Pirate Bay co-founders lost

Can you imagine a day when the big hollywood studios are being consistently outdone by small bands of people making gripping movies and putting them online to stream or download for a small cost per user? Imagine how good the films would get, if they were awful they simply wouldn't be downloaded, if they were great then millions would stream them for maybe a pound a go. Many people who get films for free online do it because they consider cinema tickets over priced, they don't want to have to leave home to watch a movie, and if the film turns out to be awful they don't want to waste 15 quid on a ticket!

This is where copyright law is outdated, it currently hinders originality and squeezes out many good actors/actresses, directors and other people. This is also where the big studios are missing the point of the internet. They will eventually have to embrace it but they're being short sighted. If one big studio just took that small step and started providing their releases online at the same time as they released them to the cinema then they would no doubt see a massive increase in profits and others would follow.

Hollywood doesn't like trying new things though

Internet records to be stored for a year.

In a move that even the most nonchalant of privacy advocates is crying foul over, the UK has put into effect a European Union directive which mandates the archival of information regarding virtually all internet traffic for the next 12 months. The program formally went into effect Monday.

The data retention rules require the archival of all email traffic (the identities of the sender and receiver, but not the contents of the messages), records of VOIP telephone calls (traditional phone calls are already monitored), and information about every website visited by any computer user in the country. The rules are being pushed down "across the board to even the smallest company," as every ISP large or small will be required to collect and store the data. That data will then be accessible -- to fight "crime and terrorism," of course -- by "hundreds of public bodies" to investigate whatever crimes they see fit.

www.telegraph.co.uk...
forums.slipstreamproductions.net...
www.neowin.net...
www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk...

Anyone who downloads illegal software is now being monitored.

As usual it's another fascist EU directive and they are using terrorism as an excuse. Information is power and that is the main reason for this directive, so they can use this information to silence or imprison anyone who steps out of line.

Originally posted by Marek
reply to post by manbird12000

 

No more $200,000,000 movies. No "Terminator:Salvation", no "Transformers" etc. etc.

Films that cost $200,000,000 to produce can often gross into the billions... and that's without merchandising, DVD sales, rentals etc...

So we're talking about 1000% profits here - somewhere along the line, the consumer is getting screwed...

I don't know of a single film that hasn't made a profit purely due to people downloading it for free... All we are a seeing her is their profits being dented - and not really by all that much relative to the huge amounts that are still being made.

Does anyone suffer because of illegal downloads? NO. Do lots more people have improved enriched lives because they can access films, ebooks, audiobooks, music. YES.

So putting aside the law here - the fact is this is OBVIOUSLY a good thing, and attempts to reverse the trend are based purely on GREED.

Also - what happens in the not too distant future - I believe around 50 years in the UK - when all of these songs lose their copyright protection and move into the public domain? At that point there WILL be a legitimate free archive of 1,000,000s of movies, songs, books that can be downloaded at will - for free. With such choice, why would anyone bother to even go and see a new film when they can download something equally as good at home for free - every-night of the week - without even coming close to 'seeing it all'... The industry should adapt now or its stubbornness will eventually cost it big time...

This whole situation is complicated because it has several different things behind it.

First, copyright laws exist to protect the creativity of those who created the material (movie, music, book, drawing, etc.), so they can be the only ones allowed to copy their work.

But that is the original idea, today, many people do not own the copyright for their own creations because they sold the copyright to some company.

In those cases, the company is gambling on the popularity of the material produced or to be produced by the artist, so the artist is not going to get any money from the copies because he/she sold it to someone else.

That is why companies sue for copyright infringement, because the artists sold their rights to the company, so the company functions as the artist, so "stealing" from the companies is stealing from the artists, indirectly, because the artist look for the large companies because those are the ones that can pay more for their work.

Second, the pirated material has to have a source. If we can download pirated material it's just because someone really made an illegal copy (and those are the real pirates, that is why the download of copyrighted material is not illegal in Portugal, only the copying and distribution, as far as I know, I am not a lawyer), and in some cases (mostly with movies) there are evidences that point to sources inside the studios.

There was a case some years ago of a famous movie critic that was found as the source for several pirated copies of a new movie, and his excuse was that he did not knew that the people that asked him for copies of the movies the studios sent him wanted those copies to sell them and make money from it.

He may be innocent of the selling of the pirated movies, but in that case he was one of the pirates, because he was not authorised to make copies of the movies.

Something that I can not prove but that I find suspicious was the initial popularity of some groups (I think it was Matchbox 20 or some group like that), when they appeared the Internet was full of copies of their album, but at the time they were little known. Was this a trick from the record label? Maybe, this is a good system of making someone unknown known very fast, and it probably was cheaper than a massive media promotion.

