I was there when a UK music tracker called OiNK's Pink Palace was shut down. The police raided the home of the site owner before dawn and even the home of his father who had no idea what his son was up to. Copyright industry writers wrote the news article, claiming it was "extremely lucrative" and included gems such as "Within a few hours of a popular pre-release track being posted on the OiNK site, hundreds of copies can be found".

The site's owner was found not guilty in court several years later, but not before the copyright industry essentially ruined his life.

But how does this happen? If you talk to most people they don't understand copyright at all. They think it's some kind of privileged status that you have to pay for, like a trademark or something. Most people are not even aware that they hold copyrights. And why would they? Can the average person summon the police to help protect their copyright? Of course not. It's not even a criminal matter. The police being involved seems nothing short of corruption.

IMO both the patent and the copyright laws, at least in the US, are broken. The original goal was good: encourage individual inventors to make technology that the whole society will benefit from at a price of some limitation on use by society for a short period of time. In the current system, "the whole society will benefit" part does not work because time limits are too high -- at the modern technology pace, in 20 years most inventions are obsolete.

I think the best way to fix it is to drastically shorten the time the invention is protected, which would require major compromises. Unfortunately, the discussion now seems very polarized: it seems to be "all information should be free" against "copyright everything and it needs to last longer, longer, longer" as major camps with little in the middle.

I know this is the common belief of the origin of patent law, but is there actually any evidence that this is the case?

As I understand patent law originated as a way for monarchy to maintain control over innovation and intellect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_roll

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section8

Yes, patents existed before the US Constitution, but the reason the practice was formalized in the US was to promote progress.

For instance the patriot act surely was filled with feel good vocabulary about protecting the public good, net neutrality’s repel “to increase investment”, and I’m sure the coming up “save the children” act that will aim at giving better education and critical thinking to younger generations.

"The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provisions for either of the cases, and most of them have anticipated the decision of this point, by laws passed at the instance of Congress." Federalist 43

For more background: http://www.copyhype.com/2010/09/copyright-and-the-constituti...

The quote you have from Madison no doubt reflects his real opnion, and well the established view in Britain. But the reason he needed to write it in his letters was that he had to argue against the opposite view among other founders.

You can guess which side Webster supported. And this is the kind of thing I mean about it being a "well-known public justification".

[1]: http://www.thejanuarist.com/noah-webster-father-of-the-ameri...

"Patent" just means "open", in this case openly declared, not secret.

Ideally "patenting" an invention provides an alternative to an inventor hoarding a trade secret that dies with him or his company. The quid pro quo for the public good of making a technology open knowledge is a temporary government granted monopoly.

The ideal and reality seem to have parted company a long time ago...

I always imagined it was more along the lines of encouraging inventors to open-source their technologies, by giving them greater legal defenses for doing so.

To avoid the "apple does research, and archives it secretly, lost forever if it doesn't reach market" scenario; instead we now see Apple publishing anything and everything it thinks it can lay claim on, to tune of absurd claims today, but in (80) years, the research is still available to all

Patents are troublesome, in particular software patents, and in particular in the US due to the way patent trolls work.

But that is an entirely different discussion. Different groups and people behind it, different power struggle. Let's focus on copyright.

Copyright. The way the US enforces it and exerts influence over it--which is what the article is about--makes it a worldwide problem.

Another weird thing is, even from the "copyright everything" camp, it must seem that the US is disproportionately represented+enforced. But you don't hear them about that. There's a few reasons for that, larger non-US studios/distributors often have deals with US studios/distributors. But those deals are mainly with the US, so on the whole it is still disproportionately represented.

I kind of wonder, but have never seen any clear evidence for this so this is just speculation: Even outside the US, a very large percentage of media (pop songs, films, TV series) are of US origin. At least in the Netherlands: Domestic films are considered "niche", the hit charts are dominated by US pop songs and the majority of TV series broadcast and/or watched are US-based. Of course a large driving force behind this phenomenon is that (in NL) we all speak English, but how do you think it became that way? It's not education; We also learn German and French in school, but the Dutch people speak way better English than they speak the language of our neighbours (Germany), let alone French. And such is the case for a large part of Europe at least (I won't try to speak for places that I don't have much knowledge about).

That's some strong cultural influence. It is power. The US probably wants to keep it that way, it's an amazing way to influence thought in western culture everywhere. Anyway it is power, so there must be forces that want to keep it.

