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silisili 1 days ago [-]
I'm pretty uneasy about legal action against the subscribers themselves. If you can prove intent, maybe? But I'd argue many or even most don't realize they're doing anything illegal.
These IPTV companies, in my experience, never advertise that it's illegal. It's just give us money for a lot of TV channels, just like a cable company does.
hn_throwaway_99 23 hours ago [-]
I'm not familiar with how these IPTV companies market their services, but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
It's like those folks that sold bootleg DVDs out of their trenchcoats in Manhattan - the defense of "gosh, I never knew buying a just-released-in-theaters Hollywood blockbuster for $5 by some dude on the side of Broadway was illegal" was never going to fly.
silisili 22 hours ago [-]
> don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost
Possibly, but not always. When Red Pocket and the other cheap mvnos came around, people were skeptical for the same reason - but it was all above board.
Pricing depends on sales channel and price. If you slum the dregs of shady marketplaces, you can get it for like 3 or 4 bucks a month. But in more mainstream settings, resellers often try to charge as much as 20 or 30 (or more) per month which isn't quite as drastic.
In the US, a few people in my mom's friend circle were raving about their 'magic box.' It cost a couple hundred but got TV, so they were happy. AFAICT it's some shady actors buying cheap android boxes and flashing some iptv software with service preconfigured. These people don't even know they're using iptv.
Macha 22 hours ago [-]
They’re literally calling dodgy boxes here by both the consumers and sellers. Look, make the case in court if you want, you might get off with a slap, and nobody’s rooting for the big bad corporation here either, but nobody is under any illusions that these are legal
surgical_fire 13 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily. Any Android TV box would do, doesn't need to be a dodgy one.
Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.
echoangle 23 hours ago [-]
> It's like those folks that sold bootleg DVDs out of their trenchcoats in Manhattan - the defense of "gosh, I never knew buying a just-released-in-theaters Hollywood blockbuster for $5 by some dude on the side of Broadway was illegal" was never going to fly.
Is buying bootleg DVDs actually illegal? Isn’t the thing protected by copyright distribution? The seller is doing the distribution, I’m only buying it so it’s fine, no?
lurkshark 21 hours ago [-]
It’s a little different because it’s easy for these IPTV pirates to whip up slick branding. Something more like if a guy in a nice looking uniform for a DVD company you hadn’t heard of offered to sell you movies. Especially for folks who aren’t very internet savvy, it can be easy to miss the subtle tells that an offering isn’t legit (even more so when the service works just fine)
koyote 22 hours ago [-]
It's definitely a gray area in some countries.
A few decades ago our family got a 'proper' company with a shop front to install a satellite dish for us. We were then able to watch the Sky Tv from the UK even though we were not based in the UK (we still paid for a subscription but it was billed to a proxy address). This was the 'gray' part of what the company was selling.
What they also sold was sattv boxes with integrated decryption that would allow you to watch pretty much any European Pay TV (albeit not Sky, as they used a more robust encryption scheme) for free. They never mentioned the legality of it but they definitely advertised it as something they openly sold (in shop and in their ads).
xtracto 23 hours ago [-]
More like buying the hacked DirecTV Sim cards.
shiroiuma 20 hours ago [-]
>but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
Why? There's lots of cases where there's much-cheaper alternatives. I have a mobile phone plan that costs a small fraction of what most of my coworkers pay, because I didn't get a full-service unlimited plan with a subsidized new-every-2-years phone, for instance. Is my phone company hacking into the other company's system to give me service? Who knows, but I trust the government regulators and judicial system enough to assume this isn't happening, or else the company they're riding on the back of would have the service stopped. In reality, low-cost mobile services like this contract with the big carriers to use their spare capacity, and the service is basically 2nd-class too.
It's not a consumer's job to know how businesses operate internally or if they're doing something illegal.
Markoff 13 hours ago [-]
> but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
And honestly many of these websites look really professional and even legal services have various very cheap promotions, so good luck proving they knew they were paying for illegal service. It's exact same reason why in EU uploading copyrighted movie is illegal, but downloading it is legal, since you can't know whether the source is legal or not unless they would advertise with big letters THIS IS ILLEGAL DOWNLOAD FOR YOU.
vaginaphobic 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rjh29 1 hours ago [-]
Everyone knows it's illegal in the UK and Ireland. They also think they won't get any punishment. Which is the point of this judgement.
