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Use case 1: Running a torrent site for the distribution of free, out of copyright, abandoned, or otherwise entirely unavailable works. Use case 2: Distributing

Use case 1: Running a torrent site for the distribution of free, out of copyright, abandoned, or otherwise entirely unavailable works. Use case 2: Distributing ripped off copies of easily available, expensive to produce, copyrighted works, largely made in the last 5 years, that the purchase of would help feed the creators. I really hope for the first, but I'm depressingly certain it'll be the second. Mass copyright infringement is not some "noble cause". It's parasitic, adolescent, greedy, "I want it, so I'm entitled to have it" behaviour that makes me despair of large portions of humanity.

scotty79 12y ago
Use case 2: Help kill outdated creative work financing model based, until recently, on technological barriers and more recently on laughable attempts at manipulating morality to shame people into paying for costless copies.
- diab0lic 12y ago
  Costless copies. I hear this one a lot, one of my last room mates used to say this one a lot. Its so black and white isn't it? How stupid am I that I don't understand this? Copies cost nothing, of course they don't. It doesn't cost YOU anything to copy it. Lets invert our perspective on that same concept. One copy of the movie (or TV show, or song) is purchased, lets say somehow its a blu-ray that costs $99.99. An inflated price to be certain, but it helps us illustrate our point as nearly all blu-rays cost less than this. Using the "costless copies" model you're suggesting that there is zero economic damage from this first purchaser posting copies online and all other content consumers instead drawing from these "costless copies". This is false. You may argue there is some middle ground but then this is a logarithmically decreasing cost or something of the like, not costless. People's concept of what defines zero or nothing (in the case of cost here) continually astounds me. Anyone who argues this "costless copies" model is at best selfish and ignorant, at worst a thief. You may counter this argument and say that its not something you would have paid for -- well you wanted it on some level or you wouldn't have pirated it. These people continually want to have their cake and eat it too. There is little difference, morally, between this and me coming to your house, kidnapping you and forcing you to work for me, maybe you're an accountant or a laborer or something I could use, but probably wouldn't just pay for. (If you're still a fan of extreme, over-simplified analogies like "costless copies" we can call this slavery -- something we've nearly universally agreed is wrong.) The difference of course being that you can disconnect yourself from it by doing it online. If you're about to make the counter argument that unlike the movie you downloaded and watched, I actually need an accountant, or labor, don't. You wanted the movie enough to pirate it, and spend two hours watching it. Do yourself a favor and stop making yourself look like so foolish by citing this costless copies bull. Its infuriating to see otherwise very intelligent people make such a blind and over-simplified claim. You might have a hard time accepting this but both sides of the argument are "manipulating morality".
  - celegans 12y ago
    The key difference between the tyranny of "costless copies" and slavery is the arrow of time. The work is already done, but it was done with a hope that something might become of it. I guess (to follow in this long-held tradition of contriving emotional pleas in defense or against intellectual property) this isn't entirely unlike pulling out of a war. There's a deep repugnance to the notion that thousands of people have given their lives in vain, and that the hope which drove them was never fulfilled. Yet we would never mistake their sacrifice as slavery nor even tantamount to it, because of the chronology. The fact that for the 20th century, the economy of movies and the tastes of the consumer were so consistently aligned that tinseltown could churn dozens of hundred-million dollar artistic edifices on a regular basis is remarkable and profound. And indeed, it'd be tragic if the advent of the digital age meant that cinema were done for—and all we had in its place was a hundred million amateur Vines and YouTube videos.
    - ticviking 12y ago
      That's just it, the arrow of time. It makes all the difference in the world. A slave is made to work with no promise of recompense, and is denied their autonomy. It is a state defined by dehumanization and coercion. Slaves have a very small decision tree, ("do as they are told" OR ("be beaten" AND ("Do as they are told" OR "Be killed for insubordination") OR "Try and escape and hope you're not killed for it") When they worked, someone took the RISK, that they could somehow make a profit selling copies of the work to the public. They paid the employees, either in cash, or as an agreed upon share of any profits. It is no different than a VC taking a risk, that I will like Vine enough to buy whatever their in-app purchase is. The fact that a "costless copy" exists does not introduce an element of coercion to the risk the producer is taking, all it does is increase the risk. Pretending that copying is the same as theft was already ridiculous, doing so with slavery borders on the offensive.
  - scotty79 12y ago
