ISPs Finally Abandon The Copyright Alert System (engadget.com)

"Major internet providers are ending a four-year-old system in which consumers received 'copyright alerts' when they viewed peer-to-peer pirated content," reports Variety. An anonymous reader quotes Engadget's update on the Copyright Alert System. It was supposed to spook pirates by having their internet providers send violation notices, with the threat of penalties like throttling. However, it hasn't exactly panned out. ISPs and media groups have dropped the alert system with an admission that it isn't up to the job. While the program was supposedly successful in "educating" the public on legal music and video options, the MPAA states that it just couldn't handle the "hard-core repeat infringer problem" -- there wasn't much to deter bootleggers. The organizations, which include the RIAA, haven't devised an alternative.
"Surprise: it's hard to stop copyright violators just by asking them," reads their article's tagline, which attributes the failure of the system to naive optimism. "It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."

Comments

error in whose ways?

[KiloByte]

"It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."

Right. So those Jews who tried to avoid concentration camps were merely misguided and should be told their race is so inferior they should welcome extermination? Arguing that an unjust law is not unjust is not that easy when it's you, personally, who paid for its enactment.

We should not dismiss the harm of copyright. It grieviously damages culture -- not just receiving culture as in "freeloading" watchers of a random crap movie, but also creating more works. It's impossible to create a cultural work without building atop of references and conventions built up previously -- it would be totally incomprehensible to any reader. Because of copyright, direct references to any semi-modern works are outright banned, and less direct ones are not banned yet only because the copyright cartel didn't yet bribe^W"campaign donate" appropriate legislation.

Culture is what puts us apart from animals (in the common sense of the word) -- as biologically we are animals with most of the same urge. It's transmission of works that makes humanity. Thus, a crime that hampers this transmission is a crime against humanity itself.

(You might call my stance "extreme", starting with self-Godwining at the start. Don't let the propaganda that "piracy is evil" cloud you.)

Re:error in whose ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so extreme? It's not about wanting stuff for free. Piracy is simply an answer to unfair practices that work against customers, such as bad value/money ratio, not having the right to use what you buy however you like, region locking, unwillingness to pay subscription fees, not wanting to share credit card information etc.

Piracy is not new, and the more big corps try to stop it, the worse it becomes. When VHS rentals were a thing people would rather go rent than get a bootleg. Now that's out of the picture so people would rather pirate whole DVDs and Blurays than buy them at full price just to watch them once and never touch them again. Not to mention the unskippable warnings and logos at the start.

Re:error in whose ways?

[KiloByte]

So, are you volunteering to work for free in return?

You mean, like Debian Developer work and upstream work on a bunch of projects? I believe I got my fair share of unpaid work covered.

Are you fine with clients just tossing your invoice for whatever you do for a living?

A non-advance invoice is a debt; it has been agreed upon beforehand (even if just verbally).

As for works of music/literature/etc, they worked fine -- better -- before the Worshipful Company of Stationers were granted copyright monopoly to limit who can own a printing press. Artists were paid generously, they just didn't get a monopoly afterwards. Grateful patrons paid them to ensure more good work is coming, as an incentive. A monopoly 75/95 years after death isn't exactly going to incentivize that artists to create more works, as he's, you know, dead.

Let's see music I listen to. I don't enjoy any drivel by MPAA/RIAA or their "artists", I listen mostly to symphonic black metal which is a niche genre (I also do +/-1 for every component, so symphonic is on my table too -- but the last time I checked, Mozart and Beethoven were long dead). Even there, musicians get only a small fraction of money for record sales, the portion is far better for concerts and merch such as shirts. Thus, I get the music exclusively via torrents, then patronize the artists some other way. Heck, I've even once put some money in a snail-mail anonymous envelope (many years ago, there are better ways now). I feel I've been skimping lately and should benefit them more, but you still can't accuse me of being a freeloader.

And, a disbanded band doesn't concert/etc anymore, so no incentive is misplaced, while I still enjoy their past work. It's just that to get my money you need to keep doing your part.

Re:error in whose ways?

[aliquis]

Whatever copyright is unjust could be argued.

Re: error in whose ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

DMCA NOTICE: You have used the terms "pirate" and "piracy" several times in your post which is in direct violation of the RIAA and MPAA's copyright on the issue of copyright infringement. You may be liable for fines and damages of up to $1,000,000,000,000 and/or imprisonment.

