You! Pirate! Stop pirating, or we shall admonish you politely. Repeatedly, if necessary A UK government-backed scheme to curtail the widespread use of pirated copies of music, television and film has officially been launched and - as expected - comes without any harsh penalties being threatened against persistent offenders. Instead, millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has been chucked at an education programme …
So how exactly did these copyright holders get hold of £3.5M of taxpayer money then? Copying intellectual property (neither piracy nor theft, by the way) is a civil matter, and should be paid for by the injured party and maybe the defendant if the rights-holders win in court.
As ways of attempting to stuff the genie back in the bottle go, I suppose education isn't he worst thing that could happen; but it does seem pretty pointless. And expensive.
I believe the copyright holders have paid for this service.
They donate to the political party, political party pays them back with tax-payers money.
Indirect funding of political parties using tax payers money.
However, since I don't have the resources available to, say, GCHQ or NSA, I don't have any proof so this is purely a hypothetical scenario you understand.
An SSH connection? A VPN?
Or just the common or garden variety of unobscured Torrent traffic. It also implies they're guessing as to what's happening content-wise on your connection, too, though presumably they're not allowed to packet-inspect to see if you're downloading Ubuntu or Transformers (so you can delete it without watching it, natch)
A feature of some torrent trackers is that they include not only the actual people sharing a file, but also a random selection of pseudorandomly chosen IPs as well. As all these random IPs ever see is torrent clients politely asking if they'd like to share, then ignoring them when nothing happens, the actual IPs thus used don't know what's happening.
If they do get warnings sent, then we can merely assume that this is down to reading info off torrent sites. The probable backlash from this ought to be educational.
Wrong copyright violation is theft, as a large number of judges and courts. But here is a recent case where a person convicted under anti-piracy laws was deported because they were convicted of a “theft offense (including receipt of stolen property)". The appeals court ruled "It is not unreasonable to deem piracy closely related to both counterfeiting and theft. See, e.g., World Copyright Law 2.29 (3d ed. 2007) (identifying piracy as a form of theft)"
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7434762040949534857
The case you quote is in the US.
In the UK it is not theft to download copyrighted material, it is a civil offence.
It can become a criminal one if you upload though so don't use torrents, use newsgroups and your legal.
"The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended by the Copyright and Trade Marks (Offences and Enforcement) Act 2002, currently protects copyrighted materials. People who download copyrighted recordings without permission face civil actions. Downloading can also constitute a criminal offence if the downloader distributes the material."
Firstly bullshit copy IP is a crime. From the UK government who know about the laws they pass
[
Unauthorised use of someone's IP can be classed as IP crime and may lead to prosecution.
]
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipenforce/ipenforce-crime.htm
[Deliberate infringement of copyright on a commercial scale may be a criminal offence.]
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-manage/c-useenforce/c-infringe.htm
Being closely related to is not the same as being the same.
The Theft Act 1968 s1(1) makes it clear that, in order to constitute theft, an act needs to deprive the rightful owner of the thing stolen. In the case of copyrighted material, this is not the case.
You are wrong - copyright violations do not constitute theft as defined in English law.
Firstly the Theft Act 1968 s1(1) is NOT teh be all and end all of the Theft act it is simply s1(1). Secondly you have misquoted it as it also says 'with the intention of permanently depriving '. Thirdly you need to account for "taking a motor vehicle without the owners consent - TWOC" is covered by section 12 of Theft Act 1968, even though there might be no intent to "permanently deprive"
Copyright infringement is an act of dishonesty that in the past was carried out by Publishers, people that weren't usually associated with the criminal classes. However, the law has no problems seeing it as theft when it wants to sanction the hoi polloi rather than the MacMillians and the HarperCollins of the world.
These IP mongers should just frig off! Shame on those complicit ISPs for what could become a slippery slope and greater losses for them. 'Education' (propaganda) won't work, only cost and convenience will. The internet is built on routing around damage and scarcity is damage, duh!
Copyright == legal fiction, anti-property *, corrupt privilege from government; the same applies to all types of the Intellectual Property, all retarded waste of taxes legal fictions.
* All IP is anti-property rights because it attempts to stop people using /their property/ in a ways which don't hurt anyone; that is an unlawful contradiction.
