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> It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. How is this greedy? It's clear

> It's impressive how much internet censorship in Europe is currently being caused by this one group of extremely greedy people. How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. The problem is that we still haven't figured out a way to properly enforce laws on the internet. Even for completely egregious violations there's no way to do anything once you track down the website to a bulletproof host in Russia or Ukraine or similar countries that don't cooperate. After 20 years of getting nowhere the courts have to find new and creative ways to enforce laws. I think everyone agrees that ideally this shouldn't be DNS blocks or IP blocks but rather these services getting removed from the internet and/or having to implement regional blocks to comply with laws. But there's just no way at all to make this happen right now.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. It's both. The re-broadcasters may be violating the laws and laws themselves could be unjust, nonsensical, yet existing and enforced because of a group of greedy benefactors actively keeping them that way.
bakugo 2y ago
> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options. We've recently seen this happen in real time with TV/movie streaming services: If you simply tell users "Pay us this single, simple and affordable fee every month and we will provide you with unrestricted access to the content you want, whenever you want", the users will come. But then the investors come knocking. It's not enough that you made N money last quarter, you have to make N+1 next quater. The line has to go up. So the subscription prices go up, the number of subscriptions required to access everything goes up, you start getting ads even though your subscription was originally ad-free, and suddenly the service doesn't seem so appealing anymore. I've heard endless stories of people having to pay for multiple subscriptions just to watch all of their favorite team's games, and still missing out on some due to whatever new money-making scheme sports companies came up with this month. It's not hard to see why so many people resort to just going online and finding a pirate stream.
- nine_k 2y ago
  From the revenue extraction POV, the optimum price is such that user is unhappy to pay it, but is still paying, while raising the price even by a small amount would convince the user to cancel the service. This means that the companies are constantly testing this edge, and check whether too many subscribers start to fall off the edge when the price rises.
  - wruza 2y ago
    When being a douchebag becomes a proper economic principle.
    - Vampiero 2y ago
      If only someone had warned us...
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
    This is only true in economics model that do not take any morality or the customer's satisfaction into account.
    - Vampiero 2y ago
      That is literally any economic model that assumes capitalism as the underlying system. Morality and ethics are just a way to hurt profits.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Customer satisfaction is priced in: the customer is still satisfied enough to keep paying, by their own free will. Entities like corporations aren't conscious and have no morality. They often discover and apply such things much like the biological evolution discovers and applies things. The closest proxy to morality that affects corporations is law; I assume here a completely legal, free interaction where the customer is not even held by an imperfect, monopoly-dominated market, like suburban internet access, or, well, sports events broadcasting.
- 2y ago
AdrianB1 2y ago
So basically the problem is reduced to "how can Italy fight against a crime happening somewhere in Russia or Ukraine"? Imagine there is a TV broadcast from Russia, how can Italy forbid it? They can definitely disrupt it (by electronic jamming), but not forbit it. Similar to Internet, the difference is the medium of transmission, not the facts of the matter. In Communist times in my country I was watching cartoons broadcasted from the neighboring country. Adults were watching adult content at night from the same source. There was no way to stop that.
immibis 2y ago
You were a significant contributor to a DMCA circumvention measure for playing pirated Nintendo games. What changed since then?

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. It's both. The re-broadcasters may be violating the laws and laws themselves could be unjust, nonsensical, yet existing and enforced because of a group of greedy benefactors actively keeping them that way.

bakugo 2y ago

> How is this greedy? It's clearly illegal behavior, both from illegal re-broadcasters and from users. Most of those re-broadcast services aren't even free either, they're directly making money from the broadcasts they're replicating. Because piracy is a service problem. Pirate streaming sites attract users because they provide a better, more convenient service than the paid options. We've recently seen this happen in real time with TV/movie streaming services: If you simply tell users "Pay us this single, simple and affordable fee every month and we will provide you with unrestricted access to the content you want, whenever you want", the users will come. But then the investors come knocking. It's not enough that you made N money last quarter, you have to make N+1 next quater. The line has to go up. So the subscription prices go up, the number of subscriptions required to access everything goes up, you start getting ads even though your subscription was originally ad-free, and suddenly the service doesn't seem so appealing anymore. I've heard endless stories of people having to pay for multiple subscriptions just to watch all of their favorite team's games, and still missing out on some due to whatever new money-making scheme sports companies came up with this month. It's not hard to see why so many people resort to just going online and finding a pirate stream.

nine_k 2y ago
From the revenue extraction POV, the optimum price is such that user is unhappy to pay it, but is still paying, while raising the price even by a small amount would convince the user to cancel the service. This means that the companies are constantly testing this edge, and check whether too many subscribers start to fall off the edge when the price rises.
- wruza 2y ago
  When being a douchebag becomes a proper economic principle.
  - Vampiero 2y ago
    If only someone had warned us...
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2y ago
  This is only true in economics model that do not take any morality or the customer's satisfaction into account.
  - Vampiero 2y ago
    That is literally any economic model that assumes capitalism as the underlying system. Morality and ethics are just a way to hurt profits.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Customer satisfaction is priced in: the customer is still satisfied enough to keep paying, by their own free will. Entities like corporations aren't conscious and have no morality. They often discover and apply such things much like the biological evolution discovers and applies things. The closest proxy to morality that affects corporations is law; I assume here a completely legal, free interaction where the customer is not even held by an imperfect, monopoly-dominated market, like suburban internet access, or, well, sports events broadcasting.
2y ago

AdrianB1 2y ago

So basically the problem is reduced to "how can Italy fight against a crime happening somewhere in Russia or Ukraine"? Imagine there is a TV broadcast from Russia, how can Italy forbid it? They can definitely disrupt it (by electronic jamming), but not forbit it. Similar to Internet, the difference is the medium of transmission, not the facts of the matter. In Communist times in my country I was watching cartoons broadcasted from the neighboring country. Adults were watching adult content at night from the same source. There was no way to stop that.

immibis 2y ago

You were a significant contributor to a DMCA circumvention measure for playing pirated Nintendo games. What changed since then?