Some ideals which people believe in, are fictitious and serve as lip-service in the politically correct newspeak of certain dominant position elites.
The point is aimed towards the so called rights holders, or more accurately, the US Content Monopolies (USCM) aka MPAA.
Copyrights are a relatively new monopoly. Without getting into its history, its current monstrous appetite for taxing end-users has grown exponentially with the fast spread of the internet and the digitization of sound and video.
When copyright laws were designed, as early as late 19th century, digital media was not even science fiction. Copyrights were intended to protect the economic rights of writers and composers, at times when distribution of their works was limited to 4 or 5 digits volumes, at best. It was thought that an author deserves the right to be compensated by those who consume his work. It was obvious that if someone will copy his work and sell it, the author would lose the income he was expecting and was entitled to. Thus an arrangement with public libraries was made so that they could purchase several copies of copyright books and loaned to the public for a fee.
Today’s technology enables easy distribution of the 3 most desired content types: movies, TV shows and popular music. Once these are digitized, they can be distributed via the internet by torrents to anyone who has a CPU (pc, mac, tablet, smartphone or streamer) linked to the internet. That’s practically everybody anywhere.
The USCM people fight the people who cannot afford to buy a box office ticket or to pay for a cable or satellite subscription. It’s obvious that watching one’s favorite TV series chapter as soon as it’s released, or buying a VOD, is cool, extremely convenient and fun. But it costs. US$99 (average) monthly in the US and more in Europe. The average monthly salary in the developed countries is between US$10,000 to US$1,200. In third world countries it’s significantly less.
People who struggle to support their families, cannot afford to pay cable, satellites and VOD. They do manage to link to the internet. Thus Netflix, where available, P2P, Popcorn Time etc. are their only solution for content consumption. The USCM will never make a nickel from them, because their alternative is not to watch movies, TV shows or listen to music albums. If the torrents or Popcorn Time option is unavailable, they will watch YouTube or porn (66% of young men and 16% of young women watch porn weekly!). But USCM will haunt the people that bring free or affordable decent content!.
By using the power money can buy, the USCM managed to maintain its monopoly (in many cases they claim copyrights for 70 years following the death of the last person who contributed to the work). In much more vital areas, monopoly power is restricted and regulated: Lifesaving pharmaceuticals are protected for maximum 20 years, and only if a patent was granted. Utility and nonfunctional designs — for less (depending in which country).
Even cable and satellite are forced to allow their competitors to use their infrastructure for a regulated fee. Networks are subject to “force to sell” regimes, under which they must provide everybody with desired content, such as sport.
This brings about the conclusion that it is all about politics and political power and immoral tradeoffs between administrations and huge money interests. There cannot be any other reason for the Polish authorities keeping the Ukrainian citizen Artem Vaulin, the creator of KickAss Torrents, in custody, for almost six months, awaiting a decision to extradite him to the US, as if he was a war criminal. The governments of this world cannot stop terrorists from communicating within their organization via Facebook, WhatsUp, and other media networks, although they can, but govern who may watch a movie and who may not.
The forecast for 2017 is that sharing of information and content in the internet will grow, and the monopolies over older content (other than box office tickets, current seasons TV series, new music albums, etc) will not be enforced because more content providers will replace those who would be shut. The files containing content are out there, in huge numbers and throughout disbursed locations of sites, being the sites of sharing, P2P users.
A new contribution to this development will be a Public Torrent Tracker Free for all, to facilitate the free or affordable content consumption.
It can be found on: https://popcorn-tracker.org
