This is a really interesting idea. Every file sharing site in the world setting up their servers in Antigua could potentially be a huge boost to their economy.
However, I bet the US will come to some resolution with them at the minute to prevent this from happening. This article is probably more of a bargaining chip than an actual plan.
I don't see how this would actually work. If you set up a pirate website in Antigua, congratulations, good luck competing with the million other ones that already exist. How does it hurt the U.S. in any significant way to go from a million to a million and one?
On top of that, it's not like the U.S. is going to sit around and allow it. Expect payment processors to be pressured not to process payments for the service, goods like t-shirts to be seized at the border if you actually try to export them into the U.S. or U.S. friendly nations, etc. They're already ignoring the WTO for the questionable purpose of prohibiting online gambling, you don't think they would do it for this too?
In other words, now you can set up a pirate website in Antigua... under pretty much the same conditions as you can anywhere else.
So if they setup a service to, let's say stream new movies, the US would have a hard time blocking a website. As for payment processors, why not bitcoin?
I guess it depends what you mean by "pirating." If you mean some thing based on morality or justice, the copyright holder is not getting their promised share of the revenue, so (regardless of how much you actually care about that) the site is in the same boat as The Pirate Bay there. If you mean "legal" then the immediate question becomes, legal where? Rojodirecta was "legal" too, remember? Didn't stop the U.S. from seizing their domain for a year and a half.[1]
What's that line? "The truth is not a bulletproof vest."
"If you mean some thing based on morality or justice"
We must have stopped talking about copyrights. Copyright is a system for promoting the progress of science and useful arts, according to my country's constitution (assuming we still care about that).
"promised share of the revenue"
So much for a market-based system where businesses are not "promised" revenue.
"the site is in the same boat as The Pirate Bay there"
On the forefront of using a revolutionary communication system to deliver creative works to people, despite constant attacks by greedy anachronistic businesses who failed to adapt to a changing market?
...because only a tiny minority of anarchists trust Bitcoin? Oh sure, you can point to a few "forward thinking" (also known as "gullible") businesses that accept it, but it is not even a blip on the radar of money. The overwhelming majority of black market drug sales in the USA are done in -- you guessed correctly -- US Dollars.
If you can convince me that (a) Bitcoin is something a court will recognize as money, and not require me to convert it to dollars first, (b) that I can repay any debt with it, including taxes, and (c) that it's value today will even remotely reflect its value tomorrow, then maybe I'll accept Bitcoin payments from you. Otherwise, you'll have to give me my country's currency, because frankly, nothing else is useful to me (unless I am in another country, in which case you'll have to give me that country's currency).
Let's put it this way: it doesn't take a bunch of people commenting about the exciting US Dollar or British Pound Sterling to keep those currencies valuable. How long do you think Bitcoin would last if people stopped playing it up as the next big thing?
I wouldn't say internet users "don't trust Bitcoin" I, for example don't use Bitcoin (much) for the same reason that I don't walk around in sketchy places with lots of cash. It's not that I don't trust cash. It's that I don't trust internet randoms to leave my Btc alone.
The difference is that it's not a pirate website. It's WTO sanctioned, thus a legal offer. This would make things harder to shut down, since it's hard to argue that it should be shut down because it's a pirate site.
They have no qualms about ignoring the WTO's judgement. I'm not sure why they would quietly comply with it now. The USTR (you know, the people who negotiated ACTA) seem likely to be very against this sort of thing.
What they will do, however, remains an open question.
WTO sanctioning wouldn't prevent MPAA, or even the US government labeling it as a pirate website. US probably could ban importing IP from Antigua, thus making downloading stuff from there as illegal as conventional pirating.
Sure. However, we in Europe care little about what the mpaa says and German judges tend to be independent from the US government as well. I'd love to get legal and timely access to high hd content and would be more than happy to shell out some bucks. Europe has a financial crisis, but there's still a market here.
>However, we in Europe care little about what the mpaa says and German judges tend to be independent from the US government as well.
They don't need to win over the German government. If the US Congress passes a law to the effect of "No US bank can do business with a bank that does business in Antigua" even European banks will stay clear.
