SOPA (maybe?) DroppedFollow

So, lets have a reasonable discussion on valid ways to reduce piracy.

First, we need to approach the reasons why people turn to ThePirateBay and other places for their ill gotten goods.

1. Convenience. I have a copy of Vista Home Premium (gag) OEM that I downloaded off TPB because my father in law lost his installation CDs, and it would take Toshiba a month to get them for me. He had a valid Vista license because he bought a laptop that included the shiny sticker on the bottom. Far, far easier to just find a torrent, call Microsoft and go through the automated nag prompts, and be done with it. I think all PC retails should have OEM copies of their OSes available for download, if you have a valid service tag or serial number. It's just as easy for me to enter a serial number on a website as it is to enter Microsoft's 56 digit security code.

2. Price. Brand new content is too expensive. Older content is too expensive. I think opening night tickets for a movie should be jacked up in price (because the fans will pay it), and then the price should rapidly decay after that first all important box office weekend is over, until a month later it's out of theaters and a buck to watch on Video On Demand. For music, CDs need to include more value added goodies as an incentive to buy them. (I own two actual FFXI music CDs, not because I wanted the music, but because I wanted the little in game item....) For books, hardback collector's editions should always cost more than the digital editions, but also come with something extra.

3. Timeliness. This applies primarily to the foreign language import market (e.g. Japanese anime and manga). Under the "old" model, an anime would come out in Japan, after it was finished showing it would be licensed for release in the US, and a year or two later put out in very nice quality on DVD. That model went on life support, the moment anime fans discovered crappy Real Media Sachi Gumi fansub VHS rips, and died an ignoble death once digital subtitling became fast and easy. (Took down many a media company too, such as Pioneer, Central Park Media, etc, that had staked their business on that model.) The content producers in Japan finally said, "If you can't beat them, join them" and officially sanctioned Crunchy Roll was born. Episodes are released in English, subtitled, at decent quality, shortly after they air in Japan. Viewers watch ads - sometimes the original ads in Japanese when they're for products also produced in the US. Fans get to watch fresh anime shortly after it airs in Japan, but episodes are not archived forever, and if you missed the first season of Naruto, well, time to go buy a box set.

There are other reasons people pirate, but price, access, and convenience are the big three.

Crunchy Roll and Netflix are two good industry solutions to the "access" part. Apple just took aim at book prices, 99 cent iTunes downloads are a good example of a price point most people can agree on, and RedBox rentals is about as cheap as a non pirated movie can get.

The big thing that companies are dragging their feet on is convenience. This is because they want to control when, where, and how people experience their content, even when the time and place the content is available is inconvenient or nonexistent. I want to listen to music in MP3 format on my Walkman headphones. That rules iTunes right out. I want to finish fixing this laptop today, not when you finish sending me the physical CDs in the mail three weeks from now. I want to watch the movie from the comfort of my couch, not on opening night in a very loud theater surrounded by sweaty men and crying babies.




Edited, Jan 20th 2012 6:44pm by catwho

Oh, please. It costs like $3 to rent a new release from the local video store. I think it's a buck from Redbox. Pay a couple bucks to rent it from your cable/satellite provider if you're too lazy to leave the house.

Furthermore, "costs too much" doesn't justify stealing it. We're not talking bread or medicine here, we're talking about Hollywood movies. You can't get anymore into the "luxury" column than stuff that's nothing more than a temporary pleasurable experience. The reason people steal them is because they're self-entitled and selfish and use "cost" after the fact to justify their self-entitlement.


The thing is, iTunes gets you about 1/14th of an album for your buck. They're just splitting the album up and charging you by the track approximately what you'd have paid per track for the entire album. You can't really so that with a movie ("I'll buy DVD chapter six!") and, if a four minute song is worth $1, how do you price a two hour movie? As you said, Redbox is about as cheap as you could ever hope for... and people still steal the stuff.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 5:53pm by Jophiel

Pioneer LDC and Pioneer Entertainment changed name to Geneon after they were bought out by Dentsu in 2006.

We apparently have different definitions of that word since your idea is for the industry to suck it up and change their entire business model to accommodate people who violate the law rather than expecting the government to actually uphold its laws and petitioning them to do just that.

Again, the idea isn't a water-tight unstoppable bulwark against any movement of copyrighted materials, it's to make accessing it difficult enough for the vast majority of users that they don't bother.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 5:57pm by Jophiel

Oh look, a SOPA workaround.

Boy, that SOPA sure is effective. Really justifies all the innocent people who would get screwed in the process.

That's going to be the situation, either way. The problem in all of these cases is that the traffic is far too large to effectively and consistently police - for any of the parties, whether they're IP owners, website owners or the government. That's why it always seems unfair to someone when you force one of them to do it.

It's not a case of should, it's a case of 'will not, either way'.



Copyright infringement is not theft.

Edited, Jan 21st 2012 12:08am by Kavekk

Armin Van Buurent hosts a radio show and weekly podcast that is released for free. So people who like his remixes get them. He releases formal studio CDs and a yearly mix CD, and goes on tour, and makes a lot of money, despite giving his music away twice a week to anyone who wants to listen.

