Piracy is a service problem.

Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.

The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.

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aidenn0 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is complicated. Ultimately a 100-year-long government sanctioned monopoly on certain intangible things is unsustainable and piracy has long been the pressure-relief valve on it.

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IlikeKitties 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy.

edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.

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shakna 2 days ago | parent [-]

And yet, in Germany like elsewhere, piracy spiked during COVID's lockdowns. Some places say greater than 180%. Showing that their enforcement alone, was not an effective tool.

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IlikeKitties 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that was more than a decade after the fines were noticeably capped and fees limited to < 1k€. I remember during my school years when there were lawyers giving talks to us and classmates getting fines in the 10s of thousands of euros.

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wlesieutre 2 days ago | parent [-]

The perfect solution to all crimes, totally out of scale punishments for every infraction! If we just charge people 10,000 euros per km/h over the speed limit, we could do away with speeding! Stop crime forever by bankrupting everyone who does anything bad!

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IlikeKitties 2 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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dotnet00 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why are you, in one post, talking about how you will never stop pirating, while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236861

> IlikeKitties 2 hours ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]

Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.

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IlikeKitties 2 days ago | parent [-]

> while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action? I'm not calling for that, you are misreading my post. Because irony hardly translates to the internet let me spell it out for you:

* Piracy is an option because the punishment for it is low and enforcement not very effective. Even in Germany where law firms can punish you for it without government involvement (i shit you not private companies send you fines you HAVE to pay) using a VPN is enough to pirate as much as you want

* Piracy could be curbed by massively out of scale punishments and total constant scanning and enforcement of the internet. I've seen the scared people here in Germany talking about it to this day. Fear causes compliance. To argue otherwise would be intellectually dishonest.

* I'm making fun of the fact that copyright owners would still call for stronger punishment until executions are on the table North Korean style ("Only then will copyright holders be safe again.")

My personal opinion is that piracy is the logical result of the fact that once a digital work has been created the cost to copy it is practically zero. Laws that try to deny that reality are by their nature unjust and should be abolished. To truly enforce them, even the death penalty isn't enough (see NK).

	▲	dotnet00 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Ah I see! Yeah, sorry about that, I completely missed the irony

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2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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