File Sharing In the Post MegaUpload Era

An anonymous reader writes "This report looks at file sharing in the post MegaUpload era. The main finding — file sharing did not go away. It did not even decrease much in North America. Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to U.S. servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links."

Comments

What did you expect?

[elrous0]

It's not like the people who've been pirating for the last ten years are just going to say to themselves "Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's and forget that we've gotten used to not paying for our movies and getting them instantly!" just because of some raid. And as long as there are pirates sailing the high seas, *someone* will be there to sell them boats.

Re:What did you expect?

[discord5]

Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's

Yeah, piracy didn't exist in the 90s. Do we get the don't copy that floppy guy back too?

Re:What did you expect?

[AvitarX]

"...and forget that we've gotten used to not paying for our movies and getting them instantly!"

Your 90's must have been way different than mine.

Re:What did you expect?

[allcoolnameswheretak]

People copied floppies. And look at what became of the software industry.

Re:What did you expect?

[aktiveradio]

So at Skyfile we have seen a huge amount of US users since January 19th, not sure that many users that use File sharing sites like ours for legal sharing needed to go outside of the US to do this.

Re:What did you expect?

[Samantha Wright]

The only permanent solution is to make content that people want to pay for, instead of making content they feel like they have to pay for. It's not hard to get people to pay for content when you make it actually engaging. You do have to give up on the lie that everyone wants content all the time, but it's possible to survive.

Re:What did you expect?

[alen]

So if the content sucks then why pirate it?

Re:What did you expect?

[JoeMerchant]

Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's

Yeah, piracy didn't exist in the 90s. Do we get the don't copy that floppy guy back too?

I think my first "copy party experience" was in a church, in 1983ish... Everybody had their box of 100+ floppies and you'd walk around and see if there was anything you wanted, "borrow it" for 5 minutes to make a copy, rinse, lather, and repeat, for hours.

Re:What did you expect?

[cheekyjohnson]

To see if you like it?

Re:What did you expect?

[Samantha Wright]

In the cases where an alternative distribution channel is available (there often isn't) and it is available for a reasonable price (which people often also disagree on), people pirate content that they don't really care about in order to fill their lives up. Perhaps there's a social incentive for knowing about what happened on some TV show; perhaps it's to stave off boredom because they're depressed and don't have greater ambitions or hobbies for their free time (this describes more people than anyone cares to admit); perhaps it's just to distract them because they're tired. In none of these cases is the consumer deriving value from the art of the content; it's just slightly more interesting than usual time-filling fluff, like the proverbial airport novel, sports news, the weather, or gossip in a bar. That's why we don't feel compelled to repay the artists behind the content.

Re:What did you expect?

[jaca44]

http://www.27bslash6.com/foggot.html

Re:What did you expect?

[nonicknameavailable]

in the 90s i didn't pay for music and programs and games

ms office 97 install code 1112111 111111111

Re:What did you expect?

[girlintraining]

It's not like the people who've been pirating for the last ten years are just going to say to themselves "Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's and forget that we've gotten used to not paying for our movies and getting them instantly.

Interestingly, the most popular items are not movies but television shows. But that's neither here nor there -- Even if the MPAA stopped charging for movies and TV shows "pirate" distribution would continue, because the quality is superior. Let's look at the selling points for "pirate" distribution content;

• Available immediately after broadcast
• No commercials
• Wide variety of TV formats (480p, 720p, 1080p, stereo, 5.1, etc.)
• Wide variety of encoding formats.
• No DRM; Can be viewed on most devices without restriction or encumberance.
• Free trials - if you don't like it, you don't have to pay for it.
• Low cost.

The MPAA currently can only compete on one of these points -- cost. And they've been competing like mad here, by sending anyone who even looks like they might download a cease and desist, airdropping lawyers by the hundred on college campuses and filesharing sites, and spending hundreds of millions on political contributions to induce law enforcement to attack downloaders. They aren't trying to win the war by arresting everyone and giving hackers 30 years in the electric chair... they're trying to win by making the cost of downloading look less appealing compared to their own product offerings, through their distribution channels.

Re:What did you expect?

[cheekyjohnson]

Because you hope you'll get something entertaining? Not to mention that downloading a file doesn't take that much effort (and you can do other things while you wait). Why not?

Re:What did you expect?

[khr]

I think my first "copy party experience" was in a church, in 1983ish... Everybody had their box of 100+ floppies and you'd walk around and see if there was anything you wanted, "borrow it" for 5 minutes to make a copy, rinse, lather, and repeat, for hours.

For me it was in high school, all the nerds wandered around with boxes of flopppies, some of us custom painted our boxes, or put stickers so everyone knew who was cool...

When the school had all Apple computers we used to trade games and utilities straight across, disk for disk... If you didn't have something someone else was interested in, you didn't get their stuff. But once we all started upgrading to PCs, we were a lot more free about "sure, copy anything you want". I don't know what changed, really, same people, mostly the same physical floppy disks, too...

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

File sharing is used legally - you'd have to be a grade A moron to not see it.

Red herrings, ignorance of facts abounds the anon. coward.

Re:What did you expect?

[TFAFalcon]

Because they paid for people to announce how THIS version does not suck. So you constantly live in the (false) hope that it's true.

Re:What did you expect?

[luther349]

there was plenty of pirates in the 90s pre napster it was some search keywords and websites with direct link's lets not forget newsbin and irc and ftp sites. in other words as long as 2 pcs can connect data can be shared, before that it was tapes and before that books. its always been around.

Re:What did you expect?

[DarkTempes]

By the 90s you mean, "Hey, let's record stuff on VHS/CD/cassette tapes from TV/the rental store/CD/whatever and share them with out friends?"

Oh, I do believe one could find stuff on usenet/IRC in the 90s as well but I understand your point.

Re:What did you expect?

[Nyder]

It's not like the people who've been pirating for the last ten years are just going to say to themselves "Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's....

Since obviously you were too young or not born in the 90's, but getting pirated warez wasn't that hard then.

Sure, we didn't have Torrents, or P2P programs, 'cept IRC. I know using FTP (that's file transfer protocol, not fucking Free 2 Play, damn ass kids) to download warez off the internet wasn't as cool as using IRC, but then you had local BBS's that you could call up and download stuff also.

You might not believe this, but in the 80's, we pirated software also. BBS's and copying parties ruled those days.

Re:What did you expect?

[Tastecicles]

direct dialling someone else's modem (hoping they had their computer on) and listening to the screech between the handset and the acoustic coupler as you pray that the connection doesn't drop again and cause a system crash... oh, those were the days...

Re:What did you expect?

[Zoxed]

You young folk: I raise you 10 years, with the 80's Home Taping Is Killing Music !

Re:What did you expect?

[Zoxed]

> That's why we don't feel compelled to repay the artists behind the content.

Or maybe they *do* want to pay the *artist* but not the media machine, the lawyers, the middlemen etc.

Re:What did you expect?

[Dan667]

The mpaa and riaa pricing of content does not reflect there are almost no distribution costs, they artificially delay content, and prevent companies from offering good online services. This is a service problem they could solve any time they wanted.

Re:What did you expect?

[Samantha Wright]

Certainly that happens too, though I suspect with less regularity.

Re:What did you expect?

[Zoxed]

>> Or maybe they *do* want to pay the *artist*...
> Certainly that happens too,...
How can we do that ? (serious question)

Re:What did you expect?

[Samantha Wright]

Stalk them and then throw money at them. It usually works pretty well. Note, though, that you may inadvertently be screwing over the sound engineers, who also did real work in producing the music.

Re:What did you expect?

[lexman098]

"Hey, let's go back to the way it was in the 90's and forget that we've gotten used to not paying for our movies and getting them instantly!"

Do you remember the 90s? You know, people were getting all kinds of free music on Napster. Everyone was talking about digital music and building their mp3 collections. There's a place where that idea still exists in reality... and I've been there.

Re:What did you expect?

[Coren22]

Unfortunately, as the MAFIA keeps shutting down the sites that were being used legally due to the people using it legally, us in the US will have to continue to move to overseas systems to do it. When Bittorrent is illegal, how will we get the latest WOW update, or download the most recent Linux distros. This is why we called SOPA censorship, the media industry thinks that if a thing is used to share music that it must be shut down, and they are completely blinded to the legitimate uses for the service which they are killing.

Era?!

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm more annoyed at the wording - "In the post ____ era, the world will never be the same."

Re:Era?!

[Rary]

I'm more annoyed at the wording - "In the post ____ era, the world will never be the same."

Especially in this case, where the "Post MegaUpload Era" isn't even three weeks old.

Re:Era?!

[Captain Spam]

I'd agree with you, but in the eons that have passed in this, the post-TaoPhoenix's-post era, it's become entirely irrelevant. Just like the first half of my post, in this post-Captain-Spam's-first-half-of-his-post era.

Re:Era?!

[khr]

And how different will my world be post-MegaUpload? I never even heard of MegaUpload until they got busted... Sure rocks my world...

Re:Era?!

[networkBoy]

*blink*

Re:Era?!

[hey!]

Especially in this case, where the "Post MegaUpload Era" isn't even three weeks old.

That's almost five months in dog years.

Re:Era?!

[Jesus_666]

In the post "in the post ____ era, the world will never be the same" era, the world will never be the same. For one, it will have one overused overdramatic phrase less.

Blame Napster

[Shakrai]

Blame Napster for making file sharing main stream. Back in the day when we had to walk uphill to school both ways the only way to pirate stuff was to be a geek or know someone who was. In the glory days most piracy happened on BBS'es, IRC and USENET. The former two were generally only available to those "in the know" while the latter was mostly used by people seeking pornography (who remembers working on PCs and finding gigabyte sized Free Agent cache directories?)

In the end even the RIAA/MPAA types know that they will never stop piracy. Driving it further underground and returning it to the domain of the technically informed would stem their perceived losses though. I'm not sure if this is an obtainable goal with the internet being what it is but you can bet they will keep trying as long as they draw breath. The only thing that will stop this is the rise of meaningful (read: cheap and easy to use) online services that make piracy more trouble than it's worth. A lot of people think that iTunes did this for music, though I would argue that Pandora has done more to negate music piracy than iTunes. I don't think you can directly translate Pandora into movies though.

Re:Blame Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a matter of time until someone develops an Android or jailbroken iOS app that allows true peer to peer piracy over bluetooth or wifi. You'd set it up to share what you want, and to search for things you're looking for. If you were friendly, you could even set it up to look for things other people you see for x amount of time are looking for. Walking on the street? Riding in a bus? File sharing everywhere you go.

Re:Blame Napster

[Hatta]

Driving it further underground and returning it to the domain of the technically informed would stem their perceived losses though. I'm not sure if this is an obtainable goal with the internet being what it is but you can bet they will keep trying as long as they draw breath.

Not a chance. Even if we had to go back to finding files on IRC, someone would whip up an XBMC plugin that made it entirely transparent and usable by morons.

Re:Blame Napster

[MickyTheIdiot]

The *AAs at this point are simply in a quixotic battle against the rules of the real world. They might as well lobby for changes in the laws of physics... it falls into the same category. Trouble is most of our legislators are oldsters, people easily bought, or people who can't understand any of the basics of the world we live in.

Every attempt to curb the "piracy" will fail because this is simply the digital laws of information work. We can take huge step backwards into the world where every piece of information is tied to a piece of paper or a piece of rock, we can try to legislate it out of existence, or we can accept it and make a world that the artists (not corporate middlemen) can make a living.

Re:Blame Napster

[WrongSizeGlass]

It's only a matter of time until someone develops an Android or jailbroken iOS app that allows true peer to peer piracy over bluetooth or wifi. You'd set it up to share what you want, and to search for things you're looking for. If you were friendly, you could even set it up to look for things other people you see for x amount of time are looking for. Walking on the street? Riding in a bus? File sharing everywhere you go.

Didn't Zune have a feature that did bluetooth or WiFi song sharing called 'squirt' (or 'squirting')?

