Swiss Copyright Law: Downloading Stays Legal, No Site Blocking

https://torrentfreak.com/swiss-copyright-law-downloading-stays-legal-no-site-blocking/

by vezycash • 7 years ago

546 360 7 years ago

ecmascript• 7 years ago

This is great news, any attempts to censor the web should be condemned!

mnm13• 7 years ago

It's good to see at least one country with some sense and the ability to stand up to the bullying of the US. It's too bad more countries don't use their sovereignty to stop ugly US laws and culture like draconian copyright laws and insane things like the drug war from hurting their people. I mean what's the point of having sovereignty if you're constantly getting bullied and unwanted things forced upon you?

IfOnlyYouKnew3• 7 years ago

The situation is quite the same in the US, is it not? So that "bullying" seems to be rather ineffective, what with not even working on themselves.

x3ro• 7 years ago

When I was young, I once paid 400 Euros or so (Germany) for illegally downloading a music album via Torrent. I remember reading of cases where people where dragged to court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per downloaded song in the US. "Quite the same" does not seem appropriate.

mnm13• 7 years ago

Your comment doesn't make sense. The US has both civil and criminal penalties for copyright infringement. It's certainly not the same as in Switzerland. And there isn't a single country I can think of that bullies the US. So what are you referring to?

PostOnce• 7 years ago

50 year copyright term extended to 70 years

aequitas• 7 years ago

70 years _after_ the author's death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...

Imho it's absurd copyright should still be applicable when the author is gone. Only to the benefit of those who arguably contributed nothing to the creative work.

ownagefool• 7 years ago

Maybe, that's fair.

But if you created a massive piece of work that did wonderfully well, would you deem it fair you family gets nothing, whilst if you'd have survived, they'd share in your success?

I'd probably go with a N years since creation or until transfered (either by death, or sale, etc), whatever is longer.

This would give the author the ability to sell their creation, but it'd also let those that want to keep their baby do so, but my N years would likely only be around 20.

davidweatherall2• 7 years ago

If copyrights disappeared after death, from a business standpoint it would become much harder to value a copyright when you also have to factor in the chance of the author dying and you immediately losing the related IP.

sshagent• 7 years ago

Imagine the new business line of having to arrange accidents for someone who holds a patent you wish to utilize. "Whoops they died, looks like we get to press a head"

Its indeed awkward to get this right, but i agree 70 years is nuts.

jstummbillig• 7 years ago

All of us greatly benefit from things that were created without our contribution, and I agree, often times it's both absurd and perverse.

To this end, I don't think copyright warrants special attention, over, say, immigration or inheritance law.

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

If I have a long and successful life and decide to write my autobiography in my last year, my dependants should get almost nothing? What of the 95% manuscript I had in my drawer that my wife or child gets published after I am gone?

The greater point that copyright terms are out of control and absurd, I wholly agree with. Family interests controlling rights of a windfall legacy (e.g. Tolkien etc) for decades is crazy. Fifteen or twenty five years after first publication seems nearer the right mark to me.

sha666sum• 7 years ago

If the copyright expires on author's death, then you're incentivizing convenient accidents and straight up murder.

contravariant• 7 years ago

At this point I just find it weird it's tied to the author's death at all. It's not going to incentivize young people, to either live longer or produce more material.

eteos2• 7 years ago

Do you guys know this doesn't count for corporations (which I presume you have the most aversion against)? For example, it's irrelevant how long mr Disney has been dead because the company still exists.

icebraining3• 7 years ago

I assume you're talking about work-made-for-hire? As far as I know, that's mostly a concept in common law countries; I'm not sure it applies to Switzerland. In most European countries, as far as I know, the rights of authorship always belong to natural persons.

n10002• 7 years ago

Hmm. Maybe I am overlooking something here, but my understanding was that an important loophole in the (now) past legislation was the fact that ISPs were not allowed to pass on the identity of their customers even when they were uploading / torrenting copyrighted material. I know a bunch of people that received letters from their ISP saying that they received a takedown notice but did not comply. Maybe that will be addressed later:

On the hosting and liability front, there will be changes, but at this early stage, it’s unclear how that will play out on the ground.

huhtenberg• 7 years ago

Uploading has always been outlawed and that aspect has not changed.

Hence an uniquely Swiss-flavored BitTorrent client, aptly called the BitThief - https://www.bitthief.ethz.ch/

lm284693• 7 years ago

It's the same in germany afaik. You're free to download all you want but the first byte* you upload will get you a nice mail asking for x000 euros. As far as I can tell there is a big business of law corps buying raw ISPs data and sending mass mails to offenders.

* of copyrighted content

pingyong6• 7 years ago

Is it really the first byte? I am from Germany so I've always wondered how this is actually handled. Like 1 byte isn't really unique or identifiable information, there are only 256 different bytes after all. People send this byte value all the time. Do you really just have to send one byte?

n10002• 7 years ago

Yes, but Swiss ISPs are not allowed to share their client's data as far as I know. So there is no way to prosecute. As I said in my other comment, I know people that received the copyright claim letters from foreign institutions "for information" from their ISP.

raxxorrax3• 7 years ago

That is an incredibly well thought out legislation. If you ever try to conquer the comparably rotten and sad chunk of land that calls itself EU, just know you have supporters.

