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Pirate Site Blocking Is Making Its Way into Free Trade Agreements
by dp-hackernews
A perfect example of how "democracy dies in darkness". They will keep pushing anti-consumer laws through the backdoor of "free trade" agreements, until we stop it by requiring that:
Before any international agreement may be ratified, [our country] must pass all the laws needed to comply with that agreement ahead of time, through regular democratic processes.
Russia is currently at a perfect position to fight back against this. I'm no fan of Kremlin, dictatorship, or wars, but if an ordinary country wants to rebel against the international "copyright" cartel, they would face sanctions. Russia is already under enough sanctions that no more can be realistically added, and it also has an existing pirate culture and a developed network infrastructure.
I would be happy to see if they start sponsoring pirate groups to undermine the right holders from "unfriendly countries" as a form of economic warfare.
It's already legalized for certain classes of software[1], but I think it has not yet formally extended into other types of content.
As a Russian, I can assure you that copyright was never really enforced in Russia in the first place, despite it being a member of WTO for some time. People around me who do pay for software and especially movies/tv shows/music instead of torrenting do it as a goodwill gesture more than anything else.
It's sort of surprising that loud announcements about no longer enforcing western copyrights haven't been made.
Such things would seem like an easy political win, and also walking back said statements are also then a valuable bartering chip for the future.
Same, it sounds like a smart statement to make to garner some popular support. Though, judging by the current situation on the fronts, they probably have bigger things to worry about.
They did do that.
Not only Russia. This is standard in most of South America and more developed parts of Africa as well.
I guess only copyright holding countries like to abide to these treaties. Particularly European countries. Some have anacronic copyright laws.
Include most countries in Asia too. Only the developed nations care strongly about it. Developing nations are lax about it.
i think this still happens in australia en masse. began because there used to be (still is?) a very strict censorship lobby and all media was (is?) owned by one guy
Also because they'll release things 6 months or a year later after releasing it in most other English speaking countries. Then you get on the internet and it's either spoilers for months before you get legal access or discussions are already dead when you do get legal access.
Russia does not allow pirate software. Your link is about discussion about legitimizing pirate software which didn't happen. I don't know why people think that Russia is some kind of pirate heaven, that's not true.
Don't know why you are downvoted. People can use pirated software at home perhaps and authorities here do not break into you flat to check if you use pirated Photoshop copy but organizations use officially bought licenses, I do not remember when was last time I saw something pirated in companies.
Also can confirm, the initiative to allow pirated software was rejected for now.
Things are different for movies and book though.
Well, there's already rutracker for one thing.
rutracker doesn't accept connections from Russia
No, rutracker is blocked in RU
https://eais.rkn.gov.ru/en/#form says that rutracker.org is not blacklisted.
It's blocked and inaccessible without circumvention. The list you linked to is provided by the regulatory body; it's incomplete and can't be searched by keyword to list specific page blocks. (blocking a single page means blocking the entire HTTPS website, obviously)
This one [1] is from Roskomsvoboda (a domestic EFF-like organization) and is much more complete. The rutracker.org itself is listed on last pages as unblocked, but that's purely technical and is done to update the IP address. Generally, there's no way to tell if a site is blocked except to test it from inside the country, that's true for every national firewall.
Moreover, Rutracker itself never blocked Russian IPs to signal anything, that was a fake started by Forbes (yes, really) and reposted by everyone else. Rutracker fought a DDoS attack for a couple days and was always open otherwise, and still is. You can open it from inside Russia without any VPN if you use a DPI circumvention tool or find a rare ISP that doesn't enforce the national blacklist.
The same can be said about the supposed legalization of piracy in Russia, which didn't happen and never even been taken seriously, it was just media overreacting to everything. I guess plenty of people were mislead by this and still believe it. I also strongly disagree with @grishka above - copyright was extremely strictly enforced, our copyright agencies put MAFIAA to shame, sadly. It might change now, of course, but still didn't. The copyright was enforced for organizations, though - we never had warning letters for torrenting like in some countries, for example.
So is the US; local bankers no longer own the banks. Good luck collecting mortgages and rent door to door.
Go ahead digitally drain accounts, they’d just be putting the economic producers out on the street. See how that works out.
Only 800,000 sworn LEO. 10k NYC cops threatened to strike over vaccine mandates and only 34 did. There’s no loyalty to politicians.
It’s a stand off elites cannot win. There can be houses, food, discovery, technology and art without the deference to a caricature with a title.
Bridges and technology need uniform language and measure for stability and correctness. The species does not need to carry forward ephemeral memes and suspect story that coddles a minority.
Even if the country theoretically was in a good place to defend against it (I don't believe they are), it would be political suicide for anyone in the western world to listen to someone that's closer to Hitler than any dictator in the world since World War 2. It doesn't matter what they say, the well has been thoroughly poisoned so any words that come out of it are automatically wrong.
No politician needs to listen to them for this to be effective. Having state-sponsored groups to attack DRM among other technical measures to produce cracked content can make them drastically harder to block. It may also help with winning over the hearts and minds of the people in in the coming years. Russia has a history of playing both sides when it comes to manipulating western politics, supporting both far-left and far-right groups in order to destabilize western countries, so this may well be a part of their strategy.
> someone that's closer to Hitler than any dictator in the world since World War 2
how good is your history dude?
https://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/35_countries_the_u_s_has_ba...
Well nobody is closer to Hitler than Adolph Hitler, and what did he say? I remember a Finnish audio engineer recorded him speaking in his normal conversational voice, of which there was no other recording.
He told his elite he fucked up. Russia was turning the war around, and specifically it was because of Donets, where there was a tank factory that made a disgusting amount of tanks, because its people were "living like animals." So they could make more tanks! So Communism worked at that place, at that time, when people worked with abandon, incentives be damned. And in fact English and Americans didn't want Russians to have a decisive victory, they wanted them to barely win so there wouldn't be a Cold War, not roll over Berlin before they did.
Donets has never stopped fighting Nazism.