I'm not sure they are. I watch stuff on youtube and some probably violates someone's copyright which is an issue for the people posting it but I'm not sure I've broken the law by watching it? Obviously laws vary by which legal system you are involved with.
beAbU 3 hours ago [-]
The colloquial term for these services/devices in Ireland is "dodgy box", alluding to the box of shady origins you hook up to your tv.
I'm pretty sure most users know that using the service is... "dodgy".
Paying for this via a bank is just asking for trouble!
HtmlProgrammer 19 hours ago [-]
People refer to them as “dodgy boxes”. They know it’s illegal and no one cares.
Everyone in the country knows this and either has one or a family member has one
bobdvb 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think when people are getting hundreds, or thousands of channels cheaper from some off-brand name, or from a referral from a bloke down the pub, they know what's what.
It's like buying something from the local market, those Adidas trackies are either a knock-off copy, or knocked-off stolen, but if they're 1/4 the price then they're still going to sell to someone.
The only thing I'd point out is that a security researcher found that a significant number of those grey market pirate boxes they tested had malware on them. So using them can open you up to a whole lot of risk. After all, there's no accountability for those pirates!
pjc50 24 hours ago [-]
Huh, Ireland has copied English law so precisely that it also has Norwich Pharmacal and Anton Pillar orders?
(De anonymozation of third parties and non-crime search warrants respectively)
roomey 22 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by copied? Ireland was colonised by the English for many years, and was part of their common law system during that period.
When it became independent, all laws weren't suddenly repealed, some were just ammended over time (as any common law system does). It's my understanding that Irish Courts can still refer to court cases from other common law countries in terms of precidence, even now
Anthony-G 12 hours ago [-]
As you say, Irish law is a “fork” of the jurisprudence system established by British rule. However, both Norwich Pharmacal and Anton Pillar orders are much more recent than Irish independence so it seems that we have since adopted both of these orders into our legal system (I am not a lawyer and only just learned of their existence today).
The Wikipedia article on Anton Piller orders¹ has this to say about their use in Ireland:
> Anton Piller orders have been granted by the High Court in William A. Grogan (copyright owner of RAMDIS) v. Monaghan Electrical Ltd & Michael Traynor (1998) related to an unlicensed copy of the RAMDIS software system, Joblin-Purser v. Jackman and Microsoft v. Brightpoint, but the issue has not come before the Supreme Court and, owing to the civil nature of the order and the strong protection given to the family home in the constitution, it currently exists in something of a grey area.
I guess that the legal framework that enables the orders was inherited by the Irish state. (according to wikipedia the orders can be made in Canada and Australia too)
bar000n 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder why all those articles about video streaming pirates use the term IPTV to describe illegal video streaming services.
IPTV is a term for some clearly standardized and perfectly legal technology to deliver television services. Check the wikipedia page and definitions maybe [0]
As someone in the media technology business, it's very frustrating for me that the pirate streaming industry has co-opted the name IPTV for it's offerings.
But it's not the articles that are driving it, it's the pirates themselves who have done it and the articles following that nomenclature. If you go online the search results for IPTV are very much about pirate services and tools now.
In the previous work I was involved in, I was responsible for technical measures against piracy and had to get comfortable with the services being called IPTV.
wolvoleo 12 hours ago [-]
This won't do anything. They'll just take crypto from now on, and the boxes will start running over a VPN of some kind, I'm sure.
Personally I would never do piracy without both of these protections. It's not perfect but it doesn't matter. You just have to be harder to catch than the lowest hanging fruit.
Like the guy running from a bear said to the other guy: I don't have to outrun the bear, just to be faster than you :)
stuaxo 13 hours ago [-]
When I worked at Sky building tests for their set top boxes, part of the tour of the site involved then showing off / gloating about how they go after people - it left a bad taste in the mouth.
zoklet-enjoyer 22 hours ago [-]
Home Taping Is Killing Music
amiga386 19 hours ago [-]
We left side 2 blank so you can help
AuthAuth 21 hours ago [-]
Sky should sue the AI companies if they want to protect their copyright. Anything else is a joke and an insult to fair laws.
