Picking up on the piracy-doublespeak theme of my last post, let’s highlight a favorite talking point among piracy advocates and apologists, the one that goes like this: If the major producers were just smart enough to make works available conveniently and affordably, people would stop pirating. That was always a lie. And it’s been proven a lie by the filmed-entertainment ...
I guess it’s pick on Andy at TorrentFreak week. (Sorry, Andy. ) But a recent blog of his titled No Level of Copyright Enforcement Will Ever Be Enough For Big Media begs a response. Citing TF’s decade of experience covering the piracy battles, Andy repeats a familiar narrative that because piracy will never stop, and because pirates will continue to ...
Among the standard responses to any proposal to mitigate online piracy is an insistence that it just cannot be stopped. Perhaps not entirely. But it can be starved. That was the underlying goal of SOPA, but people decided the criminal sites deserved the money they were making because freedom. As many readers know, the piracy universe is still largely supported ...
Image by stefanocar75 Copyright holders have long insisted that search results play a substantial role in driving users toward pirate sites. Google and piracy advocates have generally countered that search does not drive much traffic to illegal sites because the people who consistently use infringing sites know what they’re doing and will go directly to the content they’re seeking. This is a ...
Photo by alexskopje Pond5 This week, the Court of Justice of the European Union concluded what any rational observer would conclude about websites that make large volumes of unlicensed copyrighted works available to the public — that their owners know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. A Netherlands-based foundation that protects copyright interests argued in the nation’s Supreme Court that two ...
