Keeping Pirates at Bay | Hacker News Reader

Keeping Pirates at Bay

economist.com

11 pointsriffer21 comments

The most effective way to share files is to buy a 1 Terabyte harddrive and become part of a sneakernet swapping ring.

Who cares about downloading individual files when you can get whole libraries for the cost of a harddrive, storage is now so cheap that you can get a library of 300K mp3s or 1300 movies for around $100.

The RIAA/MPAA are going to have to search peoples bags on the street in order to stop that one from taking off.

USB sticks will eventually even make that look like childs play, but they are still a bit expensive (64G for $150 or so).

Naw, this has the same kinds of risks as drug-dealing, except few people would be willing to chance prison for a movie, if they thought it was a real possibility. Going from darknet to sneakernet is a step backward. What needs doing is a combo TOR/bittorrent client for Windows that emphasizes the security of the TOR route over the normal bittorrent route with UI design, while still allowing the latter, so that the client can gain traction.

While the usage might be awkward at first (you have to run a main application which you control through your browser), I2P is great for anonymous filesharing. Bittorrent is strong, there are 3 or 4 trackers with fresh uploads all the time. Speeds are lower of course, but 10-20 Kilobytes/s for new well-swarmed torrents are possible with not too much effort. The applications you can use with I2P are often normal desktop applications, for Bittorrent there is for example PyBit.

Like this? http://www.thelocal.se/images/gallery/155/8721.443.629.jpg :)

What is interesting is what the article doesn't say. It doesn't contain the words "Apple" or "iTunes".

In the US, Apple has about 90% market share for legal music downloads. They have 25% market share for all music sales, physical and download.

I can think of nothing more relevant to the topic than how Apple has managed to pull this off, but the article ignores it completely.

See:

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2009/08/19/apples-itunes-nabs-...

If I could use anonymous micropayment to purchase the files, then I would. Up to 50¢ per song. I would want my formats though, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. And a way to redownload whenever I need to.

Otherwise, you'll just take what you want?

Yes, sadly he will, and so will millions and millions more. As a society, we can sit around and call them immoral, say it's stealing, shame them, draft legislation, whatever.

Or... we can accept the situation as it is now (and is likely to be in the future) and just tell the industry that it's their business model, they can deal with the monitoring/policing/lawsuits of it all.

Our collective responsibility to them is very limited (ensuring they get their day in court and that Little Jimmy pays them what he owes them, about $.99/song). We don't need to resort to draconian legislation/monitoring/enforcement to ensure that no one may, at any cost, illegally download T-Pain's newest single.

In short: it's your business model, you deal with it. In the meantime I'll be over here doing something that someone else is willing to pay for...

Ah, the "everybody else is doing it, why shouldn't I" rationalization.

Nope, I actually try to boycott (it always sounds so silly) the music industry nowadays. I switched to Linux about 2 years ago and also shifted to (mostly) free music. I found that in the genres I am interested in, there is more than enough (actually way too much) genuinely free music available.

Still there are many albums and tracks I would love to financially reward the original creator for (I already contact them or review). Both non-free and free.

He's not taking it, he's copying it. Quite the difference.

Like the Pirate Party, do you believe all noncommercial copying should be free? So, the only people who should pay for music are supermarkets and elevator operators?

What I think about it hardly matters. Copyright, enforced by the state, is a recent invention of only a few centuries ago. It shouldn't be surprising that we haven't reached an optimal state yet. And yes, I'll ignore many, many of the laws my legislature makes and not feel bad about it or see it as amoral. Hey, I'm probably breaking a few without knowing it every day of my life! The society of laws is far removed from the society of men in many other areas than copyright.

Nope, I mostly "consume" free music nowadays, creative commons and others. If I want the music that plays all day in the radio, I turn on the radio.

Good for you. Do you support artists who use traditional licensing, but direct-via-the-Internet distribution?

I would, as I explained in my parent post.

Talking about buying music files online so far I bought several releases at http://web.archive.org/web/*/fakescience.com and one directly from an (totally overhyped) artist. fakescience is dead now (not profitable enough), the other artist annoyed me to unsubscription with egomaniac HTML mails. fakescience had a good price (5$), the artist was overpriced (and in the end I really only liked 2 tracks from the album).

I really like Magnatune's model, but then I do get my "new music" fix from free stuff nowadays and other music usually is the normal music industry model. So Magnatune sadly is not interesting for me as customer.

Magnatune is a perfect example how to do it (apart from the payment system, I believe they only support Paypal. But that is not their problem to fix, anonymous micropayment is not existing yet from what I know.).

So then, like me, you don't dispute that it's wrong to copy and distribute music from independent artists, especially when their licensing feeds fund their work directly. But you and I probably differ on how wrong it is to copy and redistribute major-label music.

I'm not stuck on the major-labels-are-evil stuff. I think they're evil too, but I also think if you want to have Gnarls Barkley on your iPod, you have to play Warner's game.

I'm curious where the slippery slope ends for you, though. Presumably, copying and republishing Girl Talk is clearly wrong. Copying and republishing Magnatune music is pretty wrong. Copying and republishing Matador albums is, what, a little wrong?

I've been buying a lot from Amazon MP3 lately. Mostly because I'm much less willing to spend the time to find what I want which isn't always very popular stuff. It's so much easier to just search on amazon for it. Now if only I could find a similar service for Movies, I might not have to do all this work. The MPAA needs to understand that DRM is making their stuff very inconvenient for most of us. We don't want to rent a movie for 6 bucks we want to own a movie for that amount or maybe even for 10.

Amazon MP3 looks promising, but alas:

   We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is 
   currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous
   states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia. 

   We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

So the industry is in my opinion far from what they try to be -- from the article:

   It does not need to make piracy impossible—just less convenient than the legal alternatives.

> Most innovative are the plans to offer unlimited downloads for a flat fee.

RealPlayer has had this for like forever now. And with realplayer you could also load it onto your mp3 device. Not sure if it worked on iPods though, maybe that was why it never took off.

The music industry as we know it must die. It's a dinosaur. It had at least a decade to adapt but it failed miserably and its still ignoring the reality.

Musicians like Trent Reznor or Radiohead have shown a new way of earning money for musicians: Cutting out the middleman. The music industry is not needed anymore. It's only hampering progress.

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