Correct me if I'm wrong but the only things we can really do to combat this increasingly absurd breakdown of intellectual property law is to teach people how to safely and effectively pirate things, and raise awareness that the problem is copyright itself.
The only way I see this changing anytime is through a massive cultural shift in our views toward intellectual property, and I think the only way we can make that happen is by bringing it to the forefront of people's minds.
I'm not sure, but I think making piracy easy and appealing is essential to taking the wind out of the sails of the enormous entrenched interests that seek to lock down IP. Ultimately copyright is a tool that serves those who can buy up copyrights a whole lot more than it serves artists, and that fact is very corrosive to our society. Artists and creatives still need protection and support, but Disney and Amazon can go fuck themselves.
Basing our economic system in the digital world on artificial scarcity doesn't make any sense and artificial scarcity itself is morally incorrect.
P.S. Since people may ask if I have any concrete solutions. No, not really other than I think everyone would be better off if copyright and patents were limited to something sane like 10 years with no option to extend that time.
In Europe you can vote for the Pirate Party in several countries, including for European parliament.
There are problems with such parties at the local level because it's hard to unite on other issues, but at the EU level, the Pirate Party representatives consistently have presented (in my view), the most technically correct interpretations of internet laws and regulations for example, all the topics around data privacy, etc. They are not "hurr durr I wanna get free stuff" at all, and most other representatives remind me of my grandpa that had no clue what a computer even was.
To me, donating and voting for people who are technically correct is a way better way to effect change than just trying to have some mass coordination around piracy / boicots, those never work.
Outside of Europe I have no idea what something effective would be. Unfortunately the patent / copyright apparatus is very very strong and the political pressure US groups put on the world is very hard to combat.
A good book about the subject of patents and this apparatus and how they basically muscled the world into abidding to US lobbies, including massively fucking poor countries with respect to pharmaceutical patents is "Information Feudalism: Who owns the knowledge economy?" https://thenewpress.com/books/information-feudalism
Never? Like universal suffrage, civil rights, (mostly universal) education, the Montreal Protocol, seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock braking.
Nah, you know what, forget it, give up, shits fucked and people are dumb. /s
Edit to add: unleaded fuel, catalytic converters, emmision standards, one third of owner-occupied homes in Australia have rooftop solar, the widespread acceptance of anthropogenic induced climate drivers.
I'm not following. Everyone agrees that smart (surveillance) TVs suck but nobody is willing to take their money elsewhere. I'm the only person, in my social circle, who cares about this issue. How do we get to a critical mass of people when we are starting from essentially 0?
Other stuff, like communism, really requires "if everybody would just". An arbitrarily small number of defectors will make the system tip towards collapse.
This may not always work, data going through HDMI is frequently encrypted. If you try to capture the data between a Blu-ray drive and a TV (for example), it will be encrypted.
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that you can get cheap Chinese HDMI splitters that strip the encryption.
I would think it has to be relatively easy to decrypt given that the Blu-Ray player has to either send a decryption key to the TV via the HDMI cable, or the TV has to already have a decryption key that could presumably be skimmed.
From what I can tell the splitters essentially convince the playback device to play by relaying whatever HDCP messages the TV sends:
Playback Device (Roku etc)
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Splitter ------ Unauthorized Player (Recorder)
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Authorized Player (TV)
Without this the Playback Device will show a black screen, an HDCP error message or something similar, but even with the splitter & an authorized player it seems the content can be encrypted.
Since the TV obviously has the capability of decrypting the content it seems like there should be a way to split the signal somewhere between the main TV board and the display panel(s), which sounds like a big deal. Or maybe someone could make an incomplete splitter / recorder that just needs a legit Samsung board attached to it?
I did a Google because I was curious, and some of them do indeed strip the HDCP.
I think what you're saying is basically what's happening. The HDMI splitter pretends to be a display/TV, so the playback device sends encrypted data to the splitter, which decrypts it and forwards the decrypted part over the HDMI connections.
From what I could find, it's usually the cheap HDMI splitters that emit unencrypted data over the HDMI ports. That kind of makes sense; they implement HDCP inbound because they have to, but they leave HDCP off the output ports because it reduces their manufacturing cost.
