> it should not be so easy to benefit from someone else's hard work without compensating them.
Nonsense. I benefit from the work of Mozart and feel no need to compensate anyone. There are real issues with funding mechanisms and creative work in a shareable digital world, but we can reject the idea that you should always pay for anything that is beneficial. If you want to give gifts to creative folks you like, you can go ahead.
I'm a left of center guy, but this kind of thinking is a very ugly slippery slope. Its not that anyone should always expect to pay for things that are beneficial, its the fact that people who very recently WORKED to create the very thing you are benefiting from should be PAID for their work.
If everyone followed your logic, we wouldn't have 12 Years A Slave. The props cost money. The costumes cost money. The cameras cost money. The cameramen's families eat fucking food, which costs money. Please, go out and find for me a quality movie that was made by unpaid volunteers. I haven't found one yet.
"Its not that anyone should always expect to pay for things that are beneficial, its the fact that people who very recently WORKED to create the very thing you are benefiting from should be PAID for their work."
Why did the camera, props, lighting and other workers contribute to the movie, if they weren't getting paid? How could they afford to?
In reality, of course, only the movie companies, some writers and a few big stars rely on percentages - the rest work for wages or get up-front money.
So your argument comes down to the special case where A puts out a recorded work, counting on royalties to pay for it, then B makes unauthorized copies - then A suffers, in some sense, a loss of the hypothetical revenue.
But wait, did B agree to pay? If there was no contract between A and B, then the supposed moral/ethical case for making B pay is reduced to "because the legislators said so". And if tomorrow the legislators grant a private monopoly on air to Monsanto, then by your reasoning we all suddenly become thieves.
There is a natural-rights case for copyright, but it extends only to the actual creators, and covers basically only correct attribution (as per some European laws [1]).
Those wages and up-front monies likely come from capital investments. It's usually financed through producers or production houses with the expectation that the investment will be made back with profit from the box office and all of the residual royalties of video, TV, online streaming, etc. Making a movie or music record, at least at the small scale, is probably not that different than a software startup.
While B didn't agree to pay, B wanted to watch the works, (and C and D and and and) If B and C and D don't pay, then next time A won't make anything, and everyone loses.
Except A haven't stopped making things in spite of B's and C's and D's refusal to pay, because Z pays.
Plus, from the get go, if there was a price tag attached to it, C and D wouldn't consume, only B and Z. So the loss is only of B's copy. C and D convinced X that A's product is good and X pays, offsetting B and more value is generated because more people watched the movie.
I used to believe this was only theoretical and the both sides didn't offset; but piracy has not killed industries so...
By this rationale, if you had a way to sneak into concerts without buying a ticket, would you do so? If so, what percentage of the time? 100%? 50%? How would you decide?
Is the experience the same whether I pay or not? How better or worse?
What's the price of the show, not in dollars, but in work I do for the rest of society?
Do the artists aggregate to my life?
How much does it cost them to be there performing?
If the wouldn't do it, would someone else?
Basically I think your example gets a bit overcomplicated because the current market is heavily distorted by giant recording companies. It is an area that is almost fringe economics because it involves feelings and quasi-irrational judgment of value. Should you ask me if I would steal a computer (not for necessity) or if I would sneak into the bus instead of walking I'd ask mostly the same questions, but the thinking process of the decision maker would be a lot more rational and, therefore, adherent to the models that shape our economy.
I did not say nor did I imply at any moment that I pirate anything; not only pirates think about piracy.
Comparing pirates to common thieves is a fallacy since it attributes the feelings we have toward common thieves to people who can't see the ones they might be hurting, and so can't empathize with them.
Someone who downloads a pirated copy of a work is not similar to someone who mugs someone or lifts a wallet on the street because it requires a lot more to visualize the one's from who you are stealing.
That being said I would like you to retract your statement about me, not because I'm not a pirate or a thief, but because you offended me.
P.S.: This is a place for the discussion of ideas, not for personal attacks. Come up with an argument and I'd be happy to debate the issue with you. Insult me and you will be breaking (again) the two first guidelines for comments on HN
Did you know walking is the leading cause of taxi cab unemployment? You should really consider the ugly nature of walking next time you decide not to cab it up. Taxis cost money, and their kids eat food.
The difference between taking a taxi and walking are significant. For your analogy to work you must alter it in one of two ways:
1. You hijack the taxi and demand the driver take you to your destination for free. This creates an equivalent or better experience for the consumer at zero or near-zero cost.
2. Instead of clicking a button and watching 12 Years a Slave, you get a crudely animated version pieced together by drawings crowdsourced from 1st grade students around the nation, and voiced entirely by Gilbert Gottfried.
The reason I think my analogy applies is because "pirating" costs cameramen nothing. You can measure their net worth before and after I pirate a movie and it will be the same. The same is not true of bumming a taxi ride.
For this comparison to be effective you have to measure their net worth, inclusive of their time available to earn an income (which has value), prior to making the movie. If they "spend" that time on being a cameraman in order to earn income and the movie studio has to pay less because free loaders keep watching the movies without paying, you have cost them money.
A cameraman's salary is paid by the movie's budget, which is effectively a loan against the projected future earnings of a film.
Sure the cameraman already got paid for the film you just pirated, but if said film doesn't earn enough then the studio will decide to make fewer films or go bankrupt, either of which could cost the cameraman their job and significantly reduce future earning potential.
But if the movie wasn't worth any money to said person in the first place, then maybe it isn't such a big loss. Maybe some just do not value cinema entertainment very much even though they may watch a movie.
Absolutely. Certainly the hypothetical cameraman has no inherent right to be paid to do whatever they want to do, I only assert that the so-called utopian pirate market is incapable of sustaining cinema without drastic changes to the business.
Not to say those changes aren't currently necessary, only that if everyone chose to pirate rather than pay then all of Hollywood would likely just shut down rather than keep throwing $100+m AAA blockbusters into a financial abyss.
Hollywood shutting down would not be a huge loss to the world. Movies of cultural value could still be funded and then be made available to the public.
That's a highly debatable point. People's definitions of cultural value differ wildly, and the sort of violence and humor that many people find entertaining would be difficult to justify seeking public funding for.
If only one person thinks that way, and pirates a movie, your statement holds true.
If 1,000 people think that way, it probably still holds true.
Extending this, however, you reach an obvious tipping point, where a critical mass of people pirate the movie and the production costs are not recouped (and the cameraman is out of work and his children starve in the street).
It's the logical conclusion of your line of thinking. What if everybody believed pirating the movies they want to watch will not affect the cameramen. What if nobody paid for the movies they're watching? Obviously, high-budget movies would no longer be possible, and we'd all be reduced to watching shoe-string-budget art house shlock (I know, I know... Primer).
Obviously, that is not sustainable. So what makes you special? Why should you not pay for the movie you're watching, while other people should foot the bill?
> 1. You hijack the taxi and demand the driver take you to your destination for free. This creates an equivalent or better experience for the consumer at zero or near-zero cost.
For completeness, this is true only if the consumer prefers the taxi ride over walking and considers it to be a better experience.
> 2. Instead of clicking a button and watching 12 Years a Slave, you get a crudely animated version pieced together by drawings crowdsourced from 1st grade students around the nation, and voiced entirely by Gilbert Gottfried.
I often wonder what would happen if the de facto standard in an industry were to disappear overnight. If taxis disappeared, would more people find ways to participate in carpool/rideshare systems?
If we stopped making new movies, would people learn to appreciate older classical films they'd never considered before? Surely there have already been more movies produced than a person could consume in a single lifetime, though it's debatable whether or not most of them are worth viewing at all.
Movies are still a new enough medium that there quality is still improving, so current movies tend to be better then those from a decade ago, and (likely) worse then those a decade from now.
Once the medium platues (or long enough after to build up a supply), then this would work.
