Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain?
If anything, they're doing the media companies a service, free viral campaigns. Without pirated content, a lot of people would never hear or care about their movies, TV shows, music. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it anyway.
Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?
All for the risk of being accused of fraud, causing "massive losses", and prison time. I guess sticking it to the MAFIAA feels nice, but is it worth the risk?
A good deal of it is status, like being involved in the most prolific group etc. But also the way "The Scene" works is almost gamified. Groups battle each other to obtain pre-release material and then race each other to disseminate to the sites they affiliate with. If you are first you win the PRE and your releases is the only one accepted by the whole scene. It becomes addictive.
Secondly money is involved, less scrupulous sites run pay to leech servers where people pay for slots and some groups are donated hardware etc for access. Also there are connections to various forms of cyber crime from contacts you can make from being involved.
> Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?
The thing here seems to be ease of access. Adobe products were at one point more easily gotten in pirated fashion than legitimate. The same was even true for MS products.
Once both companies adopted new distribution models, the pirated software was no longer the easiest option. Additionally, while costly to some, the ease of upgrades and getting patches became easier by using the legitimate channel. This is important for professionals.
The media companies appear to recognize this at this point, but they fear losing control of the distribution model. They don’t want to cede that all to Netflix, but this seems like it might be a losing option for all but the biggest media companies (like Disney). It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, since most people are not going to want to purchase single media channels, and will generally want a single source like Netflix. Until this becomes simpler for consumers, pirating for some is the simplest means of getting access to the content.
Comparing Netflix to a single cable channel is disingenuous. I can't the only one who feels that Netflix is "too much" and that the last thing I need is even more content for more money.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with subscribing to multiple services. But by the same token, there is certainly a market segment that is just going to buy a single service.
For fame, for glory, to chase the adrenaline rush that comes with being the first in a race to release something everyone else is trying to do? To feel like you have reach over millions of people who will eventually download your release...
A few groups tie back to 'organised crime', in that they cut the releases back to DVDs for sale at markets for the less technologically literate. But I'd say by and large the people in 'the scene' are doing it for the love, whatever that love happens to be.
>> Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?
I pay Netflix in the country I live, but I can't find content in my native language, so, guess what? I get pirate movies. Similar reasoning applies to some old films: very hard to find online in any legal way or at a reasonable price.
I'd love to pay a fair price to get access to films, but the industry makes it very hard for me. So thank you pirates, you make my life easier.
Yes. I don't have problems with other languages, but it's for my daughter. I want to watch movies with her in my language so that she gets used to it. Audio is cheap, I don't know why they don't include all languages the movie was translated to.
Yep, the loss to these companies is not the price of the movie. It is not the tens of millions of dollars quoted. If you pirate a movie, the person buying it is rarely someone who would pay full price. I would be surprised if the actual loss was anywhere near the amount it cost to run the investigation.
Also, there really isn't a massive amount of sophistication when it comes to distribution. Most of the media business still feels stuck in the 90s, definitely changing but still "business as usual" (for example, the English Premier League...probably the most valuable sports league in the world, same distribution since inception in the early 90s) thinking whilst the sand is shifting beneath their feet (if you look at the late teen-early twenties demo, much of the media business is already irrelevant). But yeah: spend your time chasing down people for a few hundred thousand bucks, that will work.
A basic principle of economics is elasticity of demand, which means that people will buy more of something if it's cheaper and less of something if it's more expensive.
Piracy "loss" estimates from publishing cartels pretend that elasticity of demand does not exist and assume that anyone who would copy an intangible good at a price of $0 would pay whatever price the publishing cartel demanded if the $0 option was not available. While this may be true in the very narrow case of monopoly software products used by businesses in their line of trade, it's absolutely not true for commodity consumer goods.
Very, very few people who have collected a few thousand movies (etc), at a price of $0, would have anywhere as large a collection if they were forced to pay cartel prices for each title.
At the absolute best, the cartel belief that they are entitled to full profits from every copy made is in complete ignorance of several hundred years of economic theory. At worst, it's a lie.
Anti-piracy enforcement is not about profit. It's about being vindictive for its own sake.
Yeah, you are basically forced to pirate movies if you want it in good streaming quality.
