Canadian Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System

An anonymous reader writes: Canada's copyright notice-and-notice system took effect earlier this year, leading to thousands of notifications being forwarded by Internet providers to their subscribers. Since its launch, there have been serious concerns about the use of notices to demand settlements and to shift the costs of enforcement to consumers and Internet providers. Yet reports indicate that piracy rates in Canada have plummeted, with some ISPs seeing a 70% decrease in online infringement.

Comments

Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

... I mean... there are some VPNs that are literally free.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, 70% of the people finally decided to get a VPN.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is hilarious that they are so naive that they think rates dropped.
They fuck the industry up, people find a way around it, they fuck it up more, people route around that.
They will NEVER win.

It will get to the point where people will seriously move back to sneakernet methods, aka, literally travelling outside to meet people to share files.
Or mesh networks. They are only pushing people further and further away from control. Instead they could create decent services that don't want to screw you over and rip you off. Yep, never happening.

And they will still not win over that because good luck creating a police state without the majority of the population absolutely shitting on you after having their freedoms taken from them after a lifetime of being free to go about their business without checkpoints everywhere.

You bet your ass people will fight to protect their downloads. This is the internet damn it, people fight over lesser things.
Obviously not the fat sweaty nerd types, they'll likely have a stroke before any of this happens, likely with a penis attachment hanging from them and some anime VN dating game.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

... I mean... there are some VPNs that are literally free.

Wait what?
Then why did I receive a copyright notice and start paying for a VPN? Which ones are free and work with BitTorrent?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[JMJimmy]

The numbers are based on nothing more than whatever the anti-piracy goons feel like putting out. It comes with the support of Voltage who sees notice and notice as a way to send out their demand letters for free and not face the Canadian court system which has held up their litigation and placed appropriate restrictions on the information.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

"They will NEVER win."

You are a fool if you believe that. They have won. You just don't understand what their true goal is.

The real goal is to shift control from the individual citizens and corporations, into the hands of government and mega corporations; in that effort, they were successful.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Tunnel Bear has a free version, with a small amount of traffic and limited end-points,

The non-free ones aren't all that much.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm from the US and I got a notice, so I switched to a seedbox. It's based in Canada.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather, 70% of online pirates you needlessly sarcastic imbecile. In reality, it's probably a healthy mix of decreased piracy and increasingly savvy pirates.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[lgw]

It will get to the point where people will seriously move back to sneakernet methods, aka, literally travelling outside to meet people to share files.

This has always been the primary way movies were shared. As the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magtape. People exchanging multi-TB drives full of ripped movies accounts for most of the bytes shared, at least according to some /. story we once had. And in some cities there are popular blind drops - where you put your favorite rips on a USB key, go to the niche in the wall in the park, and swap yours for the one that's there - potluck, but I guess its fun to see what you might get at random.

You bet your ass people will fight to protect their downloads. This is the internet damn it, people fight over lesser things.
Obviously not the fat sweaty nerd types, they'll likely have a stroke before any of this happens, likely with a penis attachment hanging from them and some anime VN dating game.

Come now, this will be an online fight, a battle of crypto and steganography, and in a fight like that I'd bet on the fat nerds who really want copies of that next anime VN dating game over the entire NSA!

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[SuricouRaven]

There's also the knock-off Nigel to be found in every school and office - the person who will swap a drive with anyone who asks.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Adriax]

Probably more like 7% reduction in people who pirate. And most of those would be kids who lost their in room PCs when mommy and daddy got the notice.

People don't all pirate the same amount, so changes in infringer numbers don't equate to an identical change in traffic amounts. The industry knows this and uses both interchangeably depending on whichever supports their case the best.
Here, as always, there is little to no context so we don't know the actual effect of the notices. We just have to take them on their word.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Merk42]

I think it is hilarious that they are so naive that they think rates dropped. They fuck the industry up, people find a way around it, they fuck it up more, people route around that. They will NEVER win.

True, it is impossible to win against a group of self-entitled individuals who feel they deserve everything for free.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

How do you figure that they have more control now than they did before?

You do know the internet started as a government funded initiative right?

If anything, the powerful interests are losing control... not gaining it.

Offer a counter argument. Explain why I am wrong in some sort of rational way that can be interpreted. Simply making these bald statements is not auditable and therefore technically not an argument.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[penix1]

True, it is impossible to win against a group of self-entitled individuals who feel they deserve everything for free.

You shouldn't talk about copyright holders like that... They are people too...

The point is that a copyright holder doesn't deserve the life+70 or whatever the ever expanding length of copyright is for a work. How is that promoting the science and useful arts? How is that benefiting the public domain which is the sole reason for the existence of copyright in the first place? What other job do you know of where a person can keep getting paid long after they quit the job outside of these government grants of monopoly?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Canadian here. Former heavy torrenter. Almost all of my friends have moved away from p2p for viewing movies and are using streaming sources from lockers now. Like AppleTV but free. Most of them are on VPNs now too.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yup, 70% of the people finally decided to get a VPN."

Exactly! Think of it as evolution in action.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

Exactly. Cyberlockers are VPNs.

Its not just happening in canada but pretty much anywhere that notices are issued. Even if there are no consequences, getting a notice in the mail is scary and people don't like it. The false assumption of the copyright lobbies is that if such notices are issued that people will just stop.

No... they'll just do it in a way that is harder to track.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Penguinisto]

Agreed.

I also find it interesting that they discount the growth of Pandora, Spotify, etc... and the fact that you can more easily pass around music via a digital version of sneakernet these days (long ago it was blank cassettes and hanging out at a buddy's house. Now it's "what's your dropbox addy? I can snag 'em that way." Then again, I know for fact that for quite awhile the smarter kids --and not just a few adults-- were passing around USB hard drives / geek-sticks full of music to each other as well...)

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously?

When Star Wars first came out, it was over a year in theaters and there was no accessible way to watch it (or other movies) at home without it being broadcast on TV. People simply didn't have movie collections and it the VHS was just starting. Rental shops were raking in money in the early 80s, often with no competition.

These days, people have way too many entertainment choices. Streaming movies, games, etc. There isn't much "MUST HAVE" or "MUST SEE" movies of old. Oh yes, still blockbusters, but that film absolutely everyone went to like Gone with the Wind (30s) or SW trilogy? Well, maybe Avatar, Game of Thrones (haven't seen it personally), but it's getting fewer and fewer. And even stuff like Avatar has so much less impact, no one talks about it much after seeing it. It's simply not in the national psyche as much.

What I'm saying is, before I rely on sneakernet on the off chance it having specifically what I want, I'll turn to other options. I'm not some bored kids in the burbs in the 70s that needs to go out and play baseball for a 1000th time, because there's absolutely nothing else to do.

Just think of porn, I'm sure most people can relate. Back in the 90s, no way to access it, my generation would try to either steal our dad's stash, or go on dialup and watch the same few clips over and over. We'd get obsessed with certain clips (I know I did) and it became out go-to. Other people were the same way. If enough people were interested, it was like the internet blockbuster of porn.

These days, free porn streaming is so relevant, not to mention torrents, that it happens a lot less. People may "like" certain clips, or even stars, but the age of the "Porn Star" of Jenna Jameson's level is over, if the one clip can't be found, something similiar from the 50 million other choices will be found and fapped to and then forgotten. Hardly no one would go on sneakernet on the hopes of finding "the one."

Movies, unlike food, isn't consumed once and then needed to supply more. They can be watched endlessly. That ever growing heap of supply is the reason why porn industry bottom fell out, "stars" get paid shit for the movies themselves (they have to go out camming, dancing, or whatnot and the movie is basically just a low paid commercial for them).

And with main stream movies it's becoming the same way. There will always be a demand for new stuff, or really high quality stuff since it's really so rare, but much of it became so interchangeable in the meantime. It's like how the first Survivors were huge, and the contestants became somewhat stars in their own right... and now it's up to 30 something and nobody remembers anyone from the last 15-20 after 6 months.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Penguinisto]

You do know the internet started as a government funded initiative right?

If anything, the powerful interests are losing control... not gaining it.

I disagree, and one need look no further than Facebook. Most of the political distraction/messaging being passed around positively reeks of being astroturfed by competing mega-interests. Also, consider that the proletariat is too easily distracted, ignorant, and tribal, so getting them to ask the wrong questions means you never have to worry about the answers.

The control is still there and stronger than ever - just that they're now using new methods to do it.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Penguinisto]

Dude - I thought that was the primary reason for going to a LAN party back in the day...

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Merk42]

The point is that a copyright holder doesn't deserve the life+70 or whatever the ever expanding length of copyright is for a work.

How long should it be?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[camperdave]

They can have copyright protection for as long as they pay the exponentially increasing annual fee. First year is a dollar. Each subsequent year is twice the previous year.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Merk42]

OK cool, I made a thing and have $1,023 to spend on a total of 10 years of copyright protection. So I guess people totally wouldn't pirate it that for a decade, right?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

As to facebook, it is losing interest not gaining it.

Are certain social media outlets sanitized? Yep. But consider what existed before that for the sorts of people that use face book? They have MORE ability to exchange information with each other than they did before.

Do they have as much as I do or you do? No. But then we are not limited to facebook. We are more comfortable moving through a more democratized cloud of social groups where it is effectively impossible to censor us.

