The irony for me is that the NHL is an excellent example of why piracy happens. Last hockey season, I could pay the NHL directly to get access to all hockey games from Australia. They have a Google TV app that was flawed, but worked well enough, and I was happy.
This year, because the NHL have done a deal with ESPN, I have to do a convoluted deal with a third party to get access to ESPN, and my experience is terrible. ESPN's Android app is terrible, the Google TV app flat out doesn't work, and casting from my phone to my TV craps out during period breaks and long ad breaks.
Piracy would be easier, better and cheaper than paying for things. It's the same reason Netflix reduced piracy, and now it's tanking. They created something that was easier, cheaper and better than piracy. Now with their increasing prices, declining quality, and fragmentation of their library, piracy is going to increase again.
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.” --Gabe Newell, [0]
I absolutely love this comment, but very few creative media actually work like this. Valve is able to create a market where it makes sense to discount older games, which means that people buy more of them, and developers come out ahead. This works because Steam is fixed price pay-per-game - the more games you play, the more money comes out of your pocket and goes to the developers. This is quite possibly the most consumer-friendly business model you could pick where you still get paid for your work.
It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012". The reality is that 2012 Netflix streaming was never going to last. They were dramatically underpricing their subscription because nobody in the TV industry understood streaming[0] and thus underpriced their TV shows. When TV companies realized, "oh no, people are actually cancelling cable to subscribe to Netflix", they started to charge Netflix higher rates... because it turns out the TV business sort of just requires that $100 + ad revenue come out of your pocket every month no matter if the bill collector is called Comcast or Netflix.
Sports are like this but worse. Out of that $100+ads that cable costs, the ad revenue pays for the entertainment, and the $100 pays for the sports, because pretty much every sport is far more extravagantly expensive to run than you'd think, and never pays its way for anything[1]. This is also why sports will often have extremely customer-hostile business practices and weird blackout policies - because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money.
[0] Remember how there was a writers' strike about a decade and a half ago, over, among other things, streaming royalties? TV execs genuinely thought that Netflix was never really going to take off and replace cable. Just like how the music execs thought downloads were never really going to take off and replace CDs.
[1] If you really want to get angry, look up how much money your city is paying in tax credits to your local sports teams.
Note that Newell's comments are from the perspective of the consumer. I, as the consumer, don't care at all about how expensive it is or is not to run a production company or cable channel or streaming service or sports team, I'm assessing quality, ease of access, and price.
>because the audience itself has been sold to other companies who can then force them to pay more money
Again, don't care. The point is that I, as the consumer, can't pay to watch NHL games in a reasonable way, but the pirate's product is better and free. So! Is it immoral to "steal" from ESPN/NHL in this way? Maybe, but it strikes me as kinda like Mr. Burns setting up a sunshade so as to be able to force everyone to use nuclear power for their lights -- it's a way to try to make money, and aw-shucks things are expensive [0] so they've gotta make money, but it's not going to work terribly well because of the realities of the medium and the consumer's experience.
>It's tempting to look at Netflix and say, "oh they're stupid, why would they stop being like they were in 2012"
Your straw-reasoner doesn't seem to get that Netflix isn't the owner of the content they're trying to get you to pay money for. Understanding that 2012-Netflix is streaming things they've licensed at rates reasonable to them is key to understanding why modern-Netflix stopped being like they were in 2012 -- the rates are no longer reasonable, so the content gets dropped. In contrast, the NHL is the owner of the content they're trying to get you to pay money for.
The NHL could unwind itself from predatory audience-eyeball-deals, just as I, as the consumer, could jump through flaming hoops to get a low-quality legal stream, but neither party wants to do that. So!
[0] I'm well aware of the horrifying practice of municipal (and even higher levels of government!) spending on private sports arenas, but I was under the impression that sports teams printed money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_le... suggests I'm not wrong...
Yes, you are correct that the NHL sets the price of the content. And if fans were to lose interest or move to piracy, then Newell's argument would absolutely apply.
The problem is that, as it stands, sports fans aren't going to do that. Remember, these are the same kinds of people who shout at city governments to keep subsidizing sports arenas so they don't lose "their team". The NHL has a massive money spigot and they're going to keep it flowing for as long as they can.
> same kinds of people who shout at city governments to keep subsidizing sports arenas
In San Diego, we had a stadium which had hosted 3 Super Bowls. The NFL team owner arranged for multiple referendums on the question of city subsidies for an improved stadium in a San Diego location he preferred. These votes failed. Then the owner moved the team to Los Angeles.
American fans: You can loose the bonds of subsidy to teams that believe they can get anything and be paid to take it.
> "oh no, people are actually cancelling cable to subscribe to Netflix"
Because Netflix was a better service than cable, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. The change came from TV companies wanting their own streaming service too, basically bringing back the cable model to the internet.
If they don't want to depend on Netflix, why don't they cooperate to build a unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue? Every Internet user would want to subscribe to that.
A "unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue" already exists. That's called cable - and 2012 Netflix was just a better, more convenient, and cheaper version of that.
Part of the whole premise of how the Internet was supposed to disrupt the publishing business was disintermediation - i.e. cutting out the middleman. Instead of everyone selling their works through a distributor, they'd sell them direct to the public. And that's basically what every streaming service turned into - including modern Netflix.
Cable companies used to be good, too. The shenanigans they resorted to with "packages" and price discrimination were the result of the same pricing pressure from the TV networks that killed 2012 Netflix. When Netflix refused to play that game, the TV networks decided to disrupt Netflix, because they own the content and Netflix owns nothing.
> A "unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue" already exists. That's called cable
A true neutral streaming service would be like a pirate streaming site: available globally, no geofencing, and one price for everything. 2012 Netflix showed that it can work.
> The change came from TV companies wanting their own streaming service too, basically bringing back the cable model to the internet.
With streaming, the middle man is cut out (versus cable) which makes a huge difference. Rather than buying a package of 100 channels from the cable company, I can instead subscribe to individual packages of content direct from much smaller packages of channels. Although I am paying more for the content I want, I save money because I'm not forced to subscribe to dozens of channels I will never watch.