Re:Blame Napster

[networkBoy]

That is actually really cool, but the opening for trolling is huge!
name your file todays.hot.movie.avi but have it be a slideshow of the best ever internet toll shock images...
aside from that however, I think it is a really interesting idea for dense areas where person to person near field contact is likely (NY, SF, London, Tokyo, etc.)
-nB

Re:Blame Napster

[networkBoy]

At some point that will stop as well because those in the know will want to preserve their last free zones and protect them from the masses, because once the masses can get there easily so can the lawyers.
The other option is a darknet/TOR style network, but latency and throughput suck enough that it is not a very viable option.
-nB

Re:Blame Napster

[lonechicken]

Shhh. Zip it about the U-word place! You know what the first and second rule of it is.

Re:Blame Napster

[Shakrai]

or we can accept it and make a world that the artists (not corporate middlemen) can make a living.

That's a great theory where music is concerned and any start up band can get going with a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment and a broadband connection. I'm not so certain how it translates into movies though. To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio? All of the special effects, the editing, the cinematographers, the actors, director, stunt performers, etc, etc? How do you propose to see that the "artists" in this example get paid without having some sort of corporate middleman?

If you accept that movies are a part of our culture then there has to be a sane middle ground between "information wants to be free!" and "we are going to control where and when you can watch the movie you paid for"

Re:Blame Napster

[0123456]

To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio?

You could try not paying actors $20,000,000 for a few weeks' work.

And, frankly, a future where movies were based more on characters and story than fancy effects wouldn't be a bad one.

Re:Blame Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, and playing devil's advocate here, they are actually winning the war. Yes, SOPA and PIPA may not have gone through, but it was the fact that if the US turned off another country's domain, it might be considered an act of war, with the ramifications that comes with it, similar to a naval blockade is considered an act of war for a port.

Here is how the *AA is winning the war:

1: ISPs will hand them logs now by request. Not by court order. This allows long fishing expeditions.

2: Treaties like only appear on the news after they are signed. It only was a lucky happenstance that this didn't happen with ACTA.

3: Foreigners who have never set foot on US soil are being held criminally liable for breaking US laws. Picture Americans being deported to Saudi Arabia or Syria for lashings or beheadings because they were viewing pr0n.

4: Piracy is being forced to the edges. This is success right here. Once piracy is forced to transatlantic or transpacific links, it isn't hard for ISPs to charge users for bandwidth use across those links, similar to how AT&T charges $250 a terabyte with DSL now.

5: DRM stacks are everywhere. The next generation of Windows 8 logo compliant PCs can be said to have a hardware level DRM stack with the signed UEFI mechanism that cannot be disabled, and if disabled, content like programs and games won't work.

6: It is becoming harder and harder for devices to get jailbroken. The PS3 took almost five years to have a single signficant crack, and that is currently fixed, with PSN detecting and auto-banning modified consoles. Modified xboxes are tossed off XBL instantly. Even iPhones are taking longer and longer to have a significant JB, and the Cydia market has to virtually recode stuff like Winterboard from scratch. Even with that, all it takes is a restore, a forced upgrade to the latest iOS, and iOS users are back at square one.

7: One essentially is forced to use a VPS if one doesn't want to be ratted out. Of course, good VPSes are suspect.

So, compared to this time about a decade ago, life is a lot tougher -- there are nowhere near the open wireless connections (warchalking is long gone), people who had open wi-fi connections are facing steep fines or jail times due to abuse, and the PC is essentially a dead platform when it comes to gaming.

Yes, SOPA was a battle that was conceded, but the war is still being won by the *AA.

Re:Blame Napster

[rickb928]

Sending movies over Bluetooth seems like a non-starter. Even sending an album-worth of music is a pain, and of course your recipient needs to be close enough to sneeze on you. Much easier to put it in the cloud, though we're gonna have to restrain or government from jailing people for largely legal and legitimate sharing sites.

Even that Re-whatever site is struggling to go into the first-sale resale business. The &^AA is undoubtedly trying to get some agency to raid them before they even start up.

Re:Blame Napster

[stating_the_obvious]

I wouldn't consider IRC or USENET to be 'back in the day" technologies. Both are alive and well and doing a fine job of allowing for inconspicuous file transfers...

Just because you can't search for it in Google doesn't mean it's not on the Internet.

Re:Blame Napster

[justforgetme]

IP Trolling can't be "dealt with", like every politician does; you have to annihilate it and then salt the soil in order to optimistically dampen it's impact. The only true solution is the one of self mutilation. The global community has to reorient to a new set of rules for attribution of intellectual work in order to end this self impeding plutocratic movement.

Re:Blame Napster

[icebraining]

People will still pay for stuff. Hell, the MPAA had record profits each year from 2006 to 2010.

Movies provide an actual valuable service, that some guy in his home connection can't replace for free: huge screens to appreciate those expensive special effects and pretty photography.

Re:Blame Napster

[bartoku]

How about an index of file hashes and file sizes somewhere that you can verify the todays.hot.movie.avi file against? Or would that be illegal to host in the US?

Re:Blame Napster

[Shakrai]

And, frankly, a future where movies were based more on characters and story than fancy effects wouldn't be a bad one.

They aren't mutually exclusive you know. I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.

Re:Blame Napster

[aztracker1]

Using IRC as a host network for Bittorrent trackers, etc would be pretty effective in terms of not getting shut down though...

Re:Blame Napster

[BobbyDigital83]

Ah, the good 'ole days of mIRC, bots and FTP servers... Miss 'em. Except the speed. Wow, it took forever to download one song. Even if you were on a cable connection.

Re:Blame Napster

[cheekyjohnson]

I guess they'll have to ban everything, then. There's simply no way that they can stop any of it that I see. Lawyers won't do much (as we're seeing now).

Re:Blame Napster

[0123456]

They aren't mutually exclusive you know. I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.

It's a bunch of kids in a school waving wands around. If Ealing Studios had made it in the 50s it would have cost less than a million dollars in today's money even with Alec Guinness playing one of the leads.

Heck, I've seen at least one TV show with a very similar plot and I guarantee you they didn't have a multi-million dollar budget for each episode.

Re:Blame Napster

[aztracker1]

I really wish this wasn't posted as AC, and that I had some mod points available.

Re:Blame Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Zune have a feature that did bluetooth or WiFi song sharing called 'squirt' (or 'squirting')?

It was squircle. Squirting is something different, but don't worry, we nerds probably will never stumble into that situation...

Re:Blame Napster

[SuricouRaven]

That's basically what a torrent site is today. Before the torrents, it was ed2k sites. Sharereactor used to be huge.

Re:Blame Napster

[SuricouRaven]

Ideally, get some devs on it too. It's such a great project, but marred by a few awkward bugs and lack of support for non-windows OS. No-one I know ever got wxwaste to work.

Re:Blame Napster

[kiddygrinder]

there is probably a good middle ground but there is no fucking way the mpaa is going to find it.

Re:Blame Napster

[Anne Thwacks]

Loads of perfectly good Nigerian movies are made with lower budgets than the average Nigerian wedding. The plots are more interesting than most of Hollywood's products and you can watch them for free on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=h3rAItM0lMw&ob=av1n&feature=mv_sr . However, the effects are typically less than special.

Re:Blame Napster

[AngryDeuce]

No, it will just get driven to other areas, the people will slowly move, and the cat and mouse game will continue.

Taking down Megaupload will do the same thing for digital locker sites that taking Napster down did for music piracy...that is, nothing. For a while there will be confusion while the masses react and a billion different services will rise up to take their place. When Napster got shut down, people just migrated to direct P2P like Limewire, Kazaa, Toadnode, Bearshare. When those started getting shut down, people moved on to torrents. When torrents started to get riskier, they moved to digital locker sites like Megaupload. Now that megaupload is gone, people will just start moving to one of the dozens of other sites out there. The content is still out there, on billions of hard drives all over the world. All it takes is someone fixing the links.

No, all this will accomplish is make the pirates obfuscate their activity more, which will make it harder for the MAFIAA to track/prove. The game continues.

Re:Blame Napster

[bartoku]

But a torrent site will point me to a tracker which can point me to piers who are seeding the file.
I believe torrent index sites in the US have all been shut down and pushed out.

What I am proposing is a bit less than the torrent, only the file has and files size portion, but no information on how to obtain the file.
If the site is simply compiling a list of pirated files in the wild, then is it doing wrong?
Arguably the list could be sold in a way for consumers to verify that a file is of pirate origins and they should avoid it, assuming the consumer wants to make sure they are obtaining legal wares.
While of course it could be used for identifying the existence of a pirated file and searching it out.

Re:Blame Napster

[AngryDeuce]

Kevin Smith made Clerks for less than $20,000 and it went on to make $20 million in the box office, not to mention millions in home media and network sales and the launching of his career.

I get just as much entertainment from user submissions on Youtube as I do from huge blockbusters these days. I think the only people terrified of a "Hollywood-less" future is Hollywood itself.

Re:Blame Napster

[KhabaLox]

I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.

Star Wars Episode IV was told without "fancy effects", and I've heard it effectively argued that the story was pretty shallow on the character side.

Re:Blame Napster

[pjt33]

Ah, but torrent sites now are pushing magnet links instead, which are pretty much what you're talking about.

Re:Blame Napster

[morgauxo]

where ya been? http://tinyurl.com/6tcer3h

Re:Blame Napster

[rainer_d]

or we can accept it and make a world that the artists (not corporate middlemen) can make a living.

That's a great theory where music is concerned and any start up band can get going with a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment and a broadband connection. I'm not so certain how it translates into movies though. To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio?

AFAIK, "Harry Potter" is a series of books. There was no need to bring it to the "big screen" in the first place, other than to make the author the wealthiest woman in Great Britain and for some morons who are too lazy to read...

Re:Blame Napster

[bartoku]

You call it a "magnet link", but it does not "link" to anything correct? It just contains information, has and size, about some file that is out there somewhere.

On a side note I am curious how you get a hold of the torrent without a link and only a magnet file?

But back to my question that I do not have an answer for but you have helped me clarify even further thank you:

Are sites containing strictly Magnet URIs, which I assume provide no resources for locating the tracker nor piers that would provide file, illegal or legal in the US?

If I sell the site as an anti-piracy means, provide a little file scanner that allows users to make sure their devices are "free" of pirated files, does that make it legit?

Take it one step further can I link the users back to Amazon as a way to replace their illegal files with legit ones and grab a commission?

Re:Blame Napster

[styrotech]

Star Wars Episode IV was told without "fancy effects",

Really? Star Wars special effects were about as fancy as effects got in the 70s.

Most other films of the time compared badly. The Star Wars "making of" documentaries were both popular and fascinating because people really did want to see how those fancy new effects were made.

Re:Blame Napster

[DarkOx]

Harry potter would be a simple movie to do. There is nothing in that could not be done with some plastic models, and a little time painting negatives. Would it look like it does today, nope, but it would perfectly clear to the audience what is happening and they would have no trouble understanding what stuff was "supposed to be".

Look at classic Star Trek, you don't need CGI to tell the story of man battles alien lizard man, a guy in a rubber suit works fine. You don't need CGI to have space ships firing energy weapons at each other, a little paint on the negatives works fine.

Re:Blame Napster

[craash420]

I was never trolled that bad but back in Napster's early days I downloaded Spiderman numerous times under different names. I never understood how making people think you have all the latest movies to share would increase the size of your e-peen.

Re:Blame Napster

[wbr1]

This was right before napster, but who remembers oth.net?

Re:Blame Napster

[CCarrot]

The only thing that will stop this is the rise of meaningful (read: cheap and easy to use) online services that make piracy more trouble than it's worth. A lot of people think that iTunes did this for music, though I would argue that Pandora has done more to negate music piracy than iTunes. I don't think you can directly translate Pandora into movies though.

Sure you can. It's called Netflix.

Sure, Netflix is subscription-based rather than 'free', but it still provides tons of watchable content for a very reasonable monthly fee across several platforms. (If you strongly prefer 'free', then try Hulu if you're in the states, or can spoof being there.)

