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Recently saw a movie, liked the soundtrack, and decided to buy the mp3 (On the Run - Naz Tokio). Found it, of course, on Amazon, good deal, and made the purchase.
Tried to download it after the purchase, but the mp3 was ONLY available in the cloud for various devices, not for direct download. There was language that might have implied this was the case, but it was not clear or I was oblivious, probably the latter.
I was refunded my $1.29 and went straight to a pirate site and got it for free. I would rather have paid. Occasionally, the availability of piracy is a check on bad ideas, in this case, cloud walled gardens.
> There was language that might have implied this was the case, but it was not clear or I was oblivious, probably the latter.
For what it's worth, the language and layout was probably A/B tested and painstakingly tuned to maximise the probability of you making that mistake. Don't blame yourself when there's this unfair power imbalance, blame them for using their power against you maliciously.
> For what it's worth, the language and layout was probably A/B tested and painstakingly tuned to maximise the probability
This sort of belief (that corporations do extensive testing and tuning of language) seems quite widely held, but I've never seen much support for it.
I've frequently seen claims that Amazon must have "A/B tested and painstakingly tuned" the company name, whereas it was really just the founder's whim after watching a documentary, and never received any testing of any kind.
Have you ever worked at a large corporation like Facebook or Amazon? They have extensive internal A/B testing frameworks that record a wide variety of user metrics for arbitrary control and treatment exposures. It's very easy to set up an A/B test and pretty much necessary for almost all changes. Additionally, employees are expected to have concrete artifacts when they go up for promotion, and A/B test results are often a large part of that.
> Have you ever worked at a large corporation like Facebook or Amazon?
Employee #2 at amzn.
But sure, that doesn't count because I got out before the company hit 20 employees.
I don't doubt that large corporations with heavy technology dependence engage in what you're describing to cover _some_ aspects of their operations. I do doubt that is covers _all_ aspects, and in particular, I very much doubt if amzn A/B tested the language described in the GP for the purposes claimed by the parent of my comment.
EDIT: Given the comment @
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29374358
I should probably just accept that for amzn at least, I'm just wrong.
That's pretty impressive! Having worked at Amazon much later, I do think that most copy changes do go through an A/B test. I remember an instance where we tested 20 different versions of a minor UI change. Interestingly, there was a wide spread in the performance of the different treatments.
Current amzn employee working on the retail website. Unless a team is jumping/ignoring all standard operation precedures, everything must go through an A/B test to prove that it works at increasing the revenue or whatever the KPI target is. This includes text that might need to go through legal in some cases
Fair enough then. I'm wrong, for amzn anyway.
I think to some extent you and the original post you replied to are both probably right.
There is not some painstaking language optimization designed to trick users. But there is not a filter for clarity either, so the A/B testing naturally favors "dark patterns" - it's not malicious design, it's just unintended consequences, and gives the impression that Amazon et al are deliberately hostile when they are really just ignorant
_the A/B testing naturally favors "dark patterns" - it's not malicious design, it's just unintended consequences_
Could there be such a thing as "meta-malicious design?" Bad consequences aren't executed directly, but conditions are put in place that cause the emergence of bad consequences.
I suspect, if AI ever does away with _Homo sapiens_ it will be by convincing us not to breed by changing our incentive structures.
> I suspect, if AI ever does away with _Homo sapiens_ it will be by convincing us not to breed by changing our incentive structures.
I think it'll be by just sitting back and waiting a few decades :)
_I think it'll be by just sitting back and waiting a few decades :)_
The sci-fi tinfoil hat interpretation of this: It's already here, or at least its cronies and enablers, and the plan has already been put into effect.
âBad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.â
â John Stuart Mill, 1867
I'm talking about the good people not even knowing what's happening, until they engage in data analysis.
The other scenario is that that text is the first iteration and gave a positive KPI, if there are enough complains related to the structure of the text and is linked to increase in refunds, the team in charge would A/B another iteration targeting refund rate as KPI (although that might be difficult to correlate)
It's TRUE for all large web tech companies. Everything is launched via A/B tests. Your performance evaluation as an engineer is dictated by how much your teams goal metrics moved thanks to your changes(impact measured by A/B tests).
At any given time, a single engineer might have a couple of A/B tests running. That's the single biggest engineering change I have seen in the last 20 years.
A/B tests are now crazy simple to set up; just click a few buttons and decide how much traffic to send. The major con is that it leaves a lot of dead code behind when the best of N A/B test arms are launched; the (N-1) unsuccessful arms stick around as dead code.
The last five companies Iâve worked for, three large, one tiny start up, and two msbâs, extensively used A/B and split testing to carefully fine tune every funnel and product to maximize conversion. Most of my job for the last decade has been moving split points around form flows and capturing metrics to show what caused a split to occur. I talk to less than more people that donât use this practice.
Iâve run splits for everything from background colors to copy changes. If product management anticipates some facet could influence outcome, then it will be tested.
I've personally worked at a large tech company and saw widespread A/B testing for things exactly as minute as this type of wording. It wasn't a constant dynamic A/B test that automatically selects the best results but rather a trial period and analysis for changes like this.
I obviously can't speak to this case in particular but for pieces of text that are part of the core user flow (not necessarily true in this case), I'd be shocked if A/B tests weren't going on at any large company.
> This sort of belief (that corporations do extensive testing and tuning of language) seems quite widely held, but I've never seen much support for it.
I recall integrating with a beta AWS A/B testing sdk back in ~2015 (may be off on the year) and I'm certain that some the examples in the docs were along the lines of, say, testing two different wordings for a label in your app and measuring the change in engagement. But that's not inherently nefarious, it's just analytics. They ended up shutting down that SDK and the web dashboarding for it IIRC.
Now, A/B testing for the purpose of tuning languages towards deceptive dark patterns? It's harder to prove, but I think it follows that if they're A/B testing other changes, there's no reason that deceptive changes wouldn't also be A/B tested as a matter of course.
Sometimes this happens as a sort of 'evolutionary' process.
If a dodgy company has better wording for a misleading product, its deception will work better, so you can have highly tuned wording without anyone having to run an explicit A/B test.
Good point :) I'm glad to be reminded of that framing: a/b testing is just evolutionary selection within the same company-shaped container, but it's happening in the larger ecology even if you're not trying to run it.
Even the small startups I have worked for A/B test everything they can within inches of its life to eke out an extra penny and a half. This is standard operating procedure.
Every time I've seen this (and I agree that it's ubiquitous), it seems to make a ton of work that could be much better spent on making a better product that people actually want to use.
Bet your sweet ass they tested that smile in the logo.
By the time they switched to that logo, they may have been large enough and "focused" enough to do so.
But the initial amzn logo was picked merely on the whims of the founder and first two programmers. It was never focus-grouped or evaluated by anyone else.
It took me about half an hour of constant retries for the rented Apple TV movie I downloaded for offline use to play. Each time, for some reason or another, was blocked with the error message âThis movie can only be played on displays that support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection)â.
I was on a plane with no internet, so troubleshooting the error was impossible. Furthermore, I canât test playback of a movie in the future because doing so starts the three day expiration timer.
In the future I guarantee Iâll be torrenting.
I have Apple TV for the year because I got a new iPad and I still "pirated" Foundation because the Apple TV app for Roku isn't very good. I hate the interface, the playback skips (very infrequently), and the subtitle support is pretty bad.
There's no way Plex and Emby should be better than Apple's equivalent, but they are IMO.
> I hate the interface, the playback skips (very infrequently), and the subtitle support is pretty bad.
Yeah. The video player straight up sucks. We had better software than this decades ago. There's just no way these things will ever be able to compete with something like mpv but we're forced to use them because it's the only legal way to watch something.
On the other hand, I was actually impressed, that Apple TV appeared on Android TV in the first place and that it is actually decent (at least on Nvidia Shield).
My only nitpick is, that for some reason the default subtitles are "language + SDH" and not just "language".
> Plex and Emby
Also Jellyfin, the FLOSS Emby fork that has taken on its own life and has recently gotten a lot more stable
Iâve stopped relying on offline downloads (on netflix) since upon crossing national boundaries, the offline content is deleted. As an expat who travels back to India once a blue moon (and has shitty internet back home), I now pirate any content I plan to see during my vacations.
Wow, that's terrible.
To paraphrase Chris Rock talking about OJ, "now I'm not saying you should have pirated... But I understand!"
I've hit this myself as well. I no longer purchase streaming media, but instead, I buy Bluray's or DVD's. I rip them to H.264 with Handbrake and use those for travel. Yes, it's a bit annoying, but much less annoying than the "convenience" of streaming video and offline downloads.