    By cost-less copy I just meant that the cost of making another functional copy of information is currently hovering near 0. Years ago copies required infrastructure to make them and they were almost only means of distribution of information and you could hide the fraction of the cost of creation of this information in the price of a copy. That's no longer viable strategy. Sooner people get that, sooner we'll get more honest future. Clean copy costs nothing. If a copy costs you then it's the cost of material waste plus cost of intellectual waste (DRM) plus fraction of the cost of the creation of this information plus healthy share for guys who set up all this chain to profit from it while creating nothing apart from this business model. If you wan't to be moral just download the torrent, track down guys who actually created the art and send them some cash.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  You've already killed the creative work financing model, thanks. I find it a lot harder to get paid for working on an indie film than I did 5 years ago, because it;s a lot harder to recoup production costs and investors are much warier of small-budget projects. Congratulations. It's so much more exciting to produce or work on films without any sort of credible revenue model.
  - scotty79 12y ago
    Society doesn't owe you an ability to make a profession out of your hobby. If you can't figure out business model and don't like to create for free than stop doing it and write some code instead. People are paying handsomely for that right now. Lot's of people are making indie films which they put up on youtube getting revenue from ads. It's healthier model than the traditional one because when the movie is bad the sucker who watched it loses just a few minutes of his time instead of DVD or a ticket price.
teddyh 12y ago
Suppose you build a beautiful statue in a secluded forest, with the intent of charging money for taking people through the trees to see it. Suppose further that as you have completed the statue, all the surrounding trees are felled by a freak storm, and anyone can now see your statue without paying you, by standing on public land. A large crowd now surround your statue day and night, watching it. If your response is to call the crowd “parasitic, adolescent, [and] greedy”, then I suggest you are starting off your relationship with your audience on the wrong foot. You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay. What you cannot do is declare that anyone looking at your statue is a thief, and lobby to abolish the public right to look at things, merely because it upsets your old, now-obsolete, dependent-on-no-longer-existing-conditions, business model. The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
- iamdave 12y ago
  "Felled by a freak storm' is a pretty ignorant mischaracterization of people deliberately hacking down trees to see the statue. That said: I agree with the theme of consternation over outmoded content distribution methods, not adapting with changing demand in the market place is a good way to becoming outmoded yourself.
  - teddyh 12y ago
    What? The freak storm is supposed to represent the technological development of digital copying itself – I should know, I came up with the analogy. You stop mischaracterizing the analogy. It is an analogy, not a model. Or are you implying that the developers of digital technology did so merely to copy cheaply those things which were previously hard and lossy to copy? (I doubt it.) I.e. what is your actual criticism of my argument?
howeyc 12y ago
We've really got to stop the sob story for use case 2. Just because you produce something that doesn't mean you deserve to get paid. Ask my aunt who make pine-cone christmas decorations. Nobody buys those, but she makes them. With the way people talk about "stealing" content you'd think she deserves to make a living because she's "working" and depends on the income. NOPE. It's quite simple for most things physical. They wont give me the object unless I pay their agreed price. Digital has a little wrinkle in that for most things, I can buy it then give it away to a friend (or millions of strangers) for free. This means the "payment" part has to be different for digital goods. To me, it looks like the best way is getting paid up front, like Kickstarter. Or maybe subscriptions to a movie studio or something (Netflix). Time will tell.
- sbarre 12y ago
  The problem with your rationale ("I can buy it then give it away to a friend") is that while it is certainly possible to do that, it ignores the creator's rights (both to control their creation and therefore be compensated for its use according to rules that they set, not you), and removes the incentive to create. Your aunt's pine cone example is stupid because that's a trivial task. Making a movie or an album is not a trivial task, so you can't really compare. If you aunt built homes, and then people just moved into them without paying for them, I'm no sure you'd be telling the same story. No one is asking to be paid simply for creating something, they are asking to be paid when people consume that creation, when they benefit/enjoy/use it. I'm not sure you get that.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Sell it at a fair price in ways that don't pre-assume your audience wants to break the law, and you generally make out pretty good. Completely ignoring the legal aspect for a moment, the thing about respect for rights is a two way street. Most of the media companies out there have literally none for their audience. DRM rootkits, draconian terms, absurd prices, the lot. Why should I have the slightest bit of respect for someone that has no respect for me?
    - 12y ago
quintis 12y ago
> Distributing ripped off copies of easily available With crappy services, regional lockouts, DRM, and other horrors, this is actually rarely the case. Especially if you're not the small percentage of customers in the States. > expensive to produce That's not the customer's problem to care about. That's the industry's problem to solve. > copyrighted works, largely made in the last 5 years Why should it matter that a work was created in the last 5 years? > that the purchase of would help feed the creators. You'll find that very often the creators don't actually make squat. The gatekeepers who enforce terrible services, DRM, lose customer data to hackers, and assault customers with lawsuits absorb most of the cash.
bpatrianakos 12y ago
