That they jail and fine the founders is somewhat understandable, if only for tax evasion and for making money off other people's IP, but jailing regular users is going too far. There aren't making any profit from watching films, and since we don't know if they'd be ready to pay for that content, it's not clear at all that the film industry is losing anything.
Jailing them does seem like going too far, but I can see where it makes sense to at least fine the top users. The top users pay monthly to run seedboxes. They are investing in the infrastructure of the site in a measurable way. That does make them seem involved in its operations, at least to an extent.
At this point, the US should repeal the law completely, and let the chips fall where they may. Hollywood says we'll see a loss of culture (fewer movies, songs, books).
Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.
There's scads of money being made on the infrastructure, network, and equipment that's used to pirate films. Perhaps companies like Google and Apple should be paying Hollywood more for the material that people consume through their hardware/software. Hollywood's decline would be bad for both of these companies.
How about if a bunch of other large countries simply dropped the laws and outright encouraged their population to 'pirate' American media?
If the countries/regions were large enough (like say, the whole EU, or China or Australia or whatever else), that'd really put the US in a bad situation. Either compromise and fix copyright laws, or 'fight back' against countries powerful enough to threaten them in return. How far would anyone go to 'save' the status quo?
That's probably going too far in the other direction. Perhaps start by limiting all copyrights to 5-10 years with no extension? If you can't make good money from IP in 5-10 years you shouldn't be relying on income from it anyway.
"At this point, the US should repeal the law that engineers need to be paid. People say it will result in unemployment.
Let's find out."
This is obvious a reckless idea.
I personally think that copyright should last maybe 10 years or so, so we're kind of on the same side of this.
...but arguing that hundreds of thousands of careers, billions of dollars of market cap, etc., should all be potentially destroyed because "I wonder what will happen? YOLO!" is a bad way to approach the debate.
There isn't a law that engineers need to be paid (or at least not any more than minimum wage.) I don't see how these are equivalent.
A more apt comparison would be "The US should make a law that all software must be released open source." Would we all be out of jobs if that happened? Maybe, but it's at least a debatable point.
After studying copyright law for music business classes in college, I think that most conversations about piracy could be enhanced by a common understanding of some concepts that current (US) copyright law is based on.
The most important, I think, is an understanding of the first-sale doctrine[1], and how it differs from reproduction and distribution rights.
Many advocates for piracy argue that distributing copyrighted materials on the Internet is no different than reselling a DVD they previously bought. However, the distinction becomes more clear when we consider that by distributing a movie or song through the Internet, we are also making a copy of it. Modern computers have made it incredibly easy to make a copy of a work, to the point that it doesn't even feel like we're copying something. Because of this, it doesn't feel wrong to share a song or movie.
The actual amount of lost sales is immaterial when addressing the binary question of whether or not someone should be allowed to share a movie publicly on the Internet. The right to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted work to the public is solely that of the copyright holder - whether your doing so results in them losing money or not.
The question of appropriate penalties, though, is much less clear, and I think it's a shame that prosecutors and rights-holders have pursued defendants as viciously as they have. In many of these cases the judgments are unfairly strict (or at least appear that way), which just makes the MPAA and RIAA look more evil, and hurts everyone in the long run.
I feel that by reducing it to a binary legal question you've already dropped so many layers of nuance which help shape peoples own moral or ethical view of it. We all know that distributing copyrighted goods is against the law, reducing a complex question to an irrelevant simple one does nothing to help settle what people may feel is legal overreach.
Also even the "right to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted work to the public is solely that of the copyright holder" is not an absolute when you look at things like mechanical royalties.
That's a very good point - I wanted to point out that the issue is clear from a binary legal perspective, and my personal stance from an ethical perspective is that reproduction and distribution _should_ be the sole right of the original creator (unless otherwise assigned). I don't think I communicated that effectively though.
I can definitely see that it's not a simple issue, and I think you're right to point out the nuance that I didn't acknowledge.
Compulsory mechanical licenses are an interesting beast for sure. I'm not really sure what to make of them from an ethical standpoint.
I feel like most people are acknowledging the legal perspective in this thread. The comments are using words like "draconian" or "going too far" or "The law is clear: complicity in copyright violation". There's very little doubt that the four top pirates on that site are breaking some kind of law, it's more about how hard they should be punished or if the law is fair as it currently stands.
There's this interplay between the law and ethics as to how much your ethics are shaped by what the law currently says, vs the law being shaped by the communal ethics of people. I think when you reference a detail of the law (say first-sale doctrine) as a black-and-white first principle for your view of ethical IP handling it feels like there's not much room to move the ethical line. If there is some kind of absolute author moral right to first-sale, why even put a time limit on copyright or patents etc?
