There are problems with such parties at the local level because it's hard to unite on other issues, but at the EU level, the Pirate Party representatives consistently have presented (in my view), the most technically correct interpretations of internet laws and regulations for example, all the topics around data privacy, etc. They are not "hurr durr I wanna get free stuff" at all, and most other representatives remind me of my grandpa that had no clue what a computer even was.
To me, donating and voting for people who are technically correct is a way better way to effect change than just trying to have some mass coordination around piracy / boicots, those never work.
Outside of Europe I have no idea what something effective would be. Unfortunately the patent / copyright apparatus is very very strong and the political pressure US groups put on the world is very hard to combat.
A good book about the subject of patents and this apparatus and how they basically muscled the world into abidding to US lobbies, including massively fucking poor countries with respect to pharmaceutical patents is "Information Feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy?" https://thenewpress.com/books/information-feudalism
Solutions like that or, "if everyone would just _", or "everybody needs to _" will never happen. Just my own rule of thumb.
Nah, you know what, forget it, give up, shits fucked and people are dumb. /s
Edit to add: unleaded fuel, catalytic converters, emmision standards, one third of owner-occupied homes in Australia have rooftop solar, the widespread acceptance of anthropogenic induced climate drivers.
Cristal mass is "if everyone would just".
Legislation largely works because those subject to it largely agree to abide.
If everyone would just agree to stop using the old thing / start doing the new thing.
I think it takes time.
Other stuff, like communism, really requires "if everybody would just". An arbitrarily small number of defectors will make the system tip towards collapse.
I would think it has to be relatively easy to decrypt given that the Blu-Ray player has to either send a decryption key to the TV via the HDMI cable, or the TV has to already have a decryption key that could presumably be skimmed.
Playback Device (Roku etc)
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Splitter ------ Unauthorized Player (Recorder)
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Authorized Player (TV)
Since the TV obviously has the capability of decrypting the content it seems like there should be a way to split the signal somewhere between the main TV board and the display panel(s), which sounds like a big deal. Or maybe someone could make an incomplete splitter / recorder that just needs a legit Samsung board attached to it?
I think what you're saying is basically what's happening. The HDMI splitter pretends to be a display/TV, so the playback device sends encrypted data to the splitter, which decrypts it and forwards the decrypted part over the HDMI connections.
From what I could find, it's usually the cheap HDMI splitters that emit unencrypted data over the HDMI ports. That kind of makes sense; they implement HDCP inbound because they have to, but they leave HDCP off the output ports because it reduces their manufacturing cost.
I think you can't just "forward" the encrypted packets, because then both outputs on the splitter would try to communicate back to the player, causing issues. The splitter has to MITM the connection.
https://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/remove-hdcp-hdmi-s... has some cursory info, and links to HDMI splitters that strip HDCP (not an endorsement of whatever you do with them, just an interesting device).
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41...
So we're back to the state of you don't actually have property rights in any of the things you own or paid for.
so one has 2 options, a database of VUKs that others generate (don't need a device key then) or getting a device to give up its key so that one can generate VUKs onesself. The problem with this is, that that key (if made public) will then be revoked itself.
i.e. I don't consider this being cracked, this is the encryption working exactly as designed.
> ...making piracy easy and appealing is essential
This sounds a little too naive to me. Every platform that has made significant progress towards these goals has run into massive legal opposition. And then it becomes an ever changing, moving target cat and mouse game between opposing sides. Not to mention the dangers of malware, etc lurking within sought after content - how can you guarantee safety?
I agree that copyright itself needs reform, but looking back over the last ~25 years and how big corporations have become more advanced at fighting online piracy, I don't see piracy as the central mechanism to create the big cultural shift you speak of.
They lobbied for laws to explicitly prevent this, and given the strict constructionalist nature of the current courts, its unlikely we'll regain or be able to enforce these rights in this capacity without significant intervention by policy makers.
[0] Not the real acronym, but this one allows me to call the media conglomerates the MAFIA for a bit of a giggle
You only have to buy a DVD once. There's no subscription fee. You can easily lend it, (or borrow one from the library). You don't have to download any untrusted software or learn how to configure it, and the creators still get paid.
This is IMO the most internet native way to produce content. Copyright on digital media is a legacy technology that we don't need in world where distribution is basically free and unstoppable.
Crazy that HN still misses that permissionless composability is the key benefit of blockchains.
Don't even get me started on how bad patents are.
Imagine for example something like the Expanse being crowd funded. That's about $3.5 - $5 MM per episode - a huge amount. And then it takes a year or more to see the content. And the Expanse wasn't really that expensive in the scale of things.