It's great to see I'm not the only person who thinks this way. There are going to be no shortage of thin analogies and excuses in response to you in afraid. Regardless of the merits of copyright and how "dumb" the laws enforcing it are, I can't see how you can argue with your point about the content creators being deprived of an income. Maybe those creators do get screwed but they're still getting something and to say pirating is okay because maybe the system changes and those creators get a bigger piece of the pie or change their business model seems wrong to me. Who are we to decide what amount of collateral damage is acceptable? Like you said, this stuff is easily accessible legally. Just about all of us can easily get what's primarily being distributed on sites like Pirate Bay. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Cable Company X On-Demand streams, HBO Go, Spotify, etc. it's all out there and far easier to access than hopefully getting a high quality rip off a torrent site. Okay, maybe some things aren't available in all countries and maybe the business model makes it next to impossible to buy a copy of a movie or song once and have it on all your devices in some cases. But really, is that really the primary use case for the Pirate Bay? Someone is going to say it is for them but if you believe that that's the primary use case across the board then you've got to be an apologist or just lying to yourself. Have I pirated movies, music, and software? Absolutely. Because I couldn't afford or just didn't want to pay for it. But I sure as hell am not telling myself that it was okay because copyright is evil and because "business models" and people who pirate wouldn't pay anyway so no one loses money. I live in the real world, not the ideal world.
- macns 12y ago
  The real issue here is not small time artists that want to make a living. Its not about millionaire actors or giant corps that cant afford a 5th house. Its about freedom of information. The internet makes that possible. Information should be accessible to anyone, for free. Copyright breaks that. It breaks the internet, and it causes a lot more problems than the one that was meant to fix. With respect to copyright holders, if you dont want your work shared, internet is not a full proof solution, and (hopefully) will never be. It was designed for sharing.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    The real issue here is not small time artists that want to make a living. How dare we! It's not like we have living expenses or aspire to any sort of financial stability. Information should be accessible to anyone, for free. I love how you assert that without any supporting arguments. Please send me the information on how to help myself to a portion of whatever is in your bank account. I know that anything you have accumulated there is the result of your skill and labor, but I appreciate your generosity and determination to make this accessible to me and will limit my consumption of your bank balance to an amount I consider reasonable.
g8gggu89 12y ago
Show me a single creator who can't feed him or herself due to a site like this.
- caryhartline 12y ago
  It's difficult to give examples of causation (which no on should have to do because it's so obvious), but you can see artists that are doing more concerts and appearances or placing more ads in their videos in order to make up for the lack of sales. It's an industry-wide effect.
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    > artists that are doing more concerts and appearances Good, because this has actual value, unlike copies of digital data.
    - Buge 12y ago
      So a movie or a song recording have no actual value?
      - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        No, just a price tag enforced by artificial means like copyright laws. There is simply no way to sell on the free market objects with an almost infinite supply without appealing to outside forces like state regulators.
        realityking 12y ago
        Serious question, as you seem to be a developer. How would you feel about companies using GPL licensed code in close source products?
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        I seem to, indeed :-) In what context? A laissez-faire economy without patents and copyright? You'd have to also eliminate law enforcement when it comes to licenses to render GPL useless, but I don't see how is this relevant to the discussion about the intrinsic economical value of digital data that can be copied at an almost zero cost.
damon_c 12y ago
The way I look at it is that even if you have the option to not pay for things, paying for things is giving you a voice. When I pay $4.99 to "rent" a movie or $13.99 for a season of TV, I am saying to the motion picture making world, "make more like this and I will pay". People who don't pay for things give up that voice. So if, as a creator, you are concerned with financial profit, it would behoove you to make things that are attractive to people like me who pay for things or figure out some other way to make money like embedding advertising in your content. In the long run I don't know if this will be good for art and creativity and it furthers the recent increasing prevalence of people with money having a louder voice than others, but maybe this is the market based solution to this problem.
- bpatrianakos 12y ago
  So are you saying you try before you buy? The concept is sound but it falls apart the moment you get something free. How likely is it that after pirating a movie or an album someone goes back and buys it so they can vote with their wallet? I think pirating can be voting just the same except you're hurting the creator or distributors ability to make or distribute more of it. I Don't think that this is about whether something is worth paying for. It's about whether it's worth consuming. You wouldn't go to a restaurant, order a dish, then only pay if you think the meal was worth paying for. The meal has already been made, the effort to cook it was expended, and if enough people get their meals for free the restaurant goes out of business. It didn't go out of business because it made bad food necessarily, it only shuts down because their patrons were the type of people who thought it was okay to not pay based on their arbitrary standards of what's worth paying for. After all, by consuming the meal they've already implicitly voted that the meals were worth eating. Just not paying for.
