Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites
2 years ago by PirateJesus to c/technology
Piracy Shield blocked a Cloudflare IP address recently too
Hahahahaha
Unintended consequences - what are they going to do once 90% of connections are encrypted, include use of VPNs and encrypted DNS?
This is what they're promoting.
Host your own encrypted DNS on a VPS in a non-compliant location, use a VPN to connect to it.
So many ways these idiots are cutting their own throats.
Also, let's list the companies rather than say "Movie Industry". Or let that be a link to a Wiki article listing all the companies and their holdings.
Fuck em all at this point. I go to maybe 2 movies a year, at most. And I'm cutting subscription services, down to 2 at this point.
As a guy from Russia, I must admit that vpns are not a big problem for censors. They can be easily blocked, including self-hosted ones by protocol detection. And DNS would not do much with IP and clienthello-based blocks. And most users are not enough tech-savvy to constantly switch to new protocols as old ones get blocked.
You have no rights in Russia.
VPNs can't be categorically banned in the US without major first amendment issues. It's not a huge technical issue, but unless the courts just throw out the Constitution (a risk that we're seeing too much of, but still a meaningful bar to cross), there are huge legal barriers to doing so.
Your government doesn't need to care about legal barriers because you have a dictator who can act unilaterally.
VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow "rules". I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.
Entirely unconstitutional restriction of speech.
The government can shut down specific illegal acts, such as sharing other people's intellectual property. They can't ban tools or protocols, or do things that are functionally bans. There's plenty of precedent of the government trying to restrict encryption and being shut down. Removing the ability to communicate securely is a first amendment violation.
You realize the tik tok ban bill is also going to ban the use of VPN's right?
Even HTTPS-incapsulated? C'mon.
That most users won't care enough - that's true.
Https does not actually make difference here. You can still detect VPN usage by unencrypted clienthello, encryption-inside-encryption, active probing, obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on, etc.
WTF? How are you going to look inside HTTPS?
Or is the word "encapsulation" (misspelled it first) unfamiliar to you in the network context? Maybe shouldn't argue then?
obscure libraries that vpn protocol depends on
What? Are you an LLM bot? Answer honestly.
It is obvious profit is not their concern.
Instead of releasing a film that by all accounts would have been profitable, so that they can create a loss for tax purposes.
Why not maximize.profits, even if it means more taxes?
The shareholders should have a legal case.
I think the shareholders with enough shares to have influence are the ones who encourage this sort of behavior - if it's a long-term profit at the expense of short term, they aren't interested
That's my gut feeling on it anyways
Movies are made by a lot of people.
Many people pouring time, effort, and creativity into a difficult art form.
You really think any of the people who actually made the movie had a say in the decision to shelf it?
Those people were paid for their efforts. Sure it might be disappointing for that effort to not see the light it day, but at the same time I'll bet many are relieved their name won't be attached to a poor product.
No, of course not.
If I commission an artist to make me a painting, and I then decide to throw it in a storage bin (or the trash) rather than put it in a gallery - that's my decision. Neither the artist or the general public gets a say in it. Claiming otherwise (especially in case of the public) is pure entitlement.
If you commission the artist to make you a painting, with some portion of the price being a cut of the revenue generated by displaying the painting, you absolutely should not be permitted to just throw it in the trash.
There should be an inherent obligation to make a good faith effort to make the revenue you're required to share.
From the article...
He also told the audience that pirate-site operators "aren't teenagers playing an elaborate prank. The perpetrators are real-life mobsters, organized crime syndicatesāmany of whom engage in child pornography, prostitution, drug trafficking, and other societal ills.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't throw the word 'terrorist' into that description as well.
...Many of whom engage in child pornography, prostitution, drug trafficking, murder, terrorism, poisonings, Hentai, bad DIY, unsolicited advice, telling women to smile, wearing JNKOs, hacking banks, and NOT FLOSSING!
Everybody knows movie pirates eat babiesā
Wait.
Pirate Bay.
Pirate Ba(b)y?
Pirate Babe Eat?
I think you're on to something!
