Well, Americans have been saying that about drug war, civil forfeiture, surveillance and many others things for a long long time.

... and its important to say, as experience shows, at this point its sadly irrelevant what average americans say.

while OP is right -- this doesn't seem to serve majority, the truth is that the system is rigged and this supposed to serve a few multinational corporations that feel their profits are severely cut due to copyright infringement, meanwhile posting record earnings.

it is still mind-boggling to me that this non-US human being doing allegedly non-violent crime will probably end up serving 25 years in american prison (wire fraud is a magic word in LE indictments) for a bunch of bits being configured the way to organize in magnet links that sharing of - as far as I know, similarly to URLs, had been found in courts around the world as a non-infringing act.

> the truth is that the system is rigged and this supposed to serve a few > multinational corporations that feel their profits are severely cut due > to copyright infringement, meanwhile posting record earnings.

Ignore that the system is rigged for the moment. I think it is safe to say these companies really like making more money. I have always wondered why then, they spend so much effort enforcing copyright laws rather than trying alternative methods to solve the problem and make more money.

E.g I know a lot of people who have some unblocking service and Netflix. Now they could increase prices for Netflix, so we wouldn't need the unblocking, but that's not on the cards. They would rather spend their efforts blocking me.

Is this purely to satisfy contractual obligations? I'd assume that any existing contracts must be in place for such a long time that making changes can't be done for quite a few years into the future and there is no realistic way to amend existing contracts. The contracts would have to cover new productions too.

Otherwise, this whole thing makes no sense to me. They appear to be giving up revenue, for no benefit to themselves.

Contracts with regional exclusivity give the content producers something a subscription model never will: a lump sum of risk free, up-front cash. People calling for global Netflix kumba ya with all content available are simply asking for producers to take a haircut.

I am honestly not aware of what Netflix contracts look like.

I'd have thought they also pay lump sums to get the streaming rights per territory.

Also I am proposing the subscription increases to get access, possibly per territory you want access to.

These contracts are seldom made public.

For one example of what we do know: House of Cards is not available on Netflix in Europe [1]. I'm sure Netflix is not happy with the situation but we can only guess as to what it would have cost them for the rights.

[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-subscribers-eu...

That is not correct anymore. At least in Germany, House of Cards is indeed on Netflix.

It's important to emphasize that it's science that says this, not just experience: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...

> to serve a few multinational corporations that feel their profits are severely cut due to copyright infringement, meanwhile posting record earnings.

That almost sounds like a Bernie Sanders level paranoia of words profits and corporations. Honestly share-worthy content exists because of these entities in first and I will never fault HBO, Adobe or Microsoft going after those who are pirating their software. I think it is government who is going after someone who cant defend himself and just pretending to have done something.

> I will never fault HBO, Adobe or Microsoft going after those who are pirating

That can mean very different things depending on your definition of 'going after'. If they chose to engage someone in a civil suit and could prove realistic damages, then in principle I wouldn't have a problem with them attempting to protect their IP.

But using the force and authority of the United States government (Homeland Security involved in enforcing IP infringement? Really?) to extradite a foreign national on criminal charges? That is in no way proportional to any of their perceived damages, and it goes to show just how bluntly the government is used as a tool by those with money and influence.

>But using the force and authority of the United States government (Homeland Security involved in enforcing IP infringement? Really?)

Homeland Security is in the copyright infringement business now. They've been added to the standard FBI warning at the beginning of all movies, probably as a way to make themselves feel better after all those mean TSA groping memes made people laugh at them.

Except that civil forfeiture is extremely profitable enterprise [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

So is the drug war. It all depends on where you're standing.

Prisons, lawyers, judges, social workers running drug rehab programs, feds (DEA, FBI), local police, defense industry selling helicopters, airplanes, surveillance technology, etc, etc.

An unthinkable amount of money has been spent and made from the drug war for highly questionable ROI to the public.

What type of reduction in police work would take place if the drug war was ended today? 20%? 30%?