We'll also rub rock salt and bleach in your eyes.

Re:error in whose ways?

[aliquis]

There's major difference of being volunteering and being forced too.

Re:error in whose ways?

[KiloByte]

There's major difference of being volunteering and being forced too.

Most of recipients are naturally freeloaders, and that's expected. When a merchant in medieval Genoa or a partician in ancient Rome sponsored a work of art, the plebs got to see it for free. In ancient Greece, there were even special funds so the poor can be exposed to culture. Some goods are scarce, and those are naturally limited -- during a famine, I wouldn't share my last bread no matter how loud the preachers speak -- but most artwork doesn't get used up just because some enjoy it for free. That statue on the Forum doesn't go away just because that uncultured pleb dared to raise his gaze upon it. Denying people access to an infinitely copyable good -- that's a special kind of evil.

Economics say, if the marginal price of a good is zero, the fair price is zero as well.

Obviously, such goods don't get created for free. Those with a disposable income get to decide what gets created. So instead of enriching the mafia that steals from the artists, go and patronize them directly. As middle-classers, we can decide what culture gets created instead of waiting for a 1-percenter to "trickle down" on us. It's culture that's worth fighting for, those private jets I can do without (even if I wouldn't mind owning one).

For tangible goods, you should get to keep what your produce. But for goods that can be replicated at no cost, why would you care that someone else gets for free what you paid for? You don't get any less of it -- so both you get to keep your piece, and Billy Bob gets a copy.

Quoting MAFIAA's words: "would you download a car?". If I have access to a reliable enough 3D printer, the hell I would! And I don't give a rat's ass about the car makers cartel's lost profits.

Re:error in whose ways?

[ShanghaiBill]

I forget the last time a business willingly changed its model rather than simply trying to force its customers to continue to accept the way it's always been.

That doesn't work if your customers have the freedom to switch to an upstart competitor.

Re:error in whose ways?

[Princeofcups]

Most of recipients are naturally freeloaders, and that's expected. When a merchant in medieval Genoa or a partician in ancient Rome sponsored a work of art, the plebs got to see it for free. In ancient Greece, there were even special funds so the poor can be exposed to culture. Some goods are scarce, and those are naturally limited -- during a famine, I wouldn't share my last bread no matter how loud the preachers speak -- but most artwork doesn't get used up just because some enjoy it for free.

I'm becoming more and more convinced of this. Two examples. There is a new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 coming out in a couple of month, fully crowd funded. This is art that people WANTED, and we PAID for it. It wasn't forced down our throats. Another example is my favorite band Killing Joke. One member is an art restorer. One is an active music producer. One lives a no frills life style in Prague. And the last is composer in residence for the European Union. The band is what they do for the LOVE of art, not the PROFIT. They make some money touring, but almost nothing off their records.

Fuck the MPAA. We will have art and culture, and better art and culture, if they were to disappear tomorrow. They are no longer the distribution system of art to the masses. They are the road block.

Re:error in whose ways?

[AthanasiusKircher]

You make a lot of good points. However...

When a merchant in medieval Genoa or a partician in ancient Rome sponsored a work of art, the plebs got to see it for free.

The problem with old patronage systems is that rich people decided what art existed. One might argue that's still the case with publishers and labels running the show, but it was even more extreme in the past. One of the problems with many copyright systems is that they allowed artists to effectively give up their rights to publishers in exchange for printing, promotion, etc. Copyright law does exist to allow invested parties to recoup their initial costs in creating a work (both artist and publisher), but you are right to note it also should encourage future art production... and thus the primary rights should always favor the artist.

Unfortunately, our current system tends to lead many piracy advocates to a cynical line of reasoning, "Most of the money goes to the label/publisher/whatever, anyway -- so I'm not even helping the artist!" Setting aside the fact that labels and publishers have added "value" to art in many cases in the people they employ -- from recording engineers to copy editors, some of whom play a major role in improving a work -- this is a valid point. And it's an argument for significant copyright reform, not necessarily the dissolution of the entire concept.

Anyhow, the old patronage system certainly had advantages, but the "populist" aspect of most piracy advocates was NOT one of them.

Denying people access to an infinitely copyable good -- that's a special kind of evil.

