> Downloading copyrighted material may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk.
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."
That question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
So 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.
While there is a lot of piracy, it's relatively small compared to the overall entertainment market. It's still been generally limited to the tech savvy crowd. Setting up bittorrent or usenet is just too hard for the average person. They could learn it, but they are unwilling to even try to.
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.
The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.
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.
>we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
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 :)
As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):
"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.)
>And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
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.
Capital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.
Yes but you could also argue that there are many many many more artists making money in the music industry now, and that consumers have much more choice.
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.
That's like if the parent post said, "The invention of the web allowed many more people to communicate, and was an economic boon" and you replied, "Microsoft would disagree."
Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.
If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.
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.
What did professional music look like before radio? Before audio recording? I'm not convinced that business models that emerged due to technological change should be protected from future technology.
In Netherland, we pay a "home copy" fee on harddisks and smartphones, which makes it entirely legal and ethical to download movies.
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.
We have the same 'private copy' tax in France. It is a tax on ALL storages (proportional to the size) to take a fee in the case you would use the storage for copyrighted stuff.
While it does not make download legal, in my opinion it makes it ethical. I paid a tax on it, I might as well use it.
That's not the only downside. The other is there's a tax on storage hardware even if you never do anything with copyrighted anything. And all the tax ends up going to wealthy corporations anyway and smaller artists will never see anything.
They seem to be leaving the ethical considerations to the users, which I think is perfectly reasonable. Popcorn Time can't decide for you whether it's okay to stream a movie that you own the VHS for. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore. Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie published by a company that distorts copyright law for its own financial gain.
>>Or whether it's okay for you to stream a movie you can't find on the market anymore.
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.
They only created a tool. Tools can be used for many purposes. I can smash someone in the skull with a hammer or I can use it for construction. Similarly, should the Tor, PGP, Bitcoin, etc authors consider that their tools could be used for malice and stop because of it? Tools are tools, they are simply implementations of what is possible with technology. Tools are inherently grey, not some simple black and white. It's about what you do with them.
It doesn't matter how legal your tools are if what you're doing is illegal. And this particular tool is pre-populated with copyrighted content. They don't show it in the screen captures (why? </sarcasm>), but all the films in the popular tab are 2013-2014 major U.S. theatrical releases.
Very true, I hope the devs published this somewhat anonymously at least. It's essentially just YIFY torrents taped to the peerflix script with some node-webkit glue.
I, for one, do not believe in intellectual property. Information not being rare commodity, it makes no sense to artificially limit it's supply by issuing state enforced monopolies. That actually infringes on actual property such as a hard disk, by limiting the number of combinations of bits that you're allowed to store on it.
Doesn't it pretend? The screenshoot shows very old movies. My initial impression from the web site was that this application provided a nice interface to some repository of freely redistributable movies.
And youtube has a sophisticated detection system setup that scans uploads for copyrighted content automatically. I'm thinking with the press this app is getting they are going to be forced to do something similar and block illegal content, or take it offline soon.
There is a lot of free software out there that its primary goal is to facilitate copyright infringement, I guess it is just up to the court or whomever to decide if that is the case, and worth pursuing taking it down. (Not saying that the effort could be put in for this case, but just a possibility)...
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.
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."