Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites | Hacker News Reader

Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites

arstechnica.com

48 pointsduringmath37 comments

Total clowns. These are the same greedy executives that can't wait to fire as many humans as possible and replace them with generative AI trash.

> Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy "steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales."

What steals hundreds of thousands of jobs and tens of billions are movie executives who make terrible movies and continuously abuse workers by underpaying them all the while enriching themselves with million dollar salaries.

Theoretical ticket sales, what a joke.

I was never a fan of the cinema so if I do happen to pirate a movie it certainly isn't a "lost sale"

I'm an unapologetic piracy advocate, but the one time I skipped meeting up with friends to see a movie and downloaded a camrip instead, I deeply regretted the experience. The idea that piracy is a substitute for movie theaters is preposterous. It's a competitor to bluray purchases and gimmicky streaming, sure. But not theaters.

I don’t think you telling your friends “nah I don’t want to hang out with you, I’d rather stay home by myself” has any bearing on the relative merits of piracy

Was this comment meant as anything more than some kind of weird knock? It was more like "I don't want to interrupt the project I'm in the middle of, drive a few hours, and spend this weekend in the city", but sure. I mentioned the social aspect because to me that is one of the main draws of the movie theater. It's almost as bad as if a record exec said that music piracy kills the demand for live concerts. (Although I do cringe from likening movie theaters to concert venues)

then your home theatre setup isn’t great (or you’re comparing it to a PLF experience).

a large oled and good speakers is dare i say better than 99% of poorly maintained theatre screens.

I said camrip. It wasn't about my home setup being marginally worse or better than the theater. Rather it's because the file I was watching was made with a video camera on a tripod in a movie theater. It had subtle problems throughout the movie, like the audio cutting out a bit, or random voices talking, or weird shadow. Not all the time, just little bits that ruined the experience at the wrong moments.

Larger point being that mass piracy is really about the inevitability of independent distribution once studios have released things in widely available digital formats. Studios could play their cards closer to the vest longer - theaters already have that whole trusted hardware chain they want to force upon everybody. But if anything they've been moving post-theater-format release dates sooner and sooner.

I don't care for 4k quality, but you'd have to be pretty desperate to watch a camrip. there is piracy in proper formats

I kinda wish they get what they wish for and pirating movies becomes impossible. I think modern Hollywood movies are somewhere between poison for your brain and propaganda. The world is going to be a bit better if people stop spending time watching them.

I also think they are cutting the branch they are sitting on. If kids and young adults lose access to piracy they will develop other interest and won't spend money on movies once they have disposable income.

One way or another I support them. It's a win-win if their wish is granted.

> If kids and young adults lose access to piracy they will develop other interest

Entertainment is a lot more fungible than these companies realize. Pour cold water on movies and people will watch TV. Dampen that and people will play video games. Make me hate Reddit and I'll go to youtube. Start forcing ads on youtube and I'll go to instagram. etc.

> I kinda wish they get what they wish for and pirating movies becomes impossible.

If only movies would be magically impossible to watch without paying, without any catches, I'd agree. Sadly, there's no magic out there and the side effects from the implementation are going to be... a very big problem, to say the least.

And I'm sure movie industry understands it (to some extent) - they won't dig their own grave, they're going to boil the frog at well controlled pace.

There is an underlying "tragedy of the anticommons"[1] problem that will be exasperated even if kids and young adults stop consuming mass media.

For example, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia communities almost refuse to believe any performer, label, TV/film/game studio, etc would ever release their work under a CC-BY license, even though some of these parties (as large as Warner Bros and Amazon) have a pattern of doing so in the past, probably for marketing purposes.

Typical attempts to justify why an entity is unable to distribute copyrighted content as CC-BY include:

1. Someone pressed the wrong button and marked the audio/video as CC-BY.

2. A separate marketing company may be responsible for social media accounts or website and they didn't have permission of their client to upload certain audio/video, or didn't have permission to distribute with a CC-BY license.

3. The copyright is owned by a production company which is a subsidiary of a parent company. The distribution and marketing of the copyrighted content is handled by a separate subsidiary company of the parent company. Both companies may even be led by the same vice president / CEO of the parent company. However, the theory goes that one subsidiary may not have the permission of the other subsidiary to use a CC-BY license. The CEO of the parent company also may not have the permission of the subsidiary companies.

4. A performer or label may not have gained the permission of ALL rights holders of a work to release under a CC-BY license. What if the movie studio did not get the permission of one of the multiple script writers, the person holding recording rights of a background song, the writer of the lyrics to the background song, etc. In an extreme case, perhaps a random person comes along later to claim that the movie contains a background song, the background song contains a sample, and the sample they consider to be a copyright infringement from another work.

The problem is that if you're an indie filmmaker and release a trailer to your film or excerpts from your film with a CC-BY license, the tragedy of the anticommons situation means that people won't believe you meant to or were allowed to use a CC-BY license. Even releasing all the complex web of contracts between rightsholders in your film wouldn't stop people from disbelieving in your ability to distribute with a CC-BY license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

> I think modern Hollywood movies are somewhere between poison for your brain and propaganda

Where does this hyperbolic rhetoric come from? Is this just your standard appeal to tradition? It's not like the movies of the 70's, 80's and 90's were any less "propaganda". They're entertainment, it's not that deep or serious.

They are propaganda, the CIA and Pentagon had/have their hands in many movies, Marvel's Captain Marvel is a prominent example [1]

[1] https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/is-captain-marvel-military-p...

