Fortunately most computer users today still know about files and torrents, and hopefully that knowledge continues to thrive, but I do see large-scale attempts at fundamentally changing how we interact with computing devices that could eliminate that knowledge and those freedoms associated with it in the future. Taking down TPB and chasing the other torrent sites isn't quite as effective as systematically eliminating the knowledge that makes those sites possible; in other words, remove the concept of filesharing and "the Internet it created" will essentially kill itself.

I constantly hear them chattering about how they would like to do <action> but stupid <apple/android> doesn't allow them do said action. A recent example of the other day was something about how apple blue-tooth is somehow not compatible with a windows devices or something along those lines.

Perhaps right now walled-garden devices are still profitable, but if they continue to become more limited it won't take long for a suitable (more open) alternative to appear.

As for your second point, I find it somewhat paradoxical, I assume you would agree with me that computers are becoming more and more common (including smart phones). And yet you think that the knowledge _about_ computers will decrease?

Perhaps the obliviousness of the people around you have become more apparent because of the ubiquitousness of computing these days. But to say it has _increased_ would imply that that group was knowledgeable in the first place, which is not the case. Also since more and more people are born that have been around computers their entire lives, I find it very doubtful that less of those people will end-up learning about computers than before when it was strictly the domain of "nerds".

Cars have also become more and more ubiquitous throughout the years, but I would not say that the % of population willing to open the hood and get down and dirty has grown at the same rate.

If pirating requires "opening the hood" and users' experiences with technology trend towards simplicity, it's not unreasonable to conclude that piracy will decrease.

My life isn't simpler as a result of things like DRM on my motherboard and video card. It doesn't make a user's life simpler if their computer is fused shut to prevent service, or if they have to buy ink and coffee of a specific brand in order to use their existing printer and coffee machine.

When people are given options like (say) replaceable batteries, and this isn't associated with some other giant disadvantage (as it will be if you don't even try to design FOR the user, but just to sell)... most will prefer that.

Isn't it? I don't like it, but I can admit that if you tell the user "These are the video services that work, you don't get to grab them elsewhere", or "You must buy this brand of ink", instead of giving them an array of viable options. Or saying "You must bring this computer in if you want service".

Fewer options, and having the decisions on what to do mandated for you is simpler. It means you don't have to think. It's paternalistic and encourages helplessness, but it's simpler.

Its anything but simple. I'm a geek and the only thing I really know for sure about the whole debacle is that "plays for sure"... didn't.

It was diabolical. I didn't just toss it, I actually went "Office Space" on the thing in the driveway first.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c0176416...

I love how the "small percentage of older HP ink supplies" is a list of printers as long as my arm.

Instead there will just be a lot of confusion of what is compatible with what and a lot of tears when people waste money on something that's incompatible. Say... a user without a PC who has a large iTunes in the Cloud library buying an Android phone. "Wait what do you mean I can't listen to my music any more?"

With music (or any other data) locked in the cloud, you don't own it any more. You are granted a right to use, and this right is revokable.

Pick an article, any article.

I hope Google's rediscovered interest in Web apps (Service Workers, Polymer, etc.) will herald a major shift back toward ever more powerful Web apps that are as easily installed locally to home screen (and offline capable) as native apps. If that happens, there will be less use of app stores and more low-cost devices whose only app store is the open Internet, which is a lot harder to restrict.

Err, for starters you can't install any app that's not web based with such a model.

A better analogy would be literacy. Many people struggle with functional illiteracy in the United States (and throughout the world). These people are frustrated and have limited economic opportunities. If they were given better resources to help them achieve functional literacy, they'd be happier and more successful overall.

He's speaking of desktop computers, so not including "smartphones".

A smartphone users doesn't need to have 1/10 the knowledge about OSes and desktop computing a Windows/OSX/Linux users needs.

Bluetooth is a good example... You can use regular (even Apple's) wireless keyboard on an Android phone out of the box. Even wireless mice, it's a fun thing to try, and see a mouse cursor appearing on the phone screen. I also like that I can plug a USB SDR device on my phone and explore the RF spectrum with an open source app. Something I would not dream to do on iOS, which can't event handle a USB thumb drive.

So I think the situation is very different between the two ecosystems, and it's great that people can choose according to what they value the most. Of course we want the best of both worlds and the two platforms are converging a bit along these lines but a device that allows any app to be installed will probably never be as secure as one that only takes from a curated list.

Aren't they becoming less limited? Every year Apple allows developers to do things they couldn't the year before (e.g. keyboards, widgets).

*if you want your phone to be compatible with the vast majority of external devices, services, stuff your friends have, etc, or if you want your political critter to stand a chance of winning, or if you want to not have dial-up, pay a few hundred dollars a month +, have a really slow connection, or go without Internet.

You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly, I suspect the war has already been lost.

In case anybody hasn't seen Doctorow's amazing talks on this subject, well... you should. He gets right to the heart of what will be the biggest "disruption" in social structures since the industrial revolution.

His first talk that he gave at 28C3, "The Coming War on General Computation"[1], received a lot of press, but the 2nd talk given about a year later at DEFCON 20, "Beyond the War on General Purpose Computing: What's Inside the Box?"[2], didn't seem to get as much notoriety. This is really unfortunate, because the 2nd talk is far more important: it extends the problem into a lot of other areas of "normal life". DRM in movies is generally only "annoying". DRM in some medical device you rely on is a very different situation.

This suggests that we need to start winning against stuff like DRM and the MPAA trying to censor websites. While movies are really not that important, setting precedent is important, or it will be a lot harder to fight the real problems later on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y

If there is no way to restrict piracy, and if piracy is generally normalized and socially acceptable, then how on Earth to artists, musicians, journalists, authors, etc. ever get paid for anything?

This has some pretty severe and dystopian secondary consequences. It doesn't mean that nobody will pay to have information created. It just means that the customer will not be the reader/viewer/consumer of that information. Instead, the customer will be advertisers, propagandists, governments, religious factions, special interest groups, etc. Content will never be created for primary reasons ("for the art," journalistic integrity, etc.) but for secondary reasons (marketing, state propaganda).

This is really a variation of the whole "free is a lie" theme. I really encourage people to watch this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A

If Facebook and Google being free means you are the product rather than the customer, then the same thing applies to books, movies, music, etc.

What I really keep trying to get people to grasp here is that piracy is disempowering. If you're not paying, you don't matter. Nothing will be made for you, with your interests or enjoyment in mind. Instead it will be made for whomever is paying, and will play to their interests, not yours.

Nothing is free. You either pay for things, or things pay for you.

On the hardware front, I fail to see how we can possibly create an alternative hardware/OS ecosystem that empowers the user if users are not willing to pay for it. Innovation, production, and capital follows the money. If users aren't willing to pay for a platform that empowers them, someone else will instead drive the future of computing by paying for a platform that disempowers the consumer. I think this is exactly what we're seeing.

There is exactly 0 danger of running out of creative people, regardless of whether or not they get paid. The creativity is built into the human psyche at a low level; it existed long before money, and it will exist long after our civilization has crumbled. In fact, we could totally ban music/painting/whatever, and creativity would still be extremely common.

Whether or not there exists an entertainment _business_ has nothing to do with promoting the creation of art. In fact, the industrial-entertainment complex is probably a net drag on creative expression via crowding-out effects.

I consider this abusive, exploitative, and mean spirited in the extreme.

"Yeah, we enjoy their work and it enriches our lives, but no way we're going to even slightly inconvenience ourselves to support them. Let the artists starve... there'll always be more where those came from!"

You could say the same thing about underpaid Chinese sweatshop workers I guess... "there's always more where those came from!"

I am not being paid to do it. I have no particular expectation that anyone will give me money for it after it is done. I also know that it is probably not as good as a novel written by any of my favorite professional authors.

