Hollywood Sees Illegal Streaming Devices as 'Piracy 3.0' (torrentfreak.com) 178
After hunting down torrent sites for more than a decade, Hollywood now has a more complex piracy threat to deal with. From a report: Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models" and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0. "Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own," McCoy said. "If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I'll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices."
shitty content (Score:5, Insightful)
Shitty content is the main threat these days. High prices too.
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Conversely, they'd be much more profitable if they didn't waste so much money on useless DRM and fighting piracy.
Then perhaps they could reinvest those profits in quality programming.
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Statistically, people steal for one of two reasons: For the thrill or because they feel the price is more than they can afford to spend on the product.
The latter of those two groups would pirate a lot less if the quality were better, because they wouldn't have to go through so much crap to find something worth watching. But even if they didn't, there's no evidence that the industry's spending on DRM has done anything to reduce their piracy, so even i
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Statistically, people steal for one of two reasons: For the thrill or because they feel the price is more than they can afford to spend on the product.
The latter of those two groups would pirate a lot less if the quality were better, because they wouldn't have to go through so much crap to find something worth watching.
But like, AC said, if the content is so bad, why are they pirating it in the first place?
If the content is good, but too expensive, why does that entitle them to the content on their own terms (free)?
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He didn't say it was bad as in unpleasant to watch, he said it was low quality with (I presume) the meaning that it is cumbersome to watch - unskippable ads/banners/previews, not (typically) playable with easily portable gear so it's locked to one location, etc. Increasing the convenience would increase the value and hence the probability that they'd pay instead of pirating. Lowering the price would also do so, as it would again bring the price and the value closer together. Reducing the DRM would allow the
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Because it isn't all bad. The reason I stopped bothering with watching movies in theaters is because over the course of about five years, I went from enjoying about 80% of the movies I watched to enjoying about one in every six while the price crept up from about four bucks to about seven bucks per movie. So the effective price per good movie went up from $3.20 to about $42. And the median quality has only decreased
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Actually, I think a large portion is #3: because piracy (arrrr!) is actually easier and works better.
To wit: you have multiple streaming platforms with some intersection of content and lots of 'exclusives'. It's a pain to go through 4 or 5 different services to find one movie you want to watch (not to mention paying for them or signing up for yet another if that's all that has your content). Compare that to using torrents where the only exclusivity is private trackers, but virtually any reasonably popular
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From a legal perspective, you are correct. Piracy is different from theft of a physical item because:
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I would argue that if you've paid for it, that isn't piracy. It might be a contractual violation, but it isn't piracy. If you haven't paid for it, that's a bit more problematic, and you're right that the content providers need to fix this. The notion of the world as a bunch of independent mark
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I can't speak for the grandparent, but the biggest dent to online music piracy came when the big four started letting online music stores sell DRM-free audio files. Suddenly, you could but a product that you wanted and guarantee that it would work on every device. The big four did this for a couple of reasons, but the main one was that they'd realised that DRM takes negotiating power from them and gives it to the DRM author or the channel. If you wanted DRM'd music to play on the large installed base of
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I can speak for the pirates, and we've seen the same thing. The most potent tools in the fight against piracy have been iTunes, Netflix and Steam. Most people don't pirate because they can't afford to buy a blu-ray. They pirate because it's quick, and convenient. Once legitimate purchasing became even faster and more convenient, a lot of people went back to doing that.
People are basically lazy. They don't want to have to go out of the house and walk to a store, or end up trapped in a cinema next to Baby Cri
Re: POSTS ARE BEING CENSORED (Score:2, Insightful)
Piracy is wrong and you have no right to take things that you didn't pay for.
There're people who're smarter than you who don't agree with the "morals" you're attempting - not very successfully - to push.
Re: POSTS ARE BEING CENSORED (Score:4, Funny)
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Control over the monitization channels is wrong
Monopoly ISP services is wrong
Network preferences based on income is wrong
Inherited wealth exacerbating wealth centralization is wrong
Fake News Alt-right fascists are wrong.
There is a world full of wrong
Start with the WMD liars escape from justice for the million murdered innocent Iraqis and THEN tell me you are righteous, and not before.