I should clarify that the "poison for your brain" remark is what I was considering hyperbolic. Also this is coming from someone who saw his friends join the Air Force after watching the original Top Gun in theaters :)

Why don't they simply pay the ISPs 100 million dollars each to block the websites? Perhaps they AREN'T losing 1 billion dollars per year to piracy. Or buying off the politicians is cheaper.

Corrected link: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/movie-industry-d...

Source: https://www.motionpictures.org/remarks/charles-rivkin-state-...

>He also told the audience that pirate-site operators "aren't teenagers playing an elaborate prank. The perpetrators are real-life mobsters, organized crime syndicates—many of whom engage in child pornography, prostitution, drug trafficking, and other societal ills. They operate websites that draw in millions of unsuspecting viewers whose personal data can then fall prey to malware and hackers."

I have a great idea that will greatly reduce the traffic to pirate sites:

Reduce the copyright on movies to 1 year.

Most of the money is made in initial release in theaters anyway.

It well help preserve our cultural heritage.

And it will greatly reduce demand for pirate sites.

they have a point though

I did download Hackers

Movie industry can go fuck themselves. Provide reasonably priced single subscription access to ALL content and the piracy will be gone.

Remember: If you pay for big media, you vote with your wallet for this.

While piracy might be the better and more moral choice for our community, I'd advocate to create something yourself, have fun with friends, watch indy stuff, ...

You could make some indie Indy :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raiders_of_the_Lost_Ark:_The_A...

Massive overreach - these are companies that dont deserve to continue to exist. Make some new stuff that we want to pay you for, guys… it’ll look a lot more like a fair trade.

Movie industry is guilty for existence of DMCA 1201 garbage. They shouldn't be demanding anything.

two people I knew while growing up, have made a lifetime of upper middle class income by being part of making and enforcing systems of Hollywood IP. Movies cost a lot of money to make, and distribution is a business challenge. Meanwhile, stats show that massive network traffic is pirated movies, and more massive network traffic is Netflix. I don't see that either side of this debate is blameless, or obviously in the right. This is policy with economic tradeoffs.

It's say it's all already skewed in favor of DRM proponents and all for bad reasons. So any movent even further in that direction should be strongly opposed.

I.e. many of these reasons have nothing to do with profit, they are about power and control.

Between stuff like this, state laws enforcing ID use for social media and pr0n, and the Twitter files, it seems an American Great Firewall is almost inevitable. Or, at least, the “powers that be” seem to want one. Regrettable.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39994900

Everyone here is so anti-copyright and pro piracy.

What about independent filmmakers? Should film distribution be free so that they, like musicians, have to go on tour in person to make money from their films?

And by the way, why does everyone in here think it’s reasonable for musicians to be forced to go on tour in person to make money with their music? What if the musician isn’t an extroverted attention-seeking performer type? Is the work of those people worthless?

Not that it matters. A flood of ai generated junk is about to hit us all and completely drown out everything made by people. The only winners will be big tech investors

And again with the anti copyright sentiment: everyone seems fine with scraping the works of humans to train ais which will replace them. Maybe you feel that way because you can already retire off your Silicon Valley total comp?

> pro piracy.

As I see it, it's not about promoting copyright violation, it's about people with misaligned (relatively to mine) interests pushing for control over Internet. I'm of a firm belief that it's never a good idea - too risky, no matter how good the presented cause is.

> Should film distribution be free

Others opinion may vary, but it's not about getting free entertainment - it's about paying fair price for a convenient service. Steam had clearly demonstrated that in presence of a decent marketplace, people come and pay. The same was confirmed by Netflix and Hulu in their early days.

However, while streaming platforms used to be okay-ish in their early days (in select first world regions), they got seriously enshittified to the extent people are starting to say "naaah, enough of this crap" and dust off the eyepatches. It's not about not paying (mind you, a decent setup also costs money and/or effort) - it's about getting value for your money. And that value is diminishing to the extent torrenting becomes more appealing.

In other words, media distribution industry had fucked up (again), and they (again) want to shift the blame on child-eating drug-dealing evil pirates.

> A flood of ai generated junk is about to hit us all

Sorry, but how is this is a problem? Serious question. There is a shitload of human-made movies and books that I won't bother to watch/read anyway - and I don't see how it matters how big this pile is as long as we're not getting close to some boundary where we must pick priorities (I don't think we are).

> Maybe you feel that way because you can already retire off your Silicon Valley total comp?

Hah, I'd wish! Hope other folks are doing better in this regard, of course.

ASCAP and other licensing groups are a reasonable deal for music. Individual record companies screw artists which is why they do better on their own label. Unfortunately other licensing groups are trying to make legal music purchasing harder and more complicated by fracturing music inventory available through certain services by requiring separate licensing agreements. By all means, artists should choose the deal that is best for them but I sure don't think a fractured marketplace is the way to go like the video industry has. Netflix was great when everyone was willing to license their content on reasonable terms. A dozen different streaming subscriptions is not worth it.

> A flood of ai generated junk is about to hit us all and completely drown out everything made by people.

The kind of things that gonna be generated by AI is gonna be the same crap that is made by humans today, this is like worrying that AI-made foods would replace freezer-meal chefs. If anything the good creators will rise even higher than the mass-produced crap. Honestly I don’t lament that, there’s far fewer notable art by the day.

I really don't want to support RIAA/MPAA. I don't care how people don't give them money, as long as people don't give them money one way or another.

The most I'm willing to support is a repeal of the DMCA.

Yeah, um... so? Your demand does not create any requirement that we give you what you ask for.

Maybe try creating something new, instead of the 194th Marvel movie. Maybe hire some people who can actually write. Maybe treat the ones you have better.

Digital information wants to be free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com