Inside Popcorn Time – the world's fastest growing piracy site
dn.no
dn.no
> All of a sudden all the developers discovered simultaneously that a lawyer from the film studio Warner Bros. had visited their professional LinkedIn pages.
Are there any details about how the Warner Bros. lawyer was able to find the developers?
Sounds like a story of it's own, bigger than this one.
I think the key word you're overlooking is "most", as in "most of the core team" took steps to be anonymous, not all (steps that, for all we know, may never have worked).
"– We do not know how, but he had managed to track us. We were quite unsettled. We thought it was a scare tactic. And we were frightened. None of us were anonymous anymore. They knew where we worked, where we lived."
I'm just saying, I imagine they wouldn't be scared about it if it was a big net fishing for info. Could be sensationalism for the story though.
Whilst I'm not all about the ethics of multinationals, there is a strong presumption that those 'anonymous' members were anywhere near as thorough as they say or thought they were in not leaving breadcrumbs (witness DPR and Silk Road).
Just because Warner Bros is old and stodgy doesn't mean that they don't have access to people with advanced technical skill. In England there have even been P.I. shops used by the wealthy that were shut down for hacking and that was 5+ years ago.
I have always used a pseudonym on GIT, and all other sites. I tell people, who need to see my work/me, my pseudonym. I guess if I was actively looking for a job I wouldn't be able to be anonymous?
I use pseudonyms when I wish to speak freely to a larger internet-only community, away from scrutiny by people who know me in real life but may not understand the context of the community in which a discussion takes place. I suppose I would construct an alter ego on Github if I were working on something illegal in my country.
Anything targeted at people who know you should be under the name they know you by. It's not as if pseudonymity defeats Big Data - all they care about is which ads you're likely to click on, whether there is a correct name associated with that profile is of no consequence. And of course anything not done through Tor can still be traced through your ISP's subscriber records. Using a pseudonym on, say, Facebook mostly just inconveniences people. I suppose it could be a reasonable countermeasure against a stalker, but locked-down privacy settings (or just not using Facebook) are probably safer bets.
You set your prefs to show you as anon when you click others' profiles.
Edit: I obviously don't know specifics about what they did to be "anonymous" and how they were deanonymized. But whatever, if they were deanonymized, they didn't properly assess threats, and employ adequate OPSEC. In other words, they were sloppy.
Even with our local cable companies inking deals with HBO and other big names, we still don't get the latest shows or episodes even through their local streaming video on demand services, we have to wait months or sometimes years before it's legally available in our region... and I live in a country where people don't blink while splurging on the latest iPhone 6+ or Macbook pro or a new playstation 4.
There's absolutely no logical reason that customers willing to pay for these shows should be locked out "just because", and this is what drives people to alternate tools like popcorn time.
The music industry had their first taste with napster in the early '00s, and they fought the ideas tooth and nail instead of realizing it could be mutually beneficial to embrace this technology and bring music to more people faster. Now the movie industry is making the same mistakes and are facing the same result.
It would be in everybody's best interest to rethink how we approach digital property rights across borders.
Paul Robinson had recently discussed this in a podcast:
> One of the chapters we have is on Prohibition, American Prohibition. Which I think is really wonderful. Because that really demonstrates that dynamic on a large scale. For a lot of interesting reasons we throw it in, Prohibition. But then it's broken so often, even by public officials. Nobody takes it seriously. So, it's no surprise that you have a lot of violation of prohibition laws. What's less obvious to people but I think really telling, is that during Prohibition, crime rates generally went up. Even if it had nothing to do with Prohibition. You had crime rates going up because there was this general effect. People would look at the criminal law, see that they simply didn't see drinking alcohol as condemnable conduct and that undermined their faith that the criminal really knew what was condemnable and what wasn't; saw a lot of people breaking the criminal law and not feeling bad about it. There was, the community sense was that the criminal law was just being silly and out of step here. And that reduction in its reputation, it's moral reputation, translated into a lot of other areas. It was a very bad time for crime, until Prohibition was repealed and criminal law started trying to earn back some of its lost reputation. [0]
[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/08/paul_robinson_o.htm...
Legal restrictions are subject to human whim and can be changed to something more sensible.
I'd definitely say they were less valid.
Does someone have some insight into why Netflix has time and geographic restrictions on content? I can understand, in some cases, publishers not wanting to let their movies or TV out to foreign countries. (Maybe waiting for a marketing push, or a broadcast deal to be reached in a new market/locale) But I can't really wrap my head around movies and shows being phased in and out. (Example: Recently saw that some of the Transformers movies will disappear in a week or two).
From a technical standpoint, I can't see the issue being that they can only have a certain number of films view-able. from an economic standpoint, I would think that whenever someone watches a show, a portion of their monthly Netflix fee goes to the creators of that show, so there's always an incentive for the creators to let Netflix show their content.
Essentially, the reason is that publishers want to push their own platforms.
Meaning that they now need to have the distributors on their good side.
Kinda reminds me of a claimed exchange between Disney and Microsoft, when MS was trying to peddle their then new movie file format.
They held a meeting, and the MS rep opened by asking the Disney rep how much they were willing to pay to use the MS format. No no no, countered the Disney rep, how much are you willing to pay for our content.
I thought this bundling was more to protect their profit margins. In Canada, for example, Telus has cable, internet, cellphone, house phone products available. For every product line you purchase, there's a discount. When they charge data overage fees on cell phones and internet plans, they make huge money, and subsidize the cost of running other product lines which help their lock-in effect. (Sorry for the poor wording)
I'm not questioning your conclusion but your premise is false. Game of thrones is not available on Netflix in any country (https://flixsearch.io/search/game%20of%20thrones)
Edit: Others have pointed out Netflix doesn't fall under CRTC guidelines after "internet tax" was threatened.
http://www.thestar.com/business/2015/03/12/crtc-lowering-can...
Sorry, but you can't blame the shittiness of Canadian Netflix on the CRTC.
Correct, don't blame the CRTC, blame Bell/Corus/Shaw/Rogers for buying up popular content and then locking it up so it's only available through Crave and Shomi tied to a cable subscription, or not online at all.
I'm still mad at Bell for making no attempt at matching what HBO Now does in the States. People are clearly willing to pay for the service, but they are desperate to keep people locked into TV.
Meanwhile, no uneconomic canadian content is being produced, unlike the hopes of the regulators who think their magic wand of law will change economic reality.
It never does, it only serves to hurt people.
As for geographic restrictions, movie distribution rights typically aren't global. When a movie is produced, one distributor has North America, another distributor gets Europe, etc. Netflix, unfortunately, still has to navigate these out-dated distribution channels. It's the same kind of reasoning that leads an American film to have a multi-month delay before being released in the UK despite the lack of additional overhead (subtitles, etc).
Sure, co-financing deals happen all the time. Netflix does them a lot with 'exclusive' content in the US that was actually made elsewhere.
For example, a studio in the US and a studio in the UK get together to produce a TV series. They both front up half the budget, meaning they get a full series for half the usual cost. Both studios maintain distribution rights in their respective countries.
- there is a stringent legal regime ("media chronology") that sets compulsory delays for publishing a movie on alternative mediums after it has got into theatres : publishers have to wait 4 months to get DVDs out, free TV channels won't be able to screen the movie before 30 months, and VOD subscription services have to wait 36 months (!)
- Moreover, exclusivity on the national territory is a common practice for TV series, and a lot of the popular ones have been sold to major TV channels. Ironically, Netflix had already signed such a contract with Canal+, a French channel, for its signature series House of Cards, which is thus not available on the French version of Netflix !
Is there supposed to be some kind of benefit somewhere here?
What was the pitch for such a bill? I can't think of any reasoning that benefits the consumers of france.
I can see clear advantages to that. Although there are disadvantages as well.