But the anti-piracy movements seem kind of antithetical to that, right? They are restricting distribution. So how does that add up? There doesn't seem to be a (public) fight between the "global cultural influence" forces in the US and the "content industry" forces. Again, I'm just speculating, but I can think of a few reasons: It's not about restricting distribution per se, it's about controlling distribution, and control is power. Another way is that by restricting supply (and with a lot of show), it is perceived as valuable, which legitimises. But that doesn't seem to be enough, considering the enormous amount of influence and power on cultures and thought all over the world, the US has control over. Restricting supply is just a trick and controlling distribution is not enough, there must be a force that pushes, too. But what is it? (I'm probably overlooking something extremely obvious because the alternative would be a world-wide psyops-campaign).

I mean, unless US pop-culture is just that much superior, that good, that everybody wants it, everywhere. But that also seems unlikely (and I don't mean that by hating on pop-music or anything, because non-US pop-music is really just as "shit", the "main stream" is still art IMHO, even when I don't like it myself, and that's a whole other discussion again).

Of course I understand the appeal of pirated content, sometimes it's the only usable way to get something, especially for some old movies/series. And it put pressure on large media companies for content delivery technologies etc. But it's not all fun and giggles, it's a complex issues requiring global discussion and compromises.

Some do, some don't.

I don't doubt your anecdotes, but I doubt it's true as a pattern.

Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.

The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?

If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge). For two reasons: He wouldn't have read as much as he did, and he couldn't have borrowed as much as he did for his works.

We want some kind of middleground. Creators should be compensated, but complete all-encompassing DRM means only a fraction of people would've watched Game of Thrones to discuss it at the water cooler, Kanye West (regardless of what you think of his music) wouldn't be able to release most of his music, etc.

I've never seen a torrent site which wouldn't let torrents because "oh, it's individual developer's program, we don't allow those". I would say that overwhelming majority of people who created pirate sites (or created/sold illegal compact discs before that) didn't care about who to pirate from. And practically all shareware developers felt it.

> Something being pirated 1M times never means 1M lost sales. It could mean 2K lost sales or it could mean 200K lost sales.

I've never said it did, and of course it doesn't. And I think pretty much everyone here understands it. I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.

> The book your writer wrote, did it build on a genre, area of expertise, setting that inherently draws inspiration from earlier works? Where do we draw the line on what you can borrow?

I think it's ridiculous to compare outright pirating and "borrowing from genre", everyone sees the difference. If we put that arbitrary line at absurd 90% (less than that "borrowed" is ok), than everything on the torrent sites is still crossing that line, because everything there is full copy... And there's a lot of areas where it's hard to pin point the exact place for some dividing line, but everyone can see the difference between entities: like where you put exact line between colors on a rainbow? But you know that green isn't yellow and red isn't blue, you don't need to know where that line is exactly.

> If copyright law was as established and enforced 400 years ago as it is today, Shakespeare wouldn't exist (in our knowledge)

I don't how that would make Shakespeare read less, since he couldn't download a book on his phone anyway, and he probably read many books which weren't owned by him, since they were pricey and that price was mostly behind materials of the book and work to create this physical object. But he might or he might not exist, it's hard to say. It's not certain that writing would be less developed, if there were more effects of copyright. Being able to benefit from writing more could motivate more people to write, so it's hard to say what would have happen. Would we will be on the same level of technical progress if there were not patents (yes, there's a lot of ridiculous and bogus things about it now, but I'm talking about history) in previous 200-300 years, when inventors were motivated to create new things by legal protection of the right to benefit from it? Hard to say with certainty (though I incline to the "less advanced" answer).

No it's not. Mp3s are compressed, x264 rips are compressed, digital texts are not the same as books.

Do you mean that they are "almost a perfect representation of the original work"? Because that is closer to reality, and also telling.

Someone over a 100 years ago thought that a black and white movie sped up with just a few frames per second was a convincing representation of a train running towards you in a crowded cinema.

Some people think that bad covers of songs are good enough of a substitute over the real thing.

Stories told before writing was invented was basically transcoded and compressed and corrupted, and humanity would be immensely more stupid if we had not "allowed" that.

Please pay creative people and content creators, but locking down content to people who would otherwise not pay for it regardless is just regressive, on top of never actually working.

> I've never said it did

You didn't provide any specific numbers, but seemed to be arguing with your two anecdotes that piracy (as opposed to simply natural market/product factors) caused so many lost sales it put people out of business.

> I don't know why you've put this sentence in your reply.

Perhaps for the same reason you replied to a post about copyright hoarders using stringent legal methods and talked about something else entirely; because, to quote you, things are "not all black and white".

TPB and digital piracy in general functions as a library of Alexandria. Nobody in our society gives a shit about keeping things available. It's all about NOW and MONEY. So much entertainment would be lost without the internet.

