It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society.
So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.
A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media
The freeloaders also include the copyright holders. Copyright was originally 28 years, but now it's life of the author plus 70 years, which from a consumer's perspective is effectively indefinite.
The purpose of copyright was to secure a limited monopoly so creators can profit off their works and be incentivized to create more. Nowadays, the copyright is no longer limited, and the copyright holders are most often not those creating the works. The social contract with copyright has long since been broken.
I think from an encouraging-the-arts perspective, the worst thing about the current crazy-long duration is that artists aren't free to react to and build on the contemporary influences of their youths. We're missing out on so much good stuff because artists can't go whichever way the mood strikes when they play with elements of works of the living artists that they enjoyed and admired and followed as they were developing. Copyright's so long that they can't too-closely engage with anyone's work unless the artist was dead before they were born. There's a latent, invisible whirlwind of creativity in the heads of writers, directors, et c., that they can't do anything with, and that we'll never get to see realized.
I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.
Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that.
Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes.
(* Check out the official guide on what services have the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...)
IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way.
But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
>Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media,
Beg pardon, but society doesn't suffer from freeloaders of media. The flame of inspiration is passed from each, never diminishing it's brightness. Media though wants to control it's propagation into society such that it remains monetizable in spite of the fact we have a medium that sets cost of distribution/reproduction to 0.
The problem, it seems to me, is there's an awful lot of publishers/studios etc... who haven't/don't want to imagine a solution in which their control over media is diminished.
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
I'm curious about your moral justifications. Do you ever compensate creators for their work? Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort? Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
> I'm curious about your moral justifications.
I'm a atheist and moral nihilist. "morals" literally don't play a role in that decision for me.
> Do you ever compensate creators for their work? > Do you only pirate recordings but still pay for original work like live performance?
Yeah, all the time. I go to the cinema as often as i can find time, I go to concerts whenever i can, i tend to buy games on steam all the time, because i'm a linux gamer and pirating games is really annoying to do. I even have a Spotify premium account (though that will go away soon due to pricing increases). It's genuinely a matter of pricing and convenience.
I have the technical capabilities to enjoy whatever media I want whenever I want on devices without limitations for free. If some service believes that they can make me pay to make it less convenient for me than my private tracker does, they are mistaken. If a service offers value to me at a reasonable price and without massive restrictions, I'm open to pay for the convenience and Premium experience.
> Do you believe anyone deserves to be compensated for their creative effort?
Sure, I even paid on kickstarter for movies to be made and tipped smaller movie creators that released movies as torrents because I enjoyed them so much. Just recently I watched "Tim Travers and the Time Travel Paradox" and was trying to find a way to pay for it because I liked it so much but it was unavailable in Europe. But this is mostly because I want that creator to make more content from that.
But let's be real, once a digital work has been created, the cost to make a copy is practically 0 or very close to it. Just this week I seeded roughly 800GB on a residential line. Cost me effectively nothing. That's the reality, any law or service that tries to artificially fight that reality is unjust and should be ignored. Let me give you an example to proof that this true. Here's a digital picture of the Mona Lisa[0]. Acquiring that cost literally nothing. Ordering a high quality poster print of it and getting a frame for it that mimics the original frame is propably less than 50 bucks these days. The copy is worth almost nothing, yet the original is invaluable. Digital works are just the extreme version of this, copies of it are perfect yet worthless.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mo...
Then we agree. Piracy is a service issue.
There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
> Then we agree. Piracy is a service issue.
I'd say piracy is best fought with better service but draconian laws and enforcement would also work.
> There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.
The fact that copying data is so easy means that any law trying to criminalize it is unjust by nature, that's my most important argument.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract.
Yeah, why don't FM radio listeners or OTA programming watchers pay up!!!!
FM broadcasters only became liable for royalties to artists this decade. Big bunch of freeloaders; but not as bad as the listeners. :p
> FM broadcasters only became liable for royalties to artists this decade. Big bunch of freeloaders; but not as bad as the listeners.
Back in the 70s and 80s, I would look for the "promotional copy" of music to buy. These were specially pressed records that were free of bubbles and other defects sold to consumers. They were given away to radio DJs in the hopes that they'd get played on the radio and listeners would then buy the records.
This was viewed as an advertising expense by the record producers, not a ripoff.
Piracy is a service problem.
Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.
The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
It is complicated. Ultimately a 100-year-long government sanctioned monopoly on certain intangible things is unsustainable and piracy has long been the pressure-relief valve on it.
I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy.
edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.
And yet, in Germany like elsewhere, piracy spiked during COVID's lockdowns. Some places say greater than 180%. Showing that their enforcement alone, was not an effective tool.
Yeah, that was more than a decade after the fines were noticeably capped and fees limited to < 1k€. I remember during my school years when there were lawyers giving talks to us and classmates getting fines in the 10s of thousands of euros.
The perfect solution to all crimes, totally out of scale punishments for every infraction! If we just charge people 10,000 euros per km/h over the speed limit, we could do away with speeding! Stop crime forever by bankrupting everyone who does anything bad!
[flagged]
Why are you, in one post, talking about how you will never stop pirating, while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236861
> IlikeKitties 2 hours ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
> while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action? I'm not calling for that, you are misreading my post. Because irony hardly translates to the internet let me spell it out for you:
* Piracy is an option because the punishment for it is low and enforcement not very effective. Even in Germany where law firms can punish you for it without government involvement (i shit you not private companies send you fines you HAVE to pay) using a VPN is enough to pirate as much as you want
* Piracy could be curbed by massively out of scale punishments and total constant scanning and enforcement of the internet. I've seen the scared people here in Germany talking about it to this day. Fear causes compliance. To argue otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.
* I'm making fun of the fact that copyright owners would still call for stronger punishment until executions are on the table North Korean style ("Only then will copyright holders be safe again.")
My personal opinion is that piracy is the logical result of the fact that once a digital work has been created the cost to copy it is practically zero. Laws that try to deny that reality are by their nature unjust and should be abolished. To truly enforce them, even the death penalty isn't enough (see NK).
Ah I see! Yeah, sorry about that, I completely missed the irony