I'd like you to go back to Florence at the dawn of the modern copyright restrictions (late 1400s) and make that argument. Do you know WHY copyrights first were created in Europe? To disseminate knowledge.

You see, in Florence they had these learned patrons and rulers for a few generations who were ready to move things out of the "Dark Ages" and valued learning. So they were encouraging stuff like translating editions of ancient Greek and Roman works and republishing them so people could read them and rediscover old knowledge.

But a problem arose -- a publisher would work with a learned translator (not many read ancient Greek at that time) to create a quality edition, but the moment they published it, some guy down the street would buy a copy, take it to his printing press, and retypeset the thing. A bootleg edition could appear within months or even weeks, though likely with a lot of errors and quality problems due to the speed it was produced. But the bootleg edition was also cheaper, thus drawing business away from the people who made the initial investment in getting the translator etc. (And it wasn't just translations of ancient texts -- it was also new learned treatises with practical knowledge.)

If this were to continue as a practice, the publishers wouldn't have an incentive to keep outputting new books.

So the learned rulers realized the need for a protection of this investment -- and they granted a form of copyright, generally for terms of 5-10 years.

Whether or not you think copyright is still relevant TODAY, calling the whole concept "evil" is simply a misunderstanding of how it came into being in the first place -- i.e., a way to promote knowledge and encourage its production/dissemination in quality editions.

I'll happily join you in criticizing most of the aspects of copyright that you complain about. Copyright terms that extend to nearly a century after the artist's death are absurd, as are many of the other elements you mention. But if we go back to historical statutes of 7-10 years for an artistic monopoly, I don't think the arguments are so bad. (Or even the terms of the original U.S. copyright act in the 1790s, for 14 years.) And your arguments about music sound good when you're talking about a touring band selling tee-shirts or whatever, but what about forms of art or artists who don't want

Re:error in whose ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

A business doesn't change its model, another business with a better model displaces it. That only works when the incumbent doesn't have a monopoly.

Re:error in whose ways?

[ArmoredDragon]

Why so extreme? It's not about wanting stuff for free. Piracy is simply an answer to unfair practices that work against customers, such as bad value/money ratio, not having the right to use what you buy however you like, region locking, unwillingness to pay subscription fees, not wanting to share credit card information etc.

Or it's just karma. The only reason Hollywood is even a thing is because they wanted to move the studios far out west so they could avoid paying patent royalties to Thomas Edison.

And at the end of the day, good things often come from copying.

Re:error in whose ways?

[Bert64]

Indeed many of us make our work available for free in the form of open source software. Many more people work for free by donating their time to various charitable causes. People can and do work for free.

Most people feel that some compensation is deserved for hard work, the problem is the extreme greed of many in the industry. Why should someone still be able to earn royalties from some work their grandfather did 100 years ago?

There is also the extreme damage this does to our culture, much of the work being created today is being locked away on drm encumbered media and will no longer be available to purchase after a couple of years. By the time the copyright expires, most works will be long forgotten, any original media is likely to be unreadable and playback devices are not going to be easily available.

Copyright was about give and take, the idea was that we (society) give artists a chance to profit from their work and in exchange their work falls into the public domain after a reasonable length of time. The default state is that no such thing exists, and works are immediately in the public domain to be copied. The original copyright term of 20 years made sense in the days of printing presses and horseback courier, but today where the internet allows media to be distributed worldwide in an instant even 20 years is far too long. Now copyright is massively distorted against the public.

Re: error in whose ways?

[stealth_finger]

Oh boy, it's another "Work was already paid for" meme.

So, you genius, where does the money for subsequent works come from?

From the actual sales, dickhead. Most people pirating wouldn't have paid for it anyway and only get it because they can or are you on the every download is a lost sale bandwagon?

Re:error in whose ways?

[Bert64]

A period of 7-10 years made sense in those days, when a work had to be printed and then distributed slowly via horses and sailing ships...
In these days, a work can be distributed instantly worldwide through the internet and yet instead of taking advantage of new technology, publishers are creating artificial barriers to restrict distribution.

And most work becomes abandoned after 2-3 years, at which point there is no legal way to get hold of the work. The copyright holder clearly sees no commercial value in the work, yet they prevent anyone from having it at all.

Copyright terms should be short, to reflect these modern times... Distribution should be on fair and non discriminatory terms, and work should fall into the public domain once copyright expires or once the copyright holder is no longer selling copies - whichever occurs first.

