Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly(getpopcornti.me) |
Popcorn Time – Watch torrent movies instantly(getpopcornti.me) |
That would be the MPAA actively encouraging infringement in order to then attack the infringers.
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 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 bother.
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".
This is AMAZING news!!!
I don't think the app really is useful when you weighs the risks.
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!
That's it in a nutshell!
I mean, both Apple and Microsoft are filthy rich, so what's a few thousand?
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.
Edit: HN doesn't seem to know what to do with double stars.
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.
Plus, no more external hard drives full of ~1GB movie files.
I find the idea very interesting, conceptually and technically.
However, there has never been a verdict on this.
English speaker, but I have hearing issues.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Even on legal side you are not required to compensate anyone as it's so old that it's in public domain.
Well, Mozart is dead, for one thing...
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…
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ICSVLPA/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/12-years-a-slave/id7403669...
And many others: http://www.foxdigitalhd.com/12-years-a-slave
Sony could not have made it any easier to get this film into your living room.
(Regardless, I don't think media companies have an obligation to make their content available to anyone, anywhere.)
iTunes: I don't see renting option.
Fox Digital: "United States Brazil Mexico Canada Italia Australia Deutschland Belgium Holland United Kingdom España France"
ARRRR!
iTunes has won! I guess I will be watching it this weekend :)
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.
Most copyright disclaimers allow that already ("without the expressed written consent of the copyright owner" etc).
Has anyone ever implemented this?
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.
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.
Paying these animals only encourages their deviant behavior. If you value a free and open Internet, you will starve Hollywood until it dies.
Hollywood only continues to exist because people like you keep feeding them. Don't feed the animals.
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.
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 sends usage data to Google Analytics. I can see how this can translate into you getting caught. Be careful.
Even if you don't have a 'trackingId' set it still sends GET requests to http://google.com/
It's free software https://github.com/steeve/xbmctorrent and uses libtorrent-rasterbar through https://github.com/steeve/libtorrent-go
Disclosure: I'm the author.
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.
That said, I think the cable companies would just jack the rates on internet service to compensate for their dwindling cable usage.
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."
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.
I hope they add TV shows with a nice interface for browsing seasons.
Maybe it's preferable to keep it as is today: piracy as an option for some and as a force against too much control from the content industry.
While the frontend is all Backbone, the real magic happens in its backend dependencies like peerflix (https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix) and video.js (https://github.com/videojs/video.js/).
Edit: And, of course, the remarkable (undocumented?) API provided by subapi.com. Check out http://subapi.com/popular.json !
Double Edit: The API appears to be developed by the Popcorn Time people, as per https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app/issues/294
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.
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?
(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.)
you -> [encrypted data] proxy peer -> destination peer
In this case, unless all the proxy and the destination peers are controlled by policing actors they can't know who's downloading what.
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.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/popcorn-time-is-like-netfl...
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.
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?
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.comThe 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.
curl http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | sudo tee -a /etc/hostsSo 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.
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.
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 :)
You would need an alternate universe with no torrenting to server as a control for your statement.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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)
> 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.
So.. yeah.
I have seldom felt so stupid (+) as I did the next time I looked at the empty iTunes store... :-)
(+) Cough, without alcohol being involved.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
Naturally this will also block you using google.
Its more of drastic stop tracking me measurement.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crowd funding works in certain contexts, but it's no magic bullet.
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.
People support artists in many ways. One of those ways is paying to enjoy the things they produce.
I block it with Ghostery.
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.
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.
I know the pi was created to be an educational tool, not a media device, but therein lies the problem.
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.
"Les flux financiers de la Rémunération pour Copie Privée": http://bit.ly/1fn0PqX
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.
Which is why copyright needs to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If every movie is stolen or given away for free, this reduces the incentive to create more big pictures that would keep giving these people jobs.
Eventually this could possibly lead to fewer people getting paid much needed money due to fewer productions happening.
I'm sure it's fine from a functional perspective.
I will translate it for you: "24€ for the 3 of us at the cinema... empty place. And downloading is the guilty"
You are creating situations for the sake of this argument that simply don't exist.
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]).
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.
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.
A counterpoint to this is Primer ($7,000 budget, 70% RT, 7.0 IMDb): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
(You can still watch old movies of course, so if you restrict your downloading to old movies, and not fairly recent releases, your argument works.)
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.
U.S. IP law is so outdated and in need of major reforms.
We may still have 12 years a slave but maybe not at the same level of quality.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/most-funded
[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-h...
[3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spikelee/the-newest-hot...
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.
Veronica Mars (2014) Ratings: 8.0/10 from 312 users
...
User Reviews: Review this title »
ie, no reviews. How is this "favorable"? Sounds like insiders gaming the score for the moment.
Once the medium platues (or long enough after to build up a supply), then this would work.
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.
Can I get into any show I want?
Is there social backlash?
Are there security concerns?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?