Especially eye-roll-inducing considering the pedophile problem in Hollywood hasn't really gotten better, let alone been solved. Many of the exec types demanding things change are likely to be either perpetrators themselves, or sympathisers with the perpetrators of this behavior, and they tell us what we should believe is right or wrong based on the almighty dollar? Fuck Hollywood in general, but especially fuck the movie industry executives in charge. Greedy bastards.
Arenāt those things already illegal? Wouldnāt the solution be to just go after the pirate-site owners for those reasons? Then the only pirate-site owners remaining will be regular peopleāthe vast minority, they would have you believe.
Are we surprised that the people that make up fantastical scenarios are selling a fantastical scenario? The people pirating are every day people that don't want to pay so much for entertainment. You inept dolt.
You inept dolt.
Hostile much, conflict bot?
And people accuse me of wooshness. š
Are we surprised that the people that make up fantastical scenarios are selling a fantastical scenario? The people pirating are every day people that donāt want to pay so much for entertainment. You inept dolt.
Iām upset at the movie executive that is inept. Not you.
The way you bolted that on to a comment that was directed at me, and have it meant for someone else, seems a little unusual, but fair enough.
Thanks for the clarification.
Piracy does not hurt revenue and, in fact, may actually help it:
I have found and become a big fan of tv shows that I would have never had the chance to see because of piracy, one of my favourite shows 'Corner Gas' never once aired in my home country. Thank you piracy for helping me find good entertainment.
I absolutely love it, it's the perfect show in my opinion, I'm so glad I stumbled across it.
I was sold on it by the first episode entirely because of Oscar, he kills me with every line.
Another non-Canadian who found the show by happenstance and think it's great! Also watched the animated seasons when they came out (although not quite the same).
"It wasn't willy-nilly... it was at crows."
Yeah. This is socialism.. if thereās one group that hates socialism. Meh. We know they support this.
Socialism is when government does stuff /s
Imagine how much money the movie industry would have if it stopped wasting time and effort on the false idea that 1 download = 1 lost sale.
Reminds me of how The NYPD Spent $150 Million to Catch Farebeaters Who Cost the MTA $104,000
But remember, when it comes to doing a public good/service/education/etc, the government is perpetually broke and can afford nothing.
Yup, I go to movies when they look good. But movies are so expensive these days that the bar is raised enough that I rarely go. If you're going to ask $10-15 for a single viewing, you need to make a really good movie.
I'm happy to spend Ā£10 to watch a movie at the cinema, but I refuse to spend Ā£10 AND have to buy the movie to watch it again. I will watch it then pirate it. I don't think that's such a big deal.
And adjust the fucking business model so that theatres can make money from people just buying tickets at reasonable prices and don't have to try to gouge them at the concession stand or treat them like criminals for bringing their own food.
I've been to one movie in the theatre since the pandemic and the main thing it did was remind me that seeing movies in a theatre just wasn't really worth it anymore.
Isnāt it fucking crazy that āindustry demands ____ā is likely to come to fruition, but āgroup of individuals demands XYZā isnāt likely to change shit?
I demand better living conditions. We all demand an economy that doesnāt favor the rich. Not shit will change.
Companies ādemandā shit and then just literally write the laws and hand them to legislators who pass them.
If your demands are being met you have power, if not you don't have power.
Companies ādemandā shit and then just literally write the laws and hand them to legislators who pass them.
Well, Congress only hears one side, they don't read Lemmy to get the other side.
They have no respect for their constituency, because they think their constituency doesn't care enough to engage them about it, and are 'dumb' enough to vote them back in the office again.
There was a study recently that showed legislatorsā votes are affected by like .3% by input from constituents. Iāll try to find it again, but I canāt say Iām surprised.
I've seen it (there's always one person who shares the link whenever I make this kind of argument), but that study doesn't take into account what would happen if a large percentage of the electorate that actually participated in the system were to start communicating with their elected legislators.
Right now there is so little interaction done by the electorate with their representatives.
I guarantee you that if a large amount of the voting electorate all started contacting their senators and house reps often, on different various issues, things would matter/change.
So my point still stands.