Most of the 4K HDR movies on Netflix are just available as 1080p SDR even with a 4K subscription, to get 4K HDR Atmos quality streaming you gotta pirate them. It's so damn dumb.
Not against pirating in the least bit but you can’t say you have to pirate to get the best 4K it’s just easier and cheaper. Disregarding the not available in my region argument. The Blu-Ray is still available for purchase in most regions.
The people in the article were not ripping streaming services they were ripping unreleased DVDs and Blu-Rays.
There are many 4K rental options available but at $6.99 or so a pop means pirating is cheaper and easier once again. Cross platform sharing of rentals or digital purchases is crap, pirating is again easier.
It is also way easier to access and (often) faster...or so I am told. We are in 2020, and some guy in his mother's basement with a PHP site is able to provide better service than multi-billion dollar media companies...
...maybe if they didn't spend all their time suing people.
In fairness, the average user and use case is very different. Pirating is less instant gratification since you have to wait on the download. Pirates are also generally okay with having the only peer be someone uploading at 5KB/s. Trackers go down with relative frequency.
None of that would fly on a paid streaming site.
I have wondered why no streaming service uses or offers some sort of P2P. I would think it would be great for popular releases, and you could shift some of your bandwidth costs. It also helps get you around ISPs who want you to pay for interconnects.
Maybe they're just concerned about delivering it in a raw format? I would've expected they could put some DRM on it
Spotify started P2P, but moved away from it. The rest of what you're saying is hilariously inaccurate, you don't have to wait for downloads, if you want to pirate-streaming of 4K HDR Blu-Rays you just get Real-Debrid and TVZion for example.
>I would be surprised if the actual loss was anywhere near the amount it cost to run the investigation.
That is true of lots of crimes, but it's not reasonable to then conclude we should not prosecute those crimes. Prosecution does have a deterrent effect. See [1] for a good overview of the field.
I’d think from what they quoted, that they were speaking for the general case. I’d have made the same argument and I think that the whole MAFIAA is toxic and a stain.
I remember those. If anything I think they turned people on to piracy, not off, because the general sentiment upon seeing it was "...but I would totally download/duplicate one!"
Your sarcastic comment implies there is no pirate whose imprisonment would add value to society.
Some groups pirate for profit. Is that still ok in your view?
Some groups use the profits to fund terrorist and drug activity. Is that ok?
Some use it along with human smuggling, racketeering, loan-sharking, prostitution, contract killing, and more (see [1]). Are these ok?
So is it possible there exists a pirate whose jail sentence may make the world a better place?
( I know the pop hacker belief is this doesn't happen, but I've yet to meet a hacker that has reviewed the peer reviewed literature on it, so don't retort without checking empirical evidence. I'll post but one paper below).
The reason various mob like groups turn to piracy is that pirated products have value and have very often have high profit margins, so piracy becomes a very profitable business. A group willing to do this illegally is often willing to do other high-profit risky and illegal activity.
I wonder who produced that paper(i.e who sponsored it). How easy and convenient to link pirating to terrorism, don't you think? What's next? pirating and WMD?
>> A group willing to do this illegally is often willing to do other high-profit risky and illegal activity.
A law abiding citizen is just a docile citizen if he abides by wrong/unjust laws. If you were a jew in Nazi Germany a law abiding citizen would have given you in to the Gestapo while a "pirate" would have taken the risk to give you shelder.
A group willing to torrent Game of Thrones is not often willing to do terrorism, you poor little ....! They just want to watch a fucking movie and decide to torrent it because:
a) they don't have the money to buy it
b) they can't buy it because some stupid executives believe some people should watch it 20 years after it's released in x country.
c) they can't watch it on the device they want/when they want because of the excellent DRM laws that you praise and I assume you abide of(i.g their HDMI cable is not version 2.0a it's just 1.4b
d) they are humans
Before hunting "Game of Thrones" pirates can we please do something about all the big guys such GS [0] that steal billions from poor people, some of them unable to pay for that Game of Thrones movie they pirate? I mean something more than a handshake for returning a part of the money when they get caught.
If you want to stop crime you should invest in education and provide opportunities for a decent life.
Either way, jailing your neightbour for pirating movies will not make him a better neightbour. Most likely will turn him/her into a real criminal vengeful on the system/society.
