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Pirate Bay Closure Sparked P2P Explosion
Barence writes to share that the closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyrighted materials. In fact, there has been an estimated 300% increase in the number of sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee. "In August, Swedish courts ordered that all traffic be blocked from Pirate Bay, but any hope of scotching the piracy of music, software and films over the web vanished as copycat sites sprung up and the content took on a life of its own. 'This was a true "cloud computing" effort,' the company said in its Threats Report for the third quarter. 'The masses stepped up to make this database of torrents available to others.'"
Anyone see the 60 Minutes piece last night trying to link Bit Torrent to Mexican DVD piracy to gangs to child prostitution? (think of the CHILDREN!)
It was quite ill informed, seeming to only gather information from the MPAA and other similar sources.
The link between people using camcorders to record movies and make bad quality DVD's for sale on street-corners I get, but their assumption that these are the SAME people uploading to BT, was casual at best.
Seriously, if you go through all the trouble to cam-cord the movie and burn DVD's in mass, aren't you just as threatened by BT as the studios?
Perhaps use it as a source, yes, but upload your own movies for free? I don't see it.
The idea that the media industry should be different than any other historical industry is quite beyond me. The printing press pretty much killed one of the most ancient occupations of literate civilization; the professional scribe. I'm sure lots of scribes were pretty pissed that some asshole German and his machine not only stabbed their profession in the heart, but did it with what was really a substandard result (look at illuminated manuscripts and then look at the Gutenberg Bible, it's the 128bit MP3 of its day!)
No occupation or technology is guaranteed infinite supremacy. No law can do it, not without extraordinary harm. Late feudal Japan tried banning firearms and other forms of modern warfare to stave off the collapse of the feudal system, and then by the Meiji period was bringing in every foreign expert they could to bring them up to speed before they became a two-bit colonial rape victim like China.
What I'm afraid of is that the anti-P2P movement will become like the War on Drugs, an unwinnable contest, but one with sufficient amounts of money being made by the so-called enforcers that they'll just keep trying to stop what they know they never can, under the strange idea that if you can criminalize enough people, somehow they'll eventually stop.
I think every country should adopt a new clause in their constitution; the "Stupid Ideas Tried Before Clause" that would have anyone who passes a law to try a scheme proven one or more times to be unenforceable to be removed from office permanently.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sooner or later, freenet will become more popular, and all searches for illegal downloads will become native to the client. And with the encryption that it offers, there will be no stopping people from getting what they want. Rather, the companies might wisen up and start giving incentives to buy, rather than treat their customers like scum.
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Something like ordering the shutdown of Pirate Bay makes it look to the non-tech world like “something is being done to stop those evil hackers.” When in actuality, most of the stuff you find on Pirate Bay is widely available at just about any company that has a resident Nitendo DS playing, I-Pod listening, Warez junkie working there. Most of the companies I've worked at already had at least two “darknets” up and running at all times, and that was before I worked there. (I don't condone that sort of activity, but resistance is futile.) I know of 10-year-olds that spend more time on torrents than they do texting... and that's hard to believe. They would have to kill the whole internet to make it stop, then it would start on cell phones.
It is from the perspective of the people who create such works in order to get paid. But hey, who cares about them.
No it's not. What you mean is the perspective of the people who distribute such works in order to get paid. It is a key difference that will lead creators to ways of making money that don't rely on charging a fee for distribution.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What makes a work "cultural", and why does that mean that you do not need the author's permission to copy it?
Why do they need the author's permission to copy it in the first place?
If someone tells me a fart joke, why should I get their permission to tell that joke to someone else?
And if you think the difference between fart jokes and blockbuster movies is the cost of creation - you are exactly right. But it doesn't matter because a principle that doesn't scale isn't a principle at all.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Emphasis on "limited times" and "to authors and inventors".
The industries in question have been systematically (and successfully) attacking the first item for decades, and do not generally belong to the groups specified by the second part.
The majority of the money made in these industries goes to distributors whose historical monopoly on the means of distribution is slipping away from them. In some cases they facilitate the creative process, but in the majority of cases they do not, or do so to a limited and replaceable degree.
In fact, in many cases, these monopolists have in essence enslaved the creators of works and used them as livestock to drive their engines of profit.