True, you can't save the movies you like to disk and keep them for 50 years, and you have no control over the content they offer from week to week. But I don't know (I'm not in the states), can you d/l and save songs from Pandora? Do they reply fairly quickly to content requests?

Re:Blame Napster

[FutureDomain]

On a side note I am curious how you get a hold of the torrent without a link and only a magnet file?

While it can contain a link to a tracker, most magnet links just contain a hash of the .torrent file and use the DHT system. Your torrent client would look up the hash in the DHT and find a user who is currently downloading or seeding the file. It then downloads the .torrent file from them.

Are sites containing strictly Magnet URIs, which I assume provide no resources for locating the tracker nor piers that would provide file, illegal or legal in the US?

It depends on how much hand-waving and bribing the MAFIAA do. Several years ago I would say that they would probably be legal, since you're not getting the file from them and the "link" to the files is very weak. Nowadays it really doesn't matter, our due process doesn't apply as long as the politicians and prosecutors are sufficiently bribed. They'll just seize your domain, block your donations, and threaten/raid your web hosts without judicial approval.

Re:Blame Napster

[Esteanil]

Check out the trailer for Iron Sky, http://www.ironsky.net/ - then check out their budget http://www.ironsky.net/site/support/finance/

This is their second film, the first one (the most popular film ever created in Finland) was mainly distributed (for free) over bittorrent.

Looks better than anything set to come out of Hollywood this year, IMO.

Conclusion: If Hollywood dies, we'll still have good movies. Not that there's much chance of that, seeing as they're making more money than ever...

Re:Blame Napster

[suutar]

given modern hashing, if the hash matches the odds are extremely good it's the file you want. If the size is right too, even better. So given a size and a hash, you just have to look for peers that have something matching and voila.

Re:Blame Napster

[Mephistro]

"do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio?"

Give it ten or twenty years and technology will make expensive films and film studios follow the path of dinosaurs. In that timeframe and thanks to Moore's Law the average user will have enough power at his fingertips to make CGI films indistinguishable from reality, including tricks like motion capture. A group of friends could do a film for peanuts, and if the film is good enough it could make tons of money for its makers. Of course, there would be lots of crappy films, but without the help of some humongous promotion campaign, they would be winnowed out really fast.

In that moment, with good quality films costing less than, say, 50000 $, it suddenly would make sense to obtain revenues by alternative means, i.e. publicity and product placement, and what we call 'piracy' would be the best way of promoting a film.

I think that movie studios are aware of this, and are just desperate to milk the cow as much as possible, before she falls dead.

Re:Blame Napster

[RandomAvatar]

There's a middle ground!?!? I thought there was only one side!

Re:Blame Napster

[_recluso_]

The Blair Witch Project: Budget $60k, Worldwide gross $248.6M

Re:Blame Napster

[marcosdumay]

Things never happened this way, why do you think the ones in-the-know will start behaving like that now?

People will create new channels, only the in-the-know will use them at first. But they'll pass the secret to their friends, and that will be welcome, since those friends will bring new stuff. Then suddenly, by the power of exponential growth, the channel will be big, and lawyers will take notice. Just before that new channels will be created, and just a few will be in-the know...

That is how it has even been, there is no reason for that to change now.

Re:Blame Napster

[KhabaLox]

Fair point. I wonder though, being only 2 at the time it was released, was that the draw of the film? Perhaps.

And yet, the Special Edition versions were so reviled. Is that simply because of the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia?

Re:Blame Napster

[styrotech]

Fair point. I wonder though, being only 2 at the time it was released, was that the draw of the film? Perhaps.

For most, yes. Like it was for example Avatar and Jurassic Park.

And LOTR too - generally mainstream audiences don't flock to space or fantasy movies unless they are some sort of breakthrough in special effects.

And yet, the Special Edition versions were so reviled. Is that simply because of the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia?

I haven't actually seen them, but I reckon (as you suspect) it's misplaced nerd rage stemming from Lucas breaking their rose tinted glasses.

Re:Blame Napster

[Shakrai]

If Ealing Studios had made it in the 50s it would have cost less than a million dollars in today's money even with Alec Guinness playing one of the leads.

Bridge on the River Kwai had a budget of $3,000,000 in 1950s money. That's 24 million and change in 2012 dollars. Got another bad argument you want shot down?

Re:Blame Napster

[Shakrai]

Harry potter would be a simple movie to do. There is nothing in that could not be done with some plastic models, and a little time painting negatives. Would it look like it does today, nope, but it would perfectly clear to the audience what is happening and they would have no trouble understanding what stuff was "supposed to be".

So essentially you are arguing against progress because the movies of yesteryear told the story just as good as the movies of today? You got modded up for it too; on what other subject could an argument against technology get a positive moderation on /.?

BTW, I'd love to see how you'd bring this scene to the big screen with negative printing.

Re:Blame Napster

[kyrio]

WASTE has been dead for a long time. It was revived by some dude a few years ago (great coincidence since I had just found it a short while before he started working on it), but he stopped working on it again.

Re:Blame Napster

[KhabaLox]

I've seen them. The rage is not misplaced. :)

Re:Blame Napster

[mrbcs]

I was pretty pissed off when I found out my brand new (2004) dodge caravan wouldn't play burnt dvds.

I can hook up a $20 wal mart dvd player and get around that though.... stupid **AA rules.

Re:Blame Napster

[steve_bryan]

...
Are sites containing strictly Magnet URIs, which I assume provide no resources for locating the tracker nor "piers" that would provide file, illegal or legal in the US? ...

To stop people from smirking you should refer to "peers" rather than "piers". Although the nautical image it conjures up is entertaining.

Re:Blame Napster

[FoolishOwl]

They aren't mutually exclusive you know. I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.

It's a bunch of kids in a school waving wands around. If Ealing Studios had made it in the 50s it would have cost less than a million dollars in today's money even with Alec Guinness playing one of the leads.

Heck, I've seen at least one TV show with a very similar plot and I guarantee you they didn't have a multi-million dollar budget for each episode.

You could do almost the entire story in the style of Shakespeare-in-the-Park, with painted backdrops, costumes, and a few props. Maybe some more elaborate theatrical machinery for some special scenes, but you could just rewrite the story so that fights with dragons happen off-stage, or we see Hermione and Ron and company in the stands, reacting to what happens in the Quidditch match and describing it.

I like special effects, but they're not the critical part of a good story. And anyway, computer graphics are reaching the point where a team of college students can produce results better than the big studios could a few decades ago.

Re:Blame Napster

[FoolishOwl]

The original trilogy had excellent pacing, great actors, plots that generally made sense, fight scenes that made less sense, and terrible dialogue that the actors strained to make work.

The prequel trilogy had out-of-control pacing, mostly mediocre actors who were totally subordinate to Lucas, plots that didn't make sense, fight scenes reminiscent of Dragonball Z absurdity, and terrible dialogue.

There was a review of Phantom Menace that got a lot of attention on YouTube, years after the fact, in which the reviewer shows a clip of Lucas meeting with some of his staff, and his staff are obviously terrified of Lucas and desperate to please him. There's also a clip with Lucas and some of the senior members of the team, just having watched a screening of the full movie for the first time, and they're all obviously dismayed at what they've just seen, even Lucas -- they all look like they're thinking about damage control.

I've come to believe that there was a plot outline for the prequel trilogy, in which the overall story made sense, but that Lucas literally forgot what the plot was supposed to be. In particular, I think a lot of plot elements seem to assume that the Jedi Order were not unambiguously "good guys", and by treating them as such, the plot was broken.

Re:Blame Napster

[lvxferre]

Squirting is something different, but don't worry, we nerds probably will never stumble into that situation...

Why? You know, porn is shareable too!

Re:Blame Napster

[CanEHdian]

Mod immediate parent up... that trailer is awesome!

Re:Blame Napster

[Tastecicles]

/me gets ready for the flaming...

I used to carry a portable SCSI CDROM drive (similar to the Panasonic 783 but it had a detachable 12V auxilliary power pack as well as the internal 3V) with me when I bought CDs, not just because Virgin used to let you listen to a song or two before you bought the album. I used the drive because it had a headphone socket and for some reason wouldn't play DRM'd discs. It would only play Redbook CDDA through the DSP.

So the albums that the drive wouldn't play, got put back on the shelf.

How the industry got away with misdescribing non-Redbook CD media as CD audio is... well, it's not beyond me, they paid someone off.

Re:Blame Napster

[Tastecicles]

I don't care what anyone says, Clerks is an amazing movie.

Re:Blame Napster

[Tastecicles]

Speaking of Finnish movies, any idea the what the budget was for Star Treck: In The Pirkinning? Just wondering... I don't speak or read Finnish (thank fsck for subtitles!), but I end up with hurting ribs and carpet burns every time I watch it.

Re:Blame Napster

[crossmr]

Looks like this is their 25th according to imdb.
which movie are you referring to?
http://www.imdb.com/company/co0216680/

Re:Blame Napster

[Hognoxious]

You don't need CGI to have space ships firing energy weapons at each other, a little paint on the negatives works fine.

It's probably cheaper & easier to use CGI these days. You could do a lot with mencoder & image magick held together with perl...

Re:Blame Napster

[Hognoxious]

I think I saw on once. It was about the son of a former minister and his quest to get money out of a frozen bank account.

Re:Blame Napster

[xenobyte]

Actually you have to set a limit somewhere. Moving from the file outwards, the first steps are now clear:

1) Hosting the file: BAD
2) Linking to the file: BAD
3) Running a portal with links to files: BAD
4) Linking to a portal with links to files: BAD
5) Running a portal with links to trackers that links to pieces of the files: BAD (mostly)
6) Linking to a portal with links to trackers that links to pieces of the files: Still okay
7) Running a portal with links to a hash values (magnet links): Still okay
8) Linking to a portal with links to a hash values (magnet links): Still okay

The magnet links are a in a grey zone. You can argue that a link to a hash value is useless without third party resources, and thus that it in itself in no way can be said to be illegal in itself.

Re:Blame Napster

[Ihmhi]

Never forget the potential for trolling one has with file sharing.

Re:Blame Napster

[Ihmhi]

To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio?

Yes. Just take a look at what freddiew manages to do. And yes, that is Spartacus himself in that last video.

Re:Blame Napster

[Captain Hook]

http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/

Re:Blame Napster

[Kjella]

1. In the US
2. Actually it proves the US can't just push world law
3. Not all countries will accept such US claims
4. Piracy has been on the edges since Napster in 2001, doesn't matter one bit. Speeds go up ,cost/GB goes down in all civilized countries. If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot, it'll do it alone.
5./6. Yes. On the other hand music on iTunes etc. is now DRM free and BluRay seems permanently broken. It is hard to put the cat back in the bag. And on NetMarketshare Linux is now finally moving out of the ~1% band it's been in for years, passing 1.5% last month. They're trying harder, I'm not sure they're winning.
7. You mean VPN? It's not the only way, nor is it required except in the US. At worst you will get a small fine if they pick you from the millions of file sharers.

If you can hear a repeating pattern here, it's "US". I'd say you're looking at an increasingly desperate battle because no many victories they claim, they're losing ground in the public opinion. I guess you've heard of the mythical hydra, chop off one head and two new appear? Their victories will be short lived, remember suprnova? Oh yes, the torrent world would now collapse.... nope. Will file hosts go away because MegaUpload did? Nope. And if they did, something better would appear.

Re:Blame Napster

[FoolishOwl]

That's the one.

Re:Blame Napster

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

We are the 1%.

Re:Blame Napster

[rdnetto]

That's not why magnet links are useful. You can be certain that the provision of magnet links will be held to be the facilitation of copyright infringement at some point or another, since from a legal perspective they're no different to torrent files - both effectively contain instructions on how to get the content, it's just that magnet links added a 'follow the directions you find here' step. It doesn't matter how many links there are, only whether the dominant usage is illegal.