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Of course piracy is a bad thing to do, but the problem is how Hollywood chooses to define the term. Is it piracy if you view content you normally have rights to that is geofenced off where you happen to be right now? Is it piracy if you Kodi a video channel that is in your cable package because the company's streaming app can't be bothered to include your carrier in its signon list? Is it piracy if you have to torrent a movie you want to rent that is not available in your country from any online store?
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Or, much more universally applicable, is it piracy if you torrent a movie which, absent the possibility of torrrenting, you would not bother to watch?
Re: shitty content (Score:2)
You're joking, right? Go to Google right now and type in "Logan torrent" or "Logan download". See what comes up.
I mean if your entire job was to stop only those people who are too stupid to add the word " torrent" or "download" to the end of a movie name, then congrats, I guess ... you must have stopped at least 2 people with those 300,000 tickets ...
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I don't think I know a single soul who uses Google to find a torrent for a movie they want. That seems like one of the stupidest ways to find pirated content. If someone is looking for it they already know where to go and skip Google. Your post is pretty amusing honestly, were you serious?
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Obvious troll is obvious...
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High prices too.
Probably to offset the pirates
The whole debate (or rather, the mostly one-sided whining, paid "studies" full of "scientific fact" not supported by any other study, and lobbying for yet more laws and rights for the rights holding mafia) is full of this sort of assumption, when practical evidence shows otherwise.
Such as this Kenian film maker who didn't even try to sell his film in his dirt poor country for the prices the hollywood idiots demand world-wide, only to see the expensive DVDs undercut by widespread and easy availability of muc
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The problem is, if you sell a legally licensed copy for a fraction of the price in countries that don't have money, it suddenly becomes very profitable to do grey-market imports back into the U.S. and undercut your sales there.
It is typically more reasonable to sell them at a high price everywhere, knowing that poorer countries will exhibit rampant piracy, and then just write off the rampant piracy as a cost of doing business.
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Getting it free (pirated copies) and reimporting it is illegal, and various agencies actively go after people who do that. No legitimate business would do that, and the ones that try it tend to get into a lot of trouble and don't remain in business for very long.
By contrast, if those copies overseas are legal copies, then reimporting them is legal, and those agencies can't do a thing to p
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But in the short term, it would bankrupt the industry, resulting in long-term equal availability of nothing. Yes, that's a bad thing. You don't get to free trade overnight; attempting to go down that path too quickly will result in complete economic collapse.
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If you only jump headfirst into free trade for a single industry, then the catastrophe would obviously be industry-specific. :-)
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There is another option: You just create barriers to trade. A little underhanded, but it works. That might mean laws prohibiting unauthorised imports, or technological restrictions such as DVD region coding, or something as simple as making sure that the DVDs you sell in low-income countries do not include English or other European language audio tracks.
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Eliminating the English track doesn't work very well, because a lot of countries with relatively low income and/or relatively high poverty rates have English as a common language across a wide range of ethnic groups. If you don't provide content in English, you'll either have to have many, many more translations ($$$$) or you'll miss out on most of your potential audience.
Other artificial barriers to trade are of limited effectiveness, in practice. They appear to work so long as only a few movies are rel
Re:shitty content (Score:4, Insightful)
If the content is so shitty, why do people pirate?
Quality combined with price will define demand. Low quality does not mean no demand, just slap a low price on it. See the 99 cent DVD bin at the supermarket.
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If the content is so shitty, why do people pirate?
Because it's less shitty that what's actually on TV.
Re: shitty content (Score:2)
I don't pirate these days, but many days i really want to.
The reason is that there is no legal way-at any price-to get content in an form where i can watch whatever, whenever, wherever.
Streaming services of course all require an internet connection. Downloadable content is tied to a platform. Physical media is not legally transferrable, and even if it were, takes time and other resources to get there.
Quite disappointing, really.
Note the above applies to video content only. Plenty of legal audio options.
