There's no obligation for society as a whole to support your business model above and beyond enforcing basic property rights via due process. If your business model requires throwing due process out of the window to be sustainable, go find some other way to earn money; it's not like there are no options.

The business model relies on societal guarantees against serious crime.

You can't be serious when you claim that illegal streams raking in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars for popular sports through plague like ad banners are the innocent party that should be allowed to operate freely.

Why not punish all the ad networks that, in retrospect allow their ads to be shown on these illegal streams? Don't they have an obligation to ensure their ad models aren't supporting illegal businesses?

The dual standards by intelligent tech workers who should know better is one of the biggest shames of our time.

I don't think anyone is saying that. I think the problem is systemic and to fix the problem, focus needs to be put on why their is rampant piracy in this sector. Hence why someone posted the [Piracy-is-a-service-problem](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...) from Gabe Newell.

The internet is a vast ocean of interdependencies, its not like the tangible world, as such, it requires different strategies to combat. This is why the software gaming industry is flourishing and not declining because someone decided to work on the problem from the point of the service, and the rest followed suit.

Tech workers, for the most part, know how much of a scam most intellectual property really is.

But leaving that aside, the existence of illegal activity doesn't automatically justify arbitrarily severe measures to suppress it. With pretty much anything, there's a line that we draw and say, "this is what you can use to enforce it". The measures that were proposed above are way past any sensible line in a free society, especially for a strictly economic crime.

How would you rate the relative significance of these things:

- blocking of IP addresses on an ISP level, introduced via court order

- folks who organize hockey lose some revenue

For me, the former is a 10/10, the latter maybe a 3/10. About as severe as ..bike theft. Happens all over the place, costs normal people quite a bit of money and distress, and no one does a thing about it.

This reflects an inappropriate influence of that sports league on law and society, don't you think?

We aren't reducing the argument to your simplistic depiction which is misleading at best.

We have businesses investing legally in producing and securing rights to content. We then have internet ads businesses incentivizing unverified actors to convert any impressions to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts even if those impressions occur on stolen content. How is this fair?

The legitimate businesses are losing their ability to re invest proceeds into their business thus permanently impairing them since who's to say the high price of streaming and linear TV is not a consequence of stolen revenue thanks to these illegal streams?

We will never know since society has turned a blind eye and has decided "Just too bad, let those assholes die, it's not my problem" while Ad networks and criminals laugh their way to the bank.

I think there are other remedies that would be more palatable. Perhaps making it illegal for ad networks to advertise on stolen content and let Rogers and Bell sue the ad networks that do so. Perhaps requiring Rogers and Bell to sue the pirates directly?

But the solution of turning off parts of the internet by blocking I.P.s which could block large parts of the internet if for example a pirate uses cloud flare is unacceptable.

It’s also problematic that it could end up blocking all kinds of locally hosted content from any number of ISPs using dynamic IPs. Your IP could end up blocked and other ISPs would prohibit video games from connecting to you because someone else used the same I.P. for some type of content piracy earlier.

I . .agree. I opened my comment with the line “What’s the recourse, then” for precisely this reason.

I’m calling the rogue elements of the internet, ie ad networks that behave in a scummy manner with zero transparency, integrity and self regulation , as the bad nodes. I don’t advocate for the blocking of IPs , I advocate for legal challenges that provoke a wider response (regulatory, policy, etc). The judicial system staying largely silent instead of issuing rulings in favor of the plaintiff that at least find the Content to be of a stolen and illegal nature while dismissing the petition to block the IPs , gives them some recourse in law. . .right now, the status is ambiguous , so allowed. Which is really pathetic of us as a society.

> Well, what is the recourse for legitimate businesses then?

Maybe try selling it?

Paramount refuses to sell Star Trek in my country, or let other people sell it, thus Paramount gets no money from me.

My understanding of region blocks in the US with sports games is they are often blocked but there's no way to subscribe to ESPN or whatever to watch it because another broadcaster has the rights to show it, but have decided to show it later that night (not live), or not show it at all.

Isn't it a chicken and egg problem? The existence of this illegal market can never allow legitimate sales to exist sustainably.

When people can just google " f movies <insert_movie_name_here>" and watch the movie series you mention in HD, unfettered, and ad networks reap the reward of turning a blind eye. . . this makes a sustainable market for legitimate goods impossible because the scale simply does not exist for enough people to subscribe to a streaming service or to invest in paying to watch so the costs drop at scale etc.

Except there is a sustainable market, just make it available on amazon, apple, etc.

I just finished watching the first Jurassic World with the kids, if cost £3.50 on apple. I have a feeling I may have a dvd or bluray of it somewhere in a box as I've seen it before, and it wasn't at the Cinema, but it wasn't worth the half hour trying to find it.