Caveat: this is probably still not legal. Just a comparison / thought experiment.
Are you planning on keeping the Apple TV subscription? Are you only going to to torrent something that is currently running on Apple TV while you have a paid for subscription?
If so, what would really be so different from you "taping" something on regular TV back in the VHS days? (apart from it nowadays probably not being legal - go figure).
Plus if you go on holiday for a few days, you will likely have crappy wifi, and you don't know in advance what movie you will be in the mood to watch. These streaming services just do not work for me.
Torrenting + crossing a border⊠Not a good idea. Even having âphotos for personal useâ while crossing the boarder isnât a good idea. Iâm so afraid of TSAâŠ
"crossing A border" is not the same thing as "crossing the US border".
The TSA handles neither customs nor border patrol.
Right, but they do handle the security screening and itâs all DHS
I recently bought some hardware which came with license for software ( vst plug-ins).
After registering the hardware, then making an account with the third party who provides the software, I was able to download a demo version which I should then have been able to unlock into a full version using the serial number and license file provided to me...but this was not the case.
After about an hour of tinkering, restarting, and googling, I decided to try and pirate a copy of the software that I was entitled to the full working version of.
Took about two minutes to download and have it running.
How are you liking cubase?
maybe somebody returned the hardware but kept the license?
>went straight to a pirate site
Pirates rob ships in the see and use guns for that purpose I presume. What a web site providing access to the music has to do with it?
The whole 'buy mp3' idea always have been troubling for me because I can't figure out exactly what I actually buy there. What is it I purchase?
The right to listen for some composition?
The right to listen it in that specific mp3 format ?
The right to listen it more then one time because I have access to the file?
What do I actually possess after the purchase that I didn't possess before?
If it's my property then what is it? Is it a property at all if the usage of it is limited? For instance it belongs to me but somehow there are some limits to play it in my own restaurant, isn't it?
It's all presented as you buy something and it's clear what you buy. But if you are trying to think about it's more and more unclear.
It looks more like some bully simply blocks access to something he got using some leverage over the author then sells you 'unblock' feature while author is stripped away from any rights by the same bully and have no ability to sell it directly to you. Isn't it a case now days of redundant MIM?
Another issue is with how long it is blocked by paywall. The initial idea was how much? 10 years ? 15 years? How come that let's say Beatles are still protected from public? How that even possible and why nobody rises the issue of abusing initial idea?
> Pirates rob ships in the see and use guns for that purpose I presume. What a web site providing access to the music has to do with it?
"Piracy" has been a term of art in the copyright world for over 100 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Copyrightpirates.jpg
> Is it a property at all if the usage of it is limited?
If you buy a copy of a book, you are not eligible to reprint that book and sell it yourself. There are limits on what folks can do with copyrighted works they buy.
It might be worth reading, for instance, about the American concept of first-sale doctrine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
It's unclear why '_monopoly over making copies_' is called in your comment by confusing term '_copyright_'. Why something that is not '_right_' and cannot exist as '_right_' called by this strange term? How one can have '_right_' over what others do? May be you can explain also that?
If such 'right' even exist then it belongs to people who wish to make copy of something isn't it?
It's hard to see why how and who on earth is entitled to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy as long as a person who makes copy doesn't present such copy as original.
Copyright is as much a "right" as mineral rights are a "right." It is just a system for regulating a particular industry. Don't make the mistake of thinking that all "rights" are "natural rights."
No rights are "natural rights".
> It's hard to see why how and who on earth is entitled to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy
The how and who are easy: the Constitution[0], and the American government.
The _why_ is trickier, but the idea at least is that restricting copies means more people buy the "real" thing, which means more money goes to the owner, and creators are therefore more incentivized to make and copyright things in America.
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
The "why" is that distribution is always cheaper than production of creative works. In other words, people who make new works are stuck with all the costs, while people who sell copies get all the profit. This also tends to be an asymmetric relationship: creators tend to be individuals while publishers tend to be large corporate enterprises with the ability and know-how to bury you. Copyright exists to force publishers to negotiate with creators that would otherwise have no leverage[0].
The idea that copies are supposed to be scarce is an invention of Disney marketing, and I'd argue contrary to the spirit of the law. The stated purpose of copyright is to _increase_ the amount of works on the market (by giving creators some negotiating leverage with publishers), not to make individual copies more valuable. That's just a side effect, one that is supposed to be bounded by limited term lengths[1].
[0] For those wondering, this is also what drove copyright harmonization over the last century. Any difference in law between countries creates an avenue for publishers to find a way to cheat creators. Before the era of international copyright it was quite common for publishers to race creators to foreign markets, since translation was not yet an exclusive right of the creator and most countries did not recognize each other's copyright interests.
[1] Please stop laughing. I know life+70 is practically forever.
>Copyright exists to force publishers to negotiate with creators that would otherwise have no leverage[0].
In my experience when I was thinking to publish something on phtostock I was presented with automatic contract stripping me from all of my "leverage" and if I disagree? it's their way or highway. Of course I could not agree to that. So experience was rather short as you might guess and no live person was even involved on their behalf.
So in my experience it seems that you need some other "leverage" to force publishers to negotiate with creators.
>people who make new works are stuck with all the costs, while people who sell copies
I wasn't talking about 'selling copies'. I was talking about right of making copies. Selling copies is something else I think.
"[the United States 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."
From the same source:
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
I can see here mention of "exclusive Right".
Can't see there _man in the middle_ having exclusive Right though who also allowed to strip all the rights from the Authors and Inventors. Can't see there any "copyright". Can't see there entitlement "to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy". Selling copy is something else. But who can prohibit _making_ copy?
If you read this text you have copied it to your brain from the 'screen copy' of 'memory copy' of 'web response copy' of data stored on server which is 'copy of what I wrote' . There are more stages that I've mentioned of course and each of them produces copy.
>the idea at least is that restricting copies means more people buy the "real" thing
I do not see how current system is in the spirit of [0] and I do not see how current system is even in the spirit of what you've described. It's broken and works for other purposes. Doesn't "promote Progress of Science and useful Arts" it seems.
This is the last time I'll reply, your comments are admittedly going off the rails now.
> Can't see there any "copyright". Can't see there entitlement "to prohibit to anyone in having right to make a copy". Selling copy is something else. But who can prohibit making copy?
17 U.S.C.§106 -
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106
You also take umbrage with the fact that "copy" is fairly ambiguous. You can find the legal definition of "copy" in 17 U.S.C§101:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101
. It's fairly cut and dry.
>This is the last time I'll reply, your comments are admittedly going off the rails now.
It is your choice of course but please try to understand that I was not even trying to be on any rails there as I am questioning the logic and ideas behind the current laws because I observe inconsistency of current laws with initial idea of promoting progress in Science and Arts by giving exclusive Right to Authors and Inventors. Not some man-in-the-middle by the way. Authors and Inventors. Where ever I go I do not see copyright belonging to Authors, all I see is someone else who took all rights from those Authors and Inventors. Even if we accept such exclusive Right I do not see why such exclusive Right should be transferable as it is obviously would be abused and we observe that in reality.
>It's fairly cut and dry.
In the context I've described above while I am thankful to you without any irony for providing useful links to the current laws and definitions I am still more interested about ideas behind them rather then current implementations.
>You also take umbrage with the fact that "copy" is fairly ambiguous.
I would not use word 'umbrage' but when one questioning ideas behind certain definitions every term becomes open for interpretations and the current legal definition is just one of them.
It is called "Intellectual Property Rights", and has been defined for centuries as exactly sets of prohibitions against anyone having a right to make a copy (even if not presented as original).
The entire point is to encourage creative endeavors, whether by patents for inventions or by copyright for the arts. The ability to restrict trivial copying has been essential for the advancement of arts & sciences.
So, no, making a copy and giving it to your friend is technically against the law, but in a practical sense, unless you are doing it at scale, it is legal in a practical sense.
That said, the systems of both copyrights and patents are massively forking broken. And abused.
So, the need for overhaul is massive, but to act like it is some alien concept with no possible worth is not helpful to the discussion, merely disingenuous or ignorant.
The default in the USA is that nobody has the right to make a copy of something created by someone else. The right to make copies is limited to the creator of the work. We say "the creator owns the copyright".
Since the legal system in the USA (and elsewhere) has "evolved" to consider copyright to be property in most of the same senses as anything else you can own, it follows that copyright can be transferred to others.
You are welcome to disagree with either premise ("no copying of someone else's creation", "right to copy is property") but that's the situation at present, and it's not obviously wrong unless you adopt some philosophical positions that the USA (and most of western Europe) does not (in aggregate) hold.
"right" is the right word, the point here is that it is *exclusive.