FTFY (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models"
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Unlike Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models"
I can't believe I'm about to (kinda sorta) go to bat for the MPAA - I've got *no* love for them, their accountants, their lawyers, or their DRM, so I feel just a little bit dirty posing this question. The argument above is an easy +5 Insightful when the topic of the MPAA is brouht up, but I've yet to hear a viable business model that isn't either 1) already implemented, 2) impractical, 3) deemed 'obsolete', or 4) worked around in some manner. Here's the list that I could come up with...
-Physical sales. This
Re: I can barely wait (Score:2)
half-true (Score:3, Insightful)
'Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their "business models"'
The pirates are innovative and change their business models.
Hollywood?
Not so much.....
What the hell... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just what the hell is an "illegal streaming device" ? Are there manufacturers out there making illegal devices that people are using? If so, how are these getting imported without the FTC stepping in?
Or is this just another case of Hollywood idiocy using terms they barely understand to talk about a technology they absolutely don't understand and want to squeeze back into the metaphorical toothpaste tube instead of embracing?
Is this some hyperbolic way of saying that my PLEX server is somehow illegal, because apparently format-shifting isn't allowed anymore under fair-use rules in their minds? Was the Betamax decision reversed when nobody was looking?
Re:What the hell... (Score:5, Interesting)
The devices themselves are not illegal. They're referring to the abundant amount of Android set top boxes available on Amazon and eBay. The thing with these though is that they come pre-loaded with Kodi, plus plugins for Kodi for easy access to illegal streaming services. This is just another example of a tool which can be used for either side being slandered just because it COULD be used for illegal activities. I, however, have one of these boxes and love it. I use it to stream from a root-top mounted digital OTA TV receiver that streams the TV channels over LAN. I get nearly perfect reception on 56 TV stations now, vs questionable reception from about 20 before. Without the Android box, I wound't have a way to watch this legit content otherwise!
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In other words these are the equivalent of bog standard HTPC devices that have been around for years and years already. It's just now that there are cheap Android versions and they're on sale at Amazon.
Most of what gets played on my "illegal streaming devices" are shows and movies that should be out of copyright by now.
They were bought and paid for long ago.
So there's no more blood to be squeezed from that particular turnip ever.
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Or even better, I'm using Kodi as a front-end to MythTV, which is recording crap that they are broadcasting over-the-air without any encryption or expectation that someone isn't 'time-shifting' it, as everyone has been doing since the 1980s.
Troll? What the fuck? (Score:2)
Who let the "information wants to be free" crowd have mod points today? That was a perfectly accurate description of the situation.
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And to add to that, there are vendors out there explicitly advertising/selling these as piracy boxes. They're not even trying to hide behind plausible deniability, t
How did your reception improve? (Score:2)
I get nearly perfect reception on 56 TV stations now, vs questionable reception from about 20 before.
I'm an over-the-air enthusiast too, but I'm missing something here.
How does a set-top box that runs Kodi improve the quantity or quality of OTA stations that you can receive?
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https://www.silicondust.com/ [silicondust.com]
I use a HDHomeRun sitting about 15ft cable length from the antenna to minimize OTA signal loss. The stations are then transmitted from that box over LAN to the Android KODI box (or any other device on the network I happen to be using at the time). With this, I was able to position an external roof mounted antenna in the optimum location for reception without having to worry about signal degradation over a length of coax.
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Oh, got it. I'm surprised a long cable run had that profound of an impact on the number of stations you can receive. One time I experimented with swapping a 100-ft piece of coax for a short piece, and the attenuation was not too bad.
Anyway, I have a mast-mounted high gain amp [channelmaster.com], which more than overcomes all the splitters and long cable runs in my setup. You might want to try one too. Maybe you can get yourself up to 70 channels.
Re:What the hell... (Score:5, Informative)
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not really.
The summary on ./ is paraphrasing to skew the outrage. The representative actually said in the interview that the software (Kodi) isn't illegal.
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No, the actual quote was
"McCoy stressed that the devices themselves, and software such as Kodi, are ‘probably’ not illegal."
They used typical weasel-wording so that they could pretend that the software *is* illegal, even though they 'probably' said the opposite.