> If they don't want to depend on Netflix, why don't they cooperate to build a unified and neutral streaming service where they can share the revenue? Every Internet user would want to subscribe to that.
That’s exactly what Hulu was meant to be. It’s a fair thought that well-positioned people shared, but it turns out it’s not so simple.
> Out of that $100+ads that cable costs, the ad revenue pays for the entertainment, and the $100 pays for the sports, because pretty much every sport is far more extravagantly expensive to run than you'd think
I think it’s kinda the reverse - e.g. the AHL is able to pay its players, televise its games, and make do with an order of magnitude less revenue than the NHL. After adjusting contracts, etc. the NHL could presumably do the same.
In Canada, I can't even buy the NHL's own product to watch hockey games! They black out their own local games because they've sold the rights to someone else. The NHL wants me to buy cable, then get not one, but four channels in order to watch one team (since RDS split the rights with TVA Sports and they are both specialty channels, that you must subscribe to their parent channels to get, or in case of RDS it _is_ the parent channel, but _must_ come with their child channels). Thanks but no thanks.
The NHL is 100% the cause of NHL piracy. I have the money, give me an option that isn't retarded.
I live in Leafs region and last I checked I think you have to be subscribed to three different premium cable channels to watch all 82 Leafs games.
Similarly frustrating is trying to follow tennis in Canada. There is no comprehensive tennis streaming option, the ATP and WTA use separate apps that each have a $20/month subscription, and do not have rights to show any major tournaments. So for four months out of the year, you’re actually paying $20 for two weeks of tennis coverage, and you also need to pay for TSN streaming if you want to watch the biggest tournaments. All this adds up to $60+tax/month to follow _one_ sport!
I really enjoyed the TennisTV app in the US, but this year they updated it and added a bunch of 'features' and now its slow and ugly and the logo is big. It still 'works' but it's not nearly as good as it used to be. My biggest gripe with tennis coverage is exactly what you are saying where the Tennis app doesn't stream the grand slams. I couldn't even figure out how to watch the French Open. I was too afraid to purchase the wrong streaming option. Was it Peacock? Or TennisChannel App? Or something else? I have regular nbc. ESPN streams the other slams, but they stuff matches with commercials and it completely ruins the viewing experience if you are coming from TennisTV.
Last US Open ESPN would play the same Home Depot commercial over and over and the first part of the commercial is someone using a circular saw. I have a massive phobia to saws and I couldn't change the stream fast enough to not see it in the commercial so I inevitably gave up. I'm a massive tennis fan, but I rarely watch the grand slams. .
The worst part of all this though is that there is a TennisTV App for the men's and a TennisChannel App for the women's. It's unbearable. Tennis coverage is broken. mdm_ you are not alone on this one.
Exact same thing with the NBA. Paid for their product but needed to sub to a couple local outfits to get coverage on all my teams games. It was super frustrating how bad the experience was. Now paying two separate subs to catch all the games.
The cause of sports piracy and all of these weird deals is because games are most valuable in the regions of the participating teams. It's a Gordian Knot of rights issues, and it exists as a way to extract as much money from fans as possible.
And the teams want it this way -- both the Leafs and Canadiens are tied into telco/cableco ownership, who has a vested interest in getting you to pay more for games.
That's correct. If I lived in Montreal and wanted to watch all the Avalanche's games, there would be no issues. If I live in Montreal and want to watch the local team, I need to agree to get fucked three different ways.
I'm sitting in my chair wearing a Red Wings jersey as I type this, and I haven't watched a single game this season after several years as an NHL.tv subscriber. I always had to do some shenanigans to be able to watch my team, but as they ramped up their protections to prevent people from ever being able to watch their home team, I eventually gave up and cancelled my subscription.
Haven't seen a game since and now I spend my weekends watching F1 cars drive around in circles. They seem happy to have me as a fan so that's where my money goes these days.
I’m from Poland and this is final year that we can watch F1 on TV or via F1.tv. Starting with 2023 F1 in Poland becomes available exclusively via streaming on ViaPlay. And those guys are hell-bent that 780p is best for sport because 60fps is more important than picture quality. Liberty Media is up for a rude awakening.
After Putin's invasion in the Ukraine, Formula 1 management has cancelled the airing deal with the Russian sports channel that aired the races. Comically, this led to an immense improvement in coverage: long time TV commenters started commenting the races live on their page in VK, without the video stream, and others started streaming the race video, mixing the audio stream with their commentary. An there are NO FREAKING ADS! Ads were a curse - they took up almost 20% of the race time, but now there are simply none. And commenters and streamers get a lot of donations from fans for their service. Imagine that?!
I know, but it is almost a meme. Long before even 2014, Ukrainians formed a sizeable chunk of Russian internet. And one particular phenomenon were the demands by some Ukrainians to spell "в Украине" ("in Ukraine") instead of "на Украине" ("on Ukraine"), as is the norm in Russian language.
("в Украине" does not really have negative connotations, and sounds about as correct in Russian as "on Ukraine" sounds in Russian. Still, some Ukrainians are offended by this form and believe it to be a denigrating towards their independent country. Needless to say that after Crimea annexation such demands increased tenfold and, after the war started, a further tenfold)
There are other Slavic languages like Czech and Polish, which have exactly same spelling "na Ukraine", but Ukrainians somehow give them a pass. Coming to our issue, some Ukrainians also insist that Ukraine should be called THE Ukraine in English. I sometimes comply with this request.
that's the same thing as asking people in europe to please do whatever they can to influence NATO's behavior...
or asking somebody in Colombia to please help stop all that cocaine (or dunno)
there's something deeply flawed in the assumptions of how the world works when pleading to a random person in a country to please please influence the actions of the international institutions controlling the country.
The main sponsors of war with Ukraine are EU and US who continue to buy oil and gas from Putin. It is estimated that since Feb 24 EU has paid more than 60 Billion Euro [1] for resources stolen from Russian people. If this revenue stream would dry out, Putin's economy would collapse overnight. So the most effective strategy is to cut the payments, now.
