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Microsoft-Funded Startup Aims To Kill BitTorrent Traffic
TheGift73 writes "The Russian based 'Pirate Pay' startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads. Hollywood, software giants and the major music labels see BitTorrent as one of the largest threats to their business. Billions in revenue are lost each year, they claim. But not for long if the Russian based startup 'Pirate Pay' has its way. The company has developed a technology which allows them to attack existing BitTorrent swarms, making it impossible for people to share files."
casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
Lots of "people" say this, but the evidence is lacking.
Actually, this is good. Bittorrent is a great protocol, but it can be improved in many ways. Something like this is likely to fix that (legal attacks won't).
And what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption ? It is turnrd on by default in most bt clients and I seriously doubt they can detect what content is distributed over encrypted bt connection ...
In the end it won't matter. Someone will figure out how they are doing there and modify the swarms so it becomes ineffective. The true way to combat piracy is to look at why people are pirating and modify your business strategy so that pirates become paying customers by their own choice. Yes, there are "die hard" pirates who will pirate regardless, but there a lot that wouldn't if they could get it legitimately.
Net neutrality only concerns ISP's, not service or third parties.
"The company doesnâ(TM)t reveal how it works, but they appear to be flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers."
All it would take is for a client to verify to data in the chunk (probably by it's MD5 or SHA), and if it's busted then try and download it again from the same peer. If it fails the second time then just ban the peer.
But I imagine they already do this, don't they?
Summation 2
By at least a few governments' definitions.
This is certainly interesting technology and Microsoft must see lots of potential in it. Good for them, as casual piracy really is hurting the industry. It wouldn't be so bad if it went back to the BBS secret ages, but now everyone is pirating.
Take that MAFIAA dick out of your mouth - I think it's compressing the part of your brain responsible for rational thought. If this is "hurting": http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-disney-earnings-20120509,0,984276.story I wish MY paycheck was "hurting" right now...
I assume this software is meant for use on ISP equipment, because otherwise what they're claiming seems totally impossible.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
no they aren't. i've been in touch with plenty of tech and online people since the 1980s, and if anything, people pirate less now. more total bytes downloaded, maybe, but a lower percentage of [online/connected] people are pirating than ever in my 30-year view.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Which will result in increased private trackers, whichever flavor of megaupload is coming down the pipe, expanded usenet, encrypted file contents, etc etc. I have yet to see any attempt by content holders cause any more than a minor hiccup in the download stream. Oh, wait, I have seen one - I haven't downloaded a song since iTunes began allowing me to get DRM free songs through their service.
This isn't the first time they've tried to disrupt file sharing. First, they added whitespace to music files. And that mostly killed Kaza. There has been file sharing since Kaza. Every time there's an iteration like this, the technology evolves, and the previous methods to stop illegal sharing are rendered useless. Honestly, I think this whole business is more of a fetish, or compulsive fascination with file sharing on the part of the old guard, than a solution to any actual problem.
This signature intentionally left blank.
Downloaded the blocklists for Pirate Pay as well as the antip2p blocklists.
I tested on a poisoned swarm that had listed 5000 seeders (which were mostly mediadefender and pirate pay poisoners)
Peerblock dumped over 4500 of the poisoned seeds from the torrent by blocking them and my torrent speed went from 20K/s download to 2500-3000K/s download
So for companies like this I highly recommend picking up Peerblock and getting some blocklists, especially the antip2p blocklists.
http://www.peerblock.com/
Never ever again have problem with companies like Mediadefender or PiratePay and their ilk.
They will bring down piracy by abusing the take a penny, leave a penny dish. Really impressive.
They can spend lots and lots of $$$, effort, and time trying to make it harder to get access to content that people want... ... or, they could just make the content available for a reasonable price in a timely manner. But I guess that takes too many brain cells.
And why is MSFT so interested in making their platforms less useful for consumers? As a stockholder, I'd like to see them quietly funding 'legitimate' sharing sites to make the Windows OS the preferred content consumption platform, rather than keeping me from getting what I want.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
I don't pirate movies, music, or software, but I'd be more than happy to try and figure out how to stop this. I haven't looked into it much, but I will. I seriously doubt it'll be hard to combat them, but it'll be fun figuring it out.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it.
The seatrade industry. Just look outside the coast of Somalia...
They could start by pricing DVDs and Blu-rays reasonably. Next step would be to remove all the crap that goes on between "insert disc" and "watching movie," which often cannot be skipped without violating the DMCA (I'd like to violate the DMCA, actually, with the business end of a shovel).
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I personally think that is a very ignorant thing to say. First off, I think the evidence that piracy "hurts" these industries is sketchy at best. Sure... *IF* the person pirating said copyrighted material would have bought it legitimately otherwise, then I could buy that argument, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more likely that most of the pirated material simply would not have been purchased at all. If someone wanted it bad enough, and they couldn't obtain it any other way, of course they'd pay for it.
For me though the real issue is how anyone thinks they could make such a bold claim to stop piracy all together. If it just so happens that torrents no longer function because of their software, or some other means, people who want to pirate copyrighted material will just come up with another way. This is a never-ending competition and the RIAA, the MPAA, or any other organization for that matter, will *NEVER* win it as long as there is some method to digitize the material and there is someone out there with the intelligence and the desire to put forth the effort to get around whatever copy-protection mechonism is in place at the time.
It is hard, so long as the connections are using TCP. You need a MitM position to fake TCP, not just knowledge of the remote address.
And encryption has no bearing because torrents don't provide any method of authenticating each other. So if you can MitM to fake TCP streams you can MitM to fake encryption as well.
I'd love it if there was either an organized voluntary stoppage of pirating in the U.S. for, say, a year, or if they somehow managed to stop torrents and the like for a significant period of time. It's almost certain their viewership or sales would continue to fall, and there's a good chance the legitimacy of their complaints would finally come into question (among those who matter, not us) and their stranglehold on Washington would loosen.
There's got to be a way to undue the damage done by the RIAA and MPAA to the American public through their corruption of the government, but it's probably not through piracy.
If this were instituted as a process on passing information through a controlled node then OK, you have that power. BUT if this were to go out and disrupt traffic which it itself was not carrying then it breaks many computer cracking laws in many countries. Also as a side note, how exactly are they going to tell the difference between a/ A copyrighted work shared illegally and,
b/ One shared under fair use or,
c/ One that triggers a false positive but is not matching.
Any single mistake in the above could be grounds for a suit under obstruction of free trade or even computer miss-use laws.
“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.
If they're attacking computers without authorization, they're in breach of all kinds of criminal law. It doesn't matter if those computers are participating in infringing or not. Sounds all kinds of illegal, at least in the US.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Sounds more to me like Microsoft and the media companies are being scammed.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Good for them, as casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
And a Denial Of Service attack on your dynamic IP address, or on your neighbor's IP address, isn't going to hurt your internet connection or anyone else's. Right?
but now everyone is pirating.
Yes, even Microsoft is doing it. For a long while companies like Microsoft and Macromedia (now part of Adobe) would seed their own cracked products on torrent sites, just so that they could gain market share (while maintaining their high official listed price). It seems piracy was helping those companies, not hurting them.
Sometimes, I wish companies couldn't have it both ways.
If riaa/mpaa whomever attempts this on torrents for my legitimate content, I'll track them down and file charges for denial of service.
(I'd like to violate the DMCA, actually, with the business end of a shovel).
Don't worry, that sentiment is mutual.
They could start by selling them. Like you know, in the rest of the world.
It's all great the US has all these services and that the DVDs and Blu-rays are available there in the first tier (which is still too late). But most of them never even get to Central/Eastern Europe. People pirate here not out of choice but because of lack of options. Also, in a country where a new game costs about the fourth of minimum wage (which is not enough to live on anyway), people are not going to simply become paying customers. Economy of most slavic countries lies in ruins, and that is it.
Source: I live there and have lived all my life.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
The assorted ISP-based 'filtering' stuff is obnoxious; but quite possibly legal under the 'we do whatever we want, cry about it' clause under which consumer ISPs customarily operate.
However, if the (rather vague) description provided by this startup outfit is to be believed they are spoofing bittorrent peers and sending some sort of specially crafted misinformation in order to bring communication between multiple 3rd-party systems to a halt. That certainly looks like a DoS attack, if probably a smarter-than-brute-force one. Even if there were actually some standard of proof being applied to determine that the target swarms are in fact 'infringing', vigilante justice is generally not all that legal. Without any such standard, this is a case of a couple of studios hiring some skeezy Russian outfit to perform denial of service attacks against who knows who in support of their bottom line.
I understand that the law isn't really supposed to apply to people who matter; but surely a felonies-for-hire business model presents some degree of risk to those who go shopping for their services, no?
An anti-piracy startup in Russia? Cue the sound of kneecaps being broken in 5...4...3...2...
Congratulations, Pirate Pay. You repurposed the same technology Low Orbit Ion Cannon offers so that it could target BitTorrent clients. Its a bit early to assume anyone will jump on this software, though. Fighting fire with fire and then complaining when down the road your network hosting this software is inevitably being DDoS'd by the clients it aggravated would come off as a bit hypocritical.
Although, I wonder if this targets specific torrents, or just any torrent downloading it detects on a network. I'd be rather ticked if I was in the middle of downloading a Debian DVD ISO and my download speeds dropped substantially because my system was being DDoS'd for using my download protocol of choice.
These are awful business models. Their content is all available for free on Bitorrent. They can't possible expect people to pay for content they can get for free.
So they're all a dismal failure, right? Well no. They're actually doing pretty well. There is a simple way to reduce piracy, make the content available at a good price on demand so that it's just as wasy to get it legally. Most people don't actually mind paying for content, they just don't want to drive to the store to buy a disc to watch a film.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
If I couldn't pirate Windows I'd finally be motivated enough to get WINE working properly...
no they aren't. i've been in touch with plenty of tech and online people since the 1980s, and if anything, people pirate less now. more total bytes downloaded, maybe, but a lower percentage of [online/connected] people are pirating than ever in my 30-year view.
I really love all the parameters and calculations you've used in order to achieve that conclusion.
Hey look, I am 40 myself, used computers since I was 7, and I can surely tell you that I know less people engaging in copyright infringement now than 25 years ago.
Never mind that I don't even care if anyone pirates anything, nor would I ask, nor am I buddy with tons of teenagers who are most likely to be the ones doing copyright infringement - but my logic is flawless anyway.
Brilliant.
I use to watch lots of movies using Amazon, Netflix, buy my own, and other sources. Now I just don't watch movies. Netflix stinks and when I want to watch something on Amazon it's usually a 48hour pre-release rental. Ugh, no, I'd like to watch it now, thanks. I decided the easiest thing to do was just not watch anymore. I listen to lots of music and purchase lots of music because Google Play makes it friction-less. I also read a ton now. I doubt that's the goal of the MPAA but they make it to damn difficult.
From the description, it appears to me that they are using spoofed IP addresses and other such means to "fake" the P2P data. What this amounts to is "jamming" the internet traffic, in much the same way a DDOS attack (or radio jammer, but more targeted) works.
If that is so, using this "technology" is probably very much against U.S. and international law.
I thought using force to stop criminals was only the privilege of the police and similar state owned organizations.
