unrelated, but 100% of young Nigerians (and Africans, I presume) have streamed or downloaded content illegally. You have less bandwidth to worry about copyright when you can't afford it and your compliance can't be enforced.
The industry has really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Netflix and Spotify had younger generations paying for content, but the fragmentation will surely break them out of the habit.
Because music doesn't do that much exclusives, so you can just choose a platform and you're ok. Whereas movies and tv shows are ALL exclusives now, so you have to subscribe to multiple places. It wasn't always like this as you remember, and that's why piracy died for a time.. you could just have one streaming service, and you're good.
But people got greedy. They saw what Netflix had, and wanted it for themselves.. not realizing what that would mean
>It wasn't always like this as you remember, and that's why piracy died for a time.. you could just have one streaming service, and you're good. But people got greedy. They saw what Netflix had, and wanted it for themselves.. not realizing what that would mean
The problem is -- from the content companies' point of view -- that if there is one streaming service and multiple content creators then the steaming service will make the lion's share of the money.
So the big content companies all want to have their own streaming service.
Like the peer comment, I think music will be fine. It’s cheap and you can get most mainstream music on most services.
With TV and movies it’s highly fragmented. So I think people just don’t sign up to certain services, chop and change services, or resort to piracy. Or possibly the younger generations put the time into YouTube & TikTok.
The most fascinating thing, is that most people have been paying for media for so long that they FORGOT how piracy used to work.
When I explain to them how piracy works now, how automated and easy it's become to use (setup is another thing), they are shocked. Basically piracy took a kind of microservice approach, where one app does downloading, and another set of apps (each specific to a type of media) handle finding that specific thing, sending it to the download client, and then moving, renaming, when it's done. All you do is use an app of your choice to say I want this, and everything else goes to work .. then when you want to watch it, its streamed wherever you want by another app of your choice.
Sounds difficult but the actual use of it is very very simple. Gone is the manual searching, moving, checking, etc... Heck I don't even manually find and fix subtitles anymore.
> Heck I don't even manually find and fix subtitles anymore.
The UX in streaming services gets worse with every update, to say nothing of the constant catalog changes. I do want to dip my toes back into the piracy world. What makes me nervous is how to remain anonymous. I know a few people who got hit with torrent warnings. Is it all still newsgroups? What's the state of the art in home piracy setups now?
I'm not going to advise on anything related to piracy sadly. I don't want this thread to turn into a guide.
But there is something you touched on, how the UX gets worse... The UX of piracy keeps getting better.
Also, side note... Why can't streaming services just have ALL the subtitle languages? You can get around this with a VPN, so they have the license... Why not just let us chose? Why have only a couple languages to chose from at best.
It's not easy if you want quality. I like more obscure stuff in best res for my screen (can't stream that on average connection) and without a registration only torrent tracker it'd take a lot of time to find a dl. I'm sure I'm not in the know on this to do it best though.
And for bad quality yeah shady basic web streaming sites exists though. Keep in mind they are packed with unstoppable video ads and malware js though. I don't poke them with a 10 foot pole usually.
I sub to Apple TV btw. Some originals are very good. UX works for me.
I just set up a piece of code... gotta be 15 years ago now, that just gets RSS link and extract last X torrents from it. Turns any torrent tracker with RSS feed into subscription service
Netflix was great but it got more crowded due to everyone wanting a piece of the cake. Now there are few shows or bunch of movies interesting to me that are either distributed evenly on multiple services or not available at my location at all. I’d be okay to pay as I go if there was at least one central way to access all content without ads and on demand but no one seems to be interested in that.
Yeah, I figured that was extremely low. But maybe it's because content is much more easily available legally now. You can basically never run out of Netflix.
If you're asking the millennial generation however, the numbers should be near 100%.
You might not be able to run out of Netflix, but you will run out of the good content quite fast, especially if you only have the content available in $COUNTRY
Or possibly are aware they stream or download content illegally. Copyright infringement is so incredibly routine that people don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing.
And 100% of Danes, Swedes and Norwegians, regardless age, pay pre-emptive "copying fees" on every piece of storage medium they buy no matter what they intend to use it for. You should never feel guilty for downloading some MP3s or whatever.
> why not pirate your content? You already paid for it
Because you didn't pay for the content.
Assuming it's analogous to the Dutch law, the tax compensates lost income from you being able to store publicly broadcast copyrighted materials, such as music on the radio or movies shown on TV. That's why it is taxed on storage devices and varies per device type.
You haven't gotten a license on every piece of music, software, and movie in existence. That would be great lol, I'd sign up for that tax. Essentially, that's what Netflix was for movies until Disney etc. decided they wanted not to participate and now we wonder why piracy hasn't died
Punitive money goes into the government's general funds ("algemene middelen", not sure if there's an internationally correct legal term).
This money, instead, goes to copyright holders. The amount is set to cover minor household use, like copying from a friend or a broadcast. It's not to absolve you from copyright law as an individual altogether and make you never have to pay for a movie in your life
If that's what you want, parliament is the assembly you will want to talk to, but I'm afraid that they're bound by international treaties and, even if not, the height of the tax that absolves you of all copyright ever would be more than you're willing to pay
That's fucking insane. Like, what? What if the drive isn't used to store any copywritten material ever? What if I use it to store my own log files or literally anything I want because it's none of your damn business? How is this fee distributed? How do I get a cut of this content creator reimbursement money for myself?
I'm just explaining how the law works in my understanding (and, interestingly, not getting any upvotes for it. Usually accurate comments are upvoted but then, usually, people don't disagree with the law. People don't like this messenger!), not saying I agree with it
It's pragmatic. It's a pseudo-tax paid in order to cut out some space for fair use within copyright regulations (including international copyright treaties), while getting IP owners and distributors to shut up about "lost revenue from piracy".
In some sense, this is a rent extracted by large IP holders, and consumers are getting the short end of the deal just as much as the artists. But arguably it's also a bureaucracy-minimizing and thus cost-minimizing approach at country scale: the alternative to a flat fee paid by some amount of commercial entities (and passed onto buyers through prices of hardware), would likely be dealing with individual-level enforcement, lawsuits targeting individuals and/or some other high-maintenance mess, all ultimately paid for by the taxpayer anyway.
Maybe I misunderstand but it sounds to me like there's some additional charge on storage devices that includes the cost of piracy ("copying"). Which means you did pay for it in the sense that you paid the fine for piracy. Building a piracy fee into storage devices is an incentive to pirate because you already paid for it. Why pay the fine for piracy and also pay for the content legitimately?
The fee is for legal copying. Let's say you've bought a DVD and want a copy for your family vacation home. You can make a copy of that legally. That's what the fee covers.
Something I've never done and will probably never do. I also don't know of anyone who ever has. The fee should completely go away in the age of streaming services, but I doubt rights holders agree.
Why would I pay a fee to legally copy something? What if I don't copy any content on that drive ever and I use it purely to store my original creations? Why would the fee be built in to the storage device and not the original content price? This makes zero sense to me.