Third, stopping sites like Pirate Bay is not going to help stop piracy (when I saw this news yesterday on Euronews they were running a poll where most people said that this will not "stem the tide of illegal downloading", and I agree, and one of the reasons is the what I said before, they were not doing the pirating, they were just (arguably) indirectly profiting from it.

Here in Portugal we have many small street markets, some running all year, some periodical, and on those markets people can buy pirated DVDs with "quality control", the sellers have portable DVD players to show that the movie is the real one (sometimes with subtitles) and that the quality is good.

And that brings us to the fourth problem, the digital medium.

While piracy has been a problem since the start (according to Wikipedia, the first copyright law is from 1710, because people had access to the press and were printing and selling books without giving any money to the writers), digital copies are perfect copies of the original, so the third, fourth, etc. generations copies are as good as the original, making it possible for a much larger market than the one that existed before.

But this is nothing new, digital formats exist for more than 20 years, so blaming the Internet is just half of the problem (the distribution), and it exists because of the first half was never really solved, people could (and can) make copies of CDs as many times as they want.

So, in conclusion, while copyright laws are a good thing (they protect the artists), all the market surrounding the artists may have somewhat corrupted the original idea (because the artist sell the rights to the big companies) and the appearance of digital formats without any original thought about copy protection and easy ways of distributing the digital copies (the Internet) have made the problem much bigger than it was.

Originally posted by Dutty_Rag
Also - what happens in the not too distant future - I believe around 50 years in the UK - when all of these songs lose their copyright protection and move into the public domain? At that point there WILL be a legitimate free archive of 1,000,000s of movies, songs, books that can be downloaded at will - for free. With such choice, why would anyone bother to even go and see a new film when they can download something equally as good at home for free - every-night of the week - without even coming close to 'seeing it all'... The industry should adapt now or its stubbornness will eventually cost it big time...

You can do that today, but I don't think most people prefer Méliès' "Le voyage dans la Lune" to "Independence day", and I do not see it happen in the future.

PS: the Internet Archive has several copyright free movies, books and audio files, for those that are interested in that.

Originally posted by kindred
Anyone who downloads illegal software is now being monitored.

You shouldn't download illegal software anyway as it's very often laced with trojans, also many software programs are made by small companies and should be supported by buying their products. However i should point out that torrents aren't really traceable by this system you speak of. Torrents are direct connections between computers with a central controlling server. They are not websites.

The government would have to track and inspect each individual packet coming from your computer to know what you are downloading. They cannot simply say that you connected to a peer and therefore you downloaded something illegal as you could have connected to that peer for anything. Packets are sent out when you do anything, and they would need to sample hundreds of packets and put them all together to understand what you downloaded. That would have to be done on a user by user basis.

Furthermore torrents themselves are not illegal so visiting TPB's website could not possibly stand up in court as an illegal act. On youtube a user made a series about evolution and offered it free to everyone on the torrent network, Blizzard who make the popular World of Warcraft game use torrents to send out patches, a university used torrents to distribute updates to all of it's computers at once. The list of legal torrent uses is endless so simply visiting a torrent website cannot be seen as a crime and is therefore nothing to worry about.

The tracking of all this data however is deeply worrying. It seems that day by day we're being assumed guilty and need to prove our innocence instead of the other way around.

reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984


Yes, the only sure way of knowing who is making illegal torrent downloads is being part of the downloaders and see who the other users are, making them part of the problem.

Originally posted by ArMaP
reply to post by ImaginaryReality1984

 

Yes, the only sure way of knowing who is making illegal torrent downloads is being part of the downloaders and see who the other users are, making them part of the problem.

Yep very correct, my greatest annoyance however is that whenever someone hears the word torrent they immediately assume it's illegal. Even politicians have thought this. Torrents are currently the greatest way to share media as they are very fast, user friendly and cheap. Many great things have been shared over torrents that weren't copyrighted. About a year back myself and some friends put together a database of lock mechanisms, we illustrated it all in paint programs and shared it via torrents. Not something most people would be interested in but quite a few people downloaded it.

It was in no way illegal and yet torrents are still assumed to be illegal by their very existence.

Originally posted by RogerT

If I were running a movie studio, I'd offer super high speed downloads of the movie for a dollar a pop, or less, maybe I'd price it differently depending on the GDP of the resident's country. If you work out how much the studio makes from the box office take, I'll bet they don't get that much more currently, from the $6-$10 ticket fee.

