Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir...
by RHSeeger on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:13PM
(#24287338)
> If it's data, it can be freely copied and processed. There's little anyone can do in order to stop it even if it's not supposed to be happening.
Property laws exist to stop the strong from just taking what they want from the weak. Effectively, someone can point to something and say "this is mine, you cannot have it", and either society backs them up on this or it does not. The only thing preventing someone from stealing your car, house, money, etc are laws.
The same is true of digital goods. Someone can point at them and say "this is mine" and the either society backs them up or it doesn't. You can argue that you're not depriving the creator of anything by taking a copy of a digital good, but you are; you're taking away from their ability to support themselves.
Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir...
by sjy on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @06:25PM
(#24288022)
That’s a pretty generous view of the purpose and history of property laws. This article is about American media companies using intellectual property laws to get individuals in foreign countries arrested.
If it's data, it can be freely copied and processed. There's little anyone can do in order to stop it even if it's not supposed to be happening.
> Taken to the extreme, does this extend to the realm of people's appearance? With deepfakes I can 'pirate' someone's face and voice to be used for things they would never agree to.
I'm not sure about this. I feel that the real damage is the defamation of a real person's character by the fabrication, not the act of modifying an image or video of the person.
2.) All distribution mediums are middle-men between a creator and a consumer. Whoever is making money as a middle-man is in the wrong. The person making the least money as a middle-man is the least-wrong.
I generally agree with this. For example, when people buy music CDs most of the money goes to the record company while relatively little goes to the actual musicians. I think that's screwed up.
I also think it's extremely offensive when "pirate" sites try to monetize their sites in any way.
> Piracy services only make money on selling ads and file-download/storage subscriptions, and not on a per-consumption basis. They make the least profit from the middle-manning, so pirating services are the least wrong middle-men.
None of this is necessary. There is absolutely no need for centralized and costly streaming platforms or hidden "pirate" servers. All of these are solutions to problems created by copyright.
Were it not for copyright, we'd be able to share all kinds of data over peer-to-peer technologies like napster, torrents, IPFS. It's a solved problem. The solutions are so good they'd kill the content distribution industry were they legal.
> 3.) Creators don't need monetary/financial/fame incentives, they should only create for the act of creation-itself.
I have no problem with creators getting paid. I just think they shouldn't be able to get paid by exploiting the copyright system. They could create a Patreon and get paid for the act of creating instead. That'd enable them to release their works into the public domain.
> Consumers will naturally request and "commission" more work from the creator if their work is good.
Yes.