Faark• 7 years ago

Good to know the page is still available. Could have sworn it was gone the last time I looked for it. Am using this client since getting a cease-and-desist letter many years ago.

Sadly it's quite shitty and I don't see a way to improve it, since recent versions are closed source and well obfuscated.

lawl3• 7 years ago

It's fairly trivial to patch an existing (open source) torrent client.

As a hint for people wanting to do that, torrent clients often have infrastructure in place to limit upload speed for example. It's pretty easy to bend that code a bit.

The last time i did this, it was a one line patch in my particular client.

microtherion2• 7 years ago

Switzerland is largely free to make its own legislation

That's a charming idea, but not really a very accurate one. Switzerland is under perpetual pressure to harmonize legislation with partners both close by (EU) and distant (US).

Sure, we are free to make our own legislation, but at some point, those partners would also exercise their freedom not to deal with us under favored terms anymore, and, particularly with the EU, Switzerland tends to eventually adopt a large part of EU legislation.

pingyong6• 7 years ago

In this specific case though, what are they gonna do? Stop selling media in Switzerland?

xiphias23• 7 years ago

They can always do economic sanctions. Just look at what happened to GBP after the Brexit vote.

CHsurfer2• 7 years ago

One of the problems is that much content is not available via legal means in Switzerland because the media companies have not got around to it, so many will use torrents as it's the only way to get the content. If they completely block legal access to content, then torrenting will only increase.

xwolfi• 7 years ago

That's the raw definition of freedom: your freedom stops where the freedom of others starts.

You're free to give passports to war criminals to flee to Argentina, we're free to require Credit Suisse to give us their list of european clients if they want to operate in european markets.

Everyone is free in the best of worlds, long live free Switzerland.

afiori• 7 years ago

That's the raw definition of freedom: your freedom stops where the freedom of others starts.

This does not really apply here; the meaning here applies to freedom as a right from an authority (being this a state or an abstract morality). The freedom Switzerland has is not constrained from that[1] but it is constrained by the responsibility they have towards their own population.

[1] Ok, above the state of Switzerland there is the Swiss population. But that does not really have an impact here.

m0004• 7 years ago

...failed to fully address key complaints from the United States Trade Representative (USTR) made on behalf of rightsholders.

I'm glad that a country reminded their local USTR that they're not a colony and he's not the viceroy. It's so easy to get confused on matters like this.

pas2• 7 years ago

Yes and no. Naturally as the biggest IP holding nation/country it has the most interest in maintaining, strengthening, enforcing IP protection around the globe. However, small countries that want to encourage foreign investment/capital to flow into them, or want to protect their small but occasionally successful startups' IP around the globe (for example Skype, TransferWise, all started in Estonia) also has some incentive to adopt IP laws.

Of course mindlessly abiding rarely enriches a small country.

jMyles• 7 years ago

You presume that a legal regime of IP per se encourages the flow of foreign capital and is to the benefit of local successful startups, but what's the evidence for that?

What happens when relatively robust economies start to reject IP conceptually, altogether?

It seems unambiguous that they'll be at an advantage, not the other way around.

CaptainZapp2• 7 years ago

One of the reasons, though, why doenloading is and remains legal in Switzerland, is that a levy is charged on blank media, which can be used for recording purposes[1].

Even though I can hear the wails and hollers it seems to me like a rather fair compromise and it's not incredibly high to begin with.

[1] https://www.suisa.ch/en/customers/levy-for-blank-storage-med...

edit : typo

ChuckNorris89• 7 years ago

Same in Austria, there's that tax but downloading is illegal so we get worst of both worlds.

realusername2• 7 years ago

Same in France, except that tax is so high it's skewing the EU average and it created a black market of hard drives and DVDs.

hiisukun• 7 years ago

Australia also has blank media surcharges, from memory. Though it is not well known about. I've always thought of it as an insidious method to recover potential future (criminal? civil?) losses from otherwise innocent people in the present.

Though I will agree it is highly pragmatic, and not a noticeably large amount in Australia. Otherwise, people would perhaps have noticed.

chris_engel• 7 years ago

So because you _could_ copy illegally, the tax is taken?

Thats like putting a tax on cars because they might be used in a heist. Or a tax on weapons because there might be murder...

cf141q53252• 7 years ago

Those taxes are no fines but the fees to allow you to make private copies of copyrighted work. Not a bad idea until private copies were made illegal by introducing laws to circumvent copy protection. Today the tax is just a giant "Screw you, because we can" in most countries who still have it.

beatgammit• 7 years ago

I actually kind of like the idea, and it smacks of a pigovian tax, which are generally quite fair. If something has a negative externality, taxing it to correct the negative externality makes sense. For example, taxing carbon emissions is hard, but taxing fuel is fairly easy, so gasoline and coal taxes make sense as a reasonably close approximation.

That being said, the question really is: is the tax fair (mostly affects the causers of the negative externality) and effective (does it actually reduce or fix the negative externality)? I haven't read the research to know the latter, but it seems the former isn't satisfied since there are legitimate uses for high capacity blank media. That being said, I'm not against it in principle.