Markoff 14 hours ago [-]
honestly if you pay to pirate, you kinda deserve it (same with the Plex share and Kodi guys), I have so many IPTV streams available for free, there is no time for me to watch them all, I can watch F1 from like 3-4 different streams, same with MotoGP, NLHTV, NBATV, I had olympics from like 10 different TV channels including Spanish (Teledeporte), Hungarian (M4 Sport), Serbian, Croatian, Lithuanian, Chinese, Czech, Slovak, German and dunno what else, you just need to know where to look [1]
Non-sequitur. The Internet only enables the copying of bits and not their theft, as the original bits aren't removed from their source. A remote-copy-and-delete might be considered a theft, but Bittorrent has no delete provisions and that's not really inherent to the infrastructure of the Internet per se (e.g. your network card can't physically make bits on the other side in storage disappear).
orbisvicis 24 hours ago [-]
For example:
Good. The internet is meant to uplift human society, not enable petty theft. If only they could have gone after each thief to take back the money they stole.
- signed, not-Asooka
JadeNB 24 hours ago [-]
There's a difference between "I am the creator of this content [that I actually didn't create]" and "I am enjoying this content that I did not create." One could argue that it matters, in the latter case, whether you are enjoying the content in a manner with the creator's intention of how you enjoyed it, but, to state one among many possible responses, it is far from clear when I consume media through approved channels that that accurately represents how the creator would prefer I enjoy it.
orbisvicis 24 hours ago [-]
That's why I don't feel bad pirating textbooks.
lo_zamoyski 23 hours ago [-]
Screw the author's labor, eh?
horsawlarway 21 hours ago [-]
Well, this is part of the problem.
Sometimes "the author's labor" amounts to reordering questions at the back to mark it as new revision and charge 150+ usd for a book that should have been $20 brand new, and is only purchased because it's a required title in a required class to get a piece of paper required for employment.
In that case... Fuck yes. Screw the author's "labor". Arguably, screw the whole damn system.
---
Copyright rarely helps small authors who actually need it.
It usually gets employed by conglomerates that own distribution and are already screwing authors as hard as they think they can get away with.
It's genuinely a pretty terrible system in its current form.
We can do better.
rjh29 55 minutes ago [-]
The textbook thing was a non issue when I was in college. Previous year books were sold on to the next year, and lecturers gave us page numbers for at least two editions.
I think all of the books for my year were about $150, not just one.
Now I'd assume everyone is using digital books so it might be different.
furryrain 13 hours ago [-]
The problem there isn't copyright. It's whoever is demanding students use the latest version.
> Copyright rarely helps small authors who actually need it.
>
> It usually gets employed by conglomerates that own distribution and are already screwing authors as hard as they think they can get away with.
Do you think these small authors have the resources to try to enforce copyright?
lo_zamoyski 6 hours ago [-]
Let's take the emotion out of this, because it is clouding your judgement. There are a number of distinctions that must be made.
1. The actual labor of an author. Writing a book requires a nontrivial amount of labor. This cannot be ignored. You cannot categorically say that you have a right to the labor of an author and the publisher.
2. The dishonest business practices of publishers (and some authors). I agree that university textbooks often follow this model, but that is largely a flaw with the American university education system which has long abandoned education as its primary aim. The money-making schemes around education are downright criminal, and it is disgusting that universities abet and enable them.
3. The distribution of books where this is a problem. Most published books do not go through successive bogus editions that only reorder the exercises in the back. W.r.t. university texts, I've had professors who use old books published decades ago (e.g., Dover, which are cheap) and these tend to better than the glossy tomes many professors seem to prefer for some reason. There is absolutely no reason for a 30th edition book on basic number theory or the foundations of Newtonian physics.
Professors are first and foremost pedagogues, hence why I think the research university is a grave injustice toward students, where pedagogy takes a back seat. Each professor should effectively be writing his own "textbook". This doesn't have to be a published tome. Orally-delivered or via lecture notes, doesn't matter.
