You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Check out our activisty blackout page that we're linking to. Please use this one if you want to share. (Adding share buttons now.)
So is DiF doing the Dark Wednesday thing?
By the way, did we ever actually mention SOPA in that Intermission? I know that was sorta the intention, I just don't recall us talking about it 
If not, I will just reiterate that piracy is a serious issue, ummkay? But SOPA is not the answer, it's a bad piece of legislation that would do far more harm than good. Umm, the end.
We're not going dark, just posting a page for people to share and help get the word out for a few days.
We did neglect to mention it.
The problem in a nutshell, if it's still unclear to anyone:
Under the current incarnation of SOPA, posting this gif
is an act of piracy, and a valid reason to shut the entire site down permanently, or rather to permanently block access from U.S. ISPs. Posting it just once. That's about as not-cool as it gets.
Pft. We would have been FINE if you had stayed offline like you said you were gonna do. God, Michael.
I just wanna say, I wish I had a Trey and a Dorkman at my disposal anytime I had a question about anything.
One of my friends posted this on FB, and I re-posted it.
know what i think about this SOPA PIPA bull? █████ ██ █ ████ you███ █████ will like█████ ████ ████ what you are told ████ ███ █ ██████ to. █████ ███████ ███ like █████ now████!!!
I'll point out here that fair use has barely been litigated in the United States, probably because copyright holders are warned by their lawyers that it would likely harm their long-term interests. As long as fair use is murky, they are free to scare people with spurious cease-and-desist letters. But letting a court actually make a judgment would probably result in a much broader definition than is currently accepted. After all, it's been accepted forever that writers are free to quote other authors at length. If a court applied the same rule to music, movie soundtracks would suddenly be full of unpaid-for bits of pop songs, and rap music would suddenly quote (even more) liberally from the classics, and the Verve would suddenly get back the profits from "Bittersweet Symphony"....
Precedent for this sort of unintended consequence can be found in California v. Freeman, the 1980s case where the court said that pornography couldn't be prosecuted as prostitution. Suddenly, much of the porn industry packed up and moved the Cali, where the law had neatly clarified things.
Last edited by Zarban (2012-01-19 23:28:36)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369
There goes Megaupload!
Sweeeet. 
As the article says - this shows that SOPA isn't necessary for US authorities to go after foreign pirate sites; they can do that already.
They just have to do all that, y'know... gathering of evidence, and working with local authorities, and stuff. Which I think is a pretty good requirement.
OK, my thoughts.
SOPA will not make this gif:
a site-shuttering offense because the main purpose of the site isn't to distribute animated gifs from movies. It's a film commentary site that has practically no relevant infringement going on, aside from a couple of gifs. I guess you could make an argument that because the gifs are actually built into the board that there's some infringement going on, but the bill requires that the site's main reason for existing be to illegally distribute, enable the distribution of, etc, copyrighted material. A couple gag gifs are safe.
Anyway, the point is, it's not THAT that's the problem. It's the lack of due process. If you guys were, say, distributing the commentary tracks ripped from the movies themselves, then they could shut you down because that would be a primary use of the site. "But you can already do that with current legislation, so what's different?" you ask. Well, the difference is that with SOPA they don't have to send you a cease & desist letter telling you to shape up or they'll sue you. With this they can file some documents and get a court order to have your site's domain revoked, get you delisted from google, etc. Now you have to prove you're not violating copyright before you can get your site put back online, and even if you could prove it, it would damage you immensely in terms of lost revenue, lost traffic, lower ranking on google and who knows how well screwing with DNS / nameservers will go. You are now guilty until proven innocent based entirely on one-sided evidence provided by whoever's making the complaint.
Or if you have a blog on some site where people can make their own blog like tumblr or blogger and one of those blogs is targeted. The bill could get all of blogger, including your blog, shut down rather than that specific blog because it's all hosted under one domain.
