Stream (Or Steal) This Documentary About Digital Piracy

You guys seriously need to step up your reporting lag. You just keep reporting things later and later and later than anyone else (a full week in this case).

The only people claiming there is a debate regarding piracy not hurting content sales are the people illegally making money enabling the piracy economy. Twenty-five studies have found that piracy hurts content sales.

If an artist wants to give away their music, that is great. The current situation on the internet forces an artist to give away their music. Copyright is a human right. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author. Additionally, "sharing" copyrighted content violates US Federal law 17 USC 106 and more than 200,000 people have been sued for doing that since 2010.

If it is illegal, why does it continue? ISPs asked congress for a shield from their third-party copyright liability and they got it in the DMCA in 1998. Now they abuse the law they asked for and have reneged on their agreement with congress and the American people. US law says that ISPs only have safe harbor from their subscribers illegally distributing content if they have a policy for terminating repeat infringers (17 USC 512 (i). If they were doing this, 42% of all US internet upstream traffic wouldn't be used to illegally distribute music, movies, games, software and ebooks. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that musicians wages are down 45% since p2p technology arrived. US Home video sales (DVD, BluRay, PayTV, VOD, Streaming) are down 25% to $18.5B in 2011 from $25B in 2006.

The first BitTorrent search engines debuted in 2004. Recorded music is down worldwide from $27B in 1999 (Napster) to $15B in 2011. Video Game revenue (consoles & PC) is down 13% from 2007. In the meantime US broadband revenues grew from zero to $50B a year in the US with p2p as the killer app that drove broadband adoption. Those are real jobs lost that are not coming back until the public realizes that these are your friends and neighbors whose careers are being destroyed by lack of copyright enforcement. Who is destroying these industries? ISPs who ignore the law 17 USC 512 (i) and do not terminate repeat infringers. US Telecom makes >$400B a year, US creative industries less than <$80B a year. Verizon $120B a year, Electronic Arts $4B, Viacom (CBS, MTV & Paramount Pictures) $14B a year, Warner Music Group $2.4B a year.

thanks ethicalfan, for doing poopsci's work for them and giving us some details.

Being a songwriter/musician, I can appreciate the fact that an artist should be compensated for their works. But I can remember as a kid growing up... without the internet, how easy it was, even back then, to just copy a friend's borrowed cassette tape or album. They shared with me and I would share my purchases with them. So I guess 'pirating' has been around a long time... if you want to call it that. Personally, I believe that everyone in the entertainment industry is completely overpaid; from the artists all the way on down to the ISPs. Having said that, what I believe should be fixed is not the pirating; for as we can see by ethicalfan's numbers, there is ALOT of money being made already, it's just not distributed correctly. Perhaps the artists themselves, and not the companies, should be at the top of that food chain, and the distribution, more even handed. There are ALOT more poor people who just cant afford to go to every movie, buy every cd or dvd or ebook or game or whathaveyou, than there are 'poor' companies in the industry, so I don't feel sorry for any of them.

Pirating in some form or another has always been and will probably always be around... and to say that we need to end it completely so that no one under a certain financial status can see or hear or read or play any form of entertainment media just so we can increase the ungodly amounts of money that is ALREADY in that industry is just plain greed. To me it comes down to; deny the poor kid or add a few more billion to an already greedy industry? So if your poor, well... sorry but, you just aint 'allowed' to see Avatar???

Having said all that... I do believe we try to stop the people who are trying to make money from pirated material.

Today's magic is tomorrow's technology.

Not so many folks in the US are aware that Co-founder of TPB Peter Sunde also started Flattr, a social micro-donation service mention briefly in the film, as a way to give back to creators. You can learn more here:

www.blog.flattr.net

Ethicalfan's analysis is straight from the music industry's point of view, where every pirated song equals a lost sale. The other side of the argument is that piracy resulted from music industry abuses of the late 1990s: Overpriced albums, fewer "good" tracks in albums and more "filler", offering only CD albums for sale without an option for singles. Even if digital technology had not come along, some sort of push-back from unhappy music fans was inevitable. And without the market pressure from digital pirates, would iTunes have ever been able to get support from the music industry? Probably not.

