#piracy

At its core, What.CD was much more than a torrent tracker—it was a community of dedicated music fans volunteering their time, effort, and knowledge to create a labor of love. While the internet has opened up new doors for musicians, the increasing corporatization and algorithmic takeover of online spaces has done irreparable damage to organic music discovery and independent communities. Rather than bringing about the financial stability that was supposedly impeded by piracy, the recording industry has offered meager artist payouts and a product with a sterilized user interface. Nearly ten years since their unexpected goodbye, the magical feeling of logging in to What.CD has yet to be replicated by any streaming service. Though my days of stealing music are well in the past, it’s clear that musicians are still being stolen from.

It begs the question why every author, filmmaker, and musician isn’t up in arms about the New York Public Library’s rampant sharing, while there’s a ton of opposition to the sharing habits of BitTorrent peers who use The Pirate Bay. After all, The Pirate Bay’s community shares significantly less than the New York Public Library: just 1 million items in 2008 (and the collection certainly hasn’t grown 5000% since then). The reason that The Pirate Bay is offensive, and the New York Public Library is not, is because of its efficiency.

It begs the question why every author, filmmaker, and musician isn’t up in arms about the New York Public Library’s rampant sharing, while there’s a ton of opposition to the sharing habits of BitTorrent peers who use The Pirate Bay. After all, The Pirate Bay’s community shares significantly less than the New York Public Library: just 1 million items in 2008 (and the collection certainly hasn’t grown 5000% since then). The reason that The Pirate Bay is offensive, and the New York Public Library is not, is because of its efficiency.

So, because DRM never goes wrong, let's just vandalize the content created by the purchasers of our software. Oh wait, we meant to do that to the pirates. Oh well.

So, because DRM never goes wrong, let's just vandalize the content created by the purchasers of our software. Oh wait, we meant to do that to the pirates. Oh well.

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

"Things are going so "badly" that a major new report commissioned by copyright holders says that these "consistently positive trends solidify the status of the copyright industries as a key engine of growth for the US economy as a whole.""

Damn - I had this idea for use on my own work, if I ever got around to self-publishing. "Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. "

"A week and a half ago, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton made some news for saying that nothing good had come from the internet, period. Plenty of online sites (including ours) took him to task for that, wondering how one gets to be the CEO of a major content company without understanding the internet. Today, Lynton hit back at critics -- not by saying he was quoted out of context or misunderstood, but by standing behind the statement and adding some gems to it as well. Let's take a look..."

"Given the difficulty of breaking into print in the traditional way, the Internet looks to many aspiring authors like a powerful new way to distribute content and find an audience; it has promise, not peril."

"Book piracy on the internet will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales"

"The only real argument is against piracy, but I know many people who mod their systems for legitimate purposes."

"Despite the hate from the ESA and console manufacturers, many gamers are big fans of mod chips, but not because of the piracy angle"

"Key revocation doesn't work. Suing the Internet doesn't work. DRM doesn't work ... Pirates who download movies don't ever see DRM. Honest customers who buy media are the only people who ever get restricted by it "

"It starts with good intentions. 'I'm going to get all of these movies while I can.'"

"P2P clearly gives you more bang for your buck"

"An employee of Cognitive Technologies computer company has beaten a man who was selling the company's software illegally."

"Piracy is big fat guys manufacturing fake CDs in Mexico and selling them at swap meets."

"The lesson is to find a good-enough approach to content protection that is easy, convenient and non-annoying to most people, and then accept that there will be some leakage."