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.
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.
Everyone in the country knows this and either has one or a family member has one
(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
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.
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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.
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.
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.