Posted on 03/12/2020 10:38:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
Every day, hundreds of millions of Americans look forward to the treasure troves of digital content deposited on the World Wide Web. But these new and novel offerings are regularly compromised by online piracy, which makes it exceedingly difficult for content creators to earn their due. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center, this wanton theft costs the U.S. economy more than $29 billion per year in lost revenue. As the Senate deliberates on strategies to combat online piracy both at home and abroad, lawmakers must bear in mind the immense benefits that intellectual property (IP) brings to taxpayers and consumers – and the perils of selling innovators short. Now is the time to champion ingenuity, not kowtow to digital thieves trying to short-circuit the IP enjoyed by countless consumers.
With today’s cornucopia of digital offerings, there’s never been so many choices available to consumers with radically different tastes. For lovers of all things extraterrestrial, green, and pointy-eared (Baby Yoda), there’s Disney’s streaming platform Disney+. For connoisseurs of goofy Spaghetti Westerns, services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix boast plenty of options. But these services are far from free to provide for consumers. Subscription fees go toward a host of necessary upkeep, ranging from remastering old movies to developing exciting new plotlines for series such as The Mandalorian.
Online pirates are ruining the experience for law-abiding denizens of the digital domain by stealing the content outright. According to British piracy-tracking company MUSO, “global piracy numbers reached almost 190 billion pirate site visits in 2018 [latest year available].” Unsurprisingly, TV-related piracy took up the lion’s share of incidents, followed by film and music theft. These visits result in significant, tangible losses for content creators. In 2017, scholars from Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University noted, “we are aware of 26 peer-reviewed journal articles studying the economic harm caused by piracy, with 23 of them finding piracy causes significant harm to legal sales.”
While the content stolen is often American and the plurality of visits to illicit sites [17.4 billion in 2018] are made by Americans, many of the offending sites are created in other countries. Thousands of European websites offer bootleg versions of Netflix TV shows, sports games, and movies that enjoy IP protection – on paper. But countries such as Croatia, Sweden and Greece have lackluster copyright enforcement, allowing for pirate sites to provide shaky and illegal downloads to consumers anywhere around the world. Some of the largest pirating operations in the world, such as Kickass Torrents headed by Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin, operated with impunity for years under the guise of shady front companies. Many countries that host these serial offenders aren’t exactly keen on prosecuting online piracy; Croatia didn’t make its first digital privacy-related arrest until 2016.
Online pirates are ruining the experience for law-abiding denizens of the digital domain by stealing the content outright. According to British piracy-tracking company MUSO, “global piracy numbers reached almost 190 billion pirate site visits in 2018 [latest year available].” Unsurprisingly, TV-related piracy took up the lion’s share of incidents, followed by film and music theft. These visits result in significant, tangible losses for content creators. In 2017, scholars from Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University noted, “we are aware of 26 peer-reviewed journal articles studying the economic harm caused by piracy, with 23 of them finding piracy causes significant harm to legal sales.”
While the content stolen is often American and the plurality of visits to illicit sites [17.4 billion in 2018] are made by Americans, many of the offending sites are created in other countries. Thousands of European websites offer bootleg versions of Netflix TV shows, sports games, and movies that enjoy IP protection – on paper. But countries such as Croatia, Sweden and Greece have lackluster copyright enforcement, allowing for pirate sites to provide shaky and illegal downloads to consumers anywhere around the world. Some of the largest pirating operations in the world, such as Kickass Torrents headed by Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin, operated with impunity for years under the guise of shady front companies. Many countries that host these serial offenders aren’t exactly keen on prosecuting online piracy; Croatia didn’t make its first digital privacy-related arrest until 2016.
Online pirates are ruining the experience for law-abiding denizens of the digital domain by stealing the content outright. According to British piracy-tracking company MUSO, “global piracy numbers reached almost 190 billion pirate site visits in 2018 [latest year available].” Unsurprisingly, TV-related piracy took up the lion’s share of incidents, followed by film and music theft. These visits result in significant, tangible losses for content creators. In 2017, scholars from Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University noted, “we are aware of 26 peer-reviewed journal articles studying the economic harm caused by piracy, with 23 of them finding piracy causes significant harm to legal sales.”