More to the point: the reason you find so many people advocating for pirating textbooks specifically, is because textbooks have often been used by authors/institutions/publishers to fleece students:
> Some textbook companies have countered [the second hand market] by encouraging teachers to assign homework that must be done on the publisher's website. Students with a new textbook can use the pass code in the book to register on the site; otherwise they must pay the publisher to access the website and complete assigned homework.
> Harvard economics chair James K. Stock has stated that new editions are often not about significant improvements to the content. "New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices."
Students can tell when they're being scammed, and are more than happy to go to war with scammers such as these.
0dayz 21 hours ago [-]
Who's labor wad exploited by said publisher?
I would personally love and do support ethical publishers /companies and authors themselves but I refuse to engage with the exploiting kind, since there is effectively little difference between them and pirates.
hsbauauvhabzb 18 hours ago [-]
This isn’t as clear cut as pirating a book, movie or a game. If you pirate one of those, your intent is probably to consume it. Buying an IPTV subscription does not clearly indicate that you’re intending to pirate some specific channel, in fact there’s no guarantee that you’re not consuming something licensed under Creative Commons.
KumaBear 24 hours ago [-]
Buddy we’d still be listening to cds if pirating didn’t exist.
actionfromafar 23 hours ago [-]
Spotify started out pirating.
Cyph0n 22 hours ago [-]
As did Crunchyroll.
wolvoleo 13 hours ago [-]
And OpenAI, Meta/Llama and Anthropic.
Oh wait, they make billions with it so that makes it fair use.
Telaneo 22 hours ago [-]
/s?
tene80i 1 days ago [-]
You’ll find that a pretty unpopular attitude around here (hence the downvoting on your comment, and I assume mine shortly), but you are right.
echoangle 23 hours ago [-]
It’s unpopular because it’s a bad argument. It’s not theft because you don’t take anything away. You just create a copy and don’t pay for it, but that’s not theft.
DrJokepu 22 hours ago [-]
A spy steals secrets. Credit can be stolen from you by your boss. Your competitor steals your ideas. In colloquial usage, theft is the act of stealing. The legal term is copyright infringement.
DangitBobby 18 hours ago [-]
When you "steal" a secret, it's not longer a secret. When you "steal" credit, the original thinker no longer gets credit. In both cases, the thing itself was destroyed: in the former, the secret is no longer a secret at all and in the latter the boss will no longer be considered the mastermind behind the idea. When you "pirate" something the original copy remains and the creator retains it and the rights to sell copies of it and will still benefit from selling copies. It's not theft.
hrimfaxi 23 hours ago [-]
It might not be theft but it's not nothing either. Manslaughter isn't murder but someone still died. Copying might not be theft but you're still taking something you didn't pay for.
amiga386 22 hours ago [-]
Then use an accurate legal term for it, "copyright infringement", or a pejorative that both supporters and detractors agree on, e.g. "piracy"
somat 22 hours ago [-]
But it's not piracy either. People just want to make the crime sound worse then "infringement" Might as well call it "software rape" as that crime is closer to what is being done than than theft or piracy.
zenoprax 22 hours ago [-]
It is an infringement on one's right to control the reproduction and distribution of their intellectual property.
This right is enforced by the authority that grants it. Viewing, listening, or otherwise 'consuming' this IP is not and cannot be an infringement on these rights. Those who provide are responsible.
If a country does not grant or enforce this right (or on behalf of others) then there is no infringment possible in that jurisdiction. cf. China or Russia.
Moral arguments beyond that are your own and should be clearly segregated from the law. Murder is, almost universally, both criminal and wrong. "Piracy" requires more attention to detail in order to have productive conversations.
Markoff 13 hours ago [-]
Is it even a theft if I watch publically available unlocked IPTV streams? I mean if they don't want people without paid access to watch them they should protect them with unique logins/passwords and this is valid for whatever IPTV provider (not specific to channels themselves).
These IPTV companies, in my experience, never advertise that it's illegal. It's just give us money for a lot of TV channels, just like a cable company does.