I get this unpleasant impression that you also get to use force if you are a state-owning organization...
I haven't used WINE in awhile, but doesn't it require proprietary MS files that you need a Windows license to use?
Sure, some would pay, but it would also lead to many opting for GNU/Linux or other alternatives, especially since the Chinese government isn't a big fan of having lots of money going to other countries. So, there may be some minor short-term gains, but it would be the death of the company.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In attacking BitTorrent, Microsoft is attacking a protocol, which may or may not contain something illegal. When they disrupt a valid download, it is they who will be in the wrong, and it is they who can potentially be the target of legal action (assuming they get caught). They are also attacking a group (hackers) known to fight back in ways that are difficult to detect.
If Microsoft can target BitTorrent downloads, then hackers can look for flags which indicate Internet traffic originated from a Microsoft program, and target it. If that happens, it won't be long before Microsoft products become known for their inability to function reliably over the Internet (some might argue that this is already true, but I'll ignore that possibility). Yet the individuals/groups Microsoft would have to identify are much harder to find, and thus much more difficult to prosecute or sue.
I believe this is a very foolish act, perhaps and act of despiration, on Microsoft's part. It doesn't appear likely to work very well, and is likely to make them a target.; Moral: don't start wars you aren't likely to win.
That's probably why they're based in Russia, which is notoriously lax in enforcing any sort of internet-related laws (unless they involve websites making fun of Putin, of course).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I propose an addition to bittorrent clients that detects this poisoning and floods the poisoner with packets. If all clients devoted some small percent of their bandwidth, say 10% to flooding poisoners it would DDOS them. I propose we call it 'ImRubberYoureGlue".
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I'm buddy with way more techies now than when I was a kid... And I do ask people.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Is to compensate the licenses that they sell and are never used.
I've lost count to how many "windozes" I had to buy with a new pc just to format and install some linux distro.
First, I rarely bittorent anything, but I recently tried to find an audiobook for my son that is old and no longer being sold anywhere. My experience was somewhat similar to the oatmeal trying to watch game of thrones online: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones. Audible? No. Amazon? No. Barnes & Noble? No.
The only places I could find the audiobook were used and costs 40.00 or more for cassette tapes...which I would then have had to convert to MP3s myself. Long story short, thanks to bittorent, my son is now halfway through the book and loves it.
If someone would have bothered to actually sell the audiobook, I would have forked over money for it.
This is a prime example of why copyright law should be relaxed on abandoned copyrighted material. They like to bitch about piracy, but they sure don't go out of their way to offer the public what they really want.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Not paying protection racketeers would be a great start.
Because that's what MPAA/RIAA are.
This technical writer is instantly thinking of his experience to bacteriological medical pubs. The higher up you are in the food chain, the slower you are to adapt. The bacteria always out evolve our ability to treat them because they've nothing else to do. They always find ways to piggyback onto something, adapt, move or use other species to continue.
No lion has ever killed a bacterium. In principle, there are millions of ways to share files, practically there aren't that many; but if all you need to do is modify your behaviours so it's 'good enough' to stop the flavour of the week corporate sponsored anti-piracy tech, then good enough means what it says on the tin.
Require? No. Able to use? Yes.
Yes, even Microsoft is doing it. For a long while companies like Microsoft and Macromedia (now part of Adobe) would seed their own cracked products on torrent sites, just so that they could gain market share (while maintaining their high official listed price). It seems piracy was helping those companies, not hurting them.
Reference?
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
No.
If this is adopted, P2P will adapt. Period.
It will take a month or so, so maybe we'll suffer a little bit. OTOH the media companies will have been ripped off for millions of dollars by a Russian company with 'Pirate' in their name. This will help me with the transition pains.
.
No sig today...
Yep. And by a Russian company with "Pirate" in their name.
Forgive me for what I'm about to type, but: "LOL!"
No sig today...
1: convenients. People are still buying DVD's at the food store. Ask the question why and you know why people spend money on bottled water.
2: Price. Much less important than convenients, but still important.
3: Long tail. Stop trying to control what people buy, and supply better than the pirates.
4: forced adds, piracy warnings and other crap need to go!
Netflix and iTunes already prevented a lot of piracy because they have a lot of choices, fairly easy to use, and are comparatively cheaper than hard media. but media moguls are tyrannical tech idiots, they pay their lawyers an insane amount try to fill in all the microfractures in the world when those lawyers are probably costing them more than the pirates are hurting their business. what, you think anyone is going to PAY to watch crap like Hollywood and Wine? don't make shit and people who are already willing to pay to go to the movies will do so.
yes because Piracy is hurting the industry soooooo much that films just are not making money
Oh wait...
Superhero movie The Avengers has topped the US and Canadian box office for the second week in a row, taking $103.2m (£64m), studio estimates suggest.
The film is now the first in Hollywood history to ring up more than $100m in its second weekend of release.
It is the movie's second record, after scoring the biggest-ever US opening weekend, with takings of $207.4m.
Fact is for a good while shit was comming out of hollywood so a choice between spending your money on a trashfilm or pirating it just to go meh is easier to swallow. Make something people want to see and people will go see it.
I mean compare Batman & Robin (1997) to Batman Begins (2005)
which had the better story, acting, camera?
Look at LotR and all. All this hype around piracy hurting the industry also occurred when the industry was churning out shit and enough people swallowed the piracy excuse for the loss of earnings rather than having a look at what they were actually making.
Lets call that way Usenet. Seriously, why should I even use bittorrent?
The problem being the actual content owners refusing to distribute their goods in a modern way without it being a backwards and abusive method to ensure as much forced advertisement-watching as possible while at the same time allowing them to know exactly what has been watched, where and when. Ideally segmenting the market into nice chunks so that they never compete against eachother or different versions of their own product and making sure their franchising merchandise is in the right shelves at the time of availability in every little slice of pie.
Again they embrace a way of attacking the actual network without discriminating between legal and illegal use of it.
Distributing copyrighted material via bittorrent is NOT a crime, assuming the content owner is doing it or in some way approves of it being done. It's no different from putting copies of your product on a truck, assuming again that you would want to.
I think we should start sending false traffic-announcements, swap roadsigns and pave false roads going to nowhere in an attempt of obfuscating the road network all over the entire world. This is ofcource to prevent thieves, smugglers of lewd and illegal goods as well as well as drunk-drivers and other highway-killers from reaching their homes, customers and/or victims. Since all highway killers (due to road accidents) are using the roads to do it, we can eliminate all these deaths by preventing everyone from using the roads. It has just as much merrit as other attacks on infrastructure, although not as clearly claimed cash proffit. (I say claimed cash proffit as any test with free candies outside a store will tell you that giving away 1000 free bonbons is not ammount to 1000 less sold in the store. Someone should really test this and I would encourage them to do so.)
No, while it can use Microsoft dlls, the goal is to replace them all.
The BitTorrent protocol will be reworked to neutralize this crap, but in the meantime someone gets to make an awful lot of money selling ultimately worthless software to the *AA clowns. BitTorrent is made stronger, the MafIAA has a little less money, and someone else profits handsomely at their expense.
Win-win all around.
Liberty in your lifetime
How many ISPs include Usenet these days? I miss the flame wars on comp.os.linux.advocacy.
It is a two pronged attack I think. MIAA/RIAA sue the crap out of those they catch. This company promises to dramatically increase the number of people that are caught. Even if it only works for a month say they nab ~1M people pirating stuff. How many people will stop sharing because it is too risky. How much faith are you going to but into the next "untrackable" p2p method? They don't have to stop it from being possible to get away with pirating they just have to make the expected cost of pirating more expensive than it is to just go out and buy, rent or borrow the legit product.
You do know you can download Windows directly from Microsoft, right?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is nothing new : there are plenty of companies out there, with the soul purpose of poisoning torrents so they are harded to download.
Torrent clients are already smart enough to ban peers which are offering poisoned contents.
All it will do, is slow down traffic a bit, but you will never stop it.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Actually, it is a perfect example why copyright needs abolished. It essentially creates the situation where old works are forced to be lost. Look at the case of some of the old Disney movies, for example - especially the ones deemed politically incorrect now. Essentially lost to the world. Sure, copies exist, but with the combination of perpetual copyright and lack of reproduction, that won't be true for long. Copyright is simply a perversion of a bad idea fashioned out of a method of censorship. It is not compatible with the 21st century.
Great Intellect...
"now everyone is pirating."
When everyone breaks a law, it's fair to assume society has decided it is invalid. People might say otherwise ("oh, but artists will STARVE without copyright!"), but actions prove that copyright is not truly accepted by any country in the modern world. Why does it exist? Money.
Great Intellect...
So $5-$7 for a DVD movie, $15-$16 for TV series is not good value? How low does it and have to be? Zero?
doesn't mean it's right to illegally download a copy of him -- does it?!
Almost no DVDs have MSRP of $5.
Brilliant!
But you forgot "Think of the Children!" and "Oh, the humanity!"
Sure it does.
No one is selling a new copy. You can't even give some excuse about how the creator loses royalty money, because THE CREATOR IS NOT SELLING THE THING AT ALL.
Dear anime publishers,
I'd like to give you my money, but you don't publish good series or want unrealistic high amounts of money. Please tell me when you've reached the up-to-dateness and price of common american shows, such as _two and a half men_. Until then I'm happy donate my money to subbing groups as they do a really good job. Thank you guys.
Regards,
Anonymous
P.S.: :/
I don't support torrenting of commercial movies and tv shows that are available to buy for a fair price. Unfortionately animes, and documentations, are not. Yet.
I don't know, while copyright has undoubtedly become a bloated perversion just reducing the period to a more sane 5 to 20 years would eliminate virtually all of the real problems with it. There's something to be said for giving authors, musicians, programmers, etc a window in which they have the exclusive rights to their work so that they can attempt to profit from it.
Sure, at least some would still create just for the love of it, especially musicians who can make money in live performances, but I guarantee Hollywood blockbusters would be a thing of the past. As would most popular literature. Not to mention Photoshop, Windows and probably Linux. Do we really want to hand the world to Apple and their tightly-bundled-to-the-hardware OS?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"Source: I live there and have lived all my life."
Looks like we have something in common.
I have lived all my life too!
Sounds more to me like Microsoft and the media companies are being scammed.
Yep. And by a Russian company with "Pirate" in their name.
Forgive me for what I'm about to type, but: "LOL!"
LOL indeed.
Sounds like a classic Trojan Horse attack (on MSFT and the RIAA / MPAA). They want so much for it to be true, that they have been blinded to the source of this "solution"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Only if you think in absolutes: right and wrong, verus less wrong and more right. Absolute thinking is what the law is about, but of course absolute thinking is also a sure sign of a deranged mind. Charging people a millions of dollars, extraditing them and throwing them in jail over a torrent is also not "right", especially when actual real "losses" can't be demonstrated.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
Lots of "people" say this, but the evidence is lacking.
Right. Avenger's kinda blew that out of the water. In fact, I'd heard one guy at work (after watching a pirated version) declare he was going to go see it in the theater for the 'experience'.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
well, mine does, but I do not use it because they do not have the groups I need. Third party and offshore, ssl encrypted, for a few cents per day. Can fill a 2TB disk in less than 10 days.
