Or, is it the new normal…to be able to DL a lifetime’s worth of music in a matter if days, for free?
Thanks.
Edit: sorry if thus is in the wrong forum.
I’m new here and confused. =\
There are two reasons for internet piracy:
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Some people want to get stuff for free. I don’t see this being curtailed.
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Some stuff is not available legally: For example for movies the studios make them available to theaters first and don’t allow it to be sold online for months. Or a movie is available in one region of the world but not another.
I think eventually the copyright owners are going to realize all these restrictions are not in their financial best interests and will instead make stuff available everywhere immediately–and this is going to cut piracy.
I think its mainly the first instance that keeps TPB and KAT, etc, so successful.
I’m curious if Hollywood, RIAA, etc, will ever have the might, or cunning, to close down a dozen websites…and crush those that pop up in their place. Of course some form of piracy will always exist, but without central hubs like KickassTorrents and the like, which have been running strong, uninterrupted, for a good many years, getting the latest copy if The Game of Thrones becomes much, much harder.
Will the RIAA and Hollywood ever, finally, put an end to The Pirate Bay(at least)?
Continuing my previous comment:
Look at music as an example. There was massive internet piracy in the age of Napster.
But with the availability of individual tracks from places like Apple’s Itunes and subscription services like Spotify there has been a significant decline in music piracy.
As to killing major filesharing sites, the representatives of copyright owners and the government have killed several of them–but multiple alternative sites arise for each one killed.
Ownership is overrated. Stream it, legitimately via Spotify, internet radio, whatever.
Artists get paid, all good.
You can’t stop piracy completely (or even much at all) especially for static content that is meant to be watched, read or listened to (as opposed to actual applications). Studios have tried to protect content by inserting anti-piracy measures into the source files or media but even that will not work and it has often blown up in their face.
If anyone can see, hear or read the content, it is trivial to divert the output to another storage medium at the same time and translate the output to a format that has no anti-piracy protections and share the new format with whoever wants it. Digital files don’t degrade no matter how many times they are copied so this issue is fundamentally different in scale compared to the past when people could copy VHS or cassette tapes slowly and tediously but the content would quickly degrade if someone tried to use those copies to make further copies and so on.
Today, we have some DVD’s that depend on region codes to work properly but that doesn’t do much at all to prevent piracy. The video signal still has to be sent to a TV or monitor in the end and it is very easy just to record the movie in a new format using simple, off the shelf, hardware and software. The same thing applies to music and there is no way to completely prevent people from re-recording the output of a protected file or disk to the format of their choice.
It’s not going to dissapear, but it can be curtailed a lot by making the paying alternatives convenient and preferably as satisfying as the pirated product. There has been a lot of progresses over the years (not long ago, it was still impossible to buy a single song without paying for the whole album, for instance), but we’re still not there.
For instance, to watch a specific serie, I needed to pay a one year subscription to a specific channel I had not interest in. And to suscribe to the channel, I had to pay to access to a whole bunch of other channels I had even less interest in (I hardly ever watch TV). And to get this access, I needed to change the kind of subscription I had to my internet provider. And to switch to this different model, I had to switch to a new telephone provider too. At which point I could indeed watch the serie, but with a delay and not the original subtitled version (which I prefer by far) but a dubbed one. I’m not sure it was actually intended to be such a pain in the ass to legally watch it, but most certainly nobody tried to make it easy. Who’s going to do all this (and paying through the nose for services they don’t want) for a delayed and inferior product?
Also, the games whose copyright protection schemes mess up with your computer . Or that you can reinstall only a limited number of times. Scrupulous people have been known to buy a game, and then install a pirated (but safe) version to actually play with.
And of course, the ridiculous " don’t pirate" sequences that you can’t bypass and that only paying customers get to see. Or the movie you buy but can’t watch because you’re not in the correct geographical zone, etc…
I’m convinced however that eventually paying products will be systematically as easy to obtain and problem-free as pirated ones. At which point a large part of potential customers will just acquire the paying product because it’s equally simple (in fact hopefully simpler) and legal.