How are you helping the industry by restricting them from earning money?
Obviously, consumers don't benefit from bills like that, but they're not meant to either.
"Television Without Frontiers" directive and quotas implemented by
the French Government limit the number of American films shown in
French theaters and on French Television. The EU Broadcast
Directive was passed inOctober 1989 in an effort to protect and
promote the Europeancultural identity. The directiverequires that
EU member-states reserve a majority (51 percent) of entertainment
broadcast transmission time for programs of European origin.
France lobbied hardest to pass the EU directive and has since
implemented the most stringent quotas within its national system.
Does that enable more french content to be produced?
Does it enable better french content to be produced?
Does it enable more french content to be consumed?
Does it benefit the creators of french films?
I simply am not seeing what positive impact such a law has. I can plainly see the negative impact, both on creators and consumers. I have a difficult time imagining a law banning your movie from being streamed for 3 years is of benefit to a french filmmaker.
All of this may seem hard to understand from a foreign perspective, but you have to realize that numerous rules apply to cultural industries in France. For example, channels must respect a minimum ratio of French movies and series in their programming. They also have an obligation to invest 3 % of their turnover in funding european and French movies. Thus, these French actors feel that Netflix's foreign status allows it to escape these obligations and they resent what they see as an unfair competition.
Haha you can tell when opinions are offered about services that the speaker doesn't use.
Netflix is laggy on movies (in terms of how long before Netflix gets access after initial release) and extremely hit or miss on selection. They're canning Stars and picking up Disney, which still gives them a very low total % of movies, and still prevents them from accessing the movies early.
Popcorn Time lets you watch rips and cams long before a legal Netflix has access.
People aren't using Popcorn Time to watch content available on US Netflix, they're using it to watch content that is locked behind contract and available in theatres or still in various exclusivity periods.
The same thing they use Bittorrent for. Go check the top downloads right now on a major tracker: None of the popular movies are available on ANY Netflix.
It's frankly delusional to think that Netflix's laggy, spotty access to last years movies will "kill" a service that illegally grants you access to movies earlier than Netflix will ever get.
You're attacking Netflix as-is, and saying that this couldn't occur. Yes, Netflix is laggy. Personally, I find the interface awful, browsing and navigating to be horrendous.
The question is: could a well-designed Netflix-LIKE product exist, with enough content available that a large number of people will use it instead of torrents? Would simultaneous theatre/online releases be enough?
I use Popcorn Time even when content is on Netflix. It's a better experience. Subtitles will reliably work (with nice formatting). I can adjust volume levels for low-volume movies. I can shift the centre of the content up - really useful when using a large projector. (Popcorn Time allows alternative players like MPC-HC.)
And, oddly, the streaming often works better. Netflix might start quicker, but it takes a while to pop into HD with no way to force it. I'd rather just take a 5 minute break and wait for things to fully buffer and know I'll have a solid experience. Plus I can skip around without restarting the buffering.
And since Netflix nerfed their site and recommendation system (you can't mark a film "not interested" without performing about 5 clicks on 3 screens - and they still recommend shit) -- discovery is just about as good.
The fact that you get some movies along with that original content is just a legacy of their old strategy, which means that (1) their movie library is never going to get much better than it is now, and (2) things like feature film release windows are now more or less irrelevant to Netflix's market appeal, since they have full control over when their original content rolls out.
I also wouldn't count the "old strategy" dead just yet. As torrenting becomes more popular, you may see Netflix get earlier deals and releases from those that would rather some money than no money.
I like how aggressive you are with their strategy but frankly the fact that the multibillion multiyear disney deal hasn't even begun yet really pushes against your narrative.
If you were right, the Disney deal would have never gone down.
For under $10/mo I get the mostly the same thing as I get from all those USA/TBS/TNT sorts of channels: something to skim through and usually find something to watch with the occasional original show that I specifically seek out. With basic cable, I also can't count on a large selection of recent release movies or being able to find a specific movie/show to watch at any given time. The main difference is that basic cable costs more than the $8 or $9 per month that I pay for Netflix streaming.
The simple logistics of how a video gets on Netflix vs gets on torrents should make the difference obvious. Netflix is one company negotiating and buying content. Torrents are uploaded by the people "when they feel like it".
I really wish there was something in between. What would it take for a Popcorn Time with a payment option? If payments were anonymous (difficult but what if) and movie studios began to see more money than they got from Netflix, I wonder if minds would begin to change. At the end of the day, all they want is to get paid, which is not an unfair proposition at all.
Only two options for you. And for people tech-y enough to find and understand PopcornTime, or be introduced to it by someone that is. Do your parents or grandparents know how to download torrents? I agree that torrenting is a better solution. Netflix is legal, well-advertised, and comes with almost every media device these days. It appears to be the only option for a large number of people. That illusion is the reason it's at a $40B market cap.
Anyway, I wasn't aware that the underlying streaming torrent thing was a stand-alone project -- so if you have a source of torrent/magnet-links (say a folder, rss...) you can actually stream straight to vlc/mplayer quite easily.
At least with OSS we are free to alter the program to our liking. Not that we always could or should, but with Netflix not even that option exists, and Netflix is the paid option.
btw: "Popcorn Time-killer" is questionable use of punctuation.
Direct quote, not my writing. But I personally see the capitalized "T" signifying it's the product, not a generic time-killer.
And I'm with you on the punctuation.
I agree! The hyphen does not clarify any ambiguity in terms of ownership or meaning of the word killer, so no need for it. But I'm not a dictionary.
A production company wants to make a movie (or TV show; the differences are small). Production companies are small and have limited assets (less to be sued for later) so they have to go out and raise money to make a movie. To do this, they sell distribution rights for the movie. Movie distribution has traditionally been done regionally -- one company will do it in the US, another in France, and another in China. Everything is done on a percentage basis -- the production company gets X% of gross, the distributor gets another Y% plus expenses, etc.
The distributor's goal is to maximize the revenue they make from the movie. To do this in an organized and standardized way, distributors have come to consensus around a number of different "windows". The first window is usually theatrical release -- screenings are tightly controlled, ticket prices are high, etc. The second window is usually pay-per-view, about 6 months later. A year or so after that will be the "Premium" window (i.e. all new movies get divvied up between HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc.) Another year or so after that, a show/movie will hit catalog status, and will be sold as part of a "package" of shows/movie that the distributor feels they can get more money for together than they could alone. They sell different types of distribution rights as well -- streaming rights, broadcast rights, etc. Just because you paid for one doesn't mean you paid for the other. Catalog content is "graded" for popularity and sold in a package to networks like TBS, TNT or even companies like Netflix.
Now, all of these windows are coordinated with advertising (which is why distribution is localized -- advertising plays differently in different countries). The distributor is also usually in charge of promotion as well. But because there are already large distributors in different parts of the world with relationships to sell content to their region, it becomes hard for any global player to displace them. Add to this the fact that many countries have laws requiring local ownership of media rights and you'll see that it's very unlikely that this will happen soon; if ever. You can also get situations where Fox owns the rights to a movie in the US, but Universal owns the rights to the same movie in the EU. If Fox negotiates their contract with Netflix, and Universal with Amazon, the movie will be on different services in different countries. Even more confusing here is that sometimes the studios will assign transferrable rights within certain windows to distributors that can be resold -- as happened with Epix (a "premium" cable channel) licensing their movie catalog to Netflix (and now Hulu).
The content owners (or rather, the companies that own distribution rights) absolutely do not want to see their content available forever on one service. You have to create urgency with users, or else they get complacent and develop an expectation that content has no value because they just pay this one subscription and get access to everything. By using short-term licensing deals and shopping them around to multiple companies, they 1) re-negotiate pricing terms regularly 2) shatter the consumer expectation that content is available forever and 3) retain ultimate control over their content catalog. Movies in catalog are never sold as individual films, always as part of a content package. The studios figure out internally what money gets allocated to what show (this is intensely political and often very dirty business -- you see lots of law suits as a result).