I'm guessing this is performing a DDoS attack of some sort which would be illegal. I'd agree it has nothing to do with net neutrality unless the ISPs are somehow involved.
For that reason, I'm sure Microsoft would rather people pirate Windows than use a competitor.
This is certainly interesting technology and Microsoft must see lots of potential in it. Good for them, as casual piracy really is hurting the industry. It wouldn't be so bad if it went back to the BBS secret ages, but now everyone is pirating.
I really wish those Russians would have a way to distribute kicks in the teeth of MPAA/RIAAA/Corporate shills. I bet people would crowd fund that.
Private swarms really don't do much for resolving the issues of trust on a large scale. Causing one's enemy to fragment is what the Russian technique does.
And with Avengers targeted square at the teens-to-twenties male geek demographic, it should be prime for pirating. If piracy can ruin the success of any film, it should be that one.
Well, on the bright side it means a bunch of Russian programmers get to pocket some money from clueless Americans and giggle as their efforts have zero impact on the situation.
This has been going on since Napster. The exact protocol or technology isn't the problem. If they kill bittorrent, which is unlikely, how many other competing systems are there in the wings that will fill the gap? I can think of five would be successors to bit torrent that would become a big thing overnight.
The problem isn't the presence of this technology its failing to offer viable video on demand services for your content online at reasonable rates.
Most people were used to not paying anything BEFORE piracy. What did people pay for television? Nothing. You ignored the ads and the tv was free. Even if you had cable which most didn't the cost was fairly nominal for the basic package. And as to DVDs, wake up... blockbuster and the other video rental stores have died. THAT should tell you something.
Accept it. The DVD is dead. Embrace video on demand and understand that you can't charge DVD prices for it.
Hulu was a great idea but you keep starving it. Put ALL your content on it. If you want to keep the brand new stuff off it, fine. But give it everything else and make the service ad supported.
If you can't make that work as a business model then your whole industry is doomed. Make it work.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Some movies are that cheap. Not on Blu-ray though. Not new releases. For a medium that is trivially cheap to make, it's ridiculous to pay $25 or more for a movie when it costs maybe a dollar from factory to store. Given how wealthy the entertainment industry is, I have little incentive to give them more. Yes, I buy movies and go to the theater. But I do it infrequently. We might visit the theater twice a year and buy two Blu-rays per year. Other than that if I see a cheap DVD somewhere (and I don't care about the lack of HD quality) I'll pick one up. But given the effort required, I don't put much time into it.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still like the physical media. I like that I don't need a cloud that might disappear like a fart in the wind. I pay money, I get a physical disc. Yet I still have to be lectured about not copying illegally after I paid money.
The worst part about the FBI warnings is that the FBI prioritizes copyright over missing person cases. How about you spend less time ruining movie night and more time saving lives?
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
1: use encrypted peers
2: use a block list to avoid contacting known tainted peers.
3: if the torrents go down, resume downloading via usenet binary forums
4: continual attacks on the open Internet will just drive it into a new darknet.
The signal wants to be free 8)
And I 100% agree with the oatmeal. If they would sell it to me DRM free, I'd buy it.
The MPAA's five years of consecutive record profits don't help with the evidence either.
Dilbert RSS feed
...and how many will just shift to filestube, downloading as happily as they ever had?
What I'm saying is, the adaptation may not be within a given protocol, but to a new protocol.
So far, we all went from sharing nibblers (or blank cassettes for music/video) via sneakernet, to BBS, to Napster, to eMule/LimeWire/ed2k, to BitTorrent, and now folks are getting into using one of a bajillion online "file storage" services to spread the stuff around.
Each time, it seems that the MPAA/RIAA can only seem to catch those who straggle behind and hadn't transitioned yet to the next stage.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's possible to disrupt TCP using only a stateless filter by injecting RST packets (The Great Firewall of China uses this technique to perform keyword-triggered blocking on websites). You still need interception capability, but I'm sure plenty of ISPs would be happy to cooperate on that.
At least vlc can bypass that crap.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
Hmmm, the Slashdot equivalent of the burglar complaining the homeowner shot at them while they were breaking in. Why do people do something illegal and then expect the law to come to their defense when they're prevented from continuing to do so?
This. A billion times this.
Basically, stop devaluating your product. The "honestly" bought copy is worth less to the customer than the P2P one. I get more value out of an illegal copy than I get from a legally bought one. This is afaik the ONLY product where you get actually MORE value out of an illegally acquired item than of a legally acquired one.
If I buy a TV that "fell off a truck", I have no warranty, I have no mail-in rebates, I have no discounts for add-ons, I get nothing extra. If I buy that TV legally, I get more than just a TV, I get a lot of services on top of it. So yes, the TV costs more, "legally", but I also get better value for it.
With content, it's reverse. If I download it, I can time and medium shift it, I get no ridiculous warnings and unskipable trailers, I can easily cut scenes out of it, collect a few movies on a media server if I please. All that and more is what I do NOT get when I buy it legally.
How backwards is that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
you forgot the first rule of usenet.
Then we'll see if piracy was negatively or positively affecting their bottom lines after all.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Excuse me? A private company which I have no business with is degrading the performance of my communications between myself and another party.
Aren't denial of service attacks like that illegal?
How fortunate you are.
I have merely survived.
Where can I digitally download a new release movie still in cinemas (I'd rather pay for good speakers in the privacy of my own home), when I am in Australia, for a reasonable price ($5 - $15), in a DRM free format that allows me to stream it from a central linux media server to the TV and laptops?
Are any of those points unreasonable? Nope.
Are any of those points unrealistic? Nope I do all the above right now.
Are any of those points able to be accomplished right now? Nope.
Microsoft helped write the DMCA (and similar laws in other countries) which makes this sort of thing a crime.
It is a crime to cause a system to behave in unauthorized ways, to interfere with the normal operation of a system or to impersonate other systems, services or users.
For example it would be illegal for somebody to pretend to be a DNS server when they are not or pretend to be Microsoft.com when they are not. There are no exceptions in the laws for Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA or other criminal organizations.
By the way, I'm sure that broke an unemployeed people around the world will race right out and pay $30 for terrible movies, corn syrup water and carcinogen laced popcorn while babies cry. Or maybe they would if their cars hadn't already been reposessed.
I have lived all my life too!
I hope I haven't lived all of it yet...
I remember this being done by HBO or an agent of HBO circa 2005 when I used to download Deadwood episodes. They would flood the swarms with bad data that would, of course, get rejected by the bittorrent client but it did cause havoc and did significantly increase the time to download. Shortly thereafter ip block lists began to circulate and these tactics ceased -- at least for those of us using blocklists. Once your IP got on a blocklist you were done causing havoc. Things must be calm in the bittorrent world because the blocklist I use hasn't been updated in more than a year. Perhaps that will change soon.
Most out of copyright works have a MSRP of $5, sometimes with up to a dozen movies, though the cases are usually pretty crappy. Then there are lots of old movies that go between $5 and $10, once again usually with a couple of actual movies and no ads.
This is in Canada so they should be cheaper in the States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
In this case, I can't see any victim from this illegal act, so I don't think it's wrong.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I completely agree that most media is overpriced, and that the crap makes the product far less desirable. Which is why I haven't watched a movie in a long time.
In the end it won't matter. Someone will figure out how they are doing there and modify the swarms so it becomes ineffective. The true way to combat piracy is to look at why people are pirating and modify your business strategy so that pirates become paying customers by their own choice. Yes, there are "die hard" pirates who will pirate regardless, but there a lot that wouldn't if they could get it legitimately.
Though I partly agree, and think Spotify did this for music for many, this is also a dangerous argument in some ways, laying the blame of crimes on the victims. "The true way to combat robberies is to look at why people are robbing your home".
One of the ways to combat robbery is to look at why people are becoming robbers. While some are just hard-core criminals, you'll find the leading cause is the war on drugs, with other causes such as lack of good work (good in the sense of paying a livable wage) and real wages dropping for the longest time. Fix those issues, along with the mentally ill, and the number of robberies will drop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Not optimistic this will work, but I'll chuckle if it does. Oh the angst!
the evidence is lacking.
I think in Microsoft's defense, they know there are a metric shitton of pirated copies of Windows.
It's one thing to say some of the people who pirate wouldn't if another method was available. It's another to say that when 90% of Windows in China are pirated. At least SOME of those 90% would have paid for it if pirating weren't an alternative.
Microsoft has been on record as saying that they'd rather you pirate their software then purchase the competitors.
The real issue is stopping competition. The *AAs don't want you paying indie media producers. Microsoft doesn't want you downloading a free operating system or office suit.
This technology can just as easily target legitimate uses of bit-torrent, even if it only by stopping its use for anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Not according to the vast majority of independant research.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
most of the 1980s there was no online pirating of movies or music. I remember downloading the K&R C ASCII book from CERN at 300 Baud, that took the whole night and corresponds to about 30s of mp3. Watched a stack of rented videos in the time it took to download. I think mp3 had not even been invented yet.
You're confused about what the crime here is. The "victims" here are legitimate customers who are being sold sub par goods at premium prices, not the media companies.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
How much faith are you going to but into the next "untrackable" p2p method
Quite a bit actually. Freenet is illegal to even use in China, yet it is used all over. If China's government can't track it, I have a feeling it's safe to use in the rest of the world.
So, how much money does Hollywood make from 20+ year old movies? And what stops them from remaking the movie and getting another 20 years off the remake?
Basically, I call BS, changing copyright back to 20 years will have NO affect at all on Hollywoods Blockbusters.
However, they won't be able to sue the shit out of some small production company that wants to make a side-story off the original 20 year old movie like they can now... I think this is the real fear, some small productions have been HUGE hits and as technology gets better and better the "cost" to create movies will drop significantly; in other words, they are milking every penny they can now since they know their model is doomed in the long run.
We are at the point now where actors/actresses are not needed; they can be computer generated and used for the whole production; whole movies can be created by a small team of people -- now jump ahead 10 to 20 years, think what will be possible then. The only thing that can't be easily created is the "story" itself; but if thousands of old stories become "public domain" then interesting small-production remakes, additions, remixes, cross-overs, and restructuring will dominate YouTube and other near/or free services :)
We are already seeing some of this now (even with the draconian laws) so you know the networks must be shitting themselves....
And until they do or show some proof of a succesful action, I remain sceptical.
Even Apple wouldn't make it in a world without copyright or patents. The only midsized or large tech companies that would make it longer than a year or two would be Foxconn and companies like it. They'd morph into copy houses, mass producing other people's designs at a massive scale.
Smaller companies would exist at the mercy of the large ones... as long as the products aren't TOO profitable or too similar to an existing design already being copied they'd survive.
I'm kind of assuming patents would be gone too here... it would not make much sense to drop copyright without dropping patents too.
This. I run Windows because it is free (MSDN Academic Alliance). There is no way I would pay hundreds of dollars for an OS that I can replace perfectly well for free with a bit of extra work.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
They are not attacking torrents in general. They are poisoning specific swarms, presumable *after* picking that particular file as a target. The accuracy of the selection can be called into question, but it's not a dragnet operation by any means.