My personal view is that IP protection is too generous, which results in larger IP owners having an unfair advantage. IP laws were intended to help protect smaller creators and encourage contributing to the public domain, but these days it seems to only help those who can afford to litigate. I think that by reducing IP protection terms, we can make progress on both fronts (ideally have extendable IP protections if the owner can prove they need more time to recoup their investment).

londons_explore2• 7 years ago

I mean they kinda do... Sales tax is on most things and pays for the police.

Iv• 7 years ago

In France there is the levy, and download is still illegal.

NiekvdMaas• 7 years ago

The Netherlands also has the tax AND it's illegal to download. The tax is even charged on all kinds of storage media, even phones bought in stores.

lucb1e5• 7 years ago

Well, this used to be why it's legal to download, because of that tax. Then the European court of justice came along and went "oh no that's not how this works" and then downloading was suddenly illegal without a change of law by elected leaders. I don't get why we still have the tax, but compensation for downloading was actually the purpose.

collyw2• 7 years ago

Spain apparently has something similar, though I have no idea how they distribute the money (I have a feeling that they don't).

Maken2• 7 years ago

The money is distributed among several professional associations of "media producers", of which the SGAE is the most famous one, and also the one whose board of directors were charged with embezzlement.

KingMachiavelli• 7 years ago

Does the tax apply to hard drives? Does it apply to 'full' hard drives? Seems like any tax on commodity storage would really hurt tech companies.

pjc502• 7 years ago

Back in the day, this was why lyrics.ch was hosted in Switzerland.

ddelt• 7 years ago

Anecdata, but I’d say 90% of the piracy from people who would otherwise legitimately paid for content I’ve seen or read about falls into one or more of four categories:

1. The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier 2. The person can’t afford the entire price of the content 3. The content has no form of sample/trial/demo, which imposes a fear of buying without fully understanding whether or not the purchase provides value 4. The person actually has or was planning to buy the content legally, but diverted due to DRM which is only present in the legal copies.

All of these reasons indicate that the issue lies outside of the piracy, at least in my eyes. So I’m happy at least one nation has adopted some modern legislation about this topic.

taneq4• 7 years ago

I think 2. is more ”the person felt that the asking price was unreasonable“. Most of us could afford to pay $30+ for a DVD but I’d imagine most of us wouldn’t be willing to.

iforgotpassword2• 7 years ago

For a DRM free digital copy I'd be willing to pay around 20 bucks after release and would expect a drop in prices layer on, just like with physical releases. 1080p, maybe 4k but I don't even have a TV for that yet. I'm only watching movies very occasionally so I'm not sure if that kind of business model would be feasible, but my guess is that just the paranoia of selling something without DRM is too big.

paulcole4• 7 years ago

A classic case of privileged people thinking that the rules don’t apply to them. And if they don’t like the rules someone else made, it is their right to break them and make up some BS justification.

alexis_fr• 7 years ago

$30+ DVD... with ads. I’ve always found it insulting to the consumer. I wouldn’t mind ads on a cheap trinket, but not a full-price DVD.

ptero• 7 years ago

The use case that I did personally hit a couple of times is old, out of print books. They were relatively inexpensive (say, $10-$15 at publication 30 years ago), but did not publish a lot of copies. Thus my choice is between getting free digital scans off hobbyist sites (I guess also known as those evil "pirates") or searching for an occasional seller on ebay asking $200 for a copy of unknown quality. Can I afford $200 for a copy? Yes. Will I pay it? Not so sure, sorry. My 2c.

antocv• 7 years ago

5. The person considers it a civil disobedience to not pay for services which lobby against the rights of said person/s. To not pay for your "service" is a political act.

I could afford every content I consume, yet I make sure my content cost is 0 dollars and 0 cents.

lucb1e5• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm feeding a troll by replying, but I genuinely don't understand your comment. I would ask a question but it's more that the whole thing seems incoherent. Could you try to explain it to me in different words?

zanny• 7 years ago

Since this comment is obviously going to be controversial, might as well nip the scapegoat in the bud right away -

No, you are not taking food out of the animators at Disney's mouth by not paying whatever obscene price they want for that Blu-Ray. Those workers got paid a salary to make the content and that has already been said and done. Across all industries the amount of royalties going to creators, especially when it takes hundreds of them to make a product (CGI movies, animations, etc) is within a margin of error of 0.

Your money goes to investors and corporate coffers when you are buying popular mainstream media. If piracy in aggregate causes lower profits than anticipated that results in business as usual - reevaluate your product development and / or change strategy and / or complain on mainstream media that you need to use force of law to make people buy your stuff because that obviously makes sense. The creators behind whatever the thing is already got paid all they are going to get in the average case.

A very small percentile of the revenue in the creative industry is actual content creators themselves trying to sell copyrighted works they made to make a living off of them. Most professional media is made by salaried or contract artists that are making the thing on behalf of some corporation whom has the intent to try to profit off selling the copies of the finished work.