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From a more prophetic standpoint I think the various devices are turning into de-facto cable boxes and I think Hollywood is looking into making their content available only to exclusive devices - let alone services as they do now.
Where do these devices get content?
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I believe they are implying the pre-configured "kodi boxes" that you can buy that are pretty much plug-n-play preconfigured to give you access to the illegal stuffs...
They even state in the article that the software itself is not illegal.
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Not illegal yet. I'm sure their lawyers and lobbyists are already trying to figure out how to change that. Ideally within the next two or four years, before the political pendulum might swing and they lose their current advantage.
A song for a meal... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have nothing particularly against piracy, but if you think that making entertainment isn't work, then I cordially invite you to enter the industry and pay your dues. You will enjoy not having a family life anymore, when you're pulling 12+shifts sitting in front of a screen doing repetitive tasks without any glamour whatsoever. Just because it's fun to watch movies doesn't mean it isn't real work to make them. The vast majority of people who work in entertainment don't make millions. For every wealthy acto
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"I have nothing particularly against piracy"
"My reasons against hating piracy"
Where did I say I hated piracy? Where did I say I worked in film?
AAA video games also have budgets now approaching and sometimes exceeding a hundred million, because they have to employ hundreds to thousands of people for years---and supply specialized IT infrastructure for all of them as well. None of these people are millionaires. You do the math. Do you want to have fun? Get a job and work 80 hours a week making eyeballs for se
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I worked as a physical laborer in a mill for many years. At the end of the day, most people need more than physical labor to survive. That's because most people aren't soulless automatons who live to push objects around and drop dead and even in hunter-gatherer societies you find arts and entertainment.
I highly doubt your living environment consists of blank white walls and zero movies. If you consume movies then clearly they have some value to you. If you didn't find it useful, you wouldn't even bother to
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Re:A song for a meal... (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasn't intended to. Actors get paid way too much. For every actor there can be a team in the thousands working on the film for several years, so take out the actor's wages and material costs and do the math. The vast majority of people who work in entertainment make average to below average wages, frequently work ridiculous hours, and for every one of them there's a hundred more who go broke trying.
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Actors get paid way too much.
If putting an actor in a film is what puts asses in seats, then the actor's value is based on how many asses they can put in seats, and not on how many hours they work, or how many calories they burn. Imagining that all work is equal is ridiculous.
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Oh yes, I quite get that their value is determined by the market, and the value is pretty high if you are sinking $200 million into a film. Hence Ghost in the Shell stars Scarlett Johansson instead of an unfamiliar actor to the target audience. But this is only an explanation of why that most of us already know--if you turn that into a normative instead of a descriptive claim (turning an is into an ought), it won't do much to convince anyone who thinks that one is insufficient for the other.. or further alo
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Oh ok, yeah I agree. My bad, I'm just quite used to having to explain this all the time... haha.
The market value of actors (to bring in the paying audiences) is already so high that it's ridiculous when they're asking for more.
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Importance != popularity. Civilization would completely collapse in about a week if all the engineers, technicians and operators that work to deliver clean water to your tap magically vanished along with their knowledge. Clean, potable water is 100% critical to civilization and without it millions die in a week or two and civilization collapses.
OTOH, you could nuke Hollywood from orbit and life for most of the planet, even in the US would continue uninterrupted...
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WORK IS LIFE. Or you starve or freeze... Fact.
There is less work to go around for the life that is here, and if we keep doing all the work we can do, we destroy our biosphere. Far more of a fact than your crap. Work is what we do so that we can be alive to do stuff we want to do. Absent a positive motivation we rapidly go batshit and kill ourselves, kill others, whatever. Without art, without recreation, there is no point to being alive except to just squirt out more people just like you to spend through our natural capital more rapidly than it can be
as usual, piracy fears are nonsense. (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, if these hollywood types were to be believed; the feds should encourage people to pirate CP, since that would put them out of business.
But really the average pirate fits into a few categories
1. they weren't going to buy it anyways. revenue lost: 0.
2. they want to buy it, but you refuse to sell to them. revenue lost.