EDIT: My Youtube isn't cooperating, it showed me a video about that recording where they cut and let a historian talk right in the moment I'm talking about, when a subordinate said "In Donets!" and Adolph Hitler replies, "Aye, in Donets". That's where they cut it. That tells you everything.
That's the one. Donets. Donets fucked Hitler over, the only complaint he ever made, didn't even cry when his father beat him after making up his mind against it, Donets was his undoing.
Like the Misanthropy Division, like what? Division? Oh yeah, if the word is Division it's real. Yeah those guys are real Nazis, just America doesn't care in the abstract, only in the specific when it is good for them. Gave them a pass and let them leave Germany the minute Soviets tanked Berlin. Just like not caring about tons of other things that you would think if you listened to their--to our, I'm American--Hollywood and proclamations, League of Nations. Korea bought into that over and over. I'm surprised anybody listens, History isn't that favorable if you remove WWII as the outlier it is. And now it turns out they never actually cared about Nazism, they're going to "rebrand" it now as National Socialism, poor history channel the ratings!
But realistically Donets, that just hurts, those were the people of Donets that lived like animals cranking out tanks around the clock. They didn't go anywhere, they didn't get exterminated, barely, they stopped the Nazis from getting there...but not forever. Recurring nightmare.
I had forgotten about that recording. Thank you. Definite worth listening to.
Would you also be in favor of trademark infringement?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mc-donalds-starbucks-and-othe...
Not really, but I am also not too bothered about those corporations anyways.
A part of me suspects that the proxy war the US is waging against Russia to decimate the Russian military and force a regime change is motivated by getting Russia under the control of western IP, financial, and other regulation.
It's fascinating how people will come up with bizzare conspiracy theories to fit their insignificant pet causes into much larger events.
I should have phrased it differently but I was just speculating. I think it's _possible_ the war is "partly motivated" by getting Russia more under the control of western regulations which includes copyright laws.
I don't think it's a wild conspiracy theory because Russia has been labeled a rogue state for some time and the US has an interest in regime change. It's not official policy but enough people have warned the US that regime change is a bad idea, including the NYT, that I don't think it's easily dismissed. I think it's quite possible there are western corporate and regulatory interests in having a Russian regime that cooperates with their interests more. But I can see how this is an extremely cynical take and I didn't mean to suggest that was the only reason for a war.
The US is supporting its ally in a war because it's being invaded by an adversary. IP laws do not fit anywhere in this. You might as well say the US started a proxy war to help hedgies stop the GME moon.
If Ukraine was our ally we'd have boots on the ground. This war is in no small part about keeping them from actually becoming our ally.
Ally and NATO member are not synonyms.
The US didn't put boots on the ground to help the UK in the Falklands even when it would have made things much easier. That doesn't mean the US and the UK were not allies or that the US did not help in other ways.
> Ally and NATO member are not synonyms.
Nobody said they were however NATO member does mean ally and we're pretty lukewarm on that prospect. There could certainly be another alliance made outside of NATO that would make them an ally, there could be, but there isn't. We have friendly relations with Ukraine and support a faction of their government but we're pretty cagey with our military support.
> Ally and NATO member are not synonyms.
True, but...
> The US didn't put boots on the ground to help the UK in the Falklands
The UK is, and was, a NATO member. (Indeed, a major factor that led Argentina to think that they could take the Falklands was the reorganization of the UK Navy around its role in NATO which compromised it's capacity for independent operations.)
> Ukraine was our ally we'd have boots on the ground
US allies frequently are involved in wars that don't get US boots on the ground. This is pretty much constant for Israel, for instance.
Not many full out invasions of Israel recently though.
No, waging a proxy war and vying for regime change for a geopolitical rival are not the same as supporting an ally. IP laws fit into a key part of US hegemony via Russian digital providers being accountable to US law enforcement.
is that really a conspiracy theory though? it is fairly clear what the ultimate goals the US and Russia have for each other are - Russia wants the US out of the picture so they can have free reign in Europe, and the US wants Russia broken down into two dozen irrelevant ethnostates they'll get to indirectly control
I think the goal of Russia (or more specifically Putin's inner circle) is basically great power roleplay, and as a part of that roleplay, they have to have some kind of grandiose geopolitical objective.
When it comes to actual real power, economic, soft, military, or whatever, Russia has a smaller GDP than Italy. If you imagine Italy trying to push the US 'out of the picture' so they could have 'free reign' in Europe, you can see how ridiculous Russia's 'geopolitics' is.
What's really happening is that Putin's domestic power and legitimacy stems from his ability to be a plausible cosplay Bismark while keeping the kleptocrats that are robbing the Russian people happy.
If push comes to anything close to a shove, there's simply no way Russia can contend with any of its neighbors, all of whom are just way more powerful (India, China, Japan, South Korea) or in actual world-leading blocs (EU members, NATO members, etc). That won't change until the Russian economy and society itself changes, and that's impossible without substantial reassessment and reorganization that would undoubtedly include the end of Putin's regime.
That last part you got wrong
who will give those microstates massive loans they would need to stay afloat?
who will fund the election campaigns and favorable media coverage for the agreeable candidates and parties?
whose arms will they buy and whose military bases will they build to defend themselves against each other and/or what little is left of Russia and/or China?
whose companies will get contracts for resource extraction and favorable conditions to operate there?
...
the collapse of Russia would be a greater boon to the US than the WWII was, and had Russia been a benevolent democracy, it would've been at least halfway there by now
The greatest boon to the US would be if Russia transformed itself into a democracy.
And for the people in Russia.
I hope there's a chance that'll happen if indeed Putin has an illness and is dead soon
> the US wants Russia broken down into two dozen irrelevant ethnostates
That's delusional and was what I was replying to.
to someone with a redditor's level of understanding the geopolitics, sure
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You're aggressively dismissing an off-hand thought. That makes me far more curious about who told you not to think about it.
> who told you not to think about it.
The united coalition of Lizardmen and Freemasons, funded by George Soros. Bill Gates declined to invest.