Netflix also has their own proprietary viewing data -- they know how many people started the video and did not finish, what % they dropped out at, etc. Netflix does not have to share this with the studios, and in fact they do not. Netflix will renegotiate contracts based on better data than the studios have -- and often Netflix will decline a contract because there's just not enough projected viewership lift (i.e. either too many of their subscribers have watched already and are unlikely to watch again or just that the content never found traction). So the idea that this industry will move to a "pay per view" model is optimistic -- the content industry is built around the fact that certain movies are worth more to consumers than others, and Netflix is taking advantage of this model. Even Netflix "original" shows are not immune to this -- Netflix often owns distribution rights for those shows in only part of the world.
Regardless, there are too many entrenched interests here for this to change any time soon. Netflix is simply a different distribution channel, but the media industry has come up with these complex ownership schemes to spread the risk of a single media property out among several partners. Without this type of complexity, you couldn't fund a $100 million movie -- no one entity would be willing to take the risk without assurances on the distribution side that they can get the movie to market without trouble. Unfortunately, it means that it can be complex for consumers outside the major media markets to acquire media content. Piracy needs to exist to force these companies to address these markets, so I view things like Popcorn Time as ultimately a good thing for the industry.
Because Netflix was first and is most successful (I'm guessing Amazon Prime is 2nd) they movie studios are extra demanding how much Netflix should pay them. Some of them even right away refuse to share because they either are competing or investing in a competitor.
Because of the pain these studios provide, Netflix started making its own content as well.
Basically all the unpleasantness you have in Netflix (missing, removed content, regions restrictions etc) is due to studios trying to milk as much money as they can from it.
Some of it is left-over from when films were in physical form and loaned out to theaters. There are only so many copies made. Now that modern theaters receive the movies as a download, that's not really a justification however there's still the publicity tours that accompany the release. They want a proper premier with the cast in each country. There's also language translations and such which would normally be done after the movie was already released. Basically there's various things they want to do which are difficult or impossible to do on a global scale, so they focus on one part of the world at a time. When your country is low on the list, it means the movie doesn't make it to your country for 6-12 months.
This is a pretty common sentiment on HN and other places on the internet that's used to justify piracy but I don't think it really applies to most people who say it. The person in the video is from Buenos Aires and really can't get his hands on movies and TV shows short of going to the United States.
But if you're in the United States and want a TV show, between iTunes, Amazon instant, YouTube rentals, Google Play, Microsoft Store and your cable provider the movie is probably a $2-$3 HD rental. $5-$6 if its just released. If you have time to browse HN you're not poor enough to justify pirating over a $6 rental.
Of course the counterargument is "but the DRM formats don't work on my TV/car/fridge", but that doesn't work here because Popcorn Time is designed for desktop viewing and deletes the videos on reboot, not for transferring to other devices. And "the only movies with high pirate rates aren't easily available" doesn't work either because the most pirated shows are the ones most easily available. Game of Thrones is on HBO Go, Walking Dead is on amc.com, Kingsman: The Secret Service and Seventh Son is on every rental service listed above. [0]
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-the-w... http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/top-10-pirated-tv-shows...
Another way of interpreting this: 'the shows that are in the greatest demand are the ones for which the distributors feel pressured to offer the best service and availability'.
I think the simple answer is that people like free things, and torrenting is easy enough for a large amount of people to do it. Maybe if every show ever was available on Netflix for $9/month, people wouldn't torrent, but that's a pretty absurd expectation.
That is part of the problem. If I want to watch a movie, I'm gonna use the most convenient and easy method, because as most humans, I am lazy.
So I can either :
* find which service has the movie I want to watch
* create an account on it
* enter billing informations
* watch a DRMed movie
or i can
* find a torrent of the movie
* download it
So even not taking any notion of price into account, the piracy solution is far more convenient. There is a lot of friction with legal solutions.
I'm not convinced by that argument.
It's possible that for a technically-skilled user with everything set up correctly, that could be the case - but you're exaggerating the scale of the difference for most users.
Let's say you're already a Netflix subscriber, for example; you want to watch a movie. It's offered by Netflix. You open the app, select the movie and it starts playing. You want to watch it on your TV? You use your Apple TV/Chromecast and it magically works. There's no waiting for a download, no need to worry about the format or resolution, and no concerns about the legality of it.
The same applies to e.g. Amazon Prime, or iTunes, or whatever cable service you have available. It will probably work, probably won't be a pain in the arse to setup, and won't get you into any trouble with your internet provider.
"Far more convenient" is simply overstating it.
For me, it works like this:
I want to watch a movie. I look in Netflix, which has less than a few dozen movies. Can’t find it. So I turn on the VPN, for which I pay also money. Ah, there it is. Now, let’s Chromecast it... Oh, fuck, forgot Chromecast doesn’t have the VPN. Let’s set up the VPN on the router...
(by now the person with which I wanted to watch the movie turned on Popcorn Time and has already started the movie, while I try to read the documentation of my router).
In the US, Popcorn Time is not really useful.
But especially in english-speaking european countries with bad coverage from US services, like the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Scandinavia, parts of Germany, etc, Popcorn Time is often the simplest way to watch a movie.
Before Popcorn Time, German online streaming portals like Movie4k.to, Kinox.to, which are built around hosters like streamcloud.eu or megaupload.com (RIP), were so popular that 80% of the German population has used them at least once.
> * find which service has the movie I want to watch
> * create an account on it
> * enter billing informations
> * watch a DRMed movie
You're not being honest here. Creating accounts and entering billing info is a one time thing. Otherwise there's probably a handful of clicks to get to a movie or less.
Typing in the name of the movie/show in the search bar, and clicking it all takes less than 10 seconds.
Searching for a good torrent takes at least a minute, downloading it can take 15 minutes to an hour. At best, it needs a total of 1000 seconds -- 100x what Netflix requires.
Life is too short to waste 1000 seconds on something that takes 10 seconds, just to save $8.99 a month, especially if you're a developer...
So I sometimes actually download a torrent of a movie that I started watching on Netflix. Likewise for Game of Thrones, I have a subscription to a TV channel in my country that has all the latest HBO shows but I download them because the quality is better.
From there you can manually select the highest bitrate, so your stream stays in HD - you can also use a different CDN which may have a better cache.
Also, could your ISP be throttling your netflix connections? mine (AT&T) does this regularly, so i use my VPN connection when i stream netflix and have no more issues.
Just thought I would share what worked for me
> If you have time to browse HN you're not poor enough to justify pirating over a $6 rental.
Maybe everyone you know irl who reads HN is a hot-shot rock-star developer, but I assure you the people you know who read HN is not representative of everyone who reads HN.
Popcorn Time might hurt Netflix a little in the short-term with lost users, but long-term (5+ years) I think it could help. Some of the big players in the movie industry haven't wanted Netflix to become what Apple became for the music industry. If the alternative is piracy (i.e. no money), then their hand may be forced to give Netflix more content on better terms.
Netflix/Hulu/Google/Youtube is very reliable and high quality but their library is lacking. It's a shame they don't seem to have the selection Apple does. Compared to any of their libraries, Amazon Instant is more of a bookshelf so I haven't given its streaming reliability a shot yet.
My roommate's family has HBO, so he has an account to watch HBO. But instead we torrent Game of Thrones every Sunday because the video quality is better and there's no risk of buffering interruptions. It's annoying enough for me but this is becoming a small social event and I would gladly pay $5-10 (or I guess break the law) for a guaranteed quality viewing experience for guests.