To indulge this new hobby, I have something called "a day job". Other people who create artworks frequently have one. Only a select few have the independent means to create art full time, and some have acquired a large enough base of supporters to make a living at it.

We have a wealthy society. As such, we are capable of supporting a certain number of people as artists.

But the world does not owe you a living. Less popular and less prolific authors cannot expect to earn enough to write full time just because Stephen King can. A musical performer can't expect to buy a new car even once in his lifetime just because Taylor Swift can now afford one every year for the rest of her life. A painter can't expect to get out of community service because a Banksy can sell for thousands of dollars.

The plain fact of the matter is that there are more people who want to be professional artists than society is currently willing to support. Society likes some artists enough to make them rich, but you're not going to be one of them (unless you get really lucky or are terrifyingly talented). There are plenty more that society will support in a middle-class lifestyle. But for the most part, the aspiring artist's default assumption should be that society wouldn't give two steaming piles for a new work, and it should stay that way until well after the first check clears.

As for myself, I have no plans to quit my day job. Even if I think that my book is better than Twilight, the author of that... piece... actually has dollar-denominated approval from productive society to write books as her full-time profession.

Currently, my plans are to eliminate piracy by seeding the torrents myself, while also providing a painless way for readers to pay me what they want, even if it is just a compliment with no money attached. If I get even one penny, it will be more than what I expected in return for a work of art that no one but me ever asked for.

That is why there is no danger to artistic culture. Even if no one else cares for it, there is still a reward for the creators in their pride of craftsmanship, their knowledge that they created something unique, that did not exist until their will brought it into existence.

That said, I would never ever for a moment think that line cooks don't deserved to get paid, just because I am not.

Writing a novel is incredibly difficult. It often takes years of absolutely thankless work. Your friends and family think you've gone mad, or you're just wasting your time tooling away on "that book." (Eye roll.)

Music is the same: hard work, endless practice, stop energy. "When are you going to quit that band and get a real job?"

Culture is not free. It's created by the blood, sweat, and tears of people who are willing to stand up against their own doubts and the subtile discouragement of others to channel some intensely personal muse, refine the signal in thousands of hours of dull practice and repetitive revision, and finally deliver something that we can enjoy.

But hey, we're all entitled to their works for free because we're the all-important consumer!

The "information should be free" ideology elevates the passive consumer above the active producer both morally and economically. The consumer has all the freedom and all the benefit for none of the work. Once I saw the injustice in this, I could not un-see it.

Fundamentally I think it's a half-baked ideology that comes from people who are looking only at the Internet in isolation from the rest of the socioeconomic system. Most of these people are well-intentioned, but the ideology fails.

It might work if we lived in a post-scarcity society where income wasn't strictly necessary since the marginal cost of everything is approaching zero. But we're nowhere even close to that.

The difficulty of producing the first copy is of almost no significance economically, in comparison to the marginal cost to produce one more copy than already exists.

The recipe may be difficult to create, but it is dead simple to copy. The song is difficult to compose, but easier to perform, easier still to play a recorded performance, and easiest of all to copy a recording. The book is hard to write, but easier to read, and easiest to copy.

We are not entitled to any work for free. But we have a reasonable economic expectation that what we pay to enjoy it will be close to what it costs to create an additional copy. If we elect to pay more, it will be because we wish to encourage the artist to create more works at a reasonable cost. Whether you believe that the artist is entitled to more, or not, depends in large part on whether you believe that culture should be an oligopoly good, or a commoditized good.

I happen to prefer the latter.

Did you not get the whole concept of "digital"? Information most certainly is free. It's getting someone to make the specific types of information you want that costs money.

Of course there are ways of restricting copyright infringement: laws respect for the legal system. A monopoly on the distribution is a powerful thing - it gives you a fairly easy civil case against anybody who violates that monopoly.

What it doesn't do is grant you free enforcement of that monopoly, nor does it guarantee that someone will actually buy your product. Just because you want to make some type of art doesn't mean others actually want it or that it is worth any amount of funding >0.

Also, you seem to be under the impression that money (profit motive) is the only way stuff gets created, which is patently incorrect.

"disempowering"?

Did you watch those talks? (mainly #2) This is about human rights that the arts should not trump just because they want to assert some new type of "property right" simply because they have devised some sort of technical trick to that tries to enforce some aspect of their monopoly.

To continue the example used by Doctorow, just because you have a copyright or patent on the software that runs a cochlear implant, you shouldn't be automatically able to extend those monopolies to override the wishes of the person who actually has the cochlear implant surgically inserted into their skull.

Restrictions - limiting someone's uses - are trivial to talk about when the copyright is on some movie that isn't really important, so some people have accepted the DRM argument for movies. The point of Doctorow's talk is that the concept of restrictions becomes VERY different when you're talking about repossessing someone's legs or hearing.

A lot of this issue comes down to the propaganda that has been used by the media industry over the last few decades. They created the incorrect term "Intellectual Property", when property rights are not what the government grants you when you get a copyright or patent. You get some legal rights, which is fine. You get an easy civil court case. The current effort is to try and extend that limited, specific purpose monopoly into other areas by claiming that your movie, book, song, or software is "property". Being "property" is important, because it is a lot easier to make a case that your property should be defended by force. We defend traditional property because it is finite (aka a "scarce resource"). Government granted fictions don't need such protection, as they already have it by definition!

Now, you're worried about how interesting art and such will be created, and the answer to that is simple: the same ways it has always been created, and if you're clever, some new ways. It is easy to use Kickstarter as an example of new ways to fund things, but the cool, really interesting ways haven't even been invented yet. I realize that this is probably a hard and risky business, but a copyright doesn't mean you should be able to remove that risk by break the general purpose computer. A copyright doesn't mean you should be able to get rights beyond the first sale and the ability to sue people that distribute your monopoly protected works, just because you found some technical trick (DRM) to make that distribution initially difficult. Being able to sue someone doesn't mean you're entitled to have the government any enforcement costs. Most importantly, that same copyright doesn't grant you a market or audience or any kind of guaranteed income, nor should it trump any *human rights".

It will be hard for a while, as new styles of funding are explored. Many musicians have already moved back to a live-performance model, with patronage being used in some areas. I suggest that anybody thinking that restrictions (DRM) are necessary instead focus their time and money on changing to a new funding model - or inventing one - instead of wasting that their time and money trying to prop up pre-general-purpose-computer business models.

(1) Destroy old business model.

(2) ... hand wavey magic happens here ...

(3) Utopia!

I question #2 categorically. The magic never comes.

Historically people have to struggle to be compensated fairly for their work. It was true for labor in the late 19th century, it's true for Chinese sweatshop workers, and it's true for content creators. A rising tide does not automatically lift all boats, and models of fair labor compensation do not appear without a struggle.

Let's be totally clear here. I see the piracy issue as an issue of labor fairness vs. labor exploitation.

If programmers were the ones on the chopping block, none of you people would be talking like this. You'd all be up in arms and talking about what can be done. This is entitled elitism of the first order; only some professions are entitled to compensation or for their wishes about how their works are used to be respected.

Why is it that there are a million hackers working on new alternatives to The Pirate Bay, yet I see almost nobody working on new ways for authors, musicians, and artists to connect directly with their audiences?

TPB doesn't connect musician to audience -- it distances musician from audience even more than the record companies ever did! Piracy is the ultimate in passive consumerism. It's consumerism so passive there isn't even a twice-removed economic connection. There's no connection at all. You -- the viewer or listener -- might as well not even exist.

If the goal is to get the scummy record companies out of the loop, why aren't hackers working on that? Why doesn't somebody create a distributed, censorship-resistant medium for people to publish creative work that incorporates a transparent and direct-to-the-creator Bitcoin-based mechanism for payment? I'm not even talking about DRM, which I agree doesn't work. I'm talking about a simple mechanism. On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to. There's not even a "tip" functionality. I think the intent is clear from the absence of anything like that in the design.