  - damon_c 12y ago
    Speaking for myself, I don't try before I buy, I just pay if there is a pay option available. I'm just suggesting a sort of market based incentive to pay for things that one could easily get for free. Over time, those who pay may end up getting some additional non "feel good" or convenience benefits in that they will be a preferred class of customers.
aluhut 12y ago
Oh come on. "large portions of humanity"...really? There are studies that show, people who torrent also buy. Good products will be bought. Bad products won't. They'll still be available illegally but there will just be less people to fall for crap. Interestingly, those people with crap are those who complain the most. Your overdramatisation isn't helping anyone. You hurt your position more then you help because with all that piracy going on in "large portions of humanity", the whole market looks pretty good. There was even more piracy going on in several sectors (music for example) and guess what, there is still music being made today! In fact, they never stopped. There is still Microsoft out there! Popular Games, Movies and so on. There are even musicians who share their products on torrents for free and don't end up broken in the end. There are so many examples why your overdramatisation is wrong and all those hurt the discussion. That makes me despair of a certain portion of the startup scene that seems to be stuck in some long past vision of "how it should be".
Houshalter 12y ago
I think a pirate site that only distributed >5 year old content would get much more support. After 5 years the vast majority of works have already made most of their profits. Yet older and more obscure works are much harder to get without violating copyright. See the graphic on this page for example: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi... I think copyright should only last 10 to 15 years, but that's a battle that is never going to be won. If anything it will likely be extended indefinitely to protect Disney™ Corporation.
- timonovici 12y ago
  That's not always the case, Seinfeld still bring a lot of cash for Sony, and they will never agree to stop at any point, if that still brings in money. Even a thousand years would not be enough, because that's the "raison d'être" for corporations: making money. http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/sony-pictures-business-secrets-revealed-in-hack-yep-seinfeld http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/sony-pictures-business-s... But I do agree with the general idea - torrents site should stay in the legal area (but actually is not site owners who are responsible, it's the users. The site just provides a means to an end, just like a showel could be used in your garden or to smash somebody's head. It would be stupid to sue the hardware store that provided the showel). Copyright ought to be shorter - several years would be enough, and I guess another rule would help: corporations should be banned from owning the so called "intelectual rights", or copyrights of any kind - those corporations tend to grow into monsters, and however much they would make, only very few of the creative talent behind the work would benefit.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    I said that they make the majority of their money within a few years. Also the question is whether they would have produced Seinfeld anyway, if copyright only lasted 10 years. I think they would have.
venomsnake 12y ago
How can you copyright a hash? And magnet links are even hashes of hashes ...
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Technically that is a derived work produced through an automated process. You wouldn't come up with that hash all by your lonesome, you need the content to do it.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    No, its not, because I never consume the content - it never passes a decoder. If I burn my mp3 player (with licenced music) in liquid oxygen, does the company that owns the right claim that the smoke is derived work?
  - pyre 12y ago
    I don't know if that interpretation has ever been tested in court though. There are limits to what can be a derived work.
pokpokpok 12y ago
TPB was effectively a modern cultural library for millions. If a child from a poor household wants to experience the greatest music or films created by the artists of our era, and doesn't have hundreds of dollars to pursue that wish, then I think that we are doing ourselves AND the artists a huge disservice by shutting them out and telling them: Go watch some youtube videos and play some shitty flash games, kid.
- loblollyboy 12y ago
  I never thought about it that aspect. Good point. I did have a similar thought yesterday though at Barnes and Noble, when you check out this time of year they ask if you want to buy a book for a charity book drive. I figured most of the people who would be interested in reading would have already found a way to get material without getting ripped off by a bookstore. Be it pirating, project gutenberg library or thrift shop
- res0nat0r 12y ago
  They can also go to the library.
  - ticviking 12y ago
    You may be surprised at the barriers to that for a young person with parents unable to devote time to assisting them with that. Minors need a parent to sign for them(since someone has to be liable for the late fees and repair fees if a book is trashed). In rural communities there may not be a library, or transportation. The school library's book selection is almost always heavily censored, and/or hopelessly out of date.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      What about the barriers involving possession of a computer, access to fairly high-speed internet, and the technical knowledge to use Torrents and video codecs and so on?
      - 12y ago