Yea, mp3 was mid to late 90s. There was plenty of online pirating in the 80s, as well as a lot [more than now] of in-person pirating. I was online at 2400bps in 1988, and out of the 30 boards in my county, there were only 2 300bps ones left, and they were C64-run.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Oh-ho-ho! Is funny because grandparent made inconsequential grammatical error when English is probably not his first language!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdQQjfDUBLY
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It'll lose money, just like most Hollywood films, and it will be blamed on piracy instead of shady accounting practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
My perception is similar to yours, but I also recognize the circles I run in have changed. My job has caused me to be more associated with professional techies and less with random people. This means that while average technical ability has increased, it means the available disposable income is also significantly higher than when I was a teenager/college.
Also, the assumption that 'techies' pirate is false. It's not a particularly technically difficult thing to do anymore. Before it was mostly about people who were both savvy and short on disposable income, but now it's generally just about the latter. People can afford to pay generally chose to. Some people pirate out of impatience of release schedule, frustration with DRM, insane disparity between pricing on pure electronic delivery vs. media based product, but mostly just cause they can't reasonably afford it at all. Sure there are some people pirating who would pay if they couldn't pirate, but by and large the target audience is not a realistic market opportunity.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You might have an easier time first making it so that disuse can cause expiration: instead of a flat term, it becomes whichever happens first, the flat term or a significantly smaller number of years since a significant print run. An electronic release would probably have to be under an inverted rule--a minimum number of sales or period of time, whichever qualification is met last--for counting as a significant print run.
You could also include a mechanism for a copyright's owner to release prematurely an item into the public domain, and write it off as a loss. It'd serve as a bit of encouragement for the larger companies to consider it possibly better for their bottom line to not do the token print run. You might even see some particularly disastrous bombs hit public domain quite swiftly...
If you screw with others connections without a court order, its a crime in many countries.
The people funding this should also be taken down.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"If I buy a game that 'fell of a truck', I get no access to online gaming, dlc like extra maps or weapons, support.
If I buy that game legally, I get more than just the game, I get a lot of services on top of it."
I'm not trying to make a point, and I'm against eroding first sale rights (even though Australia doesn't have one). I'm just playing Devil's FTFY advocate.
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
BitTorrent is about the most vulnerable network with regard to sabotage that is there. Filehosters and anonymous filesharing are ready, stable and available, but are a bit more effort for the user.
All these efforts are ultimately futile. The problem is the historic business model some organizations are trying to keep alive. That has never worked in the past and will not work this time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In my case its too late, as I refuse to give them another dime of my money unless its taken from me via a tax.
They had their chance, screw them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I prefer to just pay a couple hundred every few years to run it in a VM for the necessary applications than spend time stuffing around getting WINE working.
Quite easy to block RST packets. Wireshark for hours while using the computer for games/browsing/P2P/etc and have never seen one. I have a feeling they wouldn't hurt too much.
Part of me wants to see this succeed. Then let's see what excuse the AA-holes come up with for people bypassing buying crap.
It is a summary, not an abstract.
It will just build a more secure and resilient network for when we really need it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have lived all my life too!
No need to flaunt it—I spent 10 years of my life in a coma, you insensitive clod!
Already happening...
I'm currently contracted to a school with boarders. Torrenting is obviously QoS'ed into oblivion and "bad, mmmkay" sites are blocked at the firewall.
The students know about the file sharing sites that allow movies file to be played from any point. Think megaupload with the smarts to recongnise .AVI, .MKV, and .MP4 and show a flash player option of viewing. No names, as it'll drive students there / flag it for the next domain grab
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
Part of the reason I used techies was actually to distinguish that in the 1980s, that's pretty much the only ones who were doing it. 1990s for the most part too, though Napster changed that at the very end.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Does anyone remember Vista? Do we remember why it sucked so badly? I do. It had quite a bit to do with Microsoft trying to appease the demands of the music and movie industries. It resulted in a ridiculously slow and bloated OS that couldn't even run on the newest hardware.
And does anyone remember what Microsoft's vision did to Nokia? I do. Nokia is still in its death throes but it's dead. Microsoft still doesn't understand that the people don't love them... that, in fact, the people mock them and hate them. And Nokia was a respected and loved brand. Even though their own attempts at the smart phone were unsuccessful, they were inches from giving up and making an Android phone which would have been only as good as the others with the old, respected, Nokia brand. Microsoft combined Nokia's struggle with the hatred of the people to create a poison which has killed Nokia.
And now Microsoft wants to play with big entertainment AGAIN?! Really?!
Well, if we crave entertainment, I dare say we will have it... at Microsoft's expense. Even giants like Microsoft can die of a thousand cuts and failures.
At this stage of my life, my money is worth way more than my time :-)
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
No, no, no. You got the punch line wrong. It's "In Soviet Russia, you pay pirate."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Isn't the Chinese government already pushing their own Linux anyway? I don't see how this helps M$ even in the short term, since places that have bought licenses for some of their machines will probably also switch those to Red Flag Linux when they get legal. I suppose it would eliminate all the calls to MS tech support from those licensed users they'd be chasing off, so there's something.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
And of course all pirates are happy to tell the world about it. It's not like they'd get sued or anything.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
Because the kidnappers are more likely to shoot back.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Not based on telling someone verbally, they wouldn't.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
well, 300bps was at the beginning of the 1980s, I upgraded to 1200bps around 1983. DEC Rainbow with 5MB disk a year later. Online pirating of movies or music still unthinkable then, since there was no (affordable) equipment to digitize, process or store such a huge amount of data. Basically the only stuff that was pirated was software. Throw in a few notorious cookbooks with recipes you needed to be a complete idiot to try them out. BBS was fun.
Could it be that Hollywood already feels the effects of long term copyright?
Make a science fiction movie that mentions 'the planet Vulcan' and Paramount will come down on you for violating their copyright on Star Trek. If its referencing the 'space colony Vulcan', the lawyers of Chris Bunch and Allen Cole are sure to show up with their suit for infringing on the intellectual property 'inherent in the 'Sten' universe'. Studios release sequels/prequels/sidequels to their own copyrighted 'franchises' because it's cheaper than licensing somebody else's.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
you're not suppose to buy what YOU want, you're suppose to buy what THEY want to sell you. Economies of scale you see. It's much, much more profitable to sell 10 million copies of 1 Children's book than 1 million copies of 10 Children's books. Niche markets and choosey consumers are bad news for profits.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
filestube is more or less a "parked domain" style aggregating site, providing search results from out of their ass straight to places that will infect you with malware disguised as legitimate products.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Pretty much yeah. That's the whole point.
Microsoft's been cozying up to Big Media the last few years. And the next version, Windows 8, won't even play your media files unless you pay extra.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Absolutely abolish copyright law!!! I don't want it, it is goofy and hurts us people!
Oh wait that means that the GPL becomes null and void? So that means I can now copy, and black box my device all that I want? Cool let me on that train...
Copyright law is a only a means to an ends. It is up to the copyright holder to determine how the law is used. Studios use it to restrict freedom, whereas GPL uses it to give freedom. But it is the same underlying law that governs both...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Perhaps. I don't know I think bittorrent is still better than the file storage sites: I don't want to pay and search still seems a little crappy compared to even say what is built into Vuze. The problem as a user: you don't know your tech is comprimised until the police start knocking on doors. It could take months for them to get around to knocking on your door for stuff you did last year. Who knows how long of logs they have before they start having the shackdown parties?
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft pays pirates.
Also, in a country where a new game costs about the fourth of minimum wage (which is not enough to live on anyway), people are not going to simply become paying customers.
They will be if the price drops to what they consider reasonable.
And that's the point, a better marketing approach is needed.
If it can be expressed digitally then it costs next to nothing to copy it. So no matter how much money they get from someone, even 10cents, they are making a profit on the sale.
It's called 'broadcast tv'. Yes, the movie is paid for, but not paid for by you. All you have to do is sit through the commercials.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Yea it was :) I was downloading music in the form of MOD, STM, and S3M tracker files at perhaps 100-300K a pop, but the first 'real' song on my computer was a 16 second Descendents song (I Like Food) that I digitized to VOC using my SoundBlaster original. A lot of people later told me I was the first person they knew to play a song on their computer, so I had bragging rights for awhile.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Every single game I play I could get easily on the Pirate bay, The reason I don't? Steam makes it way easier.
"now everyone is pirating."
When everyone breaks a law, it's fair to assume society has decided it is invalid. People might say otherwise ("oh, but artists will STARVE without copyright!"), but actions prove that copyright is not truly accepted by any country in the modern world. Why does it exist? Money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Maybe more people need to become aware of what this (above) is, and we need more of these trials to come to jury.. If 'everyone is doing it' is 'everyone' wrong, or is the law? Hm..
How about a simple change to eliminate distribution monopoly. Copyright holders, in order to sell their work, have to make their work available to all distributors at a fixed price. So if you write a book, yeah you could fix the price at some astronomical value and publish it yourself, but if you get someone else to publish it and they pay you $X per sale, then anyone else can publish it as well as long as they also pay you $X per sale. Then we could get away from the ridiculous balkanization that we have now. Kindle and Nook (and Sony!) readers would have every book, Netflix and Hulu would be worth watching and so on. In fact, you'd have a million such sites, all with better content then now, and all competing for eyeballs.
Play Command HQ online
That gives me an idea.
Take the lot of those twits who continue to refer to copyright violation as "piracy" and pack them in a wee small boat, then sail it to off of Somalia to impress on them the true definition of the word. >:(
This is no different than dos'ing someones server/service/website with out the aid of authorities and a court order.
If MS came into my store which sells counterfeit MS games/systems and started trashing my property without a court order/warrant which is executed by authorities they'd be committing trespassing, vandalism, break and enter, etc....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Personally I rather like the renewable copyright idea. Make the base term quite short, maybe five years at most, renewable indefinitely for a modest fee each term. Most stuff falls out of copyright after the first term because it's not worth renewing, anything that is renewed has up-to-date contact information for the copyright holder so we avoid the orphaned works problem, and the Disneys of the world can have their perpetual copyright on the works they deem worthy so their not forever tempted to corrupt the legislative process and hideously distort the entire playing field.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I propose the following change to copyright:
as long as you sell your product, it's copyrighted.
When the product is no more officially available in a physical way (not a digital one), its copyright disappears.
This way, Disney can continue using Mickey or whatever they want without corrupting the whole system.
With content, it's reverse. If I download it, I can time and medium shift it, I get no ridiculous warnings and unskipable trailers, I can easily cut scenes out of it, collect a few movies on a media server if I please. All that and more is what I do NOT get when I buy it legally.
How backwards is that?
I sort of agree, with most of what you said, but with the following additions: DVD and BRs do actually come with additional value-add content. Most of them have at least one commentary track (director, actors etc). I quite enjoy these. Most DVDs have deleted scenes or featurettes on them as well.
There are many movies and shows that I have bought, and while all the non-skippable crap at the start REALLY pisses me off (no, really you have little idea how much it does), I transcode it to a nice format and pop it on my mediaserver where we can then watch it from a couple of players connected to the TVs. If I really enjoy it, I will include other audio streams as well. Living in Australia, this is legal.
Like I said, I do agree with your post, but I think you are overlooking many of the value-adding things on a DVD/BluRay.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
as casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
Really?
The movie business has—yet again—run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren't affecting box office receipts.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office/
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
But then the movie industry is rather thuggish too.