Copyright holders should also not be able to place arbitrary restrictions on a work, if you make it available then you should make it available to anyone in the world on the same terms, and anyone who buys it should have the ability to format shift, watch on any device they choose and make backup or temporary copies for their own use, and should have the right to sell their copy (transferring or destroying any personal copies in the process).
It should be about give and take, but big media only wants to take

Re:error in whose ways?

[EmptyHead]

Symphonic metal is one of my newer choices as well. Real music with a bit more oomph than 200-300 year old classical. Discovered it while bored out of my mind living in Sudan for a couple of years.

Re: error in whose ways?

[Coren22]

The last one at least still exists. You've never seen a live band at a bar?

Re: error in whose ways?

[Coren22]

Considering that the media industry has been having record years for a while now, and still pays very little taxes, perhaps from their enormous profits?

Re: error in whose ways?

[Coren22]

https://smile.amazon.com/Iron-...

I don't recall paying $4 to rent movies at Blockbuster. Especially for a 7 year old movie at this point. The media industry is just plain greedy, if they offered their product without all the stupid delays, and at a reasonable price, the piracy would be much lessened, but instead they milk every movie for all it is worth.

Copyright Violations have always been...

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright violations have ALWAYS BEEN & WILL ALWAYS BE an symptom of something else than what the MPAA/RIAA want to admit. They are caused by either scarcity or there too low of a value proposition. Scarcity is when the user can't obtain a product any other way (such as a rare song, a rare book, etc.), and low value proposition happens when you charge too much for your product compared to what people perceive the value to be.

I bought close to 100x DVD movies over the span of a couple years from Big Lots when they were thrown into the 3$ bin. I wouldn't have purchased these movies if they were "dvd movie prices" = 20~30$, and I don't mean I would have purchased less of them... I mean I would have never bothered to spend a dime on any of them.

I now have crunchyroll, netflix, youtube red, and playstation plus subscriptions. I get access to approx. 6~9 video games a month, and as much streaming movies and anime as I could ever watch. If they don't have something I want to watch, I just watch something else. All the while NEVER seeing an ad (even without the use of adblock (which I -also- use for security sake, but still)

I used to pirate movies and games, but now I don't even bother doing that. The value proposition for the services I pay for is good enough for me, and I'm happy enough to pay for them.

Re:Copyright Violations have always been...

[ckaminski]

[q]Noone would pay Netflix if we had similar services for free,[/q]

Free means either ad-supported, or it means funded by someone hoping to turn a profit some other way, or as a loss leader for some other product.

You don't get services like Netflix for Free. It's just not possible.

Re:Copyright Violations have always been...

[gweihir]

Copyright violations have ALWAYS BEEN & WILL ALWAYS BE an symptom of something else than what the MPAA/RIAA want to admit. They are caused by either scarcity or there too low of a value proposition.

Very much this. Were I live, private downloading is legally tolerated, and I have hand instances were I bought the whole DVD-collection but found it unwatchable because of all the crap they put in there and the bad UI. So I download the hassle-free, good-quality, plays-everywhere "pirated" version in addition. Recently, I have been running more and more into the problem that a legal version was not even available. In that case, I regretfully download the pirated version without compensation to the creators or I ignore the show. But the real problem for the content industry is that I download more and more things that turn out to just be abysmally bad, and that I stop watching after 10 minutes or so and just delete it. Much of it is supposedly "AAA" content, but I do not even find it worth my time.

The morons in the content industry have created a combined scarcity and low-quality problem, just as most monopolies in history have. And, just like any other monopoly in history that overdid it, they are getting bypassed because people just do not see any good reason why they should feed that monopoly. There are by now enough people that self-publish, without DRM, and that can live just fine off their content. Who cares if only 1 in 10 pays, if the money that comes in to the creator is enough. Of course, they do not have each to feed 10 stupid, fat and arrogant "big content" people that think nothing would get created without them.

So essentially, these idiots are doing it to themselves.

Re:Copyright Violations have always been...

[Kjella]

Free means either ad-supported, or it means funded by someone hoping to turn a profit some other way, or as a loss leader for some other product. You don't get services like Netflix for Free. It's just not possible.