(I personally think that EU should have stopped buying energy resources from Russia in 2014 after Crimea annexation. Instead, EU countries increased energy dependence on Russia and continued to fuel Putin's oppression and war machines)
As for my personal efforts, well, I don't think that there is a realistic way of doing something significant. I have protested Putin's regime for more than 10 years, was detained once, cops threatened to plant drugs on me, and do nasty things to my family. I don't think unarmed protests have any prospects in stopping Putin's regime anyway: Ukraine has an army with heavy weapons, Javelins and Baryaktars, and help from the West, and they still have difficulty stopping Putin's orcs. And whatever he has thrown on Ukraine he has at home - so good luck fighting that barehanded. By now I think everybody understands that if the protesters will gather enough strength so riot police would not be able to disperse them, he'll just order to mow the protesters down with machine guns and flamethrowers.
So, a few years ago I moved most of my business offshore to EU, and pay ~zero taxes to Putin's regime, but now this virtue signalling campaign by western businesses cancelling everything russian actually creates great difficulties to simply function. Russians were discriminated even before by EU and US institutions and banks, and now this discrimination is turned up to eleven. The sad irony is that most of these discriminating measures actually help Putin, like idiotic ban of Visa / Mastercard payments - now Russian people have great difficulty paying for foreign VPS services, for example, and can only visit websites that perpetuate existing state propaganda.
This is a weird framing. “Prolonging the war is a US strategy” only makes sense if you believe Russia has an unassailable right to conquer Ukraine. If Russia wants to stop the war, it need only withdraw its forces. The US is only prolonging the war in the sense that it’s preventing Russia from winning it. It’s unreasonable to expect the rest of the world to roll over and play dead because easing Russia’s conquest would shorten the war.
Russia needs to control Ukraine to prevent NATO. Ukraine is a pawn in a larger game. The US is prolonging the war to deplete Russia but the strategy is costing Ukraine lives, Ukraine cities, causing a European energy crisis and costing the west wealth all while making China stronger.
That’s a completely delusional viewpoint. Russia can claim to need anything it wishes to, but that doesn’t entitle it or a resistance-free conquest. Russia invaded another sovereign country, which is obviously the thing that is costing all of those lives. The idea that you can invade your neighbor and then hyperventilate about them fighting back is childish and naive. It’s comical to rain artillery fire on another country and then blame America for proving the ammunition to shoot back. Again, your frame only makes sense if you think Russia has some special, magical right to invade its neighbors and kill their citizens, which practically no one outside of Russia believes.
Yes, it’s killing lots of Ukrainians, causing an energy crisis, and enhancing China’s relative position. Those are the horrifying consequences of Russia’s invasion, not of the fight against it. There’s no world in which you get to invade another country and then shame them for fighting back, at least without the derision of the rest of to world. What did you think would happen? “Ah, Russians think they ‘need’ to do this, better lay down and die”,
Of course the US is funding and arming Ukraine. It would be foolish not to. But what game are Ukrainians a pawn in? The fight for their own survival? If Russia doesn’t want to be “depleted” it need merely leave. The decision has always been in Putin’a hands.
Russia has the same degree of agency as any other country, but you are acting like it’s the pawn in its own foolish war. Perhaps Russia is a nation of children who think they are merely blown about by the wind, unable to take responsibility for even their most explicit actions?
Putin repeatedly kicked a massive tiger and then acted hurt, full of righteous indignation, when the tiger’s claws came out. No amount of mental gymnastics is going to change that.
Russia cannot leave or NATO will let Ukraine in and put troops/bombs on the edge of Russian. Failing to understand that makes you an easy pawn. Calling millions of people children tells me you are out of your depth.
You are the one claiming Russians are children, but with different words. You say Russia has no choice, but you are also claiming the American response is a strategy to prolong the war, as opposed to, say, the natural reaction. So in your telling, Russian behavior is compelled and mechanical, utterly lacking agency, and the US is, somehow, from the other side of the planet, the one with agency on how the war goes. That is a child and an adult.
Pawns are the players not making choices.
I don’t think that; I think instead that Russia is being foolish and contemptible in prosecuting an unjust and insane war, and is surprised to find out the world isn’t playing along. They are adults and they are responsible for their actions. And obviously the war is their action.
Russia cannot give up the Ukraine anymore than the US could not let Canada fall into the hands of China. Ukraine is a buffer to NATO.
It's a Biden strategy.. so classifying it as stupid makes sense. The thought is to prolong the war so Russia becomes weak and wastes resources and go bankrupt. Meanwhile it benefits China..
If I were winning, the demagogueries we call democracies would be extinguished from existence, and new nations would be forming in their place.
And as far as Russia goes; it would have never gotten this far if 'I' were winning.
The Cabal is winning, and they have been for years now. Russia vs Ukraine is just their latest plaything.
Nothing we do or say will end this bullshit until the rest of you do what is right for once in your lives, and not just whatever is most convenient to you.
Have a nice day. Might be your last. Who knows? Nobody.
Baseball is the worst. Their app is pretty great but you can't watch local games because they've sold rights to Bally's so you need a cable TV subscription. The Sunday morning game is only on Peacock and that's a separate fee. The Friday night game is only on Apple TV, but at least it's free. The Sunday night game is on ESPN, so again you need a TV subscription. Every once in a while, some game is only on Facebook or YouTube.
Why won't they sell me a tier in their app where I can see all the games? I don't mind paying more.
Why would the Yankees, who own the YES Network, want to give up carriage revenue from that TV network? And it's not just the Yankees -- a surprising number of teams are tied up with regional sports networks, and they're more interested in maximizing that revenue than providing a good online product. And sports fandom is generally localized to the team's location ("we'll root, root, root for the home team/if they don't win its a shame"), so that local cable deal is generally one of the biggest sources of revenue (generally on par with ticket sales).
The only reason why the MLB has a good app is because they can capture the thin slice of revenue teams miss out on from out-of-market fans with that app; there's generally not enough of those fans to drive a per-team standalone subscription service (although the MLB does offer one, it's not price-competitive with the full league option), so the league does it as a whole.
If I would normally see Yankees games on the YES network and I watch a Yankees game on the MLB app, MLB should send a portion of my subscription money to YES.