Speech rights and copy rights are both rights. Great that speech rights are universal in most democratic countries. Awful that copy rights are exclusive.
"Piracy" has been a propaganda term in the copyright world...
FTFY
Piracy implies theft and sounds more serious; where as copyright infringement does not sounds as exciting...
(from wikipedia...)
Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright law without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works
Theft is the taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.
The correct term is probably greed: not giving back to the author of music, movie, software you use. But greed is also the foundation of our economy, so copyright owners had to come up with a different word.
Copyrights have very little to do with paying content creators. From the very first copyright law (the Statute of Anne) it was about securing profits for the industry, who invariably give only a tiny slice of those profits, if anything, to the content creators. Hollywood studios are famous for trying to screw actors, screenwriters, and others out of their share of blockbuster movie profits. Likewise with the music industry -- most musicians do not make anything close to enough money on record sales (or the modern equivalent) to live on, even as the studios themselves bring in vast sums of money.
So in a sense you are right, "greed" is the operative word -- not on the part of people who download, but on the part of the people who benefit most from the copyright system.
>"Piracy" has been a term of art in the copyright world for over 100 years.
So if it's long enough it assumes it's correct? Hard to see logical connection there.
In our power to reconsider false and confusing terminology.
>So if it's long enough it assumes it's correct? Hard to see logical connection there.
Well... Yes? That's how words work, really. If enough people agree a word means something, then it does.
No, that's how words lose their meaning: when they are used in inappropriate context to describe something completely unrelated.
Another modern example of a word that rapidly loses its meaning is "fascism": these days it is used as a general term for any policy not supported by the person that uses it. BLM fascists, left fascists, ultraright fascists, antifa fascists. On the subreddit about new Apple "Foundation" show someone described the depicted Empire as fascist. Everybody are fascists, especially the US who have fascias everywhere in state imagery!
I hate what you refer to too, it's essentially changing the meaning of a word with political intent. It also happened with "tolerance", went from enduring something you don't like to not caring about it in the first place.
But all that does it make words mean different things at different points in time, which is still just how words work. The meaning of the word "gay" is pretty different now than what it was, "meat" used to refer to all solid food, not just muscle and organs, "tweeting" is, at this point, more used as a reference to an internet service than to birds.
We didn't get to learn a final and set version of our languages, we just got the current one, they all keep changing nonstop and words changing meaning is just one of the ways in which that happens.
But in our case, "piracy" has exactly same meaning as it did 400 years ago: attacks on sea vessels, plunder of wealth and kidnapping of people for ransom or for sale.
It has precisely zero relation to copyright infringement, and should not be used to denote the it.
When healthy discussion is needed wrong terms do not help because they become propaganda terms masking the real meaning. In that case they should be reconsidered and corrected for discussion to have any chance for success.
> In our power to reconsider false and confusing terminology.
Is it? Framing a conversation through word connotation is a very powerful, and oft used, political tool. It isn't necessarily within your power to control it when stronger political and social forces are pushing it in other directions.
> So if it's long enough it assumes it's correct
Sure, that's a good enough of a descriptivist basis for a definition to be "correct."
I'd wager most folks on here don't see the name "The Pirate Bay" and question what it has to do with literal seafaring scallywags.
counterpoint. I do. every time. Using the term "pirate" or "piracy" for copyright infringement annoys the hell out of me.
You donât question it because of actual confusion. Youâre questioning it because you want to question it each time you come across it. Makes sense. It is an issue for you.
"The whole 'buy mp3' idea always have been troubling for me because I can't figure out exactly what I actually buy there. What is it I purchase?"
You purchased convenience -- not having to deal with filesharing systems that are polluted with various misidentified files, not having to try to figure out if the thing you are downloading is actually malware (for non-technical users this is often a challenge), not having to correct / create tags for the MP3 (artist/album/etc.), not having to guess at the quality of the audio (sometimes "lossless" actually means "preserved loss from some other format"), etc. For most people the convenience justifies the price.
I think the parent meant something a bit different than "what are the pragmatic advantages of buying an mp3 as opposed to piracy" - rather, they wanted some kind of handle on what - legally and/or ethically - has actually been purchased.
We travel in ships, further than most
Raiding and pillaging, from North to South coast
We steal _only metal_ like guns, tanks and toasters!
We melt them all down, and make .. roller coasters!
-anonymous
All of your questions have to do with copyright, which has little to do with the format of the thing you're purchasing (an mp3).
Culture and language evolve, an pirating became meaning getting authorized works without compensating the copyright holders. Apprently this usage dates back to the 1600s.[0]
>What is it I purchase?
Something that's legal according to your region's laws, copyright laws and the EULA. In case of unDRM-ed downloadable files, you most likely purchase the right for personal enjoyment or private screening of the media contained within the files, and of course the store often provides the files themselves too.
As you noted, the legal part is often murky. In case of Hungary, you're permitted for example to back up your legally owned media, so you can legally rip your CDs for yourself. But this is not true for all regions.
The copyright of the composition, the right the redistribute, or usage in a commercial environment is most often _excluded_ when you just "buy and mp3". These are special cases where you need a different legal instrument, like a contract or license, and to pay way more than âŹ1 per track.
Now, onto the dark patterns. The media industry is rife with this. The first is that often you can read "buying", but it's way more restricted legally, and sometimes, the media itself is crippled with a mechanism that tries to enforce some legality[1] - this would be the DRM. Region locking, unskippable anti-piracy segment on the DVD, files that "stop working" after a while, media that's encrypted from file to display, albums/games disappearing or downgrading from your catalogue, there's a lot. Meanwhile you're often presented with how easy and cheap all this is, and how much in control you are - no you're not. If you feel angry or betrayed, that's because you're realizing the con.
What can you do about this? Pirating is fine as a fuck you to the industry, but the creators of all the enjoyable goodness deserve compensation just like everyone else who does good work. So you can look for ways to support them that's more direct than licensing their music from a streaming giant. Bandcamp[2], for one, is quite excellent towards users and artists alike. And also, there is a lot of people who is not content with the current state of copyright - so many that Wikipedia had to open a page just for this issue[3]. So you're certainly not alone in your questioning.
[0]
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/462700/what-is-t...
[1]
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
[2]
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright
This does not even rise to high school level discourse. All of the points you bring up have been discussed more critically and insightfully on Body building forums.
Iâll start with that you seem to be hung up on that the only thing money can be exchanged for is property.
>This does not even rise to high school level discourse.
I am asking basic questions because I do not see basic answers which are consistent with logic. It would be more useful and helpful to provide those answers if you know them of course.
>All of the points you bring up have been discussed more critically and insightfully on Body building forums.
Unfortunately in practice it is hard to observe _impressive_ results of "what was discussed more critically and insightfully". So again perhaps sharing their line of thoughts would be useful.
My concern of course that "what was discussed more critically and insightfully" did not produce something logically consistent and that might explain why we do not see actual answers.
>Iâll start with that you seem to be hung up on that the only thing money can be exchanged for is property.
If we put aside "hung up on that the only thing money can be exchanged for is property" part which is irrelevant then probably we can see the real answer to the question : What one actually gets for his money and what is purchased when one "buys" some mp3?
Hey lovelyviking. I just wanted to say that you are right, and I agree with you.
The problem is that we are actually living in a medieval type of society. A pretty dark time actually. We have many people who enjoy exercising power over others. The trouble is that we think we are more advanced than we actually are.
We need to progress emotionally, spiritually, morally, and in our understanding of the natural world (physics: our reality). We need a new rennaissance, an enlightenment. To get there, we need clarity of thought from people like yourself who are unafraid to speak up and challenge the status quo.
keep shining your light and speaking your truth. Ignore the naysayers.
onwards.
Thanks a lot for your kind words! Sometimes naysayers are overwhelming and in those days your words are even more precious. I'll read them again especially in some gray days. Thank you a lot for taking time to support my spiritual powers).
Thanks for the info. Next time I want to know what Amazon means when they sell me "MP3 Music", I will remember to go to body building forums before clicking "Buy"
Your comment isnât consistent with what you replied to. They said the discourse is better than that comment. Taking that to consulting the forums to know what Amazon means appears to not be a good faith response.
Amazon does provide the MP3 files themselves.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
They surely make it difficult to find, though.
I used to be able to actually buy MP3s from Amazon US. I actually have bought and downloaded a few albums this way.
Then they launched Amazon Music (or whatever its name is) in my country, which only provides app-based access to music, and also took away my ability to buy MP3s from the US website and neglected to add it to my country's version of Amazon.
I tried to follow those convoluted instructions to no avail. Did it not like my Linux box? Who knows. But a company that made its fortunes making buying convenient should know better.
