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Web site that profits from widespread copyright violation-- decries the flawed legal mechanisms that widespread copyright violation enabled. DMCA has serious p

by neilv 3y ago

Web site that profits from widespread copyright violation-- decries the flawed legal mechanisms that widespread copyright violation enabled. DMCA has serious problems in practice, and needs correcting. But the piracy community should not be the ones criticizing every time a merchant ship has a gunpowder accident from the cannons they're required to carry because of the pirates.

hug 3y ago
TorrentFreak is a news site, not a site that enables torrenting per se. That said, your analogy is also flawed: this is not a gunpowder accident, it’s one merchant turning the cannons on the other, and the complaining party is the only one that has been anti-cannon the entire time. Copyright reform advocates are and always were saying that the protection laws were doing more harm than good.
- neilv 3y ago
  TorrentFreak is not a disinterested journalism site. Their sponsor ads are clearly targeted at pirates.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Can you name a non disinterested journalism site?
icehawk 3y ago
That doesn't follow, online copyright infringement didn't require anyone to write the DMCA in its current form.
- neilv 3y ago
  Piracy empowered crappy corporations and politicians to do DMCA.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    No. Piracy always existed and the corporations didn't need DMCA 512 to sue people. In fact, before 512 you could sue platforms directly and get a huge judgement. 512 protects Google, not creators, plaintiffs, defendants, or copyright holders at large.
Lucasoato 3y ago
We need a good balance between pirates and merchants. If the former get too strong, it would stifle innovation and disincentive people from investing into improvements, technology, slowing the humanity’s progress towards a better world. If the latter become too strong, (as it is right now) all those benefits risk to fall in too few hands, making this world even more unbalanced and unjust. Let’s not give for granted the freedom that we have had until right now, it’s more at peril than we think.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >We need a good balance between pirates and merchants. I disagree. We need sensible copyright terms of certainly no more than the patent terms (20 years) and probably a default of half-that. We need to remove closed distribution if we want market forces to act -- by which I mean all distribution services can offer a work (maybe after 1 or 2 years of exclusive use) provided they pay the copyright holder the fee set. No copyright unless a work can enter the public domain. So, creators need to deposit DRM free copies, or have no DRM. Sellers need to ensure games have server code available, or no copyright. We don't need to support copyright infringement, we need to be serious about the public domain and ensure the system works for the demos. These are of course my own views, independent of my employment.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    I think we can go further. Copyright is a terrible hack. Creative works are not scarce, but they're subject to front-loaded costs. (Write the game/book/song once, and then every subsequent copy is essentially free). Copyright said "let's force everyone to pretend this non-scarce item is scarce, so we have a way charge a non-zero price and recoup costs." It allowed us to continue to use market-economics tools, because we couldn't think of anything better. However, it also creates an ugly and immoral distortion of how we handle the precious commodity of knowledge, and ends up creating only a few winners at the expense of everyone else in society. But it's by far not the only way to answer that question. Why not bail on using the market at all? Massively expand the public funding for creative works. Hire armies of software developers and artists to earn a decent wage creating, and we'd probably still spend less overall because we could eliminate the opportunity for a few short-tail bazillionaires and the parasitic industries parceling out "rights".
anigbrowl 3y ago
Digital piracy took off in part because copyright restrictions were so unreasonable and onerous to begin with. Copyright was last extended to its current absurd length in 1998, and its provisions were retroactive, which is arguably unconstitutional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
- neilv 3y ago
  It took off because people don't want to pay for things if they don't have to, and the rest is mostly rationalization and retconning.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    I think it took off because we finally saw behind the curtain. By and large, people could ignore copyright for its first few centuries-- it simply wasn't in the face of most people. In 1799, or 1899 you couldn't reasonably print a commercial-quality newspaper, novel, or sound recording at home. If there was anything resembling commercial-scale copyright infringement, it was a business-versus-business play, and usually the 'knock-off' product was an obvious inferior substitute, or a clear attempt to defraud buyers. You weren't just paying for the "legitimacy" of official works, you were paying for a product higher quality than you can generate yourself. By 1999, a normal upper-middle-class consumer could buy some sub-$1000 printers and produce his own copies of documents and photographs that looked as good as anything you got from a publisher. He could get a spindle of CD-Rs in a neighbourhood shop and make audio CDs that played as well as commercial ones. At that point, the obvious question is "this costs me 75 cents to make at home, what am I paying $15 for?" The answers-- "it's legitimate" or "the artist gets paid, blah, blah", did not prove satisfactory enough. The "artist gets paid" one especially rang hollow when we saw plenty of artists sell millions of $15 records and earn enough in royalties to get a Big Mac but not fries. Only the fear of prosecution was remotely viable to force people to ignore the question and go back to buying "official" media.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
cultureswitch 3y ago
We would be better off without copyright enforcement at all than whatever we have now.

