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Mark
I stand with my feet
join:2009-07-11
Canada

Mark to Hydraglass

Member

to Hydraglass

Re: [Serious] Canada's Internet Piracy rules

Yeah I learned that when I went to pay mlb.com some money to indulge a passion, all of Canada is the Jays 'home' zone and 'live' video isn't available until 90 minutes past the completion of the game...why would anyone pay money for such nonsense?

Hydraglass
Premium Member
join:2002-05-08

Hydraglass

Premium Member

said by Mark:

Yeah I learned that when I went to pay mlb.com some money to indulge a passion, all of Canada is the Jays 'home' zone and 'live' video isn't available until 90 minutes past the completion of the game...why would anyone pay money for such nonsense?

Precisely my complaint - blackouts are just yet another geoblocking restriction... Give me the live streams of every baseball, hockey, football, basketball, and MLS game in Canada. Give me live feeds of every Nascar and Formula 1 race. Give me live feeds of all the major FIFA games. Give me the latest episodes of "Top Gear" the day they air in the UK. Let me watch "The Walking Dead" anywhere between Sunday night at 9pm when it airs and the next Sunday at 8pm when they play the repeat of it. Let me watch the entire series of Orphan Black up to the last episode played in a format I can download to my Nexus Tablet so I can take it with me on my train trip to Chicago next week... etc..

Give me this stuff simply, straightforward, not from a dozen different providers and their little walled gardens with hoops galore, and I'll happily pay for it and play by their rules. Until then, I'll keep paying what I'm paying but don't expect me to play by their rules when they put up artificial unnecessary blockades to my enjoyment of media I've certainly already paid for probably twice over. If it means I torrent a tv series over a vpn that is already on my PVR but I can't get it off because they encrypt the hard drive because they are douche canoes... well f' em.

dirtyjeffer0
Posers don't use avatars.
Premium Member
join:2002-02-21
London, ON

dirtyjeffer0 to El Quintron

Premium Member

to El Quintron
said by El Quintron:

Stealing a DVD from a store deprives the owner of a good s/he owns and prevents them from selling it, so you're hurting the owner in two ways: You're taking something s/he bought and if that DVD belonged to a merchant you're preventing s/he from making a sale and essentially destroying their livelihoods.

Copyright is about controlling the right to make copies. When you commit copyright infringement you're not stealing anything from the owner or preventing them from selling copies. What you are doing is skewering the market downwards and artificially deflating the cost of the good the merchant intends to sell.

It's still bad, but nowhere near as bad as stealing a physical good for the merchant for the reasons I mentioned above. It's against the law, but it's governed differently for what I think now obvious reasons.

downloading the movie is still depriving the owner of the store and the company who created said material, a sale though...while you haven't stolen a physical copy (which harms the person selling it two fold, loss of item purchased, loss of potential sale), it still "harms" the legitimate selling person.

while there are a lot of legitimate ways to get content today without having physical content, just think about 10-15 years ago what retail landscape looked like for media...malls would usually have 3-4 "record stores"...video rental stores were in every neighbourhood....nowadays, most malls have maybe 1 record store (if any), and movie rental stores are a thing of the past...that's not to say that pirating was the cause, but it certainly contributed to the decline in sales.

El Quintron
Cancel Culture Ambassador
Premium Member
join:2008-04-28
Tronna

El Quintron

Premium Member

Although I've already listed the potential harms of downloading, the second part of your response regarding record stores, record sales were killed by legal alternatives and the record industry itself.

Namely: iTunes and Wal Mart on the competing services side, and the record industry's love of selling a 25$ CD with one of two good songs on it.

The music I buy is alive and well, but it's generally available on Vinyl, with a digital download coupon, which is exactly how I want it.

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone to dirtyjeffer0

Premium Member

to dirtyjeffer0
said by dirtyjeffer0:

downloading the movie is still depriving the owner of the store and the company who created said material, a sale though...while you haven't stolen a physical copy (which harms the person selling it two fold, loss of item purchased, loss of potential sale), it still "harms" the legitimate selling person.

