We need to go back to pure P2P sharing like the olden days. No centralized servers. No web site that can be taken down or blocked. Just your computer connecting to your friend's computers. I'm thinking something like using WASTE or Gnutella to share .torrent files, then using torrent for the actual file sharing.
This will be our Monday show I think. WASTE is the closest thing there ever was.
Four pieces: 1. Sharing links to public torrents 2. Circle-of-trust filesharing rings 3. Encrypted, distributed, deniable communication 4. Encrypted, distributed, redundant storage of shared files
A tool that handles these covers a good number of bases, "piracy" actually being one of the least of them.
We need to go back to pure P2P sharing like the olden days. No centralized servers. No web site that can be taken down or blocked. Just your computer connecting to your friend's computers. I'm thinking something like using WASTE or Gnutella to share .torrent files, then using torrent for the actual file sharing.
Direct Connect?
Uses centralized servers.
Just for directing the traffic and searches, I thought. It points you at another peer to get your files. The hub doesn't host the files, right?
We need to go back to pure P2P sharing like the olden days. No centralized servers. No web site that can be taken down or blocked. Just your computer connecting to your friend's computers. I'm thinking something like using WASTE or Gnutella to share .torrent files, then using torrent for the actual file sharing.
Direct Connect?
Uses centralized servers.
Just for directing the traffic and searches, I thought. It points you at another peer to get your files. The hub doesn't host the files, right?
Yes, the host doesn't host the files. That doesn't matter. If the hub goes down, you are toast. There is still a single point of failure. It can be taken down, then you're fucked. You need no central point of failure, so that the only way to stop it is to stop every single user individually.
We need to go back to pure P2P sharing like the olden days. No centralized servers. No web site that can be taken down or blocked. Just your computer connecting to your friend's computers. I'm thinking something like using WASTE or Gnutella to share .torrent files, then using torrent for the actual file sharing.
Direct Connect?
Uses centralized servers.
Just for directing the traffic and searches, I thought. It points you at another peer to get your files. The hub doesn't host the files, right?
Yes, the host doesn't host the files. That doesn't matter. If the hub goes down, you are toast. There is still a single point of failure. It can be taken down, then you're fucked. You need no central point of failure, so that the only way to stop it is to stop every single user individually.
I don't remember the DC interface, but wasn't there something that just allowed you to connect to an IP address directly?
We need to go back to pure P2P sharing like the olden days. No centralized servers. No web site that can be taken down or blocked. Just your computer connecting to your friend's computers. I'm thinking something like using WASTE or Gnutella to share .torrent files, then using torrent for the actual file sharing.
Direct Connect?
Uses centralized servers.
Just for directing the traffic and searches, I thought. It points you at another peer to get your files. The hub doesn't host the files, right?
Yes, the host doesn't host the files. That doesn't matter. If the hub goes down, you are toast. There is still a single point of failure. It can be taken down, then you're fucked. You need no central point of failure, so that the only way to stop it is to stop every single user individually.
I don't remember the DC interface, but wasn't there something that just allowed you to connect to an IP address directly?
Yeah, the IP o the server, which is a singlel point of failure.
Yes, Bittorrent plus DHT plus magnet links is for the win. The problem is you still need a way to search for what you want to get the magnet link. Right now the way to get that is Pirate Bay, which is centralized, but resilient.
This will be our Monday show I think. WASTE is the closest thing there ever was.
Four pieces: 1. Sharing links to public torrents 2. Circle-of-trust filesharing rings 3. Encrypted, distributed, deniable communication 4. Encrypted, distributed, redundant storage of shared files
A tool that handles these covers a good number of bases, "piracy" actually being one of the least of them.
Fast, Private, Extensive Amount of Content. <--- Pick any two?
Ooookay... are any of those sites used for substantial non-infringing purposes?
I have a hard time believing that a significant percentage of the files shared through those websites are legit.
Does that matter? It's not the sites fault for the crimes the users commit on them. The problem with MegaUpload and the ultimate reason why they were taken down is that they failed to retain their Safe Harbor status by not following through on the DMCA complaints they received.
I can not speak about how all those other sites were handling DMCA complaints and whether they are in safe harbor or not. However, we can hardly presume guilt here, nor can the justice department. But if they follow up on DMCA complaints, the site itself is legit and shouldn't fear being closed down or have to change their business model.