The fee also covers making (private use) copies of content you don't own. It's the reason the fees were instated in the 80s - when people began recording songs on the radio instead of buying the artists' tapes at the record store.
I agree it's an incentive. But if I pay extra car-stealing fee to a builder who builds me a garage and steal your car, you'll probably think less about how I was incentivised and more that you didn't see the money.
Ah yes the "you wouldn't download a car" argument. Still as dumb today as it was two decades ago. Garages don't have car stealing fees because that's fucking stupid. Does your toaster have a fee built in for stolen bread?
I'll consider that point missed. I don't think rudimentary pattern matching is a good alternative to reasoning, nor aggression a good alternative to discussion.
As you can see, more than 50% of Danes already do. Being a Dane myself, my impression is that it is less stigmatised in Denmark than in other countries.
Around the turn of the century my family went from dialup to cable. It felt like a waste to not use all the bandwidth all the time. I had a surplus server running Windows 2000 and Kazaa, Limewire, and maybe more. I think I missed Napster. That was a completely normal thing among all my IT literate friends. My rig was kinda anemic. A buddy of mine had four 250gb hard drives. A whole ~terabyte~ of storage. And a liquid cooled AMD. I put a mod chip in my Xbox and brought it to school where we watched (pirated) Monty Python in English class.
All this to say it was normalized in the US. I don't think it is stigmatized even today. More like we had about a decade of streaming services actually providing good value. But now the product managers and UX designers have their hooks so deep in it that it's becoming unusable.
Same in Sweden. Nobody really feels guilty over doing it, and nobody judges others for doing it, because the laws permitting private copying blur the lines so to speak. But that said, by my feeling most Swedes would agree that running an actual piracy outlet of some sort holds an entirely different "sociomoral" tone because of really being illegal.
Yep, really. We've been subjected to this at least since the 80s. The original name of the legal framework was "kassettavgift" (cassette fee), obviously targeted at sales of cassette tapes. From there it went on to also afflict VHS tapes, Minidiscs, CD/DVD recordables, and today even memory cards/sticks and HDDs/SSDs.
The "upside" to this is that the surrounding laws allow us to make private copies for our own private use.
Because it’s illegal as long as you don’t own the original content.
Those fees are here just to compensate the fact that you COULD copy your legally owned content and that it COULD represent a loss of opportunity for the rights holders mafia (because that’s what they are). Oh, and that compensation is calculated by an organization representative of … the rights holders.
I have never understood those laws since their introduction. You should go to jail because you could kill someone once in your life? And because of this, I have to pay taxes to famous singers (the "mafia") even if I only store family photos on my phone or on my computer. This makes absolutely no sense to me, and that's why I got my money back by using a VPN to download whatever I want.
I suppose that those laws are from an era where the only media you could write was audio cassettes and it was mostly a way to record FM radio or copy your friends music.
And now there is an intense lobbying not to change things.
Even that doesn’t pass the sniff test. I can record my own original information onto a cassette tape. If labels don’t want records to be created they shouldn’t blast the songs out for free. Claw back the royalties from the radio stations and see how long that works.
I find your comment interesting, but I don't know what this is referring to. Any chance you can expand on this point? or link to something that explains it?
Some countries in Europe decided that it was impossible to stop piracy. Instead they added a fee to storage devices, like disks and USB drives, that is supposed to compensate for the lost revenue. I don't remember where that money goes, but probably to big media companies?
The law states that it's for "lost sales" originating from e.g. recording songs aired on radio instead of buying the tape/CD. "Piracy for private use".
There's an additional tax on all storage media, be it harddrives, usb sticks, burnable CDs. If you can write data to it, the tax is applied. The tax is used to compensate rights holders. I don't know exactly how it's distributed or who is actually receiving the money, but the goal was to offset the alleged loss of income from piracy
The discussion of how much artists are actually getting from this has been going on since forever. Plenty of Swedish artists have publically stated that they receive either "practically nothing" or "literally nothing" and that the only ones who appear to benefit are the "fat cats" at the top of the association collecting the fees rather than the artists.
I was not aware of this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention
Do you know whether it's the organisation representing the artists (Coda here in Denmark) or the labels/movie studios that end up being the beneficiaries of the tax?
No idea, I've never seen any actual accounting from Copyswede (nor the record companies) of how they split the 150+ million SEK collected annually. But Swedish artists, by their own accounts, aren't getting anything.
> "In Switzerland though copying for personal use is legal - not so in Scandinavian countries"
In Sweden it's legal. "Copying for private use" is excempt, and "private use" of such copy includes in the law's own words "family and one's closest friends". Literature is treated differently, allowing only partial copying instead of the complete print.
I would be surprised if this wasn't harmonized across the Nordics, like most laws here are.
You are plain wrong about Swedish law. I cannot state it any clearer: copying for private use is entirely legal for us, for both audio and video content, whether copied from broadcast, Internet or physical medium.
The distinction is that of the piece being a "publically published work", which in Swedish law means the source as provided in official capacity - e.g. a CD/DVD/BluRay original, a radio/TV broadcast, or the author's (or copyright holder's) sanctioned Internet outlets etc. - compared to the copy being made from "inofficial/illicit" source. Swedish law states complete legality for the former. Pe-ri-od.
Actual government-issued writs (as opposed to Googled third-party summaries):
It is disingenuous to call prv.se a third party source - PRV is the government agency responsible for immaterial rights.
Or SVT.se for that matter, who are directly quoting a professor in Swedish law at Stockholm University.
Please cite what exception to upphovsrättslagen that gives me the legal right to download movies online directly because
I could not find the exception for personal use in the 10s of pages of law text you posted.
First off, if you download content from an inofficial source you are not exercising your right to make private copies. See my previous response in this thread.
What you ask for is right at the start of the document in the second link.
Verket görs tillgängligt för allmänheten i följande fall:
1. När verket överförs till allmänheten. Detta sker när verket
på trådbunden eller trådlös väg görs tillgängligt för
allmänheten från en annan plats än den där allmänheten kan ta
del av verket. Överföring till allmänheten innefattar
överföring som sker på ett sådant sätt att enskilda kan få
tillgång till verket från en plats och vid en tidpunkt som de
själva väljer.
...
Framställning av exemplar för privat bruk
12 § Var och en får för privat bruk framställa ett eller några
få exemplar av offentliggjorda verk. Såvitt gäller litterära
verk i skriftlig form får exemplarframställningen dock endast
avse begränsade delar av verk eller sådana verk av begränsat
omfång. Exemplaren får inte användas för andra ändamål än
privat bruk.
In legal debates this point has been clarified over and over. Swedish law does not concern itself with the technical difference between broadcasting video content on TV (or airing music on radio) and making the same content available over the Internet in streamed or downloadable form. When the rights holder makes the piece accessible to the public, through whatever distribution channel, you are permitted to copy it from the same channel for private use.
No. What you shouldn't feel guilty about is storing legally obtained material on a purchased storage medium, like from a friend or the radio/TV. That is what the tax covers.