I'm being serious. Soros only funds prosecutorial races, which is dangerous, but not as dangerous as lizardfolx.
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He's dismissing it because the parent talking about proxy war waged by the US when the one starting it was Russia. He deserves all the dismissing that he gets
> proxy war waged by the US when the one starting it was Russia
It's possible to participate in proxy war when you didn't start it. Might even have better optics.
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Do not reply to this poster which is applying rule 5 of disinformation: Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
>proxy war the US is waging
You mean the war of aggression that Russia is waging against Ukraine?
Well yes, if the US were one of those parties then it wouldn’t be a “proxy” war. Assisting one side without being directly involved is the definition of a proxy war. Proxy wars aren’t necessarily aggressive or wrong, either.
No, the US's response has significantly changed since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the point where regime change looks like it's in the cards. There are very clear corporate and regulatory interests in a Russian regime that complies with western governments. If lobbying efforts can cause site blocking in trade agreements, why wouldn't that be the case for regime change negotiations?
> A part of me suspects that the proxy war the US is waging against Russia to decimate the Russian military and force a regime change is motivated by getting Russia under the control of western IP, financial, and other regulation.
To the extent that it is approximately accurate to describe such a war as existing, it is motivated not arouns looping Russia into Western IP, financial, etc., regulatory regimes, but around dealing with the security threat represented by actions like the Russian invasion of Moldova (1990-present), Georgia (2008-present), and Ukraine (2014-present), and, most particularly, the massive escalation of the last that occurred this year.
I am sure that is part of the motivation but I am totally unconvinced that is all of it.
Russia's independence from and defiance of the western law enforcement agencies, in things like money laundering, building a SWIFT alternative, cybercrime, piracy, and digital interference, among many others, are things that I think the US would like to do away with. Those aren't strictly security concerns but could still be defined that way. It would not surprise me at all if the US saw an opportunity for regime change that is more friendly to its own interests. Regime change seems to be a goal at present but has not been made official.
I stated in another post that I felt that a centralized internet under more or less the same western laws globally, with exceptions like China, was not good for the internet which is why I agreed with the parent comment. That was my main point: Russian defiance of copyright laws is good for the internet. I believe that is not a view shared by most governments. I am less interested in war specifics.
Russia invaded Ukraine.
Russia is waging war against Ukraine.
Ukraine is defending itself against Russia.
These facts are very straightforward.
Why would you assume secret copyright interests, when the open geopolitical interests are so blatent?
It'd be like if someone made a million dollars, and you accused them that its all a front to launder ten dollars. It doesn't make sense.
My answer is complex.
>Why would you assume secret copyright interests
I did not. I said "western IP, financial, and other regulation.". That includes a lot but in all amounts to essentially geopolitical control.
However, this being a thread about copyright and this being a technology website I mentioned copyright and I think copyright laws and regulations are vastly more important than you are implying. The article mentions trade agreements that can force ISPs to block web pages. As it stands right now, the internet is decentralized but single government control of the internet is increasingly becoming apparent. Western nations share copyright laws which ultimately centralizes the internet across many different people and countries. So, for example, ISP web site blocking can be performed across many different ISPs globally with similar regulation and controls in all these different jurisdictions. (edit: especially at the behest of US based corporations)
I think this is ultimately harmful for internet users especially because it can be associated with censorship. Previously, the decentralized nature of the internet made it harder for any single entity to control it, however, it is looking increasingly feasible to do so. So I agree with the parent commenter and add that it is actually beneficial for the internet if Russia enables pirating and is not under US/western internet regulations. Having alternatives is good for the internet and I think that's a very important point.
I don't doubt that copyright serves to cement usa's geopolitical position.
However on a scale of things that maintain usa's geopolitical position, copyright is kind of minor comparatively. Copyright is the long game soft power sort of thing. Ukraine is the short game. USA needs to show the world that if bad things happen to a country because they are friendly to usa, america wont let it go unremarked. If they don't, other countries will take note, and america loses its pax americana position. The ukraine thing is a rather direct challenge of america's hegemonic position. America is responding to it because its either that, or they lose their world position (or a step in that direction).
Im not saying america is above the type of long term power games you suggest, just that in this case they have a much more pressing reason to be involved, and i don't think secret conspiracy reasons make sense when their hand is basically being forced by direct means.
Copyright is actually hard power, like all other economic considerations. Without intellectual property so massively favouring wealthy countries, the US wouldn't be the hegemon, and I mean that literally. IP is hard power, and it is very major indeed.
Imagine a world where Chinese, Russian, Indian and Japanese companies get to sell their goods worldwide without a single care about American patents? If that happened tomorrow, just for one example, BYD would probably become the largest car company in the world (because they have the cheapest and most reliable batteries, but only in China due to IP laws around the chemistry). It would be a direct and immediate challenge to the American hegemony.
I think it's not about regime change as it is about slowly tearing them apart so that they can consume the remains. Russia is enormous and most of it is untouched.
Making such a requirement sounds like a very speedy way to find yourself suddenly very restricted by US sanctions and notice a mysterious uptick in discussions about the democratic illegitimacy of your last election.
Of course the World Bank and IMF will be happy to help you out of you drop them again though.
That is to say, very few countries actually have a choice on agreeing to "free trade" policies, local laws aren't really enough to resist that.
It seriously disgusts me that copyright holders can use the might of the US government to cause such damage to other countries as punishment for not upholding their imaginary monopolies.
This FTA is between the UK and Australia. I'm under the impression that both the UK and Australia currently have laws allowing them to comply with this agreement, so adding a requirement like this wouldn't change anything here.
> adding a requirement like this wouldn't change anything here
It does change something. It makes it much harder for that law to be changed in future.
None of the branches of the UK governmental system care about international law, so this is not an impediment.
The judicial system is constitutionally required to ignore it. The legislature is mostly controlled by the executive. And the executive only respects international agreements when they are convenient.
The requirement they are referring to is
> must pass all the laws needed to comply with that agreement ahead of time
Which is already met, so it wouldn't change anything.
If they ever decide to change the laws, they will have to renegotiate the agreement, which is a change.
