Where does the article mention a website-blocking system? I'm curious as to the technical details. I'm sure it'll work this time.
"For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online"
Hrmph. Citation required.
Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:
* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.
* Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.
* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It's basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney's latest remake is.
Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.
> * Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.
What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action. It's a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0].
I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it.
I'll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven't pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn't pirate a single movie- nobody I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I've been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I've caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15/month on Netflix, $12/month for Disney+, $10/month for Crave, $6/month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr/Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43/month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare).
The problem is that Hollywood doesn't understand "commoditize your complement."
Having more than one streaming service isn't a big problem, assuming they're priced reasonably. Going from one service with everything for $15 to ten services with a tenth of everything for $15 each isn't really that, but that's not the root of it.
Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through. If you actually subscribe to three different services, you want to turn on your TV and see everything available to you.
The companies in the best position to do this are the likes of Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft. Hollywood isn't too stupid to realize the dangers of that, but they're missing the obvious solution to it.
Publish a standard streaming API, so that anybody can make a streaming client, the same as anybody could make a VCR. Then the dominant consumer of the API won't be a big monopolistic corporation that will then be able to use its power against the movie producers, it will be a zillion different companies selling dirt cheap HDMI dongles with WiFi who each individually has no power at all. They'll all end up running whatever open source software somebody publishes to consolidate all the different services into one interface, which Hollywood could then improve themselves the same as any other open source project. It competitively atomizes a third party middle man that they don't want.
But it's basically the opposite of DRM. Security through clarity -- make everything open so nobody powerful can insert themselves between you and the viewer. Because big tech companies are more of a threat to them than The Pirate Bay. And they have to realize that before they're willing to do it.
> I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy.
I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established.
Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?
>For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action.
It's funny to think that the platform, which is pretty easily replicable, is nearly as valuable as the content.
Why should the content creators hand over all over the margins to Netflix?
d. clarify or strengthen rights holders' enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory "website-blocking" and "de-indexing" regime.
> The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.
The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.
It's an American law which implements a certain part of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which is indeed in force in Canada (since 2014) with a local implementing law, as well as in the European Union and many other countries worldwide:
With all of that said, Canada's legal analogue to the DMCA is a "notice and notice" regime, not a "notice and takedown" regime. The rights holder or their agent notifies the ISP, and the ISP notifies the user without necessarily taking down the content. A court order can be sought to force it offline, and I'd guess (but don't know) that some ISPs will voluntarily cooperate to some degree beyond the legal requirement.
Tell that to the founders of the Pirate Bay who were continuously raided and eventually wound up in jail, despite not being American, and not being in America.
The DMCA is like the EU's GDPR: a law specific to affected countries, that nevertheless affects the entire world.
In the GDPR's case, that's because every company wants to be able to have European customers.
But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc.
And sure, anyone could run a perfectly robust torrent tracker over Tor, that nobody could take down through DMCAing the DNS provider et al. But, without a large accessible market of people visiting to show ads, there'd be no economic incentive to do so — so nobody bothers.
PC piracy has been neutered by Denuvo, which is the most effective DRM the platform has ever seen, and has been embraced by almost all major publishers.
Ubisoft embraced Denuvo for all PC product in 2017. Thereafter their PC sales revenue and PC's share of their total revenue has hit record levels.
The other factor is that with the rise of Crypto, PC torrents are now filled with miners and other malware.
The other factor is the largest games being online-only or having exclusive online functionality.
Digital distribution (Steam) is an aged and established concept now. What Steam provides is not and has never been unique - they just had the best exclusives (Valve games).
Denuvo is being cracked by Empress, who is pretty legendary considering all scene groups gave up. Interestingly she has a habit of making controversial comments on gender identity on reddit.
The reason things like steam can "best" piracy is because piracy is so crippled by anti-piracy. Between sites disappearing, spotty content, abusive ads, viruses, malware, and risk of prosecution, it's not hard being better. Imagine if that weren't the case and the free experience were seamless.