Personally I feel that people should be able to make a living (and more) from producing creative or useful work. Everyone benefits from that. I think the legal details beyond that including copyright terms, exclusivity, first-sale, reselling used software, importing of trademarked goods, mechanical royalties, license agreements, patent pools. All of that to me is ugly hacks on ugly hacks to try and make a workable system out of it. And I don't care if people throw all of it out so long as they can still come up with a viable way for people to make movies, make video games, make music, make medicine and make useful software applications while still being able to support themselves and their family that doesn't just depend on charity.
> Modern computers have made it incredibly easy to make a copy of a work, to the point that it doesn't even feel like we're copying something.
Which is why copyright should simply die. It's need has been replaced. The car has been invented and we're in court defending the horse. It's silly and backwards.
Except with digital content you must make a copy of it to transfer it as your sale. For that matter, you must make a copy (in some cases several copies) in memory simply to play it. Without any right to copy you have no rights at all.
Luckily for everyone the actual law is pragmatic. They don't set out some set of philosphy and then enforce whatever is concluded by these axioms being applied. The rules can be made arbitrarily to mitigate practical harm and neither the "but every number is technically in pi!" or "only rights owners have the right to control copying!" have any real world weight.
And the first-sale doctrine is why libraries are legal. (I imagine that book publishers once waged an MPAA-style war against libraries.) But libraries really have nothing to do with P2P piracy.
That's not the same as building a publishing operation and creating new copies of the items in their catalog for anyone who wants one. Lending doesn't create new copies.
Personally, I think IP is nonsense, but a lot of people disagree with me.
As far as we understand the number pi, every single combination of digit is part of it at some point. So technically Pi already contains a copy of any of your work and your future work even before you think of making it!
Doesn't that make digital copyright laws completely obsolete?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating pro-piracy or anything. I just think that our laws made in the 17-18-1900's and monkey-patched to these days are not prepared to handle digital matters. We should reboot our legal system. At least it's digital-matter version.
An "unknown third-party" has it back up as a public torrent index. I think it's a honeypot too. Don't use this service ever. Many people will still use it though..
Technically speaking they could target VPN users by infecting uploaded files with a simple trojan that pings home to a server, I assume you disable VPN after the download is complete.
It's been a few years since I've downloaded a torrent. Spotify and Netflix are more convenient for me. My own routine was a VM purely for running a client in a VPN-only environment, tables to drop all non-VPN traffic and file transfers using shared folders. The VM was "virgin" to prevent any identifable info leaking out. It is possible that this is slightly more hardened that a "typical" use if a VPN. I was thinking in this context when I posed the question.
The law is clear: complicity in copyright violation, for profit. It became a criminal offence across Europe in the last decade. This puts costs for prosecution on the state, not rights holders, and it allows for jail time. Whether the law is fair or right, that's a different question. Many people lobbied hard against criminalisation of copyright and patent violations, and lost. The movie industry is just too powerful and had too many friends.
But it's not nebulous. Help others commit a crime, you are an accessory and you are liable for fines and prison.
I can understand (but don't agree with) jail time for the site owner.
I don't know if I understand that for the mods, unless they got some money from the site.
I really don't understand it for the users, unless again they got money from the site.
As I understand it copyright infringement is only criminal if it's part of trade.
The article describes those users as downloaders, which to me means the rights holders can sue for damages as a civil action, but not that the state can prosecute as a criminal case.
Wow, that seems like in France, in year 2016, the purpose-built false idea that copying == stealing can still be used by the disingenunous lawyers to manipulate courts and destroy lives of people.
I don't know why someone would create a conspiracy to make stealing == copying when they were both clearly very illegal already. I do agree that naming the charge "receiving illegal goods" would actually fit what they are doing, though.
Well, you have to prove that you have no way to know what is being transited on your website and that you do everything under your control to not facilitate illegal behaviours.
Otherwise, it's like saying I own a big warehouse where I allow criminals to meet and exchange illegal items, but pretend I play no part of it.
I agree there are some gray zones on this for torrent activities, but when you have indexes with top movies of the week with filenames and metadata pretty clear about the content, how can you defend that?
That's right, we shouldn't place blame on the sites hosting all of the illegal software torrents. They started it completely with the intent of only distributing media in the public domain. They were also totally unaware of people using their project to distribute the latest Adobe Photoshop release, and thousands of movies.
Eh, I think it's clear they don't host the actual intellectual property; they're mostly like signs pointing to who actually is hosting the IP. It seems like prosecuting those actually hosting the IP is too much work or would cost too much money and so the torrent indexers are prosecuted instead.
Their motives are entirely relevant. Especially when they speak out against it. The most prolific site ever, has the word PIRATE in it. I mean come on.
Can you point me to a few of these "non sequiturs rationalizing piracy"? I can't find them, and I'm just reading people criticizing the state of the law and its penalties.
The arrested guy's spoutings are quite funny because they're exactly what the people on the receiving end of piracy tend to say:
“To all the [anti-piracy groups and authorities]: You are a lot of vile shit, destroying lives of people who are already struggling to pay their rent, their food, their bills,” he said.