It changes nothing in reality.
I can't get to torrent search engines in the UK. I double click Nordvpn.com/bigmoney and then click "connect". I can now get to the torrent search engine without issue, even while connecting to a UK node....
Its a lot of words to add maybe three seconds of delay to my web browsing experience.
I do love Erik. Best ads on Youtube, next to the Internet Historian.
> Before any international agreement may be ratified, [our country] must pass all the laws needed to comply with that agreement ahead of time, through regular democratic processes.
In the US it must go through the Senate, the President, and depending on things the House may have some say in the funding:
> Treaty power is a coordinated effort between the Executive branch and the Senate. The President may form and negotiate, but the treaty must be advised and consented to by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Only after the Senate approves the treaty can the President ratify it. Once it is ratified, it becomes binding on all the states under the Supremacy Clause. While the House of Representatives does not vote on it at all, the supermajority requirement for the Senate's advice and consent to ratification makes it considerably more difficult to rally enough political support for international treaties. Also, if implementation of the treaty requires the expenditure of funds, the House of Representatives may be able to block or at least impede such implementation by refusing to vote for the appropriation of the necessary funds.
That's the problem - everything gets packaged into one treaty, under one vote, with a lot of political momentum behind it. Like hiding objectionable laws in 9000 page budget bills.
But you raise a good point - without a single-subject rule [1], we would be quickly back to square one, as instead of voting on ratification, there would be a large "Trans Pacific Partnership Omnibus Bill" that would simply have everything thrown in, without giving the public or the system the chance to examine each clause individually.
The rot runs deep.
Democracy is long dead. See Guantanamo, Assange, Snowden.
Society is long dead in {{this location}}. See {{example rape case}}, {{example murder case}}, {{example burglary case}}.
The rape, murders, and burglaries would have to be committed every day by the most powerful individuals without any punishment for that analogy to hold, and indeed you would be correct in saying polite society is dead in that case.
There is no right to piracy in the constitution of the United States. And I would never vote for such a thing. If you actually care about democracy.
The public domain still exists. It's functionally equivalent to a right to piracy, and is written into the constitution. Note the phrase "limited times":
U.S. Constitution Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Oh come on. That's such a weak argument.
No one is claiming that accessing media that is in the public domain is piracy. We are specifically talking about media that is not in the public domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
this is what happens when major profitable works hit the public domain deadline.
I think the idea is that we wouldn't need piracy if media would enter the public domain after a sensible amount of time. Now that disney + sony are essentially legislative branches of the us government we can be sure that nothing of value will enter the public domain ever again.
So, this right to privacy doesn't exist because it only would apply to things it doesn't apply to?
If that's the case, your argument is a tautology:
"There's no right to do things that you don't have a right to do."
The first amendmend does grant you the right to free speech, which "piracy" is.
The constitution also allows the government to limit that right "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
There are quite a few limitiations in that right that current copyright laws arguably go beyond.
Advocates of democracy would have us believe that this is the will of the people...and if it isn't, we can simply elect different people.
It's our most sacred institution, and should be supported as such.
today i saw someone on HN call piracy controls "anti-consumer laws"
You can make a bunch of comparisons here between various shadow markets. Prohibition would be an extreme example but the parallel is in my opinion quite clear. People have and continue to resist oppressive legislation that really mostly affects themselves, not everyone else. Be it drinking, piracy or extreme skydiving. It's ineffectual and breaches people's freedom. A reasonable middle ground here would be forbidding making profit off it, like some better countries have adopted.
If we now take a look at the causes, it's quite clear that it shouldn't and can't be improved with restrictions. The underlying reasons and their possible solutions have been highlighted well by cable, Netflix and Steam. Unfortunately streaming services are cable-ifying. We'll probably have to endure and wait for history to repeat again. If you didn't get what I meant - making a service not affordable, cumbersome and restrictive makes people seek alternatives.
Third and possibly the worst aspect here is that such legislation has collateral damage. Large players can steal content, revenue and obliterate anyone standing against them - simply by having deeper wallets. There are Kafkaesque content filters that you can't properly dispute. Artists have to agree to unfair contracts to properly earn royalties. Consumers get hurt by idiotic DRM. In the recent years I've seen Google search results being removed with DMCA requests by "unknown" for sharing "unknown" made by "unknown". Lumen DB literally contains entries like this.
There's no way they'll improve their behaviour when given more power, there's no way it'll improve citizen's lives, it won't even help artists in any reasonable extent. It would only help a few select shareholders.
This is primarily off of the topic that I actually raised, which is that anti piracy laws aren't anti consumer
That you're able to name some implementations you don't like isn't really relevant
Many of these laws exist that you will never learn about because they don't affect you in any way
It's like picking the worst politician you can name to show why everyone in the other team is bad
Overbroad to the point of missing what you were arguing against
> This is primarily off of the topic that I actually raised, which is that anti piracy laws aren't anti consumer
I listed other anti-consumer laws, how the current ones are both anti-consumer and creator, how future ones can make it even worse. That is very on-topic.
> That you're able to name some implementations you don't like isn't really relevant
Vast majority of them are terrible, that is relevant.
> Many of these laws exist that you will never learn about because they don't affect you in any way
Even if that were the case, which it isn't, that doesn't make them good. There's literally no merit you can infer from saying "you don't know about those laws".
> It's like picking the worst politician you can name to show why everyone in the other team is bad
It's like picking a party and listing what they've done and generalizing from that, that they aren't doing good things.
> Overbroad to the point of missing what you were arguing against
Intentional attempt at excluding parts of the discussion because you don't have good arguments against them.
> Vast majority of them are terrible
No evidence supports this
I'm not interested in arguing with a set of unjustified faiths
Seems strictly true assuming they're using 'pirating' to mean copyright infringement?
That's like saying that murder laws are anti-civilian because murderers are civilians, or that eating plants is deadly because a handful of poisonous plants exist
No, a ridiculously overbroad label isn't strictly true. It's strictly false, and the primary example of what strictly false means
Bracketed numbers, eg (ii) for ease of later reference.