If your definition of "piracy" are crappy streaming websites and shoddy warez dumps full of links to rapidshare, they are the same they were 15 years ago: full of malware and questionable ads.
BitTorrent trackers are more alive and popular than ever, and you always get what's advertised thanks to relatively high quality moderation (if you visit the right places, of course, sites like TPB don't count)
Are you kidding? Piracy has never been easier lol, gb internet and torrents for every popular show and movie on public trackers. The pirate bay is still around and going strong. I just don’t want my Goverment to waste money trying to stop the internet stoppable
As soon as you build a business model capable of delivering a quality experience, the necessary logistical entanglements that facilitate your business are now directly targetable by legal systems everywhere.
This is the soft power of the market at work. Short of refusing to create business presence or monetize, you'll never be able to get much of anything done.
If anything is to be done to force providers to raise the bar above a compelling, high quality piracy alternative, it quite literally has to be out of the goodness of contributor's hearts. Which means it must be so easy to build, people don't mind spending leisure time on it.
And assholes would still screw it up and ruin a good thing for everyone else. That won't ever change.
I can't wait until competent leadership who actually understand business, who are actual entrepreneurs, get into positions of power - like Andrew Yang with his policies.
I keep saying this: I believe piracy is a valid counterweight mechanism to the capitalistic for-profit system that would milk society dry/fleece us year round until we die from the elements: charging us more than is reasonable so we'll so FU and pirate, or due to there being so much amazing content that you're competing for our time for entertainment because there's so much amazing entertainment to choose from?
Likewise I believe a UBI lever, where $xxx is allocated/earmarked monthly towards different types of creative/content work (to be defined/determined) will be how you fund the industry and artists (once they reach a level of competency commanding whatever level of pay); they can live off of their general UBI, developing their talents, their health/self-improvement/knowledge and skill development, or raise a family - in the meantime. And then we'll also have content produced that better mirrors the likes/needs/desires of society; Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars voucher policy, every eligible getting $100/year to contribute to the political candidate of their choice falls is a similar/same mechanism but for different system - to break apart the duopoly - along with Ranked Choice Voting would compound powerfully; he wants to do this for journalism - "Journalism Dollars" - essentially to combat the duopoly (to create more than 2 core narratives that gets pumped out) but also the mainstream media/media industrial complex in general.
Re: "Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint."
Jordan Peterson's Rule 1 of his latest book - "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" - goes into this necessary balance in very good detail - I'd recommend reading it; "DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT"
Translated: I can't afford X so it's OK to steal it, because corporations are evil for being for-profit. Got it.
re UBI: you don't have to wait to see how 'well' would UBI work in practice - ask anyone from any European countries about their Roma population and how effectively they use the 'subsidies' (not the right word, but I can't recall the right one) from government. So many enterpreneurs and artists ... (/s just in case)
A friend of mine (Canadian) uses piracy sites a lot for one reason: all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu)
>all the content they are interested in is geofenced to USA and completely unavailable in the country (Hulu)
Like what? I saw a comment[1] a few days ago saying something to this effect, but someone replied pointing out it was available, just not in a manner that OP was satisfied with. FWIW I checked a hulu original that I recently watched, and it was available in canada under disney+.
Disney+ having Hulu content in Canada is only a month or 2 old. Being region locked out of content in Canada has been the norm for many, many years. What has been extremely common is one of the big telcos (Bell in particular) buying the Canadian rights and then either locking it to cable without a streaming option or using their own streaming options that have horrific apps and experiences. In the last year or so it has gotten a lot better, but people still have a lot of scars from getting hosed by telcos.
My daughter's friend uses a VPN to watch Netflix (paid account, not shared), apparently for EU shows or something. She's 14 years old. (we live in Canada)
Frankly, it's been long suggested by the government to do that. I would not be surprised if they did as well.
In Canada, our freedom of expression is limited by whatever the Government deems appropriate:
> Freedom of expression in Canada is protected as a "fundamental freedom" by Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter also permits the government to enforce "reasonable" limits.