We just need the technology improved slightly to solve this problem.
Artists should be seeding high quality files to the torrents themselves, in formats that are signed and include a crypto wallet for sending "donations". Then the playback software just needs to check the signature to ensure you're giving money to the actual creator and not some imposter if you want to throw money their way, through a payment ui the players conveniently make available to you.
There's just no need for the middle-men who make it all miserable, and exploit control of the audience for their own gain via advertising/"recommendations"/propaganda etc. Torrents have fixed the distribution problem, and no consumers are really interested in depriving their favorite artists from making a living. It's just a glaring omission that the torrent system doesn't incorporate a reliable artists compensation circuit, like it's just unfinished.
That's a very interesting thought, but the one thing I think would be a problem is fake torrents with other parties bitcoin wallets embedded.
Also some bands don't want to operate on "donations" and want to set a price for the download. I wonder how that would work to be able to set a price.
Of course you could avoid this by only getting the torrent from the official band's website, but fakes would certainly be a problem.
Pitch this to some dapp/crypto vc. Maybe @ the kid who made Ethereum. Great idea
Trent Reznor started doing that 15 years ago.
Really? Strange that none of the torrent-sourced NIN albums in MP3 format I have contain anything like a crypto wallet in the id3 tags...
But it really isn't sufficient for the artist to just stick a wallet address somewhere in files seeded, and hope for the best.
The format needs to formalize support for it, my players need to verify and make that information conveniently accessible to me, preferably in a one-click-to-tip-artist using my configured crypto wallet kind of fashion.
For me this is one of the actual legitimate use cases of cryptocurrency. These microtransaction kind of business models where folks like artists are happy to receive tiny amounts like tips if they can get it repeatedly from _all_ their fans globally, passively, just by having created their art and putting it out there where it's all effectively "long tail" revenue, stacking as they produce more work, ad infinitum.
And the problem with downloading using cloud is you have to use their apps and requires them to supply your phone data forever which is no no in my book. Imagine the dystopia there would be if there were no piracy.
You got refunded but in my country many sites have implicit rule "Once you purchase it, we can't return it back".
>You got refunded but in my country many sites have implicit rule "Once you purchase it, we can't return it back".
Do they specify what you actually purchase, I can't figure out what is it you purchase in such cases.
Don't they have your data as part of the Amazon account anyway? Why does that even matter?
Gabe Newell: "Piracy is an issue of service, not price."
THIS! I had similar problem with watching a movie trilogy on Google play movies. The movie won't play on my computer but only played on android app (no i didn't have any firewall or special ad blocker on my PC). I called google customer service and asked them to fix, it took them 3 days to get back and the problem was still not fixed, needless to say I was mad and they refunded instantly. Next thing I just downloaded it....
I'd have loved to pay but if movie studios (or whoever is responsible for this sh#tshow) will go out of their way to not give me a mp4 or similar device/service independent playable format then I couldn't care less about their loss.
I mean if you would rather have paid you could have left the money to the author and pirate the mp3 anyway.
I do wish all artists had a donate page. Most do not.
How much of that money goes to the author instead of amazon?
Whyâs that relevant? The payment is divided by the terms of the agreement with the author and associates. It was mutually agreed by everyone in writing.
How could it not be? I want to pay the creators, not some useless middlemen who only exist to solve the problems created by copyright.
Not the customer. Should they be able to pirate/donate and feel ethically okay?
Iâve taken this approach in the past.
It's insane how these companies get away with this. Nobody is "buying" anything, they're _licensing_ the content and that comes with a ton of restrictions. This should be considered false advertising at the very least.
Had a similar experience recently. Tried to buy 3 songs from a particular artist on Apple Music and for some reason, my Mac got the downloaded music and can play it but my iPhone refuses to recognize any of my purchases tracks despite being logged in the same account. Ended up pirating then tracks even though I had also paid for them already.
Iâm surprised to hear this. I thought that Amazon had moved to offer all mp3 music as DRM-free. Iâve bought a lot of music from them and never been unable to download anything so far.
How long ago was this? I bought an mp3 from Amazon (The Touch - Stan Bush) in 2019 and Iâm still able to download the mp3.
Also try to buy some J-Pop only available on www.amazon.co.jp. :p
Absolutely. I am a chronic expat, and frequently move countries. Due to ridiculous restrictions, I am unable to get movies and TV shows, in English, with English subtitles. Most of the time it is dubbed in $native_language without subs.
I want to pay for my media. But it want it in English please, with subs. The copyright lobby wonât let me, so I grab torrents. For free.
Same with Formula1. I had a annual subscription to watch races online, in English, until they made some deal with some local broadcaster, meaning I need to sign up to the local broadcastersâ service on terrestrial, cable, or satellite (the â90 called, they want their broadcasting model back) and have commentary in $native_language.
- I have disposable income
- Iâm happy to fork some of this over to the media companies
- I consume media on an industrial scale
- They refuse to provide a product that is consumable for me
So, thanks, IPTV and torrent sites!
Many people doesn't realize the value provided by pirate bay. Without sites like piratebay, scihub or libgen only rich privileged people would be able to enjoy the fruits. But thanks to sites like them poor people living in any places can enjoy the privilege.
I understand there are some downsides like small creators getting destroyed. But as with any technology we know digital piracy has various advantage. Also music, movies etc offered by torrents can be far reliable because Netflix etc can remove content at any minute according to their wish.
DRM is the main issue in piracy and I hope we can bypass this easily. And I also think many piracy doesn't have any dent on so called big producers. They are just mad that they can't suck few bucks from poor people.
Small creators aren't destroyed by piracy, because people who have money generally want to support artists that they like when they feel like that support will actually make a difference to that artist's livelihood, and will allow the artist to keep creating. A perfect example of this is Stardew Valley. I know people who pirate the vast majority of the things they consume, but have purchased multiple copies of that game so they could give it to friends.
It's a little different with video games, since platforms like Steam have changed the face of video game piracy. Gabe Newell himself said that piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. Steam removed any barrier to publishers to put their game on the platforms and players to buy the games, and game piracy is pretty much dead in the water and Valve is worth billions of dollars.
Whereas the music industry and even worse, the movie industry, still have their heads up their arses and are losing hundreds of billions of dollars if they just provided a single platform where everything is available to stream, everywhere in the world, with no restriction but a single monthly fee.
DRM is a problem, but the need to subscribe to a dozen different services to have access to most, but not all, media, is the biggest issue.
I haven't downloaded a video game since the early 2010s, I have given Valve thousands of dollars since, and I will keep paying for my torrenting VPN for music and movies for the foreseeable future. Long live The Pirate Bay.
There are a lot of independent labels and artists that you can support on Bandcamp (which takes at most 10%). Give it a look before you pirate music next time.
I do buy on Bandcamp, and I've got YouTube Music for streaming.
Streaming and buying music is _mostly_ OK nowadays, I've included it for sake of argument, the real problem lies with the movie industry.
I watched a YouTube video on the creation of Stardew valley. He did everything himself, including music and graphics. He also didnât compromise on anything. Took him years to finish.
I donât play games, I still spent 5$ (I think) on the game, just because he is an impressive individual and I wanted to do my part so he stays that way.
Companies underestimate how much love fans have for creators, when theyâre sincere and their work is very good. The only way companies know to make money is treat their users like shit, use lawyers all the time etc etc
> I donât play games, ...
Stardew Valley is a load of fun and very much built with non-gamers in mind. It's pretty accessible (though you may want to keep the wiki handy). It's also really relaxing. You should try it out, you might really enjoy it.
Why are small creators inherently more entitled to 'support' than larger creators though? Why do we just decide that at a certain threshold, it's fine to take things for free?
The value of the money made is relative to how much money the person has. A person going from $0 -> $5 gets more value than a person going from $1,000,000 -> $1,000,005.
That's the same logic a thief uses when they shoplift from Walmart. As an indie myself, the biggest threat to my livelihood is actually piracy.
But i guess we agree on one thing: Shoplifting a poor's shop is far more egregious than wall mart? Relative value of money does make sense. Its not just here but in crime too. Can you punish people who steals 1$ and 1 million dollar in same way? Bad behavior, stealing is not a binary to my eyes.
Your error is in comparing a single theft between small and large business. In reality, big business will face much more theft due to their high volume. The difference is marginal when you account for relative value. Your second example does not follow.
By that logic small scam game devs would be on par with other small creators.
I don't think it's because of relative value of money.
Once a creator reaches a (likely fuzzy, undefined, needs more study) threshold, they gain the ability to negatively influence the laws in their favor, against the laws' original intent. Regulatory capture and all. Look at all the lobbying that happened by the Walt Disney Corporation, among others, to extend the copyright term to the insanity we see today. Some people/corporations also want _perpetual_ copyright that never expires, and they tend to be the larger ones (although not all, so that is sort of almost orthogonal).