Disregarding entirely the morality of the situation, which is immaterial to the statement in question. And disregarding 'making sure creators are reasonably compensated', which is almost tangential (since the earliest eras of man we've had media production, eg cave painting, and so consumers of media, as far as we know without monetary consideration).
Those who download material restricted by copyright from torrent sites, without an exception or license are nonetheless media 'consumers'. (i)
Copyright laws restrict the activity of these media consumers. (ii)
Restricting of media consumption leads, overall, to less media consumption. (iii)
Restricting an activity is to be 'anti' that activity. (iv)
Conclusion: copyright laws are anti media consumer. (v)
Where is your issue with the verity of this?
Murder is pro-civilian because it protects civilians, but copyright law doesn't protect media consumers.
Your plant analogy seems to be a suggestion that we're making an instance-to-class logical leap (fallacy of accident?). I don't see it, at which step do you think we did that? The argument at hand is more akin to "eating plants will kill some people".
I think clause (iii) is the obvious point at which one could challenge this line. You might contend that with no copyright law (2.i) their would be less media production (2.ii) and that this would lead to less consumers (2.iii). But I think this is obviously false, we'd have the same number of consumers but arguably poorer quality media to consume.
dressing up nonsense in clauses doesn't make it any less nonsense
things aren't anti-consumer merely because individual instances of them carry consequences you don't like, and the vast majority of these laws don't do that
you seem to be confusing copyright protection for drm
Because they are.
"Free" trade agreements. "Free trade agreement" is a propaganda term anyway, but applying it to agreements that impose intellectual property monopolies is bizarre.
https://cepr.net/trade-agreements-that-increase-protectionis...
https://cepr.net/trade-deals-are-about-increasing-protection...
> It is also important to point out that the liberalization of trade in goods is largely a done deal. Tariffs are already zero or near zero in the vast majority of cases. The potential gains from further liberalization are limited, especially since goods are a rapidly falling share of total output.
> Instead, deals like the TPP are largely about locking in rules on items like intellectual property protections and preserving Mark Zuckerberg’s dominance of the Internet. The TPP, like other recent trade deals, calls for longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies.
> These protections are 180 degrees at odds with free trade. They are about shifting more income from the bulk of the population to people who benefit from rents on patents and copyrights, by making them pay more for drugs, medical equipment, software and a wide variety of other items.
It’s not bizarre. It’s the norm to use contradictory names for legal constructs and initiatives as a way to deceive the masses.
FTAs are mostly about standard normalizations (food safety, consumer protection, investor-state arbitration, etc)
the export of fucked up IP regulations is unfortunate, but since most countries are signatories to the various already existing WIPO regulations... in practice they are already in effect.
More like "unfree trade".
I used to pirate lots of music when in University but I stopped because currently all music I listen to is on Spotify which is cheap and costs like $4 in my country, even if it was the full $10 I still wouldn't mind paying for it.
However, for movies and TV shows I need to pay for like 5 services to get all the movies and TV shows that I need. No way I am paying all those. SO I will keep pirating Movies and TV shows
I agree, I think that "pirates" are basically made up of three camps; people who would pay if it was convenient, people who would pay if it was cheaper and people who would never pay anyways. I think the first camp is the largest and the only one really worth going after from a business sense. It's what I think Gabe Newell means when he says "Piracy is a Service problem"
https://www.eurogamer.net/newell-stop-piracy-by-offering-sup....
There’s a fourth camp: People who have no other choice because the content has not been made available in their region.
True! It's a rather extreme form of inconvenience.
> Piracy is a Service problem
And in the context of video streaming, the service gap keeps widening.
Music exists in an alternate universe of IP where no creator or rightsholder truly has exclusive control over anything except commercial distribution of physical media. It's crazy but that's how we got to a place where any streaming or subscription service we choose likely has all the music we want to listen to and piracy stopped being a rational decision.
Movies and television don't have that. Netflix thrived for a while as the streaming platform of choice for content owners, but their catalog was never anywhere close to exhaustive. Then there was Hulu for the content owners who didn't want Netflix ruling distribution. And Prime for who-knows-why. And now everyone with exclusive rights to content wants to put anything of value on their own exclusive platform. Combine all their fees and cutting the cord legally approaches the price of a moderate CATV package and if you want any of the CATV things that aren't available with on-demand streaming platforms, such as cable news networks, that's another much pricier subscription from Sling or AT&T.
Meanwhile, piracy keeps getting easier and better. Anything running an Intel CPU from the past 5-6 years with an integrated GPU will make a perfectly adequate Plex server that can transcode 4K content. In appliance form from Synology that starts around $300, or DIY for half that with used PC from eBay. The software stack to completely automate piracy is a handful of Docker containers that any modern NAS or appliance-style Linux distro makes simple enough for a non-geek to muddle through installing and configuring, and some expressly target that purpose. A paid USENET service and indexer cost about the same as a single streaming subscription. Content selection isn't limited to what content owners have chosen to make available for streaming, content never disappears so long as you're willing to store it, and everything is consolidated to a single "streaming service" that supports pretty much any platform that can access Netflix.
And, as it has been for years, people who don't want to put in that effort can probably find a friend who's willing to share.
I don't disagree in premise, but you're vastly overestimating the average person's computer knowledge (which is annoyingly easy to do).
Even figuring out where Plex wants the video files to be is going to be a lot for some people, much less figuring out how to get the torrent files into that location. That's assuming they've already figured out how to get the drives in, plug it in correctly, partition the system, figure out what software they need, and installed it.
The non-IT people I've talked IT with would struggle with that. E.g. a common misconception is that Explorer is the only way to see or interact with files. They're going to be confused as soon as they have to use something other than Explorer. I don't even know if NFS would help, or if it would be more confusing that a file exists both "in Explorer" and "in the browser".