So all things are relative. Do some people operate in more limited communities? Yes. But they're LESS limited than what those same people had before and we have suffered no reduction in our freedoms.

So the over all trend is strongly towards things opening up more because every person in their own context is getting MORE access.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

You're either very young or very naive, or a combination of both. If you're an adult, tough, I'd seek help because you're delusional. We're moving towards less freedom, more and more surveillance and a general understanding that we're better off censoring ourselves. Think how many things you can say today that would not only be perceived as "wrong" but actually cause you very serious trouble. One wrong word uttered and you can find yourself unemployable if not the target of the State's rough attention. We're not getting more access, we're getting more surveillance. It's going to get a lot worse.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the growth of Pandora and Spotify since the beginning of the year is miniscule when compared to the start of the new copyright notice system.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[NoKaOi]

What other job do you know of where a person can keep getting paid long after they quit the job

-CEO of a large company
-Politician

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to burst your bubble but pirates spend far more on content than the average consumer.

Take Avatar for example I
Watched it on the big screen twice.
Downloaded it.
Have it on BRD.

95 percent of the media I download I've already paid for it. Why download? It's more convenient.

https://torrentfreak.com/0-more-on-content-than-honest-consumers-130510/

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This sounds convincing until you realise that the overwhelming majority of content being shared illegally on-line is less than five years old.

People aren't really ripping Star Wars to protest against long copyright periods. They're ripping Age of Ultron so they can watch it for free.

People aren't downloading cracked versions of Donkey Kong. They're downloading cracked versions of the latest Assassin's Creed.

These things would have been illegal under even the earliest and shortest periods of copyright protection. These are titles that took hundreds of people and millions of dollars of investment to make, and the law effectively requiring people to contribute in return for their copy does promote the useful arts by making such projects financially viable.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[lgw]

What I'm saying is, before I rely on sneakernet on the off chance it having specifically what I want, I'll turn to other options. I'm not some bored kids in the burbs in the 70s that needs to go out and play baseball for a 1000th time, because there's absolutely nothing else to do.

It's not about "do you have this specific must-have thing I'm looking for"; it's about "lets swap all the all the movies each of us has ever ripped/torrented, so now both our collections are larger".

The only stuff I watch on my TV are the few titles Netflix has for streaming, or anything from my hard drive. I still have hundreds of DVDs in boxes, but I never watch them directly -- the UI is too annoying. Anything "must watch", I'll buy the DVD, rip it, and watch it immediately, but that's only a few titles a year. When I'm bored, I'll look through my movie directory and see if anything looks interesting enough to watch.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[greysondn]

Two things -

• * First, (as you already know) your numbers checked out. I evidently suffer from an off by one error in my head here, which I find fascinating because this isn't zero-indexed.
• * Second, I'm all for a system that would charge 33 554 431 for 25 years of copyright. The system is only supposed to work so long as a work is profitable enough to merit it, and such a system would force copyright holders to actual make risk//reward assessments in real time instead of taking it for granted that they can beat the horse for money forever.

You may find the code used to check prices here; it is only known to work for the first 31 years (the limits of a signed long on my architecture).

Re: Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone in middle age, this.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[wisnoskij]

Which ones? I looked back when this measure was first announced, and all I found was references to VPNs which used to allow free torrenting use. I have absolutely shit internet, so even an incredibly restricted VPN would be useful, but I found absolutely zero.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[BoberFett]

Some of us who are against copyright as it exists now might be more amenable to enforcing copyright if it had such a stipulation.

As it stands, the fact that people think everything should be locked up for what is essentially forever, many of us have zero respect for copyright because downloading Steamboat Willy carries exactly the same punishment as downloading a movie released last week.

Don't you agree that's rather ridiculous?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Deliveranc3]

Probably more like 7% reduction in people who pirate. And most of those would be kids who lost their in room PCs when mommy and daddy got the notice.

It always hits the kids who could use disruptive media to learn to think for themselves hardest.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

oh you naive fool.

That's entirely the point. You remove the low-hanging fruit, scare the idiots with N&N's, the smarter people will just go "deeper" into the "deep web", making it far easier to find the criminals creating the pirated material since there's a lot less people to "bulk" investigate.

My ... ahem... relatives that are really into the piracy stuff, have been using VPN's forever. Same relatives were into satellite piracy when that was easy. The games rules change, you play new games.

The N&N system goes after the people watching videos on piracy websites, because that's the lowest hanging fruit. Torrents are favored by people who like certain ISP's with unmetered bandwidth.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

The first U.S. Congress set the copyright term at 14 years, with one 14 year renewal. There's a good case that between modern distribution technologies, and the very short-term look of most corporations (they're focused not even on the next 5 years, but on the next quarter), it should be shorter.

The Berne Convention treaty requires a minimum of 50 years.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[dryeo]

Bill C-54, kind of a stronger version of the Patriot Act that allows all kinds of snooping in the name of "stopping the evil terrorists" and before that the law that they finally got passed on the pretext of stopping online bullying that forces ISPs to save data and pass it to the authorities when asked.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

There would be no guarantee that people will observe the copyright laws perfectly. Then again, there is currently no guarantee that people will observe the laws against murder and rape and armed robbery perfectly. Why is copyright law some special cupcake that deserves police state (DRM) enforcement, when we don't guarantee protection against serious, violent crimes?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

People aren't really ripping Star Wars to protest against long copyright periods. They're ripping Age of Ultron so they can watch it for free.

Someone who watches a shaky camcorder / smartphone video of Age of Ultron is punishing themselves. Much better to watch it in the theater, or if you can't afford that, to wait until it comes out on disc and then rent the DVD or Blu-Ray.

People aren't downloading cracked versions of Donkey Kong. They're downloading cracked versions of the latest Assassin's Creed.

They're doing both. The difference is that classic games like Donkey Kong should be passing into the public domain. To keep within the spirit of copyright, their source code should be passing into public domain and should be openly published, too. This, of course, is not happening; instead the list of works that would be public domain under a "Founder's copyright" (14 years + one 14-year renewal), but that aren't public domain now, just keeps growing longer and longer.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[cynicist]

If people are downloading cracked copies of Assassin's Creed as you say, then clearly the law is not stopping the practice of copying.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Jack Griffin]

You do know the internet started as a government funded initiative right?

If anything, the powerful interests are losing control... not gaining it.

Um, you seem to be equating "Powerful Interest" with the govt? Since the govt (in a democracy) is a representation of the People, and publicly owned, then the shift from govt owned/controlled to private (business not people) is a case of the the powerful gaining control. If Bush or Obama does something we don't like, we can vote them out (or wait 8 years). If Murdoch or Zucks does something we don't like we're screwed for life. Given the choice I prefer ownership by the former.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Jack Griffin]

As to facebook, it is losing interest not gaining it.

I Disagree
I know a lot of people giving up on FB personally, and my kids seemed to have bypassed it altogether (Instagram is the big thing for teens here), but they are still growing somewhere.

So the over all trend is strongly towards things opening up more because every person in their own context is getting MORE access.

I have a mixed opinion of this. On one hand I agree, things are opening up, but at the same time, large swathes of the population are addicted to the Murdoch/Zuckerberg myopic view on the world. It is possible that the universe is expanding in both directions at once.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Jack Griffin]

Think how many things you can say today that would not only be perceived as "wrong" but actually cause you very serious trouble.

This has always been the case. Go back 40 years, walk into a bar and announce that you're gay, or be black in the white part of town, or white in the black part, and then compare.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Dog-Cow]

At a start, it should be less than the average lifetime, instead of 2x the average lifetime.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[rtb61]

I would have to agree with that. You know it has reached the point, we I am now turned off by the idea of buying their content because it feels like I am supporting their corruption of our governments. Buying rather the pirating is now the act of evil in support of evil. I go to buy some content and I have to stop and consider where that money is going, what they are doing with it and how many people will suffer as a result. They are such a corrupt pack psychopathic and narcissistic of ass hats that they are making piracy the only honourable choice.

I try to enjoy some feel good content only to end up feeling bad when I am reminded by those arse holes how much damage they are doing all over the place, the shit heads brag about who can burn up the most resources, who can control governments more who has the most inflated ego. By their actions, they are making piracy the only sound and reasonable choice.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[SuricouRaven]

Fourteen years was the original term, and seems quite reasonable - if a commercial work hasn't brought in enough money in that long, it isn't going to bring in much more with a longer term.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

Were people in general more free five years ago?
What about 10?
What about 15?
What about 20?

Find me any group of people that you feel is being controlled by this stuff and if we followed the same people back through time you'd find that THIS is an improvement.

You can't compare the facebook addicts to you or me. We're not that demographic. I know that I am every bit as free now as I was before. I'm in no way more controlled by the social media barons than I ever was... and for those that are under the thumb of such people, what were they doing before that was so liberating?

They were never in those early forums of the internet. These are not those sorts of people.

I am... and I suspect you are as well... what has changed for us? I've lost nothing... neither have you... and neither have the facebook addicts. They never had the experiences you think they lost. And they never would have come to that world either way.

You're looking at people that used to just watch TV before... a little MTV or some cartoons or something. They didn't even interact on the internet.

Be happy they're this active. And as you pointed out with your kids, Facebook is already dead. Mostly because facebook has too many aunts on it.