Magnet links are useful because they offer increased decentralization. We used to need trackers. Then there was DHT. We used to need to the entire torrent file. Now we just need the hash. We currently need indexers. Once the technology in Tribler takes off, we won't even need that.

A completely decentralized P2P network has no central points of failure (e.g. trackers) that can be sued and taken down. All it has is users, and while the RIAA has demonstrated a willingness to go sue individual users, they have not had much success in countries which didn't appreciate the clear abuses of the judicial system, nor in cases where the individuals took them to court (you're dreaming if you think they'll recover enough via damages to cover legal costs).

Re:Blame Napster

[Coren22]

Already done; at least on Android.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Living_Network_Alliance

I received it on my Moto Droid X in an update like 6 months ago. It allows sharing of music and pictures; and I believe video, but am not sure; over a wireless (generally due to higher speed) network.

Re:Blame Napster

[DarkOx]

No I did not say that at all. I was simply saying a good movies and television can be good without modern special effects. The proof of that is good stuff existed in the past. I am not against progress, and I really enjoy some modern effects in movies.

I responding to the idea the someone how the art would die if the economics of the film industry shift to a model which will not support it. If the market won't support the production of multi-hundred million dollar movies because people are unwilling to pay $12 to see them screened or $25 to buy a copy then Hollywood should stop making them and instead produce something they can sell profitably at a price the market will bear.

Its lies and hyperbole from the industry when they say they can't; the truth is they simply won't.

Sneaker Net

[jdastrup]

I now accept requests for files over the phone or via hand-written letter and I deliver them on a USB stick, multiple foppy disks, or cassette tapes, whatever you prefer.

My file sharing will not be stopped

Re:Sneaker Net

[Shakrai]

I now accept requests for files over the phone or via hand-written letter

You might want to look up the definitions of wire and mail fraud in the United States. ;)

Re:Sneaker Net

[jdastrup]

Hmm, good point. Now that puts a snag in my plan. I must learn semaphore flagging and maybe smoke signals.

Re:Sneaker Net

[Anonymous Coward]

I now accept requests for files over the phone or via hand-written letter and I deliver them on a USB stick, multiple foppy disks, or cassette tapes, whatever you prefer.

My file sharing will not be stopped

I think the year was 1995, I was looking for an out of print movie that one of my friends was in. I found a guy on the internet who said he had a copy, we negotiated by e-mail, I sent him a tape I had made of 14 "Twilight Zone" episodes from PBS, and he sent me a copy of the movie I wanted.

Not as fast or efficient as copy by wire schemes, but it gets the job done.

Re:Sneaker Net

[PRMan]

Homing pigeon.

Re:Sneaker Net

[AvitarX]

Me too.

We have a hard disk that makes the round through a circle of friends accumulating various videos and recordings along the way (legal bootlegs only of course).

Re:Sneaker Net

[Xenx]

Homing pigeon.

Which also has the ability to return with the files, assuming USB drive is used.

But is it file "sharing"?

[zarlino]

Honestly, I never even thought of Megaupload-like sites as "file sharing". If that's file sharing, then every website is sharing with you lots of html, css and image files. I'd rather call that "File publishing". You upload a file to a server which is then published to the world. "File sharing" to me implies some form of P2P technology where users literally share local files and bandwidth with other member of a network.

Re:But is it file "sharing"?

[king neckbeard]

Agreed. I think the term for sites that are MU-like used to be 'one-click filehosts'. This is only speculation, but I think that the use of terminology like 'file-sharing' might be the result of the anti-P2P campaigns by the RIAA and such, so 'sharing' has become a bit of a dirty word.

Re:But is it file "sharing"?

[jdogalt]

How is this 'insightful'? To me, from what you describe, I see "File sharing" and "File publishing" as entirely synonymous. You certainly aren't sharing your local file unless you are using a multi-seat system (even then temporary copies might be made within the system).

The emperor has no clothes. There IS NO DIFFERENCE. The unproductive elements within our power authority heirarchies want the essence of FTP, and even the cp/copy commands to be under their control. They don't want encrypted smtp email going between 2 people, they want a corporation like facebook/gmail to sit in the middle and enable them to control such data transfers.

Or not, maybe thats just paranoid rambling. The main point was that your distinction between synonymous 'sharing' and 'publishing' was even less of an insightful comment than my rant.

Re:But is it file "sharing"?

[westlake]

I'd rather call that "File publishing". You upload a file to a server which is then published to the world.

In plain English:

Unlicensed, unlimited, wholesale re-distributon for profit ---and for the prime uploader to Mega, a juicy cash bounty.

It looks like piracy to me.

It's now less convenient

[IANAAC]

It's less convenient, for sure.

Other filesharing sites (filesonic comes to mind, but there are others) have either disabled file sharing, or changed it in such a way as to make it less convenient, never mind efficient.

Re:It's now less convenient

[jdogalt]

Actually, for me, it didn't take long to discover that putlocker was actually a better host for the 'pirated' mythbusters episodes I was watching than megavideo was (on my given hardware/OS/browser-stack platform). The process of working around megavideo's demise also led me back to bugmenot.com which I had forgotten about, to get premium file downloads from videoweed (whose non-registration video player was worse than megavideo's for my setup, but like I said, putlocker is better than both).

tv-links.eu -> mythbusters -> putlocker

I certainly grant the argument that until places like tv-links.eu get shut down, shutting down megavideo only serves the purpose (entirely useful) of stopping one particular group of assholes from profiting from something we should all be doing with a p2p network and no advertisers or profiteers ___ to empower our FAIR USE RIGHTS TO EDUCATIONAL AND ARTISTIC USES OF THE COPYABLE ARTISTIC AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR.

Re:It's now less convenient

[bughunter]

Aside from MU, Filesonic is the only other host that has disabled downloading altogether, however Uploaded.to has blocked North American access [according to Wikipedia].

Other hosts have either hurriedly obfuscated their links and filenames (not always the same) to foil MAFIAA robo-searches, or are responding to takedown notices so fast that the links on the referring forums and blogs grow stale within a day or two. The former appears to be much more common than the latter, although a few sites (like Hotfile) started responding quickly to takedown notices last winter, long before the MU takedown).

TFA's conclusion seems pretty accurate, though it's slim on supporting details. The MU takedown has created only minor inconveniences for those who want free content.

Re:It's now less convenient

[formfeed]

imdb is still up
Now, that is a site that really is accountable for lost revenues to the movie industry.

(On the other hand, it saves me a lot of money.)

People have been pirating stuff

[Osgeld]

on computers since there were computers, 1 website is not going to stop them, all websites will not stop them, what will stop them is a change in how things are done.
If people are "too cheap" to buy your product maybe your product is too expensive.
If people are getting pirate copies of your software to avoid the iron fisted DRM bullshit, well maybe get rid of your DRM bullshit.
If people are downloading your movie to watch once then never again maybe you should make it easier for people to watch.

just a thought that no one making this shit wants to hear

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

If people are "too cheap" to buy your product maybe your product is too expensive.

This is a bit of a self-defeating position... because a person who claims that the work is too expensive as an excuse to download an infringing copy of it is still proclaiming that they actually *DO* place a high amount of value on the work - the real problem is, quite simply, not that the work does not have the value being asked for (a view which is contradicted by the fact that some people are willing to actually pay for the work), but that the person expressing that sentiment is just being cheap - whether that is because they genuinely cannot afford the work or not. Perhaps it had not occurred to such people that people who consider the work to be too expensive were outside of the demographic for which the work was targetted in the first place? Never mind the notion that the creators might make more money if they widened their demographic, the fact that they might be still choosing to market it only to a particular one that is willing to pay for the work is still their full right to do.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[cheekyjohnson]

They won't know if they like it until after they try it.

as an excuse to download an infringing copy of it is still proclaiming that they actually *DO* place a high amount of value on the work

It could be that it doesn't have enough value to them to buy it (seriously, downloading something isn't that difficult, so just downloading it doesn't mean that they place a "high amount of value on the work") or it could be, as you said, that they're just cheap.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[PRMan]

I don't agree. My friends and I have a rating system for movies: Theater, DVD, Rent/PPV/Netflix, TV (when I can't sleep or there's nothing else on), Never. This assigns a real value to the movie that is willing to be spent. Notice that the last 3 options have VERY LOW values.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[__aaeihw9960]

If people are downloading your movie to watch once then never again maybe you should make better movies for people to watch.

FTFY

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[networkBoy]

Specifically:
I have no problem buying a product if it is worth it (there is opinion here, my value assignment may be higher/lower then yours)
I do not buy DRM stuff for my PCs. I only allow iTunes and similar stuff on one PC in the house (as a pragmatic issue), not on any others.
I would watch downloaded movies from the studios if they made them available, I'd even deal with an embedded ad or two and one trailer (more than that and I'll start looking for something stripped of that).
Look to Netflix as a viable business model.
-nB

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

just downloading it doesn't mean that they place a "high amount of value on the work"

They place just as much value on the work as somebody who was willing to pay for it, because the reason a person is willing to pay for it is because they want to use it, and the reason a person downloads a work is because they want to use it.

The same value, either way. If it wasn't worth the amount of money being asked for, then nobody would be in the former category.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

Perhaps it had not occurred to such people that people who consider the work to be too expensive were outside of the demographic for which the work was targetted in the first place? Never mind the notion that the creators might make more money if they widened their demographic, the fact that they might be still choosing to market it only to a particular one that is willing to pay for the work is still their full right to do.

That's perfectly reasonable, so long as the creators accept that many people outside that demographic—the people who cannot afford it—are going to pirate it because it still has utility, but not enough to justify the cost. This is the way things used to work before the content industry got a huge hair up its ass.

The problem is that the content industry has started making false claims that the lost sales caused by piracy are beyond their control, when in fact, those lost sales are entirely within their control. They are then using that argument to try to stop the piracy so that they can squeeze those same unrealistically high prices not only out of the target demographic—the ones who can afford that price—but also out of the folks who are not in its target demographic and can't afford it.

In short, the content industry is forgetting the first law of commerce—high margins or high volume: choose one. It is within their right to choose high margins; however, that is their choice, and they must live with the consequences. High rates of piracy are a direct consequence of pricing a product outside the range of the average consumer.

Want to stop piracy? Sell first-run movies at the same $5 price point as ten-year-old movies. Piracy will drop like a rock, just as it did with music when folks got the ability to buy single tracks for 99 cents. It's that simple. The fact that they aren't willing to do that is their problem, not the government's problem, and it isn't the government's responsibility to prop them up because they failed first-semester business 101.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[TheCarp]

> the real problem is, quite simply, not that the work does not have the value being asked for (a view which is contradicted by the fact that some people are
> willing to actually pay for the work), but that the person expressing that sentiment is just being cheap - whether that is because they genuinely cannot
> afford the work or not.

Well value is relative, not absolute. Some people will pay market value for a house in a neighbourhood with a homeowners association. To me, that drops the value to a negative...negative because it would mean having to keep up with HA rules, which would be an ongoing expense. Other people make different assessments. You can't really call mine, or any other assesment wrong, because it is a personal value. To me, thats what they are worth.

Could I buy them and flip them and make money? Maybe...sure... there are ways to get value out of such things. However... thats not what I do, thats not the position I am in, they are not worth that to me. Someone else being willing to do that, does not invalidate my value assessment.

As for videos? The last video I downloaded was litterally just to test freenet as a medium for large file distribution. Last game? One I already originally had a purchased copy of, but the company went out of business and their online license server was gone so I couldn't play it without getting a cracked version. Why? Because I have amazon prime and cable, and a good job that allows me to afford the few things I watch.

Frankly....copyright was a great idea back when copies were hard to make and distribute and when they worked like physical objects. Now, technology has outstripped it and any restrictions are just sillyness and treated as such. A stupid law, by silly people, and not one that I recommend paying any mind to. Then again....I never had much respect for the law for its own sake.