This is about free, not freedom. You're appropriating a bunch of high-minded rhetoric, but the reality is you're just cheapskates who want free labor.

I'll reserve my respect for people who actually make things of their own and put them out there to advance the cause of freedom-- people like Linus, or DJB, or pretty much every original OSS software author out there.

The connection is the same as always have been, you view their film/listened to their music/etc, and hopefully liked it. By that metric, borrowing a book from a friend also doesn't count. This coupling of money and art is a disservice to both those things.

> On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to.

This is so wrong. Things don't work like that. Say I watch the latest blockbuster, or the latest Game of Thrones episode. Who do I pay?

Because we categorically reject the notion that corrupt, law-breaking middlemen who abuse the artist's right to be paid and abuse or refuse service to the customer -- I mean the MPAA, RIAA, etc. -- are a better alternative or economic model for a digital age than the free sharing of bits which is what the internet (and before that, usenet, and before that, sneakernet) has always been.

We categorically reject the notion that we need state-sponsored controlled locked-down DRM ecosystems where hackers are thrown in jail for sending an HTTP request to an open server and cell phone unlocking is illegal, just so that the MPAA can continue to exist.

The free as in zero dollars alternative _is_ what is happening to software: the price of an operating system is being driven to zero dollars.

We celebrate this as the liberation of technology from the monopolistic, predatory, illegal activities that happened 20 years ago.

We applaud the brilliant, profitable companies that are not hostile to free software (as in freedom).

We hope more companies will learn how to do something like Github, The Linux Foundation, or Amazon EC2.

Meanwhile, you can question the magic. It might not make sense to you, but it makes sense to John Perry Barlow:

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

Why aren't you championing Actors Guilds, Authors fighting against Amazon's policies and fees, or even the fight against DRM?

"Free" is really a punk idea. It's a counterculture idea. "Steal this book" and all that. But ideas like that undergo a strange transformation when the power dynamics invert.

Graffiti is also a counterculture thing, a rebellious thing. But what would happen if the police started doing it? Imagine you go outside and see a couple cops spray painting "just say no to drugs!" on the side of your house? You confront them and they start spewing stuff about how "there is no property man! I should be free to express myself!" (Great comedy skit right there...)

The trouble is that hackers aren't rebels anymore. They aren't a counterculture. They've won.

So stop talking like a rebel, because you aren't one. You are a member of a super-privileged super-empowered super-educated upper class with tremendous opportunity and unbelievable power. With your ideas and gravitas you can raise more capital than most people can save over a working lifetime, and if your "startup" is successful you could find yourself with four houses and a private jet. With somewhat less effort you can command incomes that are twice the national average for a whole family and still have enough energy left over to hack on things "in your spare time" and debate politics on sites like this. You can, with a few "hacks," crash whole corporate systems and cost people millions upon millions of dollars all by yourself. If you know a bit about networks you can probably pull it off without being caught, maybe deflect the blame toward a third world dictator and create an international incident that captures global headlines... FROM YOUR BEDROOM.

You are upper class. You are rich and powerful -- far more powerful than the clueless geezers at the MPAA. I mean look... TPB gets taken down and six copies pop up in 24 hours. You can run circles around those morons because you're smarter, faster, ...

YOU ARE THE F'ING MAN.

You're not desperately struggling against the MPAA and the RIAA. Don't you get it? They're the ones desperately struggling against you, and it's a total rout. You are beating the living hell out of them.

"Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny. In the hands of "the man," piracy becomes a tool for crushing and beggaring labor, disempowering the consumer, and creating a surveillance dystopia by baiting users into passive surveillance-based content aggregators. It's as ridiculous as graffiti in the hands of the police.

You say "we" a lot. Let me tell you this. History will judge us on what we do with the awesome power we have been given.

I'm not defending the old record companies. We could do better. We could create systems that allow artists to sell their works directly to their customers with almost zero percent overhead -- 100% to the artist! Not only that, but we could create in that transaction a direct personal social link between artist and fan, a real relationship. That's so much better than the old model for everyone.

But no, we're building The Pirate Bay again, and again, and again, because we're cheap and we want free stuff. It's not just tyrannical and infantile. It's lame. It's not even technically interesting.

Everyone taking all the music they listen to for free hasn't, in reality, stopped new music creation. Therefore your argument must have some major flaws.

Perhaps artists don't unionise and go on strike, because they're afraid it would make clear the same thing the pirate bay makes clear - that the real market value of entertainment content is approximately $0.

Yeah "we want free stuff" ... but how have you managed to turn that into "people who want free stuff ... want to pay for stuff"?

I would look up a series of talks on YouTube called "free is a lie" by Aral Balkan. They deal more with the free service bait and switch than piracy, but I found them influential in getting me to question "free."

DRM and the old record companies are the lie you're selling. If they were fighting for their lives, they wouldn't have Washington DC, Apple, Google, Microsoft, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the United Kingdom, ... in their pockets.

The 100%-to-the-artists stores exist. I love 'em.

I'm not the man, I'm just another guy looking for a job. The interview process for computer jobs should make it obvious that I'm not the super-elite like Chris Dodd.

I just don't think people will ever stop freely sharing culture... long after the MPAA, DMCA, RIAA, and all DRM schemes are forgotten.

The zero marginal cost of copying bits is only true if you look at the copying of bits in isolation. If you take a whole system view, it isn't free.

I think there's two sides to this, the people who want and think that everything has a price, and the people who recognize that the digital age brings with it advances that mean this idea no longer applies to everything the way it once did.

I'll end on a point I think we can agree on: duplicating a CD or CDs is not an indication that one has the financial means to buy it/them.

I guess if you want nothing but ad supported culture and skill-less rage comics and stupid blob cartoons maybe, but the kind of culture that really inspires, challenges, and uplifts takes real effort to create.

Culture is a byproduct of civilization, we produce culture merely by existing and interacting with each other. Music, media and cartoons are but one [current] aspect of our culture, they do not comprise all of it.

I would be quite interested in what a world would look like where artists created things for the sake of creation and innovation, instead of merely for a paycheck. That doesn't mean you couldn't get paid from producing hit music, it just means if you're not a popular artist you better have supplementary income.

Speaking only for myself, what I find inspiring is generally the work of other impassioned people working on topics I'm interested in. I like watching the videos that come out of DefCon for that reason, I find them inspiring. Those videos are feely available and IMO they're part of our culture too.

We create for many different reasons. Don't reduce us to just wage-slaves.

That's never popular, but I really think I'm right about this and I think with time other people are going to see it too.

I'm not intending to insult artists, but I am insulting the Internet's popular trash culture of memes and throwaway junk. I see "free" as being partly responsible for that. There's no money in creating online culture, therefore nobody can spend any real time or effort on it. As a result you get a lot of totally disposable superficial noise and ad-driven marketing gimmickry.

I am supporting your right to have control over your work -- not only a right to earn something from it or to give it away if you so choose, but also to have some say over how it's used.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26055297

If "information is free," what right would these guys have to protest their music being used in torture chambers? None, of course.

That's an extreme example but it illustrates my point. Copyrights aren't just about money. They're also about creators having some kind of say about what can be done with their work.

I believe that the creators of things should have more rights over their creations -- yes more -- than those that just "consume" them. Anything else strikes me as a grotesque value inversion. Disempowering the creator in favor of the consumer de-funds culture creation, impoverishes creators, and encourages a society of utterly passive consumption and triviality.

It's the ultimate in passive consumerism. Value flows one way -- downhill -- until the snow's all melted and the streams run dry.