My MP3 player can record songs from over the air waves thus giving me music with out having to pay. Much like my old boombox did that had a built in cassett player. And yet that is legal and not considered piracy. I draw no conclullisions just adding information.

Owlbe are you sure its legal to record music from the airwaves? Im not so sure.

There is no way that every download equals a lost sale.
How many tomes have you downloaded something (illegal or otherwise) only to delete it without making use of it.
I sometimes have fun watching bad movies just to laugh at how horrible they are. Should I really pay for a product that terrible?

From my understanding public airwave are just that. They
belong to the public and anything broadcast on a public airwave is now in the public domain. That does not mean a person can distribute copies for profit or even for free.

}}} Ethicalfan's analysis is straight from the music industry's point of view, where every pirated song equals a lost sale.

Exactly. You want a rational analysis of the situation, go instead to John Perry Barlow's excellent Wired article, "The Economy of Ideas" -- now almost 20 years old:
www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html

And let's grasp that Barlow puts his money where his mouth is -- The Grateful Dead were one of the nations consistent top draws on the concert circuit until the passing of Jerry Garcia. And they openly encouraged fans to record their concerts, and to trade them around.

Then there's Peter Gabriel's attitude towards it:
"I have worked with musician Peter Gabriel on several projects. At a workshop we were holding for AT&T he was asked, 'How do you deal with piracy of your albums?' Gabriel said, 'Oh, I treat it as free advertising. I follow it with a rock concert. When they steal my albums in Indonesia, I go there and perform.' Now that stands the whole relationship on its head."
- Peter Schwartz -

Equally important -- The straight up fact is, you cannot stop piracy without creating a much, much larger problem -- openly enabling censorship.

This is because they are defacto the same activity:

Censorship is the government telling you "this we deem dangerous, therefore you may not access it".

Copyright-as-control is essentially the same: "This you have not paid for, therefore you may not access it".

BOTH are about controlling ACCESS (this should not be taken as arguing they are morally equivalent by any means).

If you changed the internet to allow copyright to function, then you would also be changing it to allow censorship to function. That is throwing the cat into the furnace to rid it of fleas.

Copyright needs major reform -- rewards must be inherent in the system, not based on controlling access to things. But that process is almost certain to cut out fatcat middlemen who create nothing, add nothing, and do nothing whatsoever for either the artist or the consumer. And that is who current copyright law benefits more than any other.

This is well over a decade old, but still relevant as to how the CURRENT system works:

"...the stated purpose of the [new digital recording equipment tax] law is to 'compensate' musicians for home copying. But the law diverts FIFTY-SEVEN percent of the funds to record companies and music publishers, leaving less than half for the people who participate in the creative process. Most of the remaining funds will go to musical superstars, and thus do little to encourage or assist musical creativity."
- Richard Stallman -

The current system is about protecting the financial interests of leeching middlemen, nothing more.

}}} There is no way that every download equals a lost sale.

LOL, this is so obvious it's absurd to imagine otherwise.

How many college students have 500 albums on their iPods? How many have 500 movies on their Media Center hard drives? These are COLLEGE STUDENTS. 500x$10/album + 500x$15/movie == $5000+$7500= $12,500. Somehow these hundreds of thousands of college students who did this manufactured their own 12.5k of money to buy these things instead of pirating them...???

Yeah, right. No, they would just have done without. The only one who would be any poorer is the student. The artist generally gets nothing either way.

The solution to this problem existed a decade ago, but the music industry destroyed it: Track Napster hits and pay the artists directly from some slush fund based on the number of Napster hits their works got. But the RIAA sued Napster into effective non-existence. So now it's a lot more difficult to track actual interest in any music.

Here is the problem. We don't own what we think we do. None of us own a music cd even if we bought it outright. Can't say we own it if we can't choose to give it away to anyone we want. I can take my truck down on Main Street, leaving a note on the windshield that gives any licensed driver permission to use my truck for whatever they want. Might not be wise, but it is legal. I can even have these unknown people covered under my insurance, without ever knowing letter one of their name. But I can't do it with a cd? I can't do it with my computer, because it is fundamentally changed how?

Uncle Sam #1 Pirate
China #2 Pirate
Music Industry, Professional Sport Industry, ahhem Para-Leagal Industry…How about software design Industries. I think they make they're coins. I can also argue both sides of the fence, feel free to pantomime