<story><title>European Commission Calls for Pirate Site Blocking Around the Globe</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/european-commission-calls-for-pirate-site-blocking-around-the-globe-230524/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasmer</author><text>&amp;quot; decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate&amp;quot; - you mean like giving away everything for free?&lt;p&gt;Well yeah, something someone else made, but for free, instead of $4.99, that&amp;#x27;s a &amp;#x27;better product&amp;#x27; for consumers ... until there exists non such products to buy.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an enduring bit of weird logic at HN, that somehow IP should not exist, &amp;#x27;because mega corps!&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;If anti-piracy did not exist within regular countries, then literally zero content that required investment would get made, it&amp;#x27;s that simple.&lt;p&gt;If people can trivially access content &amp;#x27;for free&amp;#x27; they generally will do that.&lt;p&gt;For music, it&amp;#x27;s not so bad, it just so happens most of the best music is cheap to make and niche artists couldn&amp;#x27;t command a high price anyhow, ergo the long-tail slot on Spotify has some efficiency to it.&lt;p&gt;But there are innumerable productions which we all enjoy which require investment and without some kind of rights management, those literally disappear.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s all theoretical until you make something that is &amp;#x27;stolen&amp;#x27; and it hits home pretty fast.&lt;p&gt;Some arguments could definitely be made that the long-tail of piracy is actually beneficial, even to content producers, as it leaks content to areas wherein individuals couldn&amp;#x27;t afford to buy it, but that&amp;#x27;s a specific argument.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a bit ominous for countries to be blocking other countries etc. but this issue likely has to be looked at somehow. If &amp;#x27;piracy&amp;#x27; is below certain thresholds they should just not worry about it, but that may not be the case.</text></item><item><author>jorams</author><text>I keep hoping for the day the entertainment industry decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate, but instead we keep getting this endless lobbying for dystopian measures and technology that only exists to destroy value (DRM).&lt;p&gt;Piracy simply offers a &lt;i&gt;better product&lt;/i&gt;. You own the source material. Sell it. Make it available for streaming. &lt;i&gt;Everywhere&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tm-guimaraes</author><text>It seems that &amp;quot;Piracy is a service problem&amp;quot; is still not in people minds.&lt;p&gt;Steam already proved that.&lt;p&gt;Spotify already proved that.&lt;p&gt;The netflix of 7 years ago proved that.&lt;p&gt;Best sellers such as witcher3 that had no DRM what so ever also proved that.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not about long tails or any other argument, it&amp;#x27;s much simpler than that. People are willing to pay for a decent service, people are unwillingly to have extra work.&lt;p&gt;A Pirate website is never going to be more accessible than an official one always because of funding to do proper UX, so, even if all kinds of DRM were forbidden, actual legal services would always have the upper hand, and the better their service the less of a need for piracy.&lt;p&gt;When steam started getting traction, PC piracy plummeted. When spotify became available, same thing happenned for music. When each film studio didn&amp;#x27;t have its own streaming service, the piracy was falling. Witcher 3 was a best seller on PC (and this is an AAA game, not a 5$ indie) when you could just copy paste your friends installer instead of buying.&lt;p&gt;Everything is so goddam simple, provide good service, good value, and only people that don&amp;#x27;t actually have the budget to buy your stuff will pirate.&lt;p&gt;Piracy is like union strikes, yes they are annoying and bring profits down, and it&amp;#x27;s bullshit that I have to wait 5 hours for a train because of a strike. But it is a necessary mechanism of power balance.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If people can trivially access content &amp;#x27;for free&amp;#x27; they generally will do that.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;trivially&amp;quot; is not so simple.
what about app store access in every device? from tv boxes, phone to PC.
what about shared settings, data etc between them?