Edit: actually it's ~$200 per household (depends on the value of the property)

But the problem, just like with patents, is that there a many kinds of actors in our modern world, including large companies who couldn't really care less. A company like Disney would, I think, be more motivated by a 5 or 10 year copyright period, as it would require them to keep on producing and innovating.

If we're talking about great, innovative artists, I think few of them actually benefit much from the copyright system anyway.

This is a really stunning claim and one that needs a lot more defense than you're giving it. I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old. I'd be happy to furnish a list if such a thing is necessary, but as it is your statement seems absurd on the face of it.

maldusiecle: I can think of countless innovative musicians, film directors, and authors who benefit from selling back catalog that's 10-20+ years old

I'd love to see more support for both sides of this argument. My guess would be that olau and maldusiecle may not have much overlap in the list of artists that they consider innovative. I'm probably closer to olau's position: while there are artists who benefit from copyright, they tend to be the ones who have chosen to concentrate on the commercial potential of their work rather than innovation. And I'd guess that most of those who are "doing art for art's sake" would do as well or better under a much less restrictive copyright regime.

Lets face it: if you haven't made your profit in 5 years you never will and the loss will have been written of.

As a budding musician. I am mentally prepare for my art to be a financial failure/setback. It comes with the territory.

And yes. Every photocopy a text book? Ever trace out a comic book panel or other image? Ever make copies of a photo (obviously more common digitally, but could be done in the film age too) that you didn't take originally? I've done all of them, they're all things I'm not legally entitled to do.

Also I think this is a European law.

But, to the OP's point, I totally agree digital changes the equation. But it should also change the law. Theoretically having an img tag that references someone else's site could be thought of as illegal, after all. I'm reproducing the work without authorization, and even making money from it (ad impressions on my site rather than the hosting site), -while costing the original site money- (since they still pay the hosting and bandwidth costs). Digital changed -everything-, because the cost to copy went to 0. The laws have not kept up.

When discussing the validity of copyright laws, using legal entitlement as an argument is pretty circular, don't you think?

Under a circular legal moral system, moral progress would hinge on new understanding of old laws or else nominally morally neutral changes to the law. The other systems more easily promote moral progress via new understanding. Utilitarians can have new insights into utility functions. Religious based morality can have life experience and new cultural understandings influence their understanding and consequences of their basic commands.

Do you give proper credit to the creator/author/inventor/discoverer of that knowledge, or refrain from using it?

The question isn't whether this happens to be legal or not, the question is whether it should be, and to what extent.

Do you have any example which you were wanting to compare to, or was the question deliberately open-ended?

I once had to pay 500€ for torrenting an episode of The Americans that I had no way of buying legally, at least in my country at that time.

The only thing I regret? Using torrent and not some alternative where they can't get you for "illegal distribution".

If it's free + ads I could agree, but most content sellers are just trying to get paid twice

US Cable television already fits that description. Almost 100 million Americans pay a monthly subscription for television content which still includes ads. For that matter, HBO itself is already an extra additional fee on top of that prior subscription.

Your restaurant comparison seems particularly disingenuous considering commercials are a pretty normal aspect of television consumption.

If we take your argument as well, then piracy is perfectly fine because people have been doing it for a long time and it's become a normal aspect of the consumption.

This is quite a bit larger than copyright, but obviously media is the first place where it became very obvious that distribution is no longer a worthwhile problem to solve as it has been commoditized by computers and the Internet.

The Internet makes it possible for creators to have a decent standard of living. A tremendous number of them can have that decent standard of living. As opposed to a handful of owners of distribution companies living in opulence. An entirely capitalist redistribution of wealth on a large scale. That is viscerally disgusting to many who see those very large companies as the pillars holding our society aloft. To them it looks like rats chewing through the pillars.

So Hollywood would love a non-neutrality network. It would give them greater power to block BitTorrent, VPN services, etc. They might complain about the fees being charged for priority access, but they would rather deal with that problem than with the impact a neutral network has on their business.

They get at least a few dollars per thousand views. It adds up really quickly when any video will quickly get hundreds of thousands of views, multiplied by the number of episodes, multiplied by the number of shows.

Pirating content is serious business. It can also be free and makes no money to the site owner but that's usually not how it's done.

Why should an individual be treated so differently to what a company would? When was Youtube's office raided? To this day, Youtube holds immense collections of music for which nobody has bothered to file even an automated takedown notice.

The point that the parent made is that copyright is only criminally enforceable if held by the moneyed few. The power that has been handed to large corporations by the back door is immense and there is very little symmetry; even when the magnitude of the damage is orders of magnitude greater.