When my 60 year old mother hangs out of facebook and scours every family member's pages for gossip... you know it isn't a good place for kids to hang out. As to instagram etc... they're going to use services that are harder to monitor. And with that, the social media censors lose their power as well because they're not really able to monitor it either when it gets that way.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

Well Mr AC, I see a lot of claims made in there and literally no supporting points.

Would you mind backing any of that up with anything?

I suspect you're mostly either whining about the NSA or Google using its adbots to read your email for targeted advertising?

In the case of the NSA, that is really only going to effect anyone that makes no effort to avoid that kind of surveliance. We're seeing huge changes in the way that data is handled so I don't think the NSA is going to get away with that for very long.

As to google reading your email... I don't see how that is control and the snooping is only done to sell you shit. And honestly I don't even see those ads because adblock.

And even then if you have any interest in avoiding that there lots of alternatives to avoid google snooping on your email.

Its a choice. You either care or you don't.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[gustygolf]

The Berne Convention treaty requires a minimum of 50 years.

No, it requires a minimum of life + 50 years. This was changed in the 1948 revision of the convention. Before that, the treaty did not dictate a minimum copyright length.

Oddly enough, the United States didn't sign the convention until 1989. I wonder who lobbied for life+50 back then. Certainly not the MPAA?

Anyone wanting to legislate sane copyright lengths will have to break an international treaty to achieve it.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[strikethree]

People aren't really ripping Star Wars to protest against long copyright periods. They're ripping Age of Ultron so they can watch it for free.

I am not so sure of that claim. Sure, some people are downloading it so they can watch it for free...

I am considering downloading it myself currently. I could watch a censored version in the theater. I could wait 6 months or however long for a dvd (I do not do bluray) to come out.

I downloaded the first Avengers movie for the same reason. I eventually bought the dvd and ripped that and deleted the version I had downloaded... but only because the version I had downloaded was inferior to rip I had made.

I also downloaded Star Wars. The REAL version where Han shot first and there was no CGI Jabba. I think you can guess why.

People aren't downloading cracked versions of Donkey Kong. They're downloading cracked versions of the latest Assassin's Creed.

Actually, I did download Donkey Kong last month. I wanted to try out MAME again and lost all of my old ROMs. Assassins Creed is crap, but to stay true to your argument, I did download Skyrim and Civilization 5.

DRM pisses me off and I never buy anything prepackaged anymore. I found Skyrim and Civ 5 on Steam and decided the DRM that Steam provides is a worthwhile trade for the convenience of being able to download it anywhere and anytime and play it on any computer. I plain bought GTA V through Steam without even downloading a cracked copy first... but only because the GTA series always has an interesting world to discover even if gameplay can be flat at times.

In short, downloading games is a try before you buy proposition for many people. If you like a game and never buy it, you will not continue to see good games being made.

These things would have been illegal under even the earliest and shortest periods of copyright protection. These are titles that took hundreds of people and millions of dollars of investment to make, and the law effectively requiring people to contribute in return for their copy does promote the useful arts by making such projects financially viable.

Fuck them. They lobbied for and got copyright extensions that are so beyond reasonable that those laws actually violate the entire purpose of copyright. I do not care what is right in relationship to copyright anymore. It is pure fucking war. I try to play fair but get fucked every god damned time. Fuck them. They already said fuck me.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It is not a black/white issue. If everyone ignored the law and downloaded cracked copies, clearly the games companies would go under as they would have huge costs and no revenue.

Downloading cracked games is like being the guy who drives up the bus-only lane and then cuts in at the junction to get past the queue everyone else is stuck in. You rationalise it with a "victimless crime" mentality, but if you look at the system as a whole, every time someone does that it damages everyone who played by the rules a little bit, and if everyone cheated the whole system would fail.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I agree that some people do download illegal copies for practical reasons rather than cheaping out, though I think this kind of argument is relatively weak. In particular, games companies have actual stats on how many players on their servers are using dodgy copies, and if 90% of the people on their servers are using a version known to be cracked (which is not an unusual figure for some games) then it's hard to believe an argument that all of those people are "just trying it out" and will buy a real copy later, particularly when they are "just trying it out" for two or three months before moving on to whatever is the next popular game.

Your last paragraph is one that troubles me, because it seems to be very common attitude today. In fact, as someone in a new business that creates genuinely original content, I've argued with my government precisely that silly copyright terms erode general respect for copyright, to the point where a lot of people just don't care. This hurts small creative businesses and individual artists who aren't using DRM or otherwise exploiting customers but who also don't have the resources to protect their assets through the legal system.

We just want people using our content to pay a fair price for it so that we in turn can pay our rent at the end of the month. There are many thousands, perhaps even millions, of us for every corporate giant, and copyright is supposed to be there so our business model can work, too. In a world where a lot of consumers don't respect copyright any more, it's mostly not going to be the big businesses that go under; they're just going to push up the cost of next version of GTA or the next season of Game of Thrones by a dollar to compensate. It's the little guys -- the game programming duo slaving away in someone's basement, the individual photographer who travels the world to take beautiful pictures, the recording artists who don't have a big media giant behind them -- who really lose out the most if the system fails.

Anyway, I'd better stop there, because I have to go back to playing my cracked copy of Generic Sports Title 2015 with a bootleg album of Manufactured Pop Band playing in the background, while I download Arbitrary Sci-Fi Reboot Film to watch over dinner. For some reason, no-one seems to make anything good any more, so that's the best I can find.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

People aren't downloading cracked versions of Donkey Kong. They're downloading cracked versions of the latest Assassin's Creed.

They're doing both.

Most of them aren't.

I agree with you that part of the copyright bargain is (or should be) that works fall into the public domain after a while. You can make reasonable arguments for different periods of protection, but I expect we'd all agree the current ones are absurdly long.

But this doesn't change the fact that most illegal copies being downloaded are relatively new releases.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Merk42]

I think it's rather ridiculous that even if copyright lasted only a year people would still pirate it within that small timeframe due to their selfish nature.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Because people want things for little to no effort and feel it is 'victimless' as opposed murder, rape, and armed robbery. They brought it on themselves.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

An anecdote from one person can speak for all piracy? Fascinating!

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[lsatenstein]

You're either very young or very naive, or a combination of both. If you're an adult, tough, I'd seek help because you're delusional. We're moving towards less freedom, more and more surveillance and a general understanding that we're better off censoring ourselves. Think how many things you can say today that would not only be perceived as "wrong" but actually cause you very serious trouble. One wrong word uttered and you can find yourself unemployable if not the target of the State's rough attention. We're not getting more access, we're getting more surveillance. It's going to get a lot worse.

Mainly in the USA. It started with GWB. Can you even take a domestic plane trip without being fingerprinted?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Projects sea, even incomplete ones, seam to be pretty financially viable unless product in question is a steaming pile of crap.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[master_kaos]

Yup I think you nailed the answer on the head.

I would say about 50% of the people I know who were pirating content that werent using vpns are now. In the past 3 months I have been asked a dozen times from people a vpn service I recommend. People who I thought didnt even know what a vpn was.

I dont use a vpn. I have received over a dozen notices, and I dont give a shit. They cant do anything other than fine me $100. But they never will because their lawyer costs will be too high to justify it. Ill look into a VPN if the law changes or if it breaks out that people are actually starting to get fined.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[mdielmann]

So what you're saying is that...the extremely long copyright durations have no real impact on the bottom line of copyright holders? Or do you assume that people are more likely to pay for those classics?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Cederic]

You may find the code used to check prices here; it is only known to work for the first 31 years (the limits of a signed long on my architecture).

This is slashdot, we can do (2^n)-1 in our heads.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[david_thornley]

I'm in the US, so I look at the US Constitution. The clear intent is to make it more attractive to create something, to decide to go ahead with a project. The question is then how long anybody would look ahead when deciding to greenlight something. Personally, it seems extremely unlikely to me that any person or organization would think it worthwhile to do something based on any reward requiring a monopoly more than thirty years down the road. If anybody has arguments or examples to the contrary, I'd love to hear of it.

I'm therefore in favor of the copyright law we had when I was a kid, fourteen years, renewable for another fourteen-year term.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[david_thornley]

Except that downloading cracked games hurts nobody. What matters is not how many copies are pirated, but how many are paid for. If somebody would buy a game, but instead downloads a cracked version, that hurts the game companies. If somebody doesn't have the money to buy games, it doesn't matter how many games that person pirates, since there was no lost sale. If somebody pirates games to figure out which are the good ones, and buys them, then not only were there no lost sales but the person is likely to spend more on games, since he or she knows he or she is paying for a good-quality game. If somebody pays for a game, and then downloads a cracked version because it doesn't have any problems with copy protection, that person is more likely to buy games with onerous DRM, and so it's a win for the game companies.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

... no one is finger printed when they take a plane flight either domestic or international from the US.

Since apparently you've never flown in the US, let me explain it.

1. your check in baggage has a swab run over it and that swab is run through a chemical bomb detector.

2.your check in baggage is x rayed

3. a TSA agent checks your ID and looks at your boarding pass. If your name matches the name on your ticket, then they let you go through gate security.

4. At gate security they have you take anything metal off your body. And they have you remove your shoes. The shoe removal is the big change.

5. Everything you're carrying is put into plastic bins that are x rayed.

6. You walk through either a back scatter scanner or a simple metal detector.

And you're done.

That is security at US airports.

