Yes, this is what I’d like to know. Was this a deal worked out with Oz? That seems likely. In which case, this should have been reasonably foreseeable and you have to wonder why they didn’t set up in Madagascar, Vietnam, Togo, etc. Hell, even Belgium probably would have been a better bet.
There’s a few layers of absurdity to industry claims that equate downloading unauthorized copies with simple loss of revenue.
For my part, I’m likely to spend X on media over the course of the year. The value of X doesn’t vary based on the availability of material to download. It doesn’t follow that if I hadn’t downloaded, I would have paid for it - and it doesn’t follow that I would have paid for it if it hadn’t been otherwise available.
The very peak of my CD purchasing coincided with the height of the Napster era. Why? Because the Napster/OpenNap networks represented a brilliant way for me to find out about music that I liked. I’d search for music I knew I liked, and check out the libraries of people who had it. I learned about lots of bands I’d never have heard of that way, and that would lead to sales. (Better to have a CD than .mp3s of variable quality, especially back when the actual napster client was clipping a couple bytes of the end of each file each time it was transfered.)
Similarly, I wouldn’t have seen Battlestar Galactica at all, if I didn’t “steal” it. But since I did, (and I liked it,) I jumped at the chance to snap up the bluray set for ~$175 . Chances of me outlaying a chunk of change like that cold are approximately zero. Even for movies I know, a download does not preclude a purchase. I loved Inception in the theatre. I’ve watched a pirate copy of it, because I needed to see it again ASAP. And yet, there it is, wrapped up under the tree.
That’s not to say that I don’t download stuff and then never purchase it. I download plenty of TV shows, just for convenience. I still pay my cable subscription, though - so I don’t feel terribly guilty about that. And, sure, there are things that I will grab and never pony up a dime for, in any form. That doesn’t mean that there’s more room in my entertainment budget for 'em, or that any anyone is being deprived of income because of it.
Yes, I installed a shady copy of Starcraft II before I bought it. I bought it because I want to be sure that quality games are still made for the PC, and we don’t end up having to make do with a bunch of crap ported from consoles. I also downloaded and installed Blur, a racing game, and played it over a week-end before deleting it because it was clearly a piece of crap ported from a console. Would I have ponied up $60 to see if it was any good? No. Net loss to developers: $0.
Here’s what I don’t get. They sieze the domain name, not the servers. Assuming people know the IP, what’s to keep them from continuing to operate? Even if some random user doesn’t know the IP, what not just toss the IP out in a blog?
-Joe
Yes, the point is the act of stealing removes that apple from the person that previously owned it. That is the difference between actual stealing and copyright infringement.
This stuff about potential sales is an additional argument as someone is still trying to claim that copyright infringement is stealing, instead saying that the lost sale (which may or may not actually be a lost sale) has deprived the copyright owner of income.
In much the same way as the above poster, almost all of the tunes I have purchased at Itunes I have downloaded and listened to first on Youtube. Naturally, the ones that get bounced from Youtube by the record companies don’t get downloaded, and don’t get bought.
Deal, censor boys.
Specifically for TV shows, getting them via torrent download is in no way similar to stealing provided:
- You get the channel legally in your cable or satellite package
- You have a DVR and always skip commercials (bonus irony points if it’s a DVR provided by the company in 1.)
If you skip commercials, the only money that show gets from you is your cable bill. This includes broadcast networks. As long as you pay your cable bill, you effectively own that show for your own private use.
Much like Larry Mudd, my experience has been that torrenting increases revenue for the company I’m “stealing” from. I’ve been an HBO subscriber for almost 20 years without fail. I’ve never had Showtime. When I first went broadband and discovered torrents back in 2007/2008, I quickly downloaded complete (at the time) series for Dexter, Weeds, Californication, and then started on The Wire. HBO sent me a cease-and-desist email, so I stopped downloading any HBO shows.
I loved the downloaded seasons of Dexter, Weeds and Californication so much that I promptly became a Showtime subscriber and have been ever since. At $10 a month for 3 years, those illegal downloads earned the “victim” of my “theft” several hundred dollars they otherwise would have never seen, and they will continue to get $10 a month from me for pretty much ever.
I still harbor a grudge toward HBO. I paid for their service during every airing of The Wire, and yet they wouldn’t let me catch up on what I missed going into the much-promoted final season. Well fuck them. I didn’t watch that final season, and almost certainly will never watch a single episode in protest.
Wait, how did HBO send you a C&D email? How did they even know you were torrenting their shows?
Heh, anyone can bust you for torrenting their stuff. The RIAA is particularly aggresive, as is HBO, but anyone can bust you if you’re stupid about it like I was. It would be against board rules to go into details, but I’m happy to explain via PM or email.