Small creators don't lobby the government in order to extend copyright duration for the nth time.
disney was once a small creator.
The thing with double standards is that there's just so many to choose from!
Maybe we're thinking about different things when we're saying "small creator" but Disney had contracts with Hollywood studios[1] almost from the start.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company#1923%E...
If people are thinking that small creators bring universally better value than big creators then they're in the right to give them money.
I, for example, dislike Take Two's way of intimidating modders so I'm trying to avoid giving them money.
This is a great question. The answer imho is that large creators can use crowd sourcing and leverage their reputation.
All they have to do is ask the public for money to make the next [say] Mad Max, Riddick, Startrek, Batman, etc etc
If the public doesn't want a new Startrek movie funding will be insufficient. It might have to happen on a smaller budget, not at all or simply have to wait until funds are sufficient.
New things (not sequels) can be done/advertised on the reputation of the studio, director, actors etc etc
I pay for production, I pay in advance for a cinema ticket, I get a digital download some months later.
Whatever copying happens after that is pure promotion.
> "small creators getting destroyed", "piracy doesn't have any dent on so called big producers"
Quite the opposite, one of the very few scientific articles on the topic piracy has been found to help small-mid level artists (but hurt big artists), explanation here:
https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-can-help-music-sales-of-many...
For instance and as said in the article artists like Ed Sheeran became popular thanks to piracy among college students.
But of a dodgy source. Anyway, Microsoft word and photoshop are only standard because people pirated them.
What dodgy source? The torrentfreak article is just a rehash of the peer reviewed one, not the source.
The European Commission ordered a study on piracy, and not liking the conclusion hid its results for two years. It was only discovered when a part that did show that some piracy hurts sales was quoted, allowing people to dig into the full report and finding that piracy helped games, was neutral on books and music, and was bad for movies:
https://www.newsweek.com/secret-piracy-study-european-union-...
> I understand there are some downsides like small creators getting destroyed
Do they? I was vaguely under the impression that the overwhelming majority of people pirating stuff wouldn't have paid, and that whenever actual studies are run they show piracy benefiting the original creators.
Indeed, to my knowledge, nobody ever managed to prove in a proper study that the creators actually lose money with piracy.
To provide a single data point, here[0] is an article about one such study. "EU study finds piracy doesnât hurt game sales, may actually help. Results suggest a positive effect, but there's a huge margin of error."
[0]
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
For me the breaking point was when Netflix removed the entire stargate series. That was a real wake up call for me personally and I canceled my subscription. 100+ TB laterâŠ
Yeah, âshow I finally have time to watch, isnât available any moreâ is really irritating; every time it happens is one more push back to TPB
Content preservation is a seriously underrated aspect of piracy. Prior to getting shut down in 2016, what.cd was practically the modern-day Library of Alexandria of music. Literally anything you could ever want to listen to was available in lossless FLAC format, made available by anonymous volunteers purely out of a love of music.
Now it's gone, and who knows how much music has been lost to time as a result.
I only downloaded a few albums off what.cd since I only had a laptop and bad internet back then and couldn't maintain the ratio their standards demanded.
However I gotta say, their content and organization was better than any music library (legal included) that I've ever seen. It is truly a shame that we lost it so the labels thought they could make more money. I would guess that humanity might have lost some rare lossless records.
Shutting down what.cd should be considered a crime against humanity. I will never forgive copyright holders for that.
The piece doesnât go deep into detail but it shows that the entertainment industry lawyer doesnât regret going after the site and its founders, despite the mixed result.
That lawyer is probably the person who has made the most money off of TPB. Of course they don't regret it.
I was at a Grammy luncheon a number of years ago and I somehow wound up seated with all of the entertainment attorneys for the labels/recording industry/whatever and it was a very interesting/bizarre conversation. Iâve spent much of my adult life (and even pre-adult life), speaking out and writing about the idiocy of those various campaigns to shut down P2P, DRM, etc., and then I was at this industry luncheon with some very nice people who believe the exact opposite of me. Interesting and civil discussions ensued (I was the odd-woman out, both for my position and because I didnât drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel in a $200,000 car), but I got the sense that as misguided as I personally think they are, many of the lawyers honestly think they are doing the right thing to try to protect against so-called infringement the ways that they do. Iâm sure the money is definitely part of it (again, I took an Uber to the luncheon. They had valet service for their $200,000 cars), but I donât think thatâs most of it to be honest.
It was helpful for me to meet and talk with people who have the opposite opinion and perspective of me. Not because we changed each otherâs minds (my mind wasnât changed), but because I saw that these were people who really thought they were protecting and fighting for the rights and protections of artists and creators. As I said, it didnât change my opinion about how misguided and ultimately harmful those fights have been (especially towards the parties they want to protect), but I did at least see that not all of them are evil boogeyman who just want to get money.
_I personally think they are, many of the lawyers honestly think they are doing the right thing_
They have tons of money, theyâre highly educated, well connected individuals, are they not? All they have to do is spend one Saturday reading up. With the money they have, they can even hire researchers to do some original research for them. My guess is that they donât want to know. Money has a way of suppressing oneâs good side.
I am having a hard time sympathizing with these lawyers. They go after students, poor people for downloading a song or two. Theyâre the reason for the sorry state of copyright laws
I donât disagree, but having pressed some of them on those exact issues (not all at that luncheon), it really is similar to talking to district attorneys who often prosecute low-level drug crimes (which I personally find even more egregious). These are people who really are convinced they are doing the right thing. As I said, this doesnât change my opinion, but it does make having a conversation more productive.
The people in the USA practicing eugenics thought they were doing the right thing. The people in the USA creating concentration camps for the Japanese (a.k.a. internment camps) thought they were doing the right thing.
Belief in yourself and your cause is irrelevant. Most people have that regardless of what they do.
I can sympathize with someone who isnât educated or living in a rural area (cut off from the world) or raised in a cult etc. I _really_ canât believe the lawyers who went to Ivy League colleges are that naive. Theyâre much smarter than an average guy like me.
Doesnât mean they are evil, just that theyâre paid enough to set aside any moral concerns they have.
The legal profession self-selects for people who think this way, for a number of various reasons.
1. If you disagree with the base assumptions of copyright, you are going to misunderstand the law and fail your LSAT/bar exam/etc. You will be blinded by "it's just to keep big companies afloat" to notice the actual rules of things like fair use.
2. If you get a law license but disagree with the base assumptions of the law, you are going to be at a financial disadvantage by refusing to represent clients whose politics disagrees with yours.[0]
3. If you choose to represent copyright defendants, you can only do so to the extent that there is a legal argument that they can make. It is illegal for a lawyer to aid a client in the commission of a crime... and if your legal career is based around the idea that something _shouldn't_ be a crime, then you will need to hold your tongue and pick your battles a lot.
4. If you somehow jump through those hoops and competently represent clients... you probably have sacrificed on your "abolish copyright" ideology a fair bit.
[0] Remember that at this point you are probably deep in student debt - your legal career is predicated on you paying back your loans by charging your clients lots of money.
I think you may be right.
I used to work as a software developer for a banking startup, and a lot of emphasis was placed on things like KYC, AML and "compliance", whatever that is.
Fundamentally, I hated all those things with passion (including how they force everyone to use a bank to transact - and here I am working for a bank), because I don't believe they any institution or government should be forcibly gatekeeping and spying upon anyone's transactions.
It's really hard to work at a place that contradicts your own convictions. When I was fired, it was a relief.
Rich, well-connected anarchists don't become lawyers.
âIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â - Upton Sinclair
Maybe a bit of a truism, but it is a popular quote for a reason
> Theyâre the reason for the sorry state of copyright laws
Blaming lawyers for the state of copyright laws is doing a huge service to the legislators that pass them and the lobbyists who write them.
...90% of whom are lawyers.
> They had valet service for their $200,000 cars
> the lawyers honestly think they are doing the right thing
Reminds me of:
âIt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.â - Upton Sinclair
Most of the piracy sites are super scummy. I can see the appeal in trying to shut them down. I've always wondered how the economics of those setups that push you through a half dozen link shorteners / ad pages with captchas all over the place work. I bet there's ad fraud going on with the captchas being solved for bots that are doing less than respectable things.
Look at Kim Dotcom / Mega Upload for an example of who the big winners are in the piracy space. Some of it is big business, so it's easy to see the lawyers' side. I'd still consider myself pro piracy because it creates a floor in terms of how bad big companies can treat us, but there are some participants that deserve to be chased by lawyers.