By better than, I hope you were referring to the image quality and special effects. In terms of filming techniques and the actual content of the movies, I do not think films made decades ago are categorically worse than films made today.
The argument being that art is intensely connected to the time in which it is created, and the function of art in the context of the progression of humanity requires that artists constantly make new art for the current generation.
It's not like people are making professional-grade movies now in the free time, as they are now driving around cities with their own cars. Likewise, not everyone is trained to make movies as most adults are already trained to drive cars.
Sure, and infinite other people screw the driver. Oh, I suppose some people will pay the posted fare for their ride. As long as it doesn't have to be us, right?
I understand the reasoning, but I believe it is flawed for two reasons:
First, you're confusing the cost of distribution with the total cost of creating media. While digitization has driven down distribution costs, it doesn't affect the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that a typical movie costs to produce. Just because you can download a movie from a server to your laptop for free, does the cost suddenly cost nothing to produce? Of course not.
Second, the scenario we're discussing does not reflect traditional free markets. Conventionally, a seller offers a product or service, and if the seller and a buyer agree on a price, there's an exchange. Basic supply and demand.
Technology now allows buyers to set the price of certain services to zero against the wishes of the seller, and the seller is powerless to stop the transaction. Clearly, this is not a conventional free market scenario, and we may need new principles.
quandrangle didn't say don't pay anyone. They said just because something is good, doesn't mean we have to pay every time we consume it. There are other conceivable ways of funding these things. Like crowd-funding, micropayments, whatever. If everyone followed quadrangle's logic, people who wanted to produce movies would find another way to fund them.
Please explain how crowd-funding a movie even makes sense? There are plenty of movies with actors I love that are terrible. Have you seen RED (or worse, RED 2)? For the same reason your boss doesn't pay you for the month you haven't worked yet, you shouldn't expect people to produce movies without any reliable way of getting paid.
And you're talking about a very new funding model. I'm not saying there are necessarily lots of examples of great movies already produced with this model. I'm saying they could easily be. A good number of projects have raised millions on kickstarter [1], including two movies [2, 3].
There's no reason the movie industry couldn't move to a pre-funding model. Or some other model nobody has thought of yet.
Their model already exists and they have moved to it - movie theaters and netflix. The movie industry is nice an healthy, they make more money each year then the previous. The reason they fight against piracy is simple - they want more money. If there's a chance to get more money, why not try? In reality, piracy is negligible and is not worth the policing effort. More importantly, eliminating piracy altogether will not convert all pirates to movie goers. That's absurd! A pirate is a person who will either steal a movie or not watch it. Either way they are not paying for it. Only a small percentage of pirates will switch to paying customers in a perfect scenario. So in reality, the industry will enjoy a negligible profit increase - that's all. Considering their current ever increasing profits from year to year, the industry is booming. They only reason they are chasing after pirates is because they are driven by they greed and incorrect perception of 'opportunity cost'. They see a huge chunk of potential pie because they imagine that once they are able to police movie watching completely, then every pirate will be paying them royalties. This is of course far from the truth. Greedy and dimwitted they persist to believe that illusion. I wonder what positive effects move piracy has on the industry that the industry is benefiting from but are not aware of? Perhaps free word of mouth advertising on an enormous scale? I think more people pirate movies than pay which means that a immense audience is functioning as free word of mouth advertisers. What impact would eliminating this group have on the industry? Worth to think about.
But there are lots of crowdfunding successes for videogames, even though they present the same problem that you don't know in advance how good it will be. So I don't think the situation is hopeless.
Another idea which I think has promise is payment by social conventions. Tipping culture in the US is like this: you are not legally required to pay waitstaff, but everyone does because they would be considered assholes if they didn't. People joke that it's ridiculous that rock bands and web cartoonists make most of their money selling t-shirts, but actually if we are aiming for social pressure t-shirts are the ideal currency---everyone you interact with in your daily life can see that you bought one. So if we got a convention going that "if you regularly read a webcomic you oughta buy the t-shirt", then it would be easy to ostracize the people who violate it.
I guess you're unaware of independent films. 12 Years a Slave would absolutely be made, regardless of a non-blockbuster budget. There are always going to be people trying to make art or assist in doing so, without the intention of making an absurd amount of money. Why do these actors even need millions for a movie? Its an absurd amount that is more than necessary.
That is a different argument. Why do actors "need" millions? Because the movie makes millions. Perhaps the problem is the cost of the individual ticket is too high?
While there are some good independent films, many aren't very good. Generally (at least to me) a high quality hollywood blockbuster is more entertaining (and more polished) than a low budget film. I'd be fairly disappointed if we lost the blockbusters and only had low budget amateur films left.
The problem is digital isn't "real". For example, imagine I create a product called a "pet rock". Let's say this product is simply... a rock. Anyone who has access to outside can basically make their own copy. Is it their fault for "copying" without paying? Or is it my fault for making a product that is extremely easy to copy?
U.S. IP law is so outdated and in need of major reforms.
The alternative is to ask people to fund the movie in advance. Either in forms of a mandatory fee (like in Germany where each household has to pay ~20 Euro for public television) or in some other way. Since digital copies are free, their price should be close to zero.
I never said that people who make movies shouldn't be paid. The point is simple: however we figure out funding movie creation, doing so by making sure nobody ever benefits without paying is definitely the wrong approach.
If a movie looks good, ill go to see it. That's how Hollywood makes money. Unfortunately the majority of blockbusters are trash. That's what projects like this are for.
If they're worth spending the effort of creating an application like this, then they're worth something. And yet this offers nothing for that something.
Except you're being scammed by Hollywood. I had numerous friends who went to school for film and went elsewhere due to finding out that the purpose behind it is to turn a profit, not to create something of worth. Every blockbuster movie contains the same boilerplate concept, the masses are too hypnotized to realize their money is being drained.
If it's trash then wouldn't it make sense to just not watch it at all? Why is it that we somehow 'deserve' to watch a film at whatever price we think is reasonable, when the whole thing is optional anyway?
I don't have HBO so I don't watch Game of Thrones. It's not like my life suffers immensely because I can't consume it. There are plenty of other forms of culture and entertainment in the world that I use to occupy my time.
Copyright law acknowledges that the marginal cost is near zero. That's why copyright holders get a temporary monopoly. The goal is to incentivize the creation of these goods so that everyone can (later) get them at near-zero cost. Copyright law does not enshrine the idea that "you should always pay for anything that is beneficial." The idea is that as a society we collectively want to always pay for something that is a net positive.
There are many ways this system is currently broken (e.g. copyright lasting 70 years after creators death in US), but the fundamental concept of incentivizing creation of works that ultimately provide public benefit is sound.
The interesting thing is that the 'temporary' monopoly isn't really temporary as it keeps being extended before most copyrights expire. In theory it is temporary but in practice it's not (at least so far). To see this in action, look at the copyrights on Mikey mouse and how many times those have been extended right before they were set to expire.
Ah. This old argument again. It would make sense if people actually support artists. Every time some one brings this up in real life, I ask them for instances where they have actually supported somebody.
Ah this old misdirection. There is no shortage of evidence of voluntary payments for creative works so stop spreading bullshit. How far do you move the goalposts when people mention examples like the Humble Bundles, Nine Inch Nails, etc.?
Go on. You might be able to cite Radiohead's In Rainbows. Did these new distribution models flourish, or were they one-off experiments? NIN's new album is available online now for a fixed price.
Nine Inch Nails? Seriously? I'm pretty sure they had already found success through the traditional channels before they had the ability to do something like that.
Crowd funding works in certain contexts, but it's no magic bullet.
Don't get me wrong. I like the crowd funding model, but the real world is not so perfect. We should not say "I won't pay for this, since somebody has already paid for it. " That puts everyone in a bad situation.
My policy: Enjoy something? Contribute back (or pay forward) in some tangible way.