We can argue whether that's fair and appropriate, and I suspect we share an opinion there, but saying that never paying any artist in the world is fine because your local copyright authority was paid... that's quite dubious
I don't know that that was incorporated when deciding the height of the tax, so then that wouldn't be covered
I suspect it'll amount to at least 50€/month (multiply by how many storage devices you buy on average per month) if the tax were supposed to cover all music and movies ever made, let alone software and other copyrighted works
The Swedish fee really is aimed at "piracy for private use", as clearly detailed in the written laws, not for duplicating one's own records/movies onto a second piece of storage.
I didn't say it's for one's own content duplication
Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go? I recall the pirate bay's domain was taken at some point and the hosting raided, despite not even hosting any copyrighted content but rather facilitating copyright infringement for the masses, so I presume copyright for individuals is still a thing there
In a reasonable world, if you've paid the copying fee, then downloading content would be legal. But no, the content corporations want to take a double dip.
There is an equivalent tax in France where you pay for every hard drive, USB key, memory card, blank CD, blank DVD, smartphone, and tablet. Since this law was introduced, I stopped having any guilt when I download something.
I still buy albums on Bandcamp because they deserve it, but the rest is free as I already paid for it without my consent.
Streaming services have crippled themselves (collectively) by hoarding content; you now need to sign up for several if you want access to everything.
And pay-per-movie (eg itunes) is just ridiculously expensive, $10/movie, that's a whole day's salary in poorer countries.
The industry needs to stop bleating about ordinary people 'stealing' from them, and come up with better business models/practices that match what people are willing to pay.
-And pay-per-movie (eg itunes) is just ridiculously expensive, $10/movie, that's a whole day's salary in poorer countries.
I don't think this is relevant for Denmark, bc their salaries are much bigger. But it's imo expensive anyways
I think the problem in Denmark is re-buying things: You bought Harry Potter on VHS, now again on DVD, again on BlueRay, again through Blockbuster, and again through YouTube. In the end that is one expensive movie!
In the end it is less unfair to just download the movie you already paid for.
Distribution costs are a thing also via the Internet, so while they're close to zero per movie it still makes sense to have to pay. However, there is no mechanism to prove you have a license, so in that sense I see your point
you can argue that the distribution costs are negligible. after all the entire post is about piracy where no one is being paid for distributing the files.
What about making a distributed system for distribution so the costs of the license validation doesn't fall on a single entity.
Then again, we might already have that. I vaguely remember talk about the fact that it is legal in Denmark to fetch a copy of movies and software you already bought.
A very good point. In a sense, the industry has been stealing from customers all along by selling the same 'rights' over and over, just in different formats.
I think there still is a price scaling based on regional purchasing power. No doubt that people in Denmark have much more dispensable income on average, but for students and low-income households renting a movie online is a luxury
That's if you can find a place where you can actually get it. As an example, a few years ago a study showed that Denmark had the second most expensive Netflix subscriptions, yet was second to last in the content available
Then there's a whole issue of localisation. Many of my foreign friends have had to ask for refunds when renting movies, because only Nordic subtitles were available for them
Piracy is simply easier and more reliable for a lot of people. Especially if you understand a little bit of tech and can setup Sonarr, Radarr, and Jellyfin
I think we used to rent VHS videos for 7.50 dutch guilders in 1999 (3.40 EUR, 5.37 EUR in 2022), which translates to $6... so $10/movie seems quite expensive indeed.
I was going to say I thought it sounds cheap, but when doing the calculations it turns out it has actually increased in price quite a lot.
Something that shocked me when I left the USA a few years ago was how aggressively region locked everything is outside of the states.
More than half the times I’ve tried to find something it’s “oh, this isn’t available in your region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but you need a credit card from this region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but your email address is tied to an account in a different region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but only in low quality”. The unholy combo of “oh, this is available in your account’s region, and it’s available in the region you’re visiting, but in this region we can only show the content to people from this region”.
It’s no surprise that piracy/vpns are still widespread - streaming companies (really media producers) are blocking people from purchasing their services!!!
So much media comes from the US, and the default position of US media companies seems to be to broadcast in the US first and think about their international strategy later.
Show comes out, becomes a big hit in the US, everyone else thinks it looks good and wants to watch, the only place it's available is via pirating. And then TV companies are shocked at the level of piracy. What did they expect?
If I'm a Ugandan film company, I make a film, sell it in Uganda and then set up a streaming website that allows access to it for $1 USD without regional restrictions, which regulations do you believe I'm breaking?
what you describe makes you a Ugandan engaging in business in EU, China, etc. So subject to any local laws. Things like paying EU VAT apply to you too.
Big like Hollywood publishers. We were talking about why they don't release stuff worldwide immediately, so there you go.. because of local laws, not because they "don't care". They care about money.
Btw recommending to ignore local laws and not pay tax and such seems like bad advice. If in doubt hire a lawyer
But I'm not engaging in business there. I'm selling an item on my website, I don't know who's buying it and where it's from. How could I possibly police that?
If a visitor on a Portugese IP with a Canadian credit card wants to stream my movie, is it my responsibility to uncover their identity? If I don't, under what law can I be proscuted? You say "local law", but I don't live within these places, so how can I be subject to them? How will they enforce them?
> If a visitor on a Portugese IP with a Canadian credit card wants to stream my movie, is it my responsibility to uncover their identity
IP or billing address etc. you should be able to show you do what's required to comply with local laws. When things are "not available" in some country it means the company is working through the legal system to make sure they don't violate laws.
> You say "local law", but I don't live within these places, so how can I be subject to them? How will they enforce them?
If you want me to tell you "it's OK to violate laws if I will not be punished" then nothing I say will matter. I know this attitude because I grew up in a country where many people thought that way. But if you want to do honest business and have clear conscience, yes you are still subject to local laws... it's never too late to start following them
> If you want me to tell you "it's OK to violate laws if I will not be punished" then nothing I say will matter. I know this attitude because I grew up in a country where many people thought that way. But if you want to do honest business and have clear conscience, yes you are still subject to local laws...
I understand how you got there, but that's not what I meant.
I mean why would I be subject to local laws of a company I have no legal entity in and have never been to? e.g I'm not subject to Sharia law, because I don't live in a country where this is the case. Is it dishonest for me not to follow this law?
There are countries where holocaust denial is illegal. Aside from the poor taste of doing so, should I obey this law despite not being in a country with this law?
My point is that if I put something up on my web server I host in my country, it is not my responsibility to understand if the content is legal in every country in the world before doing so, despite some of them maybe having laws against it. Why do you believe this becomes my responsibility if I decide to sell the content?
A good example is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is only available on Sky Showtime in my country. I actually have a subscription to Sky Showtime but I still have to get it from an alternative source as Sky Showtime in my country only has it in 1080p SDR, no 4k or HDR support at all on their service.
Who the hell launches a brand new streaming service in 2022 without 4k or HDR support?
If this is on mobile while traveling you can go into airplane mode and it should work. Not a great solution in general but is a workaround for most streaming services.
Heh, that's my experience as a tech adopter too. every single announcement is "we're launching in the US first". For whatever reason the rest of the world does not make a compelling target.
Even companies from outside the US go for "US first" from time to time...