I think that's why Popcorn Time drew so much heat. It was easy enough that your grandma could use it, which was a problem for IP owners. Usenet doesn't form an existential threat, and the users are motivated enough to find other ways if they need. My grandma is sure as hell not going to be setting up a Plex server running rtorrent with auto-downloaders and auto-sorters to make sure that she gets the latest episodes of her soaps.
I wonder what the split between people that won’t pay are people who don’t have the financial means and people who refuse to pay out of principal.
Varies greatly from country to country.
> However, for movies and TV shows I need to pay for like 5 services to get all the movies and TV shows that I need. No way I am paying all those.
These services are also very georestricted, even if you might want to pay, it might not be possible. What's worse is that streaming or lending services rarely adjust prices to match purchasing power.
If you're in the wrong country you'll practically pay three or ten times as much and get one tenth the content.
Not only do we get a fraction of all available content due region locking, the quality of the content we do get is abysmal. Netflix has compression artifacts on 90% black frames. It actually hurts to watch highly dynamic footage or any scene containing color gradients. Other streaming platforms are even worse.
It's honestly insulting that this is what I get as a paying customer while copyright infringement offers me immaculate encodes sourced from blu-rays at zero cost.
> The quality of the content we do get is abysmal
You must have a very specific blessed hardware to actually get what you're paying for. Then you have to hope that the provider isn't automatically picking lower quality for your "viewing experience". The native Netflix Windows app allows you to watch 4K HDR video with Atmos, that's about it with a PC. The app hasn't been updated for four years, can't do optical surround audio and hardware decoding is broken with older Nvidia graphics cards. What a wondrous experience.
Pirates on the other hand can just wait for the content to download and watch it offline, with whatever OS, whenever, with any HDMI cable or screen. Disclaimer, Dolby Vision is still more nuanced because how closed it is, but it's still less restrictive.
> You must have a very specific blessed hardware to actually get what you're paying for.
Yeah. Running Linux in order to enjoy your computing freedom? They can't own our computer and prevent us from copying so they simply refuse to do business with people like us. Guess copyright infringement is our only option.
> Then you have to hope that the provider isn't automatically picking lower quality for your "viewing experience".
Even on my 100+ megabits/second link they do this. Would it kill them to allow me to download the whole thing ahead of time so I can watch offline and in high quality? Download the next episode while I'm watching the current one?
Connection goes down? The content just stops playing. Reminds me of satellite TV and the loss of service due to weather. "Pirates" just don't have any of these problems.
> The native Netflix Windows app allows you to watch 4K HDR video with Atmos, that's about it with a PC. The app hasn't been updated for four years, can't do optical surround audio and hardware decoding is broken with older Nvidia graphics cards. What a wondrous experience.
God I hate the streaming platform software so much. I can't even begin to describe how much it sucks. Something simple like seeking or even rewinding 5-10 seconds is such a aggravating experience, it's actually trained me not to even attempt it anymore. On mpv I can just use arrow keys and it does what I asked it to do instantly. We had better software than this in the 90s.
> Pirates on the other hand can just wait for the content to download and watch it offline, with whatever OS, whenever, with any HDMI cable or screen.
Yeah. That's what we get for trying to support creators: companies that give less of a shit about quality than literal enthusiasts sharing files online for the love of it. One would think these corporations worth zillions of dollars would be able to beat these amateurs when it comes to offering superior service. Nope.
I really don't understand why streaming is so commonly accepted. Why do people tolerate online requirements for non-live content. Why would anyone be OK with having to run specific closed source software to play back non-interactive content rather than being able to freely choose the software that suites them independendly of the content.
If the big media approach were about paying for content creation then surely we'd have regulations requiring that shows be available to any selling platform willing to pay the per user cost. Instead it's about creating fiefdoms to lock up content and hold tv/movie culture hostage.
Copyright laws give commercial interests too much power against media consumers.
I guess the only way to win is not too play ...
I keep bringing this up, but I think it is very illustrative of the problem with media companies and how they leverage copyright: Do you all remember when Kodi plus Covenant let you watch very nearly anything, at any time, with a wide variety of audio and subtitle language choices? That was the last time I felt like I lived in the future. I would have paid good money for that, but no one sells it, at any price, because everyone want their own fucking fiefdom.
Music piracy is not worth it anymore. Besides the price being OK (though for me a tenner is still a lot for how much I use), the convenience is extreme. What kills piracy is more convenience than price IMO. I remember having to edit all those M3TAG headers removing all the crap like "--From Warezzz.com Team--", removing bad rips, bad categorisation etc. Spotify and Apple music solved that.
But for TV/Movies the convenience is becoming more and more crap with the fragmentation in all these services. Besides the price you also have to deal with multiple viewing apps, multiple contracts with different T&C's etc.
If the industry really wanted they could bring piracy to a halt today by offering everything for a reasonable price just like with music.
You are not entitled to labor of someone else for free. Don't act like you're forced to pirate, if you don't want to play the price - don't watch that show! It is that simple.
The only ones acting entitled here are the copyright holder that demand that society bends over backwards to pretend that information cannot be efforlessly copied. This becomes even more insane for content that has become part of peoples culture and you still want to further profit off it.
You're not entitled to a business model. Don't act like your'e forced to live off coyright fees, if you don't want people to pirate your content - don't release it in the first place! It is that simple.
Sure, it's "wrong" but people do it anyway. It can be argued how wrong it is, eg compared to theft, but let's go with it for sake of argument.
There are many ways to fight this. One regulation and fiscalization, sure. Companies spend their private money in lobbying and governments spend public money in writing and enforcing the laws.
Another way is to turn it into a business opportunity. Steam and Spotify put a great dent in piracy, as they offer convenient services. Netflix did it briefly, but after the multiplication of streaming services and exclusives, movie and TV piracy went up again.
I'm all for the second approach - innovation and improvement of services for the consumer instead of anti-consumer regulation paid by public money.
> the services of the ISP are used by a third party to infringe copyright or related rights in the territory of that Party.
Given the trouble Google has found itself in over News, Images, and Books search, and YouTube videos, surely ISPs could be injuncted to block Google's domains.