There is also the aspect of risk. Do you pay someone before or after they make a product in an unknown market (E.g. Will this game be successful?). Paying for it rewards them for taking that risk.
Of course, if you commission something beforehand, you take away some of this risk, and the artist should gladly part with some of the rewards.
Commissions are the same as Kickstarter, IE you pay before it's created. In no way does something like this have any bearing on works by commission, in fact it puts things back on the path of human traditions, which have typically relied on commissions, patronage or performance, rather than ownership.
And I bet most people can give you several. Can't remember the last time I bought a DVD or vinyl record, without having enjoyed it somewhere else first, for free.
Well, this is a big debate. I think musicians must be paid by playing live, amd not when every human listen a song, do a cover, or listen it in a bar. I think artists should be credited and pay when others use their creation for commercial use. Staff, as always, they will have jobs. You think the staff is all day working with the records, no, they do sound work on live shows too, as welll producers, designers, print guys, etc. People evolve.
Okay, so what about artists who are unable to play live for one reason or another (e.g. handicap, musical complexity). Recording engineering is different enough from live sound that it's almost two different jobs. And you're suggesting that the staff who do things like set up microphones and haul speakers should get paid to set that up for a live show but not paid to set that up for a recording?
Then it's easier. You cannot live from something you cannot fully profit. It's a dead model, in this case, for you, but not for the rest. Let's say you're just not a musician but you are a genious at the computer. well, you can still sell your music, but in these days, people may be more open to see you on stage and buying a 20$ CD.
Most of the movies, right now, are sold in the metro station in Barcelona tagged 1-2 dollars. And legal stores, not those slave-labor dudes with the house-made copycated movies. The industry already kills its own artists.
If that is the case, why would any entertainer allow themselves to be recorded? And who would bother to waste the time and money to make the recording? I don't have the time nor desire to go to a concert, yet I enjoy listening to good music. Therefore I pay for it.
If people aren't willing to, nope. This is a slippery slope and we can't afford to pay every employee of dying professions forever.
I think utilities and reasonable physical safety and healthcare should be paid for by the people. But for the rest, the free market will work better than an infinity of laws and incentives to put people in a corner to pay up. Money, uh, finds a way...
The idea behind this comment is that if people don't care enough about the work to bother viewing it, the maker shouldn't be paid. Which I agree with; I hate the idea of government sponsorship of art no one wants. The difference here is, PEOPLE WANT THE ART, THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO PAY FOR IT. That's a huge distinction. It has value to people, but because they have the opportunity to steal it with no consequence, they do so.
The sense of smug entitlement in some of the posts in this thread is amazing.
"I should just get for free things that other people make because how dare they charge. If they're greedy enough to want to make money for their work, then they should follow a business model I set forth here and only make money by donations or selling other things I'm not going to buy anyway. Because freedom."
Hahahaha. The responses to my comment are hilariously off-the-wall. All I said was that the reasoning in the OP was wrong. The reason to pay for movies has nothing to do with the idea that benefits should always have a price.
That's all I said. The rest of my comment acknowledged that the economics and funding for movies is complex.
All the copyright apologists are so defensive, it's absurd. It's like you can't accept dropping any of your arguments, even when they are pointed out as plainly wrong. You are so worried that your whole case is ill-founded and won't be able to keep your position if you accept any criticism at all.
There might actually be some valid points on the pro-copyright side, but we don't get to see them if you keep defending the obviously invalid arguments…
Except that Mozart had ALREADY benefited from his work. But today many people feel they are entitled to watching movies and listening to music for free. The problem is that quality movies and music are expensive to produce. And rather have one person pay for them, they split the cost up over a lot of people. But if no one chooses to pay, these movies (that people apparently WANT) will no longer be produced.
I don't have any continuous contractual relationships with any studios like I do with my employer. Maybe Netflix or HBO would qualify, but they don't charge their customer per unit, so it doesn't really apply here either.
This really is just a sideshow (excuse) to justify watching movies without paying for them. I don't have any contract with my utility companies whom mail me bills every month for using their services, nor do I have one with Kroger when I go buy groceries. I still am obligated to pay both of them for using their services.
Sorry, but you're not paying the studio for watching a movie. The cinemas are paying the studios for having the right, to charge, whatever they want for you to consume movies. It's the theathers, the netflixs who put the final consuming price on something, you're just paying them, not the guy who worked in the sound system for that movie, or the guy who made the logo of the movie, he was payed, and for sure, not so equally as everyone in here are claiming to be paid.
Quite innacurate and narrow. Many movies don't make the weekend. You will see them at some stores for 1 dollar one month later. It's not the users who kill the industry.
Actually, in this era more and more tv shows are made because they're a better format than movies and because they're attracting people to consume or pay services. Movies will never dissapear, only the worth making movies will make it and that task would be decided, not by people, but by a middleman.
There's more and more music today than ever, and it doesn't cost 20 dollars or require to be in an store to be accessible to anyone.
The folks in the entertainment business who have seen revenue drop since the 90s when bandwidth and mp3 / video encoding became practical would disagree.
They've seen drop in dead business models. But they're winning in new areas. See the reports, with the so-called 'piracy' they're winning much more money than in the past. The problem: you want to see a number, like "he sold 20 millons cds". Well, the last sucess history (everyone can't be queen or lady gaga) is Daft Punk: they sold millions of songs by making 'good' music, or music that appealed to people.
"Amazon Instant Video (formerly Amazon Video On Demand and LoveFilm Instant) is an Internet video on demand service offered by Amazon in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan."
iTunes: I don't see renting option.
Fox Digital: "United States
Brazil
Mexico
Canada
Italia
Australia
Deutschland
Belgium
Holland
United Kingdom
España
France"
Don't use propaganda terms like 'compensation' here. It's not compensation unless you hired someone to do something. The reason the media corporations want you to use terms that don't make rational sense is because it gets you to think, wrongly, that you owe them money all the time and forever. Don't fall for it my friend. No one thinks there's anything wrong with supporting creativity and artistry so let's stop using their bullshit terms together.
Here's the chain of money as I see it when making a movie:
1. Someone comes up with an idea for a movie
2. They approach someone with money to create the movie
3. Monied person gives idea person $X to make the movie with the assumption that they will receive back $X + $Y (ignoring Hollywood accounting).
4. Movie is made. People are paid out of $X
5a. Movie is successful. Monied person receives back $X + $Y
5b. Movie is unsuccessful. Monied person receives back $X - $Z
None of this simplified hypothetical happens without the idea or the monied person. The idea person makes an arrangement that allows them to realize their idea and make some coin. The monied person... Well, he just cares about money. So he wants to make more.
If movies are perpetually unsuccessful, guess what happens? The monied person ends up investing in something else, leaving the idea person out of luck.
I do agree with some of the other people on here that piracy puts pressure on the business people to improve access.
That could be a valid idea for a startup, where movie people can sign up to sell 'virtual tickets' that provide users with the legal right to watch a movie no matter where they got it from. It could even be transferrable, identifiable tickets (... ahem, cryptocurrency, ahem).
Most copyright disclaimers allow that already ("without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner" etc).
There's UltraViolet, which is perhaps similar to what you're talking about (provided you own the content, you can in theory download/stream from any UltraViolet-enabled provider as long as they have that content)
It blows my mind that it's 2014 and we can't do this. We are locked behind garbage cable boxes, poorly built custom software, and region locking, all of which is from a different era.
When I'm at work, I only watch TV as background noise. I rarely get a chance to go to the movies proper nor do I get the time to sit and watch a movie at home. This is the only reason I have Netflix.
This is specific to me and I wouldn't claim to generalize this to a whole population.
Pay for what, the ability to stream a movie? Don't we already have a dozen options for that?