Sure, but isn't the entire world a bigger market than the US? I don't get why you'd limit the amount of people who can pay for your content by geographic area when there is nothing that would prevent you from releasing it to everyone. I'm sure it's because the producers are benefiting somehow, I just don't know how.
> Sure, but isn't the entire world a bigger market than the US?
Sure but it's made up of a lot of smaller parts. I guess there is some advantage in releasing to a population of 400 million mostly English speaking people first? At least for western companies, and/or at least they think so.
> I don't get why you'd limit the amount of people who can pay for your content by geographic area when there is nothing that would prevent you from releasing it to everyone.
For content at least, they normally sell the rights to other companies in those reigons. Whatever gets them the most money I guess.
This is particularly annoying for people who've moved around in Europe. It is not unusual to live in Denmark but want to watch e.g. a French film with English subtitles, or a French film with German dubbing, but many streaming services only provide subtitles/dubbing in the film's original language plus the local language.
For some reason the EC seems to have allowed this [1], but it seems an obvious failure to create a single market.
> anti-piracy initiatives will be a priority of the European Commission’s Digital Single Market (DSM) policy
This article is unintentional satire. It’s promoting as if there were huge steps made towards making a digital single market, but they only further codified local and fragmented digital markets, for no other reason than filmmaker profit. And fighting piracy that arises as s consequence of their failure to actually create a single market is perplexingly both in scope of, and a priority for, the commission.
That doesn't detract from their point at all, it only reinforces it.
I pirate all of my movies & TV because I've decided that I'm not going to play along with geo-blocking, exclusivity deals, platform fragmentation and other anti-consumer behavior.
Make it convenient for me to pay for the service and I'll gladly pay for it. The fact is that consuming content illegally can be a lot more convenient than doing it legally and this speaks volumes about the pathetic state of affairs in the industry.
I have yet to experience an issue watching media from where I reside when in the states (or when visiting Europe) than the other way around. Given, I live in Asia and haven’t spent a ton of time in Europe so maybe that explains it.
You should consider that other people have different experiences before accusing them of being in a bubble
I'm surprised nobody is making a point of the culture loss either.
Like, my children are bilingual (italian, english), we live in Canada. One of the key things about this is being able to watch tv, read books and play videogames in native language.
It is really hard. A show is available in italy on Netflix, but in netflix canada is available in english and not italian.
Disney+ has this problem with many of their classics!
Videogames are way better,this problem usually doesn't exist.
Books are the worst of all: italian companies don't sell online to non italian credit cards more often than not, if they sell at all.
Buying an italian paperbook is usually challenging and of course I'd prefer paper over digital.
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell
I can relate to this. I get my music from Bandcamp, it is easy to get non DRM'ed files. Same for games which I buy on GoG, comes also with easy to download non DRM'ed files. I never illegally download games and music because of this.
When it comes to series though;
They are either not available anywhere legally, not in my region, only available with some streaming service subscription were the rest of the catalog doesn't interest me. Disappear from the catalog etc. etc. etc.
I might've downloaded series because of it.
Give me a service were I can legally download .mkv files and I certainly will pay for it. Right now illegally downloading it is just far superior.
This is very similar to the sentiment of Steve Jobs' open letter "Thoughts on Music" where he called upon record companies to allow him to abolish DRM in the iTunes music store.
True. I pay for steam, I pay for music I listen to, I pay for films (theater), and I download TV shows. I only watch 2-3 a year, and I can't justify paying 100€/month for at most 3 TV shows.
Content creators and studios really need to get this quote through their heads. While price may be a factor, people also choose piracy because it actually provides the product they want, rather than the product that the corporations want to sell.
If there was a movie service that offered simply a paid download where I could browse a list of all movies ever made, buy a single file (let's say MKV) that contained the movie, my choice of audio stream(s), my choice of subs, that could be downloaded once and played any number of times, in any region, on any hardware, running any software, then you have my business! Figure that out, and then we can talk about price. Bandcamp mostly figured this out for music (except for the "all music ever made" part). How is it so hard for movies?
Also really tired of hearing the vague "licensing" excuses, too. "Oh, we can't do that because licenses!" This is an industry self-inflicted wound--one that they could fix if they really thought it was important.
Honestly, I just stopped caring about movies and tv altogether. The Pandy push of trash content and everyone and their brother having a terrible and overpriced streaming service made me stop caring.
I'll go spend my time and money on industry or products that don't actively hate their customers.
Something that falls through the cracks is content that isn't available on streaming or VOD.
Like take Northern Exposure, a huge hit TV show in the early 90's. It's not available anywhere except out of print DVDs because it features a lot of music, and the license for that music needs to be renegotiated. So it's lost to time basically. This is just one example, there's countless others.
Not to mention all the older films/tv shows that no streaming company wants because they don't think it would attract anyone.
Piracy is actually keeping this content alive... It's nuts.
Streaming is not illegal though is it? The article dances around this saying stuff like “lots of people stream; but they wouldn’t steal content; survey responders agree sharing content is like stealing”.
Surprised it's only 50%, but also surprised it is 50% in the era of streaming services and walled garden that is a smartphone.
Reminds me of the time the prime minister of Sweden on TV said "well we can't prosecute an entire generation" when he was asked about his stance towards illegal downloading, about 16-20 years ago, when there was not a single soul among the youngs that hadn't downloaded (or watch someone else download for them) movie/music illegally.
Hell, most people bought a PC/connected to internet specifically to download illegally. Internet didn't have much else to offer to the non-techy person, except Wikipedia for cheating on home assignments
Back when films were distrubuted on physical reels of film, making copies of the film was very expensive. The solution was to make enough copies for the cinemas in America, and once American cinemas were done with them, move them on to other countries. Films were given internationally staggered releases in order to control distribution costs.
Once Internet advertising made marketing campaigns international, this suddenly ran into problems. Australia - usually amongst the last English-speaking countries to see Hollywood films - suddenly saw what Americans were seeing, and what they wouldn't see for the best part of a year. Many films went to DVD in America - and therefore the piracy networks - before getting to Australian cinemas.
This specific problem has been solved now that films are distributed on optical media and hard disk drives, but torrenting remains very popular in Australia.
When we talk of protecting copyright holders, the film studios are often blamed. However, this distribution system was set up by a network of separate distribution companies. A century ago, they provided the solution to a genuine logistical problem; now, they seek rent for solving a problem that no longer exists.
I know people debate whether it's really "stealing" but my opinion is that if you won't pay then just don't watch. I don't care if I'm downvoted for this but people do not have a right to listen to music or watch movies.
People seem to be united in their condemnation of wage theft where businesses don't pay their workers properly. And most people think restaurants should pay their waiters properly instead of relying on tips. I just think it's really analogous that if an artist makes some content then you should pay them for it.
(And don't complain to me about the corrupt film or music industry. It's a simple moral choice by the individual)
Problem is that some illegal downloading (even today) is not just to circumvent paying but to some, the only way to access it.