The problem is, the list of indictments against MegaUpload also contains a number of items which may be indicative of the promotion of copyright infringement (e.g. providing incentives for users to generate downloads from the site) it isn't conclusive for actually being intended for copyright infringement.
Most of these items deal with the business model (e.g. only offering short term and restricted access to non-premium users, as well as being add-based that are displayed during downloads). Many other sites run on the same business model, which makes it appear that the business model itself is the offense in question, and you can be put in prison based on the business model itself.
I think the problem is that there are some hints that MU was actually literally paying people to upload the newest movies/music/etceteras and that they also made something like $200 million while being outwardly aware of the way their service was being used.
And if you used MU to host and share you legitimate files, you absolutely deserve to lose everything for not using Dropbox instead.
I think the problem is that there are some hints that MU was actually literally paying people to upload the newest movies/music/etceteras and that they also made something like $200 million while being outwardly aware of the way their service was being used.
And if you used MU to host and share you legitimate files, you absolutely deserve to lose everything for not using Dropbox instead.
So what If people used dropbox to share copyrighted material, should they be responsible for that?
People do, and yeah if Dropbox is aware that this is the major used function of their service then I would say they should be held responsible... because that just makes sense. You can intend for your product to be benign all you want, but if it's being used almost unanimously in some illegal/bad way, you're aware of this, and you do nothing to ensure the intended use of your product or service, then of what realistic value is your original intention?
A lot of sites like to fall back om their EULAs and whatnot that hold the "we have nothing to do with your files and we don't even know what they are" statements, but when you play it cocky like Kim Dotcom did, and try to openly get involved with an industry your service is pirating (going as far as to appoint Swizz Beatz CEO), you can't tell me you have no idea what people are using your service for. It's a really slimy way to try to profit from illegal activity.
The whole file sharing industry is likely to fall under regulations like you see firearm or air duster manufacturers have, where claiming ignorance of your products use simply isn't enough. Obviously a whole different issue cause it's related to health and safety and not intellectual property, but I mean there will just be additional required steps (on the companies end) to ensure their original intentions get carried through to the end user.
This will be our Monday show I think. WASTE is the closest thing there ever was.
Four pieces: 1. Sharing links to public torrents 2. Circle-of-trust filesharing rings 3. Encrypted, distributed, deniable communication 4. Encrypted, distributed, redundant storage of shared files
A tool that handles these covers a good number of bases, "piracy" actually being one of the least of them.
WASTE still exists; why not set up a ring? It's not like Blowfish got cracked.
The other problem is that shutting down sites like MU won't do anything to stop piracy. Pirates gonna pirate, they'll just use other sites or P2P services. All it does is screw over the people that use the site legitimatlly. I know plenty of people that legally host their own creative works through these sites.
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this. On one hand it's pretty obvious that MU knows what they are doing and are condoning it because they make money. On the other hand, the business model itself is legitamate. If you think MU should be shutdown, then so should torrents and other services. I know plenty of people who use programs to pull the mp3s from the music videos off of youtube. Maybe youtube should be shut down too? Also, shutting down sites like this won't have any effect on piracy anyways.
Why not just ignore piracy and make legal music more attractive for consumers?
Ooookay... are any of those sites used for substantial non-infringing purposes?
Does that matter? It's not the sites fault for the crimes the users commit on them. The problem with MegaUpload and the ultimate reason why they were taken down is that they failed to retain their Safe Harbor status by not following through on the DMCA complaints they received.
Yes, it matter a lot.
There are two ways to infringe IP rights - directly and indirectly. Indirect infringement is basically when you induce the infringement by another party. If you run a website that has no significant other use but infringement, then you are an infringer.
For instance, back in the day of VHS, SONY got sued because people were recording shows on blank tapes on their VCRs. However, SONY was let off because the VCRs had substantial non-infringing uses (playing legit video tapes). Substantial is important - a decent percentage of the actual use has to be legit.
If they are a service that is primarily used for sharing illegal material, then failing to follow the DMCA provisions removed their only defense to this charge. If they have substantial non-infringing traffic, they could be a lot less liable.