There really is no legal equivalent to torrents in terms of selection or quality. If there was I would pay for it, like I do for music.
For the most part I prefer Netflix, their automatic HD to non-HD switching as needed is great (instead of you having to load the entire thing in HD or non-HD), their servers are good (much faster than some stuff on PopCorn), and there are some other minor advanges.
Still, I use PopCorn because frequently stuff is not available anywhere else, I am from Brazil, many stuff is not available here at all, and Netflix is also kinda limited.
What IS interesting, is that Netflix and PopCorn are killing pirated disc sellers (where I live you see lots of street vendors charging about 5 USD for a disc with pirated content, they were really popular when they were the only way to get what you wanted, but now Netflix and PopCorn are cheaper).
People invest time and money to produce movies and they have the right to make up the conditions under which you can watch them. If you don't like those conditions then don't watch the movies and force the content producers to adjust their practices.
It is morally probably more or less okay to pay for movies on one platform but then actually torrent them because the experience is better. But not paying at all because you don't like the conditions and experience is definitely not okay.
iTunes is generally botched because, as others mention, it requires full download and thus is generally a pain in the ass. Verizon makes it difficult to watch anywhere but my TV. Amazon (though relatively good on my FireTV) doesn't work well on my iPad.
More fundamentally: none release movies fast enough. And, when they do, they require me to 'buy' before they allow me to 'rent', several weeks later. Fortunately, most movies from the last decade have been garbage. But, when something truly great comes out, I have to resort to the black market to get my fix.
Luckily, we have economic principles to fill the gap. Supply and demand.
Why?
Because internet bandwidth for video streaming at home is a joke that forces you to watch virtually everything at SD or lower.
This is a debatable proposition.
And in this particular case, I am not sure Games of Thrones qualifies as "education and culture".
I am not too worried that literature and art will go away. Literature and art existed before we had avenues for mass audience to buy or rent personal copies and they will continue to exist after we dismantle copyright.
I'd like to note that I support trademarks. I do not condone people selling modified versions of Microsoft Windows including keyloggers that call home to the seller and claiminf it is official, unmodified Windows. One shouldn't sell malware with someone else's trademark on it. The problem as fsf explains well is that we have grouped disparate things together under vague intellectual property when the entire exercise is anything but intellectual.
Never mind that there are a bunch of companies, in particular in the embedded market, that violate it left and right.
If we can find a way to ensure we can get those without copyleft, alright, but so far copyright is the only legal tool we have.
Make it available, and we'll buy it. Don't, and it'll be pirated. That's just how things work.
I'm going to go 100% torrent sites.
I am willing to pay for exactly one streaming service. The idea that streaming services will become the "pay only for the channels you watch" is second to the fact that all but a few streaming sites will wind up being complete shit.
So far only YouTube and Netflix have passable interfaces, cross platform support, and a half-decent discovery algorithm.
This has happened on maybe 6 or 7 movies in the last year and I'm starting to get annoyed enough to consider cancelling my subscription.
The pickings are not very good anymore and new stuff seems so sparse and infrequent.
I'm spending money each month on something i use maybe one or two nights a month.
Why even pretend you are willing to pay, you clearly aren't.
SPOUSE: We have this movie on DVD.
SPOUSE: You could watch it without commercials.
KID: Okay. Where is it?
SPOUSE: Somewhere in the DVD cabinet.
KID: Ummmm.... that's okay.
KID: I'll just watch it on TV.
The lack of searchable indexes is a huge obstacle in every form of media. Imagine if you went to the library, and rather than a central index, you had to check each floor in the stacks separately to see if a book was available.
Likewise I used to grab a cd or tape for my walkman before leaving the house. Now it takes at least 5 minutes (probably more) to transfer files to an mp3 player though admitedly they can hold way more.
The only place I see this as a win is with the kindle where book sizes are so small, I can store way more than I am likely to read.
Also I simply cannot get them to watch a movie on a DVD somehow 'missing out' on what is on TV.
In fact I recently had to use Amazon video instead of torrent because amazon had what I was looking for and torrents didn't.
If the parents position is that he literally needs everything in one or he'll never leave, it's an unreasonable demand. No business or service will ever have 100%. Not even torrents.
Let's assume that we're talking about a show which is an hour long. Which means we're paying $2 per hour.
Netflix charges $8/month with the average usage of 2.4 hours a day in the US which comes out to $0.11/hour. More aggressive users looking to completely replace TV can average 4/5 hours a day knocking the price down $0.05/hour. And a household of three with different preferences can effectively triple that getting us down to $0.04/hour if they're casual users or $0.02/hour if they're aggressive.
Torrenting costs more in time than $0.05/hour so it's no surprise that people are willing to pay for it.
If torrenting is to be defeated it will require cooperation and a realistic view of what content is actually worth to people.
And of course there are many people for whom the money does matter, which makes the gap even wider.
I understand many people prefer to torrent, but a lot of the rationalization doesn't make much sense to me.
I am subscribed to several services, but often, usually for the newest and coolest, it is simply not possible for me to stream a movie legally. If they would only focus on solving that instead of raging against their customers, they could maybe _then_ start to complain about piracy.
Seriously, I would like to support the creation of the content I like to consume. If nobody supports it, nothing will be made.
I, too, understand that we're still far from such a situation, but I would rather not get there before someone make changes to this idiocy.
Paying customers, not pirates, are the problem.
This is often mentioned, but it's just not true. Humans produced creative work long before there was copyright or even money, and they will continue doing so long after our civilization has crumbled. People are hard-wired to create. The social status associated with creative output is the main incentive - money is just icing on the cake.
You might argue that if we don't pay theater admission for bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels, then those specific genres might not be produced, and would be replaced by lower-budget plot/character driven cinema. But that's at least arguably a feature, not a bug.
It could also be argued that bad Tom Cruise thrillers and fifth-installment summer blockbuster sequels are necessary for the industry to have enough money, experience, talent and infrastructure to be able to produce the occasional good movie.
Most of us haven't even read the world's top 100 books or watched the top 100 movies. If production were to completely cease, how long would we have until we run out of high quality media?
Did you miss the whole open source software movement? Music other content was made well before copyright was invented.
But I'm willing to moderate my statement to "no AAA blockbusters will be made" or "no really high budget movies will be made", or something like that. It will have an impact on the budget of movies. Some may argue that is a good thing, but I enjoy my Matrix, LoTR, Hobbit, Cloud Atlas, Marvels, etc. and don't really want that to go away.
[0] http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-epix-deal-expir...
I vaguely recall having heard that movies are actually not the main interest of their viewers but that might have been some PR ;)
True enough. Though for the present purposes, it it probably sufficient to note that this reformulation is not fairly debatable: "Creators and makers have the right to determine how and where the work they own is distributed."
Edit: Actually, krapht's response led me to see that this is completely wrong. "Creators and makers" have robust (though not totally unlimited) legal rights to determine the conditions under which their works are copied, but do not have an all encompassing and well established legal right to determine how their works are distributed after the first sale.
Of course, the easy confusion (that I fell prey to) is that distribution often, but not always, entails copying. When it does, creators have strong legal rights. But when it does not, their rights are considerably more limited.
The example of libraries brings this distinction out nicely.
It can't just be that a copyright is intangible, because there are a lot of intangible things one can one: money, shares of stock, debt...
The difference between copyrights and property is that the scarcity is entirely artificial. If I have your sandwich, you can't eat it. If I steal your money, you can't spend it. (There exists the possibility of copying your money, that's counterfeiting and it's a distinct issue. Not all monetary systems are vulnerable to it. But whichever way, copying your money is never seen as a crime against you. You can still spend yours.)
Copyrights and patents are properly understood as granted monopolies. In the same category as having "a monopoly on the sale of salt". Basically, a way of governments playing favourites by making someone a needless but coercively enforced toll-booth owner.