For example, early 2000 you couldn't (even if you wanted to pay) get access to Japanese Anime. And even if you did pay to get access (satellite TV) they didn't have subtitles so you couldn't really watch it. So fan-made subtitle and fan-supported illegal sites was your only option outside Japan. (except for a handful of shows)
It would've all been solved if the close-minded Japanese publisher cared to put some effort to make it available globally but they didn't.
And hence there wasn't really ANY money lost in the process, because they didn't even sell it to the people outside Japan downloading it.
One can even argue (but publisher will fanatically oppose you) that illegal downloading did lead to profit; anime was a subculture outside Japan that is now a global money making industry. It didn't just randomly out of nowhere spur because "industry finally acted" but because it already had a strong following that amplified it as soon as it got available on major platforms.
Putting all illegal download under one umbrella and judging it in a moral white/black, is a narrow view.
You could have chosen to not watch the anime. No one forced you to pirate it.
Sometimes the only way for an individual to access some content is for them to steal that content. And that person can choose to steal or not watch the content.
How is that not a simple black and white moral choice.
You have no right to see something just because you really really want to.
You completely missed the point with a false equivalence.
There's a fundamental difference here, and let me put it simply: there's zero cost in copy for digital content.
So stealing analogy don't work. If I'm a producer of fruit and have X amount that I'm trying to sell and someone steals N amount then yes it caused me a loss, proportional to X-N.
But in this example, I had NO intention or reach(or the right) to even sell my product to people that did illegally download it, and the act of copying the product is not costing me anything and not profiting anyone else.
Some illegal downloading, when you have the option to pay and support the creator/publisher, can obviously be questioned. If that options doesn't exist and the creator/publisher don't even have the will to share it to you, even for a profit, and there's zero cost for copy, and broader appeal of said product is something you can profit off in the future, then it's a very different situation.
In this case, Some distribution site also explicitly banned Japanese IP addressed because the site was for non-Japan consumers only.
>You could have chosen to not watch the anime. No one forced you to pirate it.
Why should anyone limit their action or desire if it provably is not causing anyone harm?
>You have no right to see something just because you really really want to.
A very weak counter argument. If you can't see that that comment can be equally applied to the way you see things, means this is probably a fruitless interaction.
The fault of your counter argument is that you equate physical stealing with digital copying. But that is required for your monochrome moral perogative.
I think I'm just following the old goldie: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I would not mind, and do not mind, other people using my work, that's why I have a bunch of open source work.
You can bet you ass that if I were touring the world giving sold-out concerts to 50k people at $200/ticket, 4 times a day, 4 days a week, I would not care if some bunch of random teenagers -that would have never paid for my music in the first place- download it off some torrent site.
They now know I exist, and if they're still fans when they grow older, they might come by and pay $200 to see me when I'm doing my 'legacy' tour in 30 years (hello Maroon 5).
If you do have the money, and you don't pay for the music, that's just sad, so now I've been a happy Spotify subscriber for years (and Apple Music, and Amazon Prime :eyeroll:).
A bit of a tangent but I've been paying for Spotify for years and I love it (although I do miss the old UI) but I've got to admit I'm not happy when I read about the amount the artists get paid. $120 per year is a great bargain for me and I understand that Spotify is going to lose subscribers if they start putting the price up but really it's not fair to musicians who's entire back catalog is just sitting there available to me whenever I feel like playing it.
I think it's worth to differentiate here profit going to actual people responsible for making a piece of media vs profit going to middlemen.
I have no problems screwing over the middlemen By vast majority they are shitty, predatory companies that abuse the position that they're in to screw over both consumers and creators, and probably avoid taxes too. But I'd rather pay people that actually made the stuff I enjoy because I want more of it.
> You can bet you ass that if I were touring the world giving sold-out concerts to 50k people at $200/ticket, 4 times a day, 4 days a week, I would not care if some bunch of random teenagers -that would have never paid for my music in the first place- download it off some torrent site.
That only because the losses are insignificant if you have enough money to not worry about money. It's different thing for smaller creators.
Society and the rules that hold it together is built on mutual trust and cooperation. In order for it to work people need to feel that those rules and social constructs are fair and reasonable. Morality in turn depend on people feeling that rules and social constructs are fair and reasonable.
Not paying taxes is wrong and theft. Peoples willingness to pay taxes depend on how much trust they have in government. A government that is general corrupt, do not represent the people, will result in people seeing tax collecting as wrong and theft. Not paying taxes is thus morally right and the self defense. The whole definition of right and wrong, theft, morality in general, depend on trust and the social constructs. One can not discuss morality of choice without talking about morality,
Viewing theft from a grocery shop as morally good necessitate that a person view the existence of the shop to exist outside of the social bonds and constructs of society. A modern approach to crime reduction is to increase the social support and social connections for people in high crime areas (the social part of social economic status). As is often found, harsher punishment for crime do not often reduce crime, which is partially explained by the social economic status model.
Viewing copyright violations are morally good only necessitate that a person view the current implementation of copyright to exist outside of the social bonds and constructs of society. I see maximalists of copyright as to be extremists that lives way outside of social norms. That those maximalists happen to have deep enough pockets to bribe politicians, and politicians are morally bankrupt to accept the bribes, is just that. Somewhat it is actually a simple moral choice, and those choices were wrong and made by people who should have known better.
Interesting point but can you describe a more appropriate version of copyright that you would prefer to replace the corrupt one? What would you change? Is watching a pirated stream still stealing from the artists?
The easy boring answer would be to just do damage mitigation and return copyright to 25 years.
The longer and more complex answer is to raise people to respect of copyright law. What should society expect in return for giving individuals and companies a time limited monopoly? A mandatory license given to libraries would be appreciated symbolic gesture. Different categories could also have longer or shorter duration depending on that markets needs and requirements, and government could measure the market impact that such time limited monopoly has and see if the benefits of market intervention is greater than the drawbacks (just like any other market regulation). Marketed products towards children and young adults could get additional regulated in order to reduce the differences in access to culture between the poor and rich.
Such changes are however extremely unlikely to happen due to extensive overlapping international agreements that has cemented the long copyright terms of 75+ years after the author death.
I have a right to do anything I want as long as my actions don't harm anyone else. Pirating digital content causes no harm as long as I was not going to pay for the content anyway because consuming the content has zero marginal cost to the creator. They're in the exact same position either way.
So in your scenario do you enable pirating digital copies for other people? After all they might have decided to pay for the content at a later stage?
And how do you feel about this conversation? Are your words influencing me to perhaps walk back from my stance of, "Don't watch if you don't pay"? Are you causing potential harm to the content creators if you convince me?
And how do you know that you wouldn't pay for the content in the future?
I would imagine this means everyone has watched pirated content. Not everyone is comfortable navigating a piracy site, but everyone knows someone who knows how to do it, and I've never run into anyone who has a problem with watching a pirated movie, anywhere.
Tbh it's often easier to find what you want in pirated form than streaming. Your services might have taken off the thing you want to watch, or you might not have the service that has the thing you want.
My colleague has not paid for media content in over ten years. He pirates everything. I'm surprised the percentage is not much higher. Perhaps it is a technology understanding gap?