The bill does define the sort of site that can be shut down with the bill. It's not that vague. There are vagueness problems in terms of what constitutes a website vs a user's created page or section of that website. Something like Flickr could be in trouble if there are tons of users with their own separate pages or blogs all being listed under one larger domain. That's not really defined in the bill and it's an issue because one persons entire blog or page on a site may be devoted entirely to distributing copyrighted content and thus may fall under the bill's definition of what exactly an 'infringing website' is. But this site and forum are safe, as are most sites and forums, because the objective of this site isn't to illegally distribute copyrighted content.
That said, SOPA does suck, it just sucks mainly due to the lack of any sort of due process and the fact that the bill seems to have been written under the idea that websites were still operated the same way they were back in the late 90's. There's not much in there in terms of user-uploaded content, and the lack of definition is what people are worried about.
But if you're flickr or youtube and you have systems set up where copyrighted content can be reported and you clearly state that you don't allow that sort of thing, and you don't market yourself as such, then I don't think the bill could be used to have your site shut down. It's the "I don't think..." part that's in need of fixing.
The lack of due process and the way it may screw up the technical functioning of the internet as a whole is the real issue I have with the bill.
Last edited by Squiggly_P (2012-01-20 05:28:12)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369
There goes Megaupload!
Nonsensical. All this will do is drive filesharing sites to regions where they cannot be touched, where they will then be run by genuine criminals.
Let's shut down dropbox too while we're at. And youtube. And ftp sites. And, oh wait, the internet's gone because the entire world wide web is built upon the principle of exchange of data - ergo a potential means of distributing copyrighted material.
And calculations of 'lost revenue due to online piracy' are bullshit and entirely speculative. It's simply not a case that someone who downloads a film would have otherwise paid to watch it. The real piracy is the bootlegging and selling of actual discs on market streets in Eastern regions, which thus see significantly diminished revenue because no-one is going to the cinema. But fuck all has been done about that since the early 90s.
The solution to all of this is simple. Don't allow your home video formats to be used with computers. If blurays couldn't be played on a computer at all, the ease of pirating them would be drastically reduced. But instead, the PC market appears to actively encourage copying by allowing people to read DVDs and CDs, copy their contents (even using official programs), and then burn them onto very cheap blank DVDs.. at no cost to the original's quality.
Remember in the days of VHS/Betamax when even if you could set up your system to copy (requiring two vhs players), it was a crappy quality version?
And what's more, have some goddamn security at your own offices and don't flood the awards folk with screeners AKA Copy Me.
To my mind, online piracy actually does fuck all to revenue streams, precisely because it's so relatively miniscule, it's just being targeted because it's easy for companies to connect falling revenue to it. Why bother to analyse why people aren't going to cinemas nearly as much as they were 50 years ago when you have an easy scapegoat? Especially when that scapegoat can be mislabelled as stealing.
+2
See, here's what I never understand about arguments like that. What is the definable difference between "stealing" and "piracy"? Merriam-Webster defines "stealing" as "to take the property of another wrongfully" or "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully". Isn't that exactly what piracy is?
Also, isn't blaming lackluster studio security for piracy a little like blaming someone for getting shot because they weren't wearing a bulletproof vest? Not a perfect metaphor, but still. The studios are getting robbed here. I'm blaming the robber.
Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2012-01-20 13:58:48)
Piracy may not have much of an effect on huge corporations like EA, Blizzard, Universal Studios or Warner Bros - at least not right now - but it has pretty drastic effects on smaller publishers and self-published guys. There's pretty well-documented statistics from a number of indie devs who have collected data on how people are playing their game.