2muchcoffeeman• 7 years ago

5. Torrents are more convenient.

I was happy to and still do pay for Netflix. But occasionally something comes along and I’m sure as hell not subscribing to 5 extra streaming services. One or two? Maybe even three? But now you have Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV along with the other regional streaming services if you want to get content legally. And there’s more services to come.

lucb1e5• 7 years ago

5. Torrents are more convenient.

Right but then you don't fall within the 90% that OP estimates would have bought the product. In OP's points, you either would buy it if you could (1, 2), or are planning to buy after limited evaluation (3). Item 4 is a bit of an odd one (though it applies to me: I only pay for Audible $10/month because you can still do .aa exports and turn them into mp3s and play anywhere, any time; otherwise I'd pirate the books or find a competitor), but your 5th is squarely a lost sale.

The text below your point doesn't really match your point, that sounds more like can't afford or just doesn't want to pay. Leaving in the middle whether it's reasonable to have to go to five "stores" to get everything you want, you either can afford it and are the (proposed) 10% or it falls under item 2.

amelius• 7 years ago

Exactly.

There's a problem here, though. If there was only a single distribution channel, that would be a monopoly with corresponding prices.

So this means that there will never be a distribution channel which is satisfactory. Unless perhaps a non-profit organization runs it.

cercatrova• 7 years ago

Unfortunately, any aggregator service suffers the tragedy of the commons. At first it's nice because one place has all of the content. As time goes by, each provider of content sees that they could make more money by removing their content from the aggregator and launching their own service. This is true if it occurs in a vacuum, but it inevitably doesn't; each content provider thinks similarly and creates their own service. Now the consumer does not want to pay for each service and will resort to the most convenient option, piracy. If you follow gaming news, you see this happen with regards to Steam and the Epic Games Store. Piracy is a nearly unbeatable service because it acts as the ultimate aggregator with unremovable content. (Yes, there are private tracker sites with their own selection of content, but the vast majority of people use public trackers.)

NullPrefix• 7 years ago

Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Apple TV

I think only YouTube works properly on Linux without the DRM EME botnet plugins.

fernandotakai• 7 years ago

i already pay for amazon, youtube, netflix and hulu. if some content i want to watch is not on any of those services, i will gladly download it -- not because i don't wanna pay for it, but because i'm already paying the studios (through these 4 services) more than enough.

giancarlostoro6• 7 years ago

5. Torrents are more convenient.

Don't forget Usenet automation like CouchPotato, now that is convenient ...or so I've heard. You can set it all up to automatically fetch files, and organize them in such a way for Kodi to consume them, and then Kodi gets art for all your shows and movies. There's articles online about it. Downside is Usenet costs a certain amount, course when you start piling on $14.99 for 4k from half a dozen online streaming services, $14.99 once and for all doesn't sound so bad. I don't condone piracy, but I may or may not have done that in my younger years. It was glorious.

elliekelly• 7 years ago

Not to give Amazon any ideas but I would actually love a service like Audible for seasons of TV series: pay a monthly fee and get X “credits” that you can use to access a season of a show.

forgottenpass2• 7 years ago

5. Torrents are more convenient.

I miss watching videos outside the service-branded players. I get that the floor is lower, but the ceiling is at the floor. None of them are special beyond making the DRM work, their UIs are at best rebranding of the good ideas they steal from the youtube player.

Sometimes I just want the flexibility to watch their video with a feature I know a different player has. Or without uninterrupted access to high-throughput internet connectivity. Like, in the car, the wilderness, or anywhere that the home network is administrated by a normie.

oefrha3• 7 years ago

In fact, I’ve “pirated” shows I already paid for because the owner doesn’t offer an offline option, or I don’t want to use the crappy players forced upon me. (HBO is a notable example.)

fnord77• 7 years ago

and DL'ing is only going to get more pervasive as the fragmentation of "exclusive" content gets worse with the explosion of services

pteraspidomorph2• 7 years ago

Torrents aren't that convenient anymore. The vast majority of available data is on private trackers, and the procedures for joining said trackers are extremely byzantine, sometimes outright demeaning, and require vast quantities of time and effort. I'd argue that it's much more convenient to just pay Bezos, unless - as suggested - you're a teenager and don't have any money, or the rightsholders made it impossible for you to make the purchase (this has happened to me when trying to purchase music, of all things).

mikepurvis• 7 years ago

This one hit home for me recently as my partner and I were streaming Good Omens off of Prime. It was a laptop on wifi (10mbps connection), hooked up by HDMI to the TV, and the quality kept dropping down to 480p or worse.

Every time it did it, I was like, man I should have just pre-downloaded this, and then it would be issue-free.

nurb2• 7 years ago

6. You choose torrent for ethical reasons.

To provide a culture access to everyone and not only those with enough money, to bypass censorship and virtual frontiers.

But also to avoid financing distribution companies, that P2P made obsolete. Companies that finance themselves before the tiny subset of compliant artists working for them. The very same companies that make you thing that "sharing is wrong"... Seriously, put this out of context and feel the absurdity of it.