Piracy == violent theft of physical property at sea, so associating it with disrespect for bogus Intellectual Property concepts is perverse fraud and should be regarded as libel and/or slander.
The estates, corporations, states and legal IP trolls have got to be delusional if they can't accept that Intellectual Property is now seen as an "Emperors New Clothes"; there is now a growing intellectual base which is demolishing all the sophist arguments for IP and demonstrating how retarded, wasteful and pointless it is.
US courts only have jurisdiction in the US, and even then only for limited legal or law jurisdiction, so the link is garbage for a declining world-power.
"Piracy" has been used to mean "unauthorised use or reproduction of another's work" for approximately 200 years now. Check out what Charles Dickens had to say on the subject.
Your complaint makes considerably less sense than claiming that you're abusing the term "troll", which is really a mythological spirit that lives under a bridge/in a cave. At least someone who argues that - would have had a case, within living memory.
You could use the Old English word "sæsceaða" instead. I gather (from t'internet) it means "one who takes another's work without permission", and was used pre 1300ad before Latin came in. So the concept of it being wrong to take another's work is a very old one.
Presumably, the use of "piracy" in this context is from "pirate radio station", many of which were on ships in international waters.
Of course having pinched sæsceaða for the internet, I may just have committed sæsceaða...
"These IP mongers should just frig off!"
I just wanted to repeat that, so I can bathe in your erudite phrasing. A new Byron was born 15 years ago, it seems.
If it costs £100,000 to create a good work of literature, art, music, etc the the creator needs to recoup that expense or they won't do it again. That means if it is charged at £10 then you need 10,000 people to pay that amount. If 5,000 do and 50,000 receive it for free, the person doing the creating won't do it any more. In time, you'll just get things that cost less and less to produce. While some of those might still be good, you'll have lost a lot of artists. So you'll be able to really cheaply listen to a bunch of stuff that has a lower average quality. And those who are willing to pay £10 for the good stuff won't be able to, because the artist couldn't make a living.
Provide me with a single portal (a la Netflix), where I can get *all* my video, audio, film, TV show, etc media, for one reasonable monthly rate (e.g.: $20), and I will abandon The Pirate Bay.
Otherwise, consider *why* I'm using Pirate Bay for my media needs. Hint: it isn't price, it's availability.
I have a paid up subscription to Netflix. While the UK offering is a little pathetic compared to the cheaper and vastly more comprehensive US offering, it is nice to watch things on demand for a reasonable fee and know the content creators are compensated.
On a completely different matter, I'd whole heartedly recommend using a free service like "hola" to view the the BBC News service website as if you were in the US. It's fascinating to see how the home page differs in stories because it believes you're in a different geographical location.
As much as I normally would love to grumble about Sky http://www.nowtv.com/, is pretty impressive (if all you really want is Sky Atlantic, for whatever HBO stuff is knocking about) for a very reasonable fiver a month.
Pretty much the the only thing I'd want from Sky - but without having to join, and costing less that it would if I had.
For me it's a single portal, offering brand new content, as well as an archive of previous stuff (music, film and TV shows), including old and obscure, possibly never released on DVD stuff (cartoons etc), with the ability to take an offline copy.
At the moment, torrents offer basically this for free so I guess I'd pay maybe £5 - £10 a month for it. Maybe they could have an ad supported version too. As you say though - it's about availability, not price.
I can understand people wanting to view/listen to content that hasn't been made available by the relevant author/distributor/copyright owner, but I don't agree with this entitlement mentality that seems to say "I demand this content, and if you're not prepared to sell it to me at the price I'm willing to pay then I'm just going to take it anyway". Sometimes you just can't have what you want.
Making content is a costly commercial enterprise, and the content creators have the right to determine and control how they recoup their costs, just like any other manufacturer.
I sense downvotes coming...
Clearly society values creative works, hence the urge for some people to obtain them through whatever channel they choose, illicit or otherwise. But as Bunbury pointed out above, if the professional creators are not adequately compensated for creating then they will stop doing it, and then only those who dabble will be left to produce inferior stuff just for the 'fun' of producing it. That's a race to the bottom, and everyone loses in the end.
As I see it, the purpose of copyright law should be to allow a creator to be able to claim enough reward for creating so that (s)he will go on to produce more works for everyone's benefit and enjoyment.