I don't think this interesting as a feature, it's the backend technology that's interesting. On a related note, Spotify does something similar to get music to listeners by having existing users upload to new listeners.
I missed where anyone gave us the option of streaming new releases online.
Movie theaters offer neither convenience nor comfort. It's 2014, not 1914. Further, they are epicenters of disease transfer and otherwise completely and utterly dominated by inconsiderate jackasses who, to the benefit of everyone else, should actually probably stay at home.
It's hard to imagine that we live in a world where something so absurdly ancient is still the norm. They want us to endure that AND to pay $13 to watch a new movie. The 400% ROI on the first weekend of release isn't enough, they then want us to pay $20 to "own" the movie at home (and by own, I mean have access to watch it, because they learned that it's really bad to ever give anyone an actual copy of anything, because copyright law actually then prevents them from making even more money later on). Then maybe at some arbitrary point in the future, you can pay to watch a movie once, but for $5. Long after that movie is irrelevant. As a last attempt to extract money from a dead thing, and only as an attempt to make more money. It's in no way about your convenience, nor access to the work.
Imagine if music was still the same way. For every new work, radio stations are prevented from broadcasting the music at all. You have to go to an audio theater where you will sit in an uncomfortable chair with food stuffs splattered all over the floor, all the while battered from all directions with ads and menus for overpriced food and drink for "your enjoyment." You will listen using headphones that have clearly not been cleaned in a month, next to a person with a screaming child and another person who just sneezed a fine mist over 40 sq ft, much of which landed all over your face. Now you can listen to the latest and greatest the music industry has to offer. And oh yes, for this fine pleasure you WILL pay $13. No option just to hear the cover, not even at a reduced price. This is, after all, the bastion of decadence, a truly wondrous place where you should feel privileged to have access to the latest and greatest in entertainment! This is how kings live, and you'll like it!
Then 3-100 months later, chosen arbitrarily, you'll be given the "option" of having access to listen to that music whenever you wish for a mere $10 fee, and 18-500 months after that, finally, radios can start playing it, but only if they pay enormous sums of money to the copyright holders, which requires them to ask you for a subscription fee. What the fuck? You want to listen to music for free on the radio? LOL. Shut the fuck up and listen to my ads.
Clearly that model wouldn't work for music. They tried it, and it failed, so they actually adopted a better model, or rather they got out of the way and let innovators make things so convenient that piracy has become a mere historical oddity. I don't remember the last time I've even heard of someone pirating music.
So why do we still have these evil fucks insisting it works for movies? It very, very clearly doesn't. Piracy is a clear symptom of this. What happens when piracy becomes so easy and so simple that the barrier to entry gets lowered to nothing, so that everyone is suddenly able to experience availability as it should be? My sincerest hope is that it kills the profitability of the movie industry as we know it. Maybe then it may be replaced with something that actually places value in the consumer and their interaction with the work, not solely in the work itself.
When I visit the cinema, it's usually for the experience, and less to do with catching a new release. For example, I wanted to go see Gravity this week. I could torrent the movie, but I heard good things about Gravity in theaters. Nonetheless, all the theaters within an hour drive stopped playing it, so I'm out of luck.
They should allow people to buy and stream new releases online. Then, I think they should use theaters for a mix of new movies, and old movies. Run themes, have 80s week, or classic horror movie week, or Star Wars week, or Hitchcock week.
You're paying the service, not the work done. The work is already payed. The investors now want to make more money and that's all. If they don't know what the consumer wants, i.e. you want to experience this movie on a theather, then they can't win money.
In fact, when you go to cinema, in theory, you're paying the theathers, not the filmakers or the camera man who filmed the movie. Maybe some actors have access to shared profits, but that's pretty rare business nowadays.
I'm tired of the same "compensation" history. What is the minimum compensation they want to leave a fair use? You will find the number can't be wrote down. Everyone wants free compensation for life.
I don't feel any bad for not paying those movies. These guys aren't exactly in need.
That said, yes, if the same service was proposed at a decent price and with recent releases (even popcorn doesn't get the freshest stuff), i'd totally just pay for it too.
Netflix, prime, etc don't even have stuff that's as recent or of similar quality.. (yes they've some of them)
It is the middleman problem. It is not yours. Movies will never disappear. You think all studios will close, no, they will just evolve or die. There are thousand examples of dead labor, technologies that passed away without much drama, just because consumers wanted a different thing or changed their consuming habits.
The video is not available in certain countries. In countries where it is available outside the United States and Canada, it costs close to 2x the price.
Why does it always need to be about the money?? Imagine giving a candy to a child. You make the child happy, and that is your reward. Or do you expect the child to say something like "let me pay you"?...
They already have been paid. Or you think mr. sound technician guy or lovely ms. Magda the hairdresser will receive money until his last day just because they have worked on a movie. The only one who will have that right is a company, who had nothing to do with filmaking process, they just invested, and for sure, after the premiere they've got, or not, a lot of money. Even the main actors release "rights".
To me entertainment is very simple. The person who offers the entertainment presents a value. It is up to me whether or not the entertainment is worth the value. If it is, I'll pay the price, if it is not, then I will move on to one of a million other options. It's really that simple. If you don't like the deal that is offered then move on to the next one. I have no automatic right to any of the entertainment created. It is no different from any other transaction.
Then when your friends are at your home, you kick 'em out if you want to see a movie you pay, rented? wouldn't be fair also make them pay, or will you let them consume for free too?
Which rental service requires that each person watching pays a separate fee? If the terms dictated something like that then I simply wouldn't rent from that service.
Let's say you live alone and you want to see a movie. You pay for it. Same if I want to do it at my home. we both pay and we have the legal right to see it. What if suddenly, 20 friends come to my home to see the movie without paying as they were in their homes? Downloading is the same case. That's what I mean. You can't have the best of both worlds. Either you all pay to see it or no one.
You read the licence wrong. When you buy, rent, you're explicity forbid to do public playing: that means you cannot show other people the material, they have to pay for it. That way they're sure you dont mount a cinema in your home and invite the whole city.
That's simply not true. Public playing means that you cannot go to a part and project on a screen (as an example). In the confines of your home is not considered public playing.
When I work, and want to be paid, I say upfront "I can do this for you, and it will cost you X". However if I say "here, please, take this, it's for you" it means exactly that. I don't want you to put any monetary value. Because there's a chance you might undervaluate it...
If I give something to you it's entirelly up to me to decide whether I want you to give me money. If I want to give (for free) and enjoy doing that, please stop saying "take my money", because I don't want it. If I wanted your money I would have said so or at least hinted you. In other words, don't spoil the moment.
On the other hand, may be it's just me being too sentimental... Or may be it's because I grew up in an evironment where not everything was measured by the money, and giving and helping others without expecting to be "paid" was relatively normal.
Except the copyright owners aren't giving anyone anything.
If Disney put up, front-and-center on their website, a download link for Frozen, saying, "It's our gift to you! No strings attached!" then your analogy would work.
When I do a favor or give a gift to someone, I do it out of the kindness of my heart, or because I care about the person I'm doing the favor for. But when I show up to work and perform my duties, I expect to be compensated. Furthermore, even if I _do_ do something out of the kindness of my heart (like staying late to cover an absent employee's shift) I still expect to be compensated.
There's a time and place for volunteer/charity work, and there's a time and place for compensated work. If everyone just did favors for others, there'd be a lot more people who get screwed over (and also less incentive to do very technical work)
You're far more likely to be caught by directly looking at torrent peers as is already done in bulk by media companies and is far better proof of piracy than a Google Analytics hit. Use a VPN if you're using this and have any questions about the legality of it in your area. Typically VPN providers only get complaints sent to datacenters, not actual lawsuits.
looking at torrent peers ... and is far better proof of piracy
It's not proof of piracy. It just proves that some bytes were downloaded. What, for example, if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?