The war on drugs is a job machine. DEA agents fly around like international playboys from the books I've read. Plus international governments get tons of money from the US to run their own interdiction programs.

There has to be some level of influence to keep the 'war' going from these perverse incentives.

> highly questionable ROI to the public

Only if you exclude people working for the public sector from you know, the public.

Those things create jobs for voting constituents. That's the main ROI here. Reduction in crime, drug use and increased security are just beneficial, but not necessary side effects of these initiatives.

Creating jobs for creating jobs sake is such a terrible justification. Especially because in this scenario (like many others) it's not a controlled economic stimulus but an ongoing money drain. Milton Friedman is turning in his grave seeing this idea become mainstream. These are highly skilled people too: lawyers, judges, and highly technical law enforcement who could be working on dealing with real crimes or protecting honest hardworking citizens. Not futile show trials to appease the copyright industry.

For some. Where's my cut?

Can't civilians exercise their right to seize anyone's cash?

Sure, Just like "Citizen's arrest" is a thing, I'm positive "Citizen's civil forfeiture" is too.

Ask the Bundy Clan about that

Government in general a profitable venture for those in government. You have to produce nothing, please no one and you get to decide how much money is your fair share of what others have worked hard to earn.

So did you make the roads you drove on to work? Impressive.

How about the fire, police, schools, environmental protections, consumer protections, and court system? How big is the military defending your patch of land?

I admit there are problems, but I'm always amazed when people say the government doesn't do anything, then take a car to work on public roads, listen to the radio (FCC), eat food (FDA), etc.

but whats your point??

he did make those roads... he paid taxes in gas, insurance, purchase of a car tax, license plate tax... all that do indeed sponsor roads he drives on!

as of military defending his patch of land, hard to argue. Africa is much bigger than USA -- how much they spent as a continent on defense? Bet 1000th of what US does. Other than that, he might choose to protect his own land with the second Amendment and keep military out of it, no?

Sure he sponsored the roads, but the government implemented those roads. Planning, buying, organizing, maintaining, etc are all part of the work that the government does.

I still don't get it. Who do you think paid for planning, buying, organizing and the cost of maintaining of all that??

All those things (planning, buying, organizing) are...work.

I was saying the government does lots of work. It doesn't always function great, but it does a lot right too.

No he didn't. If we abolished taxes tomorrow everything would fall apart.

Effectiveness has nothing to do with it. America is now just a simple goon to its corporations.

Uber did develop a more efficient system by stepping on legal lines and gray areas. They did have troubles after a while but not in the same way. Somehow network distribution has no 'economic' values to the eyes of authorities. I'd love to see some stats, in my mind p2p sharing wasn't growing, even going down Compared to the 2000-2010 era since people have other means to share and content (spotify, soundcloud, ...) and the novelty has faded.

I do profit from it from time to time to reach for very old clips, lives or albums that you cant find. It doesnt really hurt business if they dont sell it.

Spotify actually does use peer to peer distribution although it's not open source.

They don't anymore [1]. CDNs simply got too cheap to have a warrant a more complicated setup, that did not work on all their clients.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/17/spotify-removes-peer-to-pe...

I believe they stopped p2p distribution [1]

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...

Are you actually suggesting US companies compete on a free and open market, with consumers deciding which services and products deserve to survive based on the quality and price of the service/product? Then they might risk failing as a company just because consumers didn't like what they had to sell. Well I never! /sarcasm

>>>As an American, I wish we would stop doing this...

You can't really blame America. They've decided their jurisdiction extends to the entire planet. And, rather, than argue the point, the rest of the world just bends over and adopts the position. When faced with such supine sycophancy, why would America not keep acting this way?

I have utter contempt for Poland on this [and similar] case/s. What a contemptible lick-spittle, a once fiercely independent nation has become!

That sounds a lot like victim blaming. "They never said no, so what we did was totally fine!" Yes, other countries should say no to us more, but that doesn't absolve us for being a jerk.

am i the only one to walk away from this story thinking there must be a better way to handle large transactions than banks and cryptocurrencies.