The issue is that MLB.tv is a lot, _lot_ less expensive than what the Yankees make by offering a cable channel (where they make a lot of money from people who never even tune the channel, because of carriage fees). So that $160/year you pay the MLB would have to outweigh all that money that YES makes because they have exclusive rights to carry games in their broadcast area.
Given how many people I know who pay $80+ a month for cable only for sports, I guarantee you'd get a lot of takers for a "stream any game, any time, anywhere, $350/yr" plan for any of several major sports, including baseball.
For me to get my local teams and the games on ESPN I have to subscribe to a mid-level cable package which costs something like $1000 / year. To get the Peacock games, it's another $5 / month.
Yeah, those are the "local" games whose broadcast rights were sold to somebody else.
When I was in Hawaii I couldn't watch any of the west coast teams - Mariners, Angels, Giants, Dodgers, A's, or Padres because they were the local teams.
This is where it gets asinine - back now 20 years ago the local San Diego network that made a deal for the Padres also made the game free to stream for anyone in the San Diego area - that was nice. I doubt anyone is doing that these days. I don't even care if I get the ad-filled stream (for awhile you could get "raw video" feed on the MLB app, which was fun because when the game went to commercial you'd just see whatever the last camera that had been on wandering around the park) - make it so we can get the game!
And don't even get me started on the "it's easier to be a fan of a team far away than your local one" that is so common now because of all the restrictions.
The copyright monopolists always defeat themselves with their little "deals" that nobody really cares about. They run their little profit maximization schemes with the full knowledge that consumers have no choice but accept it. The service they offer is always of such poor quality that nobody would be giving them the time of day were it not for the actual government-enforced monopolies that rob people of choice.
"Piracy" is the full realization of the potential of our computer and internet technologies. They will never, ever be able to compete it with it without legal backing.
maybe - what about the animation and camera action on NFL football games. I don't watch sports but you have to be impressed if you watch what they built. I think of it more like Rome or Las Vegas..
Welcome to the UK, where the Premier League matches are split between three different broadcasters. So there isn't even one place you can go and be sure of being able to watch your favourite teams. Instead you need to see if Sky, BT or Amazon have got the rights to that particular game - all of which require paying for.
In the US, I would like to watch football games from my favorite team.
This team is in the Pac-12, which has its own media company https://pac-12.com/
My choice is literally just:
1) Subscribe to Satellite, or XFinity(comcast), or sling and make sure I pick a tier that has the Pac12 Network, ABC and FOX (local affiliates that carry some home games) and ESPN, and between them get many of the games live.
I would much, much rather just give my money directly to the pac12 network, and be able to live-stream all of the football games for my teams I like (and basketball, etc)as they happen, but apparently, that isn't a thing.
Piracy is so much easier, because of the business descisions that have been made by media companies to offer 'exclusive' content.
I seriously doubt that out of all the problems Netflix is having, the majority is due to piracy. Netflix content doesn’t have the mass market appeal of Disney/HBO. They don’t have the IP that gets people excited nor do they have the multiple outlets of revenue to fund content like Disney.
And before the typical “I don’t like Marvel drek” response, a bunch of HN posters don’t matter. Disney has multiple billion+ franchises
All of ESPN's streaming solutions are awful. "Your event is starting soon" messages half hour into events, events on the wrong channel, events not cutting over, and the list goes on
The order isn't terribly long and is worth a skim. This part dismays me:
...Respondents have no obligation to verify whether the IP addresses to be blocked ... have been correctly identified, and are wholly reliant on the Plaintiffs or their appointed agent accurately
identifying and communicating ... such IP addresses
I get the practical reason, but it's very dangerous that a single entity gets to dictate what to block and customers who are impacted in error have limited recourse (I hope we see some of them apply to the court for relief).
Also the judge left us an out:
Respondent shall not be in breach of this Order where
it suspends in part compliance with paragraph 2 because the capacity of its blocking system
is exceeded by the number of IP addresses for the Target Servers notified
Everybody and your toaster, go get your IPv6 addresses and overwhelm their blocklists! Finally a use for my internet-enabled fridge / toothbrush / toilet flusher.
For those who are able, it looks like non-residential plans may be exempt.
The issue here is that IPs are dynamic and the list will by design incidentally block reassigned IPs and thus noninfringing content. One could write an order creating draconian penalties for incidentally blocking noninfringing content, but the judge instead almost certainly will give plaintiffs a "pass" for interfering with the ability of Canadians to incidentally access noninfringing content. He'll do that because he feels responsible for crafting the remedy, even if it's one that isn't suitable to be deployed. My guess is this ends badly for the judge in terms of eventually accidentally blocking some popular nonifringing content, and he receives an unexpected level of popular attention. Since he is responsible for a dynamic interference with information available to nonparties I hope he is making his contact information available to people whose browsing he interferes with.
The idea that a single host with a single IP hosts a single type of content is outdated.
Just like a postal address is no substitute for an identity document, an IP is no substitute for a content identifier.
The only thing that uniquely identifies content, is the content itself or a derivative identifier. However, TLS encryption will make these identifiers unreadable for the routing party.
This problem cannot be solved reliably at the routing level as long as encryption prevents inspection of the internet packets.
The consensus at this point seems to be to just accept the false positives and negatives and ignore the consequences.
I used to be a very happy TekSavvy customer, until I moved someplace they don't service. I wish I could keep paying them my monthly fee anyway, toward their ongoing efforts to advocate this kind of stuff. They're a tiny voice of sanity in an ocean of stupidity.
On the other hand, Bell will raise their rates by 10% every year, and if you forget to call them after the 24 months of "reduced rates/credit" (whatever they call it) your monthly rate will double.
If I route an illegal stream via something like Cloudflare or Cloudfront, will the court ask the ISPs to block all cloudflare IPs? That's not going to go well.
I guess Cloudflare could block the stream, hopefully in time for that to not happen, but it seems risky.
If the stream uses something like https://webtorrent.io/, your going to have to block the IP of everyone else in the world watching it.