1. You're downloading. This may or may not be copyright infringement, even if you do already have other licence[s] for the media. Check the licences and the law, if you can understand either.
2. If you're seeding, you're allowing others to download from you. If you're not licensed to do this by the copyright holder [if any], you might be infringing in certain jurisdictions.
I simply meant to compare with Google Analytics hits, not to say anything is absolute proof, but being on a tracker or DHT is certainly a better indication than GA would be.
Though if you personally join the peer queue and serve over 30s of a movie to them, you've just proved that someone using that IP is pirating that movie. Even if you own the movie elsewhere, if I recall correctly many jurisdictions do not protect the personal transfer you're talking about. The laws are quite stupid here, but that's just how it is.
if you could prove that you paid for the movie you're downloading? Lets say you buy a movie using the Video app on the Xbox, but want to watch it on your old Windows XP desktop, or on your Android phone?
I'd be very surprised to learn there's a legal way for you to do this considering the movie you download on your Xbox is going to be PlayReady DRM encumbered.
Confirmed with WireShark. This app is a GUI around YIFY.
The binary you download from Mega.co.nz uses "YIFY Torrents" website yts.re exclusively. Github code seems to be actually used. So it all runs via this single webserver (+Google analytics). Just to verify what a installed binary blob does on your Linux box. The ease of use is impressive, a new level for P2P-ish work since Napster/Kazaa/Limewire days.
Obviously. But then it's incredibly dangerous to run any command posted online without thinking; at least this one is easy to understand and verify.
Given the demographic of this site, I thought I'd be insulting everyone's intelligence by offering up a more verbose description. I mean the description is the command itself! And verifying the contents of the URL is as simple as viewing a web page (if anyone can't manage that then I wonder how they're reading that command to begin with :p).
With `curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts`, you know that the damage is contained to appending malicious data to /etc/hosts. Furthermore, the use of tee guarentees that you see the data that gets appended. Additionally the potential damage of malicious data in /etc/hosts is minimal if quickly detected and fixed.
Quickly skimming the file no longer counts as "running without thinking" but even then, if the server sent a different file to browsers than it does to curl...
FYI, the google analytics lines are commented out in that source, as it "breaks some sites". So your command doesn't help in this case until you uncomment those lines.
Convince your customers to use self-hosted analytics software instead. Of course you understand the danger of a single entity (google-analytics.com) tracking almost every website you visit.
Piwik with Nginx was easy enough to set up and provides the data I am interested in, including conversions of goals (something I was dubious about before installing). New version even more snazzy than previous.
> It shouldn't be my responsibility to try to get these movies legally
Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s), despite the correctness of the situation, paying these fees is fine when it's only a few, but the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services!
I'm waiting for the day when consolidation hits and we have 3-5 major streaming players that have almost everything available. Netflix's movie selection is just depressing...
>Ignoring that statement, which is a nice way to excuse your obvious criminal act(s)
What's your suggestion, then? Should I refuse to consume them or force myself to go to cinema even though I don't want to? (nor have the time to do so.) I'm all ears.
>the key is that we need centralized services to offer everything easily. If every content creator starts to have their own distribution method, get ready to complain about the "expensive" $10-15 fees you pay for 15 different services!
Of course. It shouldn't get to the point where buying individual movies would be more cheaper to pay for streaming services. Studio executives should leave their egos aside and start acting reasonably. Who wouldn't pay, say, 15-20$ a month and you're allowed to watch 5 movies each month (and extra 3-5$ for each individual movie after that). That's a good and a fair deal for both parties.
iTunes was criticized as a Monopoly, but it frigging revolutionized the music business. Steve Jobs, who first of all was a super music buff if there was one, wanted exactly this. Easy accessibility. He started with compromises (DRMs and so on) and then moved on to make the giants crumble down to the current obviousness of ubiquitous music access.
Ten years later we need something that large and global, but for the movie business. It's harder and Steve's not around to kick movie executives asses anymore, but a service like Popcorn Time is very useful: they show exactly what people want and they should be a ringing bell for the movie industries. That's the way to follow, movie folks: do it or die painfully.
RASPMC and a Raspberry Pi. Takes like 3 seconds to get setup and is easier to get going than a DVR. My parents have no issues using XBMC on my Raspberry Pi that I left back home.
My ideal product is the Netflix interface with, essentially, every movie and television show ever made. I imagine there are a lot of other people out there who also wish that product existed. It's hard to say how much I would pay for it, but I'm currently spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $150/month on a collection of services (Netflix, Time Warner, Usenet) that, in the end, only provide a very poor approximation of that ideal.
This product is the closest I've seen to matching that vision. So despite its very obvious illegality, I appreciate the authors' efforts to try and push the UX boundaries around content viewing. Hopefully instead of Hollywood suing the pants off of the creators, they'll use it as a template for what might be possible if they could collectively get their shit together.
I've been saying the same thing for years. My hope is a company like Spotify or Rdio will lead the effort in this. The biggest obstacle is actually getting licensing rights, but honestly, I would pay so much for the service.
That said, I think the cable companies would just jack the rates on internet service to compensate for their dwindling cable usage.
> Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk.
Have we seriously just stopped considering the ethical implications of such things? At least these sorts of sites used to pretend they were for things like "public domain movies" and "personal backups."
That question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.
While there is a lot of piracy, it's relatively small compared to the overall entertainment market. It's still been generally limited to the tech savvy crowd. Setting up bittorrent or usenet is just too hard for the average person. They could learn it, but they are unwilling to even try to.
An app like this? Which is just download and it works? That is a huge threat. My grandma could use this.
So while a small amount of piracy isn't harmful, everyone being able to pirate everything with total ease, is harmful.
The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.
We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.
We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.
>we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
That just means despite losing "potential income" the industry is still managing to earn money via people who do not wish to circumvent Copyright Law. Or in other words, the number of people not interested in infringing copyright is greater than the number of pirates. That doesn't mean anything other than a majority of people respect copyright law.
>So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically
Please link to data that demonstrates piracy is economically beneficial to everyone. Since you're claiming 'almost certainly' - I assume you can find hundreds of studies.
Here is my simple thought experiment. Let us say it was impossible to pirate Windows or popular games or tv shows and people had to pay the $100 or w/e it is. Would every single pirate switch to Linux, free games, non-copyrighted entertainment OR Will some of them end up paying the $100?
If reducing Windows piracy means more Linux adoption, I wonder if the Linux cheerleaders would be onboard to reduce Windows piracy :)
As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
> losing 'potential income'
What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
>And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Seriously? You use the words "almost certainly" and are now trying to weasel out when simply asked to back up your statement? The correct response when you don't have data is to say - I don't know at the moment.
>So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
Lack of evidence is just proof of lack of evidence. You don't get to make any wild assertions because they sound reasonable in your head. And even if you do, you have to qualify them with the appropriate words - you don't get to say "almost certainly".
>What does that even mean? Really, what?
Perform my thought experiment.
> If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
Thats a rather childish way of twisting my argument. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand and does not deserve a response.
>The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
If you don't like the law, get it changed. What have you done in that regard?
--
There is a solution for your problem that doesn't involve breaking laws just because you don't like them.
1) Support artists who put out their work in non-copyrighted form. Perhaps they could have a new model like kickstarter for music/movies/games with people pledging money.
2) Help reduce piracy of copyrighted material and get people to support above artists.
3) The vastly increased sales of those artists will attract even more artists to that model creating a nice feedback loop.
4) Copyrighted forms of entertainment will diminish in their importance and the MPAA/RIAA could perhaps cease to exist.
Capital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.
Yes but you could also argue that there are many many many more artists making money in the music industry now, and that consumers have much more choice.
Sure they're not all making millions, but I'd rather see an industry with more players each making less money (i.e. more choices for me), than a smaller group of pre-selected artists (and the machinery behind them) that take home tons of money but put out less varied produced-by-committee content designed for mass consumption.