People do, and yeah if Dropbox is aware that this is the major used function of their service then I would say they should be held responsible... because that just makes sense. You can intend for your product to be benign all you want, but if it's being used almost unanimously in some illegal/bad way, you're aware of this, and you do nothing to ensure the intended use of your product or service, then of what realistic value is your original intention?
A lot of sites like to fall back om their EULAs and whatnot that hold the "we have nothing to do with your files and we don't even know what they are" statements, but when you play it cocky like Kim Dotcom did, and try to openly get involved with an industry your service is pirating (going as far as to appoint Swizz Beatz CEO), you can't tell me you have no idea what people are using your service for. It's a really slimy way to try to profit from illegal activity.
The whole file sharing industry is likely to fall under regulations like you see firearm or air duster manufacturers have, where claiming ignorance of your products use simply isn't enough. Obviously a whole different issue cause it's related to health and safety and not intellectual property, but I mean there will just be additional required steps (on the companies end) to ensure their original intentions get carried through to the end user.
I guess every hardware company should be regulated since crowbars, hammers, drills, and all sorts of other tools have been used in so many crimes. Car companies are also responsible for all the crimes committed using cars.
Guns are completely different because they have a very short list of legitimate uses. Cars, tools, and computers have an extremely long list of legitimate uses. Also, regulating guns is a possible thing. Since they are physical objects, it is possible to physically control the manufacture, distribution, and transportation of them. Even with it being possible, there are plenty of illegal weapons all over the place.
The Internet has an effectively unlimited number of legitimate uses. It is also absolutely impossible to stop illegitimate uses. Impossible. Impossible like breaking the law of thermodynamics impossible. I would argue it is actually impossible to even reduce them. The more you try to reduce, the more the tech world will push back, and they can not be beaten.
Even worse, is that any attempt to reduce or stop, which will ultimately be futile, will only cause untold amounts of damage for legitimate users while having no effect on illegal usage. A new gun law doesn't cause too much trouble for marksmen and hunters. Taking down something like DropBox will hurt untold thousands of real people and companies using it in a completely legal fashion. It won't hurt illegal file sharing at all.
Because that involves the change of the current IP paradigm. The rich old men of the MPAA and RIAA do not understand how digital distribution and technology work, so changing the model means giving power to soon-to-be-rich young men. That's why they don't want to see any change, unlike the newspaper business, which is actually making an effort to cope with the digital age. As it stands, the best hope for movies and music seems to be indie houses and the eventual death of the assholes running the MAFIAA cabal.
Why not just ignore piracy and make legal music more attractive for consumers?
I imagine you ask this rhetorically, but obviously there are people that don't believe that's viable. Some people seem to be convinced that the only way to fight piracy is a top down legal method. I think in many ways it's prohibition 3.0 (2.0 was the war on drugs, which is still going on). I'm absolutely with you in that the solution to these problems will come from other avenues, but for some people it's incomprehensible.
The other problem is that shutting down sites like MU won't do anything to stop piracy. Pirates gonna pirate, they'll just use other sites or P2P services. All it does is screw over the people that use the site legitimatlly. I know plenty of people that legally host their own creative works through these sites.
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this. On one hand it's pretty obvious that MU knows what they are doing and are condoning it because they make money. On the other hand, the business model itself is legitamate. If you think MU should be shutdown, then so should torrents and other services. I know plenty of people who use programs to pull the mp3s from the music videos off of youtube. Maybe youtube should be shut down too? Also, shutting down sites like this won't have any effect on piracy anyways.
Why not just ignore piracy and make legal music more attractive for consumers?
Well, it's probably good to note MUs charges also include tax fraud and money laundering, among some other stuff, so idk if they really had a legitimate business model at any point. All they had were a couple of sentences in a EULA that they thought should absolve them. Take those lines away and they don't seem legit in any sense at all given their level of awareness and sharing model.
And yeah, piracy will always be around, but the issue now a days isn't US piracy rates, cause that's actually relatively low, but rather foreign piracy... which is absurdly high. There's lots of developing nations with rapidly growing gdps that have an increasing hunger for American made music, movies, and software; but unfortunately they money isn't getting back to the US. It sucks when a country like China, with 10% annual economic growth and a freakin huge population pirates something like 80% of the US made media and software they have; especially when US economic growth is stagnating.