A little-discussed feature which acts as an enabler for piracy is anonymity.
Right now folks speed on the freeway because there aren’t cops everywhere. Imagine a world where a red light on the dashboard lights up at 1 mph over and a speeding citation is emailed to your mobile device. With another one sent every 30 seconds until you slow down. That would certainly curtail speeding.
Imagine an internet where 100% of packets are provably sourced and destinated. And which go through a central monitoring facility.
If all your torrent packets went through the central anticrime monitoring Thought Police system followed by you receiving a court citation in the email seconds later there’d be a lot fewer folks willing to pirate music.
The desire by legit people and legit businesses to limit other forms of cyber crime may well move us a lot closer to an internet like that over the years ahead. And if so, rampant piracy may be collateral damage in the fight against Chinese espionage, Islamic techno-terrorists, and Bulgarian mobsters.
I think this is the key point. Make it easy, make it cheap, make it convenient and the world will beat a path to your door. They are getting better but no, not there quite yet.
For music I use grooveshark and for a small amount I a month I get full access offline and online everywhere in the world. That is good. For my video I’m stuck with limited content on multiple platforms that don’t allow worldwide access or downloaded offline watching. That will have to change as that is not convenient for me and other than the video providers not wanting to change, I can’t see a good reason for them sticking to that (i.e. it is no harder to do than with music)
yep, it isn’t rocket science.
What the media providers may not have quite cottoned on to is that the price that the customer is willing to pay has dropped so their expectations of profits will have to drop accordingly
Also due to being able to download almost every song free from YouTube.
Yes. While content capturing might remain as easy as it ever was, we’re increasingly moving to consumption platforms that are locked down and constrained. For example, it’s not immediately clear how one would get pirated videos playing on an iPad without a significant degree of technological knowhow and some amount of luck (on there being a working jailbreak for the current firmware). Other computing platforms are moving increasingly in this direction, for example, the newest Intel motherboards features secure enclaves that focus on keeping data encrypted from the network card to the display, enabling the same kind of closed ecosystem style environments.
No.
It could be, say if we make entertainment a basic human right and pay for it in taxes. Another way is to legalize it.
Actually something like these two were done with cassette tapes, not fully but close. Fair use allowed copying, and blank tapes had a extra fee that would go to reimburse the music industry for copying, this carried on to recordable music CD’s which were in general identical to data CD’s but the data CD’s didn’t have the extra fee. There may have been a slight difference in the play length between the 2 also.
The Napster era was interesting in that the piracy wasn’t so much in the realm of “I want music for free! Stealy stealy!” as it was a feeling that people really didn’t like buying an album for $15-20 on the strength of one or two radio released singles, and finding out that the other 10 songs on the album sucked balls.
Some of them just didn’t buy albums at all, and either taped the songs they liked from the radio, or ripped them from friends’ CDs (that piracy you’re talking about), while others bought the CDs and felt ripped off.
With the advent of Napster and file sharing, people could get the exact mix of songs they liked, without having to pay for the rest of the filler, so to speak. That’s why (IMO) people were willing to pay when iTunes and other pay-as-you-go services came about. Most people were willing to pay a few bucks for a song they liked, as long as they weren’t having to pay for all the songs on the album. Same thing with Spotify/Pandora; they can tailor their playlists to what they want to listen to for less than buying albums outright.
Then there’s the portability aspects; the RIAA and others took the position that ripping CDs to your hard drive was/should be illegal, which sort of implies that you own a non-exclusive license to that particular CD, not the songs on it. People didn’t much like the idea that they could buy a CD for home, and then be expected to buy a tape for their car, and another CD to listen to at the office, so they ripped and pirated them instead. Again, the idea that I can go to Amazon and spend $1.29 and get an MP3 of “Thriller” without having to buy the entire album is a powerful thing. Most people will spend $1.29, but will just pirate it instead of paying $15 in 1994 dollars for the entire album.
Another factor at play is the long tail.