No. Most of the piracy sites that are public and well known are super scummy. That is because only that kind of scummy income can protect and justify the exposure. Semi-private and private piracy sites are really nice, safe, and have better organization and UI than most big money for profit sites that attempt to distribute the same types of media. What.cd was way less scummy than any large commercial media distribution company.
Yes, but there's no guarantee that What.cd[0] remains a charismatic defendant in any scenario where they don't get shut down. Nor should the law be written around protecting charismatic defendants.
The argument against copyright maximalism should not be made on the basis that "nice" pirate sites can exist - in fact, you should advocate for copyright reform or reduction on the basis of the least tolerable, most scummy site that should be allowed to exist.
[0] insert any other non-scummy pirate site here
True, but the industry has shown that it need the constant threat of piracy. Ebooks and music are already in a bad state again. I guess with VPN becoming more popular due to increased surveillance it can lead to a renaissance of file sharing.
People work very hard to not see themselves as a villain - especially when they are just that.
If their actions are indistinguishable from the actions of evil bogeymen, I do wonder what the real difference is.
I think the truly worst people alive right now are really, really fucking charming and 'nice' to have dinner with in a fancy hotel - they get plenty of practice - but if kindly confronted with undeniable evidence of their harms they would immediately rationalize their actions with bullshit, and get as far from you as possible.
I think the issue here is with the conception of "evil". The one shown in most media is incredibly flawed, and it is why the best villians are the ones that can actually argue their point, make you understand where they are coming from, and potentially even come to their side. People are not evil, they are simply acting as all humans do most of the time: in self preservation of some form. What makes a person appear "evil" is simply the situations they have ended up in and the accompanying beliefs and knowledge.
> but if kindly confronted with undeniable evidence of their harms they would immediately rationalize their actions with bullshit, and get as far from you as possible.
This is not meant to excuse that response, but I do want to point out that it is the rational and "easy" path of response. When people make ideas the core of their personality and survival, threats to those ideas are now personal threats. The path of coming to challenge and change those ideas is a hard road in most cases. It takes a very strong and brave person to change their mind on a core belief.
The better way IMO to approach it is to ensure people don't get caught in the position in the first place. Don't make beliefs the center of yourself, make values the center, and choose them carefully and with nuance. It allows you to change course on beliefs or ideas with much less pain and personal internal sacrifice. That needs to start early though, way before anyone at that table sat down for their meal. It's an education issue, an early one at that.
this would be a funny youtube video, have all the RIAA lawyers, this lawyer, then all the haxxor TPB coders, passing around a blunt discussing the state of the industry
You "don't do drugs" in Sweden so that won't happen, publicly almost everyone is against pot. This might be changing but not in the near future.
FWIW, pot, or cannabis, _is not_ a drug, no more than nutmeg. They're vegetables. Alcohol, on the other hand, is indeed a drug. So, no drinkers in Sweden? It always sounded like a pretty nice place to me, and now it sounds even more so.
As someone that has smoked most of his 20s away, your comment is absolute misinformed bollocks.
Accurate, you mean, though one could say delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol is a drug. Also, wine and beer? Beverages, not alcohol, though they usually contain alcohol. It seems unimportant, but getting things right is critical.
I mentioned nutmeg intentionally. 10g of nutmeg will cause quite like LSD states, and I'm not sure why, but no one anywhere considers nutmeg a drug. I'm also not sure how this was discovered as consuming even half a gram of nutmeg would be a pretty amazing feat.
From Wikipedia
>A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism's physiology or psychology when consumed.
So yes, both nutmeg and pot are plants and drugs when consumed with the right dosage. Nobody considers nutmeg a drug as it's rarely used as one in their presence.
And it was probably discovered when nutmeg was used for food preservation.
I was in high school during the beginning of tpb. I leaned towards the Pirate Bayâs ideas and philosophy of what- digital good was and where ownership exists.
Iâm thankful that I followed the arguments and merits of both sides.
If I was in high school now, I donât think I would be as lucky as to get to be apart of good faith arguments. Instead, I might end up believing in Qnon.
Iâm so thankful that the original web was much more pure, good hearted than what it has become today.
The difference IMO is the scale of individual social networks. It used to be relatively smaller independent forums which had all their own particular rules and populations. Things were more truly distributed in an organic way.
Now we have these massive scale social networks who attract all the absolute worst scum of the earth, botnets, etc. The companies running these networks are super massive and formed connections to political parties and financial interests.
The saddest thing is we could all just decide to get off these massive networks and use the smaller ones again, but the genie is out of the bottle and a critical mass of people canât be convinced to leave the new networks.
I think another aspect of the early internet culture, is the demographics.
The participants were much more tech inclined, I imagine the autism quotient of the early internet user population, would have been much higher than it is today.
I think it actually goes in cycles. I've noticed a lot more people conversing in Discord and small group chats these days than saying everything on big open platforms.
No, the difference is that social media has been very successfully weaponised, by the nation-state/mafia syndicates which communism gave birth to. So successfully, in fact, that it has made traditional warfare practically obsolete.
The social networks of today are to the world what the "Pravda" newspaper was to the Eastern Bloc in the 20th century. A weapon of mass subversion. (Oh the magnitude of trolling and shade in the name of that newspaper... Nothing in the past 100 years has surpassed that!)
This is the right take.
Also, every hacker online pre-facebook realized that it wouldn't take that much effort to do social engineering on a mass scale, but there was a brief period before any large organizations actually got involved and started doing it.
I think we got a glimpse of something special in the early internet, and I think we can build toward that again.
> I think we got a glimpse of something special in the early internet, and I think we can build toward that again.
I mean, you are writing on HN, a specialized community of practice which is the polar opposite from massive social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. And if HN is not exclusive enough for you, there is Lobsters where you need an invite to even post or comment. To me, these dynamics are pretty close to what went on on the "early internet" pre social media. Though it would be nice if federation standards were more widely adopted, to enable optional interop across sites.
It canât be built towards unless the nation state actors and bots are accounted for and routed around. I donât see that happening.
This is a start:
https://www.voanews.com/a/australian-government-vows-to-unma...
I thought that in their case it was to out people who oppose government officials? That seems like the opposite of Iâm understanding correctly.
Correct:
"If itâs in the public interest, the Commonwealth can intervene in these cases on the side of the defamed person against the social media company.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government would proactively search for such cases to intervene in."
Years of cyberbullying didn't spur the government into action. A few choice tweets about politicians did. Though they'll say this is about protecting kids etc
Media is a weapon of mass subversion in any society. Look at Murdoch.
Something awful, 4chan, and Ogrish were all started 2003 or earlier.
don't let the n words fool you; 4ch is very actively moderated; both by janitors but also it's users.
It's politically incorrect, but not as bad as Facebook in terms of damage to society.
At least on anonymous imageboards or even pseudonymous forums you can learn your lesson of how foolish/incorrect you are about something with no future repercussions, no embarrassment, no one to use it against you in the future- you can just up and change your entire perception at the drop of a hat frictionlessly, without paying a personal cost to do it.
4chan is like a focus group for unacceptable ideas.
I have always seen 4chan to be more like a youth center than a focus group, with the associated criminal aspects. In both cases the suggested universal solution tend to be an increase in supervision.
The Qanon psyop was primarily targeted towards neocon and right wing boomers, not teenagers. You wouldnât be at risk of âfallingâ for it today as a high schooler. Itâs also been dead since 2019 or so.
I say psyop because it was essentially boomer catnip. âGood guys are in controlâ âsit back and do nothing, we have them right where we want themâ âitâs all going according to planâ etc etc.
As far as psyops go it was wildly successful, posting cryptic messages anyone following the news heavily would know then ârevealâ them later as proof. This manufactured false credibility as an insider, then their âinstructionsâ were to essentially sit back and do nothing while the deep state was taken town for you.
They also sprinkled in religious references to further appeal to evangelical boomers, again playing off the âX will save me, I donât need to get off my butt and do anythingâ angle.
I say all this because the overwhelming consensus among the crowd most associate with Q (center right to far right) is that Trump was a traitor and Q was a tool to keep his more radical fans from doing anything during his term.
Iâve never followed this. Are you saying that Q was a psyop by left-wing against right-wing to convince them not to vote?
I think likely the idea is that destabilization is good, and the more destabilization- regardless of left or right- the better. Though for some reason I suspect you already know this.
In general these days I have mixed feelings about piracy, mostly because a lot of people don't want to pay because "everything is very commercial and they only want money", yet a lot of the pirated content are incredibly commercial mainstream things (e.g. blockbusters). This leads me to the positive aspect of it: I recently remembered an old Canadian movie from my childhood, and wanted to watch it with my son, but despite so many streaming services, tough luck finding it legally. I bet I could find it within minutes on torrent.