Without copyright we'd have a pot luck gathering of storage and bandwidth through torrents, the only thing you'd need at the top is a razor thin site with magnet links and a tracker with some ratio control. Sure it could never operate at $0 but "a friend of mine" is member on a private tracker with no fees, no ads and you get way, way more donation runs at Wikipedia. Even aside from price it's better than any service you could buy today, without content fees and bandwidth fees you could run "Netflix" on the loose change in your pocket.

Re:Copyright Violations have always been...

[religionofpeas]

And how will you be paying the actors and the rest of the crew ?

Re:Copyright Violations have always been...

[JohnFen]

Free means either ad-supported

Ad supported things are not free, they're just requiring a different sort of payment.

Letters

[sanf780]

As if any millenial knows what a letter is! Most of the letters that end up in my letterbox are (a) from the bank or any utility company or (b) unwanted and uncalled for.

I charge for end results, not "work"

[hackwrench]

Your way of accounting for exchange is fundamentally flawed. People don't actually pay for "work", they pay for end results. You may have built a fancy chair that has neat features that would be covered under the concept of intellectual property, but I should be able to ask another person to duplicate that chair without you having any say in it. The concept remains the same when the ability to make copies takes little effort. You want to ensure you get money for something? Prove yourself first and you can ask for money up front with a Kickstarter or Patreon account.

Movies.

[ledow]

Was looking for a film to watch last night.

(Bear in mind that I pay for everything legitimately. I don't own any music. I buy DVD's or LICENCED online content for everything I watch.

I do this so that I'm rewarding the creators of things I like. I've bought shareware. I've paid for donationware. I've bought some things several times over and bought them for friends.

The point is - I'm one of those rare people who pays for EVERYTHING I use. The vast majority of people I speak to are quite happy not to pay if there's no chance of being caught and will happily use Kodi or downloads or streams or tolerate what their child does, etc.)

I went on Amazon Prime. I didn't fancy anything on the Prime offerings, so I flicked through the "Buy" listings for movies. As there was nothing on Prime, I also loaded up the Google Play Store for movies and did the same on there. I have bought 50% of my online movies on each service, and even rented a couple of times.

I looked through all the recommended, the newly released, etc. and went back as far as I could without hitting anything I liked the look of. Fair enough, personal taste. Then I went through all the cheap movies, all dross and most I'd never heard of. Then I went through categories of movies, Action or Sci-Fi is always a good bet.

About 20 pages in, and a lot of scrolling, on both services the only things that I had any interest in were old 80's action / sci-fi movies. Okay, not a problem. I own a lot of them on DVD, though, but I wanted to watch online. I'm not going to pay a fortune again.

But then the problem hits - once I found a category I was willing to buy from and didn't already own, the prices were a piss-take. GBP10 for a movie from the 80's that's had endless re-runs on TV. 25GBP for a TV series that's on constant loop on multiple TV channels, and that's just the first series. Sorry, but I'm not paying that for an Arnie movie from the 80's, Indiana Jones, James Bond or a series of Friends to flick through. And the stuff I already have on DVD? Same prices. No way am I paying that just to "have it online".

The irony was, I'd have happily laid down the 25GBP for a complete boxset of something, or 10GBP for a new movie, or a few GBP for one of the old dross (Indiana Jones, etc.). But I couldn't justify it to myself to pay those kinds of prices.

In the end, after about an hour of scrolling through both stores, I bought nothing. My entertainment time was gone, my funds weren't going to be spent like that, and that's with me LOOKING to buy.

The other annoying part? You can't buy certain things anywhere. I love an old TV series called The Good Life (Good Neighbours in the US). I have it on DVD. I'd quite like it online too, to watch when I'm out on holiday etc. I bought series 1 & 2 online and - despite being from the 70's - series 3 is nowhere to be seen. Literally, nothing. I've been checking almost every month for years now.

Try and get Aliens:Special Edition. Half the online streaming stores just don't carry it at all, or don't mention if it is SE or not.

And then there are the TV series from years ago that still have never made it to DVD or online at all. The most annoying ones are like above - someone converted one series and then said fuck it and left it at that.

I have no surprise at all when I find out that people pirate or stream or whatever. They just want to watch the fucking movie that they like. But you can't. And even when you can, the price is ludicrous.

Because I won't pirate, this gives me one option. Stop watching. Even the old stuff. Stop buying.

The movie and TV industries are killing themselves. I have no sympathy for them.