I'm American and I would love to see a major country stand up to the US when it comes to this crazy patent and copyright stuff. But there are a lot of financial levers, and export-driven countries like Germany, Japan, and China are particularly vulnerable.
They were legal and they did pay ROMS who can legally license any content from any artist as stated by international agreements and Russian law. This is how radio stations work but nothing prevents a website from getting the same deal as long as ROMS agrees to it.
It's interesting to see Antigua's reaction to America ignoring the WTO. I think America is on shaky ground here, as many countries are getting sick of America overstepping their boundaries.
In theory, every country aligned with the WTO should back Antigua on this. In reality, America will threaten trade sanctions against them too, so it will be a question of who has big enough balls to stand up to the world's bully. Let's hope we can get a critical mass going.
What boundaries exactly got overstepped? It's a legal collision. US law says no online gambling. Antigua law says "Gambling is great, we welcome US consumers!". US tries to enforce its law via sanctions (I think). WTO law says you can't do that and awards Antigua $21M US in "equivalent sanctions" or somesuch (i.e. it's not a cash award).
Yawn. I mean, I think the US law here is dumb, but it's the law. I think the enforcement was clumsy, and it was rebuked. But this sort of nonsense happens all the time in international law. Must every trade dispute involving the US become some kind of para-nationalist rant against the "world's bully?". Can't it just be a dumb law like the literally thousands of other dumb laws?
It only becomes bullying if they start trying to do something like trade sanctions. Grecy is just worried that might happen. If there is no bullying, great!
> I think the US law here is dumb, but it's the law.
It is what it is, huh? 'It's the law' is a dose of propaganda so you don't feel bad about being forced to do something stupid.
A legal collision sounds so polite. To me, this resembles gang behavior. People want to gamble, so fuck the State. Statists are the hypocrites who let you buy lottery tickets at every corner store.
I agree with you that this isn't limited to the US, but the US wields pretty heavy influence and repercussions for disobedience.
No, see, this is wrong. The WTO ruling hinged on the argument that the US specifically allows gambling (horse, dog, state lotteries) but its prohibition Internet gambling amounts to restraint of trade and that Antigua was harmed by this. The only meaningful remedy was to give Antigua the "rights to violate" a certain amount of US copyrights (could you imagine the US actually paying a fine?).
The article is very sensationalist. WTO penalties are meant to be a proportional penalty, not some sort of carte-blanche.
The sensationalist aspect here is the idea that Antigua might set a far below-market price on intellectual property items. Ah, we'll charge $0.000000000000000000000000000001 per song/movie! Functionally unlimited songs and movies for $1! They'll have to negotiate since we now have a legal way for people go get nearly-free, unlimited American content! Except that the world doesn't work that way.
If the United States did something wrong and Antigua was awarded $21M worth of American IP as retaliation, then they should get in the ballpark of $21M. I'm sure no one in the US government is buying the "we can set any price we want and become a legal pirate haven if you don't give us what we want" argument. No one at the WTO would either. It makes a great story - especially since many of us hate the way that content industries in the US act. But the reality is that the WTO's decision is meant to be a proportional penalty to the wrong that has been done, not some vindictive nonsense.
I mean, sometimes countries would rather pay than change their laws - not because they're trying to be mean, but because they just have different values or fears. For example, let's say that Germany thinks that beer has to be made with German hops. There's nothing wrong with American hops. They're perfectly safe. Maybe they taste like crap, but snobbery isn't a valid reason to exclude a product. But maybe the Germans would rather pay. It happens. Further, let's say that Koreans are afraid that fans that don't auto-shutoff after 30 minutes will suck the air out of a room and kill people. Science doesn't back that up, it's not a valid health and safety issue, and if they want to exclude these non-auto-shutoff fans, they need to pay. Where this happens in the real world are on the edges where science is often murky. Is Pesticide A ok? Is additive B safe? Similarly, it happens with things like gambling where the US wants to regulate it and doesn't feel it can exert authority over foreign-companies (even if it sets regulations for them).
None of this is meant to give anyone carte-blanche to force issues. It's meant to keep things equal. Well, if you're going to favour your domestic industries and harm ours by $x, we get to favour our domestic industries and harm your's by the same $x plus maybe some reasonable penalty amount (I don't actually know about penalty amounts) - with "x" being determined by the WTO.