That's not what free culture was supposed to do, either. Free culture was supposed to lead to a gift culture, not a culture of take-take-take. Part of why I've lost the faith is that the promised land hasn't come. Taking is all I see... take, take, take, gimme, gimme, gimme...

But I disagree that RIAA and MPAA are totally losing - they still have direct lines to power through the government and its regulative and, ultimately, judicial and military power.

There are more than 2 sides. There is not "the man" vs. "the underdog". It's less chess and more hungry hippos. Yes, we should build something better (for the market, for the world, for the commons) than TPB. But the regulative status quo disallows those things. TPB is a mushroom colony. What you want is a tilled field.

The government does not serve RIAA well, but it also salts the earth where we might grow internet-aware markets. TPB is a compromise solution, and better than nothing.

What we build is not in a vacuum.

Let's get started cultivating the field, plowing under the existing regulation which is defunct and self-serving, erecting new fences where boundaries represent newly-reasonable compromises, advantages, and common sense.

> "Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny

Just wow. I'd like to add some thoughts so that my comment isn't just a well deserved kudos that adds nothing to the conversation:

Hackers and hacker culture aren't actually as all powerful as you make them out to be. Most of the people on hn don't have four houses and a private jet or the power to crash corporate systems single handedly. We do have disproportionately more power than we did 30 years ago and the imbalance is growing. But we still don't have the most important thing that any would be revolutionary can have: Public support.

I was watching a documentary on Che Guevara the other day and I noticed how well things went for him in Cuba contrasted with how poorly they went in Bolivia. The difference was that the people were behind him in the former and hunting him in the latter. If hackers make the MPAA out to be the enemy, geezers that we need to hack circles around, then they will never win. Most people aren't upset with the MPAA or the RIAA, they don't see them as villains to be defeated. Everyone likes to get free stuff, but not enough to stand up and fight. Most of the people I know happily pay whatever price itunes asks for music or movies or any digital content. Granted most of the people I know are professionals with enough disposable income to pay for an album or kindle book without a second thought. And until they get pissed off with something that the various entertainment industries do, there will be no support for the freedom of information cause. The revolution will not be televised, or downloaded, because it won't exist.

This is the general problem with the freedom of information movement, you can't rally people to fight against someone who isn't actually oppressing them. No one I know has a problem with even DRM, it generally never occurs to them to copy media and send it to someone else. Heck, most of them aren't even aware of TPB at all. It's always good to see people fighting for what they believe in, but unless the majority of people can be convinced to join the fight the battles will be long, hard and potentially pointless.

They're also arguably more powerful than the RIAA, MPAA, and even governments-- in this particular domain. Sure they can be arrested one by one and sites can be taken down one by one, but overall the hackers are winning and the old stalwarts are losing.

Look up the difference in average income between a musician and a programmer. Who's "punk" now?

I'd also like to point out that Apple is far more valuable than any record company, and Google is practically the gloved hand of the U.S. State Department. The technology industry -- which opposes strong copyrights for a number of reasons -- has far more political "juice" these days than ailing record companies.

In the early 90s, both Bill Gates and Oracle Corporation expressed strong doubts or outright opposition to the idea of software patents. Later they 'won' and came to use software patents as competitive weapons.

Had 'hackers', at that point of the ascension of Microsoft and Oracle, 'won' – meaning the only gracious move would be to agree that the software-patent regime was good for them? No, the 'hacker' category had broadened, and many of the people doing the most interesting work still justifiably despised software patents.

Hackers and artists are creating systems for direct creative compensation, to replace the outdated idea of criminalizing digital reproduction.

Others, who are not necessarily the same people who could (technically or socially) sell out for the "four houses and a private jet" you dangle, still prefer to build other radically uncensorable systems. Don't adopt them into your royal "we".

Some of us build Bandcamps and Spotifys. Others have different beliefs and reasoning. I don’t think there’s some ultimately objective point of view that proves one group as right and another wrong.

How many great artist[1] make a lot of money from their work while they are alive? How many make a lot of money for their label (alone, or in aggregate)?

I'm not afraid of artists stopping to create, and I'm not too terrified of a future without projects like the Lord of the Rings-films (note that the books were a work of passion, and not a main source of income -- which might be considered a bad thing, but also illustrates that people will do what can -- as long as they have some free time at their disposal). Or without TV shows like "(American) Idol".

There's an aspect of being dependent on commercial success that tends to shape what art is made -- a sinister form of self censorship. So it is not just the business model that is under attack -- but also the constraints under which artists work. People will disagree if this is a good or bad thing -- but it should probably be a part of the debate (who should have the resources to create art, and what art should they be making? Do we really think the invisible hand is the best judge of what makes good visual art?).

[1] Great art and great artists is of course highly subjective. I'm thinking of people like Townes Van Zandt, Phil Ochs, or various blues/jazz legends -- people generally highly regarded in their field, but that in spite of having published through established channels have not had commercial "success".

But I fail to see how either of those things are really relevant to my argument.

Be clear: what I'm arguing against is the idea that industrial-scale mass piracy is actually a social good. I'm arguing against people like the "Pirate Party," etc. Conversely I am arguing that building a click mill "portal" on the backs of other peoples' work (like TPB) is at the very least a dick move even if it's not actually illegal.

Pulling more money out of the creative economy is only going to make things worse for artists.

I also disagree about the value of things like the LoTR films, etc. While these are to some extent purely profit-driven, they serve as vehicles of employment for vast numbers of creative professionals who use them to hone their craft. It's blockbusters like this that pay for the cool indie art flicks, and that create careers for the people who make such things "on the side." They also drive massive advancements in the technology and technique of film-making, and these make it easier and cheaper for indie art flicks to get made. I'd say the same thing about pop music-- it supports a vast technical infrastructure of music making, recording, editing, and distribution that indie acts can tap into and use. Without all that money going in at the top, you wouldn't have such a massive market for instruments, fuzz boxes, production software, synths, etc.

Freemium and "pay what you want" can work in some cases, and some artists have made it work, but my point is that it's the artist's choice what model they want to use. Making that choice for them and then preaching about how you've got the right to do so because your "free" views are morally superior is just assholery. If an artist doesn't want their work distributed in that way, doing so is saying you don't give a damn about them.

I grew up having access to the entire canon of film, books, comics, culture. That was a huge part of my formative experience. I want my kids to have that. I don't want my kids to be limited to what's on Netflix because of licensing agreements.

I am a big believer in Kopimi. I also love the idea of torrent nodes and bitcoin nodes and other P2P modes as a metaphor for holography and as a metaphor for knowledge as a whole -- each node contains within it an image of the whole swarm.The companies who make a profit from the works of artists and use legal means to restrict this model are shortsighted, stupid, and outright dangerous to soceity.

That said, I try to only consume works that are public domain and creative commons. It's not easy, and I frequently break this "soft boycott" not just out of lack of will, but also because fair use is my right and I intend on excercising it.

We've lost a majority of the early silent films produced in Hollywood. The myth of the internet as a permanent archive persists, and I can't figure out why. I believe that copyright activists and the Pirate Party are doing a net force for good in archiving our culture.

Without all that money going in at the top, people would be using free recording tools like Ardour.

My philosophy: Don't be a child. If an artist wants to restrict your consumption, it's not art, it's commerce. If you're old enough to have disposable income, you are old enough to support CC and PD works. Anything less, and you need to go listen to some more preaching.

Nice point on commercial success driving a form of self censorship. I'm big on independant media, but I have a huge respect for those who run established brands and are able to turn a profit in media.

Some mainstream artists do a very good job rewarding those who are willing to delve deeply into music.

With any form of art, but especially music, I believe it's the artists job to take us from the familiar, to the unfamiliar, and back to the familiar. My ideal artform is a massively popular avant-garde movement, but that's more of a platonic ideal than anything else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI

Is there a transcript available?