In the UK they have effectively been granted the power to block domains for customers of the ISPs that represent a significant majority of the UK market. This is in a court that routinely allows pre-hearing legal costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Unless you work for the media companies and have insider knowledge, how can you even be so sure that the media companies are not acting with the complete contempt of due process that they have repeatedly demonstrated.

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.

Only fairly recently, and not without controversy from the people that observed it.

But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent.

Likely, somewhere in the middle is more reasonable. But the parent is correct in that the volume of infringing content on YouTube appears to be significantly larger than just about anywhere else, and no one is raiding their offices. No one is going to jail.

So the asymmetry is striking. If it were all purely civil rather than criminal, I'd get it.

An argument based on intent is an argument about the reality we live in, an argument that ignores intent might as well be about a fictional world and isn't relevant to ours.

I'd disagree, I think that Youtube shows their intent to allow infringing based on the gross amount of copyrighted content they allow on their website.

> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail?

I acknowledge that youtube seems very different from hosting a site specifically for unlawfully distributing copyrighted works. But there was a time when Youtube arguably blurred the line and gave publicity to the "our users just posted it and we didn't know about it" defence.

There's a real societal risk to treating what would formerly be called culture as intellectual capital and granting extreme powers to owners of that capital. Though the costs of distribution have never been lower there comes a point where the cost of distribution exceeds the expected returns. Even if the work is distributed for free, there is still a cost.

If we're going to allow the whole one download equals 0 < x <= 1 lost sales thing that seems to be increasingly accepted now, then you are implicitly allowing that it is the lost sale that is the problem. As such, distribution of out of print material without fee is as damaging because if I listen to n hours per week of material then I am not buying that n hours of material and I have deprived a sale. The same can be said for any intellectual capital, even copyleft, that does not make money. Effectively, it becomes a divine right to have customers which is a bizarre line of thinking that seldom seems to be explicitly stated.

I have listened to works that I could not, even though I strongly desire to, buy on CD or obtain by lawful download. There are some who argue a particular line that has the corollary that the work should be lost forever and I should never have heard them. By the lost sale argument I definitely shouldn't have and should instead have spent money on new culture that personally I find quite grating.

There are books, games, software, songs, albums, movies and TV series for which the copyright persists but there is no lawful distribution channel. This effectively makes it civilly or criminally unlawful to distribute the work for free. In these cases I would certainly think twice before taking on the burden of becoming that distributor.

> What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.

My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either.

Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s.

While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums.

Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.

Well in fairness to Steam, app stores in general (including those run by Apple, MS, and Google) are platforms for shovelware.

But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's came from physical CD's people ripped privately.

A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.

> While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream

They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a major player in digital music distribution.

Interestingly as you noted >A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.

I think Apples success at creating this market was a byproduct of it being fundemental pairing for the iPod's sucesss. Without the iPod, iTunes would likely have gone the same way as the rest of the early legal digital music sellers.

Without the existence of a large collection of mostly 'pirated' mp3's sitting on home desktops and office networks across the globe, the iPod probably would not have taken off.

Apple provided great utility for those collections by selling the iPod. Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.

True enough, and you most certainly have a point about the iPod also helping, that's something I haven't really factored in that much.

To me, iTunes was mostly a great example how usability, pricing, and ease of legal access to content matters. Much earlier versions of iTunes UI was very reminiscent of mp3 sharing clients popular at that time (Limewire/Napster/Whatnot) by sorting titles in long lists and making getting them as easy as pressing a "download" button right next to it.

The choice of pricing, single songs for $.99 [0], also felt like it contributed a lot to a paradigm shift how music is sold and consumed, acknowledging established trends in priacy by allowing legitimate customers more freedom in paying for only those songs they want.

[0] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/04/28/1723226/apple-intr...

This can even be a gray area for content creators who care about copyright, but only for their own profession.

I regularly see stories of famous musicians improperly lifting photographers' work for their marketing or social media efforts.

I also see professional photographers using unlicensed music for slide shows.

It's really quite bizarre to see content creators fighting each other for not respecting each other's copyrights when they themselves should know better.

In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.

That is exactly the weird paradox that has been going on, especially with the infamous Pirate Bay.

The users think they are a super server with super hero admins that "give back to the man".

The justice system thinks some super tech criminal is earning millions. They think that, because organisations like the MPAA give out an estimate on what "could have been earned if all those people would actually pay full price for the content they are now consuming".

Numbers are magic.. especially if there's a currency sign before them.

i.e., messing up their business model

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.

Sure, but there's a strong case that copyright infringement shouldn't be felony.

> ...the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy.