Unfortunately, until a better model emerges, the media juggernauts do serve a function in the marketplace as financiers.
You're probably pushing more triangles in ten seconds of a modern video game at 4K than in the entire run of Babylon 5's groundbreaking CGI usage. So we've definitely got the resources available to deliver broadcast-quality CGI video to the masses, and the right tooling could make it accessible.
I could imagine franchises that started with modest visuals, and if they can find bigger backers (more subscribers, advertisers, merchandising, whatever), they can level up with more resources behind them.
I also imagined that studios and directors would love the idea of CGI actors-- you could do things that are still infeasible with practical effects, you can pull them back out 10 years later and they haven't aged, and you don't need to worry that they'll suddenly go on a binge that effects their ability to film.
Blatantly false. The majority of these small creators are Twitch Streamers, Tik-tockers, Youtubers these days. All of them give their work away for free effectively.
In particular, the value in the Twitch-stream is from interacting with the chat realtime. Its effectively a live performance tied to a chatroom in some niche subject matter that the audience is interested in.
All of those can probably be released public-domain and free to copy, and they won't lose a single subscriber.
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Others are paid primarily through their Patreon account or other forms of merchandise (dolls, plushies, etc. etc.). Or direct advertisements inside of the content (see Oversimplified and VPN). You can't "skip" the ad because the Ad is part of the video itself and worked into the script.
Based on where people spend their money, your preferences are in the minority.
Juggernauts are able to put their movies in theaters or cable/streaming television, put trailers in front of other movies or tv shows, take out billboards, etc. Juggernauts are able to market the hell out of their products, while most little guys don't have that opportunity.
I imagine that this also has a lasting effect. For example, juggernauts are more likely to have a streaming service trying to pick up their media while also putting that media ahead of little guy's media in that streaming service's recommendations. I'd also guess that over time the probability of organically finding little guy's media drops at a significantly faster rate than juggernaut's media .
Blumhouse wouldn't be where they are without the juggernaut's purposefully propping them up.
How many paying subscribers does YouTube have compared to Netflix?
People are still willing to pay for things, they just want a copy of the thing that they paid for so that it cannot be stolen from them later. The only answer here IS piracy.
How many people here still have a functioning VCR? Hell, how many still have a functioning DVD player?
Continually adding on user hostile additional revenue streams, like adverts, on top of something i already paid for is one of the major drivers of piracy.
There's not always another choice.
How about i pay for things I’m buying but take a pirate copy as a backup?
It’s already clear that if you make digital content available at a reasonable price people will pay for it. The thing we’re arguing about is who is stealing from whom.
Here’s a genuine dichotomy. Assuming I’m interested in the media, then I’m either buying or I’m renting. If I’m renting call it renting. If I’m buying don’t steal it from me later by hiding the fact that it’s a rental in thousands of lines of legalese.
And even those gains, which were won with overwhelming disobedience, because early internet people were at least technical enough to burn a cd are now being eroded again, but under different guise. Piracy stopped being a thing, because it got easier to get stuff you wanted when you wanted it without trolling the internet. Now with streaming wars coming to a close, content owners think they will get to impose rules not realizing that they are making the same mistake thinking kids will not learn how to bypass whatever restrictions they put in place all over again.
History. Rhymes. All that.
It is not obvious to me than having copyright is better than not having it. It would be better for some people and worse for others.
To wit, intellectual property itself is likely a concept that keeps us locked in a local maximum.
tying money to art cheapens it.
art is priceless, attaching a price therefore is a regression.
Not everything is about money, not everything needs to be done.
better that it is free: if you couldn't sell movies - the only ones that would exist are the ones people truly wanted to make - the quality of the artform would skyrocket, even if the quantity plummets.
The general narrative and has been if you copied it without written authorization, you are a pirate. Even if you are archiving a copy for future generations.
You can't even look up news articles from 10 years ago because of that.
The only way I see this changing anytime is through a massive cultural shift in our views toward intellectual property, and I think the only way we can make that happen is by bringing it to the forefront of people's minds.
I'm not sure, but I think making piracy easy and appealing is essential to taking the wind out of the sails of the enormous entrenched interests that seek to lock down IP. Ultimately copyright is a tool that serves those who can buy up copyrights a whole lot more than it serves artists, and that fact is very corrosive to our society. Artists and creatives still need protection and support, but Disney and Amazon can go fuck themselves.
Basing our economic system in the digital world on artificial scarcity doesn't make any sense and artificial scarcity itself is morally incorrect.
P.S. Since people may ask if I have any concrete solutions. No, not really other than I think everyone would be better off if copyright and patents were limited to something sane like 10 years with no option to extend that time.