scotty79 12y ago

Use case 2: Help kill outdated creative work financing model based, until recently, on technological barriers and more recently on laughable attempts at manipulating morality to shame people into paying for costless copies.

diab0lic 12y ago
Costless copies. I hear this one a lot, one of my last room mates used to say this one a lot. Its so black and white isn't it? How stupid am I that I don't understand this? Copies cost nothing, of course they don't. It doesn't cost YOU anything to copy it. Lets invert our perspective on that same concept. One copy of the movie (or TV show, or song) is purchased, lets say somehow its a blu-ray that costs $99.99. An inflated price to be certain, but it helps us illustrate our point as nearly all blu-rays cost less than this. Using the "costless copies" model you're suggesting that there is zero economic damage from this first purchaser posting copies online and all other content consumers instead drawing from these "costless copies". This is false. You may argue there is some middle ground but then this is a logarithmically decreasing cost or something of the like, not costless. People's concept of what defines zero or nothing (in the case of cost here) continually astounds me. Anyone who argues this "costless copies" model is at best selfish and ignorant, at worst a thief. You may counter this argument and say that its not something you would have paid for -- well you wanted it on some level or you wouldn't have pirated it. These people continually want to have their cake and eat it too. There is little difference, morally, between this and me coming to your house, kidnapping you and forcing you to work for me, maybe you're an accountant or a laborer or something I could use, but probably wouldn't just pay for. (If you're still a fan of extreme, over-simplified analogies like "costless copies" we can call this slavery -- something we've nearly universally agreed is wrong.) The difference of course being that you can disconnect yourself from it by doing it online. If you're about to make the counter argument that unlike the movie you downloaded and watched, I actually need an accountant, or labor, don't. You wanted the movie enough to pirate it, and spend two hours watching it. Do yourself a favor and stop making yourself look like so foolish by citing this costless copies bull. Its infuriating to see otherwise very intelligent people make such a blind and over-simplified claim. You might have a hard time accepting this but both sides of the argument are "manipulating morality".
- celegans 12y ago
  The key difference between the tyranny of "costless copies" and slavery is the arrow of time. The work is already done, but it was done with a hope that something might become of it. I guess (to follow in this long-held tradition of contriving emotional pleas in defense or against intellectual property) this isn't entirely unlike pulling out of a war. There's a deep repugnance to the notion that thousands of people have given their lives in vain, and that the hope which drove them was never fulfilled. Yet we would never mistake their sacrifice as slavery nor even tantamount to it, because of the chronology. The fact that for the 20th century, the economy of movies and the tastes of the consumer were so consistently aligned that tinseltown could churn dozens of hundred-million dollar artistic edifices on a regular basis is remarkable and profound. And indeed, it'd be tragic if the advent of the digital age meant that cinema were done for—and all we had in its place was a hundred million amateur Vines and YouTube videos.
  - ticviking 12y ago
    That's just it, the arrow of time. It makes all the difference in the world. A slave is made to work with no promise of recompense, and is denied their autonomy. It is a state defined by dehumanization and coercion. Slaves have a very small decision tree, ("do as they are told" OR ("be beaten" AND ("Do as they are told" OR "Be killed for insubordination") OR "Try and escape and hope you're not killed for it") When they worked, someone took the RISK, that they could somehow make a profit selling copies of the work to the public. They paid the employees, either in cash, or as an agreed upon share of any profits. It is no different than a VC taking a risk, that I will like Vine enough to buy whatever their in-app purchase is. The fact that a "costless copy" exists does not introduce an element of coercion to the risk the producer is taking, all it does is increase the risk. Pretending that copying is the same as theft was already ridiculous, doing so with slavery borders on the offensive.
- scotty79 12y ago
  By cost-less copy I just meant that the cost of making another functional copy of information is currently hovering near 0. Years ago copies required infrastructure to make them and they were almost only means of distribution of information and you could hide the fraction of the cost of creation of this information in the price of a copy. That's no longer viable strategy. Sooner people get that, sooner we'll get more honest future. Clean copy costs nothing. If a copy costs you then it's the cost of material waste plus cost of intellectual waste (DRM) plus fraction of the cost of the creation of this information plus healthy share for guys who set up all this chain to profit from it while creating nothing apart from this business model. If you wan't to be moral just download the torrent, track down guys who actually created the art and send them some cash.
anigbrowl 12y ago
You've already killed the creative work financing model, thanks. I find it a lot harder to get paid for working on an indie film than I did 5 years ago, because it;s a lot harder to recoup production costs and investors are much warier of small-budget projects. Congratulations. It's so much more exciting to produce or work on films without any sort of credible revenue model.
- scotty79 12y ago
  Society doesn't owe you an ability to make a profession out of your hobby. If you can't figure out business model and don't like to create for free than stop doing it and write some code instead. People are paying handsomely for that right now. Lot's of people are making indie films which they put up on youtube getting revenue from ads. It's healthier model than the traditional one because when the movie is bad the sucker who watched it loses just a few minutes of his time instead of DVD or a ticket price.