Gold and diamonds?

also not without its problems. but yes. something like:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

outside of the US. seems plausible.

Indeed, we should. Comrade Page, comrade Brin, I'd like to have the Google software stack. IP rights are an outdated concept and the collective has decided that Google's stack belongs to the people.

Besides, everything is just bits! If you represent the whole monorepo as a single integer, denying people access to it would be akin to patenting a natural number!

There are indeeed illegal numbers

Yes, but only with context. The numbers by themselves are of course just numbers.

you could say that from the actions that occur in France if not the EU that is how they view it across the ocean. Become the best search engine only to be told you cannot favor your own services, if that is not an indirect declaration you are now a public service I am not sure what would be

It's not public service, it's regulation? You can do what you want as long as you conform to certain rules.

For example we have private electricity providers, but the prices are regulated and capped. Private companies can't just do whatever they want when it concerns things we consider to be people's fundamental resources.

As always, the freeloaders are flagging the thread whenever too many pro-copyright comments appear.

A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones can go to iTunes and, within seconds, purchase and start watching. And it will be in better quality than the torrent which was ripped off some TV broadcast and re-compressed. iTunes is available for both Windows and Mac (plus various iOS) and is super simple to use. And the one purchase lets you either stream or download to any of your devices and watch whenever you want.

The very latest content does get artificially restricted due to various business reasons (licensing deals, etc.) and I suspect that will change over time to go to an instant-release model. Ditto for fewer geo restrictions. We're starting to see these changes more and more. For music, there are far more options available: Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, etc. where one low monthly fee lets you play almost anything you want.

However, despite all this incredible ease for lots of different media, people still want content for free. Maybe the solution is to combine enforcement with an educational campaign so that people are aware of the myriad legal options available to them.

As an American living in Australia, I'd say your perspective is kind of skewed by the American market. A large number of torrenters aren't cheapskates or thieves but are from outside the U.S. and unable to even get ahold of this stuff due to the way licensing overseas works. Or if they do, it's at 1.5x-2.5x the price.

We have a 21st century distribution model tied to a mid-20th century legal framework and business model. It's hard to say what is fair in every case. What I feel is not fair is throwing the book at all of these site owners, especially when the laws are written in the U.S. but are somehow stretched to where they apply to people who never set foot there.

In 5-10 years, they could still be in jail while technology remakes itself to the point where either distribution and payment has finally started working gain, or torrenting has gotten to the point where it's nearly impossible to trace the activity to any one person. Neither option seems unlikely, and punishing people now for something that doesn't hurt anyone too much does not seem like it's worth it.

I'll give some more examples of use cases where the torrent system serves users better than the legal distribution, but has nothing to do with money.

My wife is Brazilian and I'm British, so we're trying to bring our son up as bilingual. Trying to find legally distributed mainstream kids films dubbed in Portuguese is incredibly hard. Sure, you can buy them in Brazil... and then they don't play on hardware in the UK. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime have them. Meanwhile, a quick search on a torrent download site gives me access to hundreds of mainstream films dubbed in Portuguese.

Torrents allow me to watch anything, anywhere, with minimal hardware. I don't need to buy DVDs or DVD players. I don't have to work out which subscription I need to use to watch the latest episode of a program. I have downloaded torrents for which I already own the Blu-ray DVD, but it's in a box somewhere and I can't be bothered to find it.

So yeah, there are lots more use cases for torrents than just wanting to be a cheapskate.

Similarly in the UK - if [!] our DVD player broke, someone might torrent the content we've paid for when we bought the DVDs on our shelf here.

Of course that may be a tortuous infringement. In the UK we briefly had a right to format shift but the media corps managed to kill that breakout of common sense pretty quickly.

We're in a pretty ridiculous legal situation again now, https://torrentfreak.com/itunes-is-illegal-under-uk-copyrigh... - ripping a CD you own is considered copyright infringement. It's moronic, there's no way the public would ever vote for this situation.