Some people just don't watch TV shows, and only TV shows needs alternate, less legal means. That's why illegal download isn't as prevalent as when Winamp was the only way to listen to any music.
In the meantime, I just paid 200€ in sales taxes to Universal/Disney for my ssd where I only store VM images.
If I get bored before this sting less (unlikely, but still), I'll just pay 10 euros/month to set up a seedbox with real storage and write an interface for my family to use it at will, by pure pettiness.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadWhy?
Because music doesn't do that much exclusives, so you can just choose a platform and you're ok. Whereas movies and tv shows are ALL exclusives now, so you have to subscribe to multiple places. It wasn't always like this as you remember, and that's why piracy died for a time.. you could just have one streaming service, and you're good.
But people got greedy. They saw what Netflix had, and wanted it for themselves.. not realizing what that would mean
The problem is -- from the content companies' point of view -- that if there is one streaming service and multiple content creators then the steaming service will make the lion's share of the money.
So the big content companies all want to have their own streaming service.
This of course drives people back to the pirates.
With TV and movies it’s highly fragmented. So I think people just don’t sign up to certain services, chop and change services, or resort to piracy. Or possibly the younger generations put the time into YouTube & TikTok.
When I explain to them how piracy works now, how automated and easy it's become to use (setup is another thing), they are shocked. Basically piracy took a kind of microservice approach, where one app does downloading, and another set of apps (each specific to a type of media) handle finding that specific thing, sending it to the download client, and then moving, renaming, when it's done. All you do is use an app of your choice to say I want this, and everything else goes to work .. then when you want to watch it, its streamed wherever you want by another app of your choice.
Sounds difficult but the actual use of it is very very simple. Gone is the manual searching, moving, checking, etc... Heck I don't even manually find and fix subtitles anymore.
The UX in streaming services gets worse with every update, to say nothing of the constant catalog changes. I do want to dip my toes back into the piracy world. What makes me nervous is how to remain anonymous. I know a few people who got hit with torrent warnings. Is it all still newsgroups? What's the state of the art in home piracy setups now?
But there is something you touched on, how the UX gets worse... The UX of piracy keeps getting better.
Also, side note... Why can't streaming services just have ALL the subtitle languages? You can get around this with a VPN, so they have the license... Why not just let us chose? Why have only a couple languages to chose from at best.
And for bad quality yeah shady basic web streaming sites exists though. Keep in mind they are packed with unstoppable video ads and malware js though. I don't poke them with a 10 foot pole usually.
I sub to Apple TV btw. Some originals are very good. UX works for me.
Any VPN service will be sufficient to cover your tracks and avoid those warnings, e.g. Mullvad.
If you're asking the millennial generation however, the numbers should be near 100%.
Downloaded a movie that's not available to buy anywhere via P2P? That will be $10.000.000 due to lost potential revenue. Seems fair.
A little bit of extra information in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756675
Because you didn't pay for the content.
Assuming it's analogous to the Dutch law, the tax compensates lost income from you being able to store publicly broadcast copyrighted materials, such as music on the radio or movies shown on TV. That's why it is taxed on storage devices and varies per device type.
You haven't gotten a license on every piece of music, software, and movie in existence. That would be great lol, I'd sign up for that tax. Essentially, that's what Netflix was for movies until Disney etc. decided they wanted not to participate and now we wonder why piracy hasn't died
This money, instead, goes to copyright holders. The amount is set to cover minor household use, like copying from a friend or a broadcast. It's not to absolve you from copyright law as an individual altogether and make you never have to pay for a movie in your life
If that's what you want, parliament is the assembly you will want to talk to, but I'm afraid that they're bound by international treaties and, even if not, the height of the tax that absolves you of all copyright ever would be more than you're willing to pay
I'm just explaining how the law works in my understanding (and, interestingly, not getting any upvotes for it. Usually accurate comments are upvoted but then, usually, people don't disagree with the law. People don't like this messenger!), not saying I agree with it
In some sense, this is a rent extracted by large IP holders, and consumers are getting the short end of the deal just as much as the artists. But arguably it's also a bureaucracy-minimizing and thus cost-minimizing approach at country scale: the alternative to a flat fee paid by some amount of commercial entities (and passed onto buyers through prices of hardware), would likely be dealing with individual-level enforcement, lawsuits targeting individuals and/or some other high-maintenance mess, all ultimately paid for by the taxpayer anyway.
I'm in France and you do actually pay for it through this tax since all the income goes to a private company like the RIAA.
Something I've never done and will probably never do. I also don't know of anyone who ever has. The fee should completely go away in the age of streaming services, but I doubt rights holders agree.
All this to say it was normalized in the US. I don't think it is stigmatized even today. More like we had about a decade of streaming services actually providing good value. But now the product managers and UX designers have their hooks so deep in it that it's becoming unusable.
The "upside" to this is that the surrounding laws allow us to make private copies for our own private use.
Those fees are here just to compensate the fact that you COULD copy your legally owned content and that it COULD represent a loss of opportunity for the rights holders mafia (because that’s what they are). Oh, and that compensation is calculated by an organization representative of … the rights holders.
Why the hell would I pay a fee for something I might do? I mean, what? How is that a thing?
My car can go 140mph. Does that mean I should be in jail for speeding?
And now there is an intense lobbying not to change things.
Do you know whether it's the organisation representing the artists (Coda here in Denmark) or the labels/movie studios that end up being the beneficiaries of the tax?
In Sweden it's legal. "Copying for private use" is excempt, and "private use" of such copy includes in the law's own words "family and one's closest friends". Literature is treated differently, allowing only partial copying instead of the complete print.
I would be surprised if this wasn't harmonized across the Nordics, like most laws here are.
In Sweden it is not allowed.
Edit: to be clear:
In Switzerland you can download movies legally without the consent of the copyright holder. In Sweden it is illegal.
https://www.svt.se/kultur/rattsexperten-det-far-du-gora-pa-i....
Actual government-issued writs (as opposed to Googled third-party summaries):
Please cite what exception to upphovsrättslagen that gives me the legal right to download movies online directly because I could not find the exception for personal use in the 10s of pages of law text you posted.
What you ask for is right at the start of the document in the second link.
In legal debates this point has been clarified over and over. Swedish law does not concern itself with the technical difference between broadcasting video content on TV (or airing music on radio) and making the same content available over the Internet in streamed or downloadable form. When the rights holder makes the piece accessible to the public, through whatever distribution channel, you are permitted to copy it from the same channel for private use.The topic is piracy, not right clicking and downloading from your browser.
We can argue whether that's fair and appropriate, and I suspect we share an opinion there, but saying that never paying any artist in the world is fine because your local copyright authority was paid... that's quite dubious
A lot of what is being downloaded has already been broadcasted.
I suspect it'll amount to at least 50€/month (multiply by how many storage devices you buy on average per month) if the tax were supposed to cover all music and movies ever made, let alone software and other copyrighted works
Has an individual in Sweden ever been taken to court over sharing movies with others online? How did that go? I recall the pirate bay's domain was taken at some point and the hosting raided, despite not even hosting any copyrighted content but rather facilitating copyright infringement for the masses, so I presume copyright for individuals is still a thing there
Yes, a handful of times. It almost always ends bad for the pirate, because sharing like that is not private copying for private use.