Unfortunately, there is not much guidelines these days on what "reasonable" is considered. I like to hope it would not be abused...
> In Canada, our freedom of expression is limited by whatever the Government deems appropriate:
The same could be said for the United States or really just about any other country, as there are restrictions on free speech here (think "fighting words," etc.)
In Canada, what the government deems appropriate is under a version of the Sword of Damocles known as the electorate. A government can lose confidence of the house at any time in the way we know it. We can start to see this with a polarized cabinet in Alberta right now.
If we continue to teach good civics and encourage people promise no safe votes to politicians, they won't make reasonable limits unreasonable.
Exactly. While the linked proposal isn’t very heavy on details it does include what appears to be a pretty open stance on protecting Canadian internet users rights and freedoms.
This will do little to nothing to piracy. Commercial copyright infringement is already a crime and police can shutdown piracy websites in Canada. Isohunt guy cant attest to that. Meanwhile big entities like pornhub(Canadian org) regularly has copyright infringed content and the government does nothing about that.
Piracy as a reason is a complete lie.
This is about far more about political censorship in Canada. This is about censoring the media and free speech.
The current government has extensive experience at censoring their political opponents. They are quite public about 'accreditation' of the media and 'licensing' the news.
"Proposes" has strong connotations for what amounts to throwing out a pile of ideas and seeking feedback. Website blocking is listed as one of several possible actions.
What's going to stop someone from spending 5$ a month on a VPN and connecting to a neighboring country and continuing to torrent things, this time, much more securely? Is the next step banning VPN clients?
If Canada gave anti-piracy law protection beyond copyright to only content available for sale in Canada at a certain quality minimum, you would see so, so much more content available in Canada.
The media companies would also have way less natural piracy to deal with in the first place and the government would have to spend less money on the illegal behavior that is left.
They could even go beyond and make media company adhoc enforcement of those laws illegal (ex no torrent user scarelettering)
Or the media companies would spring up a streaming service with a monthly price of 1 million dollars to satisfy the law without actually changing the market conditions.
Readit News
"For Canada to have an innovative and flourishing digital economy, we must protect copyright online"
Hrmph. Citation required.
Anyway, I'm not sure why businesses are so concerned about copyright still. Maybe this is specific to Canada? But country-specific things aside:
* The DMCA already makes it easy enough to keep things like KickAssTorrents offline, which was honestly the closest I've seen to a good tracker going mainstream.
* Steam has already shown how to "best" piracy to the extent that a business can. It's not via copyright laws. Everyone thought rampant piracy would mean Steam won't work in Russia. That aged well.
* Actually combating piracy on a technical level suffers greatly from the 80/20 rule. You can eliminate 80% of the piracy with 20% of the effort. But getting that last 20% is going to take 1000% of the remaining 80% of the work. (Sorry, yes, that was an attempt at a joke). It's basically not going to happen. Look at how well things like optical media DRM have gone. Look at how streaming DRM is going. Look at how hard it is for even *China* to stop its people from accessing free information online, much less normal countries with normal amounts of human rights abuses stop people from getting downloads of whatever Disney's latest remake is.
Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint.
What's ironic to me is that, movie piracy was steadily falling and effectively dead after Netflix launched their streaming-video platform, very similar to how video game piracy started to taper off as Steam gained traction. For a single low monthly fee you got access to movies from all the major networks, and a good selection of TV shows as a bonus. The networks started getting greedy - HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, Peacock, Discovery+, the list goes on - all wanting their own $5-$15/month cut on the action. It's a wonder why piracy has been back on the rise[0].
I agree that the quasi-monopolies of early Netflix or Steam through most of it's history are arguably bad, but the irony is that they're the most consumer-friendly ways to distribute media while effectively curbing piracy. The fragmentation of services; managing potentially a dozen subscriptions and the apps the accompany them, gets tiring for users who just want to sit down and watch Star Trek without hunting for it.
