Slashdot Mirror
MPAA Cracking Down on TV Torrent Sites
sallgeud writes "It appears the other shoe has dropped and the MPAA is now going after sites which link to torrents of TV shows. The beef with redistributing copyrighted material seems to make sense... but I'm wondering if it makes a difference in the world of DVR. The vast majority of downloads appeared to be of content that is broadcast free over the airwaves. I'm wondering how much different this is than going after Tivo? Would these sites have been hit with lawsuits if they had stuck to purely over-the-air broadcasts?"
Tivo allows personal time-shifting of a broadcast program so you can watch it at a more convenient time. BitTorrent allows distribution of programs to others.
IANAL, but I suspect that fair use allows for the former but not the latter. In either case, the difference should be clear, in both intent and in practice.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I don't expect to give up downloading TV shows anytime soon. The real kicker is that if the broadcasters would instead offer bittorents of the shows (with a few commercials to pay for them) at the same time they are broadcast, they would beat the groups that are ripping them soley for "respect" from peers. AND they would have the control they are so desperately seeking.
TV shows are about the only thing I download via bittorrent (and a few books), mainly because I can't watch when shows are on, and it is more convenient than my DVR. The shows I watch already have logos from TV stations, etc., why not run a "drink coke" banner at the bottom from time to time instead?
If they were really smart, they would also provide their own bittorrent tracker server (complete with Google/Overture ads), making it unnecessary for me to go to other sites and be "tempted" to download music and movies as well.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Mickey Mouse is the poster child for one part of the abuse. In Mickey's case, they are extending the copyright forever so that they can continue to milk the mouse. If you don't like mouse milk, that's just too effing bad. They have also greatly extended the coverage of copyright against derivative work, again to keep the mouse (and friends) alive and "uncontaminated".
The Marx Brothers represent a different kind of abuse. That's a case where they use (extended) copyright to suppress distribution of works that ought to be in the public domain. In this case, those works would compete very favorably with the tripe Hollywood produces--so they avoid the competition by suppressing those golden oldies.
Who said crime doesn't pay?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Not to burst anyone's bubble here, but I'm thinking that those sites probably would have still been busted even if they stuck to free to air content.
How many TV torrents still contain the original advertisements they aired with? I'm thinking in the region of.. hmm... zero? Now, how is all this "free to air" television subsidised? Oh? Advertisements?
Do you see now?
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
...Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once.
YOU CAN BE SUED FOR ANYTHING BY ANYONE. Will they win the case, that is the important part?
.
Stories aren't reposted because they're "important". They're reposted because the editors are careless and didn;t notice. If I can't read Slashdot for a few days, I just browse through the "Older Stuff" stories linked conveniently on the right side of the front page.
I get annoyed at this because Slashdot regularly asks me to moderate posts, to improve the quality of the site, but provides no usable mechanism to moderate the editors. Even the email address on is encouraged to send warnings of dupes and errors is rarely answered, sometimes bounces, and is ignored in almost all cases. So now I rarely boither to mod at all; why should I care about the quality of the site when the editors obviously don't? In work I've found it similarly disheartening to be concerned with quality when the managemnent doesn't give more than lip service to the concept.
Many many moons ago, I lost my mod privs for modding up the "post of death". I did it because I got a hackerly thrill out of adding my mod points to a post with literally thousands expended on it.
It actually made Slashdot more fun; I am the honorable type and felt compelled to use the mod points responsibly (when not enjoying multi-K pileons), so I browsed at -1, etc. Since "the community" told me to screw off, I'm relieved of that responsibility.
Just chill and enjoy the ride. Barring a major change, Slashdot ought to be superceded or unrecognizable in two years. The owners are making a lot of very classic mistakes, and they refuse to recognize them as such because they result in this slow, long term degradation of respect, not the instantaneous loss of revenue. By the time they understand, it will be too late, Slashdot will already have passed the inflection point. Slashdot may never "die", but I'm sure it will make a hell of a lot less money.
Ever watch Star Trek? They have those replicators that can make apples by rearranging tanks of various raw materials. If we had those starting today, apple farmers would indeed go out of business;
Ah, but you see that's a different issue altogether. If I could solve world hunger, I could put farmers out of business and guarantee they'd always have enough to eat, and never worry again. The only way this connects to freely copying art is if any artist is able to walk into a restaurant, perform or deliver some kind of art, and freely take food without paying actual money.
Copyright isn't intended to help artists. It's intended to get them to create new works (by giving them the incentive of a monopoly)
I would argue that incentive is meant to help artists. If you don't help artists turn their work into money (if only briefly) then you reduce the number of artists dramatically. The majority of "great" art created over the years was done by those who were either paid to produce or were using their art to make a living. If you completely gutted their ability to monetize their work, none of them would have kept at it.
If someone had been in the audience during the first performance of "Hamlet" and taped and re-distributed the play to everyone who wanted it, free of charge, Shakespeare would never have existed the way he does now. The risk to the public interest is that by dismissing the value of creative works and their creators, they may be discouraging the most brilliant artist of all time from taking a shot. An artist is not necessarily someone who opts to starve for their art.
I myself often find derivatives that are excellent, perhaps even superior to their sources.
What would be truly useful would be a mindset that let the creators of derivative works communicate with the original artist so that they could bounce ideas off each other to make something far superior to the first product. That was one of the worst victims of modern copyright... the inability of artists to collaborate unofficially, for fear of being sued.
Yes, except that [$1 for a movie] way too high
Yeah, I would prefer to see a complete decoupling of the service and payment myself. If you can get access to the work, enjoy it. If you enjoy it, pay something to the artist. In some cases the medium will require an up-front fee (like DVDs), but you as the consumer set the price. Most people have no trouble supporting the artist that made their favourite show or song or book. I just wonder if $1 as a suggested starting point is a good way to kick it off. I find that people today need to be told what to pay, even if they'd prefer another price. That's a whole lot of social engineering right there.
after all, how many times over do they want to get paid for the single act of creating a single work
This was the biggest problem that drama faced when it started getting written down and reproduced. It used to be you had no choice but to see the artist hard at work to appreciate their art, because you had to see them live. Once we started recording things (especially movies and TV), that personal connection got lost. Someone making a TV show shouldn't expect to be paid seven times for the same work by the same person, but if ten million people watch their show and enjoy it, they should expect that some of those people appreciate it enough to pay for it.
People in that sort of work [colour correcting] aren't the kind of artists we're talking about here. They merely provide a service, and that has nothing to do with copyright.
Ah, but it does. If I create a show and I have a crew of 100 people making each episode, and I can't keep Company B from selling it for $1 on the street corner, I can't make my next episode, and those 100 people are out of work. And those people ARE artists... that's just the point: you can say that a singer is just one person able to make their own way, starving on
The world's only surviving livewriter.