I still buy albums on Bandcamp because they deserve it, but the rest is free as I already paid for it without my consent.
Streaming services have crippled themselves (collectively) by hoarding content; you now need to sign up for several if you want access to everything.
And pay-per-movie (eg itunes) is just ridiculously expensive, $10/movie, that's a whole day's salary in poorer countries.
The industry needs to stop bleating about ordinary people 'stealing' from them, and come up with better business models/practices that match what people are willing to pay.
In the end it is less unfair to just download the movie you already paid for.
Distribution costs are a thing also via the Internet, so while they're close to zero per movie it still makes sense to have to pay. However, there is no mechanism to prove you have a license, so in that sense I see your point
Cost for single download of a movie now is going to be in fraction of a penny level of cost probably.
Then again, we might already have that. I vaguely remember talk about the fact that it is legal in Denmark to fetch a copy of movies and software you already bought.
That's if you can find a place where you can actually get it. As an example, a few years ago a study showed that Denmark had the second most expensive Netflix subscriptions, yet was second to last in the content available
Then there's a whole issue of localisation. Many of my foreign friends have had to ask for refunds when renting movies, because only Nordic subtitles were available for them
Piracy is simply easier and more reliable for a lot of people. Especially if you understand a little bit of tech and can setup Sonarr, Radarr, and Jellyfin
I was going to say I thought it sounds cheap, but when doing the calculations it turns out it has actually increased in price quite a lot.
More than half the times I’ve tried to find something it’s “oh, this isn’t available in your region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but you need a credit card from this region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but your email address is tied to an account in a different region”. “Oh, this is available in your region but only in low quality”. The unholy combo of “oh, this is available in your account’s region, and it’s available in the region you’re visiting, but in this region we can only show the content to people from this region”.
It’s no surprise that piracy/vpns are still widespread - streaming companies (really media producers) are blocking people from purchasing their services!!!
Show comes out, becomes a big hit in the US, everyone else thinks it looks good and wants to watch, the only place it's available is via pirating. And then TV companies are shocked at the level of piracy. What did they expect?
Btw recommending to ignore local laws and not pay tax and such seems like bad advice. If in doubt hire a lawyer
If a visitor on a Portugese IP with a Canadian credit card wants to stream my movie, is it my responsibility to uncover their identity? If I don't, under what law can I be proscuted? You say "local law", but I don't live within these places, so how can I be subject to them? How will they enforce them?
> selling an item
...
> If a visitor on a Portugese IP with a Canadian credit card wants to stream my movie, is it my responsibility to uncover their identity
IP or billing address etc. you should be able to show you do what's required to comply with local laws. When things are "not available" in some country it means the company is working through the legal system to make sure they don't violate laws.
> You say "local law", but I don't live within these places, so how can I be subject to them? How will they enforce them?
If you want me to tell you "it's OK to violate laws if I will not be punished" then nothing I say will matter. I know this attitude because I grew up in a country where many people thought that way. But if you want to do honest business and have clear conscience, yes you are still subject to local laws... it's never too late to start following them
I understand how you got there, but that's not what I meant.
I mean why would I be subject to local laws of a company I have no legal entity in and have never been to? e.g I'm not subject to Sharia law, because I don't live in a country where this is the case. Is it dishonest for me not to follow this law?
There are countries where holocaust denial is illegal. Aside from the poor taste of doing so, should I obey this law despite not being in a country with this law?
My point is that if I put something up on my web server I host in my country, it is not my responsibility to understand if the content is legal in every country in the world before doing so, despite some of them maybe having laws against it. Why do you believe this becomes my responsibility if I decide to sell the content?
Who the hell launches a brand new streaming service in 2022 without 4k or HDR support?
Even companies from outside the US go for "US first" from time to time...
Sure but it's made up of a lot of smaller parts. I guess there is some advantage in releasing to a population of 400 million mostly English speaking people first? At least for western companies, and/or at least they think so.
> I don't get why you'd limit the amount of people who can pay for your content by geographic area when there is nothing that would prevent you from releasing it to everyone.
For content at least, they normally sell the rights to other companies in those reigons. Whatever gets them the most money I guess.
For some reason the EC seems to have allowed this [1], but it seems an obvious failure to create a single market.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2015/05/17/ec-to-make-exceptions-fo...
This article is unintentional satire. It’s promoting as if there were huge steps made towards making a digital single market, but they only further codified local and fragmented digital markets, for no other reason than filmmaker profit. And fighting piracy that arises as s consequence of their failure to actually create a single market is perplexingly both in scope of, and a priority for, the commission.
Your bubble is watching USA content outside the USA and noticing it's made unavailable, but it's not like others don't region lock
I pirate all of my movies & TV because I've decided that I'm not going to play along with geo-blocking, exclusivity deals, platform fragmentation and other anti-consumer behavior.
Make it convenient for me to pay for the service and I'll gladly pay for it. The fact is that consuming content illegally can be a lot more convenient than doing it legally and this speaks volumes about the pathetic state of affairs in the industry.
You should consider that other people have different experiences before accusing them of being in a bubble
Like, my children are bilingual (italian, english), we live in Canada. One of the key things about this is being able to watch tv, read books and play videogames in native language.
It is really hard. A show is available in italy on Netflix, but in netflix canada is available in english and not italian. Disney+ has this problem with many of their classics!
Videogames are way better,this problem usually doesn't exist.
Books are the worst of all: italian companies don't sell online to non italian credit cards more often than not, if they sell at all. Buying an italian paperbook is usually challenging and of course I'd prefer paper over digital.
Just a disaster.
When it comes to series though;
They are either not available anywhere legally, not in my region, only available with some streaming service subscription were the rest of the catalog doesn't interest me. Disappear from the catalog etc. etc. etc.
I might've downloaded series because of it.
Give me a service were I can legally download .mkv files and I certainly will pay for it. Right now illegally downloading it is just far superior.
If there was a movie service that offered simply a paid download where I could browse a list of all movies ever made, buy a single file (let's say MKV) that contained the movie, my choice of audio stream(s), my choice of subs, that could be downloaded once and played any number of times, in any region, on any hardware, running any software, then you have my business! Figure that out, and then we can talk about price. Bandcamp mostly figured this out for music (except for the "all music ever made" part). How is it so hard for movies?
Also really tired of hearing the vague "licensing" excuses, too. "Oh, we can't do that because licenses!" This is an industry self-inflicted wound--one that they could fix if they really thought it was important.
I'll go spend my time and money on industry or products that don't actively hate their customers.
Like take Northern Exposure, a huge hit TV show in the early 90's. It's not available anywhere except out of print DVDs because it features a lot of music, and the license for that music needs to be renegotiated. So it's lost to time basically. This is just one example, there's countless others.
Not to mention all the older films/tv shows that no streaming company wants because they don't think it would attract anyone.
Piracy is actually keeping this content alive... It's nuts.