And what about things that are made scarce by the prevailing legal framework? Surely this is the case for copyrighted works and patented methods (etc.)--I take it that this is the root of your criticism--but it is also true of pretty much any other intangible thing that we think of as being property and, therefore, subject to ownership, such as stock, money, and debt. Is there any principled reason for requiring that things be naturally scarce in order to be subject to ownership?
Finally, I don't think one can simply ignore the policy reasons for the existence of the intellectual property laws that make intellectual property scarce. Maybe you don't think they are good reasons anymore, but simply ignoring the very copious literature on this subject doesn't seem like a good way to persuade anyone.
On the patent front, for example, the usual arguments are that patents 1) encourage people to make more patentable methods than they otherwise would, 2) encourage people to make greater use of the patented methods then they otherwise would (the so-called "extractive" theory), and 3) encourage people to make discoveries public (in exchange for legally enforced exclusivity) instead of protecting them by keeping them secret.
Maybe these arguments don't persuade you (some of them persuade me more than others), but I don't think they are so weak that they can simply be ignored in favor of purely metaphysical arguments about the definition of "property" and "ownership."
If you write/compose a song, and/or record a song for the public in the United States you do not have complete control over it anymore.
(When you play a DVD, you copy it into memory. But at that moment you give it to someone else, it's the physical thing.)
This all means that the spirit and the mechanical effect of the laws are different, now that we use the internet for everything.
This is very very debatable. Do you enjoy jumping into arguments where the salient points of debate have been decided before the discussion has even begun?
While I'm not a fan of the entitlement-culture that's a massive feature of large parts of the popular internet, there's more to this than simple entitlement. Demanding content for free is entitlement. Being happy to pay for content, but being denied access based on your geographical location isn't entitlement - at least to me, and I think to a lot of people both on and off the internet.
What content owners have seemed to fail to grasp, repeatedly, is that governments operate at least partly by consent[0]. No matter how successful you are at convincing the government of a country to pass the law you want, if it's a law that's very difficult to enforce and is generally perceived as being unfair/unreasonable, it will often get ignored entirely.
The problem in this particular case is that in much of the world, the content owners have taken an incredibly aggressive stance, making it extremely difficult or impossible to access lots of content legally. This is often regarded as unfair by the general population of that country - "Why can't I listen to this song/watch this film? It's been available in <other country> for months/years".
From a legal standpoint, the content owner is within their rights to say: "Actually, I don't really care about country Y. I'll not bother releasing my content there."[1] However, in practice, it's unlikely their wishes will be respected.
No matter how you or they might feel about it, in the real world, content owners have two options:
1) Make it legally available under reasonable terms.
2) Accept that it will be available illegally.
There is no third option.
0: Yes, there's debate as to what degree this applies, but for the purposes of my point that shouldn't matter, as long as you accept that there's at least some degree of consent required.
1: In theoretical discussions of this topic, it's often presumed that market forces will counteract this, and incentivise the owner to make their content widely available in most markets - this is demonstrably not the case in practice however.
It's like saying "I am willing to pay for a car" and then complaining that nobody will sell you an Audi S6 for five thousand dollars.
Good/services are ultimately priced by the people willing to purchase. The producer can charge more than what people are asking - but can only go so high. The higher the producer charges, the less people buy their good/product. Sometimes this trade off is worth it (ie. luxury brands).
If nobody was willing to pay so much as a penny over $5,000 for an Audi S6 you can bet one of two things happening:
a) An Audi S6 would be sold for $5,000 (and never see production again)
b) No Audi S6 would ever be sold (and never see production again) a) Some people would pay $100,000 and get the painting.
b) Some people would think $100,000 is ridiculous, not pay, and not get the painting.
c) Some people would copy/steal/whatever the painting, and get the painting for $0.
Option "D" (offering to pay, taking for free) comes with knowing that the artist might not be able to support themselves to make more. I've always supported artists/studios I want to see create more art and I think any adult pirating understands the economy enough to know this - and most teenagers understand it on some level (but also understandbly aren't usually made of money).
One could also argue that increased exposure is a form of indirect profit. If 3,000,000 people steal a copy of the painting someone might be willing to buy that painting for $100,000 for bragging rights. Hey guys, I own the original painting! This exposure could increase their potential sales.
The issue of pirates is never black and white. Frankly, the music industry would never see $0.01 from me if I couldn't pirate/listen to free on YT and decide "I wish to support this artist and hopefully hear a new album from them in the future."
I know I'm not the only person who would never spend a single penny otherwise.
This is not a priori true. There are agreements that prevent release in certain areas unless done through a specific middleman.
So, as an individual, you would NOT be able to get all rights.
Blanket statements are very likely to be untrue when dealing with this industry.
Though i guess it helped that they had the big scary communist block to be compared to if they had tried.
This because they also ended up allowing imported CB radios to be operated, even though the band was originally allocated for a different use.
It's then easy to see that the above does not hold true in all cases, many examples of public greater good can be provided but the case of generic drugs is perhaps the most well-known: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694898.
The only one at a potential loss here would be something like IKEA, because you didn't buy the chair from them.
And that is the kind of insane territory the likes of TPP and TTIP are heading into with their clauses whereby companies can sue nations for loss of potential profits (due to new legislations or whatsnot).
For most of human history if you, say, heard a poem someone else wrote you were absolutely free to copy it, reproduce it, even sell it! Even if you didn't do the work of actually writing it. And this was the norm, and no one thought the author should have the right to stop you. So saying that it's not debatable whether this is still the case from a moral standpoint (hence the "should" in the debated statement) seems to me shortsighted.
What's more, even today there are countless ways in which content is distributed without permission from it's makers that we don't deem wrongs. Libraries were named in this thread, and we have all kinds of lendings, readings, quotes and all use that is allowed by fair use. Where the rights of the makers should end (and those of the consumer start) is very much debatable.
The invention of IP is one possible explanation of why we have so much content nowadays. Other possible contributing factors include the population explosion of the previous century, the fundamental improvement of communication technologies, and the overall increase in the material conditions of the majority of the population.
I'm inclined to believe you but I wonder how we can possibly know that. Before modern communication and distribution technologies, lots of content was simply lost and forgotten.
There are those of us who do not agree with Copyright and would gladly suffer the negatives to be rid of it.
I'm curious how you think the cost of IP generation should be distributed across an economy, because it sounds like you want content-creators to "suffer the negatives" for your own personal gain.
And most of these people are not people who are trying to earn a living from their works.
I do not think that people should be able to own ideas and information.
> And most of these people are not people who are trying to earn a living from their works.
You could make the same argument to a person who wanted to abolish slavery. Just because someone is earning a living by doing something doesn't mean it's right.
And it's time the music/movie industry understands that they need to upgrade their business models to the internet age. Maybe they should charge for fresh music, acknowledging that after 6 months everyone can have a copy of the music, pirated if necessary.
While the English copyright only dealt with, well, copying, the French system dealt with things like how and when a play or musical piece could be performed.
This because they cared not just about the monetary angle, but about the reputation of the creator (like say if a politician the creator didn't support wanted to use a song or similar).
The reason we see this pop up is that copyright was standardized across Europe with the Bern Convention. Later this was extended across the world (USA didn't sign on until the 1980s, btw).
The french is also to thank for the whole "life+X" copyright duration...
When copyright first came to be, it was a negotiating leverage between the singular author and the owners of printing presses (very mechanical and labor intensive to operate, and therefore it was rarely done without sales in mind) for a share of the profits.
Without it, it was not uncommon for a printer to buy a text for pennies and then resell copies for pounds.
Then again, it also introduced the title page holding the name of author and printer. Thus the government had names to lean on if the content was not acceptable...