2DBoy released a game called World of Goo a few years ago and had a sale that allowed you to pay anything you wanted. In one week they sold 58,000 copies of the game, and about 16,000 of those went for $0.01. Another 16,000 sold for less than $2.00. That in itself is a bit of a sad statistic, but at least those people paid for the game, right? A little while later they revealed that through collecting data on how many different ip's were connecting to their servers at any given time and how many copies they'd sold, they estimated that their game had about a 90% piracy rate. Meaning that for every legit, bought game on their servers, there were 9 that had been pirated. If those people had paid even just one penny to the devs, they would have made an extra $5,000, and that's just in the first week. If those people had paid one dollar each, the devs would have made half a million dollars. And I'm just basing that on the one week of sales. I'm assuming that the number of sales when they released that statistic would have increased quite a bit.
The guys who made super meat boy have estimated similarly high piracy rates for their game, though not quite that high. Thing is, neither of these devs really give a shit because they know adding DRM to their game would just be a waste of time, and that piracy can lead to sales via popularity.
But the idea that piracy is some small statistic is quite wrong. There have been larger games with similar piracy rates. Quake 3 Arena was majorly pirated as well, at about two pirated copies to every legit copy on most servers. The reason they even started looking at the statistics for that one was because they noticed that the number of people who were playing the game at one time was higher than the number of copies of the game they had actually sold. That game sold in the millions, and there were at least twice as many millions of pirated copies.
Piracy has obvious effect on music. Back in 2000 or 2001 a couple of stores released some statistics that showed something like 60% drop in singles sales and 20% or so in album sales. Some of this might have been made up for in online sales via Amazon or sites like that, but I don't think mp3 sales had become a thing at that point, so it would have just been CD sales I think. I think Napster is the most likely cause of that sort of drop, tho. I feel pretty confident in assuming that there are kids out there now who have never paid a flat dime for a song in their lives.
And while movie studios are making a lot of money right now, ticket sales are dropping. I would not be surprised to learn that overall DVD sales have dropped by a significant number as well. 10-20% from five or ten years ago would not surprise me at all. I'm just taking a wild stab at that based on the spread of broadband over the last decade and the crazy growth in popularity of torrents. I would also not be surprised to learn that the piracy rate for DVD's is similar to that of games, though maybe not as high as it must be now for music.
The real problem is that the generation of kids out there right now are pretty much hard wired to torrent whatever the hell they want as a first option. The idea of actually buying software, movies, music or games is completely foreign to some of them. They're too young to get jobs, tho, so they don't have the sort of cash to drop on whatever they want. Right now the amount of money being lost isn't all that significant in most cases because that generation of kids hasn't reached the 'bread & butter' age where they have a bunch of disposable income to spend on going to shitty blockbusters and buying crappy pop music and generic shooter video games and all that other stuff that's marketed to the 16-25 crowd of people.
Wait ten years and compare sales statistics for 2012 and 2022.
The difference to theft is that you are not actually taking property, you're reproducing it. It's copyright infringement. And that doesn't sound catchy or damaging at all.
With regards to security, it's certainly a factor these days because of the open nature of exchanged data, especially between companies. It's pointless for studios to worry about people sneaking into cinemas with camcorders and try to police horrible camversions of theatrically released films all while the VFX effects, DVD authoring and PR people who work on the film post-production handle the material so insensitively, bringing it home to work on or sharing it with their friends and family. That's where those pristine early copies come from.
Isn't that akin, using your analogy, of giving someone a gun and blaming them when they shoot you?
Anyway, whoever heard of a book being pirated until they became digitilised? I've no idea why all these organisations aren't going after the manufacturers of the tools that enable piracy in the first place.
Anyway, whoever heard of a book being pirated until they became digitilised? I've no idea why all these organisations aren't going after the manufacturers of the tools that enable piracy in the first place.
Books were pirated when the printing press was invented. That's actually one of the reasons copyright laws were originally passed. One guy would publish a book and everyone else with a printing press would reproduce that book and sell a bucketload of them. You could spend a year writing a book, get it published and then have that book sell a billion copies and you'd never seen a dime of it because it was a dozen other publishers besides the one you made a deal with selling all the copies. Further, most publishers weren't going out and buying new manuscripts, they were just copying other publishers' stuff. The publishers that were going out and buying new manuscripts were getting fucked over hardcore because they had less money to print copies because they were spending that money on new content AND printing costs while their competitors were just copying their books and printing a lot more of them, thus selling more, thus making more money and able to print more and more and more.