I think you can't just "forward" the encrypted packets, because then both outputs on the splitter would try to communicate back to the player, causing issues. The splitter has to MITM the connection.
That's not correct. Version 1 of their system was, they quickly fixed it to the chagrin of many Linux desktop users (who just want to play and watch the movies they paid for on the hardware they own).
So we're back to the state of you don't actually have property rights in any of the things you own or paid for.
bluray encryption was never "cracked". even the above link is clear that it wasn't a crack. just that the encryption mechanism was well understood, but it requires a device key to generate the volume unique key (VUK) that is necessary to decode each individual disc. VUKs can't be revoked, but they are unique to each disc (pressing). device keys can, and when they are, they can't be used to generate a VUK any longer.
so one has 2 options, a database of VUKs that others generate (don't need a device key then) or getting a device to give up its key so that one can generate VUKs onesself. The problem with this is, that that key (if made public) will then be revoked itself.
i.e. I don't consider this being cracked, this is the encryption working exactly as designed.
> ...teach people how to safely and effectively pirate things
> ...making piracy easy and appealing is essential
This sounds a little too naive to me. Every platform that has made significant progress towards these goals has run into massive legal opposition. And then it becomes an ever changing, moving target cat and mouse game between opposing sides. Not to mention the dangers of malware, etc lurking within sought after content - how can you guarantee safety?
I agree that copyright itself needs reform, but looking back over the last ~25 years and how big corporations have become more advanced at fighting online piracy, I don't see piracy as the central mechanism to create the big cultural shift you speak of.
but it does not protect your right to bypass any digital security mechanism to do this, or to disclose how you did this to anyone else by threat of law.
They lobbied for laws to explicitly prevent this, and given the strict constructionalist nature of the current courts, its unlikely we'll regain or be able to enforce these rights in this capacity without significant intervention by policy makers.
If anyone has Lexis I’d love to know if there’s any caselaw on the intersection of the right to make backups vs the anti-circumvention provisions. One could certainly argue that making a lawful backup isn’t a circumvention.
Not a lawyer, but have been curious about this before. Last I checked, format shifting is legal in Canada. Breaking even the known-broken DVD encryption, however, is illegal. We also appear to still pay a blank media tax. Considering I back up important documents to blank CDs every few months, the Music And Film Induatry of America [0] is still being paid, and so I pirate with a (relatively) clear conscience.
[0] Not the real acronym, but this one allows me to call the media conglomerates the MAFIA for a bit of a giggle
They plan on de-anonymizing the internet and making you have a unique id that identifies you to get on. They can then leverage that to punish you for piracy. This is the long term plan, and pretty much nothing is being done to oppose this, and many people on this site who work for big tech are working to accelerate it.
There's an even simpler solution: Prefer physical media that plays on systems that can be repaired.
You only have to buy a DVD once. There's no subscription fee. You can easily lend it, (or borrow one from the library). You don't have to download any untrusted software or learn how to configure it, and the creators still get paid.
Yep, this model went off the rails. Its not enough I limited to where I can consume it, you can just take it away from me. MO drives making the best noise so I am down listening it all day long.
This is where I see NFT's being beneficial. Instead of 1M people spending $10 on a piece of content, they all get it for free, and 10k people spend $1k to become VIP fans with additional perks, maybe royalties on merch sales, and the ability to re-sell that VIP status.
This is IMO the most internet native way to produce content. Copyright on digital media is a legacy technology that we don't need in world where distribution is basically free and unstoppable.
except there's no need for blockchain to do that, if it was desired, it could be done entirely by the IP owner (think owning ultraviolet / movies anywhere rights and being able to transfer them to another account).
And then you miss all the composability with existing tools and platforms which is most of the point. It's like saying why use stripe when you could just build your own payment system.
Crazy that HN still misses that permissionless composability is the key benefit of blockchains.
This is often suggested on HN anytime there's some minor issue with streaming. Piracy isn't a solution to anything. Yes, there are issues with intellectual property, but most of the issues aren't with movies/TV/art. Without people paying for these things, studios won't invest vast sums of money in them and we wouldn't have the vast amount of high quality content we have today.