If you are flying INTO the US from a foreign country then your passport is checked by a customs agent. And your check in baggage is sometimes checked for contraband or pathogens. Hawaii and California for example worry about people bringing foreign fruit etc to the state that bares foreign plant pathogens... often fungus's etc from other parts of the world infect local crops in this manner so they don't want people to bring them.

I'm not saying it is fun, but we're not finger printed. The only way you get more than what I described above is if you do something stupid or you were on some kind of list. Most people on those lists are there for a reasonable reason. Some are mistakes. Regardless it is rare for anyone to be taken aside and subjected to additional security.

You can also avoid nearly all of this by getting a special ID card that lets you skip most of the security. The ID costs 50 dollars and requires you to go to an interview with the FBI for about half an hour at a Federal building. If you're a frequent flier then that is often worth it.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So what you're saying is that...the extremely long copyright durations have no real impact on the bottom line of copyright holders?

No, but I'm saying it appears to have relatively little impact on the bottom line of copyright holders. More importantly, so does vast amounts of empirical data.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You can repeat these arguments as often as you like, but the not-a-lost-sale argument still contradicts basic economics, and the just-trying-it-out argument still contradicts overwhelming empirical data the industry has been collecting for years.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[greysondn]

Blasphemy!

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

I consider any power able to blow up the world with nuclear bombs on the whim of one man to be a powerful interest.

I'm not debating that with you. If you think the US federal government is not powerful then we have nothing more to say on the matter. That position is too stupid to be taken seriously.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Jack Griffin]

I'm not debating that with you. If you think the US federal government is not powerful then we have nothing more to say on the matter. That position is too stupid to be taken seriously.

Agree, so why did you make that strawman up?

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Karmashock]

I didn't make a strawman up. I just showed how dumb your position was... and we are done. You can either correct your position and maybe I'd be able to look at it without rolling my eyes. But short of that... we're done.

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[Jack Griffin]

Strawman

Re:Or they're just proxying their connections

[admiral snackbar]

Except that by extending the duration of copyright to absurd lengths, it starts to invalidate the whole concept of copyright. If copyright was just 5 years, rights owners would have a much stronger moral case about doing something about infringement. I don't infringe copyrights anymore (did it when I was in university, but now I have too little time to watch TV anyway and more than enough money to pay for the few things I do still watch), but on a fundamental level I have zero respect for copyright, simply because how far it has strayed from its original, quite noble origins under the influence of money-grabbing companies and the politicians they have bought to do their bidding. Now if copyright were 5 years long, I'd say that would be a reasonable amount of time that a creator can claim protection for its creation. 10 years? Bit long but acceptable. You could even cut copyright in two: commercial copyright and non-commercial copyright. Make non-commercial copyright last 10 years, make commercial copyright last 50 years. With the difference being that after 10 years people are allowed to copy your stuff, but not try to make money with it until commercial copyright ends. But the current system? I'd rather see zero copyright than the idiocy we have today.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my case, it increased. With our currency losing more and more value from a terrible government, the prices of digital goods have increase. Games are now between $10 to $20 more expensive on steam. I ain't got that kind of money.

We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who got one of these notices, all it's really done is teach us how to hide it better (VPN etc...).

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't use public-facing torrents. Talk to your friends, I'm sure one of them knows a way into a decent private tracker. Or just google around and find a good one that opens periodically for signups (though referral-only ones are better :p).

I pirate tv all the time (and other things very occasionally but more often than never) - I've just learned, never download *anything* from piratebay, etc, unless it's majorly super-obscure.

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

VPN does NOT hide you. It makes it easier. Think about it this way.

Tom, Dick and Harry each have an Internet connection, with different ISP and they all go to diferent sites. If government wants to know what they did, each ISP must be contacted, and/or each person's PC searched, and each one of them can say they know nothing about it because of malware, or hackers.

If they all have a VPN, all the government needs to do is go to the VPN provider and get all logs from them, in one place. They will have proof that Tom, Dick and Harry contacted with their own computer, IP address, paid with their own credit card, and used an encrypted secure connection that all but elminiates any chance that t was done by hackers or malware. It is solid proof of Tom, Dick and Harry's actions.

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand computers at all. Computers, how do they work???

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why your VPN does not reside in your own country. Your government can go pack sand.

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Guy From V]

VPN sessions are most likely strongly encrypted insulating against any snooping on your connection...any cookies needed for the session are ephemeral keyfiles. Make sure your connection terminates quickly enough if the tunnel is broken and watch for DNS leaking. No logs could betray any data that would be of any use, some VPN companies say they don't keep logs (probably true, don't bet your life) and you can change server/IPs in a couple clicks. If you are paranoid, connect Tor through a VPN tunnel but this can be risky unless you watch what you are doing. Most VPNs are very safe, much safer than not having one at least.

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Chalnoth]

Good VPN services don't keep logs, so they can never reveal to a government which user had which external connection.

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but if you're trying to torrent via tor it doesn't provide any security or privacy at all. On the upside it does wreck tor speeds, so there is that.

If only they had been telling everyone this for years and years... oh wait.

Re:We're just getting sneakier....

[tepples]

Talk to your friends, I'm sure one of them knows a way into a decent private tracker.

So the first steps are to 1. learn to find friends, and 2. learn more specifically to find friends who use torrents. Could you elaborate?

They may have just made the pirates smarter

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really a drop in piracy, or just a drop in DETECTABLE piracy?

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Detectable Piracy Rates Plummet As Industry Points To New Copyright Notice System

Re:Correction

[Chalnoth]

Yup.

Of course, it's perfectly possible for policies to reduce piracy. But the most effective way of doing that would be to make legal methods to obtain media more convenient than illegal methods (e.g. streaming services).

But merely sending notices is far more likely to convince people they need to hide their access than it is to convince them to stop pirating altogether. When it's difficult or ridiculously expensive to get media legally, people aren't going to get it legally.

Re:Correction

[dryeo]

But the most effective way of doing that would be to make legal methods to obtain media more convenient than illegal methods (e.g. streaming services).

That's been happening as well. I understand that netflix_canada now actually has some good content, the media companies are trying to get into the streaming business and things like the CBC offer more and more streaming services.

how do they account for alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

i used to download movies. i received several notices from the service provider (comcast) that it's illegal. now i use watchfree.to to stream movies for free. so, some of those people might just be shifting to alternatives and the reduction might be less than 70%.

Re:how do they account for alternatives?

[Technician]

With some services, movies can be captured. Streaming or saving look the same.

Taxes?

[Needs2BeSaid]

I was under the impression that "piracy" was legal in Canada since they tax the hell out of all media related items.

I guess not.

Re:Taxes?

[kcwhitta]

As a Canadian, last I checked it was legal to download here but not to upload (i.e. distribute).

Re:Taxes?

[Needs2BeSaid]

Oh, yeah, that makes sense. NNTP should be revived. I miss newsgroups. Yes, they still exist but they're not the same anymore.

Re:Taxes?

[mark-t]

That "tax" (the actual proper term is a "tariff") is to subsidize private copying, not piracy.

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

The binary newsgroups are alive and well.

Re:Taxes?

[ArcadeMan]

But there's nothing to subsidize is you're making a private copy of something you've already bought/paid a license for, unless you think I should have to pay for a DVD twice because I keep a ripped copy for a media server?

Re:Taxes?

[ne0n]

I'm no lawyer but pretty sure it's ok to upload if you're using the cloud as backup. It's the cloud. What could be wrong with that?

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that tariff was applied to all media regardless of whether it was used for private copying of music.

Burn a cd or dvd with some of your pictures or personal data on it? The tariff was charged on that blank media and given to the recording industry.

And this shit goes all the way back to blank cassette tapes.

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Downloaded infringing content is still infringing, and knowingly possessing it can still make a person culpable for that... even if for entirely non-commercial purposes.

Of course, your best defense in that case is probably to deny that you ever knew it was infringing, but depending on how you obtained it, such a claim might be strongly questioned if the matter should come to that.

And of course, the infringing copy would still have to be destroyed... at your own expense. If you were genuinely unaware that it was infringing, I think you might even have a legal case for recover of such expenses from whoever you obtained it from, although ianal.

Re:Taxes?

[Needs2BeSaid]

I must have a crappy provider... I can't even find season 1 of Silicon Valley. (well, I do find encrypted ones with "instructions" to get the password).

Re:Taxes?

[Lumpy]

Yep, a few years ago I used to send a LOT of CDR's and DVDR's to friends in Canada I would trade for Cuban Cigars.

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

you do but even on good providers certain types of older content will tend to get taken down due to DMCA notices. more ofen than not you can get what you want but it isn't complete like it used to be. some of the more popular networks like HBO are quick to do takedowns which isn't a problem when you download new but it will all be gone in the long term

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are thinking of the blank media levy which they still charge and can't decide how to spend (literally they've been keeping the money from that tax since they started it in the 90s)

Cassette tapes? Yup
CD-Rs? Yup
MiniDisc? yup
Hard drives?
Flash Drives?
MP3 Players?

Laws changed around file sharing which made it illegal in most circumstances recently, as well it is illegal to circumvent DRM, so you can legally backup a Blu-Ray as long as you don't violate DRM restrictions (so if it is a movie or TV series or otherwise locked by DRM you can't make a backup).