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I’m not a fan of trying to pass legislation through trade deals, but specifically on the issue of anti-piracy: why shouldn’t content creators have a right to protect their content?
Frankly, it seems to me like if a studio wants to show their movie for $1000 dollars, only available on their windows phone app, geogated to just south east Arkansas, they should have every right to do that.
I’ve always found the HN crowd really good at separating “what’s good for me” from what’s actually right.
What am I missing?
In the US at least, the purported intent of copyright is, for a limited time only, 'to promote the progress of science and (useful) arts'. Arts in that context being the output of skilled trades / crafts. The intent is to expand the knowledge of sapient life and promote the spread of said knowledge.
Frivolous information isn't intended to be covered, it doesn't have an application that expands (as methods rather than material) the quality of type of things educated people can do.
This was also created in an era where even sound recordings didn't exist. Copyright as initially created nearly everywhere, exists in a world where the printing press exists, but is still enough of a pain to work with that books are higher value items for commoners. E.G. this is an era where farmer's almanacs of all the things useful for a farmer in a year get published as a book to improve the skills of a very common job.
The duration of copyright has also been abusively extended by... specific entities. In reality such draconian periods should only be possible as a form of consumer protection; as Trade Marks.
Copyright with a far more reasonable term length would allow material to enter the public domain within people's lifetimes, and a leading and trailing edge for culture as new ideas are created and then as greater spread and work based on those ideas is integrated into a culture would encourage better entertainment as current works would need to compete with recent classics.
There is a difference between [advocating against bad laws that promote abuse or favor interests or hamper innovation] and [advocating for no copyright laws whatsoever]. I think we're somewhat talking past each other here.
I have no idea what a good copyright law is, but assuming that one can be crafted, I think it would be totally reasonable for said law to be implemented.
From first principles, it still seems like a publisher should have a reasonable right to protect their content from theft.
Well, you're asking to ignore one side of the issue when talking about other, but clearly one affects the other.
Companies and governments push anti consumer laws to keep copyright away from the public domain forever. Public resources are spent to protect the interests of this enterprises. Companies engage in anti consumer practices such as exclusives and hard to cancel services.
This makes it impossible to have sympathy for the companies.
I'd argue that public resources are used all the time to defend the rights of companies. If a car gets stolen for a Toyota dealership, significant public resources are deployed to recover and prosecute.
The alternative is one in which private companies are expected to hire private security, and private detectives and a private militia to defend their products.
If I remember correctly, this is indeed what the East India Trading Company did, before it was determined that it was in the public interest to defend private companies.
https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
>There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we've spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.
> why shouldn’t content creators have a right to protect their content?
This is the wrong framing. The creators have a right to do with their creation as they please. What you want is for them to have control over everyone else's rights to do things with that information. Now you are talking about restricting other people and the question should be why the creators should be able to do that.
With physical property the this is a lot clearer - only one person can posess a physical item so in order for one person to be able to own something you need to restrict other people. With information this is not the case - you can effortlessly copy information without the original owner having any less of it. The idea why we have copyright is instead that we need to incentivize the creation of content by making it easier for creators to profit off it. Now this is already questionable to begin with (people have always felt the urge to create long before any copyright laws), even if you agree with the premise you still need to justify all copyright laws with how they help achieve that goal.
> Frankly, it seems to me like if a studio wants to show their movie for $1000 dollars, only available on their windows phone app, geogated to just south east Arkansas, they should have every right to do that.
Why? What does society gain from granting them that right that would possibly justify restricting everyone else's right to free speech in order to accomplish this?
If they're acting it live, sure, they can choose when to perform, but there's nothing needed from the studio for me to watch a copy of the content.
I don't need them to make the copy for me, and I don't need them to play the copy, so why should they control what I'm doing with my stuff?
They have no right to decide that I can only show my copy of it for $20 on an iphone.
What's actually right is to keep people free, not insist on arbitrary controls because the government has decided only one person is allowed to tell a certain story
> What am I missing?
The obvious collateral damage from creating the technology and legal frameworks to enforce this and their high abuse potential.
I think abuse potential is key here. Having the governments enforce strictly requires a lot of observations and tools that can readily be abused for all kinds of shit.
Something being difficult to legislate doesn't absolve the need for legislation. Police are arguably much more destructive and prone to abuse and corruption, but the solution is not to legalize theft.
The whole point of legislation is to draw lines along slippery slopes, I would think that the potential for abuse exists in almost every law ever written.
…and governments should not have the power to help the company enforce that decision.
I guess it probably depends upon ones consumption but this strategy seems outdated because nowadays private trackers/groups eg discords seem to make up a much larger share of piracy etc but I guess that’s more hurting all of the people lower on the hierarchy of content creation than the big record labels.
It will be effective for the pirates who would give up and make a purchase before spending a solid 20 minutes searching for a piracy site. Counter-piracy measures only make sense when they are less expensive than the lost revenue, so their goal is not necessarily to eliminate all piracy.
I'd guess there are Pareto-like distributions where 4/5 of the infringers are low effort and not part of any invite-only communities.
Beside that, the language used is "online location," a pairing of words so vague and incompatible that it's hard to argue it should be limited to web servers and not discord channels.
> I guess it probably depends upon ones consumption but this strategy seems outdated because nowadays private trackers/groups eg discords seem to make up a much larger share of piracy etc but I guess that’s more hurting all of the people lower on the hierarchy of content creation than the big record labels.
I think a better way when it comes to big record labels is to refuse to listen to or watch their stuff even if you can get it free of cost. Don't give them your time at all.
Because being on a big label suddenly makes the art bad? If I like a song I need to do research and trace it's origin? I don't understand how this is a viable idea nor how it helps
Music isn’t a limited commodity, you can boycott effectively unlimited artists without significant cost.
Culture is about shared experience, anything that cuts you off from sharing in popular culture has a cost. You might not care, but I think - particularly for children/teens - there is significant cost.
Interested in your thoughts on that?