Also going back to the low US piracy rates, it's because distribution models are actually more attractive to consumers now. I can't fathom why anyone still complains about paying $1 for a high quality non-DRM mp3 (that's actually properly tagged!!) that can be downloaded directly to the music player itself from anywhere, and is instantly available on every device linked to the account. Well, no one except for some internet people actually do complain, because it's part of what's making Apple the most successful tech company ever. It's basically as convenient as it gets, and not terribly expensive if you aren't harboring piracy-bred totalistic consumption habits. I'd just like to see movie costs go down, cause it's still like $30 to own a new movie, but the production costs are simply wildly more expensive than most other industries.
Why not just ignore piracy and make legal music more attractive for consumers?
I imagine you ask this rhetorically, but obviously there are people that don't believe that's viable. Some people seem to be convinced that the only way to fight piracy is a top down legal method. I think in many ways it's prohibition 3.0 (2.0 was the war on drugs, which is still going on). I'm absolutely with you in that the solution to these problems will come from other avenues, but for some people it's incomprehensible.
The thing about the War on Drugs is that they actually have avenues to fight it, even though so many places (Canada is the latest) are in favor of legalization now that that particular useless war seems to be on its way out. A War on Piracy is a fucking joke, because the web is so amorphous and versatile that, as has been said before, "[it] views censorship as damage and routs around it." They can shut down as many HTTP file lockers as they want; there'll be dozens more within a month (likely an exponential amount more, as data seems to flow in a manner reactionary to those that would try to stop it). As if that's not enough you can count on dozens of illegal media servers cropping up as Onion addresses on Tor, which has proven secure enough to hide activities that the government finds even more odious than piracy (The Silk Road is proof positive of that). Then, it's just a matter of distributed torrent servers, like Scrym is talking about, and they'll be powerless to do anything.
If shit goes down and we lose access to TPB, I will begin buying and ripping the entirety of the Criterion Collection to upload to an encrypted, distributed torrent server.
I don't disagree that there's a widening gap between the analogy of the war on drugs, and the war on piracy - but to say it's impossible to do anything draws lines in the sand that I don't think are perfectly accurate. I just hope we are wise enough not to declare "War on Piracy" during my lifetime - but it is not impossible.
I don't disagree that there's a widening gap between the analogy of the war on drugs, and the war on piracy - but to say it's impossible to do anything draws lines in the sand that I don't think are perfectly accurate. I just hope we are wise enough not to declare "War on Piracy" during my lifetime - but it is not impossible.
I maintain that if the government can't shut down a site that is both linked to on Wikipedia and facilitates the mailing of illicit drugs worldwide, then they'll be hard-pressed to stop some dedicated geeks from sharing movies, music, and miscellaneous media. TPB has been "blocked" by the Great Firewall since its inception, and you can still access it from any computer in China with the right URL.
I complain about $1 per song. That's way too much. I pay for Spotify. $5 a month for unlimited listening, $10 a month for unlimited plus mobile. Even that is too much money. I went from paying $10 to $0, now I'm paying $5 again. I might go back to 0, we'll see.
The major problem is that while Spotify has a gigantic library of music, it isn't big enough. It really only has music from 12 countries. There are almost 200 countries on earth, and there is music anywhere there are people. Almost all of my pirating activities involve getting music from those other countries which is in no way legally available. Not to mention the fact that Spotify is missing the music of a few extremely important and popular musical groups like the Beatles, Zeppelin, etc.
The other major problem is that Spotify is streaming only. I can't take a song from Spotify and make an awesome remix, or use it in a YouTube video. I would have to use the analog hole or some other hack to save the file. Also, the quality is not the highest. They aren't streaming flac, which is what I would want if I'm using it as part of a creation.
I would pay $20 a month for unlimited no DRM downloading of all of the world's music in flac. I think everyone else on earth would agree. That would give the entire music industry 72 billion dollars a month. Right now they report only 60 billion worldwide revenues per year.
Only Steam seems to understand that lower prices and more availability actually increases profits. The world has changed. What was common sense before is now completely wrong. Old people with old common sense are ruining the world, and we just have to wait for them to die.
I guess every hardware company should be regulated since crowbars, hammers, drills, and all sorts of other tools have been used in so many crimes. Car companies are also responsible for all the crimes committed using cars.
