Hoist the black flag

The major media companies in the US would like everyone to believe that access to filesharing sites would cause people to stop buying legitimate works. If you look at the actual research (as opposed to the propaganda from the media companies), this is simply not true. Of course, if you ~~buy enough politicians~~ are a job creator, you can get anything passed, so despite facts to the contrary, laws were passed in the US to punish anyone who dared to use a filesharing site.

Switzerland chose a different route. Given that the data suggested that filesharing sites present no harm to content creators, they decided that there was no reason to punish users of file download sites. Filesharing in Switzerland is completely legal. This, of course, mightily pissed off the media companies, and Switzerland was added to the Office of US Trade Representative's copyright "naughty list", known as the US Special 301 report.

To punish Switzerland for its impertinence, the media companies severely delay and limit what media can be purchased here. Television shows and movies are released years after they're released in the US. Anyone who wants to watch them before then has to get them from a filesharing site.

Like most people who use filesharing sites, I want to support artists and companies that I like. I donate to NPR, I support Patreon campaigns, and I'm happy to buy movies and TV shows that I enjoy.

As I change the address on my accounts from US to CH, I lose the ability to pay for media. If I want to listen to a song or watch a movie within a year of it being released, my only option is to download it for free on a filesharing site. It's ironic that the RIAA and MPAA are basically forcing an entire country to not pay for their products.

Fortunately, there are alternatives.

Comments

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark" When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might...

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology: The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late ...

Separate Addresses and Have I Been Pwned

Many years ago, I started giving out a different email address to every places that asked for one. To do this, I had to own a domain and set up email hosting. When I first set this up, I accepted email addressed to any address at my domain. Since then, email security has improved a lot. To use security features like DMARC , I had to stop accepting all addresses and had to only accept mail from a list of valid addresses. A few years ago, a guy by the name of Troy Hunt started collecting the lists of compromised databases and passwords that were floating around the internet. He put together a site called Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and after proving your ownership of a domain, you can request a list of all of the accounts at that domain that have been compromised. You can also do the same thing for a single email address if you don't own a domain. It's important to remember that this isn't a list of ALL compromised accounts -- only the ones that have made their way to ...

The Flag's a Plus

Search This Blog