Regardless of whether or not you think it's stealing, it's still illegal and illegal for a reason. Making up reasons why copyright is dumb, regardless of how logical those arguments might be, doesn't make it any less legal to violate copyright. We as a society have all agreed upon the idea that creators should be able to control their work and allowed them copyrights to their work. You could try to get that changed, but you'd have an impossibly difficult battle trying to convince most creators that they shouldn't have copyright.
In fact, if you were to just yank copyright out right now and let anyone copy and sell anything they wanted to, you'd probably see something more horrifying to you than evil copyright laws: You'd see corporations taking every indie film, book, play, song, etc they could get their hands on and marketing and selling those things and keeping every penny of it for themselves. They'd sell coffee table books full of photos and artwork they pulled off flickr, you'd see popular web series show up on DVDs in stores, you'd see companies rebranding every decent piece of software out there. None of the money would go to the people who made the stuff, and you know people would still be buying it. They'd drive every little guy out of business.
Corporations would have even more power than they do now, because the independent creators out there would no longer have any means of making a living by being creative. We'd all have to take regular jobs so we could pay the bills and maybe - if we could afford it - keep doing our creative stuff as a hobby. But would you release anything of worth that you made at that point? Knowing full well that as soon as you upload it anywhere or show it off that some corporation with a buttload of money would be able to just take it, rebrand it and sell it as their own, without giving you even credit, let alone money?
With regards to security, it's certainly a factor these days because of the open nature of exchanged data, especially between companies. It's pointless for studios to worry about people sneaking into cinemas with camcorders and try to police horrible camversions of theatrically released films all while the VFX effects, DVD authoring and PR people who work on the film post-production handle the material so insensitively, bringing it home to work on or sharing it with their friends and family. That's where those pristine early copies come from.
Isn't that akin, using your analogy, of giving someone a gun and blaming them when they shoot you?
Not really. The studios are releasing their material in the best way that they possibly can. There's arguments to be made that they really aren't, but for the sake of this conversation, we'll say that they are. When they allow people to have access to those early copies (copies, by the way, that would very rarely amount to the finished product), they are trusting them to be responsible enough to not break the law. I wouldn't give a gun to someone if I believed that they were going to shoot me.
The difference to theft is that you are not actually taking property, you're reproducing it. It's copyright infringement. And that doesn't sound catchy or damaging at all.
So, if I download a copy of Hugo from a torrent site, I'm not taking property? Remember, piracy really falls under two categories: Uploading and downloading. Uploaders are committing copyright infringement. Downloaders are committing theft. Either way, it's a crime.
This just in: http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/sopa-is- … ulls-bill/
Whaddaya know, democracy in action.
A quote from the article, by the sponsor of the bill itself:
The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.
“The Committee will continue to work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.
A statement which I have zero argument. It was specifically the way SOPA would have attempted to deal with that issue that I and a few million other folks disagreed with.
Owen Ward wrote:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369
There goes Megaupload!
Nonsensical. All this will do is drive filesharing sites to regions where they cannot be touched, where they will then be run by genuine criminals.
According to the indictment, Megaupload ARE genuine criminals. They weren't shut down because they happened to have some infringing content on their servers, they were shut down because:
They not only knew they had infringing content, they privately encouraged it
They claimed to remove infringing content when identified, but didn't
They used that content intentionally for personal gain
and more, all suggesting they were willfully, purposefully breaking laws for years now
So let's not be assuming Megaupload is a bunch of sweet kids who happened to have some movies on their server. The Justice Dept. has presented evidence that they were an intentionally law-breaking enterprise, and made millions at it. This case didn't come out of nowhere yesterday, it's been on ongoing investigation. And you don't get a search warrant until a judge reviews your evidence and is convinced you have a case.