They get you coming and going

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's old, so you need a provider that stores the last 3 years.
You can find the NZB with
http://nzbindex.nl/search/?q=silicon+valley+s01&sort=agedesc&max=25&p=7

Re:Taxes?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not legal and yes, there are a few extra pennies added to the cost of storage media that goes in a pot eventually shared among Canadian artists. So we get it from both ends. However, the penalty for piracy is topped to less than $5000 regardless on how much piracy you did.

Re:Taxes?

[JaredOfEuropa]

You would think so, and you'd be right. Except that politicians beg (or rather: insist) to differ. Same here in NL, downloading was made illegal but the taxes remained in place. Over here they even renamed it to the "home copy levy". There's a levy on all storage media (hard disks, blank DVDs), which is for "compensating authors and artists for copies made of music and movies from legal sources for private use". And since downloading stuff from the internet is now illegal, this means that this fee is levied solely on CDs and DVDs that you already own. Fuckers.

Re:Taxes?

[dmatos]

Downloading of copyrighted music files is legal in this country, because we pay a tariff on blank media.

However, the tariff only goes to pay for music. Downloading of any other form of copyrighted material is not covered by the tariff. This includes television shows, movies, video games, ebooks, and even audio books.

So you're partially correct, yes. But not totally, and not applicably to what people think of when they talk about downloading these days.

Re:Taxes?

[Guy From V]

1st rule of Usenet...

Re:Taxes?

[dryeo]

In Canada the courts basically said that personal copying of music is legal due to the (audio) media levy. The media companies never did really try for a levy on video media as that would have made copying video legal so now a blank DVD is much cheaper then a blank CD.

Re:Taxes?

[dryeo]

Only CDs (and cassette tapes) in Canada so blank DVDs are cheaper then blank CDs. After they got the media levy on tapes and CDs the courts ruled that making personal copies of music is OK as we'd payed the levy and the media companies didn't try to get the levy expanded to DVDs (they did try for ipods and such)

Re:Taxes?

[SuricouRaven]

No, you pay a tariff, and it's *still* illegal. The tariff is to compensate copyright holders for the assumed infringement. It applies only to music because when it was introduced, music was the only infringement of major concern. Technology wasn't up to copying DVDs yet.

Re:Taxes?

[squiggleslash]

I think that is the content industry view, however rotten it might be. The idea is that if you damaged or lost a book (or some other physical item that's hard to copy), you wouldn't expect to have any choice but to buy a new copy, so why should you have a choice other than paying for replacement with music or videos?

Re:Taxes?

[Cederic]

Don't post cascades to rec.humor

Yeah, sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

give it a week. Seriously, Rates are only plummeting cause Canadians are switching to VPNs to continue their habits.

You haven't fixed the problem, which is difficulty accessing entertainment legally (geo-restrictions, content blackouts, etc), you've merely moved the target and are forcing them to chase it again.

Detection rates have gone down cause fewer Canadian IP address are being seen on torrent swarms. Poll them in a week you'll find that no, they are still pirating. Just like everyone else.

In other news...

[meta-monkey]

"In an unrelated story, VPN services have seen a 3000% increase in Canadian customers."

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Source? I know you're being facetious, but I see this comment show up here often, yet no one seems to be able to correlate it with reality. I mean I have no doubt that some people really are just using VPN services, but the unless Canada is some technological superpower where every citizen has an IT Admin background, I'm guessing most users wouldn't even know what a VPN is.

I think the bigger question here is what kinds of metrics are used to come up with these numbers. I think we all know how easy it is to skew results by reframing the metrics.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Source??? I know you're being facetious, but I see this comment show up here often, yet no one seems to be able to correlate it with reality. I mean I have no doubt that some people really are just using VPN services, but the unless Canada is some technological superpower where every citizen has an IT Admin background, I'm guessing most users wouldn't even know what a VPN is.

I think the bigger question here is what kinds of metrics are used to come up with these numbers. I think we all know how easy it is to skew results by reframing the metrics.

Re:In other news...

[sjames]

Go to any torrent search site and the ads there (other thjan the porn ads) are all for VPNs so people can't see you download. I'm sure they could figure that out.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. VPNs are dead simple to use nowadays and so cheap - like $4/month or less. If you can figure out how to run bittorrent, you can figure out how to use a VPN.

It is like the one good thing the MAFIAA did for the net - promoting widespread use of VPNs. It may not protect us from the NSA, but being able to mix my traffic with thousands of other users behind the same IP address really pollutes the crap out of the web tracking databases.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Source??? I know you're being facetious, but I see this comment show up here often, yet no one seems to be able to correlate it with reality. I mean I have no doubt that some people really are just using VPN services, but the unless Kaneda is some technological superpower where every citizen has an IT Aemon background, I'm guessing most users wouldn't even know what a VRN is.

I think the bigger question here is what kids of metrics are used to come up with these nummers. I think we all know how easy it is to slew results by retaming the metrics.

Re:In other news...

[meta-monkey]

But it's pretty trivial to follow instructions to set up a VPN. So I'm willing to bet a post made the rounds in Canadian "music sharing enthusiast" forums (also high schools, colleges) that read something like:

1) Download a bittorrent client that uses SOCKS v5 (I like Deluge).

2) Go to privateinternetaccess.com and pay them $6.95/month.

3) Go to Preferences in your bittorrent client and fill in the connection information from your VPN account into the SOCKS authentication fields in the "Proxy" tab.

4) Trade, uh, Linux ISO files and COMPLETELY LEGAL THINGS.

Just saying, if somebody gets a notice, they're going to go searching for a way to not get notices, and while "duh VPN" is something techy, it's not a hard script to follow.

Re:In other news...

[tlhIngan]

Source? I know you're being facetious, but I see this comment show up here often, yet no one seems to be able to correlate it with reality. I mean I have no doubt that some people really are just using VPN services, but the unless Canada is some technological superpower where every citizen has an IT Admin background, I'm guessing most users wouldn't even know what a VPN is.

VPNs are stupidly simple to set up - every VPN provider has an OpenVPN based client software for every platform, or basically walkthrough step-by-step instructions on how to set up the VPN. (And from experience, if people want something, if you provide detailed enough steps including where to click, what to type, etc, they can achieve it - as long as you make it monkey-simple steps).

Canadians use VPNs for many reasons, including getting access to US Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other US-only services (which is a primary driver for VPN services). There's also DNS redirection services like unblock.us that do similar things.

It's also likely the intersection of those who use VPN services for entertainment and those who use piracy things has overlap.

Plus, I'd also think there's a rise of casual sharing networks again - perhaps instead of everyone downloading a copy, one person does and then shares it via portable hard drives or something.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

But how do these VPN's handle the bandwidth requirements as more join and keep good speeds? I mean I read a stat years ago that torrents alone take up a large portion of internet traffic.

Re:In other news...

[SuricouRaven]

I use another approach.
1. Find a friend who pirates a lot too.
2. Swap retroshare keys.
3. Goto 1.

Correction

[wodencafe]

a 70% decrease in [the detection of] online infringement. FTFY.

People still pirate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this really still a thing?

It seems so easy to entertain yourself cheaply, I can't imagine why anyone would willingly destroy their internet connection on a regular basis using p2p over this stuff.

Of course, the recording industry is in for a rude awakening if they think a lot of my money is going to them.

Re:People still pirate?

[cheesybagel]

I don't download any music files since I can just stream it from Youtube.

Re:People still pirate?

[Opportunist]

Not to mention that sometimes the people doing covers of some songs are actually better or at least more entertaining than the original group.

Alternatives

[phorm]

It doesn't hurt that Canadian Netflix etc has been improving their content, and the cable monopolies recently had to change to a-la-carte packaging for their services as well. There's also seems to be a bit of a dearth of great movies, so maybe there's less to pirate.

Re:Alternatives

[iONiUM]

Also 1/3 of all English-speaking Canadians use US Netflix, so I am sure this is also helping.

I know it's helping for me personally, as the first thing I do when I want to watch something is check Netflix.

Re:Alternatives

[Jason Levine]

The content owners seem to treat Netflix as if it were just a baby step up from piracy, but in fact Netflix (and services like it) are the content owners' best weapon against piracy. Imagine if Netflix were given free reign to stream every TV show over a week old and every movie over a month old (from all content owners). Even if they raised their prices, Netflix would be quicker and easier to use than any pirating software out there. Sure, some people would still pirate, but those people would pirate no matter what. For the rest of the users, you would see a massive drop in piracy.

And yet, content owners keep content off of Netflix and plan on how best to kill off the service.

Re:Alternatives

[MightyMartian]

Piracy really doesn't scare the big studios that much. What does scare them is Netflix becoming the gatekeeper to their products.

Re:Alternatives

[DarthVain]

Also there have been several launches of competing streaming content providers from both Bell and Rogers as well that offer additional options.

So far the a-la-carte packaging is a bit of a sham. I just signed up for cable and got it installed last weekend. I looked at the a-la-carte option, and they were not all that price competitive, nor very flexible. Many of the channels are not available either, only as part of larger packages, presumably because the content providers refused (AMC for example, and a lot of the sport channels).

That said, the actual legislative changes that come into effect actually do so in March 2016. So those that have offerings are really just testing the waters, or trying to get ahead of the ball for when the hammer really does drop. After March 2016, not only will they be *required* to do so, the way in which they do so, and the price points in which they do will change for the better. We'll see what the response is, they may try to sneak in more hidden fees, or contracts, or install fees, etc... or whatever end run they might make around the rules.

