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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?"
This post is in reply to your subject, not your unfounded accusations about out feline overlords.
Zonk is not the new timothy. Check out his journal. He posts replys to other peoples comments, so he clearly reads a few comments on Slashdot at least once or twice a week. That can't be said of very many of the Slashdot editors.
But I couldn't help noticing that right now all except one posts of the posts on the main page are made by him...
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
As much as I know it is still illegal and considered wrong. I live and work in Germany, and these shows and movies just aren't available here. I don't have the option of going to the local cinema to see a film, and when they do get here, they are always dubbed into another language.
When I do try to play by the rules and order a DVD from the US of a movie I want to see (ie.. incredibles) It won't play on my player because of the region code.
I am not saying that downloading and watching the dailyshow everyday is right, but there is definitely a moral grey area. Even with the most expensive satellite package, I can only get this 'dailyshow weekly update' on CNN.
I mean I can see how shows ripped without commercials would be frowned upon, but they advertise products that aren't available here anyway.
So how about the new series of Doctor Who, aired on the BBC (so no advertisements)?
Can I, as a license paying Brit, download episodes which have already been broadcast without fear of legal action?
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I hope legal section on piratebay gets some fresh content. http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/
I think what it boils down to, is that it is perfectly legal to download one copy of a show, but it is illegal to distribute.
Nope. Every time you have a purported fair use, you run through the analysis again. There's no sort of numerical limit involved, nor a hard rule against any kind of infringement rather than any other.
MPAA, like RIAA, has just been going after people that are easy for it to find, and who are further up the chain.
I.e. getting rid of P2P networks (as they tried in Napster and are trying in Grokster) prevents or impairs lots of people downstream from sharing since they can't use that network any more. Getting rid of trackers affects lots of people further down as well. Getting rid of uploaders at least affects some downloaders and leechers. Getting rid of downloaders doesn't really have affects on others at all. It's a simple 'attack the head of the snake' principle.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I would see it differently. Extending copyright encourages creativity because it shows that if you can come up with good original concept that catches the popular imagination you can make an absolute mint off it. If that does not encourage people to create, or investors to back creative people nothing will.
Well, Disney began at a time when terms, among other things, were much less than they were now. Clearly he didn't need additional encouragement later, so why should there be a retroactive copyright for his work, especially long after he's dead?
But this really ignores the main issue: we don't want to encourage creativity too much. What we want is to best serve the public interest. But the public has several, equal interests. First, they want original works created. Second, they want derivative works created. Third, they want works to be unencumbered -- this means free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Without copyright, we have fully satisfied the third, somewhat satisfied the second, and slightly satisfied the first. We can sum this up and determine the net satisfaction of the public interest.
If we then offered a copyright of, say, 5 years, we'd reduce the immediate satisfaction of the third and second, but hopefully increase satisfaction of the first by a greater amount, and also some satisfaction of the second. We can sum these up too, and see if the net satisfaction is greater or lower than in other scenarios.
What we want is to find the scenario that involves the least restrictive laws and the greatest satisfaction of public interest. This will almost certainly not be the point at which we maximize the first interest -- which is what you were talking about -- because there are other interests at issue as well. (And plus copyright holders don't like competition, so they're known to use their rights as a sword, rather than a shield, and claim infringement to keep up-and-coming artists out of the marketplace; maximum creation of original works is thus probably impossible)
Given that most artists will never see economic value from their copyrights at all, and yet are encouraged to create, and given that in the rare cases that they do, this is almost always realized immediately (the vast majority of revenue for any medium is made when a work is first released in that medium, and dies off days-months afterwards), I think that we could still get the vast majority of creation we see now -- maybe more -- even if copyright terms were extremely short. And we'd all be better off too, since this would encourage more work in derivatives, and more freedom with regards to created works.