So I think it's arguable whether it's better or worse for the industry, but it's definitely better for the consumer.
That's like if the parent post said, "The invention of the web allowed many more people to communicate, and was an economic boon" and you replied, "Microsoft would disagree."
Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.
If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.
The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.
What did professional music look like before radio? Before audio recording? I'm not convinced that business models that emerged due to technological change should be protected from future technology.
In Netherland, we pay a "home copy" fee on harddisks and smartphones, which makes it entirely legal and ethical to download movies.
Only downside: uploading movies without permission from the copyright holder is still illegal, and bittorrent uploads while it downloads, so this may still be illegal.
We have the same 'private copy' tax in France. It is a tax on ALL storages (proportional to the size) to take a fee in the case you would use the storage for copyrighted stuff.
While it does not make download legal, in my opinion it makes it ethical. I paid a tax on it, I might as well use it.
That's not the only downside. The other is there's a tax on storage hardware even if you never do anything with copyrighted anything. And all the tax ends up going to wealthy corporations anyway and smaller artists will never see anything.
They seem to be leaving the ethical considerations to the users, which I think is perfectly reasonable. Popcorn Time can't decide for you whether it's okay to stream a movie that you own the VHS for. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie published by a company that distorts copyright law for its own financial gain.
>>Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore.
That would be a great idea. However, the Popcorn Time website states that they only use torrents from YIFY. A brief perusal of the YIFY website tells me that they only have recent or big blockbuster films. I tried searching for "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Intolerance", and neither showed up. As far as the status of the service goes right now, its main purpose is to stream pirated movies. This could change in the future as Popcorn Time opens up to accept more sources.
They only created a tool. Tools can be used for many purposes. I can smash someone in the skull with a hammer or I can use it for construction. Similarly, should the Tor, PGP, Bitcoin, etc authors consider that their tools could be used for malice and stop because of it? Tools are tools, they are simply implementations of what is possible with technology. Tools are inherently grey, not some simple black and white. It's about what you do with them.
It doesn't matter how legal your tools are if what you're doing is illegal. And this particular tool is pre-populated with copyrighted content. They don't show it in the screen captures (why? </sarcasm>), but all the films in the popular tab are 2013-2014 major U.S. theatrical releases.
Very true, I hope the devs published this somewhat anonymously at least. It's essentially just YIFY torrents taped to the peerflix script with some node-webkit glue.
I, for one, do not believe in intellectual property. Information not being rare commodity, it makes no sense to artificially limit it's supply by issuing state enforced monopolies. That actually infringes on actual property such as a hard disk, by limiting the number of combinations of bits that you're allowed to store on it.
Doesn't it pretend? The screenshoot shows very old movies. My initial impression from the web site was that this application provided a nice interface to some repository of freely redistributable movies.
And youtube has a sophisticated detection system setup that scans uploads for copyrighted content automatically. I'm thinking with the press this app is getting they are going to be forced to do something similar and block illegal content, or take it offline soon.
There is a lot of free software out there that its primary goal is to facilitate copyright infringement, I guess it is just up to the court or whomever to decide if that is the case, and worth pursuing taking it down. (Not saying that the effort could be put in for this case, but just a possibility)...
YouTube with its reporting system has created a de facto situation where rightsholder giants like record companies, their copyrights matter, while the copyrights of the random creator (The Long Tail!) are never enforced.
Maybe you are a long tail creator and you police youtube. But most won't. Maybe they can't. Maybe they are dead.
Stream for torrents is extremely damaging to the swarm, specially for new torrents. It breaks the protocol and may end up killing itself. Picture a case of major success for this: At Prime Time there is a rush of people streaming from a torrent, acquiring the same pieces of the torrent without servers to counterbalance the upload speed of people with the complete files can't stream the file in real time to a few people who in their turn can't replicate it fast enough to lots of people.
Do you have a demonstration of that effect? I'm not buying it from the words.
With typical torrent use, you have to wait the entire download time before you can watch anything because the pieces are randomly selected. But adding streaming just means you have to bias toward the early pieces just enough to have a decent buffer. After that, you can still be random.
The case of prime time seems to be better for this approach, not worse. People still won't all start at the exact same time. The early arrivals will all replicate the early pieces, beefing up the ability of the swarm to get the pieces everybody wants.
I haven't looked at the code, but it seems to me that as long as it's flexible about the amount of time it takes to fill its initial buffer, and as long as it keeps serving after people are done watching (to compensate for the up/down pipe asymmetry), then the swarm would survive just fine.
Indeed, I think making swarm participation much easier and more appealing might increase the depth of resources around any given torrent, making results net better for popular files.
No, I don't have a demonstration since nothing like this was ever widely adopted, but it is an opinion shared among the bittorrent community:
"One of the key algorithms in bittorrent is the rarest-first piece picker. It is vital to bittorrent’s performance that the piece picker fulfills both of these requirements:
The rarest piece is picked (from the client’s point of view of the swarm)
If two or more pieces have the same rarity, pick one of them at random
The reason to pick a random rarest piece is to always strive towards evening out the piece distribution in the swarm. Having an even piece distribution improves peers’ ability to trade pieces and improves the swarm’s tolerance to peers leaving."
http://blog.libtorrent.org/2011/11/writing-a-fast-piece-pick...
I think that analysis only holds for people who want the whole package and aren't in a hurry.
If you're shifting to a demand-driven system, then pieces aren't needed equally. A numerically even piece distribution isn't what the swarm most needs. Indeed, I start watching things on Netflix that I never finish, so having more people with early pieces of something would better mirror actual demand for them.
I'm sure that plenty of people in the Bittorrent community are worried about change, but plenty of people in every community are worried about change. Until I see some math or some simulations demonstrating that this can't work, I won't be persuaded that there's an actual problem beyond the (reasonable and legitimate) fear of change.
This is a real issue indeed. First of all, in XBMCtorrent, I'm using libtorrent-rasterbar, which is _very_ optimized for the swarm.
Second, seeding in enforced during playback, to "give back".
Third, there is a time randomization in which hot spots (pieces who are big demand) are also the ones who are the most shared (since everybody is seeding these).
If anyone (or a contributor) from popcorn is reading this:
Can you explain the SEEDING part of it in more details?
As your description says it will be seeded for some time to avoid leeching but can you describe this in a little more detail.
I know the project is trying to reduce/remove complexity from the torrent kingdom (its from whatever i see in this beta version i would say they have done a pretty good job!)
but I have a (maybe an obvious) suggestion that you guys might want to add a "settings" pane somewhere so that users can play with settings.
The only major criticism i have is that the project is overly depended on YIFY as the provider of content. Which is also a problem because everything is either in 720 or 1080.
I hope some of the more "legal" providers learn from the simplicity of this project.
Why shouldn't the cost of entertainment naturally drop as more high-quality content is produced? And if that's the case, aren't big-budget productions already living on borrowed time?
To explain, entertainment is fungible, and today we have an embarrassment of entertaining riches: books, hangouts, news, board games, video games, music, TV, social web, sporting events, etc. Almost all of these things can be distributed world-wide at minimal per-unit cost.
Since entertainment is fungible, the competition for for 12 Years a Slave isn't just Dallas Buyers Club, it's also 2048, reddit, Attack on Titan, the Olympics, and whatever piques my interest during a Steam Sale. That sounds like the increase in supply for entertainment is far outstripping the increase in demand.
> Since entertainment is fungible, the competition for for 12 Years a Slave isn't just Dallas Buyers Club, it's also 2048, reddit, Attack on Titan, the Olympics, and whatever piques my interest during a Steam Sale. That sounds like the increase in supply for entertainment is far outstripping the increase in demand.
That's only because the home video market allowed people the luxury to legally watch any existing movie anytime they want, once they have purchased it, without the possibility of the studio revoking permission.