For me it has always been confusing that how these decisions come to be. Specifically, in Canada the internet is overpriced and it is getting more monopolized by the day. A Canadian YouTuber's recent story of being in front of a house committee really put things into context
His response to the ad-hominem is just flat-out the wrong answer for the committee. The answer is to address his main point, which is to say that there are many non-Canadian creators that won’t go through the hoops when they start out, and who get buried under the algorithm by the large producers who do, stifling growth. Just railing about government overreach is just the most easily dismissed talking point.
Slightly off topic, but I used to pay the $25/month USD for Center Ice (or whatever the program is called). I watch 2 teams regularly and only care about them, but I was still fine to pay the full $25 for the convenience. I only watch games on my iPhone or Linux PC, I effectively don't own a TV or a streaming box.
Reality of the situation is that I could not watch 1/2 of the games I wanted to because of blackout rules and other broadcast conflicts. If a game is blacked out, I'm screwed. If a game is playing on the NHL Network, I'm screwed. If a game is playing nationally, I'm screwed. I'm paying $25/month to catch 1, maybe 2 games a week.
I no longer pay to watch hockey. There are other means that have a substantially better experience and I never miss a game. The NHL did this to themselves due to their antiquated business model and hubris.
My parents cut the cord and one of their only holdups was live sports. They have been trying to watch MLB this year and now they have found out the odd game for their favourite team is an "Apple exclusive". So they were left with the option of buying yet another subscription or trying to figure out how to get a pirate stream working. And the main app for streaming the game sucks. The quality almost always degrades. Can watch YouTube or Twitch live no problem in 1080p60fps but Sportsnet can't even seem to do 360p without buffering on Chromecast devices.
Unfortunately these companies have little incentive to improve. Because what can my parents do? Go watch on a competitor? That isn't an option because of the stupid exclusivity deals. It is like how EA has a monopoly on most sporting franchises for being the only one who can produce games. You end up in a state where they release year after year new games that often suck, but no other company can compete as they can't use the franchise or players in their games.
Exclusivity almost always seems to be a negative for the public.
The stream quality is my experience as well... I was shocked the first time I watched a 60fps hockey game (and it wasn't on sportsnet or NHL channel).
There are ways to not have any issues catching any game you want to watch, but older people are simply not going to be stream hunting... but that's what all the young people are doing.
Yeah you're so right about that. People my age will just pull up sport streams like it's just a regular simple thing. Often it's so easy that I've realized many people don't even realize it's an illegal stream. It's always such a sad state when you can get better quality, no blackouts, at no cost. The incentives are really in the favour of pirating.
Just like how I've gone back to pirating tv shows. It's just easier and more reliable. I don't want to hunt for where each tv show is on which network. Streaming is starting to feel no different than having to buy cable packages. It used to just be simple and cost effective to just have Netflix. But now each company got greedy and switched to exclusivity. Each with their own shitty video players.
I have Amazon Prime and have a better experience watching Amazon Exclusives via a downloaded file on Plex than I do using their player. Especially considering Amazon's service has ads that play mid tv show.
I guess a lot of this comes down to the same principle I mentioned in my original comment. Exclusivity is almost never a good thing for a customer. Whether it's streaming or ISPs that have a monopoly on internet infrastructure, it's never good for the customer.
Though reviewing the order, I have a bittersweet suspicion this judge and the defendants might have done a better job than parliament will when they eventually take a crack at a legislated framework.
I imagine that Teksavvy, et. al. would not do it, but the point of the exploit is that the lists are dynamic, supplied by the NHL/ESPN/whoever. Get the provider to make a list that blocks everything.
Could be as simple as creating a web site posting that there is an intention to stream a game. Just a list: "I hear that you can watch the upcoming Leafs game on IP a.b.c.d". Let NHL/ESPN/whoever scrape it. Start with providing nothing but "bad actors". Spring the trap by flooding with sites you desire to be blocked, you know, just before the next playoffs.
This is pretty much the same strategy used to poison bittorrent feeds. More effective, though. In the case of bittorrent, only really popular torrents can be poisoned. In this case, there are a very limited number of targets that need to be attacked.
Sure, lets get some blue collar solidarity and all cancel our subscriptions. I'm sure that the cable companies will listen to our demands and not triple down on squeezing the last nickle out of the Boomers.
To be fair, there is a difference. Censorship means suppressing information and carries a connotation of "the government doesn't want you to know something". Filtering is one way to achieve that, but it can also be used for other purposes.
Blocking illegal content isn't censorship. It creates the technical framework and weak precedent for censorship and I agree we shouldn't do it this way, but it's not more censorship than seizing a bunch of copied DVDs at the border would be.
I agree with you that seizing counterfeit goods is similar to this, and not censorship, but at the same time it’s dangerous/unhelpful to define censorship based on wether the goods/information is “legal” or not.
I’m guessing most authoritarian censorship is, in the local legal system, just seizing illegal goods.
Wether its censorship or not is more dependent on the type of information/goods, and to some extent the moral or cultural framework of the observer.
Is the suggested ban in Sweden on posting photos/videos of dead people censorship or just a reasonable way to protect relatives of e.g terrorist attacks?
It's also how they prevent and punish genuinely bad behavior, which is why you need to look at why a certain thing is illegal, not just whether it is or isn't.
Does the law say "you may not write bad things about the government or good things about gay people and if you do we'll block your site"? Anything blocked under that law is censorship. Does it say "you must have permission from the rightsholder to distribute any copyrighted material and if you don't we'll block your site"? Blocking under that law, whether you agree with it or not, isn't censorship.
"you must have permission from the rightsholder to distribute any copyrighted material and if you don't we'll block your site"? Blocking under that law, whether you agree with it or not, isn't censorship.
But that is not "illegal content" - that is illegal sharing of legal content. The government making content itself illegal is much much the definition of censorship.
Sure, as long as the same rules applied to their own works. That's the whole motivation behind copyleft licenses: to turn copyright against itself. Without copyright there would be no need for copyleft, the GPL included.
Does your definition depend on what is illegal? For example, if an incumbent government were able to illegalize media from opposing parties, and ISPs blocked the websites of those parties, is it filtering or censorship?
It's censorship if they've blocked every way or the only way to view some peice of media. It's filtering if you can still see it after plunking down $19.95 or whatever.