Preventing people from rehashing old ideas from the 30's and 40's is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is actually, all else being equal. A lot of the best work is derivative, where people spend more time on polish than the underlying concept. For example Shakespeare's plays were virtually all either based on history, or earlier plays and stories which he made new versions of. He was not a big original thinker. That shouldn't be held against him -- he was good.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Make the shows available for bittorrent. Include extra advertisement directed towards the Internet crowd. Put advertisemnet in another corner.
You have 4 corners. 1 for the network and three to sell. Also include small extra's that are not available on the TV show and organise a '7 differences for 7 shows' contest so peole want to see BOTH.
Learn wat viral advertisement is and abuse it so much people are not even interested anymore in bittorrent.
Embrace it, do not fight it. Talk to your marketing people and tell them you have 10.000.000 people who watch your show and do not watch TV. Ask them if they are interested in that.
These people will be humping your leg so fast you will not know what hit you. You can even sell these services to others in other countries, so they can do the same with subtitled or syncronised shows and programs.
These people are a new market for cross and deepselling my friends. As lomg as people watch, you have a place to sell.
Put in a blue screen somewhere in the show that during normal broadcast is a building and on the bittorrent is an advertisement. I asure you, people from marketing and advertisement will go apenuts over this. You will be offerd so much sex, you wich you were impotent (well, you probably are, but you get my point).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It's the huge fear of losing control over distribution. Without control of distribution on one side, there can be no control of artists on the other. It's the frigging middle man getting squeezed out of the picture and fighting for his life scenario.
Wake up folks. It's not about their stuff, it's abotu your freedom. Why the hell do you think you don't have enough upstream bandwidth to support an ad-hoc, real time distributed distribution system?
I'll tell you. Because the TeeVee, radio, and theatre middle men would become extinct....The artists? They'd thrive because the demand for material is independent of the mode of distribution.
I think perhaps one of the larger issues here is that the vast majority of people who download TV shows have already paid in order to see them, because they subscribe to dish or cable. Other stations - the local ones - are free anyways: most people can pick them up on antenna.
I don't understand how the MPAA could sue someone who has paid for their right to view the program. Arguably, the MPAA and its cohorts would prefer to peddle the DVD sets rather than have people simply download every episode for free. If people have already paid for the right to view the program by paying a dish/cable subscription fee, shouldn't they be allowed to view any network programming for which they have paid at any time?
As previously mentioned in other posts, how is this different from simply using a VCR or DVR? It's a more permanent medium, they might say. Well, so is DVR. Cassettes can copied with no more of an investment than an additional VCR. Thus, they could be considered permanent. How is this different?
I could still see lawsuits out of this. If someone downloads a show, gets caught, and doesn't pay for service, sue them until their arses bleed green. Conversely, for someone such as myself who pays US$45/month for cable, I should be able to download shows from the channels for which I pay all I want.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
All the MPAA chasing after random sites has done is move people to new pastures , they kill one torrent site and another three pop up in various locations , it has exponentialy increased anon trackers and sites which link to external torrents.
I really fail to understand why everyone is making this such a huge problem.
All these torrent website operators need to do is host their content in eastern European (Russian) networks and all their problems magically go away. Why is this so difficult to understand?
The other problem is the mentality of these operators. I have tried to help them on numerous occasions to realize the simple fix to their problems (by donating free bandwidth in eastern European networks to them). Have you been on any of these type of IRC channels? These guys all have enormous attitudes and think themselves on a level of no less of God himself. They tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. As an owner and operator of a large ISP in eastern Europe, let's just say that indeed I do know what I'm talking about. I can host anything I want, completely free of worry of European or American jurisdiction and laws.
The networks here are the wild, wild west of the Internet. No local authorities (laws or jurisdictions) or higher level ISP's block or attempt to block content infringing on copyright and/or intellectual property.
So, until these website operators learn to host their content on webservers outside of American or European jurisdiction, their problems will never go away. Unfortunetly, their heads are too big to realize simple truth.