Does any of this make the unlicensed sharing of copyrighted works ethical or justifiable? Probably not.
The profligate use of the guillotine during the French revolution was probably not ethical or justifiable, either, but it sure happened anyway.
The monopoly is dead, like it or not. The current noise is the death rattle of an expiring regime, the which never go quiet into that good night. Something else will rise in its place, and what that will be we simply do not yet know.
But I'll bet these same money grubbers will eventually find a way to cash in without creating anything themselves. They always do.
WALSTIB!
Piracy and copyright are not comparable to monks and the printing press. The primary question you should ask when figuring out whether a comparison to piracy is accurate or not is this: "Does society end up with the same or comparible product in both cases?" That is *the question*. The printing press put monks out of work, but society still got the books -- and they got the books at a lower price. If the printing press put authors out of work, then maybe you'd have a gripe about the printing press. Piracy, on the other hand, puts the authors and creators out of work. The final stage of piracy is that no one can earn a living from their work that is benefiting society.
Piracy, on the other hand, puts the authors and creators out of work.
no, you've drunk the koolaid, the distributors' propaganda. piracy puts ONLY the distributor out of work
The final stage of piracy is that no one can earn a living from their work that is benefiting society.
you've somehow made the fanciful leap that the distributor is an integral part of the economics of the music creating process. the final stage of piracy is that distributors go out of business, and only the distributors. first, you are assuming that the pre-internet distribution model gave artists a living. plenty toiled in poverty, and plenty will always toil in poverty, regardless of piracy or not. that's simply the nature of being an artist: for every success, there are thousands of anonymous failures, always was and always will be. nothing about the pre-internet distribution model protects the artist from this truth, and nothing can ever protect the artist from this truth (and nothing ever should: if you suck, oh well)
plenty of one hit wonders became broke as well, as the distributors wrote their agreements so the artists got pennies while the distributors reaped all the real benefit. only the stellar hits: the beatles, jay z, were able to muscle their way into the sphere of distributor-level profits
meanwhile, on the internet, artists have free advertising to everyone in the world, rather than a gateway controlled by distributors. artists can connect directly to fans for free, and distribute their works for free. then they make a living via concerts, promotions, endorsements, advertising, and other ancillary revenues. this is superior to the distributor model as the artist is completely in control, not beholden to some asshole who signs contracts for willynilly reasons and willynilly projections. via a direct link between artist and consumer, an artist rises and falls simply on quality as perceived by the consumer, without an artificial filter in between of a distributor. this is a more efficient model of who deserves cash flows. rather than a distributor giving millions of dollars in advance to an artist who makes absolute crap, while utterly ignoring a musical genius, for random pointless reasons of the distributors sole discretion
study up on the history of artist-distributor contracts, and what millions of artists, successful or not have said about the randomness and arbitrarienss and frustration of their contracts, having nothing whatsoever to do with quality or the fans
Printing press = fewer jobs for scribes, more books for society, lower costs for books, and supports authors.
Piracy = creators and authors go bankrupt, society has fewer new creations and becomes culturally poor, feeding on the remnants of old creations, when creating them was still financially possible.
Piracy = distributors go bankrupt, society has diurect access to millions of artist rather than working through a bullshit filter and becomes culturally rich
why do you believe large financial outlays are required for the creation of art? why do you believe we need distributors to tell us what to listen to and that this artificial filter is somehow a definition of cultural richness? why do believe their decisions are more valid or more economically efficient than you yourself and millions of consumers deciding directly who deserves to reap economic benefits from all of the ancillary revenue streams available to an artist?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But who would pay for "designing stuff?"
Anyone who benefits from the existence of that stuff... mostly the same people who buy copies now. Readers benefit from having new books written. Film buffs benefit from having new movies made. (Third parties also benefit indirectly: e.g. someone who's in the business of selling Blu-Ray players benefits a little from having new movies released on Blu-Ray.)
Let's say you make a movie which costs 100 million $ to make, how can you recover those costs if not through the small contribution of 10$ from the millions of people who watch (consume?) that movie?
I agree!
However, today's copyright-based business model is not the only way to collect $10 from ten million people.