Right, it's only pirates who have bills to pay. The people who make content get their homes for free!
“Why all this? Because they wanted to watch and because they didn’t necessarily have the capabilities to buy a DVD / BluRay or go to the theaters.”
If you own a computer and an internet connection good enough to torrent blurays then you can afford a DVD and a cheap player, certainly a theatre ticket. "Didn't necessary have the capabilities" is pure rationalisation - it's a fantasy entirely divorced from reality, intended to let him tell himself that he's a good person really.
Just a thought: what if I only ever buy secondhand DVDs. I can only afford (read: justify the expense of) secondhand DVDs and CDs.
The content makers / publishers / distributors never see a cent of the secondhand DVD market.
Downloading pirate films is similar in that sense.
Ok, the argument could be made that the secondhand market props up the primary market, but I don't buy it. I don't think people buy new DVDs with the thought of "I'll be able to sell this for $2 to the pawn shop after I've watched it" as a motivating factor.
And, there is no secondhand market for digital media. Media piracy is the flea market of digital downloads. So an argument could be make that media piracy severs that sector of the market we would only buy secondhand DVDs anyway.
Also 2x adult theatre tickets, AUS25 each, costs as much as my monthly Internet connection bill. I know there are a lot of Australians who would not be able to justify that expense.
> The content makers / publishers / distributors never see a cent of the secondhand DVD market
1) Japanese games publishers did want to prevent second hand sales, so your question isn't as bizarre to the rights holders.
2) They do see some of that money. I can afford to buy some new games, but only if I can sell my old games. I can only sell my old games if someone buys them.
>>The content makers / publishers / distributors never see a cent of the secondhand DVD market.
typically no vendor gets any profit from having the original buyer resell whatever they bought from the vendor.
IP does have things specific to IP only, but the reselling part is on par with pretty much everything else out there getting bought and then sold again.
Their argument (rent, food, bills, etc) is parallel but also far more rational and applicable. The $16 you pay for your blue ray goes primarily to an oligarchical group of mega-corporations that use their clout to control the new media creation process as well as the marketplaces. No one in that process has struggled to pay rent since joining the club.
"Starving artists" that eventually succeed do so despite this cartel, and not because they were enabled by it. Meanwhile piracy has created an ecosystem where actual "starving artists" are giving away their music for free because they know that people who enjoy it will pay for it anyway, and can meanwhile enjoy the benefits of unlimited exposure to potential new fans.
You Can have an ADSL Internet connections for the Price of one dvd or two theater ticket per month. A cheap player Will play all your downloaded content. I don't believe most of the pirates have the capabilities of watching more than one or two film per month in theater. I do believe services like netflix are a game changer. Even with the poor french catalog.
Talking only about the cost issue.
> If you own a computer and an internet connection good enough to torrent blurays then you can afford a DVD and a cheap player, certainly a theatre ticket. "Didn't necessary have the capabilities" is pure rationalisation - it's a fantasy entirely divorced from reality, intended to let him tell himself that he's a good person really.
Even still, it's not your God-given right to consume media. If you can't afford to watch a TV show or movie, that's unfortunate, but that's how it works.
I don't necessarily disagree that there probably isn't or should be a "right to consume" (I'm less certain if that's not actually part of at least some of our laws, though). However, "Fair Use" is very much a right, as is access to "the commons". Both are rights being whittled away on the altar of Mickey Mouse's permanency and Disney's profits (Which of course is ironic, as Disney built itself up on Public Domain fairy tales, but as things are developing appears to never contribute anything back to the public domain of their own).
Yeah, if your rationale isn't "it's easy and cheap", you're probably full of shit.
When it's to the point where I can push a button and have a TV show pop up on my NAS viewable on all my devices in a few minutes (yay Sonarr) or try to find somewhere to go buy it in some weird DRM-encumbered form that I can't even copy to my phone, well, I know what I'm doing.
I can't be assed to pay for things anymore. My sheer laziness is more valuable to me than other people's hard work and I won't even try to deny it, put me in front of a computer and I go into complete utilitarian mode.
This probably applies to more people than will care to admit it and it's exactly why the "piracy is a service problem" attitude is the only one to really put a dent in piracy in the past decade.
Is the industry winning the war against piracy? I know some people -cough- who told me -cough (damn what's wrong with my throat?)- that lately it's been extremely hard to find new stuff on bittorrent networks.
Please don't call names or be rude. If you know more than others, a good way to comment here is to teach some of what you know. If you don't want to do that, posting nothing is also an option.
Really? Why not explain why this is wrong instead of just attacking. I could very well randomly generate material "owned" by someone. As the size increases the chance goes down to being very low of course.
if I understand the concept correctly, basically it's wrong because your index/seed values will be much more complex than the data you are supposedly extracting. So basically you have to already know the data you want in order to "find" it in pi.