Guns are completely different because they have a very short list of legitimate uses. Cars, tools, and computers have an extremely long list of legitimate uses. Also, regulating guns is a possible thing. Since they are physical objects, it is possible to physically control the manufacture, distribution, and transportation of them. Even with it being possible, there are plenty of illegal weapons all over the place.
The Internet has an effectively unlimited number of legitimate uses. It is also absolutely impossible to stop illegitimate uses. Impossible. Impossible like breaking the law of thermodynamics impossible. I would argue it is actually impossible to even reduce them. The more you try to reduce, the more the tech world will push back, and they can not be beaten.
Even worse, is that any attempt to reduce or stop, which will ultimately be futile, will only cause untold amounts of damage for legitimate users while having no effect on illegal usage. A new gun law doesn't cause too much trouble for marksmen and hunters. Taking down something like DropBox will hurt untold thousands of real people and companies using it in a completely legal fashion. It won't hurt illegal file sharing at all.
Yeah my point was that some things are 99% used for their benign intended purpose (crowbars, hammers, etc etc) and some things have high rates of mis-use (handguns,computer duster), and the misused things are historically prone to regulations.
And filtering the content on your site is far from impossible, there's just no legal precedent for doing so yet. What I'm saying is simply that it will be very likely that sites like Dropbox will be legally required to maintain a functioning system for filtering unauthorized content in the near future. Youtube actually already has a system like this in place; all uploaded content is automatically scanned, and if you upload a video with a known UMG claimed song or image, it will be muted or removed automatically. They actually err on the side of UMG with this, too, often removing legal content....which obviously sucks. But I'm just saying it's amazingly far from impossible to comtrol the content your users are storing and distributing, even without having to actually view the file content. Stuff will always get through and people will always find a way, yeah, but there's going to be a big reduction.
Of course, I don't mean to say SOPA/PIPA stuff is going to pass and whatnot, cause really thats simply a pathetic attempt from an increasingly irrelevant industry to try to retain its stranglehold on media. The tech world is slowly winning that battle, without piracy, through legitmate means like Netflix or iTunes or Steam, which allow content creators to distribute content without the need for massive publishing conglomerates. Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have gained massive political clout by waving their money around (check out how much MSFT and GOOG gave to Obama's campaign compared to media companies), so we're going to basically see policy changes that reflect their distribution beliefs. This is a pretty good thing for a modern consumer, who would prefer convenient digital distribution.
But for the analogies purpose, how would those dedicated geeks be different from the agriculture geeks running a nice little hydroponic lab in their basements and then distributing to their close friends and family?
Despite the freedom of the electronic medium as we see it now, it still depends on physical devices at some point. If we really wanted to make this like the war on drugs we could always start bombing every factory producing counterfeit ipods, and blowing up every unlicensed wifi signal we can pick up... then things would get fun.
And filtering the content on your site is far from impossible, there's just no legal precedent for doing so yet.
No, it's actually impossible. YouTube's system relies on the fact that the companies that own the content have to have actual human beings keeping an eye on YouTube and flagging videos. The automatic system only catches people who don't know better. Anyone who actually tries to avoid the system is successful.
It also relies on an incredibly large engineering effort by Google. Think about how much money, time, and effort it takes to police YouTube. Every minute there are 60 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. That's one hour per second. You would need 10,800 employees working 8 hours a day to watch all the video uploaded to YouTube each day.
Now imagine if I setup my own video site, and it gets really popular. Even if I am 1/60th as popular as YouTube, that will be one hour of video uploaded every minute. The cost of policing that content would be so extravagant, I could not possibly afford it. Even if I tried, it would be vastly less effective than YouTube's system, which is effectively completely ineffective.
But how do they keep porn off YouTube? Easy. Porn is something a computer can detect. It has certain colors and patterns that a computer can see. Lots of flesh color? Something that is in the shape of a genital? Computers can detect like, just like facial recognition on security cameras.
Copyright is not something you can detect with a program. There's no general pattern. That's what makes it impossible to police.
Comments
Four pieces:
1. Sharing links to public torrents
2. Circle-of-trust filesharing rings
3. Encrypted, distributed, deniable communication
4. Encrypted, distributed, redundant storage of shared files
A tool that handles these covers a good number of bases, "piracy" actually being one of the least of them.