I wish you could get sports legally in Canada for $19.95. Last I checked you need something like a $60 cable membership to even get the ability to pay $20 for sports packages and even that won't get you much.
On top of that, the insane prices are regulated by the CRTC, a regulatory body controlled by the companies that are setting the prices and think this is totally fair.
> a regulatory body controlled by the companies that are setting the prices
To be precise, the CRTC is theorically an independent public entity. In practice however, the chairman since 2017 is Ian Scott, an ex-lobbyist who worked for ISPs and telecommunications companies. He's been caught meeting with one of our major ISPs' (Bell) then-COO, now CEO Mirko Bibic, right before overturning their own 2019 order that would have forced large ISPs to lower their wholesale rates to smaller ISPs, rolling them back to previous (much higher) 2016 values.
> not more censorship than seizing a bunch of copied DVDs at the border would be.
That would be true if it were in fact content that was being filtered. But in this case it is IP addresses that are being blocked, ostensibly as a proxy for context.
That is silly sementic wiggling in am attempt to refedine a word. "Censorship" isn't a just a word that only applies to bad government controls of speech, but any control, even if warranted.
If your IP is being blocked in a country due to a court order you are absolutely being censored.
> If your IP is being blocked in a country due to a court order you are absolutely being censored.
Doubly so when taken shared hosting into consideration. I've still got old websites running with who-knows-what-else on old hosting accounts, all those sites sharing an IP address.
Censorship: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
This is bad, but it's really not censorship in the same sense that China censors Tiananmen Square, etc. You can talk about the NHL game, write about it in the news, share screenshots, teach it in school, upload an animated recreation on Youtube...
In fairness there are a few safeguards and the whole order sunsets at the end of this season, so I hope that distinguishes it a little bit from similar measures by more oppressive regimes.
Do they? eg. Once they identify an undesirable topic would they limit their censorship of it to just a single year? Do blocking orders there come with explicit legal recourse for users who believe they are affected inappropriately to petition an impartial court for exclusion (and potentially collect damages from the party that blocked their IP)? Actual questions, I'm genuinely interested.
No idea about China, but in US “they” can, using a secret sentence from a FISA “secret court”, legally prohibit you from absolutely anything, and if you complain to anyone you go to jail.
Enforcing a contract and IP law is not censorship any more than foreclosing on a house due to non-payment of property taxes is "violation of private property laws".
Why is that not censorship, but China enforcing their laws is?
I think copyright enforcement should be seen as a form of censorship, regardless of whether or not one agrees with copyright laws.
This Wikipedia article about internet censorship seems to have been partially written by people who think that copyright enforcement is a form of censorship as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
It's possible that "censorship" denotatively means suppression of any speech (including the parade of horribles -- viagra spam, stolen IDs, abuse content, etc.) and connotatively means suppression of speech with at least some political valence. Or alternatively that it's denotatively ambiguous and has multiple connotations.
A case that sort of rubs up against this in the U.S. -- I use an American example because in Canada s.1 circumscribes all legal rights, including freedom of expression, so it would be academic whether this raised speech concerns or not -- is Morse v. Frederick.
In this case, a student, Frederick, raised a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in front of some television cameras. The behaviour occurred off school grounds but nearby, and during an event that students were allowed to leave school early to attend. The school suspended Frederick because his banner promoted drug use.
A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was. One argument is that it was essentially dadaist, absurdist speech (Frederick's claim. Another argument is that it was promoting criminal behaviour (the school principal's claim; Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito in the opinion). Another argument is that it was political speech, aimed at contesting a public policy (Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg in dissent; Alito and Kennedy in concurrence)
Although there were other issues in the case, namely to do with how speech is regulated within schools and whether this constituted a school event, one of the undercurrents is that constitutional protections for political speech seem to be more crucial to many of the justices than constitutional protections for gibberish speech.
So I don't think it's crazy to suggest, at a minimum, that there exists a well-support denotative use of "censorship" that specifically refers to speech with political characteristics, rather than all speech. Through that lens, copyright enforcement could either be censorship (to the extent that the enforcement is designed or has the effect of prohibiting the dissemination of political speech or prohibits commentary on a public policy) or not (to the extent the content being restricted is fundamentally apolitical). And this is true even if there are other denotations that consider stopping any speech to be censorship.
> A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was.
But that's not germane, because “censorship” is not restricted to “restrictions on speech that violate the First Amendment”, so the US Supreme Court “parsing about which category of speech” something is has no bearing on the meaning of “censorship.” In fact, consideration of what category speech is only matters in the First Amendment context after one has determined that censorship (and, particularly, government censorship) is occurring. Only then is it important to parse the details of which set of standards to apply to determine if the government censorship involved is Constitutionally prohibited.
Edit: all the legal references are in a US context
Censorship is prohibiting speech or blocking a speaker because of the content or alleged content of their speech.
Not all censorship is unconstitutional. The legal blocking of curse words amd nudity on broadcast TV is clearly censorship regardless of if the intent or effect of cursing while nude on TV is political.
It is true that free speech protections against the censorship of political speech do tend to be stronger.
Also generally speaking, rules that prohibit speech in certain contexts or manners without regard for their content or the speaker (thus not censorship) tend are held to a lower standard for legal justification than laws that do engage in censorship.
In this case, the question is does this type qualify as "not-censorship" because somehow blocking "content that infringes our IP" is not restricting speech on the basis on its content. To me it seems obvious that this is a restriction of speech that depends on it's alleged content.
> In this case, the question is does this type qualify as "not-censorship" because somehow blocking "content that infringes our IP" is not restricting speech on the basis on it's content. To me it seems obvious that this is a restriction of speech that depends on it's alleged content.
To the federal courts, too, which is why “fair use” was a court-created Constitutional limit on copyright before it was incorporated into the statute (the reason for the weird standards in the statute is that the factors from the court-issued rule were incorporated directly into the statute.)
There are different laws. Enforcing laws that limit freedom of information is censorship, be it net filtering or burning books. Enforcing copyright laws is not - you wouldn't call customs intercepting a truck of illegally copied DVDs censorship.