It's like those folks that sold bootleg DVDs out of their trenchcoats in Manhattan - the defense of "gosh, I never knew buying a just-released-in-theaters Hollywood blockbuster for $5 by some dude on the side of Broadway was illegal" was never going to fly.
Possibly, but not always. When Red Pocket and the other cheap mvnos came around, people were skeptical for the same reason - but it was all above board.
Pricing depends on sales channel and price. If you slum the dregs of shady marketplaces, you can get it for like 3 or 4 bucks a month. But in more mainstream settings, resellers often try to charge as much as 20 or 30 (or more) per month which isn't quite as drastic.
In the US, a few people in my mom's friend circle were raving about their 'magic box.' It cost a couple hundred but got TV, so they were happy. AFAICT it's some shady actors buying cheap android boxes and flashing some iptv software with service preconfigured. These people don't even know they're using iptv.
Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.
Is buying bootleg DVDs actually illegal? Isn’t the thing protected by copyright distribution? The seller is doing the distribution, I’m only buying it so it’s fine, no?
A few decades ago our family got a 'proper' company with a shop front to install a satellite dish for us. We were then able to watch the Sky Tv from the UK even though we were not based in the UK (we still paid for a subscription but it was billed to a proxy address). This was the 'gray' part of what the company was selling.
What they also sold was sattv boxes with integrated decryption that would allow you to watch pretty much any European Pay TV (albeit not Sky, as they used a more robust encryption scheme) for free. They never mentioned the legality of it but they definitely advertised it as something they openly sold (in shop and in their ads).
Why? There's lots of cases where there's much-cheaper alternatives. I have a mobile phone plan that costs a small fraction of what most of my coworkers pay, because I didn't get a full-service unlimited plan with a subsidized new-every-2-years phone, for instance. Is my phone company hacking into the other company's system to give me service? Who knows, but I trust the government regulators and judicial system enough to assume this isn't happening, or else the company they're riding on the back of would have the service stopped. In reality, low-cost mobile services like this contract with the big carriers to use their spare capacity, and the service is basically 2nd-class too.
It's not a consumer's job to know how businesses operate internally or if they're doing something illegal.
Can you PROVE they knew it's illegal service?
It's not what you know, it's what you can prove.
https://youtu.be/1hUWPBvppvU?si=WtYEX12H3kxRlKUU&t=8
And honestly many of these websites look really professional and even legal services have various very cheap promotions, so good luck proving they knew they were paying for illegal service. It's exact same reason why in EU uploading copyrighted movie is illegal, but downloading it is legal, since you can't know whether the source is legal or not unless they would advertise with big letters THIS IS ILLEGAL DOWNLOAD FOR YOU.
I'm not sure they are. I watch stuff on youtube and some probably violates someone's copyright which is an issue for the people posting it but I'm not sure I've broken the law by watching it? Obviously laws vary by which legal system you are involved with.
I'm pretty sure most users know that using the service is... "dodgy".
Paying for this via a bank is just asking for trouble!
Everyone in the country knows this and either has one or a family member has one
It's like buying something from the local market, those Adidas trackies are either a knock-off copy, or knocked-off stolen, but if they're 1/4 the price then they're still going to sell to someone.
The only thing I'd point out is that a security researcher found that a significant number of those grey market pirate boxes they tested had malware on them. So using them can open you up to a whole lot of risk. After all, there's no accountability for those pirates!
(De anonymozation of third parties and non-crime search warrants respectively)
When it became independent, all laws weren't suddenly repealed, some were just ammended over time (as any common law system does). It's my understanding that Irish Courts can still refer to court cases from other common law countries in terms of precidence, even now
The Wikipedia article on Anton Piller orders¹ has this to say about their use in Ireland:
> Anton Piller orders have been granted by the High Court in William A. Grogan (copyright owner of RAMDIS) v. Monaghan Electrical Ltd & Michael Traynor (1998) related to an unlicensed copy of the RAMDIS software system, Joblin-Purser v. Jackman and Microsoft v. Brightpoint, but the issue has not come before the Supreme Court and, owing to the civil nature of the order and the strong protection given to the family home in the constitution, it currently exists in something of a grey area.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Piller_order#Ireland
IPTV is a term for some clearly standardized and perfectly legal technology to deliver television services. Check the wikipedia page and definitions maybe [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_television
But it's not the articles that are driving it, it's the pirates themselves who have done it and the articles following that nomenclature. If you go online the search results for IPTV are very much about pirate services and tools now.