If you just sit at home reading Lemmy, they're not going to take you seriously, and they're not going to look out for your best interests, but instead they're going to look out for their own best interests, which is usually getting money from corporations that they use to win elections, because they know they can still get re-elected even when they disrespect their electorate.
Fundamentally, they do what they do because they can get away with it, they are not policed by their voters.
TL;DR: If you don't engage, nothing will change.
But during the trump years, those figures spiked big time. Especially with services like resistbot. The amount of form letters and shitty Republican legislators using my contact as some sort of consent on my part to join their fucking mailing lists?
Not to mention, these legislators are insulated from their constituents pretty effectively. If you do manage to get someone on the phone (I never did. Ever.), itāll be an aide that might summarize the general tone of the calls and e-mails in a couple seconds worth of walk nā talk. I meanā¦the system is rigged for people with money.
I get the feeling of wanting to change that. But I donāt think the system that has been further and further adulterated to those ends will ever just hand us the tools to upend that system. It was built this way.
I mean, how many times and how many ways do they have to display their wholehearted willingness to watch us all starve and slaughter countless of us in service of capitalism? Theyāve made it abundantly clear.
Streaming services went complete degen mode (exclusives that require you 6 different subscriptions). So people went back to pirating. Old rule - you are less convinient than pirate sites, people will just pirated instead. That and quality of the shows going downhill, especially on Disney and Netflix
I still don't understand why they keep going after piracy when it is a symptom of the bigger problem. Movies today are expensive and often made inaccessible through BS digital services that periodically just make films and TV unavailable to save server space or avoid paying for licensing.
I would guess that the vast majority of people are not pirating content. I'd also guess that if digital providers and studios would actually try to change the distribution model that allows customers to buy content that is later turned off on a whim, they would see meaningful change in piracy activity.
Because piracy is the boogieman that allows them to wrestle more power and profit from everyone around them like the parasites they are. They want a cut every time anyone ever watches something, ever. And they want to control if you even have the option of what to watch.
Once Neuralink's installed adn they start selling off our thoughts to information collection bureaus, they're gonna want us to pay a license for everytime we think about someting not in the public domain
I live in the EU, have all major streaming subscribtions within the family, and we couldnāt watch Terminator 2 anywhere. One of the most famous classic action movie, not even available for purchase on Apple TV.
I still donāt understand why they keep going after piracy when it is a symptom of the bigger problem.
It doesn't have to be rational "profit-maximization". Look at comments in threads that pertain to AI training, web scraping, etc. A lot of ordinary people seem to believe that this is how it's supposed to go.
WDYM?
A lot of noisy people here have a very expansive view of intellectual property. They seem to want total control over anything they "own", without any regard for the consequences. There's no room for any kind of fair use. Where they can't own something, they still want to own it.
With some horror, I recall a thread where the mob called for making robots.txt legally binding. That wasn't big tech lobbyists, just some ordinary users here.
Movies today also kinda suck.
No. Copyright laws originally allowed creators to profit of their work for 28 years, which is perfectly fair and reasonable. Corporate lobbying extended copyright to 70 years past the author's death, which is obviously insane, since creators can't profit off their work after they die. But just because corporations perverted the law in an attempt to retain IP indefinitely, it doesn't mean that copyright law itself is bad, and wanting reasonable protection for an authors IP doesn't make you a useful idiot.
"you don't get any residuals because the movie is still in the red decades later"
Wage theft and fraud poses a larger threat to the economy. Rather than hiring 20 million dollars of internet policing to save zero dollars of the economy could we get 20 million dollars of police that prosecute fraudsters and shitty employers?
Oh no, now I will have to pay $50/mo to re-watch marvel movie 832 and an action movie where the main character has to go on a 2hr quest for revenge after someone shot their pet.
...I barely watch movies anymore, there's not been a ton of great new stuff imo. I'm so sick of subscriptions, too.
Same. Been watching a lot of film noir actually. The third man, double indemnity, strangers on a train. What happened to story telling?
Yup. I used to watch a lot of movies and TV shows, now I mostly play video games and read books. Movies and TV just aren't that good.
I would propose a law that states " All companies must keep their data away from the Internet. If the data ends up in the Internet then it's up for grabs by anyone"
Or just abolish copyright law altogether.