If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

I don't think he should go to jail, but this is an odd rebuttal. If I steal your car and sell it for $300, because I don't really need more money, will you claim just that amount as your loss?

Obviously copyright law pushes up the price, by introducing scarcity, but that doesn't really have anything to do with how much he made.

If you steal my car, I no longer have a car. I would need to go out and buy another car to replace it.

If you copy my data (a photo, a song, a film), I haven't lost the original. Only my business model has been affected, which was based on scarcity of the data.

Yes in the analogy the person will claim for the cost of replacing the vehicle.

But a company claiming they lost media revenue to me of anything greater than what I can afford is also wrong. In a world of perfect copyright infringement prevention I'd just miss out on most of the mainstream social culture.

In a fair system they'd have to prove those damages, but alas, copyright laws often include "statutory damage" provisions to help them avoid that requirement.

Oh yes? Copyright infrigement is pretty much a victimless crime - nobody is removed from any of their property - at most they might be losing some monetary compensation, but that's something that can be evaluated and compensated if that is the case.

Not sure how you can justify putting folks in jail based on that fact.

Everyone is a victim.

If you want to read something into it, nothing mentioned in this thread is victimless.

Embezzlement hurts the other employees of a company, tax fraud hurts the citizens of a nation, and piracy seems to hurt... A small group. (In fact, large companies seem to benefit from piracy in studies. Small companies can be forced to fold. Take it as you will.)

. . .it treats them as a commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it disparages the works themselves. If you don't agree with that attitude, you can call them “works” or “publications.”

Typical, not so subtle, blackmail.

One wonders what would happen if, say, the leader of some disclosure website was residing in Sweden and a superpower wanted him...

(From a comment below on TPB case: "The judge was Thomas Norström. Swedish public radio revealed that the judge, Thomas Norström, is a member of several copyright protection associations, whose members include Monique Wadsted and Peter Danowsky – attorneys who represented the music and movie industries in the case. According to the report, Judge Norström also serves as a board member on one of the groups of which Mrs. Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America’s attorney, is a member." -- hurray for independent justice in any case..)

From Wikipedia's "1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'état":

"[..] The United Fruit Company (UFC), whose highly profitable business had been affected by the end to exploitative labor practices in Guatemala, engaged in an influential lobbying campaign to persuade the U.S. to overthrow the Guatemalan government. U.S. President Harry Truman authorized Operation PBFORTUNE to topple Árbenz in 1952; although the operation was quickly aborted, it was a precursor to PBSUCCESS."

Reading about those things, one get the impression that the Department of State works for the Camber of Commerce, instead of the USA citizens.

(1). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...

If I'm not mistaken the first permanent "embassies" were set up by the Venetians (mostly) and the Genoese, and their role was essentially just that, i.e. protecting the economic interests of their "home" entities. It so happened that most of the time protecting the citizens who happened to reside in foreign countries also meant protecting their home-city economic interests, but that mainly happened because the citizens involved were traders themselves. So, in a way, you could say that what the Department of State is now doing is just the continuation of the initial idea of a "foreign embassy".

Just joking. As you say, business as usual.

Well, of course.

Movies, while extremely popular, don't generate that much money: in 2016, total box office results in the US were under $12bn [1]. That's the entire industry.

Apple alone makes that much money in three weeks' time.

Amazing, that you can apply such pressure to politics, with so little.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-bo...

In Blockbuster's heyday their revenue alone surpassed American box office sales.

Oh and merchandising... that's a big one!

This suggests possible changes in business model, but it is really hard to give up an existing revenue stream in order to build future revenue streams that may fit the current world better, especially when the future revenue stream is currently small (e.g., music industry's fight against streaming, which is projected to become a larger revenue stream than physical sales had been - https://www.ft.com/content/94c5cdb0-4a26-11e7-a3f4-c742b9791...)

It's underestimated since it's a global business, plus they there's a very long tail for every movie to turn a profit, DVD/BR releases, TV, and online reselling, renting, etc... and the fact movies remain their property for 75 years+, and for some companies like Disney they retain the copyright forever, and keep sellings goods like cupcakes as well.

This perhaps because once the cassette recorder, never mind the VCR, came to be, most nations on the western side of the wall decided to not go full police state and thus added a "friends and family" clause to their copyright laws.

This meant that a person could create a copy, if it was meant for a direct friend or a relative. This avoided having to park a copyright cop in every home in the nation.

Never mind that producing analog copies from tape to tape cause of a noticeable loss of content with each generation removed from the original.

But the computer, never mind the internet, changed all that. It made mass copying not something that required massive machinery in a warehouse, but something every kid could do in their own home. Especially as bandwidth and storage capacity kept improving at a massive rate.