And if the evidence ends up not supporting the charges, well, that's now for a court to decide. That's how we do things in the Western world.
Let's shut down dropbox too while we're at. And youtube. And ftp sites.
All of which has been attempted, sometimes with success. As a result, most every site that wants to operate as a legitimate business has now implemented some kind of takedown policy, so copyright holders have a process to identify and request removal of infringing content.
As someone who has requested removal of MY content from YouTube, MySpace, and at least one other site (Vimeo I think it was) I can tell you that in every case the removal was instantaneous. Legitimate sites have learned to take copyright infringement issues very seriously. (And if it turns out any of them simply hid the content and lied about removing it, then I hope the Justice Dept. goes after them, too.)
It's not a perfect system, no, but I still prefer it to the potential SOPA model, where theoretically my identification of infringing content could be used as grounds for the Justice Dept. to shut down YouTube, and even sites that linked to YouTube. The potential for abuse of that kind of power is far too great to allow into law.
Instead, the Justice Dept. had to do it the old-fashioned way - gather evidence, present it to a Grand Jury, convince them there was sufficient evidence for indictment, then contact law enforcement in another country and convince THEM a crime had been commited, before they could finally take action. And I'm fine with that.
And, oh wait, the internet's gone because the entire world wide web is built upon the principle of exchange of data - ergo a potential means of distributing copyrighted material.
And that's why I support the Megaupload action, but not SOPA. Civilization's a tricky thing. We've only been attempting it for a few thousand years now, it's still a work in progress. The only 100% safe society would have no freedom. A 100% free society would offer no safety. Instead, we try to split the difference, allowing freedoms even though we know they can be abused, and choosing instead to prosecute the folks that do the abusing. (Sometimes the pendulum swings too far in either direction, but as I say, it's a work in progress.)
The internet, cars, guns, steak knives, bowling balls, blank DVD's, printing presses, and cups of hot water can all be used to commit crimes. But all of those things can be used for perfectly legitimate, non-criminal activities as well. So, many things we let go unregulated, and others we've chosen to allow within certain guidelines. If you're too young or too old to do it safely, you can't legally operate a car. If you're a convicted criminal, you can't legally own a gun. But if you legally own a car or a gun or a steak knife, and then use it to do an illegal thing, society takes action.
So yeah, the downside is some folks will still get hurt or killed by cars and guns and steak knives. And sometimes content will get pirated. But banning cars, or crippling the internet, or making everyone eat steak with a spoon, isn't the answer either.
And what's more, have some goddamn security at your own offices and don't flood the awards folk with screeners AKA Copy Me.
As someone who got a stack of awards screeners last month, I can assure you that they are MORE copy-protected than consumer versions.
Every disc I received has a special menu up front which states the following:
The disc is the property of the studio, and they can assert their right to reclaim it at any time. It can't be lent or sold, and many of them even demand the disc either be destroyed or returned to the studio by a specified date. They also state that the disc is individually watermarked so that any pirated copy can be traced back to the exact person it was issued to.
You then have to press the menu button marked ACCEPT before the movie will play. And when it does, the movie has "Property of _____, not for public use" etc. burned across the screen.
The only screener I got that wasn't like that was Deathly Hallows 2... because it's already been released to video. So they just sent me a regular copy, same as you'd get from the store, with none of the above disclaimers.
The reason for this is obvious, since Hallows 2 is already out, it's already pirated. This is simply a given, it's well known that absolutely everything that gets released to video will be available in pirated form, usually a couple days before the street date. (Invariably somebody at some retail store somewhere will snatch a copy and run home with it as soon as the new inventory arrives, or somebody's advance Amazon order arrived before the street date, etc.)
But the value of a screener of a movie that isn't on video yet - I got a few that weren't even in theaters yet - would be immense. So screeners have far more restrictions than consumer versions.