Still though, financing culture still an open problem. For now the only ethical way seems to be the donate buttons and bitcoins.

arkh• 7 years ago

5. Torrents are more convenient.

Some people enjoy "crazy good" less than 1Mb/s internet conexion: no way you're streaming anything. So yeah, torrent it is.

parliament322• 7 years ago

Not to mention the lack of a unified UI. I don't want to fire up 3-5 different apps, have to figure out which show is on which, manage 3-5 different watchlists, etc. It's all about convenience.

duxup• 7 years ago

I don't even bother to torrent anymore .... I just don't view it.

I love Star Trek, haven't seen any of the new series. I'm not singing up for a new streaming service for one thing, and there's so much media available I can always find something else... so I just don't watch.

theelous3• 7 years ago

I also think that when it comes to infinitly duplicateable products, value becomes extremely subjective.

Paying full price for a movie just isn't worth it to me, even if I can afford it. I just dont value them highly.

If the inly legal avenue for getting my hands on something I want to watch is priced way out of how I see the value proposition, I'll just pirate it.

I favour a "pay what you want" model for a lot of these goods.

I would pay 5e, but it's only available for 10e a month plus the work of cancelling subscriptions and so on, so instead I pay 0e.

iamben• 7 years ago

Along the same lines, but something applicable I heard with regards to software piracy in the late 90s or early 00s - for every 5 people, 1 will pay regardless, 2 will steal regardless and 2 will pay if it's easy, fair and convenient.

As a loose rule of thumb, that seems to be roughly my experience when you take into account everyone that's accessing stuff (ie, kids, people earning money, parents, etc. etc.).

I'm also reminded of the late 90s Gate's quote: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours." -- It's exactly as you said. Make it easier and more convenient for people to get it legally than for them to get it illegally. When they have the cash they'll value the convenience. My subscriptions to Spotify, Netflix, Prime, Creative Cloud and so forth are a testament to this.

cheez2• 7 years ago

The person can’t legally access the content at all, due to age, country of residence, or other imposed barrier

I buy stuff on iTunes then pirate it in my preferred format. Same for ebooks, audiobooks, etc. Not going to risk it disappearing.

SturgeonsLaw• 7 years ago

Or being edited. I (perhaps naively) didn't realise that happened to any real degree, but there was a thread on reddit today where someone had noticed that a series they wanted to stream had been retroactively edited to remove the music they liked from it.

Archiving media by torrenting or ripping a stream is the closest we can get to owning media in this subscription based world we live in. Of course there's physical media, with the associated drawbacks others have mentioned (availability, ads, FBI warnings, etc).

https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/d68gi9/how_can...

erfgh2• 7 years ago

Itunes does not use DRM.

rayiner4• 7 years ago

In what other areas do you get to decide you don’t like the price someone is charging for something, or the terms and conditions, and get the product for free instead?

I commute from a train station that has reserved parking spots. Quite a few are unused—if I park there, I’m not costing the garage any money. Is it okay if I park at one of those spots for free, so long as nobody was going to park there anyway? I’m not costing the garage anything right? Or displacing anyone else from getting a spot?

Dylan168075• 7 years ago

Is that one of the reasons listed in the post you replied to?

The equivalent to piracy is that you park in a spot that's equivalent to a reserved spot but doesn't take up physical space inside the train station's land. And, well, that sounds fine.

lzol• 7 years ago

This is a poor analogy imo. It's not a physical medium. There's a finite number of parking spots. Once they're used up they're gone. Media is not a finite resource. If I have 50 friends over to watch the Avengers movie, there's nothing wrong with that. There's not less movie to go around, but there's probably fewer people who would spend money to rent it. I can't bring 50 people in my car to use a parking spot. There's physical limitations. Comparing digital things to physical things is always going to be a poor translation.

thatcat• 7 years ago

It seems that fining someone when there are still spots open is not really justifiable because you're not preventing anyone from parking yet.

mindslight• 7 years ago

Bottled water, movie theatre snacks, drinks at a club, lemonade stands, drive-in movie, open air concert, Linux CDROMs, cosplay accessories, 3D printer parts, maps, email, wifi, books, political donations, "Microsoft" phone scam, home maintenance, trees/plants, clean fill, printer ink, coffee, legal documents, happiness.

Basically anything you're willing to DIY rather than paying for convenience.

auggierose• 7 years ago

A typical scenario is like mine: I purchased season 1 and 2 of "private eyes" (I know, I know, but I just love this show :-)) from Apple TV. But season 3 is not available (yet?), but I know that season 3 is already out, so ...

overcast6• 7 years ago

Sorry, but being free is the reason 99% of people pirate software. This list is a good spin on putting pirates into a positive light, but the fact of the matter, is that they are stealing software and entertainment. None of which are a basic human need or right. What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE? This is like arguing that torrents are mostly used for distributing freeware/shareware. Sure there are some, but the rest is illegal software.

throwaway8941• 7 years ago

They're stealing nothing. It's really hard to take you guys seriously when you talk about "stealing" information.

kalleboo• 7 years ago

What if you could download a Playstation or new TV, and have it materialize in front of you for FREE

And in doing so I didn't deprive anyone else of their TV? I would have a TV in every room of my house.

If we lived in a post-scarcity world we would be living in the Star Trek utopia. Tea, Earl Gray, Hot.

basic human right

IP protections are also not basic human rights. When Ug invented fire, he didn't get an exclusive right to license it out to other Neanderthals for 20 years.