Discovery Season 1-3 was on netflix, Picard and Lower decks on Amazon Prime. Discovery Season 4 came out on amazon and apple at something like £2 or £3 an episode.

That's how you make money. It doesn't cost a lot to put your program on platforms like Amazon or Apple (Presumably it's a simple "x% of the price in commission").

> Well, what is the recourse for legitimate businesses then? When pirates can set up shop and distribute content that is expensive to produce, how do these businesses evolve to a more flexible model when an unknown large chunk of their rightful proceeds are directed elsewhere?

I think this falls under argument from lack of imagination. Overreach shouldn't be justified because we haven't yet figured out how to solve the problem. I still lock my car and house. I invest in that security because it is important to me. I think they could invest in their own solutions to solve some of those problems without gov't interference.

Let me rephrase that for you:

“We haven’t figured out how to prosecute criminal theft in the open on the internet where we choose to allow ad networks and hosts to blatantly flout the laws our societies are built on”

And I’m the one making an argument with a lack of imagination?

It’s often difficult to impossible to get sports streams. It feels like they don’t want you watching their product unless you’re prepared to pay thousands. Conversely, these ramshackle pirating operations get by on ad revenue just fine.

It seems like these sports leagues could easily bring thousands of viewers back into the fold by not trying to charge thousands just to watch one stream. It’s just not feasible since most sports-watchers watch every sport and don’t have the multi-thousands to purchase every streaming package.

> Conversely, these ramshackle pirating operations get by on ad revenue just fine.

Is that surprising? The pirate operations don't contribute to the production of the sporting events or anything at all, they just have hosting/streaming costs.

I imagine in stead of crowd sourcing (which would work) we could have crowd ordering and pay after delivery. The IOU's would be near-instant value created out of raw ideas.

Society evolves into communism. These are just the complications of late stage capitalism where we are still trying to patch the leaks. But, as you alude to, it is impossible to have a capitalist system where the commodity (sharing files and data) has zero cost or value.

Communism failed long before capitalism, so I'm not sure your statement is really based on reality.

Communism is a classless post-scarcity society; it wasn't ever achieved, so how could it have failed?

If you mean USSR and the likes, those guys were claiming to "build" communism, with authoritarian socialism ("dictatorship of the proletariat") as the ostensibly required temporary stage that was supposed to be brief and kept getting indefinitely extended. However, none of them have ever claimed to achieve it.

It’s never been achieved because it would never work.

I mean the USSR was willing to murder people who opposed the idea and it still failed.

And China tried it and abandoned it out of failure true.

Your rationale is the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

It's never been achieved because it was never really tried. To reiterate, what USSR and China had was not communism even according to themselves - I'm not even talking about impartial outside observers here! - so, pray tell, how is it the "no true Scotsman" fallacy?

Both China and the USSR conducted mass collectivation, land reform, commune models among other things to move away from capitalism to a communist model of public ownership. They even killed dissidents, violently oppressed public protests and starved their own people in the attempt.

And it was a massive failure.

It's a "no true Scotsman" fallacy because as long as attempts at moving to a communism model fail, supporters will just say "that wasn't true communism" ignoring the fact that if you can't actually create a functioning communist system that's indicative of failure of the model itself.

Like I said, everything that you have describe was not communism - it was a particular recipe for supposedly building it. And yes, that recipe was a massive failure, and few people on the left believe that it could have ever been anything but.

But here we're talking about communism naturally arising out of technological post-scarcity. What does that have to do with Soviet model of "public" (actually, state) ownership, or killing dissidents, or violently oppressing anyone?

If we can have communism in the solar punk sense without surveillance and all the scarcity, then I am in. If not, then that idea better dies in hell.

The idea is that it's not something that we can really choose to try or not. If/when we get to the stage where enough is produced to allow post-scarcity even in theory - i.e. the technology and the logistical science is there - it implies an extreme degree of automation. But if we have that, how would a traditional capitalist economy even work, if all that automation is concentrated in relatively few hands as it is now?

It works today because the owners of capital need workers to make that capital produce something useful, and even with all the economic rent fleeced from them, those workers still retain enough to then buy the products (if not their own, then that produced by somebody else). This enables money to cycle in the economy. But the more things are automated, the more people are unemployed, and - in capitalism - effectively excluded from the productive economy. So it's a question of how many people you can so exclude before the whole thing crumbles down.

Post-scarcity will never happen. How do you pay for the latest medical technology unless you have the money to develop it? How about other technology?

Maybe capitalism will be replaced at some point but you and I will be long dead before that ever happens.

Capitalism may well become as dirty of a word as Communism or Socialism in our lifetimes. When food, healthcare & shelter become unaffordable to enough people, this legal fiction, too, will fail into untold suffering and revolt. History does indeed rhyme.