In fact, compared to the alternative (collecting the money up front and then distributing the movie for free), it has some serious drawbacks: when you spend $100 million out of your own pocket, you're taking a huge gamble. If the movie doesn't sell as many tickets as you hoped, you've just lost millions of dollars. On the other hand, if you're a film fan thinking about contributing $10 to the production of an upcoming movie, you only stand to lose the price of a sandwich and coffee, and the movie producer knows ahead of time whether or not the movie will turn a profit.
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Yes. And? 80% of the world's population cheers the pirates. So, you point is, what? You think that when something is right, when that something is overwhelmingly approved around the world, Slashdot should kowtow to the corporate weenies? Are nerds and geeks supposed to be stupid, or what?
Let me help you to understand: the movie moguls and the music studios are STILL MAKING MONEY!! They are making so much money that they can afford to support the ineffectual RIAA and MPAA. What more evidence do you need to convince you that piracy is good for Hollywood and good for the studios? Just how many millions have they dumped down the gullets of the RIAA vultures, and the MPAA hyenas? What has been the return on those millions? Maybe - just maybe .00000001%?
Aye, matey, it's the pirate life for me!! Do you need me to rip something for you?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"It's useless to care about the pirates who would do it anyway, is a smaller group and usually dont have that much disposable income anyway. But it's the casual people and adults - your idea about piracy will change after you start getting more disposable income, like happened for me and lots of my friends and now happily buy what we enjoy (and another reason was the quality improvement and easiness of Steam and Spotify and other legit services)."
Um... no. "Lots" of my friends and I have a high disposable income. But we are simply not delivered what we want in a format that we are willing to use.
Frankly, the number 1 feature that "my group" looks for in a media player is a USB slot, and the ability to play xvid avi files. You know what? A lot of players now offer this. From the low-end on up. Can I go and buy a movie or tv programme in that format?
I don't really think that the (in the US) RIAA and MPAA are particularly on the ball -- they should have filed suit on Samsung, etc. for producing such devices. THERE IS NO "LEGITIMATE" CONTENT FOR THESE DEVICES. Would I purchase such content? Yes, I would. Ripping CDs and DVDs is a serious pain.
There may well be services like "Steam", but, honestly, I am a 50 year old, and I have never, and (most likely) will never use it. Just tell me where I can buy a copy of the new Batman movie on a USB stick. Meanwhile, if I buy a DVD copy (haven't yet), it may have yet another "anti-copy" measure de-jour implemented to make it inconvenient to rip. Frankly, it's easiest to simply torrent the damn thing (time is money, you know, and I have other things in my life to worry about).
Now, it is true that studios HAVE released movies in flash drive format:
http://www.bit-tech.net/custompc/news/604788/ghostbusters-is-first-film-to-be-released-on-usb-stick.html
but note that it has "DRM". It won't play on my Samsung player! And, its $53 for Ghostbusters (25 year old movie).
http://www.play.com/Gadgets/Gadgets/4-/11998344/Star-Trek-USB-Stick/Product.html
DivX, can "enable" up to 5 devices. Only $30 (much better than over $50). May work, but I am not sure enough to actually buy it.
And that's it. Meanwhile, what WE (my group) wants is the ability to purchase the programming, put it onto hard disks (good heavens, even my wife has a 1TB USB volume used for media and backing up her netbook, and we have 6TB in the home media server), be able to transfer to USB media for portability to be able to watch where we want. MY group sees nothing wrong with spending north of $1000 for a media pc. As long as it works. And the prices are dropping; we only paid $100 for a 1TB USB drive.
As it is, the content creators get very little from us. We have the money, but there is no product that we are willing to purchase. Which has driven us into torrents. Now, it would be hard to break the habit. Unless the content providers can somehow magically give us 500Kbps+ downloads of an incredibly large catalog. Which is the minimum bar that the "pirates" have set.
What has to happen
To get us back (and we ARE the ones with the money), the content has to be provided in SD or better quality, on-line, and via brick-and-mortar shopping, for the same price (or better for a download version), in DRM-free formats that are playable on the common home kit (aXXo's format would do nicely).
I would pay $5 for Ghostbusters (it's a 2 for $10 movie at WalMart). Billing must be as convenient as the Apple Store (and, yes, we buy from the Apple Store; but not music -- just iPhone games and applications. Why that is is another discussion, but remember, I *am* 50 years old).
And, having done that, it would still take time to convert us (our group). After all, we have been using torrents now for years.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061