In the previous work I was involved in, I was responsible for technical measures against piracy and had to get comfortable with the services being called IPTV.
Personally I would never do piracy without both of these protections. It's not perfect but it doesn't matter. You just have to be harder to catch than the lowest hanging fruit.
Like the guy running from a bear said to the other guy: I don't have to outrun the bear, just to be faster than you :)
[1] https://youtu.be/Fb5-Lts5EPs?si=18f8_A5ky-7kw_XW&t=131
this is probably good start for amateurs (you can watch them in VLC through CTRL+N or just install on Android TV some viewer like OTT Navigator)
https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv/blob/master/PLAYLISTS.md
Good. The internet is meant to uplift human society, not enable petty theft. If only they could have gone after each thief to take back the money they stole.
- signed, not-Asooka
In that case... Fuck yes. Screw the author's "labor". Arguably, screw the whole damn system.
---
Copyright rarely helps small authors who actually need it.
It usually gets employed by conglomerates that own distribution and are already screwing authors as hard as they think they can get away with.
It's genuinely a pretty terrible system in its current form.
We can do better.
I think all of the books for my year were about $150, not just one.
Now I'd assume everyone is using digital books so it might be different.
> Copyright rarely helps small authors who actually need it. > > It usually gets employed by conglomerates that own distribution and are already screwing authors as hard as they think they can get away with.
Do you think these small authors have the resources to try to enforce copyright?
1. The actual labor of an author. Writing a book requires a nontrivial amount of labor. This cannot be ignored. You cannot categorically say that you have a right to the labor of an author and the publisher.
2. The dishonest business practices of publishers (and some authors). I agree that university textbooks often follow this model, but that is largely a flaw with the American university education system which has long abandoned education as its primary aim. The money-making schemes around education are downright criminal, and it is disgusting that universities abet and enable them.
3. The distribution of books where this is a problem. Most published books do not go through successive bogus editions that only reorder the exercises in the back. W.r.t. university texts, I've had professors who use old books published decades ago (e.g., Dover, which are cheap) and these tend to better than the glossy tomes many professors seem to prefer for some reason. There is absolutely no reason for a 30th edition book on basic number theory or the foundations of Newtonian physics.
Professors are first and foremost pedagogues, hence why I think the research university is a grave injustice toward students, where pedagogy takes a back seat. Each professor should effectively be writing his own "textbook". This doesn't have to be a published tome. Orally-delivered or via lecture notes, doesn't matter.
More to the point: the reason you find so many people advocating for pirating textbooks specifically, is because textbooks have often been used by authors/institutions/publishers to fleece students:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbook#New_editions_and_the_...
> Some textbook companies have countered [the second hand market] by encouraging teachers to assign homework that must be done on the publisher's website. Students with a new textbook can use the pass code in the book to register on the site; otherwise they must pay the publisher to access the website and complete assigned homework.
> Harvard economics chair James K. Stock has stated that new editions are often not about significant improvements to the content. "New editions are to a considerable extent simply another tool used by publishers and textbook authors to maintain their revenue stream, that is, to keep up prices."
Students can tell when they're being scammed, and are more than happy to go to war with scammers such as these.
I would personally love and do support ethical publishers /companies and authors themselves but I refuse to engage with the exploiting kind, since there is effectively little difference between them and pirates.
Oh wait, they make billions with it so that makes it fair use.
This right is enforced by the authority that grants it. Viewing, listening, or otherwise 'consuming' this IP is not and cannot be an infringement on these rights. Those who provide are responsible.
If a country does not grant or enforce this right (or on behalf of others) then there is no infringment possible in that jurisdiction. cf. China or Russia.
Moral arguments beyond that are your own and should be clearly segregated from the law. Murder is, almost universally, both criminal and wrong. "Piracy" requires more attention to detail in order to have productive conversations.