I can not speak about how all those other sites were handling DMCA complaints and whether they are in safe harbor or not. However, we can hardly presume guilt here, nor can the justice department. But if they follow up on DMCA complaints, the site itself is legit and shouldn't fear being closed down or have to change their business model.
The problem is, the list of indictments against MegaUpload also contains a number of items which may be indicative of the promotion of copyright infringement (e.g. providing incentives for users to generate downloads from the site) it isn't conclusive for actually being intended for copyright infringement.
Most of these items deal with the business model (e.g. only offering short term and restricted access to non-premium users, as well as being add-based that are displayed during downloads). Many other sites run on the same business model, which makes it appear that the business model itself is the offense in question, and you can be put in prison based on the business model itself.
And if you used MU to host and share you legitimate files, you absolutely deserve to lose everything for not using Dropbox instead.
A lot of sites like to fall back om their EULAs and whatnot that hold the "we have nothing to do with your files and we don't even know what they are" statements, but when you play it cocky like Kim Dotcom did, and try to openly get involved with an industry your service is pirating (going as far as to appoint Swizz Beatz CEO), you can't tell me you have no idea what people are using your service for. It's a really slimy way to try to profit from illegal activity.
The whole file sharing industry is likely to fall under regulations like you see firearm or air duster manufacturers have, where claiming ignorance of your products use simply isn't enough. Obviously a whole different issue cause it's related to health and safety and not intellectual property, but I mean there will just be additional required steps (on the companies end) to ensure their original intentions get carried through to the end user.
I'm actually not sure how I feel about this. On one hand it's pretty obvious that MU knows what they are doing and are condoning it because they make money. On the other hand, the business model itself is legitamate. If you think MU should be shutdown, then so should torrents and other services. I know plenty of people who use programs to pull the mp3s from the music videos off of youtube. Maybe youtube should be shut down too? Also, shutting down sites like this won't have any effect on piracy anyways.
Why not just ignore piracy and make legal music more attractive for consumers?
There are two ways to infringe IP rights - directly and indirectly. Indirect infringement is basically when you induce the infringement by another party. If you run a website that has no significant other use but infringement, then you are an infringer.
For instance, back in the day of VHS, SONY got sued because people were recording shows on blank tapes on their VCRs. However, SONY was let off because the VCRs had substantial non-infringing uses (playing legit video tapes). Substantial is important - a decent percentage of the actual use has to be legit.
If they are a service that is primarily used for sharing illegal material, then failing to follow the DMCA provisions removed their only defense to this charge. If they have substantial non-infringing traffic, they could be a lot less liable.
Guns are completely different because they have a very short list of legitimate uses. Cars, tools, and computers have an extremely long list of legitimate uses. Also, regulating guns is a possible thing. Since they are physical objects, it is possible to physically control the manufacture, distribution, and transportation of them. Even with it being possible, there are plenty of illegal weapons all over the place.
The Internet has an effectively unlimited number of legitimate uses. It is also absolutely impossible to stop illegitimate uses. Impossible. Impossible like breaking the law of thermodynamics impossible. I would argue it is actually impossible to even reduce them. The more you try to reduce, the more the tech world will push back, and they can not be beaten.
Even worse, is that any attempt to reduce or stop, which will ultimately be futile, will only cause untold amounts of damage for legitimate users while having no effect on illegal usage. A new gun law doesn't cause too much trouble for marksmen and hunters. Taking down something like DropBox will hurt untold thousands of real people and companies using it in a completely legal fashion. It won't hurt illegal file sharing at all.
Well, it's probably good to note MUs charges also include tax fraud and money laundering, among some other stuff, so idk if they really had a legitimate business model at any point. All they had were a couple of sentences in a EULA that they thought should absolve them. Take those lines away and they don't seem legit in any sense at all given their level of awareness and sharing model.
And yeah, piracy will always be around, but the issue now a days isn't US piracy rates, cause that's actually relatively low, but rather foreign piracy... which is absurdly high. There's lots of developing nations with rapidly growing gdps that have an increasing hunger for American made music, movies, and software; but unfortunately they money isn't getting back to the US. It sucks when a country like China, with 10% annual economic growth and a freakin huge population pirates something like 80% of the US made media and software they have; especially when US economic growth is stagnating.