teddyh 12y ago

Suppose you build a beautiful statue in a secluded forest, with the intent of charging money for taking people through the trees to see it. Suppose further that as you have completed the statue, all the surrounding trees are felled by a freak storm, and anyone can now see your statue without paying you, by standing on public land. A large crowd now surround your statue day and night, watching it. If your response is to call the crowd “parasitic, adolescent, [and] greedy”, then I suggest you are starting off your relationship with your audience on the wrong foot. You should be doing something like selling them hot dogs. If that is not sufficient revenue, try something else, like taking up a collection for your next project. But suppose that none of the many possible methods for raising capital work; then, maybe the time of large statues is over, and you’ll have to do something else with your efforts; something for which there is an audience willing to pay. What you cannot do is declare that anyone looking at your statue is a thief, and lobby to abolish the public right to look at things, merely because it upsets your old, now-obsolete, dependent-on-no-longer-existing-conditions, business model. The very idea of intellectual “property” is extremely suspect in these days of zero-cost copying. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

iamdave 12y ago
"Felled by a freak storm' is a pretty ignorant mischaracterization of people deliberately hacking down trees to see the statue. That said: I agree with the theme of consternation over outmoded content distribution methods, not adapting with changing demand in the market place is a good way to becoming outmoded yourself.
- teddyh 12y ago
  What? The freak storm is supposed to represent the technological development of digital copying itself – I should know, I came up with the analogy. You stop mischaracterizing the analogy. It is an analogy, not a model. Or are you implying that the developers of digital technology did so merely to copy cheaply those things which were previously hard and lossy to copy? (I doubt it.) I.e. what is your actual criticism of my argument?

howeyc 12y ago

We've really got to stop the sob story for use case 2. Just because you produce something that doesn't mean you deserve to get paid. Ask my aunt who make pine-cone christmas decorations. Nobody buys those, but she makes them. With the way people talk about "stealing" content you'd think she deserves to make a living because she's "working" and depends on the income. NOPE. It's quite simple for most things physical. They wont give me the object unless I pay their agreed price. Digital has a little wrinkle in that for most things, I can buy it then give it away to a friend (or millions of strangers) for free. This means the "payment" part has to be different for digital goods. To me, it looks like the best way is getting paid up front, like Kickstarter. Or maybe subscriptions to a movie studio or something (Netflix). Time will tell.

sbarre 12y ago
The problem with your rationale ("I can buy it then give it away to a friend") is that while it is certainly possible to do that, it ignores the creator's rights (both to control their creation and therefore be compensated for its use according to rules that they set, not you), and removes the incentive to create. Your aunt's pine cone example is stupid because that's a trivial task. Making a movie or an album is not a trivial task, so you can't really compare. If you aunt built homes, and then people just moved into them without paying for them, I'm no sure you'd be telling the same story. No one is asking to be paid simply for creating something, they are asking to be paid when people consume that creation, when they benefit/enjoy/use it. I'm not sure you get that.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Sell it at a fair price in ways that don't pre-assume your audience wants to break the law, and you generally make out pretty good. Completely ignoring the legal aspect for a moment, the thing about respect for rights is a two way street. Most of the media companies out there have literally none for their audience. DRM rootkits, draconian terms, absurd prices, the lot. Why should I have the slightest bit of respect for someone that has no respect for me?
  - 12y ago

quintis 12y ago

> Distributing ripped off copies of easily available With crappy services, regional lockouts, DRM, and other horrors, this is actually rarely the case. Especially if you're not the small percentage of customers in the States. > expensive to produce That's not the customer's problem to care about. That's the industry's problem to solve. > copyrighted works, largely made in the last 5 years Why should it matter that a work was created in the last 5 years? > that the purchase of would help feed the creators. You'll find that very often the creators don't actually make squat. The gatekeepers who enforce terrible services, DRM, lose customer data to hackers, and assault customers with lawsuits absorb most of the cash.