However one thing that does seem key that no one seems to have noticed, is that they are reporting in a percentage... of what? Instances of something being downloaded, or GB of volume. In the article it really only refers to bandwidth being used for piracy. That is key. As you say, movie quality may be down, however the big difference that anyone can tell you that has downloaded anything is the difference in storage needed, for say a movie VS a TV show. To get an entire season of something is going to be several magnitudes more than a movie. A movie in HD will be about 1.5 GB. The same quality TV will be like 20GB. So the BIG difference isn't so much that movies suck, it's that TV sucks. What I mean by that is that the best TV being produced now, is available on Netflix, House of Cards, Orange is the new Black, etc... Why bother pirating it? There are only a few exceptions to that rule such as Game of Thrones, which I am sure by itself makes up a fair chunk of the content they are actually describing.

I have no doubt that they are being intentionally misleading with their figures, as it wouldn't really reflect as a success on them, more of a failure of their clients.

Re:Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

and the second thing is check Amazon?

Re:Alternatives

[phorm]

Streaming week-old shows might be a bit much to hope for, but in reality if we even had better options for purchasing episodes that would great. Rather than the current cableco setup, I'd envision somewhere where you add credit, and then can choose what you view from your available credits (e.g. to watch the latest Simpsons or Big Bang episode is $0.25). Overall cost might actually be much the same but it would pull in the outliers who are only prone to certain shows and not willing to blow $50-100 on cable packages to watch the 1-2 commercial-ladel episodes a week.

This would seem to be an avenue where micropayments might actually work out well for everyone. They could even throw in incentives like a coupon towards buying the season with discounts from the episodes you already paid to watch.

Re:Alternatives

[Jason Levine]

There is something similar to this with Amazon VOD, Google Play, and iTunes. You pay per episode of each show you want to watch or pay a discounted rate and get the entire season. It's more expensive than 25 cents per episode, though. On Amazon, episodes typically cost about $1.99 for SD versions or $1.89 for the entire season of SD versions. (Obviously, they cost more for the HD versions.)

Or

[Anonymous Coward]

If they made content cheap and ad-free (Netflix, not Hulu) then not only would detectable piracy go down, but also all piracy would go down, and legitimate purchases would go way up. People aren't opposed to paying a reasonable amount to get what they want. People hate paying too much (fees), or forcibly (ads), or for stuff they don't want (bundling). Why is that so hard to figure out? Oh, right, I forgot about distributors (aka dinosaurs afraid to move on).

Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yet reports indicate that piracy rates in Canada have plummeted, with some ISPs seeing a 70% decrease in online infringement."

Or - and this is just a crazy wild idea - what they're seeing is a 70% decrease on their ability to detect infringement.

Because people moved on to proxies, the dark net, sneaker net, etc.

But that's not the main problem with this. A 70% decrease in infringement is not good news for the "industry" by any stretch, unless it is accompanied by a substantial increase in sales.

Until that happens, this is still a colossal waste of effort.

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

A combination of Netflix, VPN and sneaker-net has reduced the piracy in my friends to zero.

A much better metric would be increase in sales, of which there is probably none.

I tried for months to buy satellite in this country at their ridiculous monopoly rates, and they failed to even state clearly that they couldn't provide it because of this new thing called "trees" that block the signal.

No, not really

[NotDrWho]

The pirates have just been slowed down trying to read the weird French.

too late

[Anonymous Coward]

My Canadian friends have already downloaded the internet ;)

I now just wait a week after a movie is on torrent

[future assassin]

kill up my load and download away.

Never seen a notice yet.

Shifted to PVR or just not watching

[MyNameIsJohn]

I watch roughly the same amount of hours of TV shows/week and go out to see the same amount of movies/year (around 5-7?). The change was I switched from downloading TV shows after they have aired to PVR'ing every series I might want to watch. No more movies are watched, if anything I watch less if I download less. I changed to the PVR instead of downloading because I was worried about exposure to those legal notices and I am too lazy to do a vpn, though I would if I had to cancel my cable

The bottom line is I do not have any extra money for more content through 'legal' means.

I am capped out on entertainment spending and its getting less and less by the year if not month.

If I have extra dollars they will go to new sports equipment, a dinner out, extra food to have friends over...

We DO NOT have any more money to give them, if anything there is less, so they can cut their prices by 10%, I still might cut the cord. These services are the first to be cut in the budget, not the last.

Re:Shifted to PVR or just not watching

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, the funny thing is that I pay $180 a month for Rogers with all the channels but it's not nearly as convenient as downloading from the internet and putting it all in plex (which I can watch on tablets and on a tv with a set top box).If they had better delivery then that money could do a better job finding its way to the right content producers whether its reforming the cable system or over the top services like Netflix (which I also have and watch often) This idea that we who pirate want something for nothing is nonsense. We want convenience and they don't give it to us. The Rogers PVR (DVR) devices are horribly slow and using DVR functionality is a lot less user friendly than VOD but the VOD on cable (On Demand) tends to be slow with poor selection. It's an inferior product. So I download tv and movies and keep my own collection which I can watch months or years later using superior software.

Re:Shifted to PVR or just not watching

[tepples]

The change was I switched from downloading TV shows after they have aired to PVR'ing every series I might want to watch.

PVR works so long as what you want to watch is shown on TV. But there are a lot of movies and TV series that aren't shown on TV, DVD, or streaming. How is one supposed to lawfully watch the film Song of the South, the film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, or the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea?

ISP Snooping

[Anonymous Coward]

Is no one else bothered by the fact that ISP snoop through our browsing in such detail that they have any idea how much copyright infringement is going on?

Re:ISP Snooping

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a thousand things that have to happen in order, we are on number 8. You're talking about number 692.

Re:ISP Snooping

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me you are not just now thinking about what your ISP can figure out by monitoring your traffic? This has been true since AOL was doing dialup at 1200 baud. I'll also let you in on a secret, they collect this information and sometimes SELL it to others....

Questionable numbers

[Guspaz]

Bell Canada shows a 70% reduction, and Rogers shows a 15% reduction... and yet they are comparable ISPs of similar size who share the majority of their territory.

Re:Questionable numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just been too busy to consume media the way I used to.
I'll get back on it soon.

Re:Questionable numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I think one is seeing what they want to see

Re:Questionable numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

One of those two major providers has had a history of capping BW/DL speeds, after certain monthly thresholds, and the other has usually been quite permissive and unlimited, so thus that one has seen more reduction because serious downloaders never used the other. At least, not for long.

Re:Questionable numbers

[aevan]

Bell also has fun throttling of torrents, and pathetic monthly bandwidth caps. Could be that the people who'd pirate have changed to other ISPs, ones that aren't as irksome in their offering.

To use an example: simply by changing from Bell's DSL to another ISP's DSL, I quintupled my overall speed, removed a 50G monthly quota (which was actually paid extra over the original quota), increased reliability, am no longer throttled during peak hours, and pay 15$ a month less.

Re:Questionable numbers

[Guspaz]

Neither Bell nor Rogers have throttled anything for years. Both abandoned their practices voluntarily after regulatory pressure, and more recent regulation (the ITMP framework) essentially forbids throttling as Bell and Rogers had originally implemented it.

Re:Questionable numbers

[aevan]

If by 'years' you mean in the less than two, then I can buy that. If you mean three, then no as was on it then and daytime/eve+torrent = nosedive in all speeds.

Rest still stands though, and as more alternatives show up, people can and are jumping ship (actually got a mail from a new isp in the area the other week: better offer than Bell, but inferior to the ISP jumped to already).

Re:Questionable numbers

[Guspaz]

Notice and notice has only been in effect a few months. Bell and Rogers both stopped throttling in 2012 (although Bell announced they'd stop in very late 2011).

I got one of those..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. and it did give me pause. A bit of researched showed that the max they could sue me for is $5000 and that they would likely not bother. Their best course is to FUD you into a settlement.

And decent ISPs help too

[Atrox666]

Does Tech Savvy even do this?

Re:And decent ISPs help too

[rhazz]

Yes they do, I know someone who received an infringement letter from TekSavvy. That person started using a VPN after their second notice.

Re:And decent ISPs help too

[Minwee]

Does Tech Savvy even do this?

I don't know. Why don't you ask TekSavvy?

They have a similar name. Perhaps they have a similar policy.

I bought a private VPN and joined private trackers

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's funny? I actually buy a lot of stuff through Amazon, actual stores like HMV, take advantage of Netflix and other paid streaming services (and of course PVR because time shift)

But sometimes, being in Canada especially, there's content that I just can't get any other way, and for that I turn to the one source that always has stock and doesn't piss around with DRM garbage so...

hey industry, here's a big bag of money *shake-shake* that you could have *shake shake shake* if you fucking tear down your rigid, self-serving mode of business with invisible boundaries and "limited releases", but until you can get your head around that there's always going to be piracy.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What about increase in sales?

[houghi]

So even if people pirate less waht does that mean for the sales numbers?

Did they increase, because people absolutely want the content, regardless?
Did it stay the same, because people who pirate are not willing to pay, no matter what?
Did it decrease, because people use pirate software as a test to see if they like it and now are unable to make a choice?

Re: What about increase in sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the right question. You can't eat lack of piracy.

Am I a hipster?