Music has largely stopped being a shared experience, that’s hard to demonstrate but the same thing happened to TV. Who shot JR on Dallas was the kind of thing people talked about and the resolution episode got 53.3% ratings share in 1980, that was only topped by final Episode of M.A.S.H which hit 60.2%.
Only 2 shows in the last 25 years even approached it. Seinfeld Finale - "The Finale" hit 41.3% 24 years ago and Friends hit 35.6% 18 years ago.
In 2020 by comparison the Super Bowl was 4x as popular as the most watched single TV episode and streaming was dominated by people watching reruns not new shows. Average viewership of actual TV shows is unsurprisingly much lower.
PS: Best selling albums of 2020 included #12 Abbey Road by The Beatles, and #6 was the Frozen II soundtrack.
it doesnt make the art intrinsicly bad, but is a yellow brick road to it. almost every body likes fame or fortune, but this leads to demands, to generate product according to the employers specifications, AKA "commercialization"
An injunction like this might be enough of a threat to make Discord et al start self-enforcing. Kind of like how the DMCA (arguably) led to YouTube implementing ContentID.
Speaking of, I'm asking here because I don't know where to find out anymore otherwise: anyone know where I can find the retro gaming torrent community these days? All my sets are just sitting here not being updated or seeded to anyone and it is making me sad.
Free Trade Agreements are being made to block free trade.
Of course. If the agreements force governments to make it illegal (and actually enforce) sales of e.g. counterfeit handbags in stores, then why wouldn't they contain passages enforcing the same thing for software or other things?
Because perfect copies of digital goods aren't counterfeits.
So call them something else. What’s the difference? Microsoft don’t want an official looking store selling windows licenses just like Gucci don’t want it for handbags.
In the case of licenses they are usually even “real” licenses just repurposed e.g re-sold from defunct companies. The only thing bad about them is that Microsoft don’t want them sold. Which is understandable as they lose revenue when they are sold.
A perfect replica of a dollar bill, made with the exact materials and equipment as the real thing, is still a counterfeit. Being a counterfeit isn't a physical property of the object, it's about provenance.
It's impossible to make a perfect copy of a dollar bill though since it's a physical object. Not even dollar bills are perfect copies of dollar bills. It also doesn't matter where the bill came from: If it's official currency issued by the government then it's worth $1.
A digital copy of a video or a song is similar: It doesn't matter where it came from... it's still the same thing. A counterfeit song or video would be a file of the same exact name and maybe even size as the original but doesn't actually contain the song or video. It's annoying AF when you download a counterfeit file but it's not even remotely the same thing as counterfeit goods or currency.
Could UK put some tax avoidance into FTAs?
I don't think the UK needs any help in providing opportunities for tax avoidance.
It's worrying but it's hardly effective anyway.
The netherlands blocks many such sites as a result of local lawsuits and people know how to find them anyway. The sites are DNS blocked only so it's trivial to bypass, you don't even need to bother with a VPN.
Canada had software rental that was banned in the NAFTA. A nasty side affect was that opened software could not and still cannot be returned for refund.
Certain pirated content should be blocked, but there is other content that is locked up by profiteers such as scientific papers funded by public money. There is also information concealed by governments of their misdeeds, and whistle blowers need an avenue for safe public disclosure.
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Good. Lots of communities on the internet try to tie themselves into philosophical knots to justify piracy because they just don’t want to pay for things.
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We could use this a vehicle for banning all cryptocurrency transactions. Just require all transactions in all currencies meet certain industry standard financial regulations and provide injunctive relief if transactions occur that don’t.
Hard to say if you're actually in favor of this or not, but this is exactly the endgame strategy for any protocols that provide an alternative to the Empire's approved ones.
Nobody should be in favor of these things imo.
I’m in favour of not burning more power that the country of Argentina for a coin who’s primary historical purposes have been speculation and the facilitating of illegal transactions. I also think it’s a hard problem to solve short of banning given the large numbers of rampant speculators.
And who are you to decide what power should or should not be used for? Someone appointed you king of the world? It’s natural to want to impose your will by force and make everything you don’t like illegal. But consider that tomorrow, the roles might be reversed and the boot might be on your neck.
Society makes laws to prevent individuals from enrich themselves by harming the public. Committing climate arson so that you can get rich speculating on cryptocurrency is precisely the kind of externality that environmental regulations are designed to prevent
> Committing climate arson so that you can get rich speculating on cryptocurrency
That's such a hyperbolic and frankly disingenuous way of putting it.
Any human activity consumes energy to an extent. You are calling it "climate arson" because you personally don't like it, so it is a waste to you. What else should "society" ban because someone thinks it is not useful and harming the environment? Gaming PCs? Meat? Cars?
No, what's disingenuous is neglecting to consider how much energy is used by different activities. The average American's gaming, meat consuption, driving, and all other activities combined emit as much CO2 as only about a dozen Bitcoin transactions [0][1]. So yes, I'm going to go on considering cryptocurrency usage to be climate arson
[0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
NB: Gaming PCs consume a tiny fraction of the energy of crypto, meat (especially beef), or cars.
(I feel compelled to defend my lifestyle from the eco-chopping block.)
Much more energy gets wasted by a high monetary inflation currency like USD, which pushes the economy to create additional busywork churn in the name of "growth".
No where did I say I wanted to be king of the world. I think our democratically elected institutions can decide such things. My vote would be to do so.
I agree that democracy potentially means that things I like may be prohibited. I don’t see that as a good reason to throw out democracy.
You are referring to the US dollar correct?
Creating and moving cash also requires power and can be used for illegal transactions.
It’s almost like we created a system of rules for moving cash and made certain behaviours with it illegal due to some of the problems with this. Imagine that.
You might not realize it, but you are giving credibility to decentralized currencies with this comment.
IMF is doing that by making countries ban crypto currency industry for providing loan.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/05/05/argentinas-centra...
Given governments use “think of the children” rhetoric against decent cryptography in private communications, combined with the research demonstrating the presence of illegal material inside the Bitcoin blockchain[0], the only reason I’m not surprised cryptocurrency hasn’t been banned already is that legislators aren’t technologists.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code