Tubes vs. Torrents: The Ethics of Piracy

http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-of-piracy

by rbanffy • 11 years ago

145 54 11 years ago

emehrkay• 11 years ago

This was an interesting read. It is pretty crazy, and easy to parallel to something like Youtube, how the Manwin empire is built on linking to work that someone else produced and using the ad money to buy the creators of that work out. I wonder if Manwin makes an effort to keep content that Manwin-owned properties put behind a paywall off of the tube sites.

towelguy2• 11 years ago

Well they have a monopoly on tube sites, I don't think they'd care enough to keep their content outside the few others.

BTW, CreativeCommons BY-NC-SA porn videos is a great move.

runn1ng• 11 years ago

WiggleYourIndex, you are hellbanned, just fyi

dsjoerg• 11 years ago

I wish I could write like that.

prawn2• 11 years ago

I checked the index to see what topics she typically covers and found a story which I thought was well-written (NSFW for prudish workplaces; no inappropriate images though) -

http://graphicdescriptions.com/27-mitcz

timc3• 11 years ago

Yes, it’s really well written

diminoten• 11 years ago

Pulling a Louie, I see.

Good. More people should.

If this works out for Stoya like it did for Louie, you should see work from new/upcoming artists coming from her studio soon after the business method is validated.

Porn and comedy. Really the same, when you get down to it.

k__• 11 years ago

In Germany you can get sued if you use Torrents, but you can't if you use a streaming service, because your're not the distributor.

So many people stopped torrenting at all and started streaming all their video needs.

It's also faster for smaller things, like those clips mentioned by her.

For this particular type of content it's simply the superior platform :\

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

Legal to download, but illegal to upload?

There's a BitThief for that - http://bitthief.ethz.ch/

weinzierl3• 11 years ago

That isn't wrong, but a bit oversimplified. The difference between streaming and Torrents is that it's easy to get hold of the IP addresses of Torrent users but difficult for streamers[1].

The situation is special in Germany because:

1. It is possible go get the name and postal addresses if you have the IP address. The lawyer just asserts infringement and the prosecutor will hand it over.

2. Legal fees for cease and desist letters are based on the amount in controversy and to be paid by the addressee.

No lawsuit will be filed, just a cease and desist letter sent with a fictitious amount. People will pay out of fear, it's border line extortion.

As far as I can tell, Torrents are dead in Germany.

[1] Assuming the copyright holders don't cooperate with the streaming services.

happyscrappy• 11 years ago

It is possible go get the name and postal addresses if you have the IP address

Do you have any more info on this, it sounds strange.

Kenji• 11 years ago

You are mistaken. In many countries an explicit, legal line is drawn between uploading and downloading copyrighted material, and some allow downloading because otherwise clicking on a link might already incriminate you. What k___ is saying is that it's the illegal upload part that moves people away from torrent.

towelguy2• 11 years ago

Long term crew members have found themselves replaced by inexperienced people willing to do their jobs for lower pay. The quality of videos made under these conditions tends to suffer.

Do people care that much about video quality in porn? Hopefully the people gone can use their experience and go to higher payed industries.

coldpie2• 11 years ago

Well, I mean, the video depictions are the whole point. Videography is a huge part of porn, and when you've seen enough (cough) you can definitely tell the difference between when the person behind the camera knows what they're doing and when they don't.

emodendroket5• 11 years ago

Like what? I mean, the problem that people with expertise are being replaced by people without it but who will work for less is not a phenomenon unique to this industry, in the first place (look at the rise of services like MyGengo or Mechanical Turk or TaskRabbit or or or), and, besides that, if a whole industry's worth of filming people are suddenly unemployed how can the other industries (which are presumably already well-staffed) really absorb them all?

prawn2• 11 years ago

"people with expertise are being replaced by people without it"

Worth noting that the replacements presumably lack expertise initially but inevitably improve along the way. Being paid to learn isn't all bad and is better than occurs for many trades.

Padding2• 11 years ago

There’s probably a lot more than what is obvious here.

Compare a modern clip to something that was made in the 70/80s. I guess it does take some skill to not end up with 2 bodies just lying atop each other and properly cutting away the boring/disgusting stuff while still maintaining some "flow".

And there’s lots and lots of competition .. so differentiating on quality might still be worthwhile, despite it possibly not being the most important factor.

tomjen3• 11 years ago

I care, how much depends on the price and the cost, but video is the entire point of 99% of porn (audio porn is supposed to be hot and literotica has a lot of porn, including things even the Japanese haven't figured out).

sago• 11 years ago

I care about production too, and acting quality, and setting. All things I feel a bit out of touch for caring about.

Audio porn is hot, and often quite a lot more intimate than video porn (if you're not a 100% visual person). And gonewildaudio (for audio) and literotica (for stories) are both communities where creators share their work for free, and explore settings and characters off the ... ahem... beaten track.

We're limbically wired for vision, but if you can get past your inner homo-erectus, then there's a lot of goodness in that 1%.

rythmshifter• 11 years ago

tl;dr

I worked for a company that got screwed by shrewd business tactics. don't give money to that company.

Goronmon3• 11 years ago

Not only is this not really a summary of the article, the little that is there, is wrong.

Padding2• 11 years ago

I agree with the sentiment. Charging for pirated content is among the worst things someone can do. It’s also why I was at least a little bit glad when the megaupload/rapidshare sites were taken down. There may be an argument to be made about traffic costs and the like, but that doesn’t legitimize anything.