    You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly,
    I suspect the war has already been lost.

For $20 you can buy a WiFi "kit" that you can plug an array of $10-20 sensors onto. That opens up A LOT of doors for people to either create budget hardware products to sell, or for inexperienced home users to piece devices together. If wifi/gps/gsm chips and sensors can be plugged together like Legos, and if software can be "beamed" to it from their Phone, then you now have a perfect breeding ground for cheap, open hardware products available to the masses.

I look on to the next 5 years with nervous excitement; I myself have even begun planning a cheap cloud storage device using nothing but an RPi, external hardrives, and a few parts from Newegg that I can assemble in a couple minutes. That's an open replacement for Apple's TimeCapsule that anyone could put together in 10 minutes if a kit of the parts were sold to them.

You mean "like Olimex A20 Olinuxino which has the same form factor of the Raspberry Pi but unlike the latter is open hardware and runs on open source software only", right?

https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO

You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software.

That seems pretty far from "open hardware". True that likely any similar project requires closed source drivers for things like the EC/embedded controller, 3D acceleration, and maybe the 802.11 chip, but at least you can choose to boot and use the system without support for the closed devices.

Please stop. This mindset is actively harmful. There's no "giant leap", it's all small steps.

I thought that this was no longer necessary[1], but after searching around I'm not sure if this means it is possible to boot without the blob. Does anyone know if this is the case?

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/

http://www.raspberrypi.org/quake-iii-bounty-we-have-a-winner...

A few more hacks like the recent Sony one, and they might be running away soon!

Today with the docker type tech being developed, it is only a matter of time before small free containers can be run on mobile devices and we will be free of the chains again :)

The more they wall us up the more we will work for freedom.

I guess I don't see how this idea addresses the concern, though. Sure, maybe it's natural that there's a split between the compliant sheep and the independently-minded. But the concern is about what the status quo is that the sheep live with and perpetuate, and the independently-minded have to rebel against. Things are worse for all of us if the kind of free expression and sharing of ideas that the Internet enables becomes something that only non-sheep do, or can do.

Would that situation be worse than in pre-Internet society? Maybe not, but maybe so: a society in which most of our information exchange takes place online, but only over controlled, monitored, or proprietary channels strikes me as worse than one in which most information exchange is offline, but not so locked down.

I don't think we have to worry about this as the commercial potential to profit off the masses is too great. I think there already is a schism between the sheep and non-sheep. The masses stay in their walled-garden apps and sites while much of the creative and interesting information and discourse goes to things like hidden services, torrents, or smaller niche sites (like HN for example).

And it has been very successful. 30% of software, music, video, and games sales is huge. They profit more from those sales than the content creators do.

Apple doesn't even let Firefox port their browser. Windows had third-party C compilers.

Is it more difficult to do things that way, than simply buying a song or movie from an app store? Yes. But shouldn't that be a good thing? For years one of the arguments against anti-piracy enforcement was that the only reason people pirated was because it was easier to get content that way. Companies were told that the right way to fight piracy was not through Congres and the courts, but by making the experience of legally paying for content easier than pirating content.

Now, that is actually coming true. But apparently it is now also a wrong way to fight piracy.

One application, supporting two operating systems and three formats. Whooptidoo.

For something that is technically as easy as copying any format file to any device. Congrats. Great f-ing progress.

Not to mention the fact that most of what I would like to consume in media isn't legally available in my country in those or any other format. And anything but music is still DRM-crippled.

It's not just easier to get pirated content, it's still largely the only way.

And unless secured boot walled gardens are legally mandatory - people derive too much value from piracy to choose only the walled garden model.

It's also easy to see how financial privacy could become virtually nonexistent if digital currencies like Bitcoin take over. Most Bitcoin evangelists are turning a blind eye to this highly troubling downside when they extoll the virtues of a global cashless society.

This phrase is a bit misleading.

While not discounting the power of the torrent protocol, there were many p2p software before it which were more popular then it (napster, kazza, edunkey/eMule) .

The reason why sharing tv-shows and movies is so easy now then before is that we have broadband. In 2000 most people had dial-up.

If at all, the greatest achievement of the torrent protocol is allowing for discovery of files without a central repository.

Multicast was always talked about in networking previously, but solutions were found only for niche applications. These tended to have centralized setup requirements and other hurdles, so the internet remained basically entirely unicast.

I still find it incredible that a single source with a slow upload can broadcast to thousands of destinations - who add and remove themselves from the swarm freely, with newcomers automagically caught up - each receiving their full copy of the data mere seconds after the source has finished uploading a single copy.

In retrospect, older multicast ideas such as RFC 1112 (et al) were never going to work. Accomplishing the necessary routing while allowing dynamic group membership would have required adding an incredible amount of complexity switching fabric of the internet.

Napster etc ran out of central corporate servers. This made them big juicy targets for lawyer bombing. Take out those servers and you take out the whole network.

But with bittorrent the tracker and the search are two separate entities. And over time you got things like DHT and multiple trackers for a single torrent that made it damn hard to knock them out.

Sony has resorted to flooding search sites with fake torrents in an attempt at slowing the spread of the files from the recent attack on their servers...

Napster and the like were great for 3-4MB files, but anything larger would cause issues. You'd rely mostly on one-source, and if the connection to that source was shaky, the download would take days/weeks, even longer. BT changed this, and turned the idea of popular file=congested networks on it's ear completely. With BT, the more popular the file, the faster your download would go.

I've never used Napster, so I can't say about it, but eMule had (and has) the ability to download the same files from multiple users simultaneously.

I'm pretty sure Kazza had such an ability as well (the more popular files downloaded faster).

I don't think it really had a whole lot to do with the protocols themselves though, but rather that broadband penetration in the States ramped up really quickly at about the same time Bittorrent came onto the scene. There was probably a short period of time where you could have downloaded TV shows on Kazaa, but that protocol died really fast.

Not many people used eDonkey back then. I tried. It was hard to find the stuff I wanted. Right after Kazaa died, both eDonkey and Bittorrent started taking off. Bittorrent just became the most popular protocol.

IRC, there where bots you could talk to. You could ask them what they got and download it. Worked like a charm, even for bigger files.

DDL, direct downloads, simple websites where you got links to download what you want.

eMule/eDonkey, those where running on my brothers machine day and night and rather good. There were links like bittorrent links back then. AFAIK you could start a DL pause it and switch to another hoster if the first one died.

Therefore there were dedicated "uppers" who would be given access to private scene FTP dumps. These uppers would create sequences of emails with files attached for various releases (usually individual rar or zip files).

They would forward the emails to people who ran bots in the chat rooms. You could request a list of files, and then a sequence of emails based by typing commands in chat. Since the files had already been uploaded, it was very fast for the chat bots to forward the emails as they were requested.

It was actually a pretty cool system. I remember calling AOL and giving them a story about how I needed to send email newsletters for my church, so could they please "whitelist" my account. Once that happened, you could send as much email as you wanted without being flagged.

I ran into a story about a guy in the UK that ended up involved in the piracy scene surrounding that platform.

The basic story was that in the UK there were a number of Amiga centric magazines printed. And in the back of them were several pages of classified ads. Amongst them were people offering to swap disks for disks via mail. You sent them a stack of disks and a list of what you wanted, and they would send you back what they had on that list.

So he put up a small ad, and got a few small envelopes. Over time this snowballed into him investing in multiple add-on drives and dedicating whole weekends to copying disks.

I think "piracy" is usually two different things: illicit copying for profit, and illicit copying for sharing. My first introduction was through sharing: cassette tapes for the vic20 and c64. Then floppies for the Amiga. Then BBSs (that where free to access, less the fee the phone companies took).