Torrents aren’t encrypted although I think there are some protocols available now that do use encryption but I think that is relatively new. That means your ISP can log everything you download and rat you out to anyone who makes scary faces in their general direction.
It’s not the ISP; they have no desire to bust their paying customers. (ISPs offer no content to steal.) It’s the companies who own the copyright that do the active catching.
The email I got was from HBO, not my ISP. Well, technically it was from the ISP, but only inasmuch as they forwarded the email from HBO to me.
If you take your apple-replicating device into the store and walk out with a copy how is that not screwing the store owner who bought it in the first place to resell and in turn the orchard owner for who there is no more repeat business? There is a HUGE upfront cost to producing these types of entertainment. Money from residuals is how they recoup their costs and make a profit for their efforts.
It’s pretty obvious based on posts in this thread that sites like Youtube, TVShack and bit torrents serve the same function as radio used to, publicizing the music/videos while sites like itunes and Amazon.com monetize the music, just as record stores once did.
My cynical brain tells me that the real fear that the media companies have is that they do not CONTROL the content of Youtube and bit torrents … anyone can upload a video or song to them. They’ll sing a different tune as soon as they manage to control the online media that publicize the music. I’m thinking some good ol’ fashioned Payola should do the trick.
I have no problem paying artists for their production; I do have a problem with paying recording industry execs for the privilege of them screwing the public AND the artists. The digital world has levelled the playing field in a way that they are desperately trying to re-unlevel so they can continue to take advantage. That doesn’t ping my (fairly strict) moral code, especially since the things I’ve been doing online haven’t been illegal in Canada (but oh yes, they are trying to change that).
Like Larry Mudd, my online viewing/listening habits lead me to purchasing a lot of product; if I download a free song from an artist, and really like it, off I go to HMV to buy the whole cd. If I download it and hate it, no loss - I wouldn’t have bought it anyway. I figure after about 500 more free downloads, the recording industry and I will be even for all the hundreds of albums I bought that had two good songs on them and eight songs of filler. 
As for recording on my home video equipment for my own time-shifting, I bought an LG dvr that won’t record many shows because there is a recording-blocking signal being sent from the station. How does that fit into stealing? The way I see it, they’re actually stealing from ME - I paid for the tv, the cable, and the dvr - I can’t watch a show if I happen to be out that evening in spite of having bought all the legal technology to make time-shifting happen.
[ol]Find torrent of HBO show online.[]Open torrent in bittorrent client.[]Observe IP addresses of peers.[]Do WHOIS lookups.[]Send C&D letters.[]???[]Profit![/ol]
I won’t claim to know how it works, but the fact that the email was forwarded by the ISP tells me that they were leaned on by HBO to report users who had downloaded HBO content - something that I believe they can find out just from reviewing their logs of your activity. The ISP’s don’t do this willingly it’s just that it doesn’t seem to take much prodding is all. That why I said ‘anyone who makes a scary face in their direction’. My guess is they issue an ultimatum that says you can either be our snitch or we can sue you and get the information anyway.
what might have happened in your case is the ISP agreed to find the users who had done the deed but refused to disgorge their names and service addresses. What you got was probably a form letter with some coded fields to insert individual user information. If you’ve even done a mail merge in Word or other word processing software, it’s basically the same thing.
If that’s what happened, then I have to give your ISP props for protecting you to at least some degree. But like I said, I don’t have any first hand info. This all based on stuff I’ve read on other forums. I do all my dl’s from an encrypted usenet connection and store them in triple encrypted volumes.
I didn’t speak to the morality of the updated analogy. I was just pointing out that his analogy wasn’t entirely correct.
No, your ISP won’t report you. The steps work as outlined by Larry Mudd a couple posts ago, The content producer finds the IP address of the file sharers and then sends a letter to the ISP that handles those IP addresses. The ISP then forwards the letter on to the account holder of that IP address. The ISP doesn’t report you, they merely act as your go-between.
Quite frankly, your ISP doesn’t care a whit either way.
your wrong, pirating is not stealing, it’s copying. I could have gone and ordered the dvd from netflix (which i have) but why bother when tvshack is easier. It doesn’t matter, the people who make the films dont care if you pirate, you still see their work, but the asshole companies who produce them do, because you dont see their ads. bottom line… it doesn’t matter if you pirate movies/tv.
Total b.s.
Pray tell, how does a maker of movies receive royalties from a stealer of movies?
OK, thanks. I’m not sure why I thought ISP’s reviewed their logs. I might be confusing it with a suit against a usenet company about a year or so ago. In that situation, if you’re not on an encrypted connection then either the ISP or the usenet company have to hand over the information. There’s no way HBO could get it otherwise. On an encrypted connection with a third party news provider, only the provider would know and I think they now claim not to keep logs - although I could be wrong about that too. Will have to check with giganews and see what their official policy is on that.