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> Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk. Have we seriously just stopped considering the ethical implications of
by d23 13y ago
> Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk.
Have we seriously just stopped considering the ethical implications of such things? At least these sorts of sites used to pretend they were for things like "public domain movies" and "personal backups."
- kzrdude 13y agoYouTube has established a huge gray zone though! So much of the material I watch there is not actually uploaded with permission.
- res0nat0r 13y agoAnd youtube has a sophisticated detection system setup that scans uploads for copyrighted content automatically. I'm thinking with the press this app is getting they are going to be forced to do something similar and block illegal content, or take it offline soon.
- malka 13y agothis is free software. Even if they did that, someone would fork it to bring back the illegal content.
- res0nat0r 13y agoThere is a lot of free software out there that its primary goal is to facilitate copyright infringement, I guess it is just up to the court or whomever to decide if that is the case, and worth pursuing taking it down. (Not saying that the effort could be put in for this case, but just a possibility)...
- kzrdude 13y agoBut it requires copyright holders to be part of it. Most are not, and most can not.
- kzrdude 13y agoIt's actually a very bad system. YouTube with its reporting system has created a de facto situation where rightsholder giants like record companies, their copyrights matter, while the copyrights of the random creator (The Long Tail!) are never enforced. Maybe you are a long tail creator and you police youtube. But most won't. Maybe they can't. Maybe they are dead.
- solipsism 13y agoThey seem to be leaving the ethical considerations to the users, which I think is perfectly reasonable. Popcorn Time can't decide for you whether it's okay to stream a movie that you own the VHS for. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie published by a company that distorts copyright law for its own financial gain.
- footpath 13y ago>>Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore. That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.
- ultramancool 13y agoThey only created a tool. Tools can be used for many purposes. I can smash someone in the skull with a hammer or I can use it for construction. Similarly, should the Tor, PGP, Bitcoin, etc authors consider that their tools could be used for malice and stop because of it? Tools are tools, they are simply implementations of what is possible with technology. Tools are inherently grey, not some simple black and white. It's about what you do with them.
- jacobbudin 13y agoIt doesn't matter how legal your tools are if what you're doing is illegal. And this particular tool is pre-populated with copyrighted content. They don't show it in the screen captures (why? </sarcasm>), but all the films in the popular tab are 2013-2014 major U.S. theatrical releases.
- ultramancool 13y agoVery true, I hope the devs published this somewhat anonymously at least. It's essentially just YIFY torrents taped to the peerflix script with some node-webkit glue.
- hxa7241 13y agoThat question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes! So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.
- res0nat0r 13y agoMany in the music industry who've seen how it looks now vs before MP3s and high bandwidth came along would disagree.
- kamjam 13y agoWelcome to the 21st century. Burying your head in the sand will do nothing, you can't un-invent the technology so either embrace it or fade out.
- mrcharles 13y agoCapital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.
- humanrebar 13y agoWhat did professional music look like before radio? Before audio recording? I'm not convinced that business models that emerged due to technological change should be protected from future technology.
- sbarre 13y agoYes but you could also argue that there are many many many more artists making money in the music industry now, and that consumers have much more choice. Sure they're not all making millions, but I'd rather see an industry with more players each making less money (i.e. more choices for me), than a smaller group of pre-selected artists (and the machinery behind them) that take home tons of money but put out less varied produced-by-committee content designed for mass consumption. So I think it's arguable whether it's better or worse for the industry, but it's definitely better for the consumer.
- mcv 13y agoIn Netherland, we pay a "home copy" fee on harddisks and smartphones, which makes it entirely legal and ethical to download movies. Only downside: uploading movies without permission from the copyright holder is still illegal, and bittorrent uploads while it downloads, so this may still be illegal.
- malka 13y agoWe have the same 'private copy' tax in France. It is a tax on ALL storages (proportional to the size) to take a fee in the case you would use the storage for copyrighted stuff. While it does not make download legal, in my opinion it makes it ethical. I paid a tax on it, I might as well use it.
- johncoltrane 13y agoA tax that was worth 193.000.000 € in 2011. Not enough to balance the alleged losses but… not bad, I guess. "Les flux financiers de la Rémunération pour Copie Privée": http://bit.ly/1fn0PqX http://bit.ly/1fn0PqX
- mcv 13y agoAlleged by whom? Note that the record industry had a habit of making totally ridiculous claims concerning their losses.
- johncoltrane 13y agoAlleged by the media industry, of course. And repeated ad nauseam by politicians and journalists without much verification.
- quadrangle 13y agoThat's not the only downside. The other is there's a tax on storage hardware even if you never do anything with copyrighted anything. And all the tax ends up going to wealthy corporations anyway and smaller artists will never see anything.
- abrahamsen 13y agoDoesn't it pretend? The screenshoot shows very old movies. My initial impression from the web site was that this application provided a nice interface to some repository of freely redistributable movies.
- dabrowski 13y agoI, for one, do not believe in intellectual property. Information not being rare commodity, it makes no sense to artificially limit it's supply by issuing state enforced monopolies. That actually infringes on actual property such as a hard disk, by limiting the number of combinations of bits that you're allowed to store on it.
- pdpi 13y agoI pay for Spotify, for Netflix, and for a Cineworld Unlimited card. Pretty sure I'm on the right side of the ethical fence on this one.