As best i recall, Germany was a latecomer to the whole copyright thing. As such, they had wide and cheap access to all kinds of texts. Both informative and entertaining.
This in turn supposedly helped them bootstrap their industrial base.
What do you make? What do you make to pay the bills; what do you make for passion? How would you feel about people pirating what you make to pay the bills?
Even if you are 100% open source everything for free forever, do you acknowledge that other people may be looking to their creative work as a source of income, and may want a more restrictive license on their work? Do you feel they are morally wrong to ever want to be paid for all the time and labor that goes into performing their craft, and probably into paying off their absurd student loans as well?
Student loans, and obligations in general that people have contracted with certain expectations, only justify that we take a "softer" approach, it doesn't change the argument.
(There are plenty of nuances of people's opposition, for example people who think arbitrary copyright licenses should still be enforceable but that it's mean to use a proprietary one.)
I'd take that regardless of whether it comes with free access to movies, music and TV shows.
edit: I think it's debatable how much impact it would have of software developer salaries. The only way I see it causing a drop in salaries is if it causes a reduced demand for developers by increasing software development efficiency.
"the relaxation of copyright and especially patent laws in the software industry"
What about all the things that still would exist? Would all those things be worse? What about if we had strong data protection laws? Maybe all those celebrities wouldn't have been violated. On the other hand maybe Google wouldn't have existed at all or maybe that is if copyright had actually been enforced. Hm.
The point being that the only thing we can be certain about is that things have changed and are going to change. When do we reach a point were copyright has to be reformed and at which point of that reform doesn't Zac Efon get to make his movie?
I'm personally not sure that the entitlement of Zac Efron is a huge factor in my views on copyright.
But why do you make assumptions about the income of HN users? I’m sure the crowd here is quite diverse.
It seems to me that software markets are already moving in the direction of assuming that creators don't have control over distribution of digital goods.
Many (frankly most) programmers are employed in positions where the revenue supporting their salary is not the sales of licenses to potentially copyable IP. I work for a hardware vendor. Web developers sell services and data access, etc...
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent's position on copyright, but the content utopia those folks envision isn't actually implausible.
To claim that content IP licensing pays for some programmers salaries is straightforward. To extend that to argue that salaries of all programmers are significantly higher needs numbers; it's not at all an obvious corrollary.
Even as a fairly radical pirate I know that most people don't care about copyright, for or against. To the extent that people are against copyright it's mainly about absurd copyright terms, harsh punishment and general industry dysfunction. There's no basis for the idea to abolish copyright, essentially no one thinks that nor will it ever happen. It's scare tactics.
Also the scenario where authors can't control distribution has already happened and has been going on for years and years. From poems to professional software.
Is there room to debate the notion of artificial scarcity and copyright limits? Sure. Does a creator of a work sacrifice all rights to distribution simply by the act of creation? Nope.
Or, in a more real-world example, if I found out a religious organization was using one of my original works as a soundtrack to a commercial - without my consent or receiving compensation - I'm going to fight to keep my rights to tell them to shut it down. The implication of your statement is much more problematic.
You do not get to be a copyright abolitionist and a supporter of mandatory source code distribution at the same time.
There seems to be a lot of overlap between these communities, and the cognitive dissonance is just stunning.
The GPL, like the Discordian Kopyleft, is a legal exploit, or a hack if you prefer, that uses a silly IP law to nullify itself.
If some people are using IP law to restrict the freedom of users and makers of software, why can't they use the law to defend themselves? It's like complaining that anarchists are hypocrites for calling the police when they are victims of crime.
Much like a significant minority of Free Software advocates (notably not Stallman) believe that the ideal is to have no IP at all, but that since we have them whether we want them or not, Free Software and Kopyleft are a valid defense mechanism.
The Anarchist claim is nonsense. They want no government, because it would be better. Yet when they get a free chance to act out that scenario (taking care of things on their own) still they call on the man. In what way would it hurt them to NOT call the cops after they've been mugged? They've already paid the taxes, so no marginal cost. It would let them enjoy the experience of their utopian society with no further cost to them.
I call that hypocrisy to the max.
Or perhaps they are trained in the use of deadly firearms and believe they can protect themselves from crime using that but they live in a country that prohibits firearm use.
The point is, sometimes we can't act as if we already live in utopia. To reach utopia we have to get there from a place that exists in reality, not from a fantasy ideal world.
[Edit: incidentally, I have called the cops three times in my life. The first two times I was told "it's not my problem". The third time they just hadn't showed up in 15 minutes, so I got bored and left.]
How about we start with, do your own investigating, hire a private investigator, put up security cameras etc. You know, the things you'd be forced to do if Anarchy was actually in operation. Too much trouble? Exactly why we have civil societies.
In a world where selling software is less relevant than selling network access to software or devices with software on them, this places companies at a huge advantage (since they don't really need copyrights on binaries) but the Free Software community can no longer forcibly extract the source code of derivatives.
The most blatant of all is that Popcorn Time is not a site, it's an application (which is why it's been so hard to block).
It uses existing sites (like YTS and The Piratebay) to find magnet links to content to stream (using a torrent streaming library)
Also: "“Mr. Robot” is not available elsewhere, apart from on Popcorn Time." - What the hell? If a series is available on Popcorn Time it's inherently because it's available somewhere else, as they don't host any content
But the one that bothers me most is that they mention how before Popcorn Time, piracy involved: "Aggressive advertising banners, websites popping up unexpectedly and strange porn ads".
Well, guess what? Popcorn Time is an application that most people download in binary form, so it could steal your personal data, inject advertising in other sites, use your computer as a proxy... etc. It's not a step forward.
In that regard, you and the movie industry have something in common. You both spread FUD around to get your point across.
This is FUD.
Neither of them are distributed by the original devs, how certain are you that they are not injecting malware into the binaries?
This question is a logical fallacy, in that a negative can't be proved in the context of this particular problem set. You would need to prove the inverse, namely that you are certain that significant numbers of binaries of Popcorn Time contain malware, and how you arrived at that conclusion.
You just have to do a quick google search to find that even the original devs are concerned about the number of forks, and malware-riddled copies of Popcorn Time [0]
Also, there's been a number of reports that the most famous forks contain adware [1]
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-warns-users-against-ma...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/2lyxnm/time4po...
If you want to point out that the author is bias hacking, fine, but don't move into "fact" mode using weakly biased arguments. You have no evidence that significant numbers of Popcorn Time instances have viruses or malware in them. When you do have that evidence, come back here and state it as such, instead of presenting a hypothesis as a fact as you are currently doing.
I would point out that having an opinion about the piece is totally valid. It's just not cool to make a biased argument on your own opinion with "facts" that are simply your own hypotheses.
Popcorn time uses a webservice.
But it doesn't even need that. You can use a .torrent or magnet URL from anywhere on the latest builds.
Just drag-n-drop a .torrent file onto the UI or simply paste (Ctrl-V / Cmd-V) a magnet URL that you already had on your clipboard and it will gladly attempt to live stream any arbitrary torrent.
The built-in video player generally works the best with .mp4 video files, but I've seen it successfully stream other media types as well.
When the torrent file in question contains multiple media files, a file chooser dialog appears letting you select which one you wish to watch.
The application could literally be re-written at any time to use any torrent site for showing content.
.. and since it's open source, the genie is out of the bottle.
Hopefully Popcorn Time will do the same for movies. Netflix and friends have made great strides -- but they are still hobbled by DRM and geographical restrictions, as the article points out.
If you want to watch football games online and you find that it's going to either cost you $20/game for only your home team's games and they cut out the announcers or something and double up on the commercials to pay for the network AND to pay for the game(hypothetical) and then you find that you can watch it on a third party streaming site for free and have your favorite announcer doing commentary, you're bound to not want to pay the ridiculous amount for it and move to using some less-than-wholesome service.
