US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir... by bitwize on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @03:28PM (#24286273)

Do you know anybody who works in the creative fields? I do. Nearly all of them -- aside from the programmers -- favor strong copyright and even DRM. And to them, large piracy networks are as much organized theft, and do as much harm, as the Mafia robbing banks. The MPAA and RIAA are not evil to them, either, at least not in the sinister cyberpunk megacorp sense favored by hackers. Creative people see them as the means to put food on the table by doing what they love. They see pirates as stealing food from the mouths of their children and themselves, and as vicious a criminal as any bank robber. U.S. law provides the means to prosecute them as such.

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Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir... by drtillberg on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @03:55PM (#24286559)

That sounds right. There's some inside baseball to this, but DRM doesn't always fit neatly in the big-biz, small-biz dichotomy. The market power of the FAANGs is at least partly from strip-mining the fair use exceptions, and using data at an extreme scale without compensating creators.

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Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir... by Nasrudith on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @04:17PM (#24286784)

And farmers thought the tarriffs would help them. I don't see what size has to do with their entitled delusions for unenforceable at scale laws.

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Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir... by Nasrudith on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @03:56PM (#24286572)

Their collective delusions don't make them any less wrong.

To call copying theft implies a spooky action at a distance to drain money from their account like a voodoo doll. Under that twisted logic if I have a sealed room and keep making copies of Harry Potter I can bankrupt JK Rowling! Hell it would be useful to test if it I can use it for superluminal communication.

Magic snark aside they are literally in denial of objective reality including conflating a granted monopoly with physical property. There is a difference even if illustrations would have to be rather fantastic. If merpeople or aliens from Alpha Centuari were making copies of our goods they would not even be violating our laws because they wouldn't be party to any treaty with them and out of our jurisdiction. Not so with literal theft where a freight captain would be justified using force in self defense against sea people/aliens.

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Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir... by themacguffinman on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @04:12PM (#24286732)

You're twisting the argument. Pirates aren't copying content in a sealed room, they are distributing it to people for free. If you kept making copies of Harry Potter and gave it to anyone for free, it's not delusional to argue that JK Rowling would be far poorer than she is now. Harry Potter is an exceptionally popular product so the reduced revenue may still be enough for JK Rowling, but less popular and more niche content may not work out well enough for their content creators.

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Re:US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier pir... by tgsovlerkhgsel on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @03:59PM (#24286600)

And the content industry is massive, revenue wise, which explains why the government is expending such large resources to protect its interests.

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