The movie business has—yet again—run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren't affecting box office receipts.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office/
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
They don't need a long copyright to remake a 20-year-old movie. There's nothing stopping them from making a movie version of a 200-year-old story that's in the public domain, and in fact that sometimes happens (The Count of Monte Cristo, for example). Same goes for one of their own stories that's fallen out of copyright protection; they can make a remake any time they want (and that remake itself will then enjoy copyright protection for the normal term), the only "problem" is that they can't prevent someone else from making their own (possibly much better) remake. Only someone who hates competition would see this as a problem.
I don't know about small production companies competing with the blockbuster-makers, however. This isn't the 90s, and computers aren't getting much faster any more; it costs a fortune to do CGI for a blockbuster; part of that is the hardware cost, which is very large due to the computational power needed, and part is the graphic artists, which aren't getting any cheaper. Computers are getting faster, but it's a snail's pace compared to what happened before, so the main improvement will be in the software tools, making it easier to create CGI scenery. For the foreseeable future, the blockbuster-makers would do well to stick to making blockbusters with lots of CGI, since the small studios can't afford giant server farms for doing such work; the small studios can instead concentrate on making movies that don't rely on much FX, and instead rely on acting talent and storyline.
It isn't worth what they are asking, the old adage "It's worth what people will pay for it" applies, they won't pay anything, so songs on iTunes should be a dime to a quarter, movies 99 cents to two dollars.
The only reason "they" got what they charged is because there was no other way to acquire the media, they controlled production and distribution, that no longer applies.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...but of course absolute thinking is also a sure sign of a deranged mind.
Cognitive Dissonance. That is all.
I think by far the biggest reason people pirate is that the content in question is not available legally in a form that they are happy with.
For example:
1.Not available to them at all (e.g. no download services in their country, download services dont have it etc)
2.Available but with restrictions (e.g. available in a way they can watch on the PC in the office but not available in a way they can watch on the big TV with the fancy speakers and comfy seats in the home theater room)
3.Available but only when bundled with lots of other content you dont want (i.e. the whole "you need cable to get Hulu" BS)
If the studios woke up, realized this "Internet" thing isn't going away and copied what the record companies did nearly 10 years ago when they created the iTunes store, piracy would go down (and the people who would stop pirating are those who would be happy to buy the content but cant).
This is why video game services like Steam are successful, but this still doesn't apply to movies and TV shows which are predominantly the topic of this thread.
For around a decade a new work was lost to a large part of the world after Disney got the rights. They bought it after the more Disney friendly "My Neighbour Totoro" but were not quite sure what to do with a movie containing things like former hookers with guns, so they very severely restricted the release (two sessions in Australia in a decade, then a few more after ten years). Since they had the rights they also blocked importation of the original.
Of course Disney live off old stories that are out of copyright and fence off the commons to try to prevent others from using them.
I like the geometric progression rising price for copyright renewal. First 10 years (or some other number to be decided) for free, the next year $10, doubling every year after that. 20 years would only cost (10 + 20 + 40 + 80 + 160 + 320 + ... + 5120 ) = $10230 (if my math is correct), but it soon starts to be prohibitively expensive - at 30 years it would cost 100 million to renew. If the creator is still pulling in income, good for them, if not then they won't renew. The central registry also means you can find easily out a work's status if it is over a decade old.
What puzzled me from TFA was just how they determined which swarms to poison. I suspect the trackers helped them, but I guess I don't know enough about BitTorrent to understand magnet links.
More simply, at what time do they determine it's copyrighted material? I wonder if their new-fangled software solution is going to get caught by false positives? The next time I'm downloading a GParted ISO via bittorrent, I don't want the "Pirate Pay" folks screwing with my torrent on accident. I could give two shits about movie torrents or music torrents (it's not worth pirating OR paying for)... so I would hope these Russians have not overlooked the little fact that there are legitimate torrents out there, and that screwing with them will make things worse... (and blow their credibility out of the water...) The idea is all a bit silly, considering the content industry's revenue has hit record levels... all while they are telling the politicians and ignorant public that they're hanging on by a thread. :)
Yeah... okay. Sure we believe you're sincere.... sincerely crazy.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I just got back from watching the movie Dark Shadows at the theater with my wife. 19 dollars for two movie tickets. The movie isn't the worst I've seen but frankly the cheesy old TV series was better. It's disgusting how rich people get making lame ass movies like this. I wish I had stayed home and read a book. Maybe a book on python programming.
A challenger appears.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The copyright holders spend lots of money on whores for congressmen. If the victim's familes would buy their congress critters little perks like that then they might get more consideration.
Tell me why trademarks need continual work to maintain, and patents worth BILLIONS last only 20 years but copyright lasts over a hundred years for NO MORE EFFORT THAN INITIAL CREATION.
What is so special about Walt Disney and Stephanie Meyers that they trump Steve Jobs and Arthur C Clarke?
Why are Arthur C Clarke's awesome books SOOO much more awesome than inventing geosynchronous satellites?
How come modern telephones are dependent on Hettie Lamar's expired and now worthless patent but her forgotten films are still "valuable"?
Most everyone is happy about 20 year patents.
Hardly anyone thinks no copyright is a good idea. And the exceptions are mostly hippy crazies that we can ignore.
The problem is that copyright is excessive for the purposes for which it was created.
I really like how when a Microsoft-funded group does something with malicious it's legal but when a private individual or group of individual does something to show security weaknesses or support a political cause it lands them in prison.
first making it so that disuse can cause expiration
yes! it should definitely have to be available for purchase to be protected. of course, they would just put up an exorbitantly priced digital download and say "here ya go".
...
And if registration were required, would you bother registering the copyright on your comment, or let it fall into the public domain because it wasn't worth the hassle? We could even leave the "no filing necessary" policy in place for the initial period, you only need to file when renewing - that would cut down the workload even further.
Besides, there's no reason the registrar side couldn't be completely automated - you send in a digital copy of your work plus a $50 (or whatever) fee, it gets filed in the system and gives you a registration number. No need to even cross-check anything, just keep it on file as evidence in case you ever need to prove your claim. So long as the filing fee at least covers the storage costs for the renewal period everything works fine, easy enough to do if you charge a flat rate plus a per-GB fee for large works. Shoot, I'm sure the Library of Congress could use a extremely reliable distributed digital archive if we wanted them to, so that your filing fee would buy you not only an extended copyright but also AAA grade archiving in case you ever lose the original.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
5. Switch to a xylophone-based IP network. At least then you'll be able to hear the network connection change tune if they hack into it.
The only problem I see with that is that it gives the big studios significant motivation to meddle with the legislation, and before you know it we're stuck back in the mud again. It seems to me that the "Big Boys" will do whatever's necessary to keep their cash cows viable. If we want to keep them from meddling with the laws we need to make it cheaper for them to get their perpetual copyrights by working within the system than it would be to buy new legislation. At least until we figure out a way to eliminate government corruption, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.
I see two distinct situations for copyright - on the one hand you've got the "one of" works - how many "Merrie Melodies" cartoons do you think Warner Brothers would keep renewing indefinitely? They're mostly throwaway works, once the initial profit is made maintaining the copyright would be administrative hassle without much benefit, even at $1/year.
The other case is "Mickey Mouse protection", in which case you need to (as I understand it) keep all works containing MM under copyright to maintain exclusive rights to the character. Now since the main reason he's valuable is that they can keep selling new works featuring him the fees will steadily increase, only linearly with the number of works but still an ever-increasing overhead. That might eventually be a problem as the cost to maintain copyright on all works featuring any cash cow characters could begin to rival that of buying new legislation. Still, that's a problem for another day.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's called 'broadcast tv'. Yes, the movie is paid for, but not paid for by you. All you have to do is sit through the commercials.
You still pay for it, first with your time and second with increased product prices everywhere (what's the average marketing budged of a company, 20-30%?). It's like the ultimate in communism, we spread one quarter of the price of every product across the entire society :)
You can try and poison a torrent, but you'll get blacklisted by other seed members once the checksums don't add up. With the current amount of IPv4 addresses in the state it is, you can't get unlimited addresses anymore, so it's only a matter of time before your netblocks will be globally blocked by bittorrent clients. Sure, it's an arms race, but one that will keep them very busy and with very limited results.
Mind you, that's with current technology already.Once BitTorrent clients will get exposed to poisoning more, I'm fairly certain mechanisms to mitigate that will become far more effective.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The USA has a history of not stopping at it's own border to arrest "criminals" that were doing something that was illegal in the USA. However, in this case I think the US government will find it way too convenient that their campaign sponsors get "voluntary" help from "unidentified" individuals in Russia. Mind you, it'd be a totally different thing if some company was found to be funding illegal activities that were taking place outside of the USA, right?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Easy enough, yes, but it has to be done by both ends.
Someone will figure out how they are doing there and modify the swarms so it becomes ineffective.
This much is so obvious, I have to ask: WHY is MS funding this? Once they use it, it will become ineffective after a short interval. Maybe they are going to wait to use it until windows 8 comes out or is leaked, thinking that if it prevents piracy of it for just a month, they'll save the money they put into developing this?
Because if they just have money to spend on technology that is doomed to fail, I'm developing this machine to turn lead into gold, I'm looking for some research funds to make it work...
They could start by pricing DVDs and Blu-rays reasonably. Next step would be to remove all the crap that goes on between "insert disc" and "watching movie,"
What's wrong with classical market forces? If prices are too high they leave themselves open for a competitor to jump in and undercut them. If the product is too annoying they'll lose sales to producers who don't insert unskippable ads.
But no, apparently the solution is to pirate the content which coincidentally means you get it for free. Slashdot probably has a much higher set of people who do it out of principle, but the vast majority just don't want to pay. Hell, I do it to save money and I'm against piracy.
a) It costs too much money to actually get to the jury-stage of a trial, for an individual in civil court (no court-appointed lawyer)
b) Juries are instructed (contrary to fact) that they are not allowed to nullify, and any jurors that display any knowledge of that right are eliminated during selection
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
it's ridiculous to pay $25 or more for a movie when it costs maybe a dollar from factory to store.
Your head has an outdated 'property model' where you think the product is simply the piece of plastic in your hand. Surely you are aware of the actors, writers, directors, advertising, R & D into the Bluray format etc. etc. etc. that is spread across every disc?
We'll never know the true profit of Hollywood studios due to their unethical accounting practices, but it's not 2400%.
Copyright is simply a perversion of a bad idea fashioned out of a method of censorship. It is not compatible with the 21st century.
I respectfully disagree, I think it's a perversion of a good idea. I think if copyright terms were shortened - to say, 14 years from date of first publication plus one optional 14-year renewal, for example - that would solve a lot of problems. Everything older than 1984 would be in the public domain, and all new content would have to compete for audience attention against all that older material which would be freely (legally) available as long as anybody cared to distribute it. You'd still be able to buy movies on DVD or BluRay, because as long as people are willing to pay for the convenience somebody will step up and offer a product for sale, but prices would be dirt cheap because you could legally rip a copy and share it with a million of your closest friends online. And people would still rush to the theaters to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster, because of the perception that the new movies they're coming out with today are BETTER than the movies they released in the early 80s.
I know, I know, never gonna happen....