I feel like you're describing a huge win here. The idea that our culture needs media juggernauts for some reason is absurd. The "vast amount of quality content" I experience from day to day comes almost exclusively from small creators, creators who's content would in many cases be a hell of a lot better if it wasn't encumbered by onerous copyright laws.
I agree with you, but I wish there were more effort from big-name directors or producers to crowd fund their film or series.
Imagine for example something like the Expanse being crowd funded. That's about $3.5 - $5 MM per episode - a huge amount. And then it takes a year or more to see the content. And the Expanse wasn't really that expensive in the scale of things.
Unfortunately, until a better model emerges, the media juggernauts do serve a function in the marketplace as financiers.
By now, I figured we'd have a lot more visual media being 100% CGI. That would have allowed small creators to ride the collapsing cost of hardware.
You're probably pushing more triangles in ten seconds of a modern video game at 4K than in the entire run of Babylon 5's groundbreaking CGI usage. So we've definitely got the resources available to deliver broadcast-quality CGI video to the masses, and the right tooling could make it accessible.
I could imagine franchises that started with modest visuals, and if they can find bigger backers (more subscribers, advertisers, merchandising, whatever), they can level up with more resources behind them.
I also imagined that studios and directors would love the idea of CGI actors-- you could do things that are still infeasible with practical effects, you can pull them back out 10 years later and they haven't aged, and you don't need to worry that they'll suddenly go on a binge that effects their ability to film.
Copyright laws protect small creators too. I'm not sure how they could expect to make a living if their work could just be copied and sold or given away by anyone.
> Copyright laws protect small creators too. I'm not sure how they could expect to make a living if their work could just be copied and sold or given away by anyone.
Blatantly false. The majority of these small creators are Twitch Streamers, Tik-tockers, Youtubers these days. All of them give their work away for free effectively.
In particular, the value in the Twitch-stream is from interacting with the chat realtime. Its effectively a live performance tied to a chatroom in some niche subject matter that the audience is interested in.
All of those can probably be released public-domain and free to copy, and they won't lose a single subscriber.
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Others are paid primarily through their Patreon account or other forms of merchandise (dolls, plushies, etc. etc.). Or direct advertisements inside of the content (see Oversimplified and VPN). You can't "skip" the ad because the Ad is part of the video itself and worked into the script.
FWIW if you don't want to see sponsored segments in youtube videos etc, there's a tool for this called SponsorBlock which uses crowdsourced timestamp information and allows you to opt out of seeing various different kinds of content you'd rather skip over (sponsorship, self promotion, likecommentsubscribe segments etc.)
Well, economics has something called “revealed preferences”. Despite your opinions, most people do prefer media from the juggernauts based on where they spend their money.
Based on where people spend their money, your preferences are in the minority.
Is it that they prefer media from juggernauts or that they're more likely to know of media from juggernauts?
Juggernauts are able to put their movies in theaters or cable/streaming television, put trailers in front of other movies or tv shows, take out billboards, etc. Juggernauts are able to market the hell out of their products, while most little guys don't have that opportunity.
I imagine that this also has a lasting effect. For example, juggernauts are more likely to have a streaming service trying to pick up their media while also putting that media ahead of little guy's media in that streaming service's recommendations. I'd also guess that over time the probability of organically finding little guy's media drops at a significantly faster rate than juggernaut's media .
Well, we have studios like Blumhouse that create low budget movies that do get a lot of press, have trailers, get plenty of promotion etc. They do well on an ROI basis. But they don’t top the box office.
Since 2014, all of Blumhouse's movies are owned, distributed, and co-produced by Universal Studios. Well, except for their BH Tilt division, which is partnered with Neon for co-production and distribution. Their most notable low-budget film that kickstarted their rise was Paranormal Activity, which was straight up acquired by Paramount Pictures for an actual theatrical release.
Blumhouse wouldn't be where they are without the juggernaut's purposefully propping them up.
I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy here. Piracy has always been there and studios still make a lot of money.
People are still willing to pay for things, they just want a copy of the thing that they paid for so that it cannot be stolen from them later. The only answer here IS piracy.