Now, I'm not saying that infringing on copyright is right or moral, or that IP protections are wrong, but that it's a valid debate to what extent these things should apply, and what morality is attached. Our laws as they are today are not necessarily an embodiment of what is true morality. Just dismissing it as "stealing is wrong!" is not a strong argument. Most of us agree with taxation, but in a way that's stealing as well.

res0nat0r4• 7 years ago

This is already being shown via an article from yesterday: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190320/07442041832/ironi...

Everything available everywhere for $12.99/month isn't feasible so folks are going back to piracy, even though signing up for a handful of streaming services one time is easy. Folks just don't want to spend the money per month it would take to watch everything they like.

This was always the inevitable outcome of trying to do a la carte TV and approach the original cost of a monthly Comcast bill.

TallGuyShort2• 7 years ago

I pay for Spotify, but then the week after I bought a new Smart TV Spotify turned off access from the official Spotify app on the new TV, and told me they were revamping it. Years later, I still can't listen to the service I pay for on the device I paid for, and as far as I can tell I've only been lied to about it. But MP3s on a flash drive work great. I used to pay for FloGrappling. First weekend I had it, I wanted to watch 3 fights and they lost sound or partial video for all of them and had spotty service the day of the event. I had the results spoiled for me before I could watch any of them. They refused to refund me any money. YouTube had videos of the same fights, recorded contrary to venue policy, so I just started scouring YouTube a few hours after fights. NBC pays tons of money to get exclusive access to sporting events and then offers inferior coverage. But I can get on a VPN and get it elsewhere, or I can torrent it after the fact.

Media companies steal from me all the time through breach of contract and anti-competitive behaviors. I'll pay for the service, and then the minute they break their end of the contract and don't care about it, it's on. I'm not going to spend money suing them or calling for charge-backs every time - someone has been offering me better service for less money this whole time.

sunstone• 7 years ago

As a linux user I'm not aware of any software that I want that I would have to pay for. I guess I'm in the 1%.

vorpalhex• 7 years ago

I've consistently bought something legally, and either lost access (service shut down, copyright issues removed the item from the service, etc) or was unable to actually access it after paying, and got no refund.

Nowadays I buy all the media I can (the restriction always being availability, usually region locking but occasionally something being too old), and then I immediately pirate a copy and usually consume the pirated copy since there's no DRM nonsense and I can actually get to my damned content.

matz1• 7 years ago

Agree. I would 100% steal if by doing so giving me something I want but doesn't cause me any trouble or inconvenient. Software piracy fit very well here.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 7 years ago

That is a rather broad brush you seem to be painting with. But I can only speak for myself.

I have disposable income. I haven't pirated in a good while ( gog and steam making it mostly pointless -- though I did uninstall steam recently for other reasons ).

One of the game I was considering ( borderlands 3 ) is coming out on epic store with restrictive drm Denuvo. Now I can afford it, but ever since certain company that shall remain nameless decided to rootkit my PC, I became less than forgiving about drm. Hell, torrent may be the only way to have drm free experience on some games.

I am not asking for free. I am not making gaming a right, but I expect that as a customer I am treated seriously. I am not. Torrents even out the playing field, cuz clearly no one cares what me as a customer thinks. Torrents put the fear of god back in the executive types.

erfgh2• 7 years ago

Well maybe the rest of the people would never pay for all the content they pirate but they'd probably pay for at least a small portion of that.

thecopy• 7 years ago

I live in Switzerland, im paying for Netflix but i often download the movies i could watch on Netflix due to the bad streaming quality i get from Netflix. I have 10Gbit/s connects, so i usually get downloads speeds of ~60 MB/s when downloading a movie.

andreasley2• 7 years ago

You might want to ask your ISP to participate in the Netflix Open Connect program [1], which provides service providers with free caching servers. My ISP (Init7) does that and the performance for Netflix is absolutely fantastic (instant playback in highest quality).

[1] https://openconnect.netflix.com/

nurb2• 7 years ago

You might want to preserve net neutrality and continue to use torrents like this.

CodeMage• 7 years ago

An interesting subcategory of #1 is when you're trying to watch a legally available movie that doesn't have subtitles in your language of choice. Watching Netflix in United States? Some stuff might have Spanish subtitles, but most doesn't. Amazon is even worse.

danmaz74• 7 years ago

Subtitles... or even audio. I've got an Italian Amazon subscription (even if I live in the UK now) and lots of US movies don't have the original soundtrack, only the dubbed one.

andreasley2• 7 years ago

I've recently tried to watch the Netflix production "I am Mother", but it isn't available on Netflix in Switzerland – nor on any other streaming service or Blu-Ray.

It's probably cheaper for production companies to ignore piracy to a certain extent than to fix the distribution/rights issues, but that's definitely not good service.

cmiles746• 7 years ago

Do individuals downloading some television or movies here and there for their own personal use really cost these media companies a lot of money, or is it more like a rounding error?

There was a post yesterday that mentioned setting up a Plex Media Server and something like Sonarr to download television shows and the consensus was that this setup is way too complicated for most people. Given that, how big an issue is piracy, really?

