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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Media piracy is in the tradition of oyster piracy (stealing from landlords trying to control the oyster market) and the golden age (robbing the Spanish silver train that was exploiting the nations of the new world) in that it’s crime against unreasonable state regimes.

    This is not to say underground media sharing has always had the moral high-ground, and it’s not even to say that fair copyright laws are unreasonable, but since the mid 20th century (since Disney, essentially) intellectual property law has not served the public in a community effort to build a robust public domain of ideas and content, rather has been used to do the opposite, to favor established businesses over new ones with complete disregard for the public.

    But then there’s the technological matter, where DRM is used to obstruct of sharing (reasonable or otherwise, legal or otherwise). Here in the states it’s legal to use DRM to obstruct legal backups and sharing, but it’s not legal to bypass DRM to facilitate legal backups and sharing. It shows us that our regulatory agencies are captured, that our government serves rich companies and plutocrats rather than the public. The law runs contrary to the social contract.

    We are in an age in which our language (English) only has words for wrongdoing that acknowledges two authorities: Sin (wrongness against the Church – allegedly against God) and Crime (wrongness against the state, in accordance to what laws are enforced by a legal system). When we talk about other entities that can be wrong, say, individuals, the community, the world population, ecosystems outside of human society, we have to make do with the words we have, e.g. sin against nature, crimes against humanity, and so on.

    Intellectual property law is a construct that (according to the Constitution of the United States) was intended to do a thing that it has totally failed at, going as far as creating perverse incentives to misuse the law. And given the companies that produce the media we might pirate are poor at compensating artists and developers, or at recognizing licenses already established (say, your DVD copy of Ghostbusters when the new medium emerges), given they pirate each other’s content shamelessly, and will steal yours outright if you can’t outspend them in court, it has actually become more ethical to pirate content than to buy it legitimately.

    But I’d teach my kids not just to pirate, but to recognize shoddy work from good work, and to not consume at all when they can, since consuming content benefits its producers, whether or not it’s acquired legally. (The MCU is about hero-team organizations who defend the status quo from all enemies, including the far left, and including those who want the human species to have a future. So they’re not really our heroes, are they? Batman runs around and beats up poor people, leaving the wealthy to continue to rule over the rest of us whose last resort is crime.

    If we’re going to consume content, let’s use it to inspire the content we make ourselves, until commercial content is entirely unwanted and unnecessary. This is the future the MPAA and RIAA fear. Not everyone pirating their stuff, but everyone not bothered to pirate their stuff.

    Edit: Clarification







  • I think this was related to their plan before, in the case that got decided (specifically that Reddit didn’t have to reveal the IP addies of its clients), but that’s always been a problem especially if an ip address leads to a router or is dynamic at the ISP, then there’s no certainty it can be identified with a single person.

    This is how the whole twelve-strikes program was formed where big name ISPs would (hypothetically) give demerits and eventually throttle or disconnect ISP addies that were identified as engaging in infringing activity. The problem is, clients stopped wanting to pay their bills when quality deteriorated, so it’s not consistently enforced. In fact, companies that are not Comcast or Xfinity are motivated not to do anything beyond threats.

    ETA: Similarly, it’s actually to the benefit of social media websites to preserve the privacy of their clients, since incidents in which they cooperate with law enforcement reduces engagement. Google used to have a robust legal resistance to giving away personal data. It was deteriorated through enshittification, but now Google has lost enough reputation that it’s looking for ways to preserve privacy, like the new effort to constrain personal map data to devices, so Google is unable to respond to location dragnet warrants. They’re still in trouble for search-term warrants.

    (Note the map thing is not yet rolled out, so don’t use Google maps when burying your bodies.)





  • While I completely agree with you based on the data, DRM is absolutely sold to publishers on the pretense that it combats piracy, at least with keeping paying customers from engaging with media in ways the publishers don’t like (such as lending content or selling that content used in a secondary market).

    And yes, the more draconian their restrictions, the more they drive people to resources that provide cracked or DRM-free content. That said, Sony is notorious for going to extreme lengths to severely limit use of their content outside narrow consumption, often with obligatory ad-viewing, driving people to either piracy, or avoiding Sony content at all.

    At one point, I might have been interested in playing Horizon Zero Dawn and went from buying it, to getting a refund to thinking about pirating it to eventually deciding I cannot be bothered. But then I steer clear of most AAA game companies, now.