I think the 'lifetime plus <n> years' thing is unreasonably greedy and provides a kind of self-justification for people who rip stuff off - but I also think the people who insist that all copyright should simply be ignored are just as greedy, wanting to obtain for nothing the results of someone else's efforts.
Copyright is indeed a kind of state-granted monopoly, but if we as a society want to enjoy creative works, how else can we ensure that it's worth the creators' while to spend their time and money producing these things for us?
Making content is a costly commercial enterprise, and the content creators have the right to determine and control how they recoup their costs, just like any other manufacturer.
But once the content has been created, artificially limiting sales to particular regions would result in lower revenue.
But once the content has been created, artificially limiting sales to particular regions would result in lower revenue.
Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't - I'd be surprised if the businesses involved were not maximising their revenue over the longer term. Maybe they see things from a different perspective from the consumer.
Whatever their reasons, if they own the copyright then it's up to them to market it as they see fit. It is not anyone else's right to distribute or take copies for free, no matter how frustrating it may be that it's unavailable to them through legitimate channels.
"But I really, really, really want it!" isn't a valid excuse to take something that isn't on offer to you.
I hope they are going to be able to distinguish between legit torrent files.... that lastest Centos is quite heavy.... not that I'm hugely worried as only the NSA/GCHQ (and I assume the Chinese) (and the Tooting Revolutionary Front) (and People's Front of Judea) are able to read my encrypted stream and they don't seem that interested as long as I don't put 'Let's bomb USA/Peking/Chicken Cottage/Judea" in my code)
> the nagging system will only be used to advise account holders that unlawful file-sharing may be taking place on their network connection
Byline coming to an ISP near you in 2015: Following no apparent drop in file sharing statistics in the UK, the CCUK awareness campaign will be upping its efforts this year and its warning emails will now include a link to purchase a copy of the illegally downloaded content.
And a year after that: Following no apparent increase in revenue from its online or brick'n'mortar storefronts from links posted to subscribers thought to be downloading copyrighted material illegally, CCUK has stepped up its warnings with a footnote that the crime of piracy is punishable by lifetime imprisonment.
And finally: Owing to continual rampant piracy, the latest iteration of the CCUK Piracy Dis-Incentive Scheme will automatically deduct either the retail value of the illegal download, or £0.01 per MB, whichever is higher, from the balance of the account holder. If the subscriber does not have the requisite funds and are unable to complete the transaction, they will be prosecuted for shoplifting.
Surely there's no way that ISP's would ever allow copyright holders to damage their customers ability to use the internet otherwise there wouldn't be a lot of customers left and as Pirate bay has shown, it's useless to try and block sites individually as they will just pop up somewhere else.
If only these companies would put the money they spent on chasing down piracy into developing something people would be happy to pay for, by actually making their content easily available for everyone and thinking of their market on a global scale rather than regional ones.
Obviously they have something that people want, they just need to put their minds to finding a way to sell it to them!
I say this as someone who has NEVER downloaded music or movies illegally.
Evidently it's still more financially attractive not to do that, despite their whinging about how they're only able to afford the one Bentley this year...
Proof, in of itself, that they're not skint else you can bet there'd be an epic digital dissemination system in place already if it were worth five dollah.
If Destiny PS4 preorders are running at nearly 1/2 million (maybe just USA alone - http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/) and say half those people (conservative) downloaded beta last weekend but shared one code with a pal then that's 500,000 x 13GB downloads (about 6.5 PB off the top of my head). If a gaming co can handle that - and there was very little outage in EU Beta here - then the MAFIAA have no excuse.
> Surely there's no way that ISP's would ever allow copyright holders to damage their customers ability to use the internet
In an ideal world, yes. But these "big three"...
> BT, Virgin Media and BSkyB
...are all content providers, selling/renting copyrighted material to their subscribers and that generates a conflict of interest where it actually might be in their interests to hamper their customers' internet connections to make their own products appear better, at least for the forms of media that they do provide themselves.
Case in point - as a BeThere refugee that was moved to sky, as soon as the transition happened YouTube went down the toilet and I was told I was going to be charged an extra £5 a month for not having sky TV. My ADSL still worked at its allocated bandwidth (so network capacity was obviously still there) and my DNS setup hadn't changed, so it's not out of the realms of possibility for sky to be intentionally sabotaging competing and/or high bandwidth applications for the sake of more money. And if one is to put ones cynical hat on, it's not out of the realms of possibility to think this might become more of a problem as time progresses.