Hell, I bought the 2011 yearmix album just because it was that good, and the podcasts don't survive more than a few weeks on my MP3 player before I delete them for fresh music.

You argued that SOPA is a valid deterrent to justify the damages. I pointed out that it's such a pathetic attempt that there's a workaround as simple as a plugin before SOPA even was put into place.

No, I argued that I thought SOPA went too far with too low a bar before action was taken. However, its premise -- the reduction of IP theft -- was a valid one.

As I recall, part of the legislation involved blocking access to them via domestic providers. While you could play with spoofing to get around that, most casual users won't bother.

That's not really the point, and those who focus on this are either confused, or are deliberately sidetracking the issue. The users (both upload and download) of that content don't filter based on a stream of ones and zeros, so why assume that if you can't do this, that you can't police the content? You police it the same way people pirate it. By name. By tracking who's downloading what and who's uploading what.

How do you go to a content site and locate that pirated copy of a film you want to watch? Are you seriously arguing that the owners of a content site can't do the same damn thing to find pirated material if they really wanted to? The reality is that those sites make money on people uploading and downloading "free" content. And they damn well know that the vast majority of that content that is uploaded comes from people who aren't the artists who created it, and the vast majority of the content that is downloaded goes to people who want that artist's work, but don't want to have to pay for it.

All you have to do is get those content providers to *not* cover for the piracy. And let's be honest, as an owner/manager of such a site, you do have to almost wear a blindfold and stick your fingers in your ears to not continually see obvious piracy going on around you. But they have a financial incentive to ignore it and look the other way because most of the people going to those sites are going there to download pirated stuff. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. So how about we stop pretending that they are unwitting victims in all this. For many of these sites the assumption of pirated material being made available is part of their damn business model. Absent the pirated material, their page views would drop, and their ad revenue would drop.



No. You just have a policy (like Youtube does) of not allowing copyrighted material on their site and then you enforce it (like Youtube does). It's not impossible to do. You just have to actually be willing to do this as the owner of such a site. But most are defacto in the business of facilitating piracy and have no incentive to stop what they're doing. Absent some sort of legal action which can be taken against them, they'll keep doing it. And while I agree that laws like SOPA have problems with them, the status quo isn't sufficient. We do need something that is workable and fixes the problem.



BS. It's easy to differentiate *if* you don't become a site where illegal uploads are so rampant that it's 90% of your business.


You keep talking about Hollywood changing its business model, but why not demand that content managers on the internet change their business model instead? If the justification for the need for these sites is so that budding artists can get their stuff out there without needing to have massive amounts of money for distribution and advertising, then why not set up sites that do just that? Limit uploads to those on your client list. Charge a nominal fee for space. Have those clients click some agreement that says they promise to only upload material that is either public domain or is their own original stuff. This way you can track who is uploading stuff and have legal recourse if someone uploads something illegally (and the ability to pass the legal trouble onto the person actually doing something illegal). Allow the content uploader to set pricing for the download of his content as he wishes.


If this industry were really about enabling indie folks to upload and distribute their material cheaply, we'd see a whole bunch of sites dedicated to that. It's a business model that would work and would ensure protection of the artists, their work, and their customers and would actually accomplish what you claim these content sites are about. But we all know that's not what they're about, don't we? Sure, there's a smattering of artists out there putting their stuff up for others to view, download, and possibly even buy. But that is massively outweighed by pirated material on most sites.


Let's stop pretending that this isn't a real problem. Just because a work can be digitized doesn't mean we just throw our hands up and give up on managing it.

Mininova did it.

Not trying to be a **** or anything, but you clearly don't understand what you're talking about, which I think is the problem.

The average pirate does have some basic understanding of how to use a computer. You have to in order to setup most torrent programs and/or track down proper players and codex. Even so, these minor users aren't the problem, the problem are the distributors, most of which aren't US based. The average user who can't figure out how to install a simple firfox pluggin isn't going to accidently do enough pirating to even scratch the MPAA or RIAA.

All SOPA and PIPA did was spoof the DNS address when a DNS lookup was made to a blacklisted site, that's it. There's no actual blocking going on.

It's literally as simple as setting up a proxy and entering a foreign DNS server's address as the DNS lookup. My mother can barely find the power button on her PC and I could walk her through it in five minutes. And I promise writeups will be all over the internet.

This fix is as stupid as holding a blanket in front of something and telling people it isn't there. Anyone with a brain is just going to walk around to the other side of the blanket. It isn't a matter of the degree of its effectiveness, it simply isn't effective.


I forget the exact numbers and I'm too lazy to check, but ISPs report the worst bandwidth hogs (assumed to be torrenters/pirates) are less than 5% of their subscribers but the majority of their bandwidth usage. These are the people that are the problem, not the average person. The average person grabs a few things here and there for personal use. The problem offenders grab everything they can for redistribution.