There's no real solution to any of this aside from a paradigm shift. Yes, money is the motivation for creating a lot of this stuff. However, people are just going to continue to find ways around terrible ridiculous lock downs.
This kind of parallels craigslist, which has turned the classifieds market into a multi-billion-dollar sinkhole (http://theweek.com/articles/461056/craigslist-took-nearly-1-...). Except craigslist has critical mass and can't be easily replaced, whereas a concerted effort to innovate instead of stagnate by the movie industry could easily become a preferred service to PT.
These services already exist, though (not movie-theatre-release up to date, but neither is Popcorn Time). Yet people still want to watch these movies for free.
Let's not kid ourselves - yes, the MPAA could help to create a better system than currently exists for streaming movies. No, users of Popcorn Time won't suddenly start paying for movies while the free Popcorn Time service still exists.
Where they exist?
When they released the first version in 2014 they shared it on twitter mentioning all the team.
> It's popcorn time! @getpopcornapp! /cc @tomasdev @abad @brunolazzaro @alan_reid
https://twitter.com/diego_ar/status/432720371465609216
I mean, if they were so concerned with their identity, they would have deleted that tweet, right?
The idea that everyone would just transition to a gift culture and give artists a big hug in a post-copyright world is incredibly naive. Too many people are cheap greedy assholes. It'd be an exploitation-fest for the five seconds it would take for all creative industries to go bankrupt. Then there would be nothing.
At the very least copyright reform and "gift culture" are very distinct ideas.
Also, removing copyright isn't really copyright reform.
I disagree entirely that there would be "nothing". Art and entertainment would just look different. The budgets would probably be lower, and the payment and distribution channels would be entirely different. Kickstarter/Patreon vs. Netflix/retail.
This is another way of saying the salaries would be lower and there would be no benefits or permanent career path in the arts. The arts would become a hobby that people do before they get a 'real job' that is able to support them as adults.
What I don't think you understand is that those big-budget shallow pop pieces support the rest of the industry both directly and indirectly. Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc. The high salaries in tech are held up by the demand that these large houses create. When you cut the top of the pyramid off an industry, the result is recession -- an overall deflation of the rest of the labor market. Look at what happened to even unrelated industrial concerns in Detroit when the big-three auto makers left town. The entire economy of the city collapsed, not just car factories.
I'll give you a concrete example: all the cool synth and instrument gear musicians use to innovate. It's a good example because I know people who work for Moog Music and other firms in those areas. The majority of those firms' revenue comes from larger and deeper pocketed artists and other creative concerns that buy the latest-and-greatest and the big-ticket items. Kill off all that and Moog would go out of business and all the little indie bands would no longer even be able to purchase gear.
Your ability to produce an album or a movie on a Kickstarter budget is in fact subsidized indirectly by way of demand generated by the larger and deeper pocketed side of the industry and the productive economy of scale that it helps create. Industries are ecosystems and the bigger concerns within them are primary producers -- what happens to a forest if you cut down all the trees?
I agree that copyright is in need of some reform, but the radical anti-copyright and 'pirate party' position is just insanely naive and would completely destroy art, music, and literature as viable career paths for anyone. It's the kind of position you encounter from people who have zero understanding of economics and/or are really naive about human nature (a.k.a. have never met a sociopath).
I just don't think that maintaining the status quo justifies the current policing of personal computer and internet usage.
Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will. The creative industries have refused to acknowledge this reality. I don't think any individuals should be jailed or bankrupted to maintain this illusion any longer.
When the dust settles, society will still have art and entertainment. It will just be different from what we are used to.
I also agree that the concept of copyright is a 'legal fiction' in the sense that it's a kind of hack. 'People who make intangible things should be able to get paid, so let's pretend they are physical artifacts.' But the purpose of that hack is at least in its purest sense noble. Child labor laws are also a legal fiction. There is no natural reason for them to exist. We made them up because we got tired watching the children of the poor be used up as a consumable good. Nature sucks. Civilization is a conspiracy to escape the brutal amoral Darwinism of nature.
If you want to get rid of copyright, create a better alternative. But your better alternative must do the good things that the original does, otherwise it won't work. So far I don't see such a thing.
The fundamental issue is present here in this sentence:
"Nowadays, film and music are just files, and can be freely copied at will."
Let's say I have two files. One is a music file, the other is the output of /dev/urandom. They could be of equal size, and they are equally easy to copy. But one contains the results of possibly thousands of hours of human labor not to mention the irreplaceable and ethereal quality we call 'creativity', while the other contains no actual information at all.
Conflating one with the other based on how easy they are to duplicate amounts to a profound devaluation of human labor and human life.
The same sort of argument sounds absurd when applied to physical goods e.g. "a t-shirt is just cotton, so why do we have to pay a premium to a bunch of factory workers?" But it is in fact the same argument, since in reality everything is just information and therefore all labor amounts to the transformation of information. Your t-shirt is just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. organized in a particular way.
(This argument carried further gets really interesting, but I have work to do. Quick version: in a post-3d-printing future where everything is automated, copyright might well be the only form of property and the only mechanism for compensation available to the non-capitalist class.)
This is a drastic change from the days of printing presses, vinyl records, etc. The idea that these industries should be allowed to ignore this reality by punishing those who make use of it is ludicrous, in my opinion.
My alternative to copyright is nothing. Let society figure out how to remunerate artists without coercion.
It already has. It's called Spotify, Apple Music, etc. If you remove copyright from the equation, this is what will happen:
These services will continue to exist, but free of copyright restrictions will make all content available to their customers. Then they'll become free, or freemium with an ad-supported free tier and an ad-free tier for a few bucks a month. Now that one of their major cost centers is gone they won't need to charge much.
Apple and the other Lords of the Brand and the Distribution Channel will still pay the artist... whatever they see fit to pay. It will be below minimum wage, with the artist expected to make up the difference by brewing coffee or waiting tables. They may occasionally take an artist and make them wealthy (by artist standards) in order to con the majority of punks into thinking art is a viable career path. As with all industries powered by burning out the young, you have to keep the queue full.
This looks not terribly unlike the old record company model, but with one key difference:
In the old model the artist had a contract. It might have been a shitty contract, but it was a contract and the artist had some negotiating capability. In the new model the artist has none, zero, nada. Yes master, pay me whatever you like master.
A few artists will try to rebel and form alternative channels, but there is no copyright, remember? Apple and the others will simply vacuum up the content from these channels and add it to their already-massive catalog without paying anything in return. A few loyal fans might boycott the big channels and go with the indies, but not enough to make a difference. Do you want six apps/sites/feeds to listen to music or just one?
A few rebels might also try to turn the tables by vacuuming up the catalogs of Apple et. al. and creating bootleg ad-free versions. Sure, fine, go ahead. It'll cut into the majors revenue a bit but it won't do anything for the artists. If anything it'll make things even worse by squeezing the majors, causing them to cut expenses in the one place they're now completely free to do so: paying artists less.
It's called a "deflationary race to the bottom," and in such scenarios the lower-downs lose more than the higher-ups because they have no intrinsic structural leverage.
If you're curious I can also tell you what will happen without child labor laws. It'll involve crying, secret mass graves, and cute little amputees.
Everyone is not an asshole, but enough people are assholes and enough businesses are more or less amoral that laws are required to address the worst of the resulting excesses. You'll never have a society without coercion. The question is whether you want one where the strong coerce the weak or one where coercion is applied according to some more objective standard and with the goal of common welfare and compassion. What we have now is somewhere in between, as real things tend to be, but I'm very much against anything that moves it more toward a might-makes-right world.
I say this as an ex-Libertarian. The big thing that destroyed my faith was getting deeply involved in the business world and learning how Shit Really Works, which reminds me of that old 'we should teach the Bible in school so we'd have more atheists' line. It ain't a joke.