Also going back to the low US piracy rates, it's because distribution models are actually more attractive to consumers now. I can't fathom why anyone still complains about paying $1 for a high quality non-DRM mp3 (that's actually properly tagged!!) that can be downloaded directly to the music player itself from anywhere, and is instantly available on every device linked to the account. Well, no one except for some internet people actually do complain, because it's part of what's making Apple the most successful tech company ever. It's basically as convenient as it gets, and not terribly expensive if you aren't harboring piracy-bred totalistic consumption habits. I'd just like to see movie costs go down, cause it's still like $30 to own a new movie, but the production costs are simply wildly more expensive than most other industries.
If shit goes down and we lose access to TPB, I will begin buying and ripping the entirety of the Criterion Collection to upload to an encrypted, distributed torrent server.
The major problem is that while Spotify has a gigantic library of music, it isn't big enough. It really only has music from 12 countries. There are almost 200 countries on earth, and there is music anywhere there are people. Almost all of my pirating activities involve getting music from those other countries which is in no way legally available. Not to mention the fact that Spotify is missing the music of a few extremely important and popular musical groups like the Beatles, Zeppelin, etc.
The other major problem is that Spotify is streaming only. I can't take a song from Spotify and make an awesome remix, or use it in a YouTube video. I would have to use the analog hole or some other hack to save the file. Also, the quality is not the highest. They aren't streaming flac, which is what I would want if I'm using it as part of a creation.
I would pay $20 a month for unlimited no DRM downloading of all of the world's music in flac. I think everyone else on earth would agree. That would give the entire music industry 72 billion dollars a month. Right now they report only 60 billion worldwide revenues per year.
Only Steam seems to understand that lower prices and more availability actually increases profits. The world has changed. What was common sense before is now completely wrong. Old people with old common sense are ruining the world, and we just have to wait for them to die.
And filtering the content on your site is far from impossible, there's just no legal precedent for doing so yet. What I'm saying is simply that it will be very likely that sites like Dropbox will be legally required to maintain a functioning system for filtering unauthorized content in the near future. Youtube actually already has a system like this in place; all uploaded content is automatically scanned, and if you upload a video with a known UMG claimed song or image, it will be muted or removed automatically. They actually err on the side of UMG with this, too, often removing legal content....which obviously sucks. But I'm just saying it's amazingly far from impossible to comtrol the content your users are storing and distributing, even without having to actually view the file content. Stuff will always get through and people will always find a way, yeah, but there's going to be a big reduction.
Of course, I don't mean to say SOPA/PIPA stuff is going to pass and whatnot, cause really thats simply a pathetic attempt from an increasingly irrelevant industry to try to retain its stranglehold on media. The tech world is slowly winning that battle, without piracy, through legitmate means like Netflix or iTunes or Steam, which allow content creators to distribute content without the need for massive publishing conglomerates. Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple have gained massive political clout by waving their money around (check out how much MSFT and GOOG gave to Obama's campaign compared to media companies), so we're going to basically see policy changes that reflect their distribution beliefs. This is a pretty good thing for a modern consumer, who would prefer convenient digital distribution.
Despite the freedom of the electronic medium as we see it now, it still depends on physical devices at some point. If we really wanted to make this like the war on drugs we could always start bombing every factory producing counterfeit ipods, and blowing up every unlicensed wifi signal we can pick up... then things would get fun.
It also relies on an incredibly large engineering effort by Google. Think about how much money, time, and effort it takes to police YouTube. Every minute there are 60 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. That's one hour per second. You would need 10,800 employees working 8 hours a day to watch all the video uploaded to YouTube each day.
Now imagine if I setup my own video site, and it gets really popular. Even if I am 1/60th as popular as YouTube, that will be one hour of video uploaded every minute. The cost of policing that content would be so extravagant, I could not possibly afford it. Even if I tried, it would be vastly less effective than YouTube's system, which is effectively completely ineffective.
But how do they keep porn off YouTube? Easy. Porn is something a computer can detect. It has certain colors and patterns that a computer can see. Lots of flesh color? Something that is in the shape of a genital? Computers can detect like, just like facial recognition on security cameras.
Copyright is not something you can detect with a program. There's no general pattern. That's what makes it impossible to police.