I don't pirate...100% because its more easy for me not to.... just like most people who don't.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

many people outside that demographicâ"the people who cannot afford itâ"are going to pirate it because it still has utility, but not enough to justify the cost

That's like suggesting that cable companies should just accept that people outside of the demographic that cable TV is marketed to are going to, if you'll forgive the expression, "steal" cable simply because they want to have it.

Give me one good reason to expect that anyone should ever have some sort inalienable right to have absolutely everything that they might happen to desire, for whatever reason, simply because they have the ability to do so?

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[cheekyjohnson]

The same value, either way.

Not really. One places enough value in it to pay for it, and the other doesn't. They probably don't value the work enough (yet, anyway) to justify going out and buying it. Downloading may be much simpler to them.

If it wasn't worth the amount of money being asked for, then nobody would be in the former category.

The value of the work is subjective. As such, different people value the work differently. You seem to be lumping everyone together in a single category and pretending as if the value of the work is objective.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

I don't think I ever suggested that it was absolute. People really need to stop thinking in terms of dollars and cents when the word "value" is mentioned.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

Ah... but there is a loss. Just not a financial one. The fact that there is a loss, arguably, could entitle the copyright holder to some compensation... although the exact amount of compensation is often a matter of considerable subjectivity, and not one that I wish to get into here.

What does the copyright holder lose when piracy happens? Exclusivity. Copyright is supposed to be be an exclusive right to decide who may copy a work. When somebody else does that without permission, they directly impact the copyright holder's exclusivity on their control of the work. Whether a person believes that the creator should never have had that level of control over the work in the first place is entirely irrelevant - the law still recognizes it.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[luther349]

your funny. how many humble indie bundles have been released proving you wrong and how many millions in donations have they made. how many millions has angry brids made and its a free/3$ game depending on the platform heck now they even sell plush toys of them. point is if your product is good and wanted it will sell. if you try to shove the same crap down peoples throat it gets pirated and ignored all the angry birds clones. and thats what the movie and music guys are doing.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

That's a completely absurd argument. By your argument, the value of a "free, take me" couch covered with bed bugs is equal to the value of a new couch from a furniture store. This is true only if you cannot afford the new couch and absolutely have to have the couch.

In the real world, there are always alternatives, whether it is a low-end version of a program, a similar program at a lower cost, a different movie at a lower cost, watching videos on YouTube, or piracy. The utility of a particular product depends not only on whether someone plans to actually use something, but also on how much better it is than the alternatives.

For the couch example, the person might already have a chair. A free couch would be nice, but might not be worth the cost of fumigating it. A couch for a few hundred dollars from the furniture store also might not be worth the cost. However, a free couch that does not require fumigation would be worth taking because the cost associated with it is less than the utility associated with having a couch.

Thus, value is not defined based on utility alone, but on how much the marginal utility of acquiring a new good exceeds its cost. It is therefore quite possible for a free download to have positive value and for a paid download of the same product to have negative value, assuming you consider the probability of getting caught to be low, and therefore the financial risk of getting caught to be similarly low.

To give a concrete example in software, you might decide to pirate Photoshop because it makes it easier to do what you're trying to do than Gimp. If you plan to use it for a week to design a flyer that you won't make money on, the value to you is fairly small. Someone else who decides to buy Photoshop might plan to regularly use the product for commercial purposes. The value to such a person is clearly much higher. Thus, claims that the value to downloaders and buyers is the same are ludicrous. The value is not defined based on what the product is, but rather is based on what you get out of the product—something that varies widely from person to person.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

Actually, every single piece of software on my households 3 computers is either compeletly free software (gimp, inkscape, open office, etc), or else has been completely paid for. I am not a big company. I am not rich... My household income is somewhat below the national average. I see myself just an ordinary individual who recognizes that I don't have any real right to arbitrarily try to include myself in a demographic that a copyright holder did not intend to target when doing so means breaking the law.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

I fail to see how any of what you're talking about somehow proves me wrong. The amount of value that people place on something is entirely independent of its price.

Case in point... how much do you pay for air? How much do you value breathing?

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

Stealing cable is more like stealing a DVD because you are directly utilizing a physical product that the cable company provides without their consent. Piracy is actually more like asking your neighbor (who has cable) to record a show for you and bring you the tape.

Also, if 70% of a cable company's under-30 customers admit to stealing cable at some point in your lives, that is a pretty clear indication that cable prices are way, way too high, or that there is inadequate competition. As long as we're talking about just a few people stealing cable, it's not really a fair comparison. When only a few people pirate content, chances are good that they can actually afford it, and are just being cheap. When the majority pirate content, the conclusion changes.

Finally, stealing cable is significantly different because it is easily detectable. The risk of getting caught is high. Therefore, the lower cost is an illusion. This is not the case with software piracy, or at least not to the same degree. If software companies want to make it easier to catch people who pirate their software, more power to them. That's a reasonable response. Whining that piracy is destroying their sales isn't.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"...the person expressing that sentiment is just being cheap...

I used to write and sell software and, sorry, I don't agree with you. Basically what you're describing is a bad customer, and piracy didn't invent that. All piracy did was show you that he exists.

Software is still beholden to Supply and Demand and piracy has not actually proven to change that.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

So what you're saying is.... that as long as you can get away with it, then it's all good?

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[luther349]

well you just answered your own question its the vale people place on it. so if old style of delivering media no longer has any value to people and we have switched to the hear now style of media witch we have you have to adapt to that change. some people have done this with success despite the old people at the media company's trying to drag them down with them netflicks and itunes. but rather then get eith the times they have abused and mutated copyrights to try and keep a long dead business alive.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

But if they continue to want to use it, then it *DOES* continue to have that value. So a person who continues to use software they are proclaiming is too expensive to pay for is actually defeating his own position. Nowhere is it written, in stone, or otherwise, that everybody should be entitled to have everything that they want, simply because they can take it.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

It's also worth noting that long before copyright ever existed, people who created works always had some measure of guarantee on their exclusivity of control over the copies on their work. Before the printing press existed, this guarantee came in the form of copying being too difficult and to unreliable to do by hand for any sizable work. After the printing press, copyright was invented to take its place. What do you propose to take its place if you abolish copyright? What will the creators get out of such abolishment? What, unless they were willing to surrender their work into public domain anyways (not merely make freely available, but completely relinquishing all forms of ownership on, surrendering it entirely into PD), would be the incentive for anybody to bother to publish anything?

Again... this has nothing to do with financial benefit... it is still ultimately about control.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[s.petry]

Honestly I stopped buying music for a long long time until there was a 99c a song option. A band comes out, has a CD full of shit and 1 descent song. Paying 13-15 bucks for a CD to get one song is simply idiocy, so I stopped buying all together. The preview option is also beneficial. I may end up downloading, hence buying, something I did not want before because of the sample. The MPAA and RIAA both want samples taken away as well. This is something that works, take the hint and run with it!

When it comes to TV shows, the number 1 reason I know of people pirating is because the industry does not make the shows available. This is not a country restriction, or ratings issue. Something that runs today or ran last year is probably not available through normal means. The only option is to find illegal copies. It's the digital age, put things in digital format and let people purchase!

Movies, I just wait for them to come out on HBO or regular TV. Even those have been shit for the last 10 years or so, I won't pay 15.00 to see a movie at a theater. Add in the 10 bucks for a small popcorn and 5oz of soda, the lie that the movie starts at 7PM and really it starts at 7:30 because they run a half hour of advertisements and previews. Improve the experience and maybe people would want to sit in a theater again!

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

No, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if the vast majority of people are stealing your service rather than paying for it, it is safe to assume that your price is too high. The fact that only a handful of people steal cable is evidence that their price is roughly reasonable.

I'm also saying that your comparison is flawed because it does not take into account differences between the two markets. In cable, very few people steal it because they are so easily caught. The cable companies are thus forced to compete in a purely capitalistic universe in which the number of people who get their product is dependent on how well they price it. By contrast, the number of people who watch a movie is not dependent upon price. At all. Even if you only consider the number of people who buy a movie and loan it out to their friends (which is legal, unlike loaning out your cable service). Only the number of people who pay for the movie is dependent on price, not the number of people who consume it.

This fundamental difference between the inherent nature of selling a service (cable TV) and selling a product (a movie) makes your analogy completely irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

In cable, very few people steal it because they are so easily caught

So if *were* easier to get away with not being caught, then you believe that the cable company should have an obligation to lower their prices, simply because more people would steal it?

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

By a staggering majority, the number one reason that people that I know who pirate give is because they know they can get away with it.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

Obligation, no. But if it became safer to steal cable overnight, and if more people then stole it, I think you'd find that most of the people stealing it were those who currently use an over-the-air antenna. In other words, the market would be almost exactly the same as it is today as far as the cable company is concerned. As such, they would not suddenly earn the right to whine about all those evil cable thieves taking away their business.

More to the point, if they then decided that they wanted to turn those new cable thieves (who previously used an antenna) into paying customers rather than merely turning them back into over-the-air antenna users, their only viable option for doing so would be to lower prices. No amount of cracking down on them will improve their bottom line so long as free or significantly cheaper alternatives exist (even if those alternatives are inferior).

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

Just as you correctly observed that people do not generally steal cable because it is so easy to get caught, it's sadly the case that most people who steal copyrighted works do so predominately because they can get away with it. While it may be true that in many cases they also might not be able to afford the prices being asked for, this fact is largely superficial, and lowering prices does not tend to produce substantially more purchases when the relative convenience and ease with which the work can be obtained for free, even if illegal, has not actually been altered (in fact, as the price is lowered, often the net amount of piracy on the work increases, because although the number of people that that buy it increase with increased affordability, a certain percentage of the new purchasers acquired will also make unauthorized copies of it, and distribute it to others, making it even easier for people who want to get it for free to do so).

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

A person who doesn't pay for a work, but instead downloads an infringing copy of it, is not a customer at all.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Ask Microsoft or Autodesk about that.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[luther349]

yep and vhs is going to kill movies. but that was the same thing a shift into how people wanted there media as well as the right to record what was on tv. and they threw just as big of a fit and made the same clams of copyright abuse and so on. and hear we are 30 years later there fighting to keep it alive compared to digital modes.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[Brannoncyll]

What does the copyright holder lose when piracy happens? Exclusivity. Copyright is supposed to be be an exclusive right to decide who may copy a work. When somebody else does that without permission, they directly impact the copyright holder's exclusivity on their control of the work. Whether a person believes that the creator should never have had that level of control over the work in the first place is entirely irrelevant - the law still recognizes it.

Copyright is supposed to be a *temporary* exclusive right to decide who may copy a work *before it enters the public domain*. The natural state of any recorded work (book/movie/music) is the public domain, copyright is there only as an incentive to produce. In recent years the copyright holders have broken this social contract, with copyrights lasting longer than recorded music has existed. Clearly if the copyright holders no longer respect the contract, why should the public? I say screw 'em.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

I suppose it depends on the product, but....

• Price hikes on eBooks over the past year have triggered significant increases in piracy.
• The two most pirated app are Photoshop and AutoCAD, which are also two of the most expensive apps.

In general, it looks to me like there is a strong correlation between price and piracy rate. Now you might argue that both the high price and the high piracy rate are caused by high utility, but both of those products are relatively niche products used by a small percentage of computer users. How can they have dramatically higher utility than, for example, Microsoft Office? Clearly, this is not the case. Yet Office gets pirated much, much less than Photoshop. Why? Most likely because it costs a lot less.

More to the point, this wasn't always the case. A decade ago, Office was one of the most highly pirated apps out there. Then Microsoft started making it available at a lower cost. For example, in China (where piracy was rampant), they lowered the retail price to $29. Now, they have a much lower rate of piracy. I'd say their experience pretty solidly refutes your assertion that lowering prices doesn't reduce piracy.

Now I'm not saying that lowering prices will always reduce piracy. I'm sure you can find some situations where lowering the price does not decrease piracy rates—the app's utility might be relatively low (and thus worth almost nothing to its users), the app might be a buggy piece of garbage that nobody is willing to pay for, or there might be artificial impediments to its legal purchase (e.g. sold exclusively with expensive hardware, sold only to people in a particular field, sold only as part of a larger collection/album/set, etc.). And there is certainly a point of diminishing returns beyond which lowering the price won't reduce piracy further. Most software, movies, and music are nowhere near that point, though, as far as I can tell.