It would be if Blu-ray disks and DVDs weren’t covered in copy protection making it close to impossible to backup your physical purchases, or guarantee your long term ability to watch them.
How many people here still have a functioning VCR? Hell, how many still have a functioning DVD player?
Dvd and Blu-ray are deeply upsetting things. Used to be that there were unskippable adverts and all sorts of junk I don’t expect if I paid for it.
Continually adding on user hostile additional revenue streams, like adverts, on top of something i already paid for is one of the major drivers of piracy.
How about i pay for things I’m buying but take a pirate copy as a backup?
It’s already clear that if you make digital content available at a reasonable price people will pay for it. The thing we’re arguing about is who is stealing from whom.
Here’s a genuine dichotomy. Assuming I’m interested in the media, then I’m either buying or I’m renting. If I’m renting call it renting. If I’m buying don’t steal it from me later by hiding the fact that it’s a rental in thousands of lines of legalese.
No. Piracy is the only reason things moved in acceptable direction for regular consumer. Were it not MP3, P2P, codecs, matroska and other technologies and formats, we would all still be beholden to some ridiculous locked down standard imposed by the copyright holders and bricked-by-design devices ( ala Zune, which had crazy DRM approach ). Let us not forget that there were ideas of destroying your PC if there is an indication of not allowed content on it.
And even those gains, which were won with overwhelming disobedience, because early internet people were at least technical enough to burn a cd are now being eroded again, but under different guise. Piracy stopped being a thing, because it got easier to get stuff you wanted when you wanted it without trolling the internet. Now with streaming wars coming to a close, content owners think they will get to impose rules not realizing that they are making the same mistake thinking kids will not learn how to bypass whatever restrictions they put in place all over again.
I don't like this argument. It's true that without copyright we would not have the current status quo, that much is obvious. But what we could have instead if everyone was allowed to remix any content and create things freely based on other published works is unknown and unknowable.
It is not obvious to me than having copyright is better than not having it. It would be better for some people and worse for others.
Agreed, I do think we need to make sure creation is rewarded, but creation should also be used for the good of society not hoarded for wealth. That's the problem we need to solve, we need to look for systems that encourage creation WITHOUT the need to create artificial scarcity and means for people to collect rents on intellectual property.
To wit, intellectual property itself is likely a concept that keeps us locked in a local maximum.
There’s a middle ground. If I want a movie or TV show, I’ll buy it from iTunes and then strip the DRM / pirate it. If I can find it streaming somewhere that yt-dlp works, I’ll download it. I don’t mind paying for content but only if it can’t be taken away from me after the fact.
Sure. I guess in this very narrow situation where the content is no longer available, I don't have an issue. But the person I responded to seemed to be suggesting stealing content as some sort of broad solution to an undescribed issue.
we need less superhero movies, more independent content that is there for the sake of itself, and not for the sake of making money.
tying money to art cheapens it.
art is priceless, attaching a price therefore is a regression.
Not everything is about money, not everything needs to be done.
better that it is free: if you couldn't sell movies - the only ones that would exist are the ones people truly wanted to make - the quality of the artform would skyrocket, even if the quantity plummets.
It would depend on what your definition is, I suppose.
The general narrative and has been if you copied it without written authorization, you are a pirate. Even if you are archiving a copy for future generations.
You can't even look up news articles from 10 years ago because of that.
The only way I see this changing anytime is through a massive cultural shift in our views toward intellectual property, and I think the only way we can make that happen is by bringing it to the forefront of people's minds.
I'm not sure, but I think making piracy easy and appealing is essential to taking the wind out of the sails of the enormous entrenched interests that seek to lock down IP. Ultimately copyright is a tool that serves those who can buy up copyrights a whole lot more than it serves artists, and that fact is very corrosive to our society. Artists and creatives still need protection and support, but Disney and Amazon can go fuck themselves.
Basing our economic system in the digital world on artificial scarcity doesn't make any sense and artificial scarcity itself is morally incorrect.
P.S. Since people may ask if I have any concrete solutions. No, not really other than I think everyone would be better off if copyright and patents were limited to something sane like 10 years with no option to extend that time.