Nah, but definitely limit it to 10-15 years. The original term in the US was 14 years, with an optional, one-time extension for another 14 years. I'd be down with that.
The movie industry can't bother to provide and preserve the movies they make, they should shut the fuck up.
Still waiting to see Dogma on Blu-ray..
Why?
Harvey winestein owns the rights IIRC from a interview I read a while back
USDoJ: How about no.
Oh, right. This isn't 1992 when the DoJ had balls and a constitution.
Half a year later, additional categories are added for CSAM. And another year later for illegal copies and cracks. All the while some states openly missuse it against porn and abortion. We know that game already!
Anyone have a list of legislators who are also investors in VPN companies?
For all the random crap American ISPs have done, the one thing they usually don't do is piracy monitoring unless they get paid a premium to do it.
Like Disney pays ISPs and other data companies to track torrent peers and report any IPs in the USA. But I bet you at&t would not care at all if they weren't being paid for it lol.
Service Provider
Not Service Regulator
They shouldnāt have any knowledge of what websites people visit
Piracy websites should add a copy of the U.S. Constitution to their websites. Just slap a "/constitution.html" on the site.
Then, if the MPA succeeds, we can talk about how the U.S. Government is blocking access to hundreds/thousands of copies of the Constitution online.
LOL this should be done.
"/ConstitutionUSA.html"
Should be added.
If it's that big a deal go after the service providers for the servers, this type of shit just makes inhibiting free speech easier.
If I don't want people using Truth Social I guess making a bunch of accounts to share torrent links would be enough to shut it down?
The MPAA still has never been able to demonstrate that privacy even has actual impacts on movie and ticket sales... When Netflix was super convenient and had a lot of content piracy went down. Turns out splitting to dozens of streaming services made it difficult enough that people just went back to sailing the high seas. So lower your prices, make it more convenient to pay for services and people will just do that instead.
Yeah, well they should keep it up. If they can prove in a US court that a "website is bad" they can make the same argument in the jurisdiction the website is hosted in, the Internet is great because it's not (mostly) stuck under a single country's thumb
The MPAA still has never been able to demonstrate that privacy even has actual impacts on movie and ticket sales...
It does. If everyone paid for tickets in cash and never online, they wouldn't be able to harvest user data.
Frankly combining the recent and less recent events - I think fuck them.
I can understand selling a book or a movie and it being theft to download a copy. It's at least logically consistent - you show someone something with a condition that they pay you, it's dishonest to look and not pay.
But owning characters and universes and their names and so on?
And these laws not being used against "AI" firms?
All at the same time?
No. Right is about compromise. They don't do that, so we don't owe them anything. And let them obey what is made for their benefit first.
Copying is not theft.
If you've promised to not copy to get what you copy - it's quite close.
It's really not. A pair of shoes has one owner by its nature we can't both wear it. If I take yours you can no longer wear it. Because valuables are locked up the only way to take it is usually to commit some other crime like breaking into your house or your locker or assaulting your person.
Copyright isn't something I agreed to or even had any meaningful say in its something lawmakers promised they wouldn't let happen on my behalf without any input from me before I was born. Rather than enforcing the safety of my person and home against removal of my property it says that you own certain combinations of words and even if I use my paper and ink to write them as soon as I write enough similar words it becomes your property. Moreso than just not being an enforcement of the inherently exclusive nature of physical property it is a violation of it because it assigns my physical property to you.
Sorry, but you wrote with many letters something which doesn't say how it becomes honest that you get a thing or a knowledge on very specific conditions and then violate them with the intention to do that.
Another guy just said there were. It was more specific, but "piracy" violates it anyway.
So without an agreement you don't get the book, unless it's a copy given by another person who violated the agreement without which they couldn't have gotten it.
With an agreement there is that promise.
Seems a simple enough thought.
Instead of being contempt with one yacht, they're gonna do what they can to have zero.
When A24 and state run film studios like Vicscreen are the only ones making anything remotely worth the box office, you have a problem, and burning down the barn to stop the foxes from all those delicious hens aren't gonna fix it. Just more socialized losses.