This is already the case for most people, and how society at large sees it. The barista with an art degree and the waiter aspiring to be an actor are both cliches at this point. The arts are intrinsically difficult business models because of their anti-rivalrous nature, their varying scarcity and in the digital age, increasing intangibility. Just as artists had patrons in the past, today they have complicated chains of publishers and distributors they must go past. As those become less relevant with digital distribution, then the problems of saturation set in.
Look at software for an example -- your little open source effort is in fact bankrolled by the open source ecosystem that is subsidized by Facebook, Google, big VC money, etc.
Well, not exactly.
The parts of open source that get subsidized tend to be limited in their scope, primarily user-facing and application development software -- what you would expect for media companies to care about, and what is easiest to sell as a service.
Infrastructure and systems software has always been treated as more of a commodity and receives relatively little attention. Some companies devote teams to enhancing it, but much of it remains dominated by private individuals and researchers, the latter sometimes working as part of research institutes that are both privately and publicly funded.
Clearly since people risk civil and criminal action to watch the stuff for free.
There is tons of actually free stuff on the internet and people still want the hollywood stuff.
The civil and criminal fines are pretty damn ridiculous. If I were in charge, I'd treat it like a parking ticket. Your IP gets caught, you get a 75 dollar fine unless you can show it wasn't you. That's how we treat parking tickets.
I just think it's silly for pirates to argue that the media content is worthless junk. Since they spend so much time consuming it for free. That goes double now that netflix has enough content for a lifetime for 8 bucks a month.
Netflix has its own problems, besides. Chief among those, the predatory licensing agreements causing entire swathes of content to vanish overnight, or the fact that those agreements are often local to the USA, causing people in other countries to get a vastly reduced/different catalog of content.
If the movie industry wanted to serve their customers instead of screw them, they'd get their lawyers together and release their own Popcorn Time. Literally all the movies, $XX/month, no heavy infrastructure required beyond P2P, no worries about your favorites disappearing randomly some day.
..But they will never do that, because to do so would cause them to admit those evil pirates had the right idea, and cause the false valuation of their content to evaporate.
Plus you essentially can do that on Amazon Instant or Itunes. It has nearly everything. Pirates just don't like paying 3 dollars a movie.
And what's more, "pirates" don't like paying any amount of money for DRM-encumbered crap. Streaming is a different beast, but even then it's a bad situation what with the time limits and such.
2) The article is about the people who made Popcorn Time. Not about producers of content.
3) Why do you claim that everybody feels entitled to content? Surely you must understand that is not true. Even though some pirates would pirate regardless of legal alternatives there is a a lot of people who do so because that content is not available on Netflix or other options. Which is the reason why PT was developed in the first place - no legal alternatives in Argentina.
How people talk: "Where did you get this music?" "Oh, I got it from bittorrent."
People aren't nuanced enough to know the difference between an indexing service, an application, a protocol, and various implementations or instances of all combinations thereof.
Probably for the same reason "I HTTP'd it" never became established because people were already using their browsers for regular downloads over HTTP.
From it, you could get episodes that had been aired hours before, with subtitles, with online streaming. It spread like wildfire because it was orders of magnitude easier than going to Pirate Bay(which is a terrible experience).
I dont know how pop popcorn time actually is in Argentina itself since none of my friends use it, and installing the app was a bad experience for me and my gf: nevertheless a famous phone carrier published a 4G connection ad saying : "eat popcorn in 4G".
If I am a movie producer, do I or do I not have the right to release a movie in one region and a month later in another region?
Do I have the right to release in one medium first, then some other medium later (or not at all)?
Do I have the right to maximize the profit on an optional, non-essential product?
Now, the studios say one thing, everyone here seems to be saying another. There's a ton of rhetoric on either side, but no clear-cut answers.
(By "here", I mean in general tone, not specifics within this particular thread of conversations.)
Realistically, not everyone is going to make that choice.
Mostly, Amazon seems to have gotten things right with the Kindle: content is mostly accessible anywhere, and it's very easy to buy, making that the path of least resistance.
Movies however...it couldn't be any less convenient to buy a movie in high quality and original audio/language that can be played in any media player (like Kodi/XBMC). In fact it is legally impossible. Buy and download online? Not possible. The closest option is buying a bluray and ripping it. I'd even consider getting an optical drive (that I absolutely don't need otherwise) to do that, but as a european I'd also have to deal with those unnecessary delays in availability.
I'm sorry, but as long as this situation remains, I won't feel sorry about pirating bluray-ripped movies in good quality. On the other hand I can't remember when I last pirated music.
(Similarly for physical goods: it would be absurd to set up a bookstore but based on people's passports I may or may not sell them books.)
US policy has, in at least one specific case, decided that you are not allowed to restrict use of the copyright, so long as you are fairly compensated for it. This is called "compulsory licensing."
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly, so it is natural that there will be tension over the extent of it.
Some people strongly feel that it is natural that creators should have control over the publishing of their content, others feel htat it is not so.
Roman law provided for no copyright, but several other legal traditions, including ancient Greek, as well as Jewish Talmudic laws provided for what today are known in Europe as "moral rights" which are distinct from copyright and cover things such as false-attribution and distortions of the work.
So the question would be, what grounds does a movie producer have to prevent me from giving away a thousand copies of a DVD I have purchased? Clearly there are legal grounds, but are the legal grounds representative of some underlying philosophical ownership a creator has of their works, a monetary incentive for creators to publish their works, or something else?
Why has the time come? Watching content on the owners web site is a horrible experience. You get the same ad multiple times in a row, OR the volume on one is barely audible, and the next is blowing out the windows. Worse then it ever was on cable or broadcast. From what I hear, popcorn time makes this all go away.
The initial line of reasoning in this quote is flawed. Creators and makers don't have the right to pre-determine judgement of a particular piece of software or the possible use of that software by users based on some claim to "rights". It's the pre-judging part that is wrong here, not the simulated assertion to ownership of the content in a hypothetical violation. Judging my use of a particular piece of software before I use it is stupid, narrow minded and factually blaming. Would they also limit my use of an operating system to run the software? Or a computer to run the OS? No. Why? Because Apple makes lots of money doing those things.
Because this line of reasoning is flawed, it's not a big surprise Stan quickly drops into bias hacking the audience by making arguments that Popcorn Time "negatively impacts audience experience" and contains "malware and viruses". Given the fact they are willing to spread falsehoods is an indication they themselves are in cognitive dissonance over the whole thing.
Not that they don't spread falsehoods about their own content all the time to us via commercials, billboards, flyers, ads on websites, reviews, etc., etc.
I'd like to see the creative industry move toward an Open Source model over the coming years in an attempt to move us away from these confrontational rationalizations which are being driven by increasing demands around revenue. Perhaps this Open Source model would also allow us to better illustrate the problem of mass production of low quality movies and content. These low quality movies "have no legitimate purpose and only serve to infringe on moviegoer's rights, thus preventing them from enjoying their night and wasting their money on yet another crappy flick".
If anything, it is the legal ways to watch movies that have traditionally had the inverior experience. Forcing me to watch commercials or be warned that copyright is a crime for minutes before the actual content.
Movie industry: You have always been burning bridges! Wake up, for crying out loud! </pointless rant>
I expect the case law around this sort of thing will continue to evolve.
For instance, here's a google search [0] that gives you access to the same pirated material that Popcorn Time does (but with a worse UI)
Does this mean google is an illegal site? Is HN an illegal site? It can get pretty complex.
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=yify+jurassic+world+filetype...
In Germany you won't have problems downloading movies, but uploading them gets you quickly a nasty letter and further abuses escalates to prosecution.
Since Popcorntime is using Bittoerrent, does it just download, or does it upload too?