Don't worry - studios are already trying to think of ways to "fix" that (stream-only content that is never released in DVD format is one example)
That's an interesting take on it. Even in a single entertainment category it can often feel like the supply far outstrips demand, especially if my morbidly obese Steam library is considered.
> Hollywood studios (should) make their money in cinemas
I'd be just as happy if all movies went straight to streaming, I'd even be ok with higher prices closer to the release if they did drop down to reasonable levels after a period of time. I personally have grown to hate going to the theater, I find it much more enjoyable to watch movies in the comfort of my home without people talking, babies crying, and teenage girls on their cell phones the whole time. Not to mention I refuse to pay for concessions which are extremely over priced.
What I'm saying is that the new movies are not available in DVDs so there are no quality pirate releases (only unwatchable camera rips) unless there is a leaked copy of the movie (very rare).
I have no idea what kind of money companies get from DVDs, but if we where to go to a world where I would have to go to cinema to see every movie I'm interested in then I'd just stay home and watch horrible Cam rips. I have no desire to go to cinema and pay ridiculous amounts of money for movie tickets and whatever shit they are passing as food these days, I want to stay home and enjoy the movie not listen as some kids giggle next to me.
Or maybe it will push content providers to make movies and shows available for streaming from day one. So far piracy has only done good things for consumers, in the sense that it has forced Big Content to do what consumers wanted all along, ever since Napster came out.
By making it actually readily available, instantly, in a usable interface, close enough to free as customer doesn't care the cost.
For decades, I've seen endless such "but it's free/easy/instant" things be anything but, insofar as it takes resources (time, fiddling, knowledge, skill, tools, etc) costing on par with paid versions, isn't easy for >90% of the population, and falls down often enough that it's hardly 'instant'.
$99 + $8/mo works a whole lot better than most any "free/easy/instant" solution I've seen. Sure, you may be one of the fringe consumers who can handle such solutions, but most people can't. There's always some part which is so dull/annoying/unsatisfying, but must be done right to achieve persistent widespread acceptance, that you'll have to pay (and recoup) someone to do.
In my opinion, the real issue is more along the lines of "How do I purchase and watch a film that I would like to see." The solutions are many and varied, but none provides access to all of the films one might want to watch. A given film may never be available in a theater near you and once they leave, may never become available online (via Netflix, iTunes, etc.) Just like the record companies, the production houses are hoping that if they fight progress long and hard enough, people will continue to pay top dollar for physical media.
In the case of the record companies, widespread pirating put pressure on these companies to make their content available online at reasonable prices. In my opinion, piracy is once again providing that pressure, this time on the film production houses. I believe that once the majority of films are available online at reasonable prices, products like Popcorn time will lose much of their appeal.
Is it less ethical than corporations lead by "the man" that refuses to use new technology for fear of not being able to wring every drop of profit out of people?
Look at staggered releases of Movie/DVD/rentals/redbox and the fake scarcity to protect profits.
I know companies need profit... but on the same time, if it really is THAT easy to get movies to people - then it's time for a shakeup that moves the industry forward.
MP3s and napster led to iTunes and other avenues to get music easily AND "Support the Artist".
Maybe we'll get better options out this - other than Netflix (Which I love, but damn it doesn't have a lot of titles) or pick-your-flavor digital locker that may or may not exist next year?
Movies and music are a luxury item, not an essential. So it is very difficult to construct an ethical argument that supports piracy of newly released works, as there is basically negligible harm to the consumer in not receiving such items for free.
(Compare this to, for example, patents on medical products being used to induce scarcity. The stakes here are life and death - so there is a strong ethical case in favour of ignoring the patents to produce cheaper generic products so they can be supplied to those who would otherwise be unable to pay. As has been done with certain drugs in the developing world.)
I never said that we should receive them for free. Re-read my post. Slowly.
Look at MP3s, Napster and iTunes. The Music industry refused to offer digital alternatives leading to Napster. It was(/is) easier to get music for free. Why would I buy a CD with a rootkit on it (look up Sony Fiasco #87), or pay $15 for a CD when I only want one song? Why go to the store when I can get it sitting at home?
It was easier to get for free, and the industry suffered for not giving customers what they wanted.
Now we have iTunes/Amazon/etc and I can buy a CD OR just a single song! Or I can subscribe to Pandora/LastFM/etc to get music other ways.
I get to support the artists I like with ease! EVEN THOUGH I can get it "for free". It's not a BURDER to support my music entertainment "needs" and I have multiple options.
Now... compare that to Movies where they make fake scarcity by forcing a release cycle that basically forces people to pay multiple times. Movie. Followed by DVD. Followed by DVD Ultimate Edition. Followed by Red Box. etc... (not to mention DRM and other restrictions). Followed by broken availability (This only available on Netflix... that only on Amazon... Hulu... Disney... blah blah bleh)
There is no reason they can't do Movie followed by general release. Rentals on the same day as DVD release. Available in multiple places easily.
Or do you honestly believe there is a good reason for a months long delay forced on Red Box (or similar) before they can start renting a DVD? AFTER Months long delays to get to DVD?
> I never said that we should receive them for free. Re-read my post. Slowly.
There is no need for such a condescending tone.
Anyway, I don't see how a staggered movie release cycle can be considered unethical. It's not causing you any real harm by having to wait until the film is released on your preferred medium. This is a very poor justification for software such as Popcorn Time.
> There is no reason they can't do Movie followed by general release. Rentals on the same day as DVD release. Available in multiple places easily.
Sure there is, and the reason is that the various streaming and rental services throw lots of money at them (and the physical rental services were doing this before streaming was even an issue) to get exclusivity, and the movie producers are profit-maximizing industries.
And the same thing happens: It's more difficult to get "legally" (DRM, channels, "months" until available in my area/format, etc)? Easier options will keep popping up.
I'm sure plenty of money got thrown around then, as well as now... but if the CUSTOMERS aren't given good options? Then they'll go for 'other' options...
Same thing happened with Music until reasonable options appeared.
Same situation for intrusive DRM on Games like always-on-connections (Hello Sims), CD/DVD checks, nanny software, etc...
When it's easier for pirates - AND they have a better customer experience? Something is wrong and the market will fight back.
History ignored is a history doomed to repeat itself.
It depends what they are sharing. Sharing copyrighted works without the authorization of the copyright holder is the common definition of piracy. In which case, how is it unethical (as you say) to equate the two?
Because "piracy" is a slur that equates sharing to attacking ships and stealing cargo and threatening or even killing people.
The implication in copyright-infringement = piracy is that when you share something, you are an aggressor actively attacking the copyright holder. It's complete garbage and shouldn't be tolerated. Sharing is the complete opposite motivation from stealing. We want to encourage sharing and oppose stealing. Trying to equate them is ludicrous.
Of all the things to be incensed by on this topic, the fact that words have more than one definition (with the copyright infringement meaning going back to at least the 18th century[1] - it's not a recent derivation) has got to be the most bizarre. I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not.
This looks very interesting. It works quite well, on Linux as well. This technology could actually be used for legal purposes too, lowering the price of content - if content providers really wanted to.
"Hit & Run" torrenting without proper seeding hurts the torrent community and makes Hollywood happy.
I do not support "Popcorn Time", but i /do/ support free culture.
I actually had the idea to a) create a similar product/service, b) charge for its use and c) transfer most of the income (keeping only enough to cover the running costs) to the producers of the original material, with or without their consent. I have no idea how would that work out, but I bet that after a few months/years of steady and growing income some things would start to change.
This is not streaming, this is just torrenting and it includes uploading. The only difference between this and other torrent clients is that it downloads torrent files sequentially by default and opens the file as soon as you have enough data to start watching. From the FAQ:
Popcorn Time works using torrents, fair enough. Am I seeding while watching a movie?