Antigua had been arguing to the WTO that the US harmed it in the billions. The WTO awarded them $21M. It sounds more like, "we're going to try to find a loophole because they mostly disagreed with us" than it does legitimate. Really, it sounds like the type of negotiation posturing that no one buys.
EDIT: I think the important thing to think about here is how you would want things settled in other cases - a consistant standard of practice - and not just in terms of nations. A lot of us here disliked Apple's harsh stand against Android. We don't mind proportional responses, many of us don't mind paying for quality products or components at a fair price. Likewise, we tend to dislike the "they made a tiny infraction! burn everything that is their's!" disproportionate response. Here we have "the US blocked Antiguan gambling sites in a discriminatory manner". The response shouldn't be, "destroy the entire American IP industry until they submit!"
And it's important to note that these standards should (ideally) be applied equally. If we don't wish disproportionate responses against Actor A, we shouldn't wish it against Actor B. The world might be less interesting in such a stable system, but I think we all benefit. We benefit when small wrongs are treated as small wrongs. We suffer when random wrongs carry random penalties.
Absent a government-granted temporary monopoly, the market would be willing to pay very little. So it ends up a bit circular when debating government IP policies.
The "people who download the most also purchase the most" stories that pop up every six months or so disagree. Even many of the people with the most awareness of the fact that they could get stuff for free are willing to pay the current market rates for a lot of it. It's been almost 14 years since Napster. A decade since suprnova and widespread availability of torrents for movies and TV shows. And yet the floor still hasn't fallen out of market prices. Things are changing in the creation and distribution world, but I see little indication that some substantial part of the population has decided that we're paying content creators too much, and that a song, show, movie, book, or game is only worth very little.
40 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] threadHowever, I bet the US will come to some resolution with them at the minute to prevent this from happening. This article is probably more of a bargaining chip than an actual plan.
On top of that, it's not like the U.S. is going to sit around and allow it. Expect payment processors to be pressured not to process payments for the service, goods like t-shirts to be seized at the border if you actually try to export them into the U.S. or U.S. friendly nations, etc. They're already ignoring the WTO for the questionable purpose of prohibiting online gambling, you don't think they would do it for this too?
In other words, now you can set up a pirate website in Antigua... under pretty much the same conditions as you can anywhere else.
2) Service is not going to be able to easily attract users if they only accept bitcoin.
3) Why would someone pay money to pirate movies when they can just do it for free?
What's that line? "The truth is not a bulletproof vest."
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/government-goes-0...
Promised by whom?
We must have stopped talking about copyrights. Copyright is a system for promoting the progress of science and useful arts, according to my country's constitution (assuming we still care about that).
"promised share of the revenue"
So much for a market-based system where businesses are not "promised" revenue.
"the site is in the same boat as The Pirate Bay there"
On the forefront of using a revolutionary communication system to deliver creative works to people, despite constant attacks by greedy anachronistic businesses who failed to adapt to a changing market?
...because only a tiny minority of anarchists trust Bitcoin? Oh sure, you can point to a few "forward thinking" (also known as "gullible") businesses that accept it, but it is not even a blip on the radar of money. The overwhelming majority of black market drug sales in the USA are done in -- you guessed correctly -- US Dollars.
If you can convince me that (a) Bitcoin is something a court will recognize as money, and not require me to convert it to dollars first, (b) that I can repay any debt with it, including taxes, and (c) that it's value today will even remotely reflect its value tomorrow, then maybe I'll accept Bitcoin payments from you. Otherwise, you'll have to give me my country's currency, because frankly, nothing else is useful to me (unless I am in another country, in which case you'll have to give me that country's currency).
Let's put it this way: it doesn't take a bunch of people commenting about the exciting US Dollar or British Pound Sterling to keep those currencies valuable. How long do you think Bitcoin would last if people stopped playing it up as the next big thing?
What they will do, however, remains an open question.
They don't need to win over the German government. If the US Congress passes a law to the effect of "No US bank can do business with a bank that does business in Antigua" even European banks will stay clear.