bpatrianakos 12y ago

It's great to see I'm not the only person who thinks this way. There are going to be no shortage of thin analogies and excuses in response to you in afraid. Regardless of the merits of copyright and how "dumb" the laws enforcing it are, I can't see how you can argue with your point about the content creators being deprived of an income. Maybe those creators do get screwed but they're still getting something and to say pirating is okay because maybe the system changes and those creators get a bigger piece of the pie or change their business model seems wrong to me. Who are we to decide what amount of collateral damage is acceptable? Like you said, this stuff is easily accessible legally. Just about all of us can easily get what's primarily being distributed on sites like Pirate Bay. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Cable Company X On-Demand streams, HBO Go, Spotify, etc. it's all out there and far easier to access than hopefully getting a high quality rip off a torrent site. Okay, maybe some things aren't available in all countries and maybe the business model makes it next to impossible to buy a copy of a movie or song once and have it on all your devices in some cases. But really, is that really the primary use case for the Pirate Bay? Someone is going to say it is for them but if you believe that that's the primary use case across the board then you've got to be an apologist or just lying to yourself. Have I pirated movies, music, and software? Absolutely. Because I couldn't afford or just didn't want to pay for it. But I sure as hell am not telling myself that it was okay because copyright is evil and because "business models" and people who pirate wouldn't pay anyway so no one loses money. I live in the real world, not the ideal world.

macns 12y ago
The real issue here is not small time artists that want to make a living. Its not about millionaire actors or giant corps that cant afford a 5th house. Its about freedom of information. The internet makes that possible. Information should be accessible to anyone, for free. Copyright breaks that. It breaks the internet, and it causes a lot more problems than the one that was meant to fix. With respect to copyright holders, if you dont want your work shared, internet is not a full proof solution, and (hopefully) will never be. It was designed for sharing.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  The real issue here is not small time artists that want to make a living. How dare we! It's not like we have living expenses or aspire to any sort of financial stability. Information should be accessible to anyone, for free. I love how you assert that without any supporting arguments. Please send me the information on how to help myself to a portion of whatever is in your bank account. I know that anything you have accumulated there is the result of your skill and labor, but I appreciate your generosity and determination to make this accessible to me and will limit my consumption of your bank balance to an amount I consider reasonable.

g8gggu89 12y ago

Show me a single creator who can't feed him or herself due to a site like this.

caryhartline 12y ago
It's difficult to give examples of causation (which no on should have to do because it's so obvious), but you can see artists that are doing more concerts and appearances or placing more ads in their videos in order to make up for the lack of sales. It's an industry-wide effect.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  > artists that are doing more concerts and appearances Good, because this has actual value, unlike copies of digital data.
  - Buge 12y ago
    So a movie or a song recording have no actual value?
    - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
      No, just a price tag enforced by artificial means like copyright laws. There is simply no way to sell on the free market objects with an almost infinite supply without appealing to outside forces like state regulators.
      - realityking 12y ago
        Serious question, as you seem to be a developer. How would you feel about companies using GPL licensed code in close source products?
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        I seem to, indeed :-) In what context? A laissez-faire economy without patents and copyright? You'd have to also eliminate law enforcement when it comes to licenses to render GPL useless, but I don't see how is this relevant to the discussion about the intrinsic economical value of digital data that can be copied at an almost zero cost.

damon_c 12y ago

The way I look at it is that even if you have the option to not pay for things, paying for things is giving you a voice. When I pay $4.99 to "rent" a movie or $13.99 for a season of TV, I am saying to the motion picture making world, "make more like this and I will pay". People who don't pay for things give up that voice. So if, as a creator, you are concerned with financial profit, it would behoove you to make things that are attractive to people like me who pay for things or figure out some other way to make money like embedding advertising in your content. In the long run I don't know if this will be good for art and creativity and it furthers the recent increasing prevalence of people with money having a louder voice than others, but maybe this is the market based solution to this problem.