Likewise, I do wish there was a nice, easy way to purchase stuff, but there's plenty of things that never get a release (lots of BBC documentaries for example), lots of stuff that's out of print or otherwise unavailable (tried for ages to find DVD's of McKellen's "Richard III" and BBC's "The Great War" and a bunch of other stuff... all either impossible to buy or £100's for a might-be-legit copy).
But that's not going to change, so persuasion it is. Until it turns into intimidation at least.
"I say this as someone who has NEVER downloaded music or movies illegally.
Why, because you're a Goody Two-Shoes or the stuff you want is always available wherever and whenever you want it?
There's little doubt there's a major problem in sourcing much of the content (for whatever reason), thus many resort to piracy out of desperation. Until content providers stop this 'supply' nonsense there'll be little incentive for the 'pirates' to change.
BTW, I never download movies, I very rarely watch them, even on free-to-air TV.
As KjetilS correctly says "They could perhaps try to give customers what the want." and there's precious little that I wish to see.
"..its warning emails will now include a link to purchase a copy of the illegally downloaded content."
This could be handy. So if I download a bit of Game of Thrones, will the link let me buy a legal DVD/Blu-ray now-ish? Like not having to wait until Feb 2015?
They could perhaps try to give customers what the want.
No, I don't mean that the media industries have to give it all away, but after Spotify was launched in the nordics, music piracy dropped to almost zero, since the legal alternative was easier than pirating.
This seems to be the experience if people try to go the legal route with movies and TV shows.
I pay for both music and movie library access.
The music library is more extensive and consistent than the movie library - hence I still use other mechanisms to access video content which isn't available on the subscription model.
If the video library was as good as the music library (in terms of depth and, more importantly, stability of content*).
* As in not have things that disappear from the library - just put them in there and keep them available.
There you have it. With storage so incredibly cheap these days (I remember when it cost several thousand for a 10Mb Winchester HDD about the size of a domestic washing machine - back when the Internet was all fields), there's no reason not to have *everything* stored and available to subscribers.
Instead we have the latest 'teeny sensation', this year's X Factor winners, a bunch of wrinkled old rock dinosaurs who might have been relevant 40 years ago, the usual mass market tosh.
I you're looking for something less than commercial, anything that wasn't in the Hot 100 Chart, experimental, dangerous (you remember - the stuff the record companies used to release back in the days of Manticore, Island and Virgin - then you won't find much of it in a music store.
The new, exciting, but quite possible commercially failing music that record companies used to seek out in the late 60s/early 70s (admittedly because record execs were mainly old and out of touch and had no idea what 'the kids' would be listening to next) are no longer an expensive option. hell, most of these guys absorb their own production costs - all Sony BMG has to do is store the audio file somewhere.
Some of it's very very good, some very very bad. Some of it is too strange to easily form an opinion of. But I always thought that the major selling point of online music was to be presented with things you wouldn't normally hear at your local HMV (if anyone still has a local HMV).
In the old days, you had to go digging around to find unusual or different music. Some people did, and new genres arose. But to go hunting for something you need to know it exists, and as long as online music stores continue to offer just more of what sold well last week, new music will continue to be the province of diehard P2P music fans, asking each other in the forums 'Hey, did you hear this? See what you think'.
Sorry, meandered a bit. If there's a point in there I'd like to claim it.
Correct.
I'm trying to work out whose fault this is. Is it the broadcasters, who for arcane reasons of their own, don't want to put it out within a day or so of its first appearance elsewhere?
Or is it the publishers, who want to stagger its release in different markets so that ... I dunno, they can tie in marketing events or something? Dang, if only there were some way of marketing a show in many different markets at once!
Seriously, does anyone know why we have to put up with this nonsense?
It seems to me it's difficult to get an accurate handle on what's actually being copied/pirated. From years of experience, we know it's completely nonsensical to take the copyright holder's figures as being even vaguely accurate, so exaggerated they generally are.
With reasonable percentages known for each type/classification (movies, audio, programs etc.) then the problem could be tackled logically instead of all the noisy rhetoric and ballyhoo that now surrounds the copyright problem. From having accurate figures it might be possible to reform copyright law sensibly.