It's not about who does it, it's about why they do it. Is blocking illegal-due-to-copyright content a slippery slope to blocking illegal-because-opressive-regime-said-so content? Yes. Is "slippery slope" a bad argument? Also yes.
I agree having court-enforced IP block lists controlled by private companies is bad. But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.
> you wouldn't call customs intercepting a truck of illegally copied DVDs censorship
I might, depends on the context. Copyright laws can indeed result in censorship. Let's say those DVDs have an additional commentary track.
> But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.
So when your IP address gets block in Canada for a year, regardless of what content or speech it was engaged in amd without any attempt to verify that you indeed were sharing content out of copyright, you aren't being censored? Come on.
The intent behind the actions matters. China blocks content it is afraid of ( gays, Tianenmen, Taiwan is kind of a country, etc.), while US, UK, Canada, EU, usually block content that violates copyright law. The most recent exception i can think is the "blocking" ( it really isn't blocking, it's removing from some platforms) of Russian state sponsored propaganda, which is also quite easy to justify.
You could say this the other way around: China blocks content that violates the law, US blocks content Congress was lobbied (let's pretend that's not a legalized corruption) to block.
The US Constitution gave Congress the power—but not the obligation–to enact copyright laws in pursuit of certain social goals. A mistake, IMHO, but it was certainly mentioned as something Congress could do at its discretion.
And then the First Amendment promptly nullified that power by categorically stating that the freedom of speech shall not be infringed. Distribution of content is speech, and copyright enforcement penalizes it, which infringes the freedom of speech. This is how the exceptions for Fair Use came about, by attempting to reconcile the Copyright Clause with the First Amendment, but Fair Use is only a half-measure which does not fully avoid the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have Rule A saying that you may do something and Rule B saying that you must not do that thing, they don't combine to create a compromise rule which says that you can do that thing most of the time with a few narrow exceptions.
You can pretty much justify anything with the "greater good" slogan. Women wearing Burqas, greater good of lowering promiscuity and increasing family stability is how politicians justify it in the middle east.
Democracy is done in America if more people think the government controlling what people read and think is some sort of social good.
You can have good intentions, but still cause terrible things to happen.
In the last year we saw government's pushing experimental drug on healthy young people in order to add a few extra months of life to 75+ year olds with multiple health conditions, and the extremely obese. Locking down, destroying small business and causing serious food price inflation, that will send millions of people around the world into absolute poverty.
A drug that did not stop transmission, had pages worth of short-term side effects, and yet to be determined long term effects. One thing it did not due, was lower the 3x jabbed from catching covid, since they get infected now at highest rates now. How long before we go from "safe and effective" to "no one forced you to take it".
It really is debatable what if anything governments COVID policy accomplished.
Why shouldn't people be able to debate it?
It's censorship in both cases. What, you think governments that censor don't do so in the name of the "greater good"? It's just that one "greater good" is considered valid enough a justification (by some), while the other one is not.
Not sure it's that clear. Some of China's censorship is in the name of social harmony, which is arguably the government believing it's doing good. Nobody wants riots and civil war, do they?
If Germany blocks sites promoting the Nazi party, is that doing good because such promotion does bad, or is it censoring an opposing political viewpoint that's competing with it for power? Even if the government has the support of most of the population, it's still a political power struggle between them and the Nazis.
"So, as we were ordered to, TekSavvy is now complying with the order, and we will be blocking access to whatever IP addresses Rogers' consultant tell us to block. This sucks. It's not how the Internet works. But we have to comply with the order."
The linked post doesn't highlight one of the most egregious elements of this order, in my view, in that the list of blocked sites is subject to a confidentiality order.
I wonder if the information on the IP addresses is made available in a plaintext form stating the reason why they are on the list, or if it's just a blank feed of only IP addresses?
It will be interesting to see when IP addresses start being added that belong to competing ISPs or platforms that are politically opposed to the board of directors of Rogers & their political interests. For example, recently Ed Rogers fought to not have Masai Ujiri be the Raptors President and it was discussed on the Internet. Ed Rogers went to court to fight his siblings for control of the company. It was also discussed how Ed Rogers hangs out at Mar-a-Lago. Does Ed Rogers have the power to say put the IP addresses of every site that mentions the bad behaviour of Ed Rogers on the list?
What is the process? Do people sign off in meeting minutes notes with an audited trail that this address is being added or why, or is it just someone adding whomever their boss tells them to?
The content producers (NHL) and publishers (Rogers) neither own nor operate the content distribution networks (ISPs). However they make commercial terms with each other to give one party exclusive rights to distribute the other party’s content via the ISPs, implying a restriction on how any other party (eg ordinary citizens) can use the ISPs. Since they don’t actually control the ISPs, they’re having the government enforce the terms of their commercial agreements against parties that weren’t part of them.
Doesn’t seem like this should be the role of government, but not surprising for Canada. On the spectrum of irrational distrust of government to irrational trust of government, any population is going to have a distribution. Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
You are incorrect. I’m going to assume you are not Canadian? Every Canadian knows that Rogers is an ISP, and so is Bell. Heck Rogers and Bell even have stakes in professional sports!
They are the 2 major telcos of Canada that all Canadians love to complain about.
Might be a quibble but Rogers doesn't own the leafs. They own the jays. MLSE owns the leafs. Rogers has a partial ownership of the MLSE. Not sure stake but its not large
True, Rogers indirectly owns part of the Leafs. But, when it's time for the team to make a decision on media, that'll generally be enough to swap that decision.
Was curious about ownership stake and it's much larger than I remember. So I stand corrected on that aspect. Looks like BCE and RCI basically co-own the leafs at 37.5% respectively [1]
You're right about the first part. I actually am Canadian, though haven't lived in Canada for over a decade. Absolute brain fart on my part. If you asked me outside the context of this article what Rogers does, I would've listed cable, Internet, telephone provider before any of its media/publishing stuff, but got tunnel vision in the context of this article.
I forgot about the degree to which Rogers is vertically integrated (ISP, cable provider, landline and cell provider, TV stations, radio, partial ownership in all major sports teams, etc.) and the degree to which this is a duopoly with Bell in Canada. But it's no wonder they can get the courts to issues these orders against themselves (and their smaller competitors) to legitimize actions that protect their broader interests.