Reminds me of the time the prime minister of Sweden on TV said "well we can't prosecute an entire generation" when he was asked about his stance towards illegal downloading, about 16-20 years ago, when there was not a single soul among the youngs that hadn't downloaded (or watch someone else download for them) movie/music illegally.
Hell, most people bought a PC/connected to internet specifically to download illegally. Internet didn't have much else to offer to the non-techy person, except Wikipedia for cheating on home assignments
Once Internet advertising made marketing campaigns international, this suddenly ran into problems. Australia - usually amongst the last English-speaking countries to see Hollywood films - suddenly saw what Americans were seeing, and what they wouldn't see for the best part of a year. Many films went to DVD in America - and therefore the piracy networks - before getting to Australian cinemas.
This specific problem has been solved now that films are distributed on optical media and hard disk drives, but torrenting remains very popular in Australia.
When we talk of protecting copyright holders, the film studios are often blamed. However, this distribution system was set up by a network of separate distribution companies. A century ago, they provided the solution to a genuine logistical problem; now, they seek rent for solving a problem that no longer exists.
People seem to be united in their condemnation of wage theft where businesses don't pay their workers properly. And most people think restaurants should pay their waiters properly instead of relying on tips. I just think it's really analogous that if an artist makes some content then you should pay them for it.
(And don't complain to me about the corrupt film or music industry. It's a simple moral choice by the individual)
For example, early 2000 you couldn't (even if you wanted to pay) get access to Japanese Anime. And even if you did pay to get access (satellite TV) they didn't have subtitles so you couldn't really watch it. So fan-made subtitle and fan-supported illegal sites was your only option outside Japan. (except for a handful of shows)
It would've all been solved if the close-minded Japanese publisher cared to put some effort to make it available globally but they didn't.
And hence there wasn't really ANY money lost in the process, because they didn't even sell it to the people outside Japan downloading it.
One can even argue (but publisher will fanatically oppose you) that illegal downloading did lead to profit; anime was a subculture outside Japan that is now a global money making industry. It didn't just randomly out of nowhere spur because "industry finally acted" but because it already had a strong following that amplified it as soon as it got available on major platforms.
Putting all illegal download under one umbrella and judging it in a moral white/black, is a narrow view.
Sometimes the only way for an individual to access some content is for them to steal that content. And that person can choose to steal or not watch the content.
How is that not a simple black and white moral choice.
You have no right to see something just because you really really want to.
There's a fundamental difference here, and let me put it simply: there's zero cost in copy for digital content.
So stealing analogy don't work. If I'm a producer of fruit and have X amount that I'm trying to sell and someone steals N amount then yes it caused me a loss, proportional to X-N.
But in this example, I had NO intention or reach(or the right) to even sell my product to people that did illegally download it, and the act of copying the product is not costing me anything and not profiting anyone else.
Some illegal downloading, when you have the option to pay and support the creator/publisher, can obviously be questioned. If that options doesn't exist and the creator/publisher don't even have the will to share it to you, even for a profit, and there's zero cost for copy, and broader appeal of said product is something you can profit off in the future, then it's a very different situation.
In this case, Some distribution site also explicitly banned Japanese IP addressed because the site was for non-Japan consumers only.
>You could have chosen to not watch the anime. No one forced you to pirate it.
Why should anyone limit their action or desire if it provably is not causing anyone harm?
>You have no right to see something just because you really really want to.
A very weak counter argument. If you can't see that that comment can be equally applied to the way you see things, means this is probably a fruitless interaction.
The fault of your counter argument is that you equate physical stealing with digital copying. But that is required for your monochrome moral perogative.
How's that white horse treating you?
I would not mind, and do not mind, other people using my work, that's why I have a bunch of open source work.
You can bet you ass that if I were touring the world giving sold-out concerts to 50k people at $200/ticket, 4 times a day, 4 days a week, I would not care if some bunch of random teenagers -that would have never paid for my music in the first place- download it off some torrent site.
They now know I exist, and if they're still fans when they grow older, they might come by and pay $200 to see me when I'm doing my 'legacy' tour in 30 years (hello Maroon 5).
If you do have the money, and you don't pay for the music, that's just sad, so now I've been a happy Spotify subscriber for years (and Apple Music, and Amazon Prime :eyeroll:).
I have no problems screwing over the middlemen By vast majority they are shitty, predatory companies that abuse the position that they're in to screw over both consumers and creators, and probably avoid taxes too. But I'd rather pay people that actually made the stuff I enjoy because I want more of it.
> You can bet you ass that if I were touring the world giving sold-out concerts to 50k people at $200/ticket, 4 times a day, 4 days a week, I would not care if some bunch of random teenagers -that would have never paid for my music in the first place- download it off some torrent site.
That only because the losses are insignificant if you have enough money to not worry about money. It's different thing for smaller creators.
Not paying taxes is wrong and theft. Peoples willingness to pay taxes depend on how much trust they have in government. A government that is general corrupt, do not represent the people, will result in people seeing tax collecting as wrong and theft. Not paying taxes is thus morally right and the self defense. The whole definition of right and wrong, theft, morality in general, depend on trust and the social constructs. One can not discuss morality of choice without talking about morality,
Viewing theft from a grocery shop as morally good necessitate that a person view the existence of the shop to exist outside of the social bonds and constructs of society. A modern approach to crime reduction is to increase the social support and social connections for people in high crime areas (the social part of social economic status). As is often found, harsher punishment for crime do not often reduce crime, which is partially explained by the social economic status model.
Viewing copyright violations are morally good only necessitate that a person view the current implementation of copyright to exist outside of the social bonds and constructs of society. I see maximalists of copyright as to be extremists that lives way outside of social norms. That those maximalists happen to have deep enough pockets to bribe politicians, and politicians are morally bankrupt to accept the bribes, is just that. Somewhat it is actually a simple moral choice, and those choices were wrong and made by people who should have known better.
The longer and more complex answer is to raise people to respect of copyright law. What should society expect in return for giving individuals and companies a time limited monopoly? A mandatory license given to libraries would be appreciated symbolic gesture. Different categories could also have longer or shorter duration depending on that markets needs and requirements, and government could measure the market impact that such time limited monopoly has and see if the benefits of market intervention is greater than the drawbacks (just like any other market regulation). Marketed products towards children and young adults could get additional regulated in order to reduce the differences in access to culture between the poor and rich.
Such changes are however extremely unlikely to happen due to extensive overlapping international agreements that has cemented the long copyright terms of 75+ years after the author death.
And how do you feel about this conversation? Are your words influencing me to perhaps walk back from my stance of, "Don't watch if you don't pay"? Are you causing potential harm to the content creators if you convince me?
And how do you know that you wouldn't pay for the content in the future?
Tbh it's often easier to find what you want in pirated form than streaming. Your services might have taken off the thing you want to watch, or you might not have the service that has the thing you want.
In the meantime, I just paid 200€ in sales taxes to Universal/Disney for my ssd where I only store VM images.
If I get bored before this sting less (unlikely, but still), I'll just pay 10 euros/month to set up a seedbox with real storage and write an interface for my family to use it at will, by pure pettiness.