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I wonder if my original ADLIB could have done that. No, I do not consider sharing MID files as music pirating ;-)
16s appears to be the whole song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A12o3gjvKtg http://www.mp3lyrics.org/d/descendents/i-like-food/
the aim is to get mpaa to pay.. to.. chaching.. pirates. those who used to live counterfeit dvd sales.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The arguments for a very short copyright were all out there in 1841, in a powerful speech to the British House of Commons by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
Every single argument is still valid today.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
Copyright laws actually has nothing to do with giving to the creators of said works, it has all to do with having control.
If Big Media had their way, no one would be able to release anything to the world without their say-so, and at that point they would only sell Blu-Rays you can only view once at 100$ a pop.
Also, Humans by nature want to give and give as much as they can, only the exceptions doesn't want to do that.
If we had sane, easy ways to give to the creators of said works directly, instead that someone takes 98% of it in the middle, i bet many creators would be making many times more money.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
LOL!
So what you are saying is that:
We are at a point where no skill is required, not even on scripting/writing. Well, ok, i guess that is true as so many movies are spinoffs of the same old story with different backdrop.
We are at a point there is nothing new to invent, no new methods to do it.
And at a point where one doesn't need any money to live, doesn't need food or shelter thus no salary.
And as for need off actors, we are now all basicly the same, and there is no differences in personalities and ways of doing things, or differences of perception between individuals? So we are robots?
Yeah sure.
Big budget movies and actors will be required pretty much always. Sure, a few very smart individuals can do a hugely popular show or movie, ie. Star Wreck, but you can still notice the lack of budget, and even Star Wreck has a certain amateur/B-Class feel to it, however in case of Star Wreck that probably makes it just better. Even Star Wreck required a bit of budget, nevermind Iron Sky is pretty much "big budget" film. If i recall right Iron Sky is the biggest budget finnish movie so far, or was it biggest budget independent film so far.
I wouldn't say 7.5 million € is minimal budget any small crew could attain... Plus everyone has to eat.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
But still requires MitM positioning, which means that some company in Russia can't do it without widespread support.
Their actual method of generating MD5 collisions with bad data is much more plausible, at least in the short term. In the long term it's easy to add a second hash to torrent files, so make collisions significantly more difficult to calculate, but in the short term it's a lot easier than getting everyone with the appropriate wire position to allow you to inject spoofed packets into their network, or buy/run your platform.
Which is pretty easy, given a peer-to-peer client. By definition if one end does it the other end will as well.
and so 10,000 years after the first showing of Steamboat Willie a lightening storm finally knocked out all of disneys servers at once and mickey finall entered the public domain.
disney had been listing digital copies for the very reasonable price of 1000 times the average anual wage per copy.
with digital distribution and no upper ceiling on price that effectively means eternal copyright since companies can keep everything they've ever made "on sale" for a price better compared to the GDP of small countries.
Infact, computers are getting plenty faster, at a rate of approximately double the performance every 2 years, instead of 18months. Some of the transistors are now used to add additional features, or optimize very specific scenarios, in which of those scenarios performance gains are far more than double per ~18months.
A lot of work also goes to decreasing power demand per unit of computing.
Compare original Core 2 Duo to Nehalem to Sandy Bridge for example.
Nevermind GPU processing power which is probably far more important for CGI as GPGPU is getting quite good.
Infact, i would argue that for the past 4.5-6 years the computing total power has increased faster than double every 1.5years on average. The leap from Core series to Nehalem was immense, and to Sandy Bridge no small leap there neither!
Around 2008 the norm used to be 4 or 8Gb of ram on a highend desktop computer, today we are seeing upto 48Gb on high end desktop.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
You are wrong, plain and simply.
A lot because of "not invented here" syndrome with so many companies.
Also Apple makes a huge portion of it's revenue on App sales and such.
Foxconn can be denied to make exact clones on contract, and if they did exact clones after your release, big business would simply move on their business elsewhere, making it stupid for Foxconn to sell clones to others.
High end tech is also closely safeguarded secrets, so for example Nokia would sell their high end just like now as no one has some of their technologies. Sure, there could be low end knock offs for cheaper, but people would probably still purchase mostly the Real Thing due to guarantees, quality assurances etc. the low end cheaper knockoffs would probably not have good warranty nor quality assurance.
More competition on the market is always better, as that drives technology and development further. These big companies would make other revenue streams if they had an actual issue with clones.
Also without clones you wouldn't be having a probably rather cheap computer build from misc parts. Remember that PCs used to be single manufacturer too on the early days, then "clones" arrived.
As for the smaller companies, without patents and copyrights they would be free to innovate, instead of making sure they are not meeting the business end of a lawsuit. I fail to see how that is a bad thing.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
First off, I think the evidence that piracy "hurts" these industries is sketchy at best
There do seem to be a lot of links to studies thrown around suggesting piracy increases sales. If this is true how does it sit with the argument that the best way to get rid of piracy is to give people what they want - substantially lower prices, worldwide availability (a substantial cost) and no DRM (a cost saving)?
Argument 1: Piracy increases sales (through exposure)
Argument 2: Piracy can be reduced/eliminated by lower prices etc.>
Scenario: Producers lower their prices etc. This will reduce piracy (argument 2) which in turn will lower their sales (argument 1). Now they are selling less at a lower price! So either piracy does hurt these industries or one of these justifications/arguments has to go.
That film is already a success beyond all other successes. It has grossed over $1bn worldwide, with 3/4 of that in the first week.
The MPAA is talking out of it's ass. Fifth year of record profits. Not even the "best" Hollywood Accounting could spin that film as a loss.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I wrote: without digital copies.
We should not allow copyright on things that do not exist physically.
And I prefer that Disney keeps distributing Steamboat Willie in their Disneylands, and stops perverting the system due to their unreasonable requests on copyright.
Our artistic culture is disappearing because a few companies try to protect their work.
The robbery example is quite good to look at, why do people rob stuff?
Could it be because they see no other way in the situation they are in? Crime tends to increase with rising unemployment.
Decrease poverty and give people the opportunity to make a living wage and the risks associated with robbery become unacceptable. Getting caught would mean losing your job probably your home any hope of a career a family life. When you don't have these things the risks become more acceptable any fine has to be manageable for someone on a very low income because if it isn't then it becomes impossible to pay and then theft takes place to pay the fines or go to prison for not paying the fines.
Robbing people is pretty extreme, there are a whole host of lower level crimes shop lifting at walmart for example doesn't deprive an individual of anything and walmart still shows a profit so it isn't devastating to walmart of course walmart would like bigger profits and not need to spend so much on security however you might actually consider that without the theft the security guard would also be out of a job.
People get quite creative when there are no real jobs to be found there are lots of people working a few hours here and there paid in cash and undeclared, that helps meet the bills maybe buys a pair of shoes for your child so they can go to school
It certainly used to be the case in the UK that if you declared any income whilst unemployed you were allowed to keep £4 a week the rest would be taken away from any benefits you were getting. Realistically that means your working for no gain once you do more than 1 hour.
Even places where you could declare and just lose benefit for that particular day the paperwork and processing is very inefficient and you could easily be left in a situation where you have no money coming in.
People may become self-employed in fairly creative ways if you can buy or get laid on an oz of hash you can sell it as quarters eightths 16ths £5 deals what ever. It won't make you rich but it'll subsidise your costs or give you a few quid extra a week. You can download films burn them to disk and sell them at markets again making a little cash. The person that buys them is happy enough too. Lets them keep their families entertained and keep the electricity on.
People create cottage industries growing plants and then selling hanging baskets for example or maybe just planting vegetables to eat later and maybe sell or trade any spare.
I fully understand that the entertainment industry feels they are being ripped off and maybe they are to an extent but to sell to the people who are ripping them off the prices would need to tumble and of course if everyone was paying 25 cents there would be no one buying at a dollar and it would be financial suicide. Why do we have such insane lengthy copyrights these days? Again it is the entertainment industry fighting to keep their current product financially viable. The Internet has made the public domain accessible like never before and a viable alternative to current material. Such a pity I shall be dead before much of the good stuff made before I was born will reach the public domain.
It would be kind of nice and principled if more people would take an honourable stand and just say no to commercial media and software instead of ripping it off.
Broadcast TV radio has plenty of content and with a PVR you can cherry pick the good stuff, Linux is a perfectly viable alternative to Windows, why rip off Windows and its commercial software offerings?
You can also make your own entertainment and if you are willing, give it away. I write my own music and if its reasonable i'll record and upload it. Sometimes its just fun to make video's, I certainly have no problem with sharing the stuff I create. Lets face it Britains got talent was won by a dancing dog thats a pretty low standard to reach if you want to entertain people.
So if you want to reduce crime as a society invest in your people an
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Doesn't anyone else see the double meaning in the name Pirate Pay? Given the long and glorious history of Russian/Ukrainian internet criminality, don't you think the RAHRCTEPOB would love to have a "trusted security" partner doing their packet sniffing for them?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
No, I mean it has to be configured into the firewall at both ends. P2P clients just use the system library for TCP connections, so it has to be done at a lower level.
More simply, at what time do they determine it's copyrighted material? I wonder if their new-fangled software solution is going to get caught by false positives?
Come on - do you really think Microsoft, Sony, Disney and some "rights enforcement" goons from Russia actually care about that when pulling a publicity stunt? They most likely flooded some minor ISPs networks with invalid packets, broke DNS and routing somewhere in the wild east for a few hours or days, kicked anything out of the net that was listening on "suspect" ports and brought down a gazillion of "pirate" SANs, printers and traffic lights. Sure, they might also have interrupted a few kids' filesharing activities for an afternoon and they probably have also seen someone sharing copyrighted content, but that's not exactly rocket science. Propaganda action. My bet. MS, SONY and Disney(!!) - what else could they join forces for? Tech research? Sure...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
Remember the 80s? It cost a full quarter to play for one minute at the local arcade.
As in the game was actually timed out exactly per play? Or is that just how long you could stay alive for?
I've played some arcade games in the past where the player could spend 15 minutes on the same quarter, depending on skill.
I suppose the game creators should have had a better grasp on difficulty, it's pretty bad when you start considering moving to a different machine while you still got lives remaining.
Fear is the mind killer.
Let's all bow our heads for the demise of "ThePeices", and thank our lucky stars that the rest of us have not yet lived all of our life.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you read the rest of the post, it is blatantly clear that he writes English quite well, so your conclusion is sans merit.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I was having a dig at ThePeices for nitpicking the AC's post.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
They would be copyrighted, not copywritten. The issue is RIGHTS not writing.
If riaa/mpaa whomever attempts this on torrents for my legitimate content, I'll track them down
But how do you know that it's your legitimate content, as opposed to something from a major publisher that you accidentally copied into your own work? (For U.S. precedent regarding accidental infringement, see Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs.)
Well, chances are that you won't play the game in a year or so anyway when the next incarnation comes out. Any EA sports player will inform you.
There might be a "hacked" server, though, that lets you play...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, when comparing the hardship of having to sit through unskipable crap and having commentary tracks, I'd guess the solution is to scan the PP for the commentary tracks...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yep. I went to see Titanic 3D because, well, it was 3D. There was nothing new there, nothing I hadn't seen before or couldn't download.
And you know what? It was worth it.
