Glad to see the site I go to isn’t there. Also hilarious that I have Sky Sports and TNT and yet for 3pm I’m forced to stream, but also, sometimes it’s just easier for me to stream via an illegal site.
Do you want to kill what tiny fanbase you already have in America? Because this is how you kill what tiny fanbase you already have in America. We already have MLS to not give a fuck about, but if you make it impossible for fans of a premier team to watch their team play then people will pivot to MLS or a new sport entirely. And somebody might chime in to point out that they have no reason to care about people who aren’t paying customers, except that these white whale fans absolutely are paying customers because they buy team merch and don’t shut the fuck up about how other people should also pay attention to their team, thus expanding interest in their team across the American market.
I like the sport, but I can’t be bothered to give a shit about any team in particular. I just like the higher stakes games between high performance teams like in the world cup group stage and onward.
Premier league by all accounts is growing in popularity in the U.S. Them going to court sort of shows how valuable it’s become. But I of course agree this will lead to much lower viewing in total.
Seizing domains is HUGE blow but never a “Total Destruction”. Such ring is not operated by single enthusiast, it’s runned by a team of professional pirate siteops who do this for pretty comfortable living and who foresee such risks and have a plan for this type of incident. And i’m sure they have another bunch of domains already registered and fed to google. There’s no significant difference between getting domain banned in the country from where 95% of traffic is coming (and this is frequent issue) and loosing this domain at all. Your traffic is gone, your money is gone. So seizing domains without busting servers and siteops is far from winning final battle.
The title of the article is a bit misleading, as upon reading it you may came to conclusion that Russian pirate infrastructure is actively hunted by goverment. That’s not really true and the article itself adds some significant nuances.
Long story short: Piracy in Russia over last two years has greatly increased overall (in both demand and supply) due to sanctions making legal options unavailable. Number of piracy takedown requests has also increased, but only reason for that is local streaming services hunting for local content. This effectively means that it’s enough for siteop to remove some Russian titles from the library (or hide them for Russian IPs) to keep operating without any significant legal problems.
So pirates worldwide are benefiting from more pirate services with more content and better speeds that their Russian fellows keep bringing them.
In today’s world limiting access to content by location and government is stupid. If they would open their content worldwide, even if charging money, I bet they would get a lot more money.
Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book for a limited period.
This is misleading. IA had a restriction of one digital copy per real copy scanned, however they removed this restriction during covid - and that was when the publishers sued.
End of the day, IA tried to test the limits of them and ended up having them defined better in favour of the publishers. They paint themselves as the victim, but actually it’s their actions that made things worse. Hopefully they’ll straighten things out a bit in the appeal, but IA only have themselves to blame here.
I don’t know dude. I think the publishers here are in the wrong too.
IA does a lot more than being a library and this lawsuit will probably crush them. For the big publishers, the lent files are probably a fraction of a fraction of a percentage for their business.
IA also archives a lot of data, including hard to find books, websites, trailers, etc. I don’t think anyone else will step up to replace them.
If you don't believe in copyright, whatever, but IA was doing something blatantly violating the law and getting away with it until they decided to flamboyantly draw attention to themselves by removing the veneer of legality and just giving away unlimited copies.
Publishers absolutely were in the wrong, morally, but my point is that IA stepped out of the legal grey area and into what was completely wrong in law. Then, they (and apparently their argument still does) rely on a judge basically making the law up, and in doing so left no real option for the judge but to rule against them. Now, the grey area isn’t grey anymore, it’s explicitly prohibited.
If IA hadn’t broken the one digital per physical copy rule, or if they’d settled out of court or done anything sensible with their lawsuit, they wouldn’t have made the law worse.
It is a bullshit fake restriction because it doesn’t even exist. However, it’s something of a grey area that, up until IA poked the hornets nest, allowed a bit of wiggle room to get away with breaking copyright law.
Now a judge has ruled that managing one digital copy per physical copy is explicitly against the law as written. They aren’t even trying any sort of fair use argument, they’re basically just saying “we do public good” but don’t actually explain how that means anything in law.
Meanwhile, the lawyers get paid, and IA goes on fundraising campaigns.
Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)
British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.
In the US context, the founding of public libraries were most famously and substantially supported by Carnegie. A man of "crime and robbery" if there ever was one. When you hear "philanthropist" think "tax evasion". Not to mention how he came into possession of all that loot in the first place.
I agree with the author's point broadly but it's not well made.
Whether the site’s operator made $35 million from advertising remains a question, […]
I’m really curious, where this much money would come from. Advertising on these sites isn’t as lucrative and I won’t believe that they made on average 0.5$ from each visitor. Don’t people use ad blocking?
Only way to stop piracy is to make it easier and cheaper to buy the goods legitimately in all corners of the world. Since that won’t be happening, and since so much content is an outright gamble if it’s even any good, piracy will continue to grow.
*Looks at the 4 busted ass appliances, that were built to fall, I bought brand new 3 years ago that are barely clinging onto life. * Consumer protection huh? What a concept.
Oh thank the heavens, someone is here to save us guys!!! The corporate greed and multiple wars going on aren’t important right now, at least we are safe from free media!
Glad to see someone else have the exact reaction I did. They know this has nothing to do with consumer protections. Thats just blatant, bold-face lying.
Does Keiyoushi seems like the best extension repo alternative right now? They of course have the pre purge extensions, and some updates, but their rules about not discussing alternatives to them seems anti-community.
Does anyone know more of the players in this power vacuum?
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