So I would be happy if we were at least able to legally download things you can't really find "officially" because too few people care and nobody sells it.
Another case I find myself grabbing pirated copies of movies is when I click play on and the best bitrate (once it decides to "automatically tune" to it on my symmetric gig fiber) makes me think the members of YIFY went to go work at Amazon to try and get 4k HDR encodes to fit on DVD-9s.
This! I would say that if there is no simple way to find commercial content (for the location of the potential customer!), the law should treat the case as if the copyright owner waived their right to the copyrighted material.
So if you ever offer a work for sale, you're obligated to either sell it forever, or have it given away?
I think of this more like: Just while you're not offering your work for sale in a country, then we all just agree as a society to look the other way as it's pirated. But you can end this get out of jail free card at any time by providing an official alternative.
Not doing this creates memory holes for artistic content. TV shows from decades ago with unclear rights ownership will be gone, disappeared.
Not just offer it for sale, but if you ever publish it. Once you've let something be part of the common culture, it belongs to the people.
What's the difference between offering it for sale and publishing something? That seems like an artificial distinction.
Plenty of things are widely published without charging money for them, and things are sometimes sold but privately to a limited audience (e.g. Kit Williams' artworks) which I wouldn't consider to be publication.
I don't see how it's unreasonable these days. You can just simply leave it up on Bandcamp, GOG, and whatever may emerge in the future as a video ownership platform (as opposed to video rental).
Not unreasonable? It forces people to engage in commerce whether they want to or not, and "but we want it!" doesn't seem like the kind of compelling public interest that could justify that. Beyond that, it's trivially easy to work around (ok, now my software costs $10M a copy.)
Yes.
Yes, this is a huge positive. It serves as a kind of archiving enabler too.
I'm sure many years from now we'll be thankful that we can find 'obscure' movies and TV shows from the early 2000/10/20s etc
As Chamath pointed out on the All In Podcast, Pirate Bay and torrenting serve as competition for rights holders, keeping Hollywood pricing and quality in check, and thus a net good for consumers.
The 2013 TPB documentary -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTOKXCEwo_8
When Wadsted was asked whether it was worth the time and money, she replied with âAbsolutely!â
âEven though it was the American film companies that paid for my work, that work benefited all the authors and copyright holders. This is a very important but often forgotten aspect,â Wadsted told M3.
It really didn't benefit film companies tho, it exposed TPB to probably 100's of millions of people who didn't know about it previously. I wouldn't be surprised if more people know how to pirate content as a result.
She wasn't really answering whether it benefited film companies. Notice her answer immediately focuses on "paid for my work". The only way she can conceive of the question is "Did I personally profit from the campaign?", and that defines her moral horizons too.
Ah yeah I read the article at 2am. Youâre right I misunderstood what was written!
I've been reading a particular Science Fiction magazine for more than 50 years. When it first arrived on the Kindle I was delighted, no more lost subscriptions each time I moved, no more hunting newsagents to try and find a printed copy.
Everything went well for ten years, when suddenly my magazines stopped magically appearing on the Kindle each month. It turned out that the WiFi in my Kindle was broken. Not to worry, I'll just download the mag and sideload via USB.
But it is impossible to select recent editions on the Amazon website. It refuses to show any mags for this year.
Even if I bought a new Kindle, I still couldn't schedule my unread magazines for download.
So I tried to contact Amazon. It is now impossible to talk to Amazon by email. Only possibility is to talk via Chat. But after three very long sessions on Chat (last one being 8 hours long) I got absolutely nowhere.
The people on Chat simply couldn't understand what I was trying to tell them. And it was impossible to send them a screen shot which showed the problem (they no longer have email).
In the process they insisted on cancelling my account and starting a new one, which of course resulted in my losing ten years worth of magazines. However I persisted. After many times asking for the supervisor, they eventually agreed to send my report to "the technical people". And of course after a week or two I have I heard nothing back.
It's pretty obvious that this blocking of downloads is because various sites have managed to crack the Kindle DRM. But the infuriating thing is that the Amazon Web page (and the Chat operators) are not aware that it's been blocked.
Eventually I ran out of patience and cancelled all of my Amazon subscriptions.
In the past I spent a LOT of money on Amazon, but no more. Goodbye Amazon forever.
Similar experience with the Kindle. Lost some books but I will never buy into this DRM hellhole again. I feel sorry for the people that do. The readers are awesome in so many ways, but I went back to papers.
> And it was impossible to send them a screen shot which showed the problem (they no longer have email).
I have used imgur many times for sharing screenshots.
Since we are already paying for all the media we _might_ pirate, in the form of a tax on empty media lobbyed by the media conglomerates - new hard drives included; And our attention and consciousness are constantly exploited by a barrage of malicious advertizements and spyware; And our tools and computers are gradually stripped of our freedoms and capabilities of expression in favor of inescapable consumerism and engagement;
I feel absolutely justified employing whatever technological means available to bring equality and democratization to digital arts. I'm a political pirate.
http://piratebayo3klnzokct3wt5yyxb2vpebbuyjl7m623iaxmqhsd52c...
_> It is a cultivated myth that we would not have any streaming services for music, film and TV series if Pirate Bay did not exist. Those who claim it do not understand how technology development works._
Someone forgets how legacy copyright industry fights tooth and nail against any innovation, until they realize it's futile and then they try to start using technology instead of fighting it. This hasn't changed a bit. They literally do it every step of the way trying to slow progress down for the sake of their obsession with control.
With an occasional detour to try to push some sort of technology that nobody actually wants.
Torrents tied to a digital wallet is a clear next step. Creators could get paid and no need for a "distributor". Anyone could host pointers, we could download and pay when we watch.
I wonder if copyright will still be around in 50 years? It's easy to record music. It's easy to share music. It's hard to untangle what inspired a piece of music, and how much an artist reused previous work. I wonder when the whole scheme of copyright will collapse under its own weight.
This has been the case for at least 20 years, so why hasn't it collapsed yet?
20 years ago it was still difficult to download music.
In the 1990s and early 2000 there was much discussion around copyright. Specifically how much the fan base contributed to the success of a song. How much does each song borrow from others.
In the teens, many streaming services came about, people could legally listen to almost anything they wanted on Youtube. The conversation died down. 'Algorithms' helped to police Youtube.
What's going to be the next stage? I think just fatique with the whole industry. Maybe cancel copyright for authors that are found to be abusers?
"It is a cultivated myth that we would not have any streaming services for music, film and TV series if Pirate Bay did not exist. "
This is false. Although, if someone wants to argue that other piracy services were more influential in breaking the old DRM systems, I will debate it with you.
It's crazy DRM today has made screen capture almost impossible on consumer devices, and I see people use one device to photo the other just to share a screenshot to friends. If it turns out pirate can't be stopped by this, why bother anyway?
I know that screen capture is impossible on mobile phones. I use Linux and screen capture is definitely possible on linux.
Is screen capture possible on windows/mac?
It differs by streaming platforms, take Netflix by example[1][2], up-to-720p are fine in most browsers and software DRM, 1080p may get "soft locked", 4K are well locked by a combination of software and hardware spec (HDCP 2.2, ECP).
[1]
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23931
[2]
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55764
Linux is not relevant here. I don't think it has an equivalent of the protected path that is widely used by publishers.
This mess kinda reminded me why I've stopped watching movies altogether.
It's simpler to do anything else than putting a lot of effort figuring out when and where to watch something.
Stopping it may not be possible but the change of hands killed everything that was nice about tpb. Quality plummeted very fast and the last time I checked extremely obvious malicious torrents with faked seeder counts were at the top of the games section for days. The whole site looks like it lost its community and also it's heaps of obscure content.
I'm still grateful for the sysops of tpb and more importantly, Mininova for providing me with endless hours of entertainment before I had the means to stay in a private tracker.
Oh man, RIP to Mininova. First torrent site I ever used. I have many fond memories of that site.
The biggest being the introduction to all the content that was so far out of reach for me, as a young kid. I could get vintage games that were long out of sale in retail stores (this was before mass GOG and Steam game availability), and conveniently sized movies by aXXO.
Another memory was when they switched to legal-only content, creative commons stuff. Logging in one day and I had to double check why there was almost nothing "mainstream" present anymore. Introduced me to the concept of torrenting as a convenient, reliable method of file sharing, rather than just for getting stuff for free (illegally).