Indeed, you are. You're going to be uploading bits and bits of the movie for as long as you're watching it on Popcorn Time.
This is what (sadly) puts a hole in the concept. Because most of the tyrant ISPs don't provide symmetric connections, you are never going to maintain a 1.0 ratio throughout a viewing, so you depend on seed boxes to keep the download demands from crippling popular videos. Unless they add a daemon option to keep seeding when not using the app, users are always leechers.
Not necessarily. It doesn't matter how much faster your download speed is as long as your upload speed is fast enough to "reverse stream". i.e. for a 700mb 1h40 movie your upload speed needs to be ~120kB/s, which most people have now (at least in the UK)
That is only if you always watch your movie start to finish. If you don't consume the whole film that number goes up dramatically, say if you watched 5 minutes at a 5MB/1MB connection, then you could download 1.5GB (probably half the movie) while only seeding 300MB back.
Does BitTorrent protocol support ordered downloading? What usually prevents streaming kind of usage is the fact that BitTorrent clients download file blocks without any specific order. If ordering is possible, then any client should be able to do that.
On a similar topic, years ago I used to download video from Chrome, and as it was downloading I could watch it with VLC, so long as the download stayed ahead. Then that stopped working. Is there a way to recreate this functionality?
This happens because it no longer downloads to the final location, it usually downloads to the same place but with .crdownload or something appended. I get around this by downloading with a different program (aria, wget, etc...) or by hard linking the file it's actually downloading to something looking like a movie file, and vlc-ing that.
How does this work? Is it downloading chunks in order from people, or just starting off doing that, then downloading the rest non-sequentially and streaming that? Is it seeding what it takes? Does it cache complete movies?
This seems waaaaaayyy too polished in all respects for an app designed to break the law. I would not be at all surprised if those prebuilt binaries were sending your details off to the MPAA.
Binary blobs running on user boxes can collect direct, identifiable, evidence. Spying an IP address from afar that may or may not be proxied/NAT'd is flimsy circumstantial evidence at best.
uTorrent has a similar function [1], but from what I've heard, it's spotty at best.
It's rare that you'll get enough of the packets at the right places to get a coherent stream going. Especially if you haven't told it to stream from the start of the torrent.
Gonna be interesting to see how this goes, same concept or some cool tech in the background like S3?
I've always thought of how revolutionary it would be to have some kind of video hosting site where you distributed encrypted content throughout the users in fragments. When you would be using the client it would always be broadcasting to others, but you could enable or disable a background daemon to do it throughout the day. You could have it "smart allocate" the video cache, and it would keep local your favorites and could pull down your "watch later" videos in advance. It could buffer episode 2 when you are watching episode 1, etc.
I can't think of another way to democratize youtube - the costs of storing and broadcasting petabytes of videos are astronomical, but I think torrenting proves there is a lot of untapped bandwidth in the world you could take advantage of if you mask it over with a nice GUI. I guess that is the real downside of such an idea - it can't work in the browser, unless you implement a torrent client in javascript, and even then you couldn't maintain a local cache.
Why couldn't you maintain a local cache with JavaScript? Chrome and Opera already support the Filesystem API and it's only a matter of time before it ceases to be a working draft. But even discounting that API (which allows you to set a user authorized storage limit your application has read/write access to) there are already ways to cache > 5 MB of data in the browser; they're just hacks at this point.
If the FS API were standardized and broadly adopted then yeah, it wouldn't be an issue. I've never gone around trying to store greater than localstorage on all the browsers though to know if it would work.
There should really be a version of this using files stored on sharehosters, like what you can find on serienjunkies.de . There is basically zero legal risk when using those.
Yeah, considering the terrible quality of YIFY's movie rips I wouldn't see this as being competitive with legal alternatives at all. All the audio is low bitrate stereo, and the 1080p video never goes above 2500 kbps. The second there is any motion the entire thing falls apart into a blocky mess.
Such low bitrates do make it easy to stream, but I don't think the site is correct in saying you are watching "the best quality".
It's a gray area in lots of countries, although typically they tend to have much greater issues than some very low income worker trying to find escape in torrenting films.
Well, the downloading is legal in Netherland (we already pay a fee for that). The uploading not so much. Not sure if it matters that you only upload what you downloaded, so you aren't distributing anything that wasn't already distributed.
i think this community is the last place for this. I have the sense most people can figure out a torrent download and get it running. Weren't people actually able to download files and open the in the early 2000? OR has that become a resume skill too ? "Can download and run files"
Disagree COMPLETELY. I can waste time hunting down the file I need, or someone can build something fantastic to use.
Hell, when I was a youngin' I wrote FastFlick to make MY life easier. We as hackers are always striving to make things simpler for everyone, but most importantly for ourselves.
Your use of capitalization is completely unnecessary. I think a better convention might be to use single stars like completely or double stars like completely but the moment I see letters in all caps I just automatically disregard whatever it is that person is saying.
Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.
This community is about making widely used product, and pushing boundaries; ease of use and torrenting are absolutely part of that. Say: it is acceptable that the software torrents out without the user’s knowledge? How are the files architectured to allow fast start? Is there a way to improve the experience by preloading some? How is this coming to affect how Netflix positions itself?
Can this mean that content can be disintermediated a little more, and could something, say a documentary that wouldn’t fit on YouTube (say, because it includes violence, or suspected espionnage) and wouldn’t be able to be produced by common producers would still be able to reach an audience and critical success? There has been many attempts at making torrents more user-friendly, and this is an interesting example.
I think the point is that what was formerly a file-oriented task now behaves much more like a service. Netflix would be nowhere near as popular if you had to download the movie file before watching.
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
The subtitles feature is a huge win for me. My partner is Spanish speaking so every film we watch requires a hunt through various subtitles sites(not being able to use srt files with likes the of iTunes is also a major issue when paying for films). Of course I know how to do it but it's one of those things that has really made we wish there was a good quality commercial offering(I'd be very happy to pay something like $70/month for a spotify type service).
VLC player has a plugin that can do this for you. It's called Vlsub. It doesn't check for synchronization, but you can try out about 3-4 subtitles in less than a minute, so it works very well in practice.
Once you involve the filesystem, you lose about 90% of users. Personally, I think hierarchical file systems a pain in the ass. I'm glad platforms are moving away from them.
If I understand you correctly that you don't care for the paradigm of organizing your data in a hierarchical database I would be curious to know what you would use preferably, say when you want to open a document? Tags? Full content search?
I disagree completely. It's not about solving a the problem of not being able to "download a torrent file", but adding a new functionality to an established protocol.
I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.
Then just don't read/upvote/post in this thread, the community already has the necessary tools (upvote and downvote) to decide whether it is the place here for this type of threads or not.
Although I do support (legal) torrenting, I wonder whether one can trust this applications considering the high risk of malware packaged with this application coming out of this community.
Having said that, I do not know of the developers/people behind this project, so please do not take offense at this if this is misdirected and/or wrong.
It works very similarly to streaming anything. When you think about streaming a video on Netflix, the server sends the movie data to your computer sequentially, so after it downloads maybe the first 4 minutes, your movie starts playing, and while your movie plays it continues to download the rest of the movie.
Streaming via torrent works similarly, except while the movie is playing, you're also seeding.
It's generally frowned upon to download sequentially via a torrent because normally, torrent "pieces" are downloaded randomly to ensure that all pieces are available to everyone evenly. Imagine if everyone were trying to download the same piece at the same time!
Are you guys seriously crying and screaming about compensation when so many actors/directors/producers are filthy rich? I am sure they are all so hungry right now...Think about it! Not to mention the differences between countries regarding salaries and quality of life.
I immediately quit the application as it should not be so easy to benefit from someone else's hard work without compensating them.
Please, movie people, let me pay for this.
You might kill the cinemas, but you'll still get paid.