There was an article on Vice recently[0] that indicated BitTorrent traffic was on the rise (too many streaming services, too much exclusive content). But my knee-jerk reaction is that if it was really costing these media companies significant dollars they'd be investing in one streaming service rather than splitting off into more and more.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3q45v/bittorrent-usage-i...

rapind• 7 years ago

put.io + showRSS trivializes it. Mind you put.io has a price, but maybe that illustrates the parent's point that people are willing to pay.

have_faith• 7 years ago

I think number 2 is very common in the professional software used by hobbyists world. For instance if you dabble in music or video production but can't afford your preferred DAW or editor then pirating the software is a very low friction option.

I sometimes see companies offer "Lite" versions of their software for a reduced price but often stripping out desirable features making pirating the normal version even more appealing.

yummypaint3• 7 years ago

Dont forget the people who already purchased the content but lost the physical media or their access to it

SkyBelow2• 7 years ago

due to age

Many of the others make sense, but age seems like a hard one to work around. Generally these restrictions only apply to children, and legally (and to some extent socially) we treat even near adult children with the same attitude we treat toddlers. Yes, kids will pirate, but in this case giving them legal access may be a far worse choice as long as our society continues to view a child who is willing to pirate as being just a kid.

emosupportfi• 7 years ago

Another way to read the original post's "due to age" might be the age of the content itself, rather than the age of the user downloading it.

For example, you can't get a digital copy of the original Star Wars theatrical release, but there are fan conversions of old VHS or film reels and additional reconstructions that aren't legally available, but are certainly out there. I know that when I was doing pop-culture research for a thesis on pre-WWII American Cartoons I ran into a lot of works that were only digitized by amateurs and hobbyists, and therefore not legally available anywhere.

wanderer2323• 7 years ago

4a. The person would by legally but content only comes in a form that the seller can delete remotely on a whim without any recourse (or will become unavailable if the seller goes out of business).

chimi4• 7 years ago

No one is entitled to any of what you describe. I believe that is the problem. The feeling of entitlement endemic in our society/culture/species.

If you can't afford it or access it or demo it or feel comfortable with your purchase then do without.

You aren't entitled to someone else's property.

drak0n1c• 7 years ago

You're right, but given that this is the current psychological reality, comments like the parent are useful feedback for sellers and creators to know these motivational tipping points if they want to expand their business in the future.

Of course if they so choose they should be free to keep themselves to a premium boutique industry, and should still receive legal protections for doing so.

4bpp2• 7 years ago

What is the notion of something being someone's property, though, if not an entitlement? The problem with this analysis is that it's completely dependent on what entitlements you are willing to acknowledge. There is no such thing as an empirically readable tag on an object or a particular combination of bits that identifies the owner; the notion is entirely constructed and maintained by humans, and therefore the weight of any particular notion that "A owns X" depends on which and how many humans believe it.

On one end, pretty much all members of our society agree to and hone people's titles to movable objects like, say, a car. If the car is parked in place A, the owner is in place B and a random third party is in place A, then we believe that the owner has a moral right to demand that the random party not take the car, even though in some real sense the third party currently "has" the car, or at least has access to it. A hypothetical society in which people only believe in a very narrow set of property rights along the lines of "you have the right to not have your things ripped out of your hands" might write something like: "If you can't protect it or hold on to it or make sure that nobody else lays their hands on it then do without."

If you consider, say, building squatters and their supporters, or public-right-of-way advocates, this intuition that government-granted title counts is already not nearly as universal for certain pairs of property and owners; a nontrivial number of living humans appears to believe that an individual living in a building or plot of land has more of a title to it than a faceless landlord nominally owning it without putting it to use out of some abstract economic consideration. In the eyes of those who tend to side with the squatters, it is the landlords who are acting entitled to somebody else's home, just because they paid money to get an official-looking piece of paper from another unrelated entity. (This becomes more apparent in cases where there isn't a single continuous government in control of an area. If governments A and B claim a territory, person X buys a title to a plot of land from government A and person Y buys a title to the same plot of land from goverment B and then they squabble over who gets to move in, which one is "acting entitled"?)

There generally seems to be far less consensus once we talk about titles to "property" that is not even physical, and/or can be cloned rather than moved at zero cost. Is someone who designs and places a building in a public space entitled to restrict reproduction of its appearance in photos? (France says yes, most everyone else finds this ridiculous.) If we forget about reproduction, am I entitled to freely sell or give my unique copy of a book or game to somebody else, or is Valve or the author entitled to stop me from doing so? (Many Americans seem to lean towards siding with the publisher, a parallel thread mentions that the EU just reaffirmed that the publisher's rights are exhausted with the first sale.)

Other cases where people disagree about whose title is valid : taxes, patents, copyright duration...