And a final present memory is seeing fudged peer numbers, which I'm so glad I have a screenshot securing this memory, and securing this time in history of the web.
https://i.ibb.co/tb2rV6h/mininova-2009.png
https://i.postimg.cc/63h9m9VW/mininova-2009.png
What a screenshot lol. Imagine trying to present that browser design as an MVP in 2021.
Wonât stop them from trying. The DRM folks have plenty of help from the evangelical âmoral policeâ who want to wipe out obscenity online, even where there is no victim.
DRM will never stop the pirates. As long as you can reproduce something, you can always record the output. For example, you can always record your audio output from Spotify or video output from Netflix.
DRM is a minor annoyance and nothing more.
DRM has nothing to do with pirating. Piracy is just a nice excuse.
DRM is about killing the second hand market. About keeping the market segmentation between countries. About killing fair use.
It has been very succesful in all of this.
But with streaming subscription services there is no second hand market. So there it must be just for piracy?
I agree it's totally useless. Just takes one person to record the output and it's done.
Just wait until Apple decides to "protect" its users from piracy by running a Content ID system client side. Then even if you can download a pirated file, your OS won't play it. If you're lucky, it will just delete the file, rather than informing the police.
That's just another DRM to be disabled.
If we can't disable it somehow, we'll switch operating systems.
Keep in mind that we're still seeing jailbreaks for iPhones after all these years.
> If we can't disable it somehow, we'll switch operating systems.
I admire your optimism. Unfortunately, once Apple has shown it is possible to prevent the playing of unlicensed copyrighted works, Windows and Android will have to match this or be treated as second-class platforms by the media industries.
Very few people will be willing to buy dedicated Linux computers (with custom Secure Boot keys) for watching torrented videos, and such devices will then become subject to more and more regulations, like having to pay an annual fee to the government.
Wasn't Apple one of the major vendors _removing_ DRM back in the iTunes days?
Apple don't give two shits about piracy.
Their own pro grade software that is paid for (logic, final cut) is always cracked basically day 1 of release and they've never made any attempt to tighten up authentication
How would Apple determine between an mp4 that is a pirated movie or a personal video you've downloaded to edit in Final Cut?
The same way that YouTube determines whether there is copyrighted music playing in the background of the video you upload, or the way Apple determines if you are trying to upload illegal images to iCloud.
> and nothing more
I strongly suspect DRM is not a way to stop someone but a security theatre serving as way to make money off the licensing and hardware. Thatâs why the industry does and always will require it - not because theyâre stupid to believe it protects something (though it nominally does) but simply because it greases their other hand.
Also, yeah, it kills the second hand market.
Let me give you an alternative view: DRM is a highly effective way for the movie industry to make money. No, it is not perfect, but DRM creates a system where:
1. Sharing is hard. Plenty of people legally purchase a movie, and then want to give it to their friends; DRM makes that difficult and thus generates at least some additional sales.
2. Forced obsolescence -- people who buy media legally can be forced to buy it again and again every time they buy a new entertainment device.
3. Creative business models -- in a world without DRM, you could not offer "rental" downloads, "streaming" would just be a form of "downloading," and the industry could not offer special "deals" like "family" passes that permit more than one account holder to view a purchased movie. All of these are ways to make money that could not happen in a world without DRM.
Yes, DRM is always broken after enough time -- that is not as much of a problem as you might expect. As long as the time between a DRM system being deployed and being broken is long enough that the industry makes back more than the cost of developing the DRM system, the system worked. Developing new DRM systems from time to time is just the cost of doing business, not really a problem for anyone in the industry, and as you point out it may even work to the benefit of certain participants.
I am not a big fan of DRM (in fact, I would argue that the entire movie industry needs to rethink its business model, embrace the true power of file sharing as a means of distributing movies and focusing more on using movies as a draw or value-add for other lines of business), but it is not as if the movie industry executives are a bunch of buffoons who continue to waste their money after decades of broken DRM. If DRM was not adding to the industry's profits they would have stopped bothering with it -- see e.g. the music industry, which has a somewhat different business model and which has largely given up on their DRM dreams.
Streaming-exclusive games are a notable exception to this, which is why it's so important to smash things like Stadia before they can gain a foothold.
Not even from a piracy standpoint, just a "I want to play this after the server/company shuts down" standpoint.
I know I won't spend a penny on a service like stadia or xbox game pass. Even if it does have good here and now offerings. Games are the last category of software you can still generally "buy" these days and get permanent access with a one-time payment.
>Games are the last category of software you can still generally "buy" these days and get permanent access with a one-time payment.
This isn't even remotely true.
Almost every game seems to have an online element and won't run at all if you aren't on the latest version.
Not for single player games, no. Or for many indie titles.
Eh, itâs still ownership. If they wanna stop offering me updates they need to release Farm Simulator 2022, but Farm Simulator 2021 will keep working indefinitely. Steam letâs you play the vast majority of your library offline (99%+ of single player games).
In actual fact, games need to be kept up to date in order to run okay on newer OS versions, and most of them are trying to get you to subscribe or otherwise DLC / microtransact you to death. Shame really
The analog hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
Which is one of the reasons behind the removal of the headphone analog output from various devices.
Which only raises the price of exploiting the analog hole by a relatively small amount -- it is not hard to buy better audio recording equipment to record the audio as it is being played, and the postprocessing needed to make it sound like the original is not very complex. A few thousand dollars (maybe low tens of thousands) wuold be enough to get you a rig that records a high-def movie with little noticeable loss, and anecdotally I have heard of such systems being used to rip TV shows as they air.
> buy better audio recording equipment to record the audio
Huh?! You can just buy a sound card or even a DAC for very little.
They believe the content creators are the victims
Wasn't the founder of Spotify the CEO of uTorrent?
IIRC, the uTorrent guy (Ludde Strigeus) was employeed by Spotify and worked on, among other things, the P2P feature in Spotify.
Kinda, Spotify bought uTorrent to get the head programmer then sold the company.
Spotify pirated early content.
Torrenting died because things like Netflix and Spotify came along, and they were âgood enoughâ - they didnât have _everything_ but they had enough stuff that it would leave most people happy.
Now though, things are becoming so fragmented again that I think itâll pick up. Most people are already sharing accounts to get around it partly.
Exactly. Spotify killed music downloading for me. Providing convenience and quality for a good price. Netflix did too for a while but the current level of fragmentation is crazy. It's more convenient again to download.
Spotify is a shitty service though that might decide your content is too controversial. So in the same breath its existence make sense for piracy. You can just hope creators don't get contracted by them.
Are we talking about Joe Rogan?
Consider the good that a piece of copyable art does. The happiness, insight and highness that it creates.
It's food for a person's soul. Multiplied a million times. The world is definitely made better.
Compare that good with the good of "the owner gets paid".
Pirating is clearly the _much_ greater good. Pirating is a moral necessity.
Itâll stop me if the certificate is invalid.
The Foundation is out on Apple TV and I'm already paying for 4 streaming services. Avast matey! Piracy isn't dead, it's just underground.
Maybe not, but its quality can tank so low that nobody recommends it anymore, which has long since happened.
Well the lawsuits were worth it mainly as a way to create a income stream for the lawyers
Piracy was cool when I was a college student with barely enough money to buy McDonalds, nowadays however I believe in paying for peopleâs work. It just seems fair. I donât work for free and I donât expect others to either.
And yes, this includes publishers and content providers, theyâre providing something of value too.
Good news: there will likely remain a steady stream of college systems with barely enough money to buy McDonalds. New people are being born all of the time. Some of them in developing countries, where they literally couldn't afford to pay for your product no matter how much they wanted to.
Piracy serves an important role for those people.
The Pirate Bay provides value also. So, how does that fit into your logic?
There is an interview with co-founders of Pirate Bay on darknet dairies.
The founders come across as very arrogant, making childish arguments and apparently unaware of how modern society in which they live functions. Also lots of F words.
I was put off.
> Also lots of F words.
They are not native English speakers. Learning english from American pop-culture makes you swear alot.
Also even native swear-words don't have the cultural taboo in Sweden that they do in anglo-cultures. The last time I remember someone frowning at curse words was when I was ~8 at the house of a classmate with very conservative Christian parents.
They have always been like this, yeah. Here is a link to their legal section on their anonymous VPS / anonymous DNS registry service:
http://njallalafimoej5i4eg7vlnqjvmb6zhdh27qxcatdn647jtwwwui3...
clearnet link :
Keep in mind that you also may have just come across as very arrogant and apparently unaware of how modern society functions.
> unaware of how modern society in which they live functions
how so?
Hasnt the website been down for months?
Nope.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PirateBay_Proxy/comments/qkax5j/pir...
Works fine on my end? The canonical domain is blocked by some ISPs around the world, but thereâs always the .onion site. You can find the links on Wikipedia probably.