Also, we TOLD THEM THIS several decades ago when they started on the pointless crusade against piracy. If they'd listened then, maybe they wouldn't have wasted money on stupid DRM schemes, they'd have not lost public favour, and they might have been able to try things like streaming, downloads,

Re:Movies.

[Megane]

Sounds like you need to get to work using Handbrake to re-encode your videos, then carry around the results on your own private storage. It'll also save your wireless data quotas and can give you a better picture than streaming. But you'll need to find an RPC1 DVD drive or firmware patch first, because the MPAA conspired with the optical drive industry to make drives fail to operate properly if there's the tiniest hint that you're trying to rip the contents of discs that you purchased, even to use only for your own private purposes.

(Note: don't use Handbrake to rip DVDs even with an RPC1 drive, I tried it a few months ago and it sucked at that. Find another ripper, and only use Handbrake for re-encoding.)

Re:Movies.

[MightyYar]

Just come to the dark side - everything searchable in one place, high quality, no DRM so it works on all of your devices. If you lose it in the future you won't be upset.

Re:Movies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I have the technical capability.

I refuse to do so, just to watch a movie. That's hours of pissing about just to watch a movie at some point in the future.

It's easier to just stop watching movies, which will also be a lot cheaper in the long run.

In the time it takes you to watch a movie, you could be ripping three more. If your only remedy is to stop watching, I don't even know why the hell you spent the time pissing about drafting your original post.

Oh, and you probably should stop talking about the "next" generation. Between the laziness and the bitching, you've certainly morphed into a lazy, spoiled Millennial in the worst possible way. Might as well sell your DVD collection, since pulling one out of the closet to put in a player is now too much effort for you.

Re:Movies.

[Solandri]

Fact is, movies and TV have to be considered purchases.

I just take the MPAA/RIAA up on their insistence that we're buying a license, not purchasing a product. Any song or movie I've already paid for, I just download it from a pirate site. After all, I already bought a license (on record, tape, CD, VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray).

Re: Movies.

[corychristison]

The one thing that I consider to be the biggest problem is the fact that simply repackaging a work is enough to consider it a new work, at least in the sense of licensing.

The second thing that seems to be the MPAA/RIAA don't care about customer convenience.

I've proposed it in the past, but was shot down by Slashdot because it would cost truck drivers their jerbs(!!!1!!).

What we need is a way to buy a license for a work that isn't attached to a specific physical or digital download. A "pirate license", per se, where it doesn't matter where or how you obtain the copy of the content, but are in the legal clear so long as you pay for the license.

Currently, even if I own a physical boxed set of a work, I still don't have the legal right to download it in a different format. Depending where you live, it's also illegal to rip or convert that boxed set into something usable.

Personally, I own a good collection of movies and tv shows, but I also downloaded them because it's more convenient than ripping and after my BluRay player crapped out I didn't bother buying a new one. Also, the people at YIFY are much more experienced than I at ripping.

Re:Movies.

[djinn6]

Sounds like you need to get to work using Handbrake to re-encode your videos, then carry around the results on your own private storage.

Or, you know, just download a copy from someone else who already did that. If you're making a copy from the DVD to the hard drive (and several more copies in the process of conversion), then you're already violating copyright law. Why go the extra mile?

Re:Movies.

[complete loony]

So run your own streaming server and keep everything at home. Plex is fairly easy to setup.

It's not too hard to automate ripping DVD's so the only user intervention required is swapping discs. Then you can use software like FileBot to organise everything consistently. But getting episode numbers of TV show DVD's right is a fiddly process.

Re:Movies.

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Nothing wrong with good 'ol DVDDecrypter. I still use it to this day.

You will never get the money of the freeloaders

[gweihir]

They will simply do without your content if you manage to stop them. They will never, ever pay for it. And, surprise!, it is actually much worse for you to have them not watch your stuff at all than to have them watch it for free. But it takes some minimal understanding of how a market works and how word-of-mouth works. You do not have that.

One exception: All the really, really bad "AAA" stuff would profit from people not downloading it early, because then people would go to cinemas unaware how their time will get wasted and their money essentially stolen. But since that morally amounts to fraud on your side, I cannot find it in me to see that any injustice is done to you there.