You need to recognise that many anti-copyright campaigners come from a moral framework where the creator of a book or movie has no meaningful title to what someone does with data that they have stored; in this framework, it is the copyright owner who is by default assumed to be acting entitled to someone's manifest property (a sequence of bits on their harddrive, which they are not withholding from anyone else). Often, this goes hand in hand with a basic moral intuition that ownership := you are entitled to not lose use of the thing := you are entitled to not have others gain use of the thing. (That's why "you wouldn't download a car" is so universally made fun of in anti-copyright circles. It makes sense if you think of the point of owning a car being that others don't get to use it.) You might persuasively argue that this notion of property/pattern of recognised titles is inferior to yours - and this is the type of argument that is being made whenever people debate whether patents encourage or stifle innovation, rather than making the debate about whether the inventor or the commons is acting entitled - but to simply assert that the studios' title is valid and the copy-holder's title is not is as useful as shouting "no, MY moral principles are right".

nybble413• 7 years ago

Certainly no one is entitled to anyone else's property. And yet, somehow, copyright holders manage to act as if they were entitled to other people's money (their property) when those people apply their own materials and labor to produce copies of certain information, an act which doesn't involve any property belonging to the copyright holder.

hiccuphippo• 7 years ago

6. Piracy isn't seen as something morally bad in your society.

Where I come from, you can buy a bootleg dvd/bd from a store for a buck and nobody bats an eye.

Scapeghost• 7 years ago

There's another category:

5. The culture generally has no concept of placing monetary value upon intellectual property.

I'm from a "third world" country, and throughout my life, I have almost never known or seen anyone pay for original software, movies or music. Originals were never easy to get here (few companies have official distribution here) to begin with, but even after widespread internet access (since the mid 2000s) and millions of smartphone (mostly Android) users, there's still virtually nobody who spends a dime on software or media.

blitmap• 7 years ago

Or you can't find the most valuable copy of something: highest bitrate video, multiple languages for subtitles, multiple audio streams for different languages. I just want 1 supreme copy of something.

ACow_Adonis2• 7 years ago

I've torrented physical media I've bought because it's more convenient and I don't wan't to pay the long term price of storage (either in terms of data or physical space).

It's an interesting thought experiment: if I buy a DVD and physically keep it, am I more entitled to watch a movie in perpetuity than if I buy it and burn it in a fire. What if i keep the ashes? Where's the digital equivalent of a perpetual ownership structure?

(For me, this all comes back to the problem that intellectual property laws/ concepts are, as a general rule, farcical/nonsensical)

dorian-graph• 7 years ago

I think you're missing a huge group of people.

Those who just want something for free. They easily step over/don't care about any of those barriers you've mentioned.

I've said this before as well, but listing all those problems make it sound like someone, at any cost, simply must consume some pirated content, otherwise some terrible thing would befall them.

peterburkimsher• 7 years ago

Anecdotally, I agree with you, and memes [1] confirm this. Apologies for referencing 9gag, but that site did in fact go through Y Combinator.

[1] https://9gag.com/gag/aj5DjOp

abc03• 7 years ago

While uploading is illegal in Switzerland, we should also mention that it is not actively prosecuted by attorneys. Historically, it was always the case even during C64 times when swappers in Switzerland didn't have to fear anything.

shmerl• 7 years ago

Good push against copyright maximalists.

dstola• 7 years ago

Makes me think of that old anti-piracy commercial

you wouldn't download a car

Made me and every person I know laugh every time; if I could, I definitely would

malthaus• 7 years ago

Swiss here

I pay for Netflix I can't legally subscribe to HBO, Showtime, etc

Hence, i download anything not on Netflix. Legally. Because i live in a country which is ruled by its people and not its corporations.

mrlala• 7 years ago

That's kind of a weird attitude. You get on your high horse about a country which you claim is more ruled by it's people.. yet you eagerly consume the content which is produced by a country apparently ruled by it's corporations?

Maybe you should consider that the reason the US is able to produce so much of everything- whether it be tv/movies/social media/technologies such as apple/android/windows is, well, because it is a little bit controlled by the corporations? Yet because it's basically all digital, you are able to sit in your bubble and condemn the US while reaping all the benefits.

I don't disagree that the US has a lot of problems, and I would love for this country to move WAY more toward socialist politics that actually HELP everyone. So go ahead and condemn the US, but the whole world is way better off technologically at the expense of our fairly extreme capitalistic system. If nothing was digital and everything was physical, and we had extreme advances only physically because of a country ruled more by corporations than people, somehow I think you would have a different attitude. I think people would be lining up to get into the country, even though there would be a lot of downsides. But because this is all digital, you can just take it all and then laugh at how backwards things are.

I don't know, just take a moment to look at what you use on a day-to-day basis and think if you used nothing but what was produced in your country how your life would be different. I'm not sitting here saying the US has done everything- so please don't take it like that. But since we are talking about media and technology, and you even saying you can't legally subscribe to HBO etc.. well, HBO is a US company and everything produced here. Why should you be able to access it? Do you sit there and say "this is so unfair US didn't setup a Disney World here!". Yet, because it's digital you are automatically entitled to it apparently.

I know I went a bit extreme, and I'm playing more devils advocate here. I just think the US is looked at very unfairly these days because you can use everything we do but you get the benefits of a more socialist culture.

guerrilla• 7 years ago

So, Netflix shows are good because of the corporatocracy..

And it's not okay to like Netflix shows if you wish the US wasn't a corporatocracy...

Swiss Copyright Law: Downloading Stays Legal, No Site Blocking

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