...in fact, as the price is lowered, often the net amount of piracy on the work increases, because although the number of people that that buy it increase with increased affordability, a certain percentage of the new purchasers acquired will also make unauthorized copies of it, and distribute it to others, making it even easier for people who want to get it for free to do so).

That's completely wrong in the modern era. It might have been true when content was pirated by swapping disks around at a user group meeting. With P2P piracy, content remains available as long as there is at least one complete copy among all of the people who are trying to download it and/or are still seeding it after finishing their download. Thus, the number of original copies is meaningless; it only takes one purchaser to make the content available to everyone. After that, for the most part, none of the people making unauthorized copies are people who purchased a copy.

Therefore, to the extent that lowering the price increases piracy rates, it is not because it is easier to find a pirated copy, but rather it is an externality caused by more purchasers recommending it to more people, a greater number of whom are people who would not have even considered the work otherwise. Thus, when lowering prices increases piracy, it solidly supports my assertion that few of the people who pirate books, movies, or music would have bought the work, making all the industry's whining and kvetching utterly without merit.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

I take it you know a lot of people who would steal a car, a television, or a DVD.... Assuming they could get away with it, I mean....

People like that are going to steal or pirate no matter what the manufacturers/distributors do, and if they can't steal or pirate one thing, they'll steal or pirate something else. They still won't pay for any of it as long as there are free alternatives. There will always be free alternatives. Therefore, that portion of the pirate market is not only unavoidable, but also utterly irrelevant to any discussion of piracy.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[Tastecicles]

I don't use Photoshop. Not because it's too expensive (frankly it is, but that's not to say I can't afford it), but a low cost, perfectly serviceable alternative in the form of The GIMP is available and I use that instead. Why should I buy Photoshop again? Same with Office. I don't want to be paying several hundred Pounds for a typesetter when low cost alternatives such as OpenOffice/LibreOffice are available, which are perfectly adequate for my needs and they don't bring my computer to its knees every time I want to use them.

I still buy console games. No, I don't fork out £30-£70 a time for them, because that pricing structure is just obscene. I don't "pirate" them either. I never have. What I've always done is hit the budget shelves, and the secondhand market. I've never paid more than £10 for a game ever. Not even for the new releases that blow me away on TV previews - I wait until the price comes down.

Music? Give me a break, I don't want to know about that digitally "enhanced" shite that the content industry tries to pass off as music. My personal view is that if an artist cannot carry off a live band and belt out song after song for three hours, maybe it's time for them to go back to flipping burgers, because their talent sure doesn't lie in creating anything I'm likely to listen to, much less "pirate". Yes, I do go to concerts, and for the most part I enjoy the experience; a lot of bands will either happily let you record audio or even video of the event or just give you a nudge and warn you to not let the floor staff see the blinking red light - these guys are for the most part thankful that they have people that want to come see them perform, often on a repeated basis. And it's far more artists than you'll find on sites like eTree that'll let you record their shows and even distribute those recordings. I do donate/buy drinks for/buy merchandise from just about every concert I go to, just to say "thanks for the experience, it's been a blast, have one on me." And sometimes hte experience goes beyond the concert (oh, the stories I could tell about Cradle of Filth aftershow houseparties!)

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[shiftless]

Spot on accurate. And to further expand on this, the value of a particular item changes with time and the person's circumstances. What if the weekend Photoshop user develops improved artistic/photo editing skills over time in part thanks to his access to such high quality software? What if he then turns this developed skill into a successful business, say an advertising firm? Now that he has some stable revenue flowing in it makes no sense to continue running pirated software, so he makes software purchases for the whole office.

So that initial download years ago that didn't cost Adobe a dime, actually turned out to be an investment which made them thousands of dollars in the long run. What does it matter if 10,000 other people also downloaded the software, even if maybe 10 of those people get some extensive commercial use out of the software without paying Adobe a dime? They will become registered users eventually, or stop using Photoshop, it's inevitable due to the risk and liability involved with using pirated software as an organization grows. Adobe wins in the end regardless. Piracy helps them, the same way it helped Microsoft back in the 80s and 90s to become the dominant player in its market.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

I suppose, if they could somehow rationalize in their own minds about why it could be okay, then yeah... probably.

People are generally very good at coming up with justifications for the things that they do to convince themselves that what they are doing is not actually wrong or acceptable behavior... so good at it, in fact, that they themselves genuinely believe them.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[TheCarp]

Um no, what I am saying is control is an illusion. Someone always could have laboriously reproduced some work, the printing press gave the ability to do it easily to very few. Very few can be regulated effectively. Now that power is in the hands of everyone. Its as sensible as asking people politely not to breath.

I think any sort of attempt to retain such control is doomed to utter failure, and thus, a pointless activity. I offer only recommendation that it be abandoned.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[TheCarp]

I can only reply to the statements made. How else is one supposed to take the suggestion that one persons assesment of a lack of value is invalidated by someone else being willing to pay for it? Or, do you read that quote differently?

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

Is it your position that absolutely everything that anyone ever releases to anyone else should be public domain? I can pretty much guarantee that would be a disincentive for a lot of people to bother to publish anything at all.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[mark-t]

Some (relatively small) percentage of people who pay for a legitimate copy of a work will create unauthorized copies of it and distribute to other people. This is completely unavoidable as long as copying is easy to do (and is why companies have been trying to invent schemes that make copying hard to do... or at least harder and less convenient. The chief problem with the approach that these companies are taking is that only a single unauthorized copy is all that it actually takes to completely defeat all of that extra work they did).

My earlier remark about more people making unauthorized copies from legitimate purchases as more people purchase it is a generalization of the above fact about a percentage of legitimate purchases making infringing copies, and should not be construed as a universal truth. In fact, the point that you have mentioned, which is that because more legitimate customers have it, the product is more widely known about, perceived of as more ubiquitous, and this increased visibility increases the number of people who will want it and try to seek it via illegal means, is probably a much greater contributing factor to piracy than the point that I made.

Nonetheless, the point that I was making can still stand... which is that lowering the price of the work can, in fact, sometimes cause the net amount of piracy on the work to actually increase. It is not my contention that this situation would ever be universally true, but it most certainly can happen.

Utimately, the "it's too expensive" justification for piracy is just a lazy excuse used by somebody who figures that, for whatever reason, they have a right to take something simply because they can.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[dgatwood]

Utimately, the "it's too expensive" justification for piracy is just a lazy excuse used by somebody who figures that, for whatever reason, they have a right to take something simply because they can.

Tell that to the college students who can barely afford their tuition. Even the student editions of Photoshop, at $199, is solidly a factor of ten more than is realistic for most students. That approaches the cost of the textbooks for an entire quarter or semester, and that's before you factor in the fact that they get some of that money back when they sell the books back.

The bigger problem is that the piracy that was actually excusable when they were in school becomes the normal way that they obtain software going forward. There is exactly one solution that will fix that, which is to charge only low double-digit dollars for your app, at least to students, so that most of them will buy legitimate copies instead of pirating them. When those students graduate, if they still need the app, they will be used to paying for it, and will be more likely to buy it (at upgrade pricing). This approach requires practically giving away the software, though, which is why most businesses are too scared to attempt it.

Re:People have been pirating stuff

[TheCarp]

Should is not relevant. Should it rain on your wedding day? Should the the continents drift and slide against eachother causing massive devestation?

Tested? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how the picture in the article most likely contains a link to either a virus, malware instead of the actual movie. We all have seen these in the links before -- 100% complete , full download, real version , etc. I wonder what the percentage of these files they claim are movies are the actual movie, and not some scam to download supposed codecs.

color me surprised

[whathappenedtomonday]

Isn't the real question whether litigation remains the dominant way of a dying industry to fight the status quo (i.e. files being shared)? File sharing is here to stay. About the syndicates I'm not that sure... .

Re:color me surprised

[TheCarp]

Exactly.

File sharing is here, its not going away. Any attempt to make it go away is just stupid when set against the backdrop of the internet and technology. Their BEST HOPE is to keep delaying things long enough to update their business model... which doesn't seem to be what they are trying too hard to do.

We are only going to get more bandwidth, more connected, and more able to share, and more secure in that ability, I expect this to be about as effective as sueing the clouds for bad weather. Or attempting to legislate away a glacier that's floating in an inconvenient place.

Re:color me surprised

[whathappenedtomonday]

> to update their business model

As long as there's no real incentive for "them" to do just that because they just buy the laws prolonging their outdated business model (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, SKMYBLS et al.) and as long as it remains profitable to just sue file sharers, there is no "best hope". I wish it were that easy... .

> sueing the clouds for bad weather.

Hmmmm... I see a business model there...

Whats this Mega thing?...

[thaiceman]

In the end it will come down to what has always been the backbone of sharing on the internet newsgroups/private ftp's and the servers that host them. That said I haven't had any problems for the better part of the the last decade and a half getting anything I wanted & somethings I didn't from one of the oldest parts of the internet.

RIAA/MPAA - idea.

[dowens81625]

If the RIAA/MPAA really wanted to increase revenue, they would start bootlegging a low res version their own movies, and sell slices of time of the movies to advertisers, anyone remember when Movies where on Film in the theater and the 1/30 second image of a bucket of popcorm flashed by ? Let me insert subliminal adverts into the low res version and the distribute it freely and widely.

Re:RIAA/MPAA - idea.

[Mashiki]

See this is an idea that accepts and embraces technology. These are guys who think that home computers are colecovision's, or worse fill up an entire room. Ever work for someone like that? It's hell.

Re:Wait! I have a plan!

[MickyTheIdiot]

The real loss on "piracy" comes from the copies made to CD-R and DVD-R that are regularly sold on the Asian street markets. The loss is multi-million each year and it is a *real* loss as compared to the bogus loss numbers we are subjected to in the media over file sharing.

However no one ever goes after THAT problem. Why? It would take actual diplomatic work.

Sorry, what?

[Saint Aardvark]

1. What's their methodology? How exactly did they get this info? I see nothing here like a link to a full paper.
2. Who are they and why should I trust them? Disclaimer: I could turn out to be woefully ignorant, and maybe I should just get my head out of my ass. But their main web page appears to be amazingly content-free, and there are two posts on the blog -- this is one of them. (To be fair, the
3. They only present two data points here -- Jan 18 and Jan 19. What's happened since? Why the breathless summary (Slashdot's and the blog post) saying file sharing is all going to Europe now?
4. The post-Jan 19 diagram says the hosting provider breakdown changed, which is presumably why they're breathless about Europe. But there's no data presented on where those new providers are located -- no corporate info, no datacentre locations, nothing.

If there's something to see here, I'm missing it.

Archaic models of war

[Wolfling1]

Traditional military strategy has been to go for the command and control infrastructure. The morons in DoJ just don't realise that its a useless strategy when dealing with the internet. Your enemy is far more mobile than you are, and they will simply relocate, or re-distribute to overcome the assault.

/politicians and police don't understand the internet

Re:Archaic models of war

[M0j0_j0j0]

They don't understand anything for what it looks.

Re:Archaic models of war

[el borak]

Traditional military strategy has been to go for the command and control infrastructure. The morons in DoJ just don't realise that its a useless strategy when dealing with the internet. Your enemy is far more mobile than you are, and they will simply relocate, or re-distribute to overcome the assault.

It took The Federation some time to figure out how to defeat The Borg. In fact, they were only able to do it when the writers got stupid and decided The Borg needed a centralized Queen, for a wonderfully convenient single point of failure.

Re:Archaic models of war

[HeckRuler]

I thought it was a schism inserted into the Borg hivemind via Data and his experience as an individual. It caused a portion of the Borg to try and self-actualize, or at least start talking in the first person and experiment with shapes other than a cube.