Re:You will never get the money of the freeloaders

[LienRag]

One exception: All the really, really bad "AAA" stuff would profit from people not downloading it early, because then people would go to cinemas unaware how their time will get wasted and their money essentially stolen. But since that morally amounts to fraud on your side, I cannot find it in me to see that any injustice is done to you there.

That, my friend, is the actual reason for "anti-piracy" laws: if people have access to good quality movies (or, more generally, culture), why would they watch marketed crap?

To content owners

[OneHundredAndTen]

Make all your material available all the time, everywhere, in convenient ways, at reasonable prices. Stop the artificial scarcity nonsense. Stop making people feel like criminals. Stop limiting where and when they can watch/listen to the material. Abandon the the-material-is-ours-not-yours-we-just-let-you-watch-it-as-and-when-we-want mindset. Hardcore pirates will still practice piracy. Normal people will do the right thing, just because it is right, and for peace of mind. It is, of course, your right, to carry on doing what you are doing. You might even make more money with the current approach. But, the thorn in your side, of millions upon millions of people enjoying your material for free, day after day, year after year, will dig in deeper and deeper. Piracy is not going anywhere. If anything, with faster and faster networks, it will get worse. The choice is yours: learn to live with rampant piracy, as is happening now, or with a modest amount of piracy - much easier to monitor, control, and suppress. The twentieth century is not coming back.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: unpaid

[hackwrench]

I have no problem with having them. If someone can manage to get a paid job working in that field without doing unpaid, in a job climate where doing so is the norm, that is fine too. It's all about what rules i believe we should be living under. Keep coming up with examples that could potentially change my mind, though. I may indeed find a situation that is so unbearable that I may say that I don't want this after all. Or go for how anpther system could have much better results. All i know is that I've spent quite a bit figuring out why things should be the way I think I want them.

Re: What's in a name

[hackwrench]

It os when Symphonic is at the beginning of it!

Re:MPAA have stolen from us

[KiloByte]

how dare you compare copyright infringement to concentration camps! WTF!

There's more than one type of crime against humanity. Decrying a second one doesn't make the first any less appalling.

Two more arguments:

• * you're bound to die anyway, murder "merely" speeds that up. In a few years, maybe a cousin will once mention that uncle yayoubetcha did so-and-so, and that's it. On the other hand, culture you create has a chance to live almost forever. And that's not restricted to "high" culture -- that cat meme might survive. A scatologic grafitti you painted on a wall might get buried by a volcano, then unearthed two thousand years later, cherished by scholars. Cut your name with a knife into the marble of an ancient church? Here you go, as a rare proof of Viking contacts with Byzantium. Some birch sheets of your kid scribbling survived? Your name gets to live forever.

  That's why I deem the likes of Diego de Landa in the league of Hitler -- the former nearly completely erased literate heritage of a mighty nation. Heck, as a Polack, I don't know even the names of gods of my forefathers, after the Church's work all we got are wild guesses that a deity depicted by a four-faced statue was Swiatowid ("sees-the-world") then years later, with no new evidence whatsoever, that's declared invalid, replaced with "Svantevit" ("holy lord").

• * what's worse, killing a million or reducing the quality of life of a billion? Reduce that quality enough, and I'll vote for the latter.

Absolute self-centeredness and ignorance

[raymorris]

You are seriously equating these two:

A) If you want to listen to Justin Bieber rather than the millions of free songs available on Myspace and elsewhere, please pay your 99 cents share of the cost.

B) Being toward to to death.

Your total and complete lack of any sense of perspective, your absolute self-centeredness, is sickening. Trivializing actual suffering by implying that it's no worse than paying 99 cents for a song (or choosing a different, free, song) is profoundly insulting to those who have actually suffered (though neo-Nazis surely appreciate your argument that the Holocaust was no worse than Redbox).

 

Re:Absolute self-centeredness and ignorance

[KiloByte]

If you want to listen to Justin Bieber

In this particular case of "culture", copyright restricting access grants us all a favour.

Your total and complete lack of any sense of perspective, your absolute self-centeredness, is sickening. Trivializing actual suffering by implying that it's no worse than paying 99 cents for a song (or choosing a different, free, song) is profoundly insulting to those who have actually suffered

A single murder is immensely worse than a single act of restricting access to culture. But compare the number of victims a single Auschwitz guard has killed to the number of lost copies that haven't been created because of actions of a single MAFIAA executive -- it's no longer anywhere close to one-to-one. There's so many orders of magnitude difference in counts, that, even though each act of the latter is miniscule, I do compare actions of the latter to those of the former.