For instance, does the 70-year copyright expiry rule actually make any sense? Having a royalty income for each classification versus percentage for each year from year one to 70 might show that for some classifications the rules are nonsense. Such figures also might show that copyright laws for say movies should perhaps be different to say photographs or books (seems to me much piracy has to to with fads/popularity and, as such, most piracy occurs within a few years of a works' release).
Personally, I believe true copyright reform is long overdue, especially in the case of orphan works or where copyright is continually renewed by farcically small changes to works just to keep them in copyright longer. Copyright holders object to orphan works being available (even on a private-use/non-commercial basis because the market is bigger and thus new works experience more competition). This, I believe, makes little sense unless one is trying to over protect an already existing monopoly (which is what copyright actually is).
The other scam of extending copyright by tiny changes to works is just as morally bankrupt. We see such practices manifest in various ways such as publishers making minor changes to the pagination or adding a new preface to xyz edition etc. just to extend copyright. Such practices should be outlawed.
However, until we've an accurate statistical picture of piracy together with the extent of the many abuses perpetrated by copyright holders, ordinary consumers will be held to ransom by both sides (and we'll continue to end up suffering stupid short-term solutions a la this proposal).
This is a very interesting question. A cursory trawl of my memory banks suggests that it's not one where the answer has been clearly enunciated. Which immediately fires up the suspicion that there's a little bit of media massaging going on here. I bet the answer to the question not only doesn't back up the assertions of the media lobby, but might actually dispel it.
Speaking (AC natch) for myself, the majority of my torrenting (actually NZBs are far better, and have less chance of leaking your details to a honeypot tracker) involves content I could have accessed, but for some reason didn't. A case in hand being "Edge of Darkness" currently being shown on BBC4, but - for reasons I can't fathom[1]) unavailable on iPlayer. I missed the first one, so it was downloaded so I can continue to enjoy the rest of the series.
In fact a quick trawl of my media library shows that there is very little content that I have avoided paying for (e.g. blockbuster films). It's mainly content I missed at the time, for whatever reason. Or content I didn't want to wait for (e.g. "Veep").
[1]Actually I can ... the programme info page suggests you buy from Apple or Amazon. Which I would happily do, when the BBC instigate a mechanism to allow licensepayers to receive the benefit of them flogging shows commercially.
"...It's mainly content I missed at the time, for whatever reason.
Right, such pirating would never bring in revenue for the copyright holder anyway, piracy often occurs just because it can be done. It's what I call the 'Photoshop issue': from observations many--probably most--users of pirate copies of Photoshop use it because they have had access to a pirate copy, not because they really need it (and thus would never buy it if not available as a pirate copy). For these users, Gimp or even something less exotic would have sufficed in most instances.
Most of us are guilty of this behaviour even if we're not conscious of it--myself included. For instance, if I record something off the TV for time-shifting reasons and then don't erase it immediately thereafter then this is technically piracy. In my case, stuff can hang around on the PVR or TV set HD until it's full then it's deleted but I'd never buy it--well anyway at least not 99.9% of it!
Unfortunately, the fudged statistics include such examples (thus stats are inflated and misleading). It just reinforces my view that copyright law is well overdue for reform (but don't hold your breath--as we've seen, international treaties aren't reformed quickly (and they usually favour those who originally demand them)).
I pay for an everything-but-the-porn SKY subscription and we have 2HD boxes, an SD box, internet and calls, coming to around 150 pcm.
Despite being a massive TB fan, I missed Season 7 Episode 1, was busy dealing with a family bereavement. So I went to On Demand. Every single episode ever is there, except this one. There doesn't seem to be any way of buying just that one episode. Was it terrible of me to get it from Pirate Bay?
"Was it terrible of me to get it from Pirate Bay?"
Yes it was, and your children will be forced to sniff the nether regions of Satan unto the seventh generation as punishment for your sin.
Or the Chairman of Sony BMG should Satan not be available.
I'm reminded of the Good Old Days(patent pending) when, if you happened to be out for Space Force, or Emergency Ward 10, or the Moon Landings, that was it. No video recorder to preserve it, no +2 to give you another chance to miss it later on, in many cases, no expectation of a repeat broadcast, ever.