I think my first introduction to copying for (small) profit was around the time of the first affordable cd burners. Some people financed their cd burners this way -- and some made real money.

I never used Napster -- so I can't really comment. But with IRC and ftp sites -- things were again back to copying for sharing (no fee). Same for DC++/Direct Connect -- people ran hubs out of love, for fun -- and in many ways I'd say they were more distributed than torrent sites -- in the sense that there were many small (compared to the Pirate Bay) hubs, and there was more of a sense of community.

And again, no ads, no money involved.

I hope we'll see the rise of more distributed networks (eg: freenet) run by the users themselves, without any central orchestration -- and without an artificial ad-financed gateway like TPB. We'll see.

It's a shame Netflix can't just change to distributing torrents, as they'd never be allowed to license the content like that.

Some would also show how many were in the queue for a file.

"Oh new release lets get to IRC... !search anime-xyz-107... 9123 in queue .... D:"

Then when I went to Uni there was a large campus DC++ network with internal 100 MBit downloads.

Not only this, but prices for cheap virtual servers dropped like a rock, meaning that many more people could afford them or seedbox providers using them. Not many people running eMule or similar on a 100mbit or gigabit pipe.

This made downloading popular files quite a bit faster, and eliminated most of the issues with p2p networks like Napster—it was just much less convenient because you had to search for the peers yourself.

I have no idea if that's why it was done that way but it sure seemed to fit well. I'm pretty sure usenet is still a popular way to "pirate" TV shows and movies and such. It's just not as well known since it typically requires you to pay for access these days with most ISPs dropping support (and I doubt they'd allow access to the TV/movie groups anyway).

After CD-RW drives became common RAR files were mostly used for uploading and downloading as you describe, to avoid file size caps and to make it somewhat easier to fix corrupted chunks. By the time the data being shared was filling the CDs we had writable DVDs, so RAR wasn't needed to span CDs. Then writable BluRay came around before DVD spanning became necessary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

As it was written eMule had a soft-cap of 10x "line speed" for someone who's uploaded 5x as much data to you as you have to them. This was far too little to get through a queue quickly. Worse, place in line wasn't remembered, so even a massive seeder on the eMule network might end up with zero files if he turned on the client for only half a day or so -- this is why eMule sharing typically consisted of having a computer run 24/7 and not expecting the file you wanted until a few days later.

Bittorrent changed that. While both clients were working with the same amount of underlying bandwidth, bittorrent made the connection between uploading and downloading much more immediate without an upper limit on tit-for-tat, and the incentive was clearly stronger.

Am... What? Color me surprised, I thought the biggest weakness of BitTorrent protocol is that it need a centralized, searchable repository of files.

I was comparing it to Napster, and I thought Kazaa also had a central repository.

But both Kazaa and eMule have the same "supernode" like search mentality as bit-torrent (in bit-torrents it's the trackers).

I was referring more to the fact that unlike Kazaa/eMule where you needed to first find a "supernode" and then search for the file, bittorrent actually had the "tracker" url inside the download link (.torrent or magnet link).

Even before those things became popular IRC was a popular way to trade files. The first MP3s that I downloaded came from an fserv on IRC. That lead me to alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.* on Usenet.

Television in Britain has 3 main models:

1: BBC tv paid for by licence, no advertising.

2: ITV, paid for by ads, no subscription (much less advertising than sky)

3: Sky, big subscription and wall to wall ads.

Having been weaned on the former BBC, ITV duopoly there a distinct feeling that Sky are gougers and deserve to be punished.

These magazines went out of business years ago, back issues are difficult to find, and it's unlikely they'll ever be available digitally legitimately.

So yes, it's not always about getting it for free... in some cases, it's about getting it at all.

But on the "free" angle, it's not about that for me, or not entirely. I want to punish the copyright holders (and if only I could). They've subverted the system and turned into rent-seekers. It was never intended for them to set up their descendants with royalties for all eternity, nor is this an unintentional good thing that sane people should support.

I get your point but that's incorrect. Alternatives include:

- paying for the cable + HBO subscription and only watching GoT.

- waiting for the blu ray/dvd/iTunes release

Both those options allow you to watch GoT and nothing else. The problem is that people don't want to wait for an official release or want a cheaper way to get it 'right now' (i.e. a cheaper HBO only subscription). I think GoT is a big torrent is because it's not available on TV in a lot of countries or there is a big delay between the US airing and the local airing. Another reason is that people don't pay for something when they can get it for free. I would like to see how many people who torrent GoT (but say they would pay for it if it was available to them on their terms) would pay $3-5 for an episode via a torrent if there was a button to pay (and get it legally) and a button to get it for free (illegally).

I would like to say this is wrong, but I have no evidence to support my claims. However what I can say empirically is that myself and many other people I know have stopped pirating games and/or music ever since easy-to-use services like Steam and Google Music came out.

Personally, nowadays I find myself with so many legit games on Steam that my first thought when a new game comes out is "meh, I don't have time to play that, I'll buy it later when it goes on sale". Years ago it would've been "let's hop on XXXX to see if there's a torrent ready!".

It simply is not worth it, to me, to pirate games, set up cracks, be sure I have all the proper files, set up backups in case I want to replay it later, etc etc. With Steam I can just click "download" and it just works.

I firmly believe that if you make something easy-to-access, cheap enough (steam sales, anyone?) and immediate in delivery, you will soon realize piracy really does not matter. The market just needs to evolve and adapt to newer technologies.

I love how easy it is to get a book on my Kindle from Amazon at the click of a button, but given my voracious reading and the bill it generates it might be that I would consider looking at alternate sources for some of those books. So I might consider buying some and torrenting some. The alternative would be reducing the amount I read. And if I went the torrent route, I might suddenly notice that the volume of bought books might reduce from 5-10 legitimate purchases a month to 1 a month.

My guess: not everyone, but a lot of people.

Frankly, I do not believe those are viable alternatives. Suppose I put food in front of a hungry man. Formally, his options are eat or don't eat, but it's clear that they are not equal from his point of view. He might not eat if his conviction is strong enough (say a hunger strike) but this doesn't change the fact that the options are not equally balanced.

It is not fair or reasonable to assume that TV show aficionados have a strong enough moral conviction that copyright infringement is bad, compared to their desire to see more of the show. After all, in a way, the show is designed to make us want to watch more.

Okay, now on to the former alternative -- paying for cable and only watching GoT. The first thing that needs to be said that this alternative is not universal -- there are countries where HBO is unavailable. Even this simple fact has implications -- a non-trivial market for torrents, for instance. But let us ignore this and assume cable is available.

I think most people inside a capitalist society are trained to evaluate objects. This means that if you want to sell me a bundle, I divide the price based on the objects in the bundle. Usually, this is used by marketing in a devious, but smart way -- for instance by adding free modifications to a car, washing mashine, cell phone plan, what have you. In our case, it is detrimental -- people who only want to watch GoT and nothing else hardly see value in the entire HBO bundle. In fact, they actually see negative value in it, especially if they do all of their TV watching via their computer.

The reason why I say they see negative value in the bundle is this: If you are asked to buy a fairly pricey bundle but all of the things in it except one do not interest you, you again divide the price... and note that you pay a lot of money for something you don't need. That's not a feeling a seller should promote.

I think the smart move by HBO would be to offer individual shows for purchase on their website, and alongside them offer the HBO subscription as a discount on all the shows. This way the bundle feels like a discount again.

Which certainly seems fair enough - these things aren't just entertainment, they're culture. If you're a couple weeks behind GoT, chances are you're going to spoiled on it when some newspaper runs a damn headline about an episode.

For people in Australia, there is no other option: many shows simply never make it here. I remember trying to watch Battlestar Galactica on Channel 10 - by the end they really didn't care about that show, and by the time we got it season 2 was already starting in the US. They didn't pick it up.