[Anonymous Coward]

I must not like the right things, because I've never seen a notice or had that "call" from my ISP in my life, and I don't know anyone who has got it. There was one guy in college who got a call from his ISP, but all they said was something to the effect of "geez, your bandwidth consumption is through the roof, do you want to upgrade your speed"?

I'm guessing it's because what I pirate is not the latest greatest pop music, blockbuster movies and FPS games, and I'm not getting my shit from big mainstream tracker sites... which is weird, because I thought the torrent sites I go to ARE the big ones. If there are even bigger and more popular places, how have I remained oblivious to them?

There was a site a few years ago that would look-up your IP address and show which torrents you've been downloading recently. Never showed anything for me, even when I had my bittorrent client running 10+ torrents. At the end of the day, I think that's what's actually going on. People are moving away from whichever trackers are loose about user data (are we sure there aren't any corporations secretly running tracker honeypots). That or tracker sites are stepping up the anonymity for their userbase.

Re:Am I a hipster?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have received a couple of notices. They were for content that had been online for weeks or months. I suspect the copyright monitors don't monitor new torrents for a while. And only monitor some of the more popular titles.

Anyhoo .. count me among new VPN users, at least for a few hours a week while torrents are downloading.

Re:Am I a hipster?

[FilmedInNoir]

I thought to be a true hipster you need to like something ironically. However, having said that, my definition is when a group of people form a temporary sub-culture
surrounding something new. (ie. vaping) I actually like 80's TV, so my downloading Emergency! is covered under nostalgia. I also like MST3K, I think that falls
under geekism nerdaphile, whatever. Other than that, my piracy comes in other forms now, far more ingenious than the primitive torrents of yesteryear.
Well, IPTV anyway.

There's only one solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow a beard. Call the jihad upon them, in the name of Allah the Merciful, and bomb and behead the shit out of them. The only thing that really scares a rich white male is a brown-skinned swarthy bearded man screaming ALLAHU AKBAR.

Re:There's only one solution

[Opportunist]

Ya know, I wonder why them terrorists don't do that themselves. Why don't they blow up some nasty corporations instead of, say, subways and running events? They really suck at PR, do you have any idea what goodwill they could harvest if they blew up some corporate HQs?

Re:There's only one solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya know, I wonder why them terrorists don't do that themselves. Why don't they blow up some nasty corporations instead of, say, subways and running events? They really suck at PR, do you have any idea what goodwill they could harvest if they blew up some corporate HQs?

You do realize the World Trade Centers were just a massive corporate HQ....

Scams

[Anonymous Coward]

And probably a 700% increase in "WE CAUGHT YOU DOWNLOADING X AND HAVE LOCKED YOUR COMPUTER, SEND $Y TO US NOW AND WE'LL UNLOCK IT" style malware scams, because now many more people will think they're legit.

Sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see, the article says that piracy rates have dropped 70% according to "CEG TEK".

Fair enough, so who or what is a "CEG TEK"?

CEG TEK International (formerly Copyright Enforcement Group) is a Los Angeles-based copyright monetization firm. The company also conducts and releases studies about piracy of motion pictures, music, and other forms of digital media.

So, draw your own conclusions.

http://fightcopyrighttrolls.co...

Re:Sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good post.

Even taken at face value, the statisic is meaningless unless we also have figures derived by the same company, using the same methodology, from comparable areas over the same timeframe.

Well, what do you know.

[He Who Has No Name]

Threaten people with total legal impunity and they tend to not want to get eaten alive.

Next you'll tell me that making it a condition of employment that workers live in a company dormitory, buy food from the company store with company scrip, and sign hideous non-compete contracts, all reduces cost for corporations.

Re:I now just wait a week after a movie is on torr

[Anonymous Coward]

That is something I've wondered about. If you're not downloading stuff that's still playing in theaters/HBO/etc., do they even bother to send notices?

Most of the things I download tend to be a few years old at least, well into the long tail of profitability. I'd think an automated system could just send out notices for *everything*, but maybe it's really only the new stuff they care about....

Maybe it's because...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 70% of all new movies are shit not even worth pirating?

Re:Maybe it's because...

[Opportunist]

If movie quality was any reason for a rise or decline in copying, infringing would have hit rock bottom years ago.

Re:I now just wait a week after a movie is on torr

[future assassin]

When I download lots of old stuff 5.10,20 and etc years I leave upload limit open so people can get it. For anything brand new, I now wait a bit, turn off uploads and download to my hearts content.

Nice. Do they buy more now?

[Kartu]

Did that have positive impact on sales of the corresponding content?
Because if not...

The real reason for the drop

[CanadianMacFan]

Sorry folks but the hockey playoffs are on and we are busy watching that. Once they are over we'll be busy with the short summer and be outdoors. Once the fall rolls around then the torrent rate will spike back up as we catch up on the TV shows and movies we've missed.

That's bad,

[Anonymous Coward]

right?

So.. Sales are up then?

[scsirob]

I guess this must mean that Canadian music business is booming! I mean, all those nasty downloaders would otherwise be buying music and movies, right? The billions of losses story?

Show the correlation.

Re:So.. Sales are up then?

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I find it hard to imagine music is even a major target for downloading these days - it's way too easy to simply go to youtube, find the song you want, download and convert it to an MP3.

Re:So.. Sales are up then?

[Shados]

Even if they're not, it could still help in other ways.

Right now a lot of multimedia content, like music, is complete garbage. But its still "popular", because its "free".

If people end up only consuming good stuff, and ignore all the bad stuff (because now they have to pay for 100% of the content they consume), it would force the industry to actually pump out content people want to pay for.

This is true of almost everything where people can just sidestep rules. It puts a lot of noise on the signal, for those responsible to actually do what people want. ie: as long as people cheat the food stamp systems, you don't really know how much you're helping those who really need it.

Same deal here. As long as people can just pirate music, you don't know how much stuff you pump out people actually want.

But are they making more money.

[ewibble]

The question is, are sales significantly up? Assuming that pirates are not just hiding better, then if sales aren't up then clearly piracy doesn't actually significantly effect the companies bottom line.

So lemme get this straight

[Opportunist]

ISPs send out threatening letters to those that they find copying. ISPs see a 70% drop in copying.

In other words, a third of the people who got the "you filthy pirate" letter simply ignored it.

In other EVIL news...

[DarthVain]

MPAA owned subsidiary VPN services collected an increase of 3000% in Canadian customer information... All part of their evil plan to get at your information that the ISP refuses to give up!

no choice!

[Anonymous Coward]

sometimes, we have no choice to download illegally, for instance AMC still refuses to sell The Walking Dead to QC French channels, so for people in QC, the only way to watch TWD in French, is to wait for an episode to be aired in France and download it a few hours after...

Surely that's the wrong metric though

[91degrees]

Piracy may well be down.

Are sales up?

The only reason piracy is illegal is because it affects legitimate sales. If people are not getting media for free, but still aren't buying it (for whatever reason) then this is a net cost to the economy.

Here's my theory

[msobkow]

My theory is that with Crave TV and such coming on the market, people don't need to pirate everything that they used to.

There is also a new IP TV provider in Canada that isn't tied to the internet infrastructure provider. That may have something to do with it as well.

And? Are people buying more digital content?

[gweihir]

Because that is the real kicker: The copyright industry believes every infringed copy is a lost sale. Quite a bit of research found that it is actually the other way round: Copyright infringement increases legitimate sales. Hence these more effective practices to reduce copyright infringement should also reduce legitimate business.

Will be interesting to see, especially if this turns out to be happening and the content mafia cannot believe it.

Why content owners don't like Netflix

[rduke15]

The problems content owners have with Netflix could be what I heard from one of them (in Europe):

- They pay very little

- They give absolutely no information about how many viewers watched the content.

For content owners, Netflix is pretty useless. For smaller movies, it may be more expensive to find and package the content to deliver than what Netflix will pay. (It is in fact time consuming to hunt down the movie files at the right framerate in the right encoding, audio matching the framerate in the wanted languages and mix versions (5.1? LtRt?, both?), subtitles in the right format and with times adjusted for variable logos etc.)

Does someone know if Netflix in the US is also so strangely secretive and also pays so little? After all, they do know exactly how many viewers watched what and when, how many interrupted without watching to the end, etc. They just don't share it per movie with the movie's owner (or rather distributor).

Re:Why content owners don't like Netflix

[phorm]

"They give absolutely no information about how many viewers watched the content."

Why would this matter? In TV-land, the networks care because the *advertisers* care about getting their ads in between popular shows, and one of the best benefits of Netflix is that there *aren't* any ads except perhaps existing product placement in-show. In Netflix, there seem to be lots of places that discuss which shows are most popular, so there should at least be some gauge as to whether the show is going to be worth carrying forward from wherever they're getting that information. Judging by how Netflix was willing to pay the US internet carriers their pound of flesh, I'd imagine that they have margins enough to still send good cash to the content owners.

Re:Why content owners don't like Netflix

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason I can think of. Although, I'm not sure the parent post was thinking of this....

Product placement.

Product placement is *huge* in many shows. Even older shows like Seinfeld had product placement after product placement, and it paid HUGE. Just the cereals that were on Jerry's shelf in the background all of the time?

We paid placement ads by cereal companies...

So, that could be a valid reason for needing to know viewership.

However, I think this lack of usage stats is a bit of a bogus statement. I'd think that Netflix would want to pay on a per-watch basis. They're not going to want to pay for movie $x, and it is never watched....