Re:Archaic models of war

[DM9290]

It took The Federation some time to figure out how to defeat The Borg. In fact, they were only able to do it when the writers got stupid and decided The Borg needed a centralized Queen, for a wonderfully convenient single point of failure.

thank you for ruining the Borg for me.

Re:Archaic models of war

[el borak]

Nope. As seen in [i]First Contact[/i] the Queen was supposedly present at Picard's assimilation.

But regardless of how the Queen's existence was explained by the writers, introducing a central intelligence to the Borg completely undermined the one thing that made them formidable. It was idiotic. In one stroke they castrated the signature opponent for that generation of Trek.

Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking back at the stuff I "pirate" it's really kinda funny. It's mostly TV shows that are no longer on the air. Shit I would watch on Hulu if they had it. It baffles me that the TV networks are so bad at this concept. Put a show that's been off the air for 5, 10, 20, 50 years or more and slap some modern advertisements on it and you can do what you've ALWAYS done and make money off of advertising. Off shows that you've already paid the production price... it's practically free for fuck sake.

You get targeted ads, a clear picture of what people are interested in watching, and you're continuing to make money off of your legacy. But no they only want to put the last 3 to 5 episodes off the current season. So stupid. I pirate less because of sites like Hulu. Their business model, making money off adds, doesn't even have to change. How can they fucking not see it? So. god. damned. stupid.

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[Sarten-X]

They're also seeking to increase revenue in other ways. If they make all their old good shows available, there's a smaller audience for their latest "reality" show. That means the ads for the new show bring in less revenue. As a show's viewership get higher, ad prices rise exponentially. To the distributors, it may very well be worth it to have a slightly smaller audience, but more concentrated on a few new shows.

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[__aaeihw9960]

This is exactly what I don't understand. These corporations will spend years, and millions of dollars trying to maintain their comfortable status quo; laboring under the delusion that it's easier and cheaper than adapting, simply because they've never tried to adapt.

You give me all the seasons of (insert show here) available on your website for free, and I will be more than willing to watch 20 seconds of commercials.

A man who fails to adapt is a man who fails to understand his world on the most fundamental level.

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[NotBorg]

Heck maybe they can stop canceling shows because they get low viewership at 2 in the morning (Firefly).

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[firefrei]

How can they fucking not see it? So. god. damned. stupid.

The only justification I can see is that the media executives are simply just power hungry for control. Even though giving people what they want is likely to result in higher levels of profitability and (dare I say it) loyalty for treating your customers right (I don't like using the word "consumer", it feels too corporate and impersonal for some reason), they'd much rather make less potential money in exchange for a greater level of control, or at least as far as their concerned.

The lust for control and power itself is greater sometimes than profits it would see to these suits.

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[HeckRuler]

And that's control. They want to decide what you consume rather than fulfill the desires you already have.
Their goal is not to try and serve their customers better, but how to squeeze more money out of them.

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[Mitreya]

But no they only want to put the last 3 to 5 episodes off the current season.

It's a mystery where a content provider is simply not interested in supplying what the customer wants. Hulu introduced a paid package where you have access to full seasons of shows. However, they explicitly refused to make the experience ad-free. I would be quite interested to try out a fee-based subscription, but I will not pay money to be bombarded with ads. There are three ad breaks (beginning and 2 in the middle) per 22 minute episode!
And, need I point out, that downloaded shows that cost nothing have no ads. With Hulu I can't even seem to get rid of the ads if I offer to pay!

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[Dhalka226]

I am happy to pay reasonable costs as well (I am a Netflix streaming subscriber and have Amazon Prime as well).

However I don't consider the Amazon PPV prices for TV shows to be reasonable for anything more than an "oops, I missed one, let me grab it." It's not suitable for watching the entire series. $1.99 x ~22 episodes in a season puts the cost at almost $44. That's essentially the price of the DVD boxed set, and another $1/episode for HD. No thanks. If I'm going to pay that price I'll get the physical product and rip myself digital copies.

Further, there are a lot of shows that I simply have not found on any legitimate service regardless of price. Home Improvement (the Tim Allen sitcom) is one example; not on Netflix, not on Amazon (the Prime selection or otherwise), not on Hulu. Doesn't matter if I'm willing to pay. Baywatch is another. (I watch it for the uh, cinematic quality.) Simply not available digitally anywhere legitimate that I have found. So fuck 'em, illegitimate it is!

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[phorm]

Yeah, but there's a finite time resource too.
I picked up a bunch of movie series for a decent price when Blockbuster went down. In my limited free time, I'm still watching through episodes of BSG. For everyone which picks up "older series X" at a lower price (because people likely won't pay the same as the newest shiny), that may delay or inhibit somebody from buying "shiny new series Y"...

It's all about pushing the "new shiny" at the highest price-point possible.

Re:Don't fight it, put ads on it.

[mikael_j]

Ah, but when it comes to Hulu, eyeballs are eyeballs. Remember, they don't have to lower the price per impression on their advertising for old episodes of That 70's Show or MASH because it "airs" at odd hours, there are no such restrictions, there is no logical reason to withhold it from the viewer. They're trying to push TV advertising reasoning onto a medium which is very much not like TV in this sense.

Re:Why not? Less Windows = More Linux?

[cheekyjohnson]

After all, people keep telling me on Slashdot that the pirates are not to be counted as lost sales since they would not buy it anyway.

The most I've seen is people saying that someone downloading copyrighted material doesn't necessarily result in a lost sale. Not always.

There is no stopping it

[na1led]

No mater how much Governments try to stop this, others find better ways around it. When they put a stop to Napster and Limewire, Bit Torrent was invented. Someone will find a new way to share files that make it impossible to control, or until our Government becomes a complete Totalitarian and controls everything!

Economics

[betterunixthanunix]

Economics defeats moral arguments every single time. People pay money to see their favorite bands play a live concert, because live concerts are an experience that cannot be burned to a disc or downloaded from a website. People pay money to see movies in a movie theater because you cannot download the experience of being in a movie theater. Concerts and movie theaters make money because the experience you are buying is scarce.

Copies of music and movies are not scarce resources anymore. We no longer require specialized industrial equipment to make those copies, and it costs almost nothing to make a copy. With an effectively unlimited supply, we should expect copies of music and movies to cost nothing; the industry needs to find some new scare-but-demanded way to enjoy entertainment, or focus more on the ways they have left.

Re:Economics

[Samantha Wright]

People will also donate to artists, even those who aren't in theatres or in concert, simply because they're super-impressed with them: behold, the humble donation. Since concerts are so expensive to organize, I believe that artists should focus on cultivating and engaging their fan base, much like web comic artists do, in order to make their living. It's an act of extreme arrogance to believe you can just dump a record at a consumer and expect to have money thrown at you for doing so, without ever going out and asking the consumer what he or she wants. This, essentially, is why the content industry is falling apart; much like when shows on Fox started failing simply because everyone expected them to get cancelled, and stopped putting their hearts on the line.

Re:Economics

[chrismcb]

... Concerts and movie theaters make money because the experience you are buying is scarce. Copies of music and movies are not scarce resources anymore.

So what you are suggesting is that movie companies should not release their movies to DVD (or digital). Instead they should hoard the digital bits, and only allow them to be show in movie theaters? Because that is what is going to happen if you force the movie companies to give their movies away for free.

Re:Economics

[master_p]

Money is also artificially limited. With modern technology, it is easy for each one of us to print money. However, there is this thing called devaluation, where money loses its value if its printed without limitations.

Have you ever thought that the same might be valid for movies, songs and games? artificial scarcity is what enables their creation, keeping their value high enough to be able to spend lots of man years developing those products.

Re:Economics

[betterunixthanunix]

Money is also artificially limited. With modern technology, it is easy for each one of us to print money.

Except that money without the backing of a bank or a government is worthless. Counterfeiting money means more than just making copies, it means convincing people that those copies are actually backed and have value. This is a very different situation from music and movies -- whether or not a particular copy of a movie is authorized has no bearing on your ability to enjoy the movie.

To put it another way: Money comes with all sorts of hard-to-copy features that can be used to verify its authenticity. There is no technical reason that music and movies could not come with such markings...but hardly anyone would bother to check (compare with the way people check $100 bills).

Have you ever thought that the same might be valid for movies, songs and games? artificial scarcity is what enables their creation, keeping their value high enough to be able to spend lots of man years developing those products.

That is one way to do things, but creating artificial scarcity means rolling back the clock and preventing people from having general purpose computers. As long as there are PCs, there will be copyright infringement, and it will happen on a grand scale.

Tragedy of the Commons

[Kupfernigk]

Look it up. The sad fact is that if a resource isn't protected, people will abuse it. Example

In our village we have a surviving section of a Roman road, and a small, protected wood of ancient hardwood. They are open to the public all the year round. The preservation committee has enough cash to go to the High Court for an injunction against people who might try to damage them, but almost every year we get some moron trying to destroy the road by ploughing it up with a Range Rover, or trying to vandalise the wood. We are prepared to defend both, but we have to be.

The problem is that a nasty minority spoils things for the majority. Security at the Glastonbury costs a fortune because of the people who try to destroy the security fence - which is needed because those same people used to break in and try to wreck the festival.

This isn't a rant against file sharing. I think the recording industry is its own worst enemy - it is purely entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs should never have special rights over real property. But, at the end of the day, the real answer is drastic: if you don't want performance to be free, do not encode it digitally and accept that restraint.

But perhaps that's what you meant?

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Samantha Wright]

Sort of. My point was more like "if you want people to pay you just for producing something that is essentially free"—ignoring concerts and stuff—"then make them want to donate to you. Nothing else will work. And no, you will not rake in millions of dollars of profit. You only got those dollars because you created artificial scarcity. The consumers who have been giving you that money don't care about the value of the product; they just want side benefits, and so have no incentive not to exploit you. They have no reason not to abuse the public property."

That last part is the key; remember that the MPAA's argument is that downloading is 'stealing from artists.' Your artists haven't made material that people really want to give you money for having made, and by the way: it's impossible to appeal to everyone at the same time.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[betterunixthanunix]

if you don't want performance to be free, do not encode it digitally and accept that restraint.

Sure, except that the bands that do make their songs available online will become more popular and see more revenue from their live shows. The way for musicians to monetize filesharing is to use filesharing as a form of from advertising, and if we stopped spinning our wheels trying to keep copyright alive we could spend our time developing systems that enhance the advertising capability of filesharing. Imagine if when you downloaded a song, you also could receive information on when and where the band that played it will be holding their next concert, with a convenient link to buy tickets.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Nadaka]

A now dead company I used to work for was actually trying to market a similar service by pushing advertising over P2P. RIAA didn't want to do it. RIAA also didn't want to pay analytical details of P2P traffic. They DID want the IP's of people torrenting their music, but again they didn't want to pay for it.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[manicb]

This is quite significant if true, I know a few people who'd be interested. Citation?

Re:I miss megaupload but Ill still use other servi

[tommy8]

Posting TV shows is still piracy from what I understand.

Movie budgets

[betterunixthanunix]

1. There is no real way for an outsider to estimate the cost of producing a movie. Movie studios vastly overstate the costs of movie production to avoid paying people whose contracts stipulate a percentage of profits; this is a practice that is called Hollywood Accounting and it once received the attention of a congressional investigation.
2. Large amounts of money is spent on special effects that add little to the development of the plot or characters in a movie. While this makes movies look cool, it is not clear that it is necessary for the movies to be a box office success, and it often detracts from the plot (many movies hardly have a plot to speak of, and rely solely on special effects for entertainment value). Further, these special effects should come down in price as computer time becomes cheaper and software is improved.

Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.

Re:Movie budgets

[KhabaLox]

Movies could be produced for far less than what is typically spent on them, and at a reasonable quality level. What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects or the bogus accounting, but the story that it tells, and that story could be told on a lower budget, with good acting, good directing, and good camerawork replacing much of the technology that is thrown at movies today. Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.