I'm American and I would love to see a major country stand up to the US when it comes to this crazy patent and copyright stuff. But there are a lot of financial levers, and export-driven countries like Germany, Japan, and China are particularly vulnerable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Organization_for_Multi...
In theory, every country aligned with the WTO should back Antigua on this. In reality, America will threaten trade sanctions against them too, so it will be a question of who has big enough balls to stand up to the world's bully. Let's hope we can get a critical mass going.
Yawn. I mean, I think the US law here is dumb, but it's the law. I think the enforcement was clumsy, and it was rebuked. But this sort of nonsense happens all the time in international law. Must every trade dispute involving the US become some kind of para-nationalist rant against the "world's bully?". Can't it just be a dumb law like the literally thousands of other dumb laws?
It is what it is, huh? 'It's the law' is a dose of propaganda so you don't feel bad about being forced to do something stupid.
A legal collision sounds so polite. To me, this resembles gang behavior. People want to gamble, so fuck the State. Statists are the hypocrites who let you buy lottery tickets at every corner store.
I agree with you that this isn't limited to the US, but the US wields pretty heavy influence and repercussions for disobedience.
The sensationalist aspect here is the idea that Antigua might set a far below-market price on intellectual property items. Ah, we'll charge $0.000000000000000000000000000001 per song/movie! Functionally unlimited songs and movies for $1! They'll have to negotiate since we now have a legal way for people go get nearly-free, unlimited American content! Except that the world doesn't work that way.
If the United States did something wrong and Antigua was awarded $21M worth of American IP as retaliation, then they should get in the ballpark of $21M. I'm sure no one in the US government is buying the "we can set any price we want and become a legal pirate haven if you don't give us what we want" argument. No one at the WTO would either. It makes a great story - especially since many of us hate the way that content industries in the US act. But the reality is that the WTO's decision is meant to be a proportional penalty to the wrong that has been done, not some vindictive nonsense.
I mean, sometimes countries would rather pay than change their laws - not because they're trying to be mean, but because they just have different values or fears. For example, let's say that Germany thinks that beer has to be made with German hops. There's nothing wrong with American hops. They're perfectly safe. Maybe they taste like crap, but snobbery isn't a valid reason to exclude a product. But maybe the Germans would rather pay. It happens. Further, let's say that Koreans are afraid that fans that don't auto-shutoff after 30 minutes will suck the air out of a room and kill people. Science doesn't back that up, it's not a valid health and safety issue, and if they want to exclude these non-auto-shutoff fans, they need to pay. Where this happens in the real world are on the edges where science is often murky. Is Pesticide A ok? Is additive B safe? Similarly, it happens with things like gambling where the US wants to regulate it and doesn't feel it can exert authority over foreign-companies (even if it sets regulations for them).
None of this is meant to give anyone carte-blanche to force issues. It's meant to keep things equal. Well, if you're going to favour your domestic industries and harm ours by $x, we get to favour our domestic industries and harm your's by the same $x plus maybe some reasonable penalty amount (I don't actually know about penalty amounts) - with "x" being determined by the WTO.
Antigua had been arguing to the WTO that the US harmed it in the billions. The WTO awarded them $21M. It sounds more like, "we're going to try to find a loophole because they mostly disagreed with us" than it does legitimate. Really, it sounds like the type of negotiation posturing that no one buys.
EDIT: I think the important thing to think about here is how you would want things settled in other cases - a consistant standard of practice - and not just in terms of nations. A lot of us here disliked Apple's harsh stand against Android. We don't mind proportional responses, many of us don't mind paying for quality products or components at a fair price. Likewise, we tend to dislike the "they made a tiny infraction! burn everything that is their's!" disproportionate response. Here we have "the US blocked Antiguan gambling sites in a discriminatory manner". The response shouldn't be, "destroy the entire American IP industry until they submit!"
And it's important to note that these standards should (ideally) be applied equally. If we don't wish disproportionate responses against Actor A, we shouldn't wish it against Actor B. The world might be less interesting in such a stable system, but I think we all benefit. We benefit when small wrongs are treated as small wrongs. We suffer when random wrongs carry random penalties.
What's the price of something that has no incremental cost? We've been trained to think it's ~ $15, but there's no real basis for that.
Whatever the market is willing to pay.