While the content stolen is often American and the plurality of visits to illicit sites [17.4 billion in 2018] are made by Americans, many of the offending sites are created in other countries. Thousands of European websites offer bootleg versions of Netflix TV shows, sports games, and movies that enjoy IP protection – on paper. But countries such as Croatia, Sweden and Greece have lackluster copyright enforcement, allowing for pirate sites to provide shaky and illegal downloads to consumers anywhere around the world. Some of the largest pirating operations in the world, such as Kickass Torrents headed by Ukrainian national Artem Vaulin, operated with impunity for years under the guise of shady front companies. Many countries that host these serial offenders aren’t exactly keen on prosecuting online piracy; Croatia didn’t make its first digital privacy-related arrest until 2016.
Millions of American households and billions of digital denizens depend on a fair, robust system. Without strong IP protections and enforcement against internet pirates, movies such as another installment of Pirates of the Caribbean may never set sail again.
So is that an argument for or against pirating?
Arrrghh!
First, kill all the spammers. Announce that the pirates are next. They will stop.
Time for patents and copyrights to have a minimum monthly fee and the fees be based on the abound of revenue generated. Congress has ignored the limited time clause of the constitution, ruining those who pay for copyright and patent protections the opportunity to be paid back with the content going to the public domain.
Then we’ll care about the pirates.
Anything that weakens an enemy does not have to be justified.
Liars. It doesn’t cost industry anywhere near what they claim.
Online pirates will not buy the products they are pirating at any price if they can’t find a free download. Industry is assuming they could get full price from these “potential customers.” That’s total and complete B.S.
The industry has fallen for the classic blunder of assuming their “entertainment” content is worth spit.
There’s nothing coming out of Hollywood worth watching. One of the advantages of being deaf is it doesn’t matter what language as long as you can find English subtitles. :)
Yes, God forbid we don’t get “Pirates of the Caribbean 17: Jack Sparrow Sails To Retirement Island”
I think what Hollywood has forgotten is their people continually insult common sense people and patriots and expect us to follow them to the box office. I wouldn’t give, as a recent example, Harrison Ford, a penny after he trashed the POTUS and America hawking his new film (a remake of a classic that he probably changed to reflect the PC world we now live in)”Call of the Wild. When Noah came out a few years ago, my church wanted to go see it, but I told them that “rock people” built the Ark and Noah had a stowaway and met a guy on the water wanting to sell them things. What an insult to Bible believers! I’m sure there were many non Christians that pirated it to keep from giving them any money for the trash. I could give a list of names that I’m sure most people wouldn’t give them the time of day, let alone buy them a new Bugatti. Hollywood consistently gives award shows telling us how much they hate us and then expect us to go to the box office. I haven’t seen a movie in a movie house in literally decades. I have my daughters Netfix, Hulu, and Amazon passwords for my own accounts piggybacked on her. If she unsubscribes, there will be no paid for movies in my house. It’s all trash! 1 film out of 100 is worth seeing and if that’s the case, I will pay for it on a Monday Matinee with the senior discount.
Good point.
Also, the very idea of “intellectual property” is a paradigm from a bygone era that isn’t sustainable anymore. There is no feasible way to protect IP now that pretty much everyone on the planet has a device in their pocket that can replicate any picture, motion picture, or audio with the click of a few buttons. I’m sure we’ll try to keep propping this system up, but we’re doomed to failure.
What happens when “mobile devices” become just a chip implanted into our brains? Anything we see or hear we will be able to copy to permanent storage and share with anyone else. How are they going to police that?
“It doesn’t cost industry anywhere near what they claim.”
Hollywood is good a fudging ledgers to show that “hit movies” didn’t really make any money. Then you find out a few years later that that movie that bombed at the box office is a major cult classic once it went to DVD. Their numbers don’t add-up.
Broken window fallacy
This article overstates the problem by citing numbers of “visits” to these piracy sites. Most of them are torrent download sites. Torrents download by grabbing bits of content from suppliers wherever they can be found. Some of the most effective torrent software causes downloading one title to involve “visiting” hundreds of sites many times in succession.
This would have been a bigger issue back when Hollywood made content worth stealing.
It’s fun to talk theory, but out here in reality part of the reason piracy is so rampant is it’s mostly untraceable. Best you can hope for is that folks aren’t using a VPN to obfuscate their IP and you can complain to their carrier.
The first pirated copies of movies show up with Chinese (Mandarin) subtitles embedded.
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