A lot of long tail materials aren’t online because they’re not valuable enough to maintain servers for, trade with, or be bought/sought out by pirate content producers. The most popular everything still rises to the top, regardless of delivery system.
However, low cost dumping grounds exist, like YouTube, archive.org, and some university collections, and paid systems are increasingly filling their systems with long tail material in order to promote quantity and accessibility. Old TV shows that may have only survived in non-digitized VHS formats, for instance, are being released by the likes of Netflix and Hulu and AOL. Ditto for books, especially audio books.
However, I haven’t seen this in music, and maybe it’s a royalties issue. Spotify, Pandora, etc, still only have really mainstream stuff, compared to Youtube’s archives (which I access through reddit). Music is still heavily ghettoized by genre. This may persist, especially as Youtube ad revenue might provide more money to a new artist than royalties.
You are incorrect. The main format for pirated videos is mp4/mkv, which is also the standard format on Apple devices. Therefore, pirated video on “closed” architectures is a matter of drag and drop. Think of it as just like mp3’s universality.
My Roku, Smart TV, and BluRay player also all play mp4s natively and hook up easily to a media server to do so. Still have something in AVI? No problem, they can all transcode.
But why bother, when it’s in Netflix? It seems like the only stuff I would be interested in pirating if I were a pirate is paywall stuff, like Black Sails and Game of Thrones. For everything else, the demand and inclination is sinking as availability increases.
Another example is comic books. Sure you can pirate them, but demand for pirated comics has vastly decreased since Comixology got started, and only long tail issues remain.
Edit: I’m only talking about consumer “stuff.” The piracy/accessibility issue for manifestos, suicide notes, hate materials, trade agreements, software distributions, encryption/security techniques, etc. existing on a black/grey market is entirely another issue.
I’d say it’s the new normal, in the same way that international outsourcing is “normal” - they’re both made possible by recent advances in technology/commerce, government/society hasn’t caught up with the new situation, and they’re virtually unavoidable.
Unauthorized distribution (aka piracy) can (and has been, for short periods) curtailed by attacking the biggest and most obvious offenders (e.g. the megaupload debacle caused many file locker sites to close up shop, or significantly change their practices). However, it’s very much a “getting the genie back in the bottle” sort of thing.
I can, in thirty minutes, set your computer or Android device up with a few commonly available, downloadable programs so you can stream pretty much any movie or TV show ever made, for free, in at least 720p quality. If you have a decent internet connection there isn’t a movie you can think of, including many in theatres now, you can’t watch on demand. You can also get pretty much all the sports, though I cannot guarantee HD quality all the time.
I’m not going to tell you how because, frankly, it would run afoul of the law, or I think it would. “Streaming” is a legal gray area. How you turn a stream into a pirated version I don’t know and don’t really know why you’d want to knoiw if you can stream it anytime you want. But it’s doable, and people have been doing it for six or seven years and the industry has not been able to stop it from happening.
It’s not going away, and to be honest I have no idea what’s going to happen to the entertainment industry as a result.
Absolutely, as I speak I’m on a skiing holiday in an Austrian Apartment in deepest rural Carinthia. Yet I have a wireless connection and a passing knowledge of IT. Certainly enough to get a VPN working that spoofs my IP address and allows me to watch the BBC Iplayer and netflix of whatever nation-flavour I choose.
I’m listening to the England-West Indies test match but I can hop onto any sport-streaming site and watch the match should I wish.
Point is, the technology is a problem that has been solved yet the content providers choose to ignore the inevitable. More fool them.
I think the stuff about only wanting 2 songs on the album was a very lame excuse for people using napster and the like.
I also recall many people proclaiming they would not pirate once it was easy to buy stuff. Then itunes comes along and many of those same people kept right on pirating. (Some people did switch to legal methods)
Except many of us didn’t consider it piracy. We were exchanging songs that could not be found, heard, rented or purchased any other way, by hook or crook, with any amount of money, under any circumstances. Many of us would have been glad to pay a reasonable amount to the copyright holder, but the law and the application of it prevented us from doing so. Hard to define that as a criminal act.