And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.

This is because copyright relates to stuff that's usually intangible. People easily grasp the idea of theft when it comes to tangible, physical stuff.

>> And digital copies do not degrade like an analog one does.

True, but digital copies are for the most part still stored on media that can degrade, break or malfunction. In the context of places like TPB, digital copies are indeed degraded as they are often uploaded with lossy compression to reduce file size.

That's a large industry definitely and a powerful one.

But movies are part of Intellectual Property, which is the US's biggest export (in real dollars).

So much money wasted on futile attempts to suppress a website...

I was pleasantly surprised that my Prime subscription might actually still be useful for something.

Subtitles would help a lot but even that is missing with a lot of providers (I wonder what people with hearing disabilities do).

A far worse offender, for me at least, are Blu-Rays in that regard. During their introduction, they were hailed as allowing distributors to pack dozens of high-quality different language tracks and different subtitle options on the disc.

While the reality these days looks like this: Most Blu-Ray releases are still regionalized, very often with limited audio language options (in 2.0 quality) and sometimes not even subtitle support for one language.

I think a lot of that has to do with distributors pretty much forming cartels by region, thus having only rights to distribute only specific versions in specific regions.

I've never understood why so many people feel that they have to see every superhero movie or every Blockbuster.

Register an account in a different country, pay for a gift card in another currency, suffer international transaction fees + currency conversion rates, then manage multiple accounts with different balances depending on when iTunes has juggled around it's regional stores.

Or just visit pirate bay.

And as a side note it could open you up to getting your main account blocked by Apple if they start cracking down on that.

Streaming services (Amazon, Netflix, etc) would love for you to be able to access their catalog from anywhere (as you can see since Amazon allows you to watch their own content from anywhere) but are limited by contractual clauses and/or exorbitant fees, which make this sort of deal not worth it.

Studios are used to a territory-based model instead of a globalised market, since that's pretty much how cable works, so when you negotiate content with a studio the contract will tell exactly which territories you're allowed to stream the content from.

I'm curious about this - does it mean hosting in a country that "doesn't care", or is there some other option that I'm unaware of?

>At the time of writing the site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers.

>All virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers.

https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...

I am new to the US, got Netflix and Amazon Video but soon realized they hardly have what I am interested in. So I got myself a Vpn (BlackVPN, if that matters) and started using Popcorn Time. I am still a bit wary to download torrents, something I used to do a lot back home.

So, any suggestions on what more I can do before starting torrenting?

How would you like it if I set up a mirror with cracked versions of all of your apps, and then successfully diverted all of your sales to it?

And then when you sue me, how would you like it if I openly mocked you? I'll post your takedown letters on a section of my site where I call you a fool, do the digital equivalent of spitting in your face, and continue to flagrantly violate your rights.

That's exactly what the Pirate Bay does and I don’t understand how someone who sells their painstakingly created intellectual property could support that, let alone admit to participating in it.

Edit: na85, and what if I only divert 10% of the sales? Why should I now be totally innocent?

As a creator as well, I am aware that my software is out in the wild and people are using it for free and so far I've yet to notice any harm coming from it, quite the contrary. Even if we live in a connected world, we still don't live in a fair world, having a credit card or a PayPal account is still a hard thing to obtain in quite a bit of countries and so it happens that from time to time I receive emails of users that are using cracked version of my software offering to snail mail me checks or asking me for alternative payment methods, in these cases me knowing that they get enough joy of my apps is payment enough.

In my case I do believe this is free marketing, in the end a good chunk of users come back and buy the apps if it's truly useful for them and counting the others that wont buy it as lost sales is stupid as they would not spend the money anyway.

No doubt you can back up this assertion that the pirate Bay diverted all or at least the majority of movie sales.

There are always people who are ready to pay and people who will go to every length to not to. Instead of focusing on giving a good experience to the first crowd, companies end up screwing it up and then waste time on trying to force the second crowd to pay.

Disney and pirates compete on price, quality, availability, ease of use, and so on. Price is going to be hard to compete with since pirated stuff is free, and I guess they are attacking the availability of pirated material to increase their own by comparison, but what I wish they would focus on is to make it easier for the user to find the stuff they want. If I knew I could go somewhere for all of Disney's catalog of shorts and feature films, I'd be happy to pay a small amount per movie or subscribe for continuous access. Instead it's spread across multiple services, or you have to buy individual DVD boxes and try to assemble your own collection which is a lot of work. They could make it a lot easier for me to watch that specific short (now I go to YouTube and hope it's there) or movie (I check if it's on Netflix or another streaming service, and if not, I skip it).

