs that make it safe from litigation.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 3y agoI don't think banning an entire protocol would go over nearly as well as you'd think. If it's legal to ban usenet, then that'll get translated into banning encryption eventually. Right? It's a slippery slope at the very least.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoDoesn't have to go over well. Just has to be effective. China does such shit, and maybe people there silently grumble. At least until the next grimace recognition software update starts dinging their social credit score. Banning a protocol that is 100% used only for piracy will have not nearly enough sympathy among the public or the government for the solution to remain unimplemented. The only thing protecting it is that it's such a shitty protocol and so completely paywalled that most people don't want to use it. Should that ever change...
- dtx1 3y agoEven if they succeed using DNS blocking and you can't find any DNS that resolves piratebay etc. I will just graffity their IP on a wall. Have fun fighting windmills. Meanwhile I can't be bothered to pirate games anymore because steam and GOG on linux are just too damn convenient.
- dark-star 3y ago> Meanwhile I can't be bothered to pirate games anymore because steam and GOG on linux are just too damn convenient. this is actually a thing. Piracy declined once Apple Music, Spotify and Netflix appeared, because they were more convenient than handling a torrent client. Now that every single studio seems to want to build their own streaming service, usability declines and piracy will increase again.
- mock-possum 3y agoGood luck /eyeroll
- jorams 3y agoI keep hoping for the day the entertainment industry decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate, but instead we keep getting this endless lobbying for dystopian measures and technology that only exists to destroy value (DRM). Piracy simply offers a better product. You own the source material. Sell it. Make it available for streaming. Everywhere.
- beerpls 3y agoIt’s honestly difficult being on this site some days the way people are such consumers No, I really don’t want “a better product”. I don’t want to be “sold” anything. I made the choice long ago just to not invest in garbage media. It was easy when they made it cumbersome to get. Instead of sitting around pouting, demanding the media corps behave in a not sociopathic way, I realized there are way better things to invest my limited life in than consuming propaganda And looking back I cringe hard at how many grown adults can’t get off this tit no matter how unreasonable the supply chain is. But to each his own
- jasmer 3y ago" decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate" - you mean like giving away everything for free? Well yeah, something someone else made, but for free, instead of $4.99, that's a 'better product' for consumers ... until there exists non such products to buy. It's an enduring bit of weird logic at HN, that somehow IP should not exist, 'because mega corps!' If anti-piracy did not exist within regular countries, then literally zero content that required investment would get made, it's that simple. If people can trivially access content 'for free' they generally will do that. For music, it's not so bad, it just so happens most of the best music is cheap to make and niche artists couldn't command a high price anyhow, ergo the long-tail slot on Spotify has some efficiency to it. But there are innumerable productions which we all enjoy which require investment and without some kind of rights management, those literally disappear. It's all theoretical until you make something that is 'stolen' and it hits home pretty fast. Some arguments could definitely be made that the long-tail of piracy is actually beneficial, even to content producers, as it leaks content to areas wherein individuals couldn't afford to buy it, but that's a specific argument. It's a bit ominous for countries to be blocking other countries etc. but this issue likely has to be looked at somehow. If 'piracy' is below certain thresholds they should just not worry about it, but that may not be the case.
- gumballindie 3y agoInteresting. Copyright applies to regular folks but not to corporations ingesting our content for model training.
- dark-star 3y agothe corollary is that if you download a movie not to watch it, but to train an AI on it, then copyright does not apply. So when someone knocks on your door and accuses you of illegal streaming, just tell them you "trained an AI" on it ;-)
- troglotit 3y agounix `cp` command is AI
- kwhitefoot 3y ago> scientific research is usually exempt from copyright. Is it? Everywhere?
- neximo64 3y agoMaybe its that governments should train AI models to be fair with copyright. One could argue that people ingest copyrighted content too and spit it back out too.
- gumballindie 3y ago> One could argue that people ingest copyrighted content too and spit it back out too. Well then we should be allowed to store entire movies, since we can memorise just like hard drives do.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThat's still an open question. The AI people here sure claim it doesn't. The typical workaround is that scientific research is usually exempt from copyright. If you train a model for research, and then use that model for your business, your business didn't take part in the violation step. Unless the model you trained is a derived work, of course. If it is, you need to pay for every scrap of copyrighted work you use, same as with music samples (fair use probably doesn't apply here but IANAL). There are two American lawsuits about this going on at the moment that I know of. I think the lawsuit against the stable diffusion people can bring the clearest answer to this question, though I wouldn't be surprised if the case goes through various courts because of the implications for the AI industry as a whole. Actually having to pay for the stuff you use would ruin a lot of AI startups. Then again, having to pay for the stuff you use also ruined Napster.
- mrfinn 3y agoEuropean citizens call for obliterating the European Commission madness. Also who voted for this fellas?
- Bran_son 3y agoDid you somehow miss the vast protests and grassroots campaigns for even stricter copyright laws and enforcement? /s
- josephcsible 3y agoIf a precedent gets set for countries to be able to block sites even outside of their own borders, then what argument will we have against China when they want to take down pro-democracy sites around the globe?
- NoZZz 3y agoSell-outs.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoThe US spies on everyone and the Europeans jeer. "EU protects our privacy!" Then Europe leads the way on censorship, Americans jeer, "you have no freedom in Europe!" Meanwhile our rights are being whittled away worldwide and the left of all groups seems to be cheering it on. When did the rebellious supporters of change become the cheerleaders of the state? How does it feel when your rebellion is just fashion and your substance is that of a government tool?