If such format shifting were to happen, I don't see what could possibly considered morally wrong about it?

Note: You can find some shows on youtube.

Cheers and abraços

My son liked Fishtronaut / Peixonauta [1] which was made in Brazil and released in Portuguese, Spanish, and English simultaneously, I think (it's on Netflix in the US).

1: http://tvpinguim.com/peixonauta/

Obrigado! We found a few kids shows - Palavra Cantada has a great channel on there, and there are a few Turma da Monica episodes.

But not films like Toy Story.

That was my point though -- excluding people who are in different markets, have special language needs, etc. etc. you're left with 95+% of the US market who have very efficient ways of legally licensing all but the very latest unreleased or specialty content. Yet still a huge number of those people pirate that content. So I just don't buy the argument that it's a lack of efficient systems that leads people in the US to pirate stuff. I suspect they do it because it's become socially acceptable and they'd just rather not pay for stuff they can get for free.

The motivation of people can vary a lot. For a big part of the world, the price of digital content is just not realistic at all.

For other people, like me, it's the lack of a reliable, convenient, well done solution. I won't touch iTunes with a 50 feet pole. All the on demand services I've tried have a limited catalog, reliability problems, stupid policies, try to push a bunch of stuff down my throat.

The torrent flow is perfect. Type the name of almost anything, wait 5-15min for it to download. Quality is amazing, no commercials, no bullshit.

I would gladly pay $100/month if I could go to IMDB and have a one click, 1080p download button on everything. Seriously.

> it will be in better quality than the torrent which was ripped off some TV broadcast and re-compressed

Sorry to say, but that is very out of touch.

The problem is that where I'm from, $100 is a weeks pay. An average Blu-ray costs a full days wage. VOD solutions exist, but they are expensive, poor quality, and are usually not in configuration I want/like(no subtitles/forced subtitles/forced dub). The internet is a global thing - a US or UK citizen can easily afford a brand new film. But move slightly further away from 1st world countries and new media is either too expensive for your average person or simply not available.

I used the $100 to express that I would be willing to spend a decent chunk of cash on a great service, I agree the price would need to be adjusted depending on the country.

I've lived in South America for quite some time, and paying $20 for a movie is completely out of the question for 95% of people. Piracy is completely open here, everywhere you have shops burning and selling bootleg DVDs for around $1.

I'd pay like a buck or two (or three) per movie. I don't have time to watch a movie every day. I tried Netxflix but they had at most a fifth of the movies I was looking for, so I cancelled the service again. I don't understand why the studios don't have sites of their own where I can just pay a bit and download a copy of any movie they ever made.

I'm a person in (1) the Netherlands, who wants to watch the (2) latest season of the Game of Thrones, runs (3) Linux without Apple-software like iTunes, and who does not want to buy (4) single items but has subscriptions on a service like Spotify.

The solution is not to educate the public, but to fix the distribution model.

Even my little sister has been using online streaming sites since she was 12, because she wanted to continue watching her favourite TV show, but in english, so she could pretend to be learning something for school while having fun.

No way to get the english dub even anywhere close to release in Germany, so the only solution was such a streaming site.

And now with the VPN ban, Netflix is useless, too. There's no realistic alternatives.

This.

It's not that I want conntent for free, I just don't want to be forced to pay for it. I view copyright terms as extremely excessive and copyright itself a restriction on the freedom of information, and thus, immoral. So I'll do by best to pirate and avoid copyright laws... (simlar to what people do with taxes).

"A person in the US who, for example, wants to watch all but the latest season of Game of Thrones"

This is simply not true. In my experience, only the most mainstream content is available legally on portals like itunes or netflix. If you want to watch something more rare (art film, old foreign film, film with subtitles in different language) you can try to buy very expensive DVD+shipping and wait few weeks for it to arrive or you have to use illegal sources.

Much of humanity has no access to what you are talking about. Without torrents and sharing most of humanity will have no experience of Game Of Thrones.