3. they did buy it, but you make it more convenient to use a pirated copy (unskippable bullshit menus, insistence on optical media) revenue lost: 0 (unless you truly expect people to buy it more than once?)
4. they would buy it, but it's priced too high. revenue lost: debateable. it's just as much the industries fault for not pricing their product appropriately. But easier to blame the pirates.
Piracy makes for an excellent boogeyman, since anytime revenue numbers don't meet expectations they can blame pirates. Anytime congress needs to be pestered to get more favorable laws and such for your industry, pirates can be blamed.
side note: piracy is not the right word, nor is theft. if i download something from TPB, i'm not *stealing* from anyone. I'm not depriving anyone of their copy of said item.
Side note 2: how much innovation has been the direct result of 'piracy' over the years? How many times have we heard of some start up that started out using less than legit software, only to become billion dollar companies (and then immediately turn around join the BSA or similar?)
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Side note 2: how much innovation has been the direct result of 'piracy' over the years? How many times have we heard of some start up that started out using less than legit software, only to become billion dollar companies (and then immediately turn around join the BSA or similar?)
I disagree with the implication that Google/YouTube has become legitimate. They are simply too ubiquitous and large to sue. Besides, how would lawyers planning to sue Google communicate or make their lawsuit known without Google being able to see and subvert the effort?
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They would communicate through email, phone, and fax, same as they do now.
Or do you think Google has some magical ability to spy on a law firm?
It's not magic, but yes. Can you figure out how? Try not to get their attention as you figure it out. Good luck!
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5. they would buy it, but since they can get it for free they do.
I mean seriously, how many of us have too much money? If I can spend less on something, I can spend more on something else. If I'm not particularly bothered with it being wrong because I don't believe so or I don't care and/or I'm not particularly bothered with it being illegal because the risk so so low, then of course I won't spend money on it. Well okay maybe exceptionally, for a small sum because that's what most people who put up tip jar
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5. they would buy it, but since they can get it for free they do.
I mean seriously, how many of us have too much money? If I can spend less on something, I can spend more on something else.
My general strategy is that if the movie I want to watch is at redbox, I pay for it, otherwise, I search for it on google and generally find a pirated copy. I don't pirate because I'm not willing to pay for it. I pirate because I'm not willing to pay $4 to rent a movie that I can buy on amazon for the same price. They aren't even trying. Do a search for the movie "Mrs Doubtfire" on amazon. You can own the DVD with free prime shipping for $4. So guess how much the digital version is? $14 to buy or $4
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costs considerably more to buy the digital movie than buy the physical version and in some cases more to rent the digital version than to buy the physical version. In what world does this make sense?
In a world where physical version has already became liability.
I dont watch movies, but when I buy computer games I want them to be on steam. I actively AVOID buying the physical copies as I find them inconvenient. I do have some of them for old games, but honestly I should just throw them away as I haven't even touched them for the last 6 years (since I moved into my current place). I have even bought some of those games again on steam or gog so that I can actually play them in convenient way.
For movies th
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side note: piracy is not the right word, nor is theft.
Give it up already. Words change. Your mouse isn't a rodent. Your keyboard has buttons rather than keys and your desktop has nothing to do with a desk, so why aren't you complaining about those word redefinitions?
Piracy and copyright infringement, in 2017, are synonymous phrases (and have been for a few years now) in the context of intellectual property. Just learn to live with it and go spend your time fighting a battle that actually matters.
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It's hardly even an in insult. The world's most popular piracy website is called The Pirate Bay. Pirates have their own culture, adorned in treasure chests, flags, and stylish swords. They wear the label of pirate with pride now, and embrace it.
Re: as usual, piracy fears are nonsense. (Score:2)
The day you can lossless copy a physical object without harming the original, your analogy will be apt.
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Piracy would be if I looked at the car, took detailed notes and photos and then made a copy of it. Theft is depriving you of your property--hopping in the car and driving away. They have entirely different consequences, and as far as I know most legal systems rightly distinguish between them, which is why p2p is charged under civil, not criminal law (so far).