People have various opinions on the moral equivalency and just has been done in the past I have no doubt in my mind that they will continue to convey their until they are blue in the face, but none of this is relevant to the initial point.

There is absolutely nothing similar between stealing a DVD from a store and pirating a movie off the Internet when it comes to how they are dealt with under the law. Theft of a DVD from a store is dealt with under the theft sections of the Criminal Code of Canada, whereas illegally downloading a movie off the Internet is dealt with under a completely different legislative framework which is primarily civil in nature but also includes criminal provisions for the most egregious examples, such as setting up a table in the Pacific Mall and selling thousands of illegally downloaded movies for a significant profit.

I am willing to accept an argument from individuals who claim these two acts are morally equivalent, even though I may not hold that view myself for several different reasons. But they are in no way legally related, and anyone who claims as such is entirely wrong.

Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium Member
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS

Anav

Premium Member

I would also say there is a huge difference from an individual who knowingly makes a copy of the authentic movie and places it on the internet, compared to an individual downloading segments of files from multitudes of others, without really knowing what they are downloading. The act itself means little in my books. There is no purchase, no profit, no transaction per se, no guarantee.

aqk
join:2006-07-17
Elgin, QC

aqk to JamezGuy1

Member

to JamezGuy1
said by JamezGuy1 :

first its piracy next thing their robbing banks we need to set

And ultimately, the kid starts smoking cigarettes.

Ahhhh... those gateway crimes!
AsherN
Premium Member
join:2010-08-23
Thornhill, ON

AsherN to Gone

Premium Member

to Gone
Further to that, the loss of revenue from downloads is also iffy.

First TV shows, especially from services you subscribe to. There are 4 possible ways to watch those shows
1) live, commercials and all
2) PVR, and watch it with commercials
3) PVR, and skip the commercials
4) download it with the commercials edited out already.

1,2,3 are all legal. 4 is not, but how does it differ from 3?

As with movies, I claasify movies in 3 categories
1) I want to see it in a theatre and I'll gladly fork out $25 for me and the mrs.
2) I want to see it, not worth $25. I'll wait until it gets to PPV.
3) I wouldn't mind seeing it, put i know it's not worth the money.
a) I'll wait until it's on netflix or
b) I'll download it.

1, 2 and 3a are legal. 3b is illegal, but how does it deprive the rights holder from revenue if I would simply not have watched it anyway if I couldn't download it?

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

1 edit

Gone

Premium Member

Lost revenue is entirely theoretical and can't be definitively proven for a multitude of reasons, the largest namely being that you can't assume someone who pirated content would have paid for it if it wasn't available to be pirated.

This is why I don't buy into the whole parallel some people attempt to draw between theft and copyright infringement. Theft assumes that you actually deprived someone of something that they already had, be it by physically taking it or through fraud. In contrast, theoretical revenue has no value. It is just an assumption that you can't prove. This is why copyright infringement is not the same as theft in the eyes of the law! Having said that, just because I don't classify copyright infringement as theft doesn't mean that I am so deluded as to think it isn't wrong. But like all matters of civil litigation, interpretation is up to a judge and the one with the better lawyer is often the winner no matter how much one assumes the other side will win.

digitalfutur
Sees More Than Shown
Premium Member
join:2000-07-15
GTA

digitalfutur to Gone

Premium Member

to Gone
So if I understand you correctly, an individual can download any number of copyrighted movies for personal use, is that right?
digitalfutur

digitalfutur to Anav

Premium Member

to Anav
So as long as an individual didn't know what he or she was downloading, that makes the downloading of copyrighted movies legal?

Gone
Premium Member
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON

Gone to digitalfutur

Premium Member

to digitalfutur
said by digitalfutur:

So if I understand you correctly, an individual can download any number of copyrighted movies for personal use, is that right?

Please point out where I said anything that would even remotely indicate that I suggested that.

edit - n/m, I see the typo. Fixed it. Thanks.

digitalfutur
Sees More Than Shown
Premium Member
join:2000-07-15
GTA

digitalfutur

Premium Member

Thanks for the clarification.