I don't necessarily disagree, but compare Memento and Inception. Both tell a very interesting "what is real/my mind" story. The level of directing is comparable, as is the acting (to me anyway). One made great use of special effects, and had the "sheen" of a well financed production. The other was made for about $5 million. Memento grossed about $40 million ($35m). The numbers for Inception were $825m gross and and $160m budget ($665m profit).

Both were critically acclaimed and appear on numerous lists of best X films. Yet it's clear that having a major studio backing you and throwing money on the project (in part so you can make it look slick) helps immensely.

Re:Movie budgets

[Xeno man]

You assume the money was spent on special effects. In reality more money was spend on advertising. TV ads are not free. Posters are not free. Billboard space is not free. Take out the advertising budget to get a better look at production costs.

Re:Movie budgets

[Nadaka]

That isn't a good comparison if you are trying to make your point.
Using your numbers Memento had an 8 times return on investment and Inception only had a 5.16 times return on investment. Memento was the more profitable movie from an investment standpoint.

Re:Movie budgets

[DreadPiratePizz]

I'm on the inside. Working on an indie feature this summer with a budget of 5 million. No stars, no special effects, all location shooting. Making movies with the craftsmanship generally expected when you see it in a theatre is not cheap. You need to pay crew, location fees, and for equipment. There are upwards of 40 people working on seat each day. They need to be paid. If you want a wide release, you can't just take your DSLR and your light kit and shoot on the run with just you and a buddy.

Re:Movie budgets

[KhabaLox]

I thought about this.

The problem with that analysis is that the variance in return on a Memento type film is probably a lot higher than the variance for an Inception. If you had $160m to invest, would you rather do one (or two) big budget film(s), or 32 Mementos? With an auteur director like Nolan (or Scorsese, Tarantino, etc.) I'd probably do the former.

Re:Movie budgets

[KhabaLox]

Marketing budget is proportional to the films gross, at least for the first couple weeks (then word of mouth takes over). Take away Inception's marketing budget and it wouldn't have gross nearly as much I'd wager.

But anyway, I'd like to know your source for the claim that more money was spent marketing the film than on special effects, post production, set design, and all the other things that make Inception feel so different (from a production standpoint) from Memento.

Re:Movie budgets

[im_thatoneguy]

. Memento was the more profitable movie from an investment standpoint.

Not true in the slightest. Films are based on their talent and talent is difficult to come by. Memento had an 8x return on a small budget and Inception had a 5x return on investment but if the director is busy making memento he can't be shooting Inception.

It's also easier to market (1) Inception than it is to market (20) mementos. You also have to read 20x as many scripts, approve 20x as many lead actors, find 20x as many directors of photography etc.

And most "mementos" end up sucking and making $0. VFX films tend to be more successful financially.

Re:Movie budgets

[kyrio]

So what you're saying, with the numbers you just gave, is that instead of making $1280000000 from 32 great movies, a studio should spend the same amount of money it would have cost to make those 32 movies on the budget for a single movie, and only make $825000000?

Re:Movie budgets

[KhabaLox]

Yes, because they won't make $35m on every low budget film. They are more likely to make a smaller percentage, but larger dollar value, on a big budget film that has similar quality directors, actors, and writers, but much better production values (including marketing).

Re:Movie budgets

[chrismcb]

Movies are indeed part of our culture; special effects need not be.

There are a lot of things that don't need to be a part of our culture, but that doesn't mean they won't be. People like special effects. Therefore the movie makers will put special effects into the film, and people will pay to go see them.
YES you can make a good movie on a budget. But normally you can make a better an enormous pile of cash. A better movie tends to make more in the box office. Which one do you think the movie makers will want to make?

Re:Movie budgets

[phantomfive]

What makes a movie like The Matrix great is not the special effects

No, presentation was 90% of that movie. The story itself was boring and far-fetched, what philosophy student hasn't heard the 'brain-in-a-vat' problem? And using humans as a source of energy? Really? They hadn't heard of fission, or coal? What were the people in Zion using then?

It was the acting, the cinematography, and special effects that made the Matrix. Think of any memorable scene, and I'll bet it's related to one of those.

In fact, look at it the other way. Imagine how great HHGTG could have been, with better presentation. It could have been up there with LOTR. Instead it looked like a trashy british sitcom (no offense to the brits).

Re:Movie budgets

[Saintwolf]

They hadn't heard of fission, or coal? What were the people in Zion using then?

Geothermal energy perhaps?

Re:Movie budgets

[funkylovemonkey]

Unfortunately I don't think a Memento/Inception comparison is really valid since there's an important variable that you're not controlling for; name recognition. Hollywood knows far too well that people like to go see things that they are familiar with, whether it be a franchise they like or a director they trust. Which is why the Matrix Reloaded made more then the Matrix despite being generally considered a far inferior film. People like things they are familiar with. This is also why Steven Spielberg's name is used in any project he's remotely connected to despite not having done anything of much significance in the last decade; Spielberg's name brings warm memories and increased sales. Memento had the misfortune of being directed and written by a little known guy named Christopher Nolan who's only previous film, Following, was known mostly to movie geeks. Inception on the other hand was directed and written by a big name director Christopher Nolan, who was responsible for Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. People like what is familiar, which is why we'll never be rid of sequels and remakes.

What it did do...

[roc97007]

...is cause a lot of people to rethink storing legitimate data in the cloud.

hyper-bowl much, JACK?!

[Thud457]

Watch out Hollywood, the VCR is going to cripple your business model!

I used to have a viable business model, then I took a VCR in the knee.

You know, that's not funny, my business model was raped by a VCR once.

Re:hyper-bowl much, JACK?!

[Coren22]

You missed the "you insensitive clod" in your comment.

Pirate buys boat?

[jopsen]

And as long as there are pirates sailing the high seas, *someone* will be there to sell them boats.

And here I thought pirates just took the boats :)

Wrong way around

[Roger W Moore]

The MPAA currently can only compete on one of these points -- cost.

Actually the MPAA can effectively compete on all the other points EXCEPT cost...they can do everything you list, better than any pirate, except give it away for free. The fact that they are ignoring all the other points and trying to compete on cost is why they are having such a hard time. If they released content commercial free, at the same time as (or even in advance) of broadcast in multiple DRM-free formats for a low cost the chances are that they would attract customers willing to pay for the simple convenience vs. searching dodgy websites for content of unknown quality which is only available after broadcast.

Re:Wrong way around

[crossmr]

searching dodgy websites for content of unknown quality

This really only happens if you go to google and type "Free downloads" or something like that.
I would suggest that anyone with half a clue should be able to avoid any "dodgy" sites, but this is pretty common propaganda from the various groups involved. According to them every single download is infected with thousands of virus and spyware, when the reality is with very little effort, I haven't picked up anything bad in 20 years.

Re:please note

[HeckRuler]

Let's kick it up a notch.
The post-lunch era saw a dramatic rise in belching and the prosperity of the land was apparent. Belts were slackened and the terrible threat of hunger was abolished. But what were the long term consequences in this brave new world?
Turns out, not much. A significant portion of the populous continued to snack, and the powers that be simply shifted their debate from "where do we lunch?" to "What's for dinner?". This reflects on the fundamental nature of man to... uh... eat.

The word your looking for is "pretentious".

Can't Stop the Signal

[_0x783czar]

Right or wrong, Piracy will not stop because of this sort of regulation. The very nature of our media technology is too versatile for them to be able to stop it. They can throw up road blocks but in the end they will only hurt honest file-sharers (although it seems often that they are even after them). But if they want to stop Piracy they will have to change the culture. You can legislate till doomsday but that will not change people.

But Amazon does NOT offer reasonable prices

[sgtrock]

I'm not willing to pay $3 to watch a 27 year old movie. I'm ESPECIALLY not going to do so on top of an $80/year subscription to have the 'privilege' of paying those kinds of ridiculous fees.

Nope, Netflix at $8 or $9 a month is about right for just about everything I want to watch. When I can't find what I want to watch there, Hulu Plus for another $8 a month fills in the holes. (Although I'm finding that my faimly just doesn't care as much about Hulu Plus as I thought they might be.)

Then there's all the free or cheap movie resources of all kinds to fill up your evenings, specialty channels, streaming music, news, private channels created by the community, and more galore!

Forget using your MythTV box for anything other than a basic media center for serving up your ripped DVDs and CDs. Drop your cable TV subscription and get yourself a Roku instead. :-)

Re:But Amazon does NOT offer reasonable prices

[ajlisows]

Obviously I'd like the price to be lower/free, but $3 to rent a 2 hour movie is a pretty good ROI for your entertainment dollar. I myself have Netflix and Hulu Plus (no cable/satellite/uverse) as my means of television entertainment but sometimes there is a movie or television show that my wife and I really want to watch. Using Amazon prime, Zune on Xbox, or whatever other On Demand Pay Per View type things are out there on those occasions isn't bad. I can probably rent 25 movies a month that way and still come out ahead of where I'd be paying for Cable Television.

Re:But Amazon does NOT offer reasonable prices

[sgtrock]

I still say, "Get yourself a Roku." In addition to everything else, it includes Amazon on Demand if you really insist on paying for it.

Well, Im just gonna buy my own Congressman

[gearloos]

Well, Im just gonna buy my own Congressman and make my own site. They can keep their Congressman and their dum RIAA DRM. My Congressman can beat up their Congressman anyway. He costs more!

Tribler?

[ridgecritter]

Would this (http://dl.tribler.org/download.html) be something like what you're thinking of?

RSS over IRC with magnet links for the DHT

[bd580slashdot]

RSS over IRC with magnet links for the DHT. EZTV and some others to the RSS over IRC thing.

Motion towards = accusative

[Hognoxious]

Say I'm tired of the top 20 that's played constantly on the radio ad nauseum.

So do something else. Study Latin, perhaps.

Re:Wait! I have a plan!

[Lando]

OMG, those dirty Chinese. There should be a law!!!! They don't have one? They better get one now!!!! After all if they do stuff like that, next thing you know they will be producing drek^H^H^H^H imitations of the highest form of crap^H^H^H^H artistic expression, just like those Americans using British patented stuff without licensing it and look at what became of them they eclipsed the British, let's not let the same thing happen in China! Keep America strong.

All kidding aside, China doesn't have the copyright laws that we have in the US and you think that is wrong. But why do you think it's wrong? Look at how microsoft dealt with the problem of copies of windows being distributed, they lowered their prices and got the chinese government to buy a bunch of copies through kickbacks, ie bribes, but that is the way things are done there. Are you saying that your personal preferences are more important than the chinese to govern and grow themselves?

I'm not personally against copyright, but it is an artificial scarcity imposed by the government supposedly to improve society as a whole. Currently according to the RIAA themselves, 85% of people in the US pirate. Now if 85% of the population represents a majority of the people, which by my math it does and the RIAA wants to bankrupt financially anyone that pirates, it seems to me that that isn't good for the population as a whole. Copyright is out of balance in my opinion and the solution is not to make everyone else conform to our laws.

Besides, how many Chinese are going to be buying American CD's and DVD's at the current prices that exceed a weeks wages? Just because the company producing the product values the product at a certain price, doesn't mean the value of that product is the price that the creator set. If I value a cup of coffee at one million dollars and someone bumps the table so that the coffee spills, does that mean I am entitled to a million dollars?

Equating their loss to millions of dollars is giving value where no value necessarily exists. If I can't afford 50 bucks to go to a movie, I'm not going to a movie, but if the same movie is playing at the dollar theater and I see it there, that's not a loss of 49 dollars to the movie industry. If the industry cannot provide a product at a price the public is willing to pay, that generally means the product isn't worth what the industry deems it's value is. Trying to legislate so that the industry is owed that money no matter what is highly unfair. Currently, copyright is being used to steal from the public. All these works that were produced when the copyright term was lower and then grandfathered into the new system is changing the contract to which the public did not agree. Congress and the executive branch stole from the public and the courts ruled that that was completely legal.

Now out of the products that are sold today and the product that could be sold today, who has lost more the industry or the public?