Nevertheless, the real issue here is that those services exist because there is demand for them and the "legitimate suppliers" don’t seem to feel a need to attend it. As Valve’s founder put it "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

Is there any service out there with Netflix-level breadth of the titles available? Is there any service out there that let‘s you watch without having your name associated to "adult videos" in various databases? Is there anywhere people can turn to when still underage? Is there anywhere people can go to for getting the latest "fappening" leaks?

Hence piracy.

Yes, some of those reasons may be questionable or outright wrong, but given that the situation is what it is, why not try to at least make the best out of it and settle for some youtube-like service/agreement where the content creators will get at least some share of he profits and at least some control over the contents can be retained?

The argument about torrents vs "tubes" however seems pretty irrelevant. If you want HQ videos, don’t mind the wait and have plenty of storage available then torrents are likely the better choice. If you need something right now, don’t have much bandwith or storage and don’t care much for quality, a steaming service might work well enough for you. That there exist some unscrupulous streaming service providers is no different from torrents containing malware or torrent-indexing/tracking-sites/communities engaging in similar behavior as streaming services.

smcl2• 11 years ago

Just a heads-up, this appears to be _related_ to NSFW content. I say "appears to be" because I got a nasty "you're trying to access some sketchy domain and your admin has been notified" warning when accessing this through my work computer. Nothing in the title or URL seems to suggest this so I figured I'd share share in case anyone else may have a similar setup.

lucb1e3• 11 years ago

And that's why I browse through Tor. Accessing Pastebin or Slideshare gets me a similar page.

fooqux2• 11 years ago

So your company blocks "non-work" sites, but somehow allows Tor?

I'm reasonably certain that, even if I installed Tor at home to get around the site blocking, that the traffic would never make it through the proxy. Also likely is a call from security about wtf I'm doing.

ersii• 11 years ago

The domain is owned by Stoya Incorporated, which is the adult actress, writer and model Stoya's [1] company.

There is no explicit content at all in this article. It's all text and hyperlinks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoya

smcl2• 11 years ago

Ahh I see, so it's just our filter being a bit overzealous. Hope whoever looks at my "infraction" inspects the actual URL, and doesn't just do a simple "what is this domain for, oh a porn star" check :)

rbanffy• 11 years ago

I figured out someone could get in trouble for an overzealous proxy monitoring policy.

frenchman_in_ny• 11 years ago

I got the same with a "URL Category: Extreme, Pornography".

@dang - wasn't there a "possibly NSFW" tag on this earlier?

nsnick• 11 years ago

Why would you work for a company that censors your internet?

Strang• 11 years ago

I work for a great company and I'm happy with my job. They also happen to censor my internet (very mildly, I should add). In fact, there are plenty of sectors where all viable positions would include internet blacklisting. And finally, plenty of people can't be so picky about their jobs to make litmus tests out of relatively minor factors like this.

tymski• 11 years ago

Because regardless of privacy and rights, censoring porn at work is completely reasonable.

zcdziura• 11 years ago

Because at the end of the day, I need to earn money in order to live at a standard that I'm comfortable with.

fr0ggerrr• 11 years ago

"Appears"?? I don't appreciate having fleshlight ads displayed on something I read at school.

coldpie2• 11 years ago

Please install adblock plus.

Goronmon3• 11 years ago

Why? I have no problem with people trying to monetize they content they generate.

davidslv• 11 years ago

why couldn't you put a NSFW tag? is that asking too much? Thanks for the awkward office moment.

AnthonyMouse2• 11 years ago

That blog has a surreal intersection with the issues people talk about on HN.

Put aside the politics of pornography. She's a content creator trying to make a living, trying to have a reasoned discussion about how to make that happen.

But she can't get paid because we don't have easy, secure, anonymous payment systems, and her customers won't trust small time studios with credit card or personally identifying information because they don't want to get double charged by unscrupulous bastards or end up in a database.

So customers don't have a good way to pay her which means her work is inevitably going to get pirated more often than bought. At that point she wants the rational next best thing, which is to distribute her work for free to as many people as possible, because the only way to make money when only a small percentage of people pay is to grow your fan base so that it's a small percentage of many people. Which means that what she wants is a platform for community engagement -- something like BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay which is open to everyone and doesn't censor anything or divert your viewers to your direct competitors. But those platforms and their users are under attack by the aforementioned unscrupulous bastards and their extortionate "settlement letters" that push users to their own streaming sites.

So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers.

Which can only lead to the conclusion that this content creator would be better off if the likes of Bitcoin, BitTorrent and Tor were more widely used.

Yet people keep saying that stuff is only useful to criminals.

Goronmon3• 11 years ago

So she writes a very reasoned explanation of this, only to have her entirely-not-inappropriate reasoned discussion blocked by overzealous corporate proxy servers.

To be fair, I did see an ad for a Fleshlight product when I visited the page.

AnthonyMouse2• 11 years ago

The ad and the nature of the site is obviously the reason the page is blocked. But the page is still blocked.

If you mean to argue that this isn't a false positive, I disagree. It's just an extraordinarily hard false positive to avoid. The post and the ad shown contain no pornography but they're about pornography and other content from the same source might. None of the filters are that granular.

And that's the problem. Nobody's boss has any justifiable reason to allow their employees to read HN but not the post in question, but the burden of false positives doesn't fall predominantly on the company with the filter or even its employees. It's a negative externality that harms the author of the blocked content even though she has no ability to fix the filter.

So filters with false positives are a bug and anti-filtering proxies like Tor are the patch. Which is why everyone benefits when they're more widely deployed.

Tubes vs. Torrents: The Ethics of Piracy

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