 there is no success pirate story on that, only techies that have such hobie have something compared to an actual nice setup. It&amp;#x27;s the &amp;quot;why dropbox&amp;quot; comment. Pirates can&amp;#x27;t get enough money or legal ground to build something comparable to what a legal company can build. This means it&amp;#x27;s ok if it is forbidden to block bullshit practices like DRM and remote deletion, if you actually care for the customers, no pirate app&amp;#x2F;website can compete with you.</text></comment>
<story><title>European Commission Calls for Pirate Site Blocking Around the Globe</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/european-commission-calls-for-pirate-site-blocking-around-the-globe-230524/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasmer</author><text>&amp;quot; decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate&amp;quot; - you mean like giving away everything for free?&lt;p&gt;Well yeah, something someone else made, but for free, instead of $4.99, that&amp;#x27;s a &amp;#x27;better product&amp;#x27; for consumers ... until there exists non such products to buy.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an enduring bit of weird logic at HN, that somehow IP should not exist, &amp;#x27;because mega corps!&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;If anti-piracy did not exist within regular countries, then literally zero content that required investment would get made, it&amp;#x27;s that simple.&lt;p&gt;If people can trivially access content &amp;#x27;for free&amp;#x27; they generally will do that.&lt;p&gt;For music, it&amp;#x27;s not so bad, it just so happens most of the best music is cheap to make and niche artists couldn&amp;#x27;t command a high price anyhow, ergo the long-tail slot on Spotify has some efficiency to it.&lt;p&gt;But there are innumerable productions which we all enjoy which require investment and without some kind of rights management, those literally disappear.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s all theoretical until you make something that is &amp;#x27;stolen&amp;#x27; and it hits home pretty fast.&lt;p&gt;Some arguments could definitely be made that the long-tail of piracy is actually beneficial, even to content producers, as it leaks content to areas wherein individuals couldn&amp;#x27;t afford to buy it, but that&amp;#x27;s a specific argument.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a bit ominous for countries to be blocking other countries etc. but this issue likely has to be looked at somehow. If &amp;#x27;piracy&amp;#x27; is below certain thresholds they should just not worry about it, but that may not be the case.</text></item><item><author>jorams</author><text>I keep hoping for the day the entertainment industry decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate, but instead we keep getting this endless lobbying for dystopian measures and technology that only exists to destroy value (DRM).&lt;p&gt;Piracy simply offers a &lt;i&gt;better product&lt;/i&gt;. You own the source material. Sell it. Make it available for streaming. &lt;i&gt;Everywhere&lt;/i&gt;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jorams</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not saying IP should not exist. You don&amp;#x27;t have to legalize piracy. Piracy is not a good thing.&lt;p&gt;Piracy does not offer a better product because it&amp;#x27;s free. Pirating is actually an awful experience for most people, involving shady sites, malicious ads, and a serious risk of malware. Once you get through all that, however, you&amp;#x27;ve got a video file of whatever quality you prefer, that you can play in whatever way you prefer, that won&amp;#x27;t disappear based on some contract you are not party to.&lt;p&gt;Some people pirate media because they don&amp;#x27;t want to spend any money on it. You&amp;#x27;re not going to get those people to pay. Lots of other people &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; willing to spend money on media. For those people either the product they want is not for sale, or they are punished every step of the way for their willingness to pay.&lt;p&gt;In the days of DVD it was unskippable anti-piracy warnings, only seen by people paying for DVDs. Now it&amp;#x27;s the proliferation of streaming services with different exclusive content. It&amp;#x27;s their unavoidable software that&amp;#x27;s somewhere between bad and thoroughly broken. It&amp;#x27;s limiting video quality to 720p&amp;#x2F;480p on platforms that aren&amp;#x27;t sufficiently infected with DRM. It&amp;#x27;s content getting deleted from streaming services, either because of their license expiring or the service deciding it doesn&amp;#x27;t want to pay residuals anymore. It&amp;#x27;s the fact that DRM-free media is &lt;i&gt;not for sale&lt;/i&gt; in the first place.</text></comment>