I'll throw in my two cents, that my personal experiences line up with this 100%. Before ~2010 when I was introduced to Steam I pirated virtually every game I played, but since then have only done so in very extreme circumstances. Similarly with music, as soon as Spotify, then Tidal were introduced to Canada, I haven't pirated a song since. Movies on the other hand, there was a several-year period where I didn't pirate a single movie- nobody I knew did anymore. In the past ~2-3 years I've been having people ask me about torrenting movies again, and I've caught myself doing it a lot more often than I would like to, but I just can't bring myself to spend $15/month on Netflix, $12/month for Disney+, $10/month for Crave, $6/month for Paramount+... While you can setup Radarr/Sonarr and Emby to accomplish the same for $0 (you could argue the cost of storage, but the $43/month saved on services gets you 3 brand new 4TB hard drives each year with money to spare).
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/piracy-is-back.html
Having more than one streaming service isn't a big problem, assuming they're priced reasonably. Going from one service with everything for $15 to ten services with a tenth of everything for $15 each isn't really that, but that's not the root of it.
Their problem is that people are going to want a single interface to view everything through. If you actually subscribe to three different services, you want to turn on your TV and see everything available to you.
The companies in the best position to do this are the likes of Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft. Hollywood isn't too stupid to realize the dangers of that, but they're missing the obvious solution to it.
Publish a standard streaming API, so that anybody can make a streaming client, the same as anybody could make a VCR. Then the dominant consumer of the API won't be a big monopolistic corporation that will then be able to use its power against the movie producers, it will be a zillion different companies selling dirt cheap HDMI dongles with WiFi who each individually has no power at all. They'll all end up running whatever open source software somebody publishes to consolidate all the different services into one interface, which Hollywood could then improve themselves the same as any other open source project. It competitively atomizes a third party middle man that they don't want.
But it's basically the opposite of DRM. Security through clarity -- make everything open so nobody powerful can insert themselves between you and the viewer. Because big tech companies are more of a threat to them than The Pirate Bay. And they have to realize that before they're willing to do it.
I doubt that would remain the case indefinitely. There would be too much temptation to increase revenues once they were established.
Perhaps the question should be: what would the market look like if there were multiple providers, each of which had equal access to license content they felt best fit their customer base?
It's funny to think that the platform, which is pretty easily replicable, is nearly as valuable as the content.
Why should the content creators hand over all over the margins to Netflix?
Read the longer version rather than the press release: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html
d. clarify or strengthen rights holders' enforcement tools against intermediaries, including by way of a statutory "website-blocking" and "de-indexing" regime.
The DMCA is an American law, which does not apply in Canada or much of the rest of the world.
https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/treaties/ShowResults?start_year=...
With all of that said, Canada's legal analogue to the DMCA is a "notice and notice" regime, not a "notice and takedown" regime. The rights holder or their agent notifies the ISP, and the ISP notifies the user without necessarily taking down the content. A court order can be sought to force it offline, and I'd guess (but don't know) that some ISPs will voluntarily cooperate to some degree beyond the legal requirement.
DMCA is a country-specific thing. Moreover, it is specific to a country the article is not about.
In the GDPR's case, that's because every company wants to be able to have European customers.
But in the US's case, it's because Internet commerce and ad-tech companies mostly exist within the US, and so you can't have a profitable torrent tracker / pirate-TV streaming site / etc. because — if the DMCA says you're not to be traded with — then you won't be able to get these US businesses to place ads on your site, or engage with US payment processors, etc.
And sure, anyone could run a perfectly robust torrent tracker over Tor, that nobody could take down through DMCAing the DNS provider et al. But, without a large accessible market of people visiting to show ads, there'd be no economic incentive to do so — so nobody bothers.
Ubisoft embraced Denuvo for all PC product in 2017. Thereafter their PC sales revenue and PC's share of their total revenue has hit record levels.
The other factor is that with the rise of Crypto, PC torrents are now filled with miners and other malware.
The other factor is the largest games being online-only or having exclusive online functionality.
Digital distribution (Steam) is an aged and established concept now. What Steam provides is not and has never been unique - they just had the best exclusives (Valve games).