That way, I could release my movie instantaneously to a market of several billion people, with virtually zero distribution costs, and almost no advertising.

At $1 for a download, how many more 'bums on seats' do you think they'd get?

I thought you said all "information" should be free?

Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly with your post (aside from the nonsensical ramble about ego). I have no problem with internet distribution and torrents.

So, now you have your Movie Studio and first film available how are you going to ensure the first person to download it doesn't just re-upload it to TPB or similar?



[edit on 19-4-2009 by Marek]

reply to post by Marek


Wow, did you really just ask a question I've spent 2 pages answering, immediately preceeded by some blatant misquote/misrepresentation of a previous post?

Can't see much point in continuing responding to your bitterness.

It's a bit like when you reveal the cure for someone's life threatening illness and they ignore or invalidate your contribution because "if it were that simple, everyone would know about it."

Originally posted by Marek
reply to post by RogerT

 

What a load of rubbish.

Not one coherent thought amongst them.

It's so freaking obvious that if you steal from someone they will have less. There is no justification.

you are not alone
the worst part about this is that i'm still reading this thread.

Originally posted by RogerT


If I were running a movie studio, I'd offer super high speed downloads of the movie for a dollar a pop, or less, maybe I'd price it differently depending on the GDP of the resident's country.

[edit on 19/4/09 by RogerT]

great thats a good idea, but you would also fail, because there would still be "free" copies all over the web. and like you said, who would pay a whole dollar when they can get it for free. I know i would vote with my wallet.

Originally posted by Marek
So, now you have your Movie Studio and first film available how are you going to ensure the first person to download it doesn't just re-upload it to TPB or similar?

That is what many people have been saying, you do not upload the movie to Pirate Bay or any of those sites, it does not work like that.

The person that had bought the movie would make a copy available on his/her computer and would publish the torrent file, and sites like Pirate Bay have only copies or links to these files, files that do not break any copyright laws, they only point to where the original file is hosted (the seed) and have information about the blocks in which the file was divided (each of these blocks can come from a different source).

But you are right in your assessment of the situation, there is nothing to stop people to distribute copies of the paid for movie, and they can even ask for money (if they get it is another story).

reply to post by conwaylemmon


Wow, another question I already answered!

I wonder how many other people will read this thread and completely miss the point.

Originally posted by RogerT
reply to post by Marek

 

Wow, did you really just ask a question I've spent 2 pages answering, immediately preceeded by some blatant misquote/misrepresentation of a previous post?

Can't see much point in continuing responding to your bitterness.

You've spent two pages attempting to justify theft. With no good argument I may add.

It was a civil question, along with several others I have asked that gets no sensible answer. Do you want to try and answer any of them or just rudely attack me as you have in every other response?

And what makes you think I'm bitter? I'm just thankful I still have a job where many of my friends and co-workers working in the entertainment industry do not. Or do they deserve their fate being part of the "evil corporate machine"?

reply to post by RogerT


i didn't miss any of your points, but when they contradict each other, in my head they cancel each other out.
there are obviously differences of opinion on this subject. I respect your opinion. i don't agree. i will do what i'm going to do, and so will you. but i'm done. good luck to you.

The revolution internet brings is not entertainment - it is knowledge. You can share THOUSANDS of books, all types of information. You don't evern need to download torrents - there are legal sources of information, but torrents help a lot in sharing.

I believe that torrent sites should completely ignore copyrighted material - and make it a matter of bad taste to buy ANYTHING COPYRIGHTED. Consumerism should stop forever.

Have your own food, power. Avoid using system resources absolutely.

Every human SHOULD BE INDEPENDENT.

Originally posted by greshnikEvery human SHOULD BE INDEPENDENT.

Unfortunately, we cannot live just but eating ourselves, so we need to get food somewhere.

For people that live in large cities it is difficult to grow their own food, so they have to trade it for something.

Some people make music or other kind of art, and so that is what they sell.

If other people get their work for free, less people are interested in paying for it.

The less people wanting to pay for it, the less chances the artist has of getting food.

So, by copying copyrighted material we are reducing the probability of the artists of selling their work at a good price, so we are limiting their freedom.

reply to post by ArMaP


You totally have not understood what I said. Any "art" that you have to pay for is not art. If you live in a city and are totally dependent - move out.

Interest rate is illegal. Every person that tries to use interest rate should be in jail.

reply to post by greshnik


OK, does it mean that an artist must grow his/her own food, make his/her own house, furniture, clothes, medicines, tools, materials, etc.?

[edit on 19/4/2009 by ArMaP]