On Demand viewing and listening is something relatively new, but something we got used to very quickly. It slipped in quietly and established itself in most of our lives, making it mind numbingly obvious, to al but the content owners, that it's how we want it.
So if the Beeb, or Sony or 20th Century Farts, or anybody else tells people "I'm sorry, you can't have this because you're in the wrong region, or we can't get your local broadcaster to pay over the odds for a copy, or we simply don't believe that making it availabe would be profitable', then they shouldn't be surprised that people go elsewhere to get it.
Hell, if they bunged all of their content on a big(gish) server and charged people a tenner a month to access anything they wanted, you'd see copyright infringement drop dramatically. And the only thing stopping them from doing so is that they used to make obscene amounts of money and are in denial over the fact that the world no longer works that way.
No argument that copyright could do with some looking at, now the Internet is the main method of publication (legal or otherwise).
However, I wonder whether trying to ascertain what is probably unknowable (accurately, at least) is the best starting point? It's probably only going to delay doing something productive. There is piracy - as some have put on this topic, almost piracy from exasperation, rather than from malice - is that not enough to go forward with the real issues?
I wonder whether the copyright issue has been clouded by the pro-lobby insisting that it was an issue for creators? Who will pay the piper?
When the issue is really about how those who restricted access to content (published) before the Internet made information dissemination so cheap and easy, can continue to do so (if they can).
I also wonder if opponents of copyright wouldn't be better served supporting content that was only delivered in a way that suited them; rather than finding ways of pirating content that is not available in the way they want?
Visit a self-publishing website/community and one of the popular phrases you will see is, writers just want to be read.
Assuming musicians also just want to be listened to and film makers watched; then not watching what they produce (legal or illegal) unless it is available in the way you want, would see those creators - rather than publishers - quickly find a way of making sure you were willing to go back to watching their stuff?
Unless - rather depressingly I think - the old system really did coral all of the best talent in the world?
I have a license for all the media I view, but not necessarily for the specific means by which I acquire the media.
Uncle Rupe wants me to spend an extra £10 a month so that I can download that media to my tablet - which seems excessive, this is a feature the tablet already has.
He also insists on me turning on (and leaving on) location services so he can use GPS to ensure I'm actually present in a territory to which he has permitted me to watch his curated media - despite my permanent residence in that territory being a pre-condition to registration.
Therefore, even though I do pay Rupe to license that content, I don't actually get it from him. I use an alternate provider to source DRM free media for the content I have licensed from Rupe.
stop producing repetative crap then.
At the moment i pay £1XX what ever it is to watch the news and eastenders when i can be bothed a couple of times a week thats it.
No workaholics on BBC
People just do nothing is just 4 episodes....
i dont care about these crappy reality shows, cooking, dancing, badger and all that
Give me 5thgear everyday or topgear (TG, before it stated this entertainment lark, Oi go back to 15 years ago when the Sub' P1 owners club was in the studio with like 20 people and LOADS of FACTS and INFO!!!)
all the music these days is shit, 1 track of an album maybe ok.
in the last 15 years i have paid for both Adele's. - that is all.
why should i spend my hard earned money to pay and watch somthing once. and then have to pay again to watch it again.
My TV collection is only about 5TB but growing of the stuff that I want to watch, and watch again.
I dont want a Tivo that analysis what i watch, when i watch it, if i skip brakes, what i looking at the internet for the same time i am watching tv.....
you could say , ah har, but this is how they find out what i want. no because even then they will chuck in a load of crap that i dont want to make somthing i do appealing, but then that means i am only giving them say 1% for somthing i do want and then 99% for something i dont. Give me 100% of what i want for 100% of my costs.
Music people = stop pushing out the same olf crap over and over
Films = we arnt that dumb that when you change a title or remoake a film from 10 years ago we dont see it as complety diffrent, its still the same!!!!
Tv= i pay my licence and all they give me is crap back
so now it costs me for a half decent internet connection and my own security to view what i want when i want.
the day i go back to legal is the day i pay £xxx for a years access to exactly what i want and no more.