Btw, good job with Aaron[1]! You've done the "right thing", right? So much justice that makes me sick to my stomach. All this to make the few wealthy and privileged wealthier and the lives of the poors more miserable!
When I read your comment your attitude remembered me of a quote from Cloud Atlas[2]: "There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well. "
But it's intellectually dishonest to equate a legal activity tied to breaking the law with illegal activity tied to breaking the law, especially when the illegal activity helps break further laws.
People don't go into taxis to make profits by breaking the law. If they did break the law while securing taxi profits, then that becomes prosecutable, and should be pursued.
People do pirate material because by breaking that law, they can obtain profits not possible without breaking the law.
They also screw over consumers by selling such products on Amazon and elsewhere, and many times when a consumer needs help, or a return, or thinks they have a warranty, the fake goods screw them over. Note nearly every product cloned with a software component is a copyright violation, most anything with a logo is a trademark violation, etc.
The OP implied that there is no benefit to ever jailing a pirate.
So instead of inaccurate metaphors, do you think there is ever a case to be made for jailing a pirate?
That's a silly question. Of course I think there are situations where a taxi driver should be jailed. For example, when they commit terrorism.
Being a taxi driver does not justify immoral acts. That would be absurd. Illegal acts, however, don't need to be justified. The fact homosexuality was once illegal should be proof enough that doing something illegal is not a sufficient condition for deserving punishment.
> They also screw over consumers by selling such products on Amazon and elsewhere, and many times when a consumer needs help, or a return, or thinks they have a warranty, the fake goods screw them over. Note nearly every product cloned with a software component is a copyright violation, most anything with a logo is a trademark violation, etc.
Trademark violations may also be called "piracy", but they have about as much to do with copyright violations as copyright violations have to do with theft.
>The fact homosexuality was once illegal should be proof enough that doing something illegal is not a sufficient condition for deserving punishment.
That there is an example of a thing is no argument that all things follow that pattern. So what if some past law was bad. That is not evidence a current one is also bad. By that simplistic reasoning, if I pointed out a law in the past was a good law, I could then conclude this particular one was good too. But that's just as ludicrous as going the other direction.
Edge cases, by definition, don't apply broadly.
And as far as the law goes, yes, something illegal does mean something deserves punishment, under the law. You and I and our grandmothers may not feel our flavor of "deserves" is the same as the legal one, but that is the benefit of having laws - we don't all get to impose our feelings on each situation.
And, if society someday thinks some law has outlived it's usefulness, then society can change that law.
That you personally don't think this particular case deserves punishment is irrelevant to whether or not these people are punished, just as someone who wants to punish them even more than the law allows will not get their way.
>but they have about as much to do with copyright violations
Ignoring that lots of items that are counterfeited are also copyright violations? Anything copying custom code is a copyright violation, and a massive amount of products now have some programmed component.
> as copyright violations have to do with theft.
Nowhere did I make such equivalencies. Please stop with the dramatic metaphors - they're not relevant to the discussion.
> That there is an example of a thing is no argument that all things follow that pattern.
Of course not. Nowhere did I argue that there are no good laws. Every law should be evaluated on its own merits.
> And as far as the law goes, yes, something illegal does mean something deserves punishment, under the law.
Under the law. The law is the opinion of the state. If something deserves punishment under the law, the state believes it deserves punishment. That doesn't mean it actually does.
> Ignoring that lots of items that are counterfeited are also copyright violations? Anything copying custom code is a copyright violation, and a massive amount of products now have some programmed component.
Then why did you bring trademarks into this? They're separate issues, even if they can occur at the same time.
> Nowhere did I make such equivalencies. Please stop with the dramatic metaphors - they're not relevant to the discussion.
Absolutely not. I'll continue to express my opinions and arguments the way I see fit.
>> Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain?
That's what I was wondering. Do they monetize the activity with ad revenue? Other than that I cant think of any motivation other than some kind of status seeking.
If anything, they're doing the media companies a service, free viral campaigns. Without pirated content, a lot of people would never hear or care about their movies, TV shows, music. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it anyway.
Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're making things accessible to most people, so many ex-pirates used to their products are buying them. Not so for the media companies. Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM?
All for the risk of being accused of fraud, causing "massive losses", and prison time. I guess sticking it to the MAFIAA feels nice, but is it worth the risk?