It's really not because studios think industry professionals would pirate their screeners, it's because at least some of those professionals have an idiot teenager at home who wouldn't be able to resist the chance to share Transformers 3 with their buddies before it's even out.
As someone who works in the DVD manufacturing / distributing industry, I can guarantee that the weak link in the chain is places like where I work. We often start manufacturing the discs a couple months before they get released, or some other plant will make the discs and ship them to us. There are a lot of holes in the process and a lot of people touching those discs.
It's funny, really. There were a couple of security guards at my plant that got arrested because they were taking advantage of their position and getting movies out themselves. They weren't just getting out a copy so they could rip it, tho, these guys were stealing whole cases of movies to sell apparently. That was three or four years ago, tho, and you better believe that heads rolled and security at that place became unbelievable for some time after that.
I'm surprised they don't require a retinal scan to use the bathroom at this point.
Tangentially relevant, damn Berne Convention.
The Berne Convention is a bizarre and terrible rule. First, the vast majority of content that has significant value is created by teams, so basing the length of copyright on the lifespan of the "author" is stupid. Second, doing so creates a highly arbitrary length of time. The author might create the work at 19 and live to be 99 (copyright for 150 years) or he or she might die the next day (copyright for 70 years).
Ask yourself: would any publisher/producer decide NOT to buy the rights to a work because its author just died and therefore the copyright won't last more than 70 years? No. That would never be a consideration, because the publisher/producer will see the vast majority of profit from the work in less than 30 years. So why make copyright last so long?
Right now, 70 years goes back to January 1942. If that were the rule, Casablanca would be about to follow Citizen Kane and Dumbo into the public domain, along with "String of Pearls" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". Couldn't we live with that? The originator could still produce new works based on it, like deluxe editions and restored cuts, which would be derivative works and have their own copyright protection. Anyone who wanted to put out a version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would have to get ahold of an original 1930s 35mm film print and do the transfer themselves—not just rip the latest Blu-ray transfer.
The rule should be first publication plus 70 years or a flat 50 years for material that is never published. That gives authors and their corporate overlords plenty of time to reap the financial rewards from a work and any follow-ups/sequels. But it stops Disney from keeping authors alive by arcane magic and alien technology in holding tanks in the basement of Disneyland, WHICH YOU KNOW THEY DO.
When is the last time you saw Ub Iwerks?
I'd be a dick and take copyright lapse back to what it was before they extended it the first time, which was something like 20 or 25 years plus one extension (that you had to enable if you were the creator), making copyright last a total of about 50 years if you took the extension, but only 25 if you didn't. This would mean that stuff from as late as the 80's would be entering the public domain right now if there were no extensions in place, and stuff from the 50's if there were an extension on those works.
That seems much more fair to me for both the creator and the culture that was shaped by those works.
Or maybe we could come up with some other way of looking at copyright altogether. Maybe there should only be the sort of modern copyright we have now for 25 years, and after that the rights to a work lapse into a lesser form of copyright that's more akin to a CC non-commercial license that would allow people to freely use that material so long as they weren't making money off it and attributing it to it's original author, etc. Let's say that lasts for another 25 years. Then it becomes public domain material.
Good arguments all. It's a fascinating discussion, and the stuff about the Berne Convention is really interesting. I once wanted to go into copyright law.
Trey - I meant genuine criminals as in organised crime. You can bet if it's profitable servers will be set up in Eastern Europe countries where they'll be mafia running the show.
DoctorSubmarine - I'm afraid I disagree, downloading is not theft. I don't believe the law considers it such either. It's a crime yes, because you are infringing on the owner's right of reproduction (downloading is the creation of a copy). That's distinct from the taking of property and is such not theft.
Powered by PunBB, supported by Informer Technologies, Inc.
Currently installed 9 official extensions. Copyright © 2003–2009 PunBB.