No.. I think they provide watched stats, in the form of paying for the content on a per-view basis.

Regardless, product placement is BIG. HUGE in TV series.

If you see someone drinking a Coke on a series, movie, whatever, it's because Coke paid for that...

Re:Why content owners don't like Netflix

[jabuzz]

I call bullshit on that. If you are going to produce a DVD/BlueRay then you can turn the very same content into something suitable for Netflix for something close to zero cost. In fact I am sure that Netflix would happily employ someone to do the work for you using DVD's and BlueRays as the source material.

Given that almost all (we are talking like 99.99%+) new content ends up on DVD this is a facetious argument. Huge swathes of older content is also on DVD/BlueRay as well.

Re:ciri ciri crystal x asli

[Anonymous Coward]

are you aware this is primarily an English language site?

mmhmm

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news... VPN sales are up 70%...

And when they see a 50% drop in sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they still blame it on piracy, or will they admit that "piracy" is free advertising that works, rather than annoys the fuck out of people.

That Explains My First Notice

[Maltheus]

I always VPNed to Canda for torrenting until I got a notice for torrenting a show about pirates (ironically enough). Wasn't sure if it was the VPN provider cracking down or a Canada thing. Haven't had any issues after switching to another country.

I do wish the movie/TV industry would sell me the content in an acceptable format though. I haven't pirated music in many years. Not since I could get a decent quality, non-DRM MP3 for a reasonable price. Money is not the issue for me, so much as the video format.

Re:Sneakernet

[Technician]

Phones, tablets and micro SD cards. What big brother can't see..

The ease of online file sharing has become risky. Other avenues are much less risky in a schoolyard.

My kids had no problem loading their devices to the max without using the home internet connection.

Relevant metrics?

[Anonymous Coward]

As many have pointed out copyright infringement can be disguised - I live in a bandwidth starved part of the world and sneakernet is very common - as just 1 example. So the two pertinant questions become: 1) has demand for media dropped along with the supposed plummet in copyright infringement. My strong suspicion is: no, people still consume similar volumes as before.

and 2) Have sales increased? This has always been the claim that if copyright infringement was zero that there would be a huge sales to make up for it. So we need to see that spike in sales or we can just assume that the infringement moved to a new, harder to detect method of transfer.

Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights.

[trout007]

The real underlying flaw with Intellectual Monopoly laws like Copyright and Patents is they violate property rights. Someone that creates a movie now has a legal claim on my hard drive. They can show up at my house and use violence against me if I arrange the magnetic patterns on a disc I own in a particular way. The same with patents. They can use force against me when all I have done is arrange materials I own in a certain pattern. These laws violate my property rights.

Your only argument is that monopolies can get rich is correct. When you can use force on peaceful people to make them pay you then you tend to get wealthy. Not a big shock there.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Those things violate your property rights in about the same way that you having your house violates my right to freedom of movement over the land it's built on.

All property rights are artificial, including physical ones. The natural state of things is that if someone has a bigger stick/rock/gun than you then they can take any physical possession you have if they want to. We create and enforce legal property rights in the hope that they will help society to run better than that. You just seem to want a version of property rights that says you get to have everything you want but everyone else doesn't get anything in return.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[Merk42]

I didn't actually expose my genitals to that child, all I did was arrange the zipper on a pair of pants I own in a particular way.

netflixy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to download an album to see if I liked it. If I did, I bought it. If I didn't, I didn't buy it. Now I don't have to do that. Artists put up part-song samples, youtube has live or even studio versions. etc etc.
I used to download television series that I had missed, or wanted to re-watch. Then along came Netflix, Shome, Crave, OrangeTV (or whatever it is) etc....now I don't have to do that.

Basically THEIR technology caught up with WHY I was downloading. Now I don't download.

Re:netflixy...

[Anonymous Coward]

OH ya, and the cost of TV shows on DVD declined. That too. So I spend $20 or less and buy a series if I want to watch it....why spend the time/effort/bandwidth downloading?

Is this new?

[Imazalil]

Haven't ISP's been sending out these notices essentially forever? I remember a friend (cough) getting one in '99 or 2000 from one of the major ISPs.

Pub + 50 vs. life + 50

[tepples]

The Berne Convention treaty requires a minimum of 50 years.

No, it requires a minimum of life + 50 years.

You're both right. Most motion pictures are works made for hire. Berne defines "life of the author" as zero years when determining the copyright term for a work made for hire. US law defines it as 25 years after publication or 50 years after creation, whichever is sooner.

Patents last 20 years; why can't copyrights?

[tepples]

One Cambridge researcher says the optimal copyright term is 14 years, closer to the patent term. Patents last 20 years; why can't copyrights?

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[trout007]

Property is scarce and property rights are consistent and non-contradictory. Ideas are not scarce. They can be freely reproduced without loss. Monopolies in ideas cannot be consistent and contradict property rights by giving others claim to your property.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Time of life is scarce, something a person/collection of people used to create content.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Ideas are not scarce. They can be freely reproduced without loss.

Right. The marginal cost of extra copies of information is very low. Unfortunately the initial cost of putting that information together may be extremely high, and if the information is never collected it won't be distributed either.

So we create an economic incentive to encourage that creation and distribution, effectively amortizing the initial development cost over all those who ultimately obtain a copy. This might not be the perfect economic model, but I'm still waiting for anyone to offer a plausible better alternative.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[trout007]

There is already Economic incentives to create. You just won't have a small group of people get incredibly wealthy without a monopoly. Just like every other monopoly.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There is already Economic incentives to create.

Really? What are they, then?

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[trout007]

You may be able to make a profit but you just won't get monopoly profits. Just like before recordings actors and singers earned money from live performances. if you want to make movies you have to keep them under your control in a theater, insert ads or product placements, fund through crowd sourcing, or try to come up with digital distribution easy enough that people will pay instead of copying. There are plenty of ways to make money creating content without monopoly.

Go for CC music

[Mathinker]

> piracy the only sound and reasonable choice.

There are quite a few sources of legally free music, like Jamendo and ccMixter. And it's also easy to find non-free music which is not funding whoever it is exactly you don't want to fund. Often direct from the artist!

Even though I've only done it once or twice, my personal favorite way is to buy from good local acts at a live venue.

You lack imagination (even though I sympathize with your feelings).

Re:Go for CC music

[rtb61]

I did not say I made unlicensed content, I just said it was becoming the only sound and reasonable choice. Nowadays when I here modern music and auto tune all I hear is the greed and it really is off putting, so my preferred choice is to not listen at all. Every now and again I might listen to some old content but that is to recapture the emotions recalled with specific memories associated with that content, rather than listening to the music and I really don't do that much either. Other than that maybe some bargain bin diving where their reward is absolutely minimal. Of all things I am most enjoying https://archive.org/details/ol..., it is really quite fun to listen to when going for a constitutional, walk that is.

Re:Intellectual Monopolies violate property rights

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There are plenty of ways to make money creating content without monopoly.

Sure there are. The trouble is, every single one you listed has serious drawbacks compared to the current model.

Just like before recordings actors and singers earned money from live performances.

Yes, they did. Plenty still do, though for most of them it's beer money rather than a career.

But before recordings you didn't need a sound engineer in a studio with a mixing desk and a lot of expensive equipment. Who pays the sound engineer in your world? Or the composer of the symphony? Or all those people whose names come after the actors when the film credits roll? Your model might work for the latest production of Hamlet. It isn't going to produce Fast and Furious 8.

if you want to make movies you have to keep them under your control in a theater

That damages the experience for the majority of viewers, who no longer have the option to enjoy the movie in the comfort of their own home.

insert ads or product placements

Because an ad-funded internet is so good that people invented ad-blockers, and blatant product placement doesn't in any way reduce the enjoyment of TV shows.

fund through crowd sourcing

This is one of the more promising ideas on your list. However, right now, even the most successful projects on Kickstarter and the like are still coming in with an order of magnitude or two less funding than comparable projects generate through a copyright-based system. When GTA VI comes along, do you think it's going to be supported by a successful crowdfunding campaign?

or try to come up with digital distribution easy enough that people will pay instead of copying

People like stuff for free. I'd agree that some people rip content illegally just because of the convenience factor -- films out in theatres before you can buy physical media or stream a legal download, DRM, and so on. But the idea that the only reason people don't pay for stuff they can download illegally for free is because it's inconvenient is implausible.

Do you know what does work, very reliably, by your arguments about violating property rights? Locking down the Internet and limiting devices you can legally buy/sell/own in the first place to those that play nicely with your closed ecosystem.

The trouble is, the "information wants to be free" crowd think this is a joke and can never happen, and that cute sound-bites like "censorship is damage and the Internet routes around it" will overcome the will of the billion-dollar infrastructure companies that actually produce a lot of popular content and the governments with laws and police and jails. They will not, and all you're doing is pushing those powerful organisations towards systems where -- as, ironically, you suggested -- content providers will keep everything under their control. The only way to enjoy any content will be to rent it and access it via limited mechanisms.

New mediums hereinafter created

[tepples]

Personally, it seems extremely unlikely to me that any person or organization would think it worthwhile to do something based on any reward requiring a monopoly more than thirty years down the road.

The amicus brief by Dr. Seuss Enterprises in Eldred v. Ashcroft implied that one key objective of a long copyright term is to cover adaptations into new mediums created decades after first publication of a work.