“We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity." - T S Eliot, 1925
“What else, in the desolate waste of present-day culture, holds any promise of a sound, healthy future? In vain we look for a single powerfully branching root, a spot of earth that is fruitful: we see only dust, sand, dullness, and languor” - Freidrich Nietzsche, 1871
“to speak of the morals of our country, the nature of my theme seems to suggest that I go farther back and give a brief account of the institutions of our forefathers in peace and in war, how they governed the commonwealth, how great it was when they bequeathed it to us, and how by gradual changes it has ceased to be the noblest and best, and has become the worst and most vicious.” - Sallust, c. 40 BC.
"Everything's shit now. It was better when I was a lad." - every old fart ever.
""Everything's shit now. It was better when I was a lad." - every old fart ever."
Utter bollocks. When I were a lad the only music we had was the plink plonk of the crows pecking at the piano strings we were hung up by, accompanied by the dulcet tones of my dear old dad starting up the chainsaw.
And we were glad of it. Etc...
This is making me really nervous - I barely sleep. For weeks now I've been getting jittery every time I hear a van draw up, the crunch of large boots on the gravel driveway or the clack of the letterbox being forced open - it happened yesterday and I almost shat myself with fear till I realised with some relief and a little chuckle it was only a hand delivered summons for non payment of 20 years of VAT returns.
If little Johnny hadn't got that new PC last Christmas we wouldn't be in this dreadful, soul eating predicament. We thought he was just doing his Geography homework when he was really downloading "Nice girls go Black" in glorious 4k. But if we'd only listened to that school psychiatrist when he was five perhaps at least he wouldn't have downloaded the full 7,842 episodes. The shame!
The gnawing dread will be back tomorrow; waiting waiting for the soft swwock of the letter from the ISP hitting the doormat ....
Muppets, really.
> nag subscribers when their accounts appear to have been used to access pirated material.
This might sound laughably ineffective now. However, laws change. We also have some insidious situations where people are threatened with prosecution for things that weren't illegal in the past. There are now cases where (retrospective) legislation is in place to "recover" taxes from people who legally managed to avoid paying it in the past.
[ref: http://metro.co.uk/2012/02/27/retrospective-law-sets-a-dangerous-path-3822883 ]
What's to stop the same thing happening with this - especially as the government appears to be giving this initiative its blessing?
We know that BIG MEDIA cares little about justice (except the "justice" of getting paid) and it's not inconceivable that all those "nags" you collected in the past and laughed about, could magically, when enough political donations have been made, be turned into retroactive laws that bite you in the nuts.
It wouldn't take much for a public campaign, along the lines of "minimising your tax bill is bad" metamorphosing into "avoiding the right amount of tax is illegal" to change "you really shouldn't be downloading all this stuff" into "Kerrr-ching. Here's a back-dated bill for all that stuff you've stolen P.S. We'll take your house - or the ISP account holder's house - if you don't pay".
Makes sense to me. Both copyright cartels and ISPs get useful market data on things like:
- rate of false positives
- effectiveness over time of telling people they've been 'caught'
- overall customer reaction, especially to erroneous messages
and they get people who never use the internet themselves to help pay for it.
"That’s why we’ve [BT] worked very hard with rights-holders and other leading ISPs to develop a voluntary programme based on consumer education and awareness which promotes the use of legal online content."
I always fine this use of the term "education" rather insulting.
There is absolutely no point in "educating" us to use "legal" content if that legal content is not available by "legal" means. Trying to "educate" people into not pirating stuff they cannot obtain legally is really trying to brainwash them into accepting the absurd notion of artificial borders and boundaries on the Internet.
Quite happy to pay for stuff as long as I can get it and I can get it for the same price as (for example) those in the US. For example, I am not going to, (and nor should I have to) pay £stupid for a DVD box set in the UK when that same show is available on Netflix in the US.
Be interesting to see how they intend to cover music and movies that you actually own on cd, dvd, bluray etc, that you are legally allowed to own a digital copy of, regardless of where you downloaded it from. How can they distinguish between people who have bought and and people who haven't? especially for older movies. I can understand films and music that are yet to be released to the public, such as movies currently at the cinema and stuff, but we are legally allowed to own a digital copy of music cd's we buy, it really doesn't matter if that copy was downloaded off the pirate bay or not if you own a physical copy does it?
Otherwise some smartarse will use that against media companies (such as BBC and chums) who quite happily steal content from the web to plump up their sites scraping off any inconvenient marks of ownership along the way. They could hit the four strikes in seconds...daily.