It's all good. You should come back and visit :) You will definitely not find a shortage of people that do not like how Rogers operates. You then probably missed out on the whole Rogers fiasco where Edward Rogers was infighting with his own family in trying to regain control. It just turned everybody off.
Rogers and Bell are the two ISPs that between them control the Canadian ISP market. They also own the content publishers (the streaming services and networks) that send bytes over those cables, wires, and allocated public radio spectrum provided by the ISPs. They also own many of the Canadian sports teams that provide the content streamed by those bytes. The NHL is owned by the teams, hence controlled by Bell and Rogers.
What's going on is that the vertically-integrated entertainment/communications cartel is refining its regulatory capture through the judicial branch of of the Canadian government in order to launder artificial restrictions on competition at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. It's how they pay me my big fat dividend checks so I can contribute their massive quarterly profits through my taxes, since I don't watch sports.
Rogers itself is an ISP. This order is Bell(also and ISP) targeting all other ISPs in the country.
Finally, I don’t get what purpose your final paragraph adds to the conversation? This is a court order. It has nothing to do with executive action from the government, rather a judge ruling that the ISPs must block pirated sports.
Let's not be naiive here. The courts and the government are not totally disconnected. Everyone has at some point observed court rulings that they thought to have been impacted by political discourse. Instead of indulging myself into a loquacious sesquipedalian treatise on the nature of ethics and origin of judicial and political systems, I will, paraphrasing Hemingway, let go of my dick and just tell you what is there. The system is man-made and man controls every aspect of it. It is corrupt and everything is connected. This is obvious to anyone willing to step away from their ivory tower and just apply common sense.
I believe that last paragraph to be an observation that is obvious to most people.
The person made a false assumption in their first paragraph, and then linked that false information to his second that is really not that relevant here.
If you read the article, it even states:
6. That didn't stop Bell, Rogers, and Quebecor, who went straight to the Federal Court in 2019, asking for an order against themselves to block a streaming service called GoldTV. They also asked the court to order other ISPs to do the same, including TekSavvy.
In addition, they have tried this twice before, through the Federal Government, and it didn't work:
2. For years, media companies in Canada have asked the government to use Internet filtering—or "site blocking"—to help enforce copyrights. In 2017, through a coalition called FairPlay, they asked the CRTC to create a site-blocking regime. They lost. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2018/2018-384.htm
3. They made a similar pitch to the federal government committee reviewing the Copyright Act in 2018. I was there to oppose it. In its report, the INDU committee recommended studying a limited, copyright-specific injunction that balanced interests. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/INDU/Reports...
So to write that ALL IS CORRUPT and the Government is the baddie is unnecessary. These corporate people, and I certainly am not on their side, are just trying the numbers game. They will keep asking their lawyers to keep trying in order to restrict their product/service so they "make more money". I certainly don't agree with Rogers and Bell, but let's not mislead people here.
I'm saying that the entire original comment was misleading since it was based on a false assumption which lead to a false conclusion. The government has said No to this twice already! I do not believe the person who made the comments is malicious, it's just a simple error and I hold nothing against the person. But then another commenter jumped on board and continued on that false premise.
I went fishing for marlin but we accidentally caught an endangered _loquacious sesquipedalian treatise_ and had to throw it back before the fish and game officer saw it
> Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
I mean didn't they just decide that the constitution not applies and start freezing bank accounts and detaining people for political speech the government didn't like?
As others have mentioned, the absolute nonsense of needing two or three streaming subscriptions to watch all 82 games of a team's season is infuriating. Particular with the garbage streams on TSN - some games were a full 20% of pixelated smear - on a wired connection getting well over 900 Mb/s, and surprise, never any dropped streams on other services.
The kicker of course, was the influx of gambling ads on TSN this season, thankfully, at least on the NHL app for the other games the ads are replaced by the gentle ice making video :-)
Yes, the VPN will work in some instances, but despite being savvy, my spouse will never fart around with the hoops to get the VPN on the Apple TV which is where most games get streamed.
The whole thing needs to burnt down and re-built with a model that doesn't suck so bad.
Well until they actually do move on to 'defamatory content' or they start to block things like YouTube that are only vaguely associated with piracy I do not think there is too much to worry about. Free internet would be nice but as with everything the law has to be maintained and users need to be protected from very easily breaking the law and opening themselves up to severe consequences. People could be getting a record for clicking on the wrong link if ISPs are like 'yeah, do whatever you like'.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Copyright is Hitler, got it. If you ask me fascism is what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Maybe the finesses of copyright do not matter so much compared against real evil.
I find that these broadcast exclusivity deals are not compatible with todays tech and should be thrown out the window. They cause people to pirate content because they can't legally or easily purchase it in some regions.
The NHL should offer all their games directly to anyone who wants them anywhere in the world which they do except for the US and Canada. If a cable company/tv station wants to carry them they do not get exclusivity.
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?
>DNS blocking is a way of basically taking a phone number out of the phone book...then we're going to be back here five years from now talking about why we need to implement deep packet inspection,
How about we make it mandatory to enforce transparency on the assets of the bad guys? Who are the ad networks that are allowing the blatant monetization of illegal content?
Why are the hosting providers who presently find it easy to detect and kick off workloads deemed damaging to their infrastructure such as crypto mining unable to detect illegal video hosts?
Don't get me wrong, i'm staunchly in the bucket of the free transfer of information, but i simply cannot turn a blind eye to crime.
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.
“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 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 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?
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.
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.
This year, because the NHL have done a deal with ESPN, I have to do a convoluted deal with a third party to get access to ESPN, and my experience is terrible. ESPN's Android app is terrible, the Google TV app flat out doesn't work, and casting from my phone to my TV craps out during period breaks and long ad breaks.
Piracy would be easier, better and cheaper than paying for things. It's the same reason Netflix reduced piracy, and now it's tanking. They created something that was easier, cheaper and better than piracy. Now with their increasing prices, declining quality, and fragmentation of their library, piracy is going to increase again.