My (limited) experience of NFL.com is that they've done great when it comes to making it easy to watch current and older games, with options to subscribe to all games or just one team. The English Premier League doesn't have the same centralized streaming service I know of and instead depends on selling the rights to TV channels to show games, which leads to consuming a lot of pirated material if you want to follow a specific team all season or want to watch all concurrent games.

If the content providers just compete in the areas they can affect, most people will pay to use it it's more convenient than the alternative.

This is exactly how Spotify get my money. It's so much easier than trying to manage a pirated collection.

Never mind that since then Netflix have lost the right to distribute quite a few movie catalogs that may hold hidden classics, as they shift their focus onto producing their own content and the copyright holders wants to keep the percentages that Netflix got for themselves.

This however leads to market balkanization and drive people to once more consider alternative sources.

I am not taking strong sides against or for fighting piracy. I do hope the greater share of the profits do end up with the original authors and not the content distributors.

I think there was a claim floating around that one could offer all the TPB magnet links in a simple text file that would be a maybe a MB in size.

This does not include the descriptions though.

Also check out https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo

One of the founders of TPB, Peter Sunde started:

* Njalla (https://njal.la/) - a privacy focused domain registration service

* Flattr (https://flattr.com/) - a tipping/micropayment service to support content creators

* A VPN service - https://ipredator.se/

Another link that you might find interesting, his interview with Vice : https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkjpbd/pirate-bay...

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/8118457/TPB.AFK.2013.1080p....

While I do recommend adblock, there is no reason to be afraid of the site, or of torrenting this copyleft material.

He never gets mentioned much for some reason*

* Because of his far right connections

Well, how do you feel about your government blackmailing, extorting, or otherwise "strong-arming" other sovereign nations in order to foist its laws upon them and then hiding that from you? (It really is a minor miracle this cable was released at all.) Is it truly worth stooping to such measures to ensure that Micky Mouse remains copyright protected for all time everywhere? Don't other nations have the right to make their own laws? How would you feel if some other nation foisted it's laws on the U.S. in such a manner? Why does the U.S. government go to such extremes for private enterprise anyways?[1]

Piracy is bad. What the U.S. government has done in response is worse.

[1]I suggest you google the United Fruit Company's history the next time you're eating a Chiquita banana for a real eye opener.

If I sell some object and my logistics is that I sell 3 per months, then I manufacture 3 objects per months and wait for customers to buy them. If someone steals one, then I've only 2 remaining objects. I've the choice between telling the 3rd expected customer that I'm out, or to manufacture one extra, which in any case result in a direct loss of money. I'm a victim of theft.

If I'm a film producer and my logistics is that I sell N viewings per month, and someone pirates the movie, then this doesn't interfere with my ability to sell the N viewings to my expected customers. So this isn't theft. Of course, I would like the pirate to be my customer so that I can step up to N+1 viewing per month, but if I want to enforce that I need to turn to who made the copy available to the pirate, which is counterfeit.

Beyond that, there is a hatred toward piracy that is arguably worse than that of theft.

Fighting this propaganda-fueled nonsense is difficult, because piracy, on the surface, is a choice to not pay rightsholders, which is, on the surface, bad.

As soon as one digs beneath the surface, however, it is easy to find many neutral, or even good reasons to "pirate" content.

The abuse by rightsholders, organizations, and even government in the name of protecting copyright is bad, and not simply on the surface. It is a deep-rooted, malicious system, and people ought to understand that whatever hatred they have toward piracy, they should have ten fold toward anti-piracy.

(edit: spelling)

That this passed without causing a conflict of interest is astonishing. https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/0423/pirate...

Also worth mentioning is that the lead investigating police got a job from Warner Brothers very soon after the trial was successful. Thank you, job well done. https://techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/officer-who-investigated-p...

In recent news, the chair of Swedens Supreme court judge Stefan Lindskog has been implied in shady financial transactions, and is under investigation by the police. The belief we once had that Sweden had a low level of corruption can be put to history. And of course even having a low level still means there is some corruption. https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/polisen-utreder-hogsta-doms...

YMMV.

Can you blame them? Thanks to that case the guy got a lot of experience in the area of copyright violations and online piracy, that's valuable knowledge to have and they could use someone to advise them.

You're implying that he did it for the cushy job he got for it, but I have my doubts. Maybe if you can prove he got the offer before the investigations started?

Corruption by big corporations and similar things is usually another thing (although if things are corrupt in the low level, they will for sure be in the higher levels).

The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the same that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.

While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's as a community wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but simply couldn't find an alternative, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats.