Even worse, by your words I see that they succeed in reversing the notion of evil: they made people think it's piracy what's evil rather than preventing transmission of culture.

So, what about this example: killing Terri Schiavo vs burning the Library of Alexandria? A single act of terminating a human life vs a single act of cultural destruction.

Dyac. Tortured, not toward

[raymorris]

I've got to start using the Preview feature.
I don't use it because it's an extra click, which is basically the same thing as being in a Nazi labor camp as you starve to death, according to GP.

Well..

[fluffernutter]

Here come the goons to break people's kneecaps.

Re:More convenient than pirating

[fluffernutter]

I think the problem is that they are locked into a business plan that does not support reasonable payments. Aren't these the corporations that are supposed to dissolve into newer better companies which are stronger, and paying more and employing more people in a capitalist system?

Re: unpaid

[ewibble]

People should pay for work, work but historically end results are a good way of judging work, In your example of a fancy chair you judge the quality and quantity of work required to make the chair. Allowing other people to make the chair gives you a comparison and forces continual improvements in either cost or quality. If someone can make the chair better or cheaper than the original creator they should, that is what is best for society.

The problem with patents and copyright is you basically stop other people from making a chair because somebody came up with it first. So they can charge an unfair price up until the point people will just sit on the floor, there is no incentive to improve your product or make production more efficient. If you need any evidence of that look at car keys, to get one cut if it has an immobilizer in it, cost at the lower end $400, You can get an entire new alarm system for less than that, but because the hold a monopoly they can charge, not what they want because you will simply get a new car, or walk but a vastly unfair price.

For movies and electronic devices this is bad, but things like medicine this is down right mass murder, you are basically giving the customer an ultimatum give me all your money or die, oh by the way no guarantees you will live. I understand that it requires money but giving someone the power of life and death over someone in a bargaining situation is not going to end up with a fair deal. What you need to do is say Ok you can have a monopoly for a limited time but you have to prove you are not overcharging, and if it is discovered that you are using creative account practices to over inflate expenses, you will be charge with the crime you are actually guilty of which is mass murder.

Re: paing for work

[hackwrench]

No, we should not pay for work What we want is more and higher quality stuff for less work. When you reward work, that gets messed up.

One reason for piracy

[Applehu Akbar]

I believe in making a good-faith effort to buy what I want fair and square. But occasionally, I run into silly geographical restrictions on purchasing digital content, generally movies and books. I want to see a given movie that is available online but not in the US, am willing to pay a rental on standard sources, but they won't let me make this purchase.

I then take the easy way out and download it from a pirate site. Sorry, asshole middlemen.

Rrrrr!

[fox171171]

"It assumed that most pirates didn't even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways."

I'm sure that is true, what with the pirates being so busy stealing boats and robbing people at sea and all, they probably had no idea they were infringing on copyright.

Re: unpaid

[Plumpaquatsch]

The problem with patents and copyright is you basically stop other people from making a chair because somebody came up with it first. So they can charge an unfair price up until the point people will just sit on the floor,

So with patents, most people will just do what they did before you made an invention, until the patent runs out, then they can use it for free. Much better than you either having no incentive to make an invention, or keeping your invention a trade secret kept secrete with lethal force, like before patents.

Shame on Slash Dot, Again

[MooseMiester]

Interesting how they forgot to mention the two lawyers who got busted by putting porn files on TOR, and when the copyright alarm went off shaking down scared surfers at $1,000 a pop, that turned out to be a fraud.... Which was the driving force behind the ISP's getting off the program.

But that wouldn't bring out the intellectual property whiners, we've already seen today's story about how Trump is destroying the galaxy, we've already seen the story about solar energy jobs, and a Windows bashing story, and we need more traffic... Wait, how about another MBP bashing? Nuclear Energy? Surely we can drive more traffic, surely....

Windows...?

[pabloesgalhardo]

I always wonder if we wouldnt be living in a better world if the windows wouldnt have been so extensively pitrated...

Re: unpaid

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Patents at least have a half ways sensible length. 20 years. For a physically device, possibly something that could save a life.

Copyright is author dead + 70 years. Mostly for entertainment material. WTF?