There's also cases of compilation CDs being the biggest sellers of the year, eg. The Beatles compilation a few years ago. Every Beatles fan had all those songs, they can get them on P2P but it's the biggest seller of the year. Go figure.
The RIAA can cry me a river. The world has changed but they haven't offered us anything new in the last 20 years. They're still trying to sell us the Album-on-shiny-disc which you have to sit in a special place of the house to listen to. The Pirates are giving us what we want. Guess who delivers more music?
No sig today...
Ah, but there was a lot of "pirating" from vinyl and CD to cassette tape, VHS recording off of pay TV and things like that. Also a slew of "sneakernet" copying of floppy discs, so that game publishers made malformatted discs on purpose, sometimes to the detriment of the disc drive heads (hint: they didn't prevent copying).
Later, CD publishers tried to add copy protection to their music CD's, mainly by breaking the Red Book standard and rendering the CD unplayable on some players, incurring a backlash from Philips, denying those discs that weren't Red Book conform the license for the Compact Disc logo.
Nowadays? Kids don't torrent music as much as rip it from YouTube-videos or mail the songs to each other. Torrents aren't really trusted, and the kids I know think that half the torrents are put out by the big studios as a trap. I'm sure they share music as much as we did when I was a teenager, the main difference is that they now share with friends that they know through the net. They still don't care about quality, they aren't audiophiles. They just want the song now, and have the same youthful disregard for Right and Wrong that we had when we were their age.
I was thinking more of a combination Spanish Prisoner and Emperor's New Clothes scenario: keep promising vaporware and delivering nothing as long as the vain and greedy pay. But you could also be right, that the Russian developers have tricked Microsoft into letting them eventually take Windows itself hostage against a price...
Well, when comparing the hardship of having to sit through unskipable crap and having commentary tracks, I'd guess the solution is to scan the PP for the commentary tracks...
I disagree. I don't like the crap that Big Media puts the entertainment that I purchase, but I don't agree that they deserve nothing for their trouble. I wish that they would learn. I appreciate the entertainment that they provide me and I will be happy to pay for it. I don't think that their current accounting models are a great indication of how much I would like to pay for the entertainment, but if they were to drop the whole concept of hollywood accounting and if I can teach them to drop the pointless "Hey! Don't pirate shit - and watch these trailers for shit you aren't interested in!" then I just might get what I want from them - the entertainment that I want, and nothing else. if I want to pay for a show, I want to pay for nothing else. The amusing thing that I find, is that it seems that the really early shows to DVD actually GOT that concept - Babylon 5, straight to menu. BSG, straight to menu. Deadwood, straight to menu. All that other shit that spams me, LISTEN!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
If there are any out-of-copyright movies in the United States, they don't have sound.
sites are blocked at the firewall
Please tell us which school this is, so that we may avoid attending it and so that any alumni may stop donating money.
The other case is "Mickey Mouse protection", in which case you need to (as I understand it) keep all works containing MM under copyright to maintain exclusive rights to the character. Now since the main reason he's valuable is that they can keep selling new works featuring him the fees will steadily increase, only linearly with the number of works but still an ever-increasing overhead. That might eventually be a problem as the cost to maintain copyright on all works featuring any cash cow characters could begin to rival that of buying new legislation. Still, that's a problem for another day.
But Trademark law seems to do pretty well for that. Superman is not under significant pressure from the Fleischer cartoons that are out of copyright, for example and widely, legally, available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischer_Studios#Popeye_and_Superman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCiv6FuEUEA
The whole copyright system was based on a fair deal between the author controlling the work, and society at large gaining ownership and free access later (with the ability to reuse the characters in stories of their own making).
What you're now arguing is a way to get corporations a way to weasel out of the deal (which is what they've been trying to do by effectively "stealing" the public domain by legal technicalities), and have everything their way, because it's easier.
What we need is a fair deal again. If money could be made by people with a 12 year copyright when it took most of that to saturate the market, then why do we need an effectively infinite copyright when market saturation can measured in days or weeks (theoretically in hours in some cases)?
This no longer adds up as a fair deal. So they are surprised when people ignore a rule that's no longer making sense?
All true, and before the cassette player we used reel to reel devices, exhausting our funds for the tape. The teenage audience probably has more funds today, but also many more options to blow the cash. But it is the same situation for the content industry: they do not really loose money in this segment from pirating, maybe just a little. Equating a pirated copy with a lost sale is complete bs. I financed my first floppy drive with a bank loan and went ballistic when the copy protection schemes gnawed at its health. The kind of ballistic I later went when CD protection schemes lowered my quality of life and installed malicious sw on my computers. Never bought a CD again, they completely lost me as a customer at the turn of the century. I had plenty of vinyl and legally upgraded nearly everything to CD.
So, musicians who distribute their music only over the net or game makers who sell only through steam or similar services, bypassing traditional middlemen are out in the cold and don't get copyright protection while big old companies who sell physical media get copyright protection?
that's possibly the worst possible combination.
You'd have to go through a big company like disney to publish, they'd also want a cut of the digital sales and they can just keep an archive of small numbers of print on demand copies "on sale" for all eternity.
Copyright is *all about* non-physical things.
The Adlib would typically only play ROL and CMF files (which I also collected a lot of from BBSes and still have, winamp plays some of them), which are basically MIDI files. The SoundBlaster let you work with actual samples (and had Adlib as a chip on the SoundBlaster).
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
One thing that puts me off arcade machines both now and in the past is the way that your first credit won't last long. Your second won't last much longer. Eventually by the time you've pumped a decent amount of cash into the machine you have a chance to get good at it, but not at first.
Those who have experience might well be able to last for quite some time on a single credit but those first few credits required to learn the game will bring down the average.
My collection was sent to /dev/null in the 90ies when I let a friend use my computer for video editing. During booting he managed to enter
the setup of the SCSI controller card and low levelled my 4GB drive.
What the hell I'm undoing a MOD but check the discount bins at WalMart. I think I saw the "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" there for $3. Most people anymore don't use DVD's or even BlueRay. It's all in the (((cloud))) now.
My most traumatic crash in my life was also a 4G drive in the 90s. I only managed to just recover some files (I had images of the harddrives that all the files were moved FROM prior to the crash, it was a brand new HD) in the past few months thanmks to @CLIMagic twitter account mentioning the use of 'strings' (which I have in cygwin) and me realizing, "yea, run strings on those HD images and maybe i'll find my text file of all the dreams [and things i can't mention here] i had in college". Finally got it 15 yrs later. Like last month.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
They are if they are complicit.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
At one point I took a job with a company that did exactly that. We could intercept, analyze and interfere with nearly a any type of P2P and could even manipulate certain types of unencrypted streams.
The problem is that the movie and recording industries want their shit for free. They will not pay you to interfere with piracy. They will not pay you to swap out the pirated movie someone wanted to download with a trailer of your latest blockbusters. They don't want you to monitor P2P traffic and provide real time statistics on trends in what people are interested in. They don't even want you to insert ads into mp3s and take a cut of the advertising revenue. They want everything for nothing, and will not pay their bills.
Why don't you mount the images? For me it was as traumatic as being woken up by a SWAT team und 5 machine guns stuck in my face :-)
I also have some backup data left on QIC(?) tapes but not seen a drive in ages. I think I was sane enough not to use compression when I created them, so there still is hope,.
You start with filename recognition. That is the easy part. Nearly everyone names their movies/songs with the name of the movie/song.
Most won't move on to the other steps of verifying content or creating a hash library to identify the media in obscurely named swarms.
I have tape-backup-data I've tried to retrieve unsuccessfully too. I thought when my Grandad died and I inherited his working DOSbox with a tape drive in it, that i'd finally be able to get my WWIV BBS source code, but nooooooooooooooooooooooo. No use.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
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which is what they've been trying to do by...
No, which is what they've been quite successful at doing. I'm simply suggesting that since they've already repeatedly shown themselves to be willing and able to distort the legislative process in their favor we would all be a lot better off giving them what they want in a manner that doesn't corrupt the entire playing field in the process.
Is it an ideal situation? Hell no. But any other solution requires that we also prevent them from getting up to their dirty tricks with congress, and that's a MUCH larger fish to fry, one that the politicians themselves will likely actively resist since corporations pulling dirty tricks have become their bread and butter. But if you have any ideas about how to limit copyright so that it stays reformed I'd love to hear them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sorry, but it probably won't fix anything. They're light on the details but it really looks like it's just a DoS attack which has to be launched against specific swarms. If the attacker doesn't know about a particular swarm, the attack probably doesn't do anything.
It's open season on the MPAA and RIAA. Every time they prove themselves to be gullible, more and more people come out of the woodwork to sell them snake oil. I think over the next coming years we're going to hear of lots more unethical scumbags taking innocent entertainment companies to the cleaners, all telling them "You can keep on saying No to customers, refuse their money, and use our product to somehow make a profit anyway. Just sign here and hand over your check."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The problem is not the tape drive, but the software used to write the tapes. Using compression or encryption made it incompatible with other vendors.
Yea, that definitely adds another layer of difficulty. Still, I'd be happy for THAT to be my problem, compared to "have tape drive; can't get data off of it". There are pro-recovery services out there that do tapes. I've considered it. It's only 250M. How expensive could it really be?
-Clio
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Actually this is the essential reason why content publishers want copyrights to apply to abandoned works, as well as for those copyrights to have a lifespan for as long as they can get away with. If you cannot obtain an alternative--the low/no cost old stuff--they believe you will be forced to purchase their new stuff. As it stands (for a large portion of the world at least) unless you're a steam punk fan, there's really no way to legally get content that's culturally relevant to you.
Is it right? Is it fair? Of course not. But this is business and business always gets what it wants in the end. Their money is a most effective force multiplier against a woefully inadequate number of soldiers fighting for the cause of the citizenry.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I stopped using tapes after the QIC-80 (80 MB, compressed 120 MB). Later had a brief affair with a DLT library, long enough to learn a DLT design flaw (when the plastic lip breaks off from a cartridge the drive it is inserted into is damaged, mechanically unhooked. Very funny in a multi drive robot library when the defective cartridge is passed around, Could not stop laughing for days). Anyway, have you tried tar?
tar xcvf .. yea, I don't even know what the options mean, my fingers just spit them out. For the most part I'm actually a ZIP'er (RIP Phil Katz), or, if i want to split it to multiple files, RAR'er. I rar stuff to quarter-dvd-sized chunks a lot.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
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Actually the publisher loses money from the sale of "new" things because people are buying/copying the old. That's why libraries are evil.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
What "new" product would he have purchased for his son had he not downloaded this for him?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
So how much do you pay per blank CD/DVD/Blu Ray in extortion money?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Couldn't buy your kid the book instead? Audiobooks lead to illiteracy.
tar is another very useful program from the universe string comes.
It would have been horrible if it had been my tape library, but since it belonged to an investment bank I can still laugh today. (It was long before the crash and it is not related to it)
Hell, *I* can still laugh today at that! Thanks! :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
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Yes. I didn't last too long on the arcades. A Mortal Combat match against a buddy never really lasted 15 minutes. I can't remember if you could just take your time and not have it time out, but that wasn't the goal exactly. I remember the games being short enough, that the depletion of quarters were more of a buzzkill than the game was a buzz. If you got good enough to spend 15 mins at a game, you probably spent a good deal of money to be good enough to do that.