If someone steals my music, that means they've come into my studio and stolen the multitrack files off my hard drive, or claimed my work as their own,
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No, you've failed to account for theft of intellectual property.
You mean a crime that doesn't yet, to my knowledge, actually exist, and seems to only be used by the misinformed, and the intellectually lazy instead of copyright infringement? Where are the people who have been prosecuted for this "theft of IP" law that supposedly exists, versus copyright/patent/trademark infringement, etc? Surely, you can demonstrate it, since you're so sure it exists as a legal tort and/or crime, and is more appropriate than the IP laws that exist in application.
That "law?"
Ha. Wh
BurryTheFuture (Score:3)
Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Offer a compelling product that allow people to watch stuff online, easily and quickly, at a reasonable price.
Piracy is a distribution problem. You try can fight it all you want, if you're not providing a platform that's good and available in more than just 1 country (USA), you're asking for it.
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It is a moot point. All you're doing with all of your screeching and fighting is simply altering the time table. The same mooch will still avoid paying even if you invent the perfect anti-piracy measures. They will just catch content at the other end of the pricing cycle.
Meanwhile, you could potentially do great harm in terms of personal rights and sabotage of technology if you're allowed your copyright maximalists dream.
Also, it's not stealing if what you are "pirating" should rightfully be in the public d
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You don't have a right to demand that someone else sell their products for less
Yes I do. Its an indirect right in the form of "I don't purchase your product if you don't lower the price."
Its their problem if they refuse to compete with someone offering the same product for a lower price (and more convenient to boot.)
This is, very literally, a monopoly complaining that they can't survive when competition enters the market. In any other industry, if you make a $100m investment and can't recoup the costs due to competitive pressure, we wish you good luck with your bankruptcy. But when
How did they arrive at 3.0? (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry to rain on the buzzword parade,but I'm pretty sure version 1.0 was copying sheet music and forging paintings, and 2.0 was copying cassette and VCR tapes. If I've missed a step there please feel free to fill me in.
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Yeah. They rebooted the series in the early aughts.
And Owning Physical Media = Piracy 4.0! (Score:2, Insightful)
Owning your own physical media with movies on it will soon be Piracy 4.0, because it prevents the companies from charging you per view.
Somebody is bad at math (Score:3)
So it really is just all about $$$ (Score:2)
Spare me to self-righteous moral talk. As if these big shots really value copyright. What the main dispute is is just money. If there's no money in it, would they really care about such things? So don't twist justice for your own gain. Ultimately, is it really your right? You are merely borrowing rights from others and ultimately in turn, someone is giving things away for free at the top of the source. You brood of vipers.
I know just how to fight this! (Score:2)
We can create a commercial subscription service for like $15/mo and let people watch most anything they want and just divvy up the money based on what people like.
In the same service we will allow purchase and rental of other shows for a reasonable charge.
(if netflix is only $12/mo for FOUR people no show should ever cost more than half that for a single season $25/season is ridiculous esp for a 12/yr old tv show)
Of course this service will have all the ease of use of existing pirate services such as the no
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Are you CRAZY?! Why in the hell would we ever give customers what they actually want!
Every media mogul is convinced that they can get people to pay them more than their media is actually worth if they don't have to compete in a fair and open marketplace. At least most of them are wrong, but that doesn't stop them making things shittier for other people on their way to failuretown.
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(if netflix is only $12/mo for FOUR people no show should ever cost more than half that for a single season $25/season is ridiculous esp for a 12/yr old tv show)
They could start by reducing the price of the digital to the same price you can buy the physical. Amazon has a pretty broad selection of digital movies but many of the older titles are considerably cheaper to buy on DVD (with free 2 day shipping) than it is to buy the digital. In some cases you can buy the physical DVD on amazon for the same price or cheaper than you can rent it on amazon. This is ridiculous.
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Not just that but a DVD with a digital copy is often cheaper than a digital copy.
It would be nice if amazon offered autorip for DVDs like they do for music.
Before you post your outrage.. (Score:2)
the summary is poorly paraphrasing what the media rep stated, not sure if that's intentional or not, probably is. He stated clearly that he does not believe that Kodi is illegal. He talks about the plugins that you use to gain access to illegal streams.