Caught an interview (with Vince Cable, I believe) stating that there is a special police unit for copyright theft. Nothing else better to do then, like catching REAL criminals such as burglars, thieves, rapists and murderers. Presumably these are the same cowboys in the City Of London division that "advised" registrars to pull web sites merely on their say-so of suspicion of being engaged in criminal activity with no due process or court order. This, if I might say so, does seem an easy way out of "investigating" what I suspect should be a purely civil matter in the first place. My gut feeling is that police should NOT be involved or be the the private force of the entertainment industry.
...or will be painted that way.
The reality is that piracy is going down all by itself, and they should have no trouble taking credit for that.
But what is really happening is that more and more content is becoming available from legitimate sources at fair prices online and that is really all people wanted in the first place.
"The reality is that piracy is going down all by itself"
I wonder whether the initial 'piracy' boom was due to all us old farts downloading our 'classic', no longer available, old albums, past radio and TV shows (I can recommend Undone and Doomwatch)?
For most of us, our collections are complete down to the 'demotape Florian Schneider did in his bathroom when he was 8' and 'discontinued local TV drama - lasted 4 episodes but had Billie Piper in it' level, and there's just nothing left for us to download (or we've realised we need to live to 187 just to watch/listen to what we've go already!)?
So maybe TPB is now catering to the tiny group of people who, for whatever reason, want their own copy of Iron Man 3, or Transformers 4, or who missed last week's X Factor and regard it as a bad thing?
Dear copyright protection people - how about:
Fixing the problem?
Case in point, When I got my Chromecast I bought season 1 of Friends from Google Play. When I watched all of Season 1 - I bought Season 2 of Friends. Now - for 2 seasons of Friends I have paid £40.98 for the convenience of watching it online. For between £50 and £80 I could have all 10 series on DVD. I will not pay £200 to buy all 10 series online. If anything just like the music industry learned (eventually) - it should be cheaper for me to buy all 10 series online, than it would be to get them on physical media.
Next we come to availability -
As long as Amazon / Netflix / Sky etc are going to keep having these ridiculously long "exclusive" terms, piracy will continue. Sky for example with their "once we have it, no one else can have it for 18 months" 18 months!! Exclusivity windows need to be reduced to at the most - 6 weeks. I am NOT going to have a Netflix subscription, An Amazon Prime subscription, a Sky subscription and a TV license. I am going to use one service, and anything I can't get on that service, or buy legally online for a reasonable price - I am going to have to get elsewhere.
> Think of how much it would cost if it was good for business
Actually, according to the Swiss Government, it already is good for business...
Vic.
When I bought my sony eBook reader a few years back; It came with a bunch of preloaded ebooks, all public domain, out of copyright kinda stuff
All had a brand spanking new Sony copyright on em. From what I understand they altered the text just enough to allow them to legally put a new copyright on it. They splattered around a bunch of "th e", "hte" type change plus random punctuation changes.
If it's a crime to misuse other peoples copyrighted works, then it should a crime to re-copyright works that has matured into the public domain
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Well you know, the copyright owners (and just what percentage of copyright holders are the people who actually created the content?) are constantly reminding us that we don't OWN our movies, songs, books - we have simply bought a licence to watch/hear/read the content. So by that token, people should be getting little packages from Big Media every time technology changes.
Dear Mr D iViDeD,
We notice that you baught a licence to watch Bambi in 1983. The copy on which your licenced film was recorded was, I believe, a VHS tape. Please find enclosed a replacement Blu Ray disc.
I mean, the alternative would be to force us to buy a new copy of what we already have every time the format changed.
And that would be ridiculous.
Wouldn't it?
I've worked for a fair few smaller companies that actually use the Torrent system to distribute their own legit software. Its much more cost effective than hosting hundreds of mb of files on your own servers.
Would be interesting to see how ISP's differentiate the content, would I get a letter for legitimately downloading the latest purchased train Sim or such like over a Torrent connection?
I think I know the answer here.
Just tack on a "media tax" to the VAT. Then, have the UK government set up their own TOR feed that the creators post to. Whenever it's downloaded the treasury can pay them accordingly.
No need for lawyers or useless ad campaigns. Just let your government take care of it like everything else.
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