BitTorrent trackers are more alive and popular than ever, and you always get what's advertised thanks to relatively high quality moderation (if you visit the right places, of course, sites like TPB don't count)
This is the soft power of the market at work. Short of refusing to create business presence or monetize, you'll never be able to get much of anything done.
If anything is to be done to force providers to raise the bar above a compelling, high quality piracy alternative, it quite literally has to be out of the goodness of contributor's hearts. Which means it must be so easy to build, people don't mind spending leisure time on it.
And assholes would still screw it up and ruin a good thing for everyone else. That won't ever change.
I keep saying this: I believe piracy is a valid counterweight mechanism to the capitalistic for-profit system that would milk society dry/fleece us year round until we die from the elements: charging us more than is reasonable so we'll so FU and pirate, or due to there being so much amazing content that you're competing for our time for entertainment because there's so much amazing entertainment to choose from?
Likewise I believe a UBI lever, where $xxx is allocated/earmarked monthly towards different types of creative/content work (to be defined/determined) will be how you fund the industry and artists (once they reach a level of competency commanding whatever level of pay); they can live off of their general UBI, developing their talents, their health/self-improvement/knowledge and skill development, or raise a family - in the meantime. And then we'll also have content produced that better mirrors the likes/needs/desires of society; Andrew Yang's Democracy Dollars voucher policy, every eligible getting $100/year to contribute to the political candidate of their choice falls is a similar/same mechanism but for different system - to break apart the duopoly - along with Ranked Choice Voting would compound powerfully; he wants to do this for journalism - "Journalism Dollars" - essentially to combat the duopoly (to create more than 2 core narratives that gets pumped out) but also the mainstream media/media industrial complex in general.
Re: "Dunno. As much as I hate copyright, and as much as I love free culture, it's hard for me to get too interested or worried about stuff like this nowadays, from a legal realism standpoint."
Jordan Peterson's Rule 1 of his latest book - "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" - goes into this necessary balance in very good detail - I'd recommend reading it; "DO NOT CARELESSLY DENIGRATE SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT"
More like their landlord can live off their general UBI.
Abolish rent!
re UBI: you don't have to wait to see how 'well' would UBI work in practice - ask anyone from any European countries about their Roma population and how effectively they use the 'subsidies' (not the right word, but I can't recall the right one) from government. So many enterpreneurs and artists ... (/s just in case)
I've no idea if anything has changed in the last month, but here's what he wrote on the topic most recently: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2021/03/blocking-is-back/
Like what? I saw a comment[1] a few days ago saying something to this effect, but someone replied pointing out it was available, just not in a manner that OP was satisfied with. FWIW I checked a hulu original that I recently watched, and it was available in canada under disney+.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26772054
> The Government of Canada Launches Consultation on a Modern Copyright Framework for Online Intermediaries
to
> Canadian government proposes website-blocking system for piracy websites
?
In Canada, our freedom of expression is limited by whatever the Government deems appropriate:
> Freedom of expression in Canada is protected as a "fundamental freedom" by Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter also permits the government to enforce "reasonable" limits.
Unfortunately, there is not much guidelines these days on what "reasonable" is considered. I like to hope it would not be abused...
Is hyperbole constructive?
The same could be said for the United States or really just about any other country, as there are restrictions on free speech here (think "fighting words," etc.)
If we continue to teach good civics and encourage people promise no safe votes to politicians, they won't make reasonable limits unreasonable.
Piracy as a reason is a complete lie.
This is about far more about political censorship in Canada. This is about censoring the media and free speech.
The current government has extensive experience at censoring their political opponents. They are quite public about 'accreditation' of the media and 'licensing' the news.
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/693.nsf/eng/00191.html
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2019/01/bell-urged-canadian-gove...
The media companies would also have way less natural piracy to deal with in the first place and the government would have to spend less money on the illegal behavior that is left.
They could even go beyond and make media company adhoc enforcement of those laws illegal (ex no torrent user scarelettering)