"The Pirate Bay, which grew into an international phenomenon after it was founded in Sweden in 2003, allows users to dodge copyright fees and share music, film and other files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site – resulting in huge losses for music and movie makers."
I have seen no credible evidence that file-sharing causes losses to music and movie makers. In any independent studies I've seen it in inconclusive and some of them suggest that file-sharing actually boosts sales by providing a fremium model / free advertising / word of mouth transmission etc.
Also many other things are shared via the pirate bay other than copyrighted films and whatnot.
Has anyone noticed recently how Russia is clamping down on file-sharing and such? Often in very extreme draconian ways.
I was wondering why does the Russian government give a shit about copyright infringement, most of the content being infringed upon is not made in Russia, so in a way infringement means less imports for them.
I'm not usually a conspiracy nut but I genuinely think they are using piracy as a scapegoat so they can just clamp down in general and establish a more totalitarian regieme. They are also clamping down on gay people, feminists etc.
They only say that copyright owners can't impose their ridiculousness on ISPs. Which should be obvious. It's as stupid as suggesting that gas stations shouldn't service highway toll evaders, because that would be helping them with their crimes. Or that car companies shouldn't sell them cars.
I suspect that the enthusiasm to bend the laws to address pirate bay is slowly going down. Each court case pushes the scope for assistance, and in the case of .se registry case, the court even explicitly wrote that the Swedish law is currently very far reaching in this aspect. At some point all this will be used as precedence for non-copyright cases.
And in the US. Comcast has de facto banned torrent sites, too. If you use them, they start injecting warnings into your web browser, and it escalates from there.
> Bredbandsbolaget refused to comply, stating that its only role is to provide customers with internet access and ensuring the free-flow of information.
Now that's an ISP to be with, regardless of whether they are the cheapest. The cheapest would cave to avoid the lawsuit, instead of using your money to set precedent for Sweden.
(The studios tried the same thing in Australia, and iiNet put up a fight and won. Sadly iiNet was later bought out by another company and might no longer be a champion)
It's noble and all, but I think that the same decision would be made even if only business aspects were taken into account. Imagine being "that one ISP where you cannot download movies". They would probably loose many current and potential customers by having that stamp, even among customers that do not illegally download any movies at all.
I'm Swedish myself and I have Bahnhof as my ISP. They are a company which builds much of their image on issues such as integrity and privacy, and that image is what got me to choose them over other options which were slightly(!) more expensive. So, all the sudden you have a company that gets a lot of appreciation from the public, and it's not like they are spending more money on their infrastructure just because they do everything they can to avoid tapping their customers' traffic.
This seems like a no-brainer decision, which is why I find it hard to understand why it's not like this everywhere.
> They would probably loose many current and potential customers by having that stamp, even among customers that do not illegally download any movies at all.
I think you are grossly overestimating the amount of thought the general public puts into which ISP it uses (when it has a choice).
It was Internode that put up the fight initially. They were then bought by iiNet, who was then purchased by TPG. One great company was subsumed into a pretty-good one, which was then taken over by a mediocre-to-poor one.
Should the electric utility also be involved, they provide electricity which is used for piracy. How about the makers of the CPU, the motherboard maker, the storage vendors?
Should the builders of roads be responsible for people speeding on it, how about car makers making cars that go above the speed limit should they be responsible?
As an individual I do have a moral right to pay for the digital media I consume so that new media will be produced and other people will not have to pay for my consumption.
Funny that you mention "storage vendors". In Germany we have to pay a fee as compensation on storage like USB sticks, because it is potentially used to store copyright material. It's outrageous.
Finland had a similar tax before. At least here the purpose of the tax was to offset the loss of income incurred from (perfectly legal) private copying (i.e. making copies for yourself or your close friends). In this sense our tax did not excuse piracy.
On the other hand one might not agree to offsetting costs from legal copying and use the tax as an excuse for piracy anyway.
Well, if the copying is legal, then noone deserves to be compesated for it, obviously.
Furthermore, I don't even agree with offsetting costs from illegal copying (since there are no provable costs), hence my moral interpretation of the tax.
The storage device is where the copy of the copyrighted media resides. The CPU, speakers, headphones, video display, RAM, etc. are all transitory in their involvement of piracy; but the hard drive/USB stick is "where" the violation is taking place.
Again, devil's advocate here! This is mostly a thought exercise.
Some media companies have tried to sue switch makers over the fact that their switches temporarily hold copies of the sent media in their cache without a license.
It is the same in Russia. But does it implicate that, according to No-double-pay-for-one-service principle we can legally pirate stuff and store it on our storage drives?
Another interesting thing is that many countries seem to have allowed home copying through taxing storage media but DRM prevents you exercising your legal friend/home copy right.
Notably, copyrights owners still didn't solve the "not available in your country" issue. A lot of people WANT to pay, but can't, since there is no legal option to pay for the content in their country
Not only that but some online services add DRM to their media downloads, which can range from minor annoyance to being unable to play the legally obtained file.
I've had the issue with a special edition movies set on iTunes, which prevented the playback on an external monitor (vga connector). There was no info about this limitation on their store page and only after contacting support did they mention that the problem was the DRM imposed by the publisher.
Another sector where I've noticed this quite a lot is in international media releases (music & videos). I've experienced your mentioned "not available in your country" many times with Japanese music videos. It makes (kind of) sense if we're talking excerpts from a TV show, which is usually licensed out to the individual countries, so you'll most likely not be able to watch clips on their official site unless you're accessing it from within the origin country. However, I don't understand how this applies to music videos. One would assume that those are being used to generate hype & revenue for music/ticket sales, so why do they get access restricted?
Nobody should have the right to manipulate or to censor that table. It should be entirely decentralized, just like the table storing the onion addresses on the tor network. So, if it helps getting rid of the existing DNS system, I am in favour of blocking the DNS entry for the pirate bay. I want to encourage them to destroy that system by thoroughly discrediting it. I don't want to block just one entry. I want to block all of them.
I have seen no credible evidence that file-sharing causes losses to music and movie makers. In any independent studies I've seen it in inconclusive and some of them suggest that file-sharing actually boosts sales by providing a fremium model / free advertising / word of mouth transmission etc.
Also many other things are shared via the pirate bay other than copyrighted films and whatnot.