And when people demand living wages, or properly priced housing, or affordable food, that shit doesn't matter right?
Fuck the movie industry.
They were doing just fine until people started to hate theatres and so their main source of ripping people off faded away.
Fuck em
Tor Tor Tor Tor Tor that's the way the vpn goes.
(In the cadence of the thong song)
Why not?
There are only about 2000 exit nodes. I wonder how many are running on substantial hardware and internet connections.
Tor is a fed honey pot
While TOR does accept funds from the U.S. federal government it is not a honey pot. Given tor is free and open source it is easy to verify the security of the software.
I use fedora btw (use open source software you fools)
If no one has told you yet. The feds busted a child porn network in the UK that used for because they were hosting over 65% of the exit nodes at the time. If your open source anonymous VPN is hosted by the feds, they can 100% see where the traffic is coming and where it's going
Please link to a story substantiating this. What I have heard of happening repeatedly is that they trick criminals into communicating outside of tor, running an executable, or just take over the endpoint and nail people eg take over dark web drug markets and use information to track down the folks using it.
The story you linked is from 2015, and has nothing to do with exit nodes. The feds bsuted the actual server that was used to host csam and kept it up while collecting user information for two weeks. Not exit nodes related.
There are many illegal sites hosted on tor that get taken down quite often. Tor in itself is not an insecure software and it proves that by readily having nefarious and illegal sites operate for long durations of time.
All the instances I have read about large sites that host some form of illegal content on Tor going down have all had quite unique and extensive efforts put in by law enforcement agencies to make the bust happen.
Also, if you're into that kinda thing, you should look into ceilidh from the cult of the dead cow
I think the concept is if you own enough exit nodes and you have monitors at the backbone level you can correlate traffic with time-based attacks.
The current number of people using tor in a given time isn't so insurmountable that you can't throw a couple of data centers worth of VMs at The problem and they've had backbone monitoring for decades.
The thing is, the feds aren't going to come knocking at your door because you are downloading movies. The MPAA figured out a long time ago that it's a losing battle going after individual people downloading/uploading. If you were trying to use tor to hide behind doing things to harm other people, running terrorist networks and the like, there's a reasonably good chance they could track you down if you were just using tour but they'd have to really want to do it, and that's not going to happen for Steve's half terabyte of CSI.
looks over at usenet-only arr stack
"Ok, whatever."
Been doing torrents for about.. I don't even know now. 25 years? I've got the same setup. What makes use et better? I still don't get it. I tried it once. It was weird, I had to grab a bunch of files and combine them or something, and I'm mystified how it's any different than downloading off someone's server and how they're able to skirt around site takedowns. You have to pay for it too. Is the lifetime of files even any good? When I tried it I remember you had to take what you could get while it was still there.
Iām mystified how itās any different than downloading off someoneās server
A huge difference is you actually are downloading off someone's server - unlike torrents where you're actively participating in the distribution of pirated material. If you ever do end up on the wrong end of a copyright case.. that difference will be important.
True, but how are these servers just willy nilly allowed to exist and not taken down?
shrug thatās their problem not mine
Depends on your countryās laws, but where I live you get busted for PROVIDING copyrighted material for download - not for downloading it. Unlike a torrent, you arenāt sharing with anyone else.
Couple years ago when I first set up Radarr, I found the same shit was on Usenet as the private trackers I was on, so I just stopped torrenting.
Block piracy websites with what? Dns resolver?
Basically demands lawmakers for ISPs implement censorship tools.
Then they'll come for blocking vpn ports or IPs. Then tor. Then....
Time for our own user owned distributed wireless network.
VPN to what? A country that haven't yet applied such law? This shrinks the internet very much.
Honestly these movie companies are doing it to themselves.. When I was a kid in the 90s movies would take 3-6 months for home media, now it is like 1-2 months tops combine that with $15 tickets and I'll give it a wait and see. Holiday movies wouldn't see a release until the following year.
Nah
Ugh Charles Rivkin has such a punch-able face.
Whatās a āmovieā? Is that like some kinda Olde English thing like castles and rickets?
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Cool. Now all of Google Drive is blocked because one guy hosted a movie there for a few days.
save