Also, by Kodi Box I believe he is talking about the pre-configured boxes that you can purchase that will have everything you need to access the illegal streams. Kind of like those iPods that were pre-filled with albums on ebay and craigslist. heh
Here, let me fix that headline for you... (Score:2)
Hollywood sees EVERYTHING as 'Piracy 3.0'
Martyr Complex 3.0 (Score:2)
Someone remind me how many times Hollywood has ended...
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Yet they routinely break their own records for movie revenues.
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I'm an analog piracy purist. I only pirate my movies on Beta tapes.
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Not to mention the movie industry keeps posting record profits year after year. If anything, piracy has been a boon to their business, providing free word of mouth advertising across the internet.
Re:Capitalism 101 (Score:4, Interesting)
Please explain why you can have a subscription that allows you to watch over 1000 tv shows for under $15/mo but a single season of a tv show may cost $25+ a single movie may cost $20 and I've yet to find a service that allows the rental of tv shows.
How about this you can buy shows by the episode for $1 but you can rent them for $0.25 an episode. Still higher than you would like but way more reasonable for something you will very likely never watch again.
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Mostly because Netflix amortizes the subscription fee across all of their licenses and across time, whereas movies (especially in theater) and tv shows are generally expected to individually pay for themselves.
Then of course you want to have all ticket/dvd/etc prices to be equal (give or take. All movies are usually equal, while tv show boxes are usually equated by #seasons.)
Combine those two and you end up with all
movies/shows being priced to the highest (per-show cost + desired profit) / (per-show #sales
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The prices for a digital copy shouldn't be equal to the price of a physical copy there is a huge diffrence in what you get.
With a digital copy you get convienence but you lose
the right of resale, you can't sell it to someone else or give it away.
It destroys any chance of their being a second hand market further fixing prices.
Some shows now aren't even available on disc they are online only.
Assuming the show or movie is say 10 years old and they only made the one movie or season why should it still be $25? I
Re: boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
The movie industry shouldn't have to change their business model just because people have decided it's okay to steal things they want and not pay for them.
The sustained assault against the public domain and ridiculous extensions to copyright are stealing from the public. I'll worry about their feelings about thieves once they stop stealing en masse. Just because you decided to put something out doesn't give you the right to eternally control what is done or not done with it. Copyright is a time-limited public burden made to incentivise people to make new works, not to have control in perpetuity over them. The current "time limitation" is an utter mockery of the intentions of the Constitution; I can guarantee you that "time limited" does not mean "extended 20 years every 20 years until Disney decides to fold." I think a lot of people have entirely forgotten that, or never knew it in the first place, since their screeching about "stealing movies," though of course that aspect of it is entirely intentional.
Technically, considering OSS (which you are almost certainly using whether you realize it or not), and the rapidly increasing capabilities of automated music and video production, it's arguable that even that role is coming to a close, since people can and do put out content for free. They certainly didn't avoid making them before copyright even existed, or when copyright was much, much shorter. Heck, some of our most well-known cultural contributions fall into this category. But thanks to this bullshit the days of anything entering the public domain are over, and as such anything they don't profit off will die, and they will control those things they do profit off of forever, if things go their way, all the while pushing for more restrictions and invasive measures to control computers to do their bidding for copyright enforcement and attempting to slowly force everyone into a permanent "rent-per-view' model..
At this point, considering the massive amounts of damage done by the media corporations, piracy is arguably an act of justified civil disobedience. I am aware that you and people like you will rationalize this as "an excuse for stealing," but that's to be expected of people who either do not think of the larger ramifications of this, or have some vested interest in perpetuating control of content, and ultimately control over computers and people in general.
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I, for one, would feel a lot more sympathy for the copyright-based industries had they not lobbied for the repeated term extensions. There is absolutely no way anyone can argue that ninety-five years is in the public interest. Here in the UK it's seventy years for music now - an extension passed with some urgency to keep the Beatles from going public domain. Because it's really important they maintain their incentive to publish more music.
I have no objection to companies having the ability to profit from co