When what.cd was taken down, none of the copies of copyrighted content were deleted. The community was broken up.

If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere.

What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a good thing.

When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant.

Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.

"2. Summary. In a visit to Sweden last month to raise the growing concerns about Internet privacy in Sweden, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), together with ..."

So these days the list is meaningless and is roundly ignored by Canada. Sweden probably should of did the same thing.

It's more autobiographical than a research document, and has some unproven claims, but no one has punched holes in the important claims there AFAIK.

Convenience is the real reason people went to websites such as the Pirate bay not stealing, people don't buy fast food for their health.

The rise of cheap and reliable streaming video websites such as Netflix changed that. That's all anyone wanted a convenient reliable way to legally watch and pay a reasonable amount.

In Germany, as soon as you start a torrent client, your traffic is being monitored by bots and agents, and if you upload something inappropriate you (or your host) will get a letter from a law firm with a heavy fine. (I know of two friends who had to pay $600 and $3000.)

How is traffic monitored when I start a client? Don't I need to download/upload something to get monitored? Is the monitoring connected to trackers I download from or ISP monitored?

"[...] with a heavy fine."

Was it a fine or some kind of fee? ("Abmahngebühr")

As for the traffic monitoring, indeed, I'd imagine it to be honeypot tracker where all content/traffic is visible rather than something installed on the ISP side.

There are companies who join the download swarm and register all other downloading parties. That's very easy with bittorrent, since the protocol is (originally) designed for fast download sharing without any regard to anonymity or pseudonymity.[1] The process is not reliable for providing evidence of copyright infringement, though, and the German system mostly works by scare tactics of lawyers - many people don't want to risk a lawsuit even if they could win it.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/thousands-of-spies-are-watching-tra...

They sent some awfully scary letters for what amounts to legally obtaining an ISO file.

In other words, such things are considered low-hanging fruit by these companies. Just throw it out there and see what sticks.

Though that only tells you the RIPE member for it.

They might have still leased the IP elsewhere (which is totally informal, if you operate a IP range all you need is a letter saying you can do it with the owner's signature)

Insane, you can get a good VPN from TorGuard, PIA or NordVPN for 10x less than half of an episode!

I don't know if this has changed in recent years, as I haven't heard anything about it recently.

See https://ictrecht.be/featured-2/torrents-wat-mag-en-wat-mag-n....

They settlement demands have been between 500€ and 3000€ and they have usually been lowered in the cases that have gone to court. A few have however ended up footing legal costs in the tens of thousands.

ISP's only hand over data by court order but in the past few years, court orders have granted this right to pretty much every request from the copyright holders. ISP's are now contesting this and there were two recent judgements in the courts to allow ISPs not to hand over the data. See this [0] (in Finnish).

So the situation is now better in Finland, partially because the predatory abuse from copyright holders' law firms sending out tons of "fines".

[0] https://www.turre.com/operaattori-voitti-oikeudenhaltijat-tu...

Once I started reading other people's experience of running an exit node through that ISP (Hetzner), it turned out that the hosting company was the one receiving these reports and forwarding them to you. After it, the consequences can range all the way from warnings to physically shutting down your server until you do something ridiculous (IIRC send them a physical mail).

Since I didn't want to risk my server being shut down for whatever reason (there are some other uses of it non-Tor related, and the rest of the monthly bandwidth goes towards Tor relay), I've decided to just not run the exit node.

I'd say it's still very useful to the Tor network, since it handles something like 400 GB of Tor traffic per day.

However, it's on a purely notice-and-takedown basis, which is the DMCA of germany but more broadly applicable; if you are made aware of illegal activity on your network you must stop the activity and take reasonable measures to prevent future abuse. They can also fall under the network operator laws in which case they are not responsible for the traffic at all but I'm not sure if that is applicable to tor nodes or not.

The content industry punches above its weight in getting the government to protect it overseas for this reason.

The name of the employee in the wires has been redacted. I wonder if the physical size of the redacted box, together with the fact that this is a name, together with a database of public employees, could be used to uncover the identity of the person.

By comparing the size of the redacting box with the lines above and below, we can guess that 6-9 characters are masked out (including the space). This is an a rough parallel to a timing attack used against crypto. The DB of public employees could be thought of as a list of candidate inputs.

Weak redacting?

This reminds me of a law in Poland where a person accused of a crime can not be named. Media will blur out photos and state something to the effect of "Mark W. an executive at XYZ Corp., stands accused of ...". If the accused is a well known actor with a unique first name, this becomes a running joke.

[1] http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html

[2] http://notanumber.net/archives/54/underhanded-c-the-leaky-re...