Anyway, looks like I got modded -1 disagree up there.
He can still buy the "new" product as he still has the money.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
He "could" but, having satisfied the need why would he "want" to?
If won a mint condition 1999 Ducati Monster in a poker game, how likely would you follow through with your original plans to buy a 2012 Yamaha Zuma?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Anyone want to take bets on how long this will last? I'm guessing some teenager will find a way to thwart these guys within a month. Fix your business model or people will keep stealing. If you just keep making locks, more people become locksmiths.
So they essentially DDoS?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
All it would take is for a client to verify to data in the chunk (probably by it's MD5 or SHA), and if it's busted then try and download it again from the same peer. If it fails the second time then just ban the peer.
But I imagine they already do this, don't they?
Yes, but I wonder what happens when a torrent with, say, 100 legitimate seeders suddenly becomes a torrent with 100 legitimate seeders and 100,000 fake/poisoned seeders.
Legit clients waste time and bandwidth rooting out the fake seeders...what ratio of fake/legit seeders is required to being the whole thing to it's knees (e.g. you waste 682GB of downstream bandwidth trying to download a 700MB movie and it takes 2 weeks)?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Notice that I said they had to sell for a digital print run a minimum number as well as make it available for a minimum amount of time. Implicit is that they need to make the requirement before the 'disuse' period is up, and the phrasing requires that both the minimum period and minimum sales requirements be met. You will have to price a token digital print run so it will sell enough copies before the drop-dead date, and start offering it sufficiently ahead of time for the 'period of time' requirement to be met.
Both conditions are picked to prevent exactly that: using an exorbitantly-priced digital download, or a reasonably-priced one for 3AM-6AM on 1/1 as a dodge. The same goes for the 'significant print run' rule on physical copies, because otherwise you could just sell a dozen copies and call it quits.
A physical print run will generally result in cheap copies if they overprice it initially, simply because it costs money to warehouse it--especially if the rules are that you can't count copies pulped as part of the print run. (You want to ensure, after all, that they only bother when they can actually break even or make a profit off of holding onto the copyright.) A print-on-demand run probably would have to be done on the same rules as a digital one: you've got to have it on the market for a certain amount of time, and sell enough copies, for it to be counted as a significant print run.
It probably would be worth making it awkward at best to use copyright in place of trademark, ultimately -- perhaps by having it so that you are going to have, if you try it, potentially the loss of both copyright and trademark over the property, pay significant penalties, and a judge annoyed at having your waste of the court's time.
The real problem is that Disney wishes perpetual copyright over everything with their rodent on it. This only exists legally in one place for one thing: the play Peter Pan, and the fees it collects apparently provide a not insignificant chunk of the costs of the children's hospital that was given it by the author. This is about the only place I'd be particularly comfortable giving perpetual copyright, and please note that they've only got ownership of the original play. No, I do not think Disney had given them a shilling...
Set it up so that you have a 'lesser copyright' for the automatic ones--perhaps shorter period, certainly lesser damages outside of somebody filing a false registration (which ought to be classed as a type of fraud), and no official legal date of registration. It possibly would be worth adding the requirement that no transfer of title to a registered copyright will be legally recognized unless the registration is changed to reflect it, much like you do have to file paperwork to transfer title to a car or to real estate.
What's wrong with classical market forces?
Classical market forces would have competition drive the price to the marginal cost of production. As the marginal cost of production for DVDs is effectively zero (or rather the price of a blank DVD), the last thing media companies and software companies want is classical market forces. That would kill them. They require monopolies, legal sanctions, and other extra-market forces in order to stay in business. That is why you have all those laws making it illegal to buy a DVD in Singapore and then sell it in the U.S., etc. It is all about blocking market forces. And the consumers are, of course, trying to evade these extra-market mechanisms.
And the same is true in any area in which there are increasing returns in the relevant quantity scales -- e.g. autos, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, utilities, chip manufacturing -- basically all of manufacturing and anything with the word "industrial" associated to it, or anything that requires large fixed investments. Big business only stay afloat to the degree that they can repress/avoid market forces from driving down price to the marginal cost of production.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
the protocol is often used to download fully legal software that competes directly with Microsoft's products.
To which software are you referring? If Linux distributions, then I seem to remember well-publicized patent FUD against certain Linux distributions, making them not clearly "fully legal". Otherwise, Microsoft wouldn't have had grounds to sue TomTom.
THIEVES stealing other people work!
Did Walt Disney Pictures "steal" the work of the Grimms, H. C. Andersen, Carlo Collodi, Rudyard Kipling, etc.? How much should Disney have paid the estate of William Shakespeare for its animal fable adaptation of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?
I CREATED something, I MADE IT
How do you know it's yours, and that you didn't accidentally copy your work from someone else's work? (e.g. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music)
If you made a program that can do something that people want, it's yours
Is it still mine if it interoperates with the products of other authors? (e.g. Oracle v. Google and Blizzard v. bnetd)
you put the price on it and if people want it they have to pay that price.
How much should people expect to pay for a lawfully made copy of the film Song of the South?
I agree, but just greed alone doesn't get things done. Greedy people with money do.
Great Intellect...
That's a tradeoff I can live with. To me, the GPL is a defense against the monied powers in the software industry. If they are deprived of copyright as a weapon, then it isn't very important anymore.
Great Intellect...
Also, in a country where a new game costs about the fourth of minimum wage
Is that weekly, monthly, or annual? And why do games developed by residents of Slavic countries for residents of Slavic countries have to cost the same as games developed by residents of Japan, anglo- or francophone North America, and western Europe?
There's a system almost like that in the United States. If the infringement occurs after the copyright is registered, or if the copyright is registered within three months after a work's first publication, statutory damages become available to the plaintiff. Otherwise, only actual damages are available.
Do you realize how many copywritten works there are in a given year
Yes, there are a lot of advertisements containing text, and yes, they're born copyrighted.
PROTIP: The easiest way to tell that someone has never read the copyright statute is that one misspells "copyrighted" as "copywritten".
So, musicians who distribute their music only over the net
Could sell copies of their albums on CD-R through the mail. Plenty of musicians on the old MP3.com did this.
or game makers who sell only through steam or similar services
Could likewise sell discs directly to customers through the mail, as long as the games are for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android, or another platform that doesn't charge an annual fee to jailbreak one's own device. No optical drive? No problem: blank SD cards have broken the $5 barrier.
If copyright were repealed, and someone were to take a GPL program and distribute a modified version without complete corresponding source code, you'd be completely within your rights to disassemble the modified version, heavily comment it, and distribute it yourself. In fact, some people are already doing that for classic video games, copyright be damned.
A lot of people aren't willing to pay for a $144 library on which iTunes depends: "The iTunes store does not work".
Are you just pointing out that under a Common Law derived legal regime nothing can ever be "fully legal", since the law itself is indeterminate?
I'm pointing out that Microsoft holds patents on certain technologies used in Linux, especially those used to interoperate with Microsoft products. For example, all file systems supported by Windows for USB flash drives and other non-optical removable media are patented. The way FAT stores long filenames is patented, and as far as I can tell, so are NTFS and ExFAT.
Blank CDs are expensive (extra 22 cents IIRC) due to the right to make personal copies of music money. Blank DVDs and Blu Ray have no extra charges besides what the distributors think they can get away with. (When the Cdn$ went from 70% to par with the US$ their profits went up and they've all decided better to keep them then to pass on the savings)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Lots of old movies weren't correctly registered or didn't correctly renew back in the days when they had to do paper work and lost their copyright. The most famous example is It's a Wonderful Life which was a dud until due to lack of copyright due to a clerical error, it started getting lots of air time due to TV stations being able (or believing) to freely broadcast it. Sadly once it became a hit it was forced back into copyright due to it being a derivative work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_a_Wonderful_Life#Release
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Classical market forces would have competition drive the price to the marginal cost of production.
Interesting post, this is not how I've considered it, assuming the total cost of production is distributed. Long-term, yes, it should trend to the marginal cost (which happens with 'classic' abums and DVDs).
That is why you have all those laws making it illegal to buy a DVD in Singapore and then sell it in the U.S.
Yes, these markets are almost an afterthought. If those laws didn't exist they would likely not enter these markets, or do so at full price. The problem for these companies is that market access is becoming global but the disposable income of various consumer groups differs radically.
And the same is true in any area in which there are increasing returns in the relevant quantity scales -- e.g. autos, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, utilities, chip manufacturing
The thing is it's difficult to think of any industry that doesn't have some upfront cost. Does it mean consumers should be free to not pay for this upfront cost if they have the opportunity? Does this destroy the whole idea of capitalism? In a way it does as an ideal and I guess that's why we've developed patent and copyright laws.
The media industry is an extreme example of this class of industry;
* Marginal cost of production is diminishingly small (close to zero)
* Upfront cost is the vast bulk of of total cost
* Consumers have the ability to almost perfectly bypass splitting the upfront cost
From this perspective it's easy to see why society created copyright laws. That said, there's plenty of room left for capitalism to 'work' through competition by the means I originally listed. The fact that is hasn't (although I think it has price-wise) is more a reflection on how much people really do value the product.
You're still combining the worst possible elements of the current system with the worst elements of your own.
Your proposed system has no advantages over the current copyright system while in many ways being vastly worse.
Now any musicians have to handle manufacturing disks and distributing them. way to step back half a century and game makers have to do the same.
It's lovely that you think only the platforms you like should have copyright protection but you've given no reasons. you just keep making your proposal worse and worse.
It goes back to the definition of "copy" in U.S. copyright law, as a material object in which a work of authorship is fixed. Copyright grants specific protections to "the owner of a lawfully made copy" that do not apply to someone watching a "performance" (that is, a stream) of a work. Say a copyright owner makes a work available for performance on demand but does not offer to distribute copies of the work to the public. This means the copyright owner can arbitrarily withdraw the ability of users to make necessary backups (17 USC 117), to resell a particular copy (17 USC 109), or even to make use of a purchase after the copyright owner decides to "unpublish" the work. Having a copyright and working around the statutory limitations of copyright is like having one's cake and eating it too.
And the next version, Windows 8, won't even play your media files unless you pay extra.
This is a actually good thing -- you get to decide if you want to pay the license fee, instead of having it bundled in. You should be supporting this ala-carte style opt-in feature set, as you get to vote with your wallet against the closed-source DRM of DVDs by not even paying for the underlying tech every time you get an OS (and in particular, even when you get the OS for a computer incapable of even playing DVDs as it has no optical drive as would be the case otherwise).
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
Isn't attacking a computer system illegal? I know they're based in Russia but since corporations here in the US are considered "individuals" as the law goes, and since they are funding this illegal activity, wouldn't they then be considered accomplices and therefore be eligible for prosecution under US laws? Since the board of directors and officers of the company represent the company, shouldn't it be all of them that end up in prison or breaking federal computer crime laws?
Really? Then you must be deliberately sticking your head in the sand. Probably 50% of my friends, work colleagues and family will freely admit to downloading media from BitTorrent, or sites like Pirate Bay. Some of them very frequently. If the people I know are representative of the wider population, then this is happening on a very large scale. There really is no excuse for it any more. The majority of films and music are available online from several legal online sources.