It isn't very popular - partly because it is the same as a netflix subscription but so much less content, partly because it is a technical disaster (you can't use a tablet only, the ios app doesn't support streaming the pictures to a tv, no chromecast support while netflix has both) and partly because they launched slightly after Netflix with a much worse proposal.

That said if the same offer was available in the US, I think a lot more users would take it. And certainly HBO makes nothing from torrent users.

Finally users like buffet style content - it means you only suffer the pain of paying once, rather than every time you press the button.

Never mind that there is an aspect that keeps being overlooked, social interaction. A popular TV show or movie is not just about the experience itself, but also the chatter afterwards. Be it over the lunch room table, or over the net.

And the latter is what drives many to pirate even if they know the episode will eventually be broadcast locally. This because they are involved in the chatter about the show online, and there people will discuss the latest when it aired initially, not when it aired in some nation or other.

If there is a good service and I have to pay no problems. I am willing to give out $10 to Amazon every time there is a ebook I want. Give me a better service so I can follow the 2-3 TV series I want, and watch the occasional movie, I will pay.

Option 2 will allow me to watch GoT, true, but I'd have to wait for the BR release.

It’s more like: Going into a bookstore, taking the encyclopedia britannica, reading the article about Elephants and the leaving again, without buying the encyclopedia.

Overall the store lost no sale. You wouldn’t have bought it otherwise anyway (For example as I had the choice between paying 20$/month just for Game of Thrones, or not watching it at all, I decided to just ignore that boring show).

It might even have made a sale, because as you were already there, you might have bought something else (Pirates tend to spend the most money on additional stuff like cinema tickets or merchandise).

And the store didn’t even lose anything, as you didn’t take something from them that they had, you actually didn’t even cost them any money.

I'm sure you would have a different attitude if your boss decided to randomly withhold part of your income whenever he wanted because he believes there are no moral consequences of doing so.

Person A states that you should pay X for their product. You don't. There isn't any other argument other than you are just cheap and only do it because you can get away with it. If the same happened to you and affected your income you would be on here whining about how terrible the situation is.

Again everyone would respect you much more if you just said: yeah I'm cheap and can take content for free, so I do.

I made no such argument

>Person A states that you should pay X for their product. You don't

Correct. I state you should pay me $20 for reading my post. Are you morally obligated to do so now? This is a serious question, your moral code is not clear to me. Mine is quite simple. I am not morally obligated to capitulate to random people's arbitrary demands of me.

>If the same happened to you and affected your income you would be on here whining about how terrible the situation is.

Yes, if I were a different person I would be a different person. That is not a very impressive insight.

>Again everyone would respect you much more if you just said: yeah I'm cheap and can take content for free, so I do.

I have no problem with how much respect I am given right now. Your need to try to rationalize your morality does not require making stupid assumptions about people you don't know.

> There are no moral consequences of piracy.

So, their beliefs are not universal moral truths, but yours are?

Person A: Oranges taste good. Person B: No they do not.

These people are both making personal statements of their own beliefs/opinions. Even though the phrasing does not explicitly state "I personally believe oranges taste good", it is implied because it is a subjective statement and neither could reasonably make a universal claim.

Person A: Everyone like oranges. Person B: I do not like oranges.

Person A is trying to make a universal claim. Person B is not. "I do not like oranges" is a personal claim. "I do not have a moral obligation to give money to people just because they tell me to" is a personal claim.

If HBO doesn't provide their content, on-demand, on my country, it's not my problem.

Same goes to Walking Dead... Here in Brazil Netflix has it only till season 3... On popcorn time I can watch the last episode, with subtitles, only 2 or 3 days after it's aired.

I'm really willing to pay for content as far as it's available on my country!

Demand is much larger when a product is free. I doubt HBO is missing out on a large amount of sales. Especially without the amount of free marketing illegal downloading has brought them.

Downloading pc games on Steam is absurdly easy, much easier than pirating. Yet, games available on Steam are downloaded in masse.

People download network TV shows that are available over the air for free, on the internet to stream on their networks website / hulu, or on Itunes for 1.99.

I think it's a bit naive to think that getting stuff for free isn't the main reason people torrent.

My guess is that there are a lot of people who purchase games on Steam but torrent shows/movies, particularly if they live outside the US. Surely they know these games are available for free as well?

I think it's a bit naive to think that getting stuff for free is the main reason people torrent.

I'd venture that people who buy a lot on steam yet don't pay for TV shows are mostly buying multiplayer games that cannot be pirated and still give the same experience.

I simply don't watch a lot of TV any more because I can't cope with all the adverts, and everyone I talk to about this says that they don't watch TV in real time any more and just skip all the adverts. So I have to wonder what the actual value of advertising is in the first place; probably a lot less than what retailers are currently paying.

And if the value of advertising is inflated, TPB might well become the least of the industry's worries.

"Everyone I talk to" is probably not a representative sample of the whole population (its probably distinctly skewed to be geographically, socioeconomically, and by interests and preferences similar to the speaker compared to the population.)

Anyhow, you can only skip some of the ads on TV if you are watching the show at all. [0]

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/24/breaking...

And the people who watch it in real time, they just tend to switch to another channel, or turn off the volume and talk to each other, or do other stuff, etc.

The push in NBC for this sort of paid placement was so strong that the show 30 Rock mocked it repeatedly in their storylines.

And yes, a bug chunk of it appears to be going away from advertising.

Yet both of these companies you mention are reviled by the content producers. What the content producers want is their own walled garden. You want their content, you come to their app or website.

It's pathetic. I would pay a reasonable fee for TV and movies (and often do, btw). There are some movies you can't get in any format but DVD. Ghostbusters, for example. The owners of that particular title refuse to let it be licensed for streaming of any kind. So, I downloaded it (in a completely safe way, of course).

Much has been written about the licensing nightmare for content, though. It's going to be the undoing of Netflix, unless they can get enough of their own content to keep them alive. I'm not sure they can. Whenever I look, it's very hard to find stuff that I want to watch. All the newly added stuff is really 2nd and 3rd tier stuff.

And that is, exactly, what they cannot have. There are plenty of ways to make money from digital content, but there is no way to control it. All you do is teach people how to find the stuff illegally, such as on the pirate bay, on youtube, on grooveshark or on watch series.

Or, perhaps even more dangerous, find some other content - that was what I did when I couldn't find some particular bands on Spotify. Turned out the bands I found instead were better.

While your general point remains valid, Ghostbusters was a poor example. It was available for streaming on Netflix earlier this year. (http://www.ibtimes.com/netflix-movies-disappearing-2014-over...)

I have a decently-sized collection of DVDs. But my indexing and search system sucks, in that it heavily relies on physical discs being replaced in exactly the right spot, which is often hard to reach. Now, a decent HTPC with networked storage would solve that problem handily. But I would still have to read the video files off all the discs and put them into a media catalog.

Netflix has already done all that work for the videos they are licensed to distribute. So if I know that a movie I want to watch is buried behind two rows of DVD cases, certainly no longer in the genre+alphabetical order that I try in vain to enforce, and possibly not even in its case, I'll definitely check to see if it's on Netflix before I get off the couch.

And if I know I don't own the DVD, and it's not on Netflix, I'm certainly not going to go check a dozen walled gardens that will probably still want me to pay $2.99 to view each TV episode one time, or $4.99 to see one movie one time, and maybe they also want me to log in using credentials from a cable or satellite provider.

It only takes a few instances of being annoyed and frustrated like that, and a few instances of finding exactly what you desire from friendly pirates, before skipping the former. I have already demonstrated my willingness to pay for content that I like. But that willingness has limits.