bpatrianakos 12y ago
So are you saying you try before you buy? The concept is sound but it falls apart the moment you get something free. How likely is it that after pirating a movie or an album someone goes back and buys it so they can vote with their wallet? I think pirating can be voting just the same except you're hurting the creator or distributors ability to make or distribute more of it. I Don't think that this is about whether something is worth paying for. It's about whether it's worth consuming. You wouldn't go to a restaurant, order a dish, then only pay if you think the meal was worth paying for. The meal has already been made, the effort to cook it was expended, and if enough people get their meals for free the restaurant goes out of business. It didn't go out of business because it made bad food necessarily, it only shuts down because their patrons were the type of people who thought it was okay to not pay based on their arbitrary standards of what's worth paying for. After all, by consuming the meal they've already implicitly voted that the meals were worth eating. Just not paying for.
- damon_c 12y ago
  Speaking for myself, I don't try before I buy, I just pay if there is a pay option available. I'm just suggesting a sort of market based incentive to pay for things that one could easily get for free. Over time, those who pay may end up getting some additional non "feel good" or convenience benefits in that they will be a preferred class of customers.

aluhut 12y ago

Oh come on. "large portions of humanity"...really? There are studies that show, people who torrent also buy. Good products will be bought. Bad products won't. They'll still be available illegally but there will just be less people to fall for crap. Interestingly, those people with crap are those who complain the most. Your overdramatisation isn't helping anyone. You hurt your position more then you help because with all that piracy going on in "large portions of humanity", the whole market looks pretty good. There was even more piracy going on in several sectors (music for example) and guess what, there is still music being made today! In fact, they never stopped. There is still Microsoft out there! Popular Games, Movies and so on. There are even musicians who share their products on torrents for free and don't end up broken in the end. There are so many examples why your overdramatisation is wrong and all those hurt the discussion. That makes me despair of a certain portion of the startup scene that seems to be stuck in some long past vision of "how it should be".

Houshalter 12y ago

I think a pirate site that only distributed >5 year old content would get much more support. After 5 years the vast majority of works have already made most of their profits. Yet older and more obscure works are much harder to get without violating copyright. See the graphic on this page for example: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-mi... I think copyright should only last 10 to 15 years, but that's a battle that is never going to be won. If anything it will likely be extended indefinitely to protect Disney™ Corporation.

timonovici 12y ago
That's not always the case, Seinfeld still bring a lot of cash for Sony, and they will never agree to stop at any point, if that still brings in money. Even a thousand years would not be enough, because that's the "raison d'être" for corporations: making money. http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/sony-pictures-business-secrets-revealed-in-hack-yep-seinfeld http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/sony-pictures-business-s... But I do agree with the general idea - torrents site should stay in the legal area (but actually is not site owners who are responsible, it's the users. The site just provides a means to an end, just like a showel could be used in your garden or to smash somebody's head. It would be stupid to sue the hardware store that provided the showel). Copyright ought to be shorter - several years would be enough, and I guess another rule would help: corporations should be banned from owning the so called "intelectual rights", or copyrights of any kind - those corporations tend to grow into monsters, and however much they would make, only very few of the creative talent behind the work would benefit.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  I said that they make the majority of their money within a few years. Also the question is whether they would have produced Seinfeld anyway, if copyright only lasted 10 years. I think they would have.

venomsnake 12y ago

How can you copyright a hash? And magnet links are even hashes of hashes ...

jacquesm 12y ago
Technically that is a derived work produced through an automated process. You wouldn't come up with that hash all by your lonesome, you need the content to do it.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  No, its not, because I never consume the content - it never passes a decoder. If I burn my mp3 player (with licenced music) in liquid oxygen, does the company that owns the right claim that the smoke is derived work?
- pyre 12y ago
  I don't know if that interpretation has ever been tested in court though. There are limits to what can be a derived work.

pokpokpok 12y ago

TPB was effectively a modern cultural library for millions. If a child from a poor household wants to experience the greatest music or films created by the artists of our era, and doesn't have hundreds of dollars to pursue that wish, then I think that we are doing ourselves AND the artists a huge disservice by shutting them out and telling them: Go watch some youtube videos and play some shitty flash games, kid.

loblollyboy 12y ago
I never thought about it that aspect. Good point. I did have a similar thought yesterday though at Barnes and Noble, when you check out this time of year they ask if you want to buy a book for a charity book drive. I figured most of the people who would be interested in reading would have already found a way to get material without getting ripped off by a bookstore. Be it pirating, project gutenberg library or thrift shop
res0nat0r 12y ago
They can also go to the library.
- ticviking 12y ago
  You may be surprised at the barriers to that for a young person with parents unable to devote time to assisting them with that. Minors need a parent to sign for them(since someone has to be liable for the late fees and repair fees if a book is trashed). In rural communities there may not be a library, or transportation. The school library's book selection is almost always heavily censored, and/or hopelessly out of date.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    What about the barriers involving possession of a computer, access to fairly high-speed internet, and the technical knowledge to use Torrents and video codecs and so on?
    - 12y ago