by neilv 3y ago

hug 3y ago

TorrentFreak is a news site, not a site that enables torrenting per se. That said, your analogy is also flawed: this is not a gunpowder accident, it’s one merchant turning the cannons on the other, and the complaining party is the only one that has been anti-cannon the entire time. Copyright reform advocates are and always were saying that the protection laws were doing more harm than good.

neilv 3y ago
TorrentFreak is not a disinterested journalism site. Their sponsor ads are clearly targeted at pirates.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Can you name a non disinterested journalism site?

icehawk 3y ago

That doesn't follow, online copyright infringement didn't require anyone to write the DMCA in its current form.

neilv 3y ago
Piracy empowered crappy corporations and politicians to do DMCA.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  No. Piracy always existed and the corporations didn't need DMCA 512 to sue people. In fact, before 512 you could sue platforms directly and get a huge judgement. 512 protects Google, not creators, plaintiffs, defendants, or copyright holders at large.

Lucasoato 3y ago

We need a good balance between pirates and merchants. If the former get too strong, it would stifle innovation and disincentive people from investing into improvements, technology, slowing the humanity’s progress towards a better world. If the latter become too strong, (as it is right now) all those benefits risk to fall in too few hands, making this world even more unbalanced and unjust. Let’s not give for granted the freedom that we have had until right now, it’s more at peril than we think.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
>We need a good balance between pirates and merchants. I disagree. We need sensible copyright terms of certainly no more than the patent terms (20 years) and probably a default of half-that. We need to remove closed distribution if we want market forces to act -- by which I mean all distribution services can offer a work (maybe after 1 or 2 years of exclusive use) provided they pay the copyright holder the fee set. No copyright unless a work can enter the public domain. So, creators need to deposit DRM free copies, or have no DRM. Sellers need to ensure games have server code available, or no copyright. We don't need to support copyright infringement, we need to be serious about the public domain and ensure the system works for the demos. These are of course my own views, independent of my employment.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  I think we can go further. Copyright is a terrible hack. Creative works are not scarce, but they're subject to front-loaded costs. (Write the game/book/song once, and then every subsequent copy is essentially free). Copyright said "let's force everyone to pretend this non-scarce item is scarce, so we have a way charge a non-zero price and recoup costs." It allowed us to continue to use market-economics tools, because we couldn't think of anything better. However, it also creates an ugly and immoral distortion of how we handle the precious commodity of knowledge, and ends up creating only a few winners at the expense of everyone else in society. But it's by far not the only way to answer that question. Why not bail on using the market at all? Massively expand the public funding for creative works. Hire armies of software developers and artists to earn a decent wage creating, and we'd probably still spend less overall because we could eliminate the opportunity for a few short-tail bazillionaires and the parasitic industries parceling out "rights".

anigbrowl 3y ago

Digital piracy took off in part because copyright restrictions were so unreasonable and onerous to begin with. Copyright was last extended to its current absurd length in 1998, and its provisions were retroactive, which is arguably unconstitutional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

neilv 3y ago
It took off because people don't want to pay for things if they don't have to, and the rest is mostly rationalization and retconning.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  I think it took off because we finally saw behind the curtain. By and large, people could ignore copyright for its first few centuries-- it simply wasn't in the face of most people. In 1799, or 1899 you couldn't reasonably print a commercial-quality newspaper, novel, or sound recording at home. If there was anything resembling commercial-scale copyright infringement, it was a business-versus-business play, and usually the 'knock-off' product was an obvious inferior substitute, or a clear attempt to defraud buyers. You weren't just paying for the "legitimacy" of official works, you were paying for a product higher quality than you can generate yourself. By 1999, a normal upper-middle-class consumer could buy some sub-$1000 printers and produce his own copies of documents and photographs that looked as good as anything you got from a publisher. He could get a spindle of CD-Rs in a neighbourhood shop and make audio CDs that played as well as commercial ones. At that point, the obvious question is "this costs me 75 cents to make at home, what am I paying $15 for?" The answers-- "it's legitimate" or "the artist gets paid, blah, blah", did not prove satisfactory enough. The "artist gets paid" one especially rang hollow when we saw plenty of artists sell millions of $15 records and earn enough in royalties to get a Big Mac but not fries. Only the fear of prosecution was remotely viable to force people to ignore the question and go back to buying "official" media.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago

cultureswitch 3y ago

We would be better off without copyright enforcement at all than whatever we have now.