I bought the Ghostbusters DVD, because I knew that I'd want to see it again, at multiple times of my choosing in the future. And I also know how to use certain programs to take the video off the physical medium and transcode it to a file viewable on my kids' Android tablets. That's still not as convenient as Netflix, because I have to do that extra work, and there's still no central entertainment nexus, where I can search in just one place for the video I want to watch.

That's the thing that will kill the walled gardens. People don't want to have to flip through 57 channels and still not find anything they want to watch. They want to open up the program guide, maybe search, maybe look at recommendations and reviews, and then press play. If consuming your entertainment becomes too much like work, your audience shrinks. As long as Netflix has the infrastructure to make consuming entertainment convenient it doesn't need to carry exactly the content people want. All they need is a reasonable alternative.

For example, if people search for "Indiana Jones" on Netflix, they might see a "not found" result. Instead, Netflix could have said "not found, but..." and made suggestions.

Features like "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark": "The Librarian and the Spear of Destiny", "Allan Quatermain and the Kingdom of Skulls", "The Da Vinci Code", "The Mummy", (>> more >>) ...

Features starring Harrison Ford: "Star Wars", "The Frisco Kid", "Witness", "Cowboys and Aliens", (>> more >>) ...

Features directed by Steven Spielberg: etc ...

Features set between 1917 and 1945: etc ...

Something like that would kick those distributors who refused to license content at a reasonable price right in the wallet, because Netflix would be forcing them into direct competition with all the other features that include the same old tropes and plots. Likewise, anyone who could seize the initiative from Netflix as the first place that people check for the features they want to watch could kill them, too.

All it would take is a better search engine, with support for alternative recommendations.

Lets not forget that they started out with video rental. I think video (and music[1]) rental already demonstrated that "pay2own" is overpriced, and has been since the early days. I mean, you could run a store (rent space, pay employees) and afford to pay "enough" in license fees for content that people paid, what, 25% of the price of purchasing a copy. Sure, I could lend a VHS I'd bought to a friend -- but does anyone really think that lending led to less profit, rather than more? (See: libraries aren't killing the publishing industry).

> with the assurance of consistent quality and convenience.

What? The files I've downloaded - they're consistent and convenient. They play back off line. They play back on the OS I use. I'll have them in 20 years, no matter what kind of licence bullshit happens, or if Netflix goes bankrupt or not. I do accept that it might be convenient to a lot of people -- but it's not convenient for me.

Spotify is a little better (off-line support) -- but you only get access as long as you pay rent. Their Linux support has been spotty (no pun intended). And while they are better now, I grew tired of feeling like I was playing the lottery every time I opened a playlist: How many songs would be left? How many would have disappeared due to distribution rights?

I used to buy CDs, buy some LPs. I buy some music direct from artists (eg: bandcamp etc). But I refuse to buy stuff that's "protected" with DRM[2]. I've grown up borrowing books, comics, music from people I love and respect. I want to lend out the stuff I've found that's good. I want to be able to do that in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. That doesn't work if the only copy of a song is on youtube, and I don't download it.

[1] In Japan, along with recordable mini-disks (with their one-digital-copy-drm-limit), music rentals on CDs was pretty big in the late 90s.

[2] I do love to go to the cinema. I think it's sad that the industry has pretty much doubled the price of projection equipment, just to enable DRM. But at least they've cut back on the cost of making prints, and the cost of distribution.

Minor nitpick: "carnation" is a flower; I think you mean "incarnation".

Unless you knew about usenet

some music labels in that area have gone back to making cassettes because its much harder to copy those. CDs get ripped right away

I love the image of reverting to cassette tape as an illustration of DRM: intentionally selling an inferior product - because you buisiness model no longer fits with reality.

OTOH: I challenge the notion that it is "much harder" to copy cassettes. At least if you're doing it as part of an (illicit) distribution business. Presumably casette decks are a available (why else distribute on cassette?) -- an all you really need is a decent deck, line-out and line-in -- and then you can easily sample and encode how you please. It's easy to detect gaps between songs (silence) -- and the digital recording isn't likely to sound much worse than the same song, playing on a cassette deck.

Now, ripping and giving a copy to a friend, the overhead of the process would probably make more of a difference.

CD dup is much much much faster, it only takes a few minutes to burn. cassettes are real time, or at best 2x. bigger tape dup machines can dup by projecting radio waves at the tape and do it 100x. but the cafes and internet shops in that are that do pirate copies don't have those. they just do USB sticks and CD rips.

its also a kind of throwback retro thing - cassettes in Africa have been a way of life for a long time and the older generation misses the joy of buying a tape. The labels doing this are real labels recording real bands in proper studios. Its expensive to record and release a record.

> I love the image of reverting to cassette tape as an illustration of DRM: intentionally selling an inferior product - because you buisiness model no longer fits with reality.

Just to be honest, as a musician I find this kind of statement rather rude.

>> I love the image of reverting to cassette tape as an illustration of DRM: intentionally selling an inferior product - because you buisiness model no longer fits with reality.

> Just to be honest, as a musician I find this kind of statement rather rude.

How's that? CDs worked fine w/o DRM. LPs work fine w/o DRM.

Regressing to lossy media in order to extort (as opposed to solicit) money from fans seems regressive to me. It's a little like banning radio plays of songs, because people can (and did/do?) tape radio... while this is all more akin to libraries:if the product is any good -- free copies/samples will lead to more sales.

Small record labels in Zimbabwe are not extorting anything from their fans. This is a preposterous statement.

I've known literally thousands of musicians and labels and none of them have ever done DRM on any medium whatsoever. I'm not even sure why you are bringing up DRM. It is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Well, technically, choosing cassette tapes as a medium over CDs, because tapes are harder to copy than CDs would be deploying "Analog Rights Management", rather than "Digital Rights Management". What they have in common, is that both DRMed distribution channels, and "ARMed" (like VHS, cassette tape) are an inferior product to the alternatives (such as CDs, non-DRMed laser disks/DVD etc).

The sub-thread was started with a comment to the effect that labels were choosing tapes over CDs, because CDs were to easy to rip (and hence were pirated). I think the point is relevant.

We can of course disagree on whether or not an industry (small or large) that needs to cripple its products in order for people to be willing to pay for it, is a sound one (no pun intended) or not.

you are very strange. your goal appears to be primarily to annoy me. I admitted that I found your comments rude, and you still keep going. do you get pleasure from this ? do you just look for any argument on the internet about piracy and then show up to argue ?

you even purposely INCLUDE small music labels in your statement above. this comes after me pointing out to you that none of the thousands of labels and musicians that I have known and worked with have done any of this DRM stuff that you are so obsessed about. none of them.

none of them "cripple" their product.

that's sociopathic behavior. just so you know.

Internet, de facto (kill 1 server and the network still works), and web sites, social network, and people using them are a lean mean copying machine, everything is build around that very same principle: how to distribute (and share) data fast and efficiently to the biggest number.

Before TPB, you had ppl cracking software, other ppl organising "copy party", then burning CDs, FTP, IRC, binary usenet, etc.

After TPB, a lot of "mini" pirate bay all over the place by the thousands.

And even more ways to copy and share files on the Internet.

To me, it's Napster happening again.

To prevent smartasses from using servers in countries without these restrictions, you further force ISPs to prevent any large amounts of data from being uploaded to those countries (cumulative, to avoid tricks like uploading small parts to many servers). E.g. back in the early 00s, some of our ISPs used to have different traffic caps for national vs international connections, here in Portugal.

It's not that hard if you're willing to go the full mile.

What happened to that?

Or maybe they could bring it back by switching the DNS of one of their numerous domains to a server still up, but don't really want to/feel like they're done with TPB.

Basically, I think the raid took down their load balancers. So they probably still have servers up in the cloud, but without load balancer as an entry point it's useless.

https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-has-not-been-resurre...

Impressive how it went from being the 35% of traffic in 2004.