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Illegal File Trading Draws Two P2P Raids In Europe
had3l writes "Police in Finland raided the operation of a popular Bit Torrent site and arrested 34 people, 30 of which were volunteers who helped moderate the site. This comes right after the MPAA reported that it would start suing tracker servers." An anonymous reader points to a story (currently at the top of RespectP2P.org's homepage) about the raid yesterday morning of Dutch eDonkey sites Releases4u and Shareconnector.
Hmmm, no wish to upset but if it starts in other countries no doubt the MPAA and RIAA will try it here (with the help of their favorite police depts, of course)
When you can sign up for Netflix and get them delivered to your home for about 66 cents each!
Maybe I'm just lucky, but where I live I can get 14 movies delivered a week with Netflix's 8 movies at a time plan.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Yeah, we are back to the assumption that Corporate America likes to make that every single song, movie or piece of software would have been legally purchased if they had not been illegally downloaded. Obviously that is false, but it makes the "losses sufferred" sound really impressive.
The gathering storm against bittorrent users has already started to worry me. I have been using suprnova to find torrents of TV shows only, no movies. I'm essentially time shifting content that I could almost as easily have "tivo"-ed myself.
A recent example is that a friend of mine missed last week's episode of her favorite show, ER. I got a torrent the next day and burned her a DVD.
I wish that type of usage was considered "fair use" but it's not.
A lot of people have said that the ongoing copyright crackdown represents the end of the sort of "Wild West" nature that the internet had at first.
I disagree.
This represents the wild west nature finally becoming complete.
Previously the internet was a place of lawlessness.
Now it's still a place of lawlessness, but on top of this we have little tyrannies, where those rare people with lawyers can make anything they want happen just by issuing threats and governments can take things out at will without having to worry about pesky things like jurisdiction, right or courts. Like the wild west, where on top of the chaos it was overlaid that if whatever self-appointed lawman felt like it you would get hanged or shot for no reason at all.
Perhaps this comes down to how you define the word "laws"; after all, there have been many times throughout justice where "law" meant nothing but the imposed will on a subjugated populace of a bunch of armed thugs. But I think laws imply justice. I see none of this coming to the internet, only the raw exercise of naked power.
What's completely, utterly amazing that there hasn't been a single mention of the incident in the news of any of the tv channels, nor anything in the major papers either. For a while there was a short item on the site of Helsingin Sanomat (the largest paper in Finland) but that was taken away after an hour or so. Makes you suspect that the police might actually be controlling any reporting on the subject? Guess that's it for truly independent mass media in Finland.
RTFP
/. readers will get up in arms about ("how dare they stop me from stealing!")
Yes, he's blowing his karma to hell. No, he's not talking about legal P2P, only illegal, which most
Had you ever created or accomplished anything worthwhile, you'd likely understand.
I should register an account so know-nothings can mod me down and dock my karma, too.
Yeah. And Nelson Mandela was wrong to disobey the apartheid laws.
A bad law is a bad thing, and civil disobedience is one way to protest it.
I am trolling
I do it every week. Yes, I know it's illegal. Yes I know I probably won't be able to in the future with the draconian laws coming down.
I have a special circumstance though. I live out in the middle of no where. I don't get broadcast TV except on one station...I do on the other hand get high-speed DSL.
Now I COULD get Comcast cable, but since I only watch 4 tv shows a week, I'm not going to be paying 50 bucks a month (yes, 50 bucks here even for just plain basic). Not to mention Comcast likes to raise their rates at the drop of a hat.
Dish services are also out because the number of trees they can't get a good signal, I've tried. SO that leaves me with downloading these TV shows.
But what the TV networks are missing out on is that THEY should offer torrents of their shows right from their web pages. If they throw in the regular commercials how is this different than just watching it over the airwaves? I would download them in a heartbeat and gladly watch their commercials if they did this. Why are so uptight about this? They should be like "hell, download all you wish and trade them with your friends...as long as the commercials are still there we're still making our money...and we could also target advertising better for people that download and that could generate even more money blah blah blah..."
Movies though, I don't download at all. Never have, never will.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Advertisments for very well known companies are appearing on the biggest torrent sites. The money from these companies is the reason why downloading movies is easy enough to become mainstream. Without this money casual users may well be put off, as the process of finding torrents would become more obviously illegal and more difficult.
yeah, cause no one here is involved with open source.
incase you haven't noticed code can/is considered to be 'intellectual property'. yet for some reason so many people don't love those laws and so something weird, they *give the code away for free*.. how strange..
MABASPLOOM!
Using the same logic that you just did, there's nothing inherently wrong with stealing anything. You didn't pay for it, so it has no value...
Gimme a break. I don't see how you can say in one breath that these P2P laws are "stupid" while claiming that enforcement of said laws is "good". When is it ever good to enforce stupid laws?
If anything, people using these sites are engaging in the most peaceful form of resistance I can imagine-- nobody is getting physically harmed by someone downloading a movie or an MP3. Nobody is being threatened with a weapon. Nobody is being deprived of physical property.
Ghandi would be proud.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Love this quote.
"Police say the site had 10,000 users, all Finnish, who downloaded illegally-copied content worth millions of euros. The site featured 6000 torrents, including film, videos, music and games."
I always thought something was worth whatever you actually paid for it. These downloaders were paying zero.
So if I steal a TV and thus pay nothing for it, no one loses out? Get it right. I know what you're trying to say - that technically no money has been lost - but you didn't express it will
The problem isn't that people have stolen the record industry out of $15 worth of music, but that they have $15 worth of music that they didn't pay for. It's not like stealing a TV, which results in a store and company losing money. The nature of digital music means that it can be replicated at ~0 cost (excluding stupid things like the power used when your PC is doing the ripping and so on) so you're right to some extent that the record industry doesn't lose $15 of music, as nothing leaves their inventory. However, people do acquire things that they haven't paid for, which does strike me as wrong.
It's a difficult issue, because in many ways no one loses anything, but people certainly gain something. And, if extrapolated to a potential conclusion, people do lose out in the long run because if everyone got their music from P2P and didn't pay for it, and the record industry only sold the initial CD from which all rips were taken, then they would be losing out.
You've made a few really bad assumptions there though. The worst is that you assume all of the movies people download are burned to a CD-R (and who still pays 40 cents each for those anyway???), that is simply WRONG. Second is that you assume the computer wouldn't be on or in use were you not downloading a movie, that is often wrong as well. And finally you assume that the only reason the person has a net connection is to download movies. I have DSL and DON'T download movies, so if I downloaded a movie next month will by bill go up by 40 cents? According to your math it does. The way my (and most other nerds) PCs are setup, I could download movies now for very nearly free other than my own time. My PC is already on 24/7 so electricity and depreciation is a non-issue, I pay by the month for DSL, and I don't even HAVE a DVD-player so I wouldn't burn them to disk when I could just watch them the same way I watch DVDs (through my PC) and I very rarely watch a movie more than once unless it is a classic and most people buy those on DVD anyway...even those who download movies.
101 idiotic ways make a point:
#73 : compare the struggle against the MPAA in your attempts to download motion pictures from the Internet with the emancipation of a race of people from racist oppression.
Don't get me wrond, I do understand your point (i.e. that the original post was a massive overgeneralisation) but you don't do yourself any favours comparing what are basically selfish goals with the one of the great heroes of the 20th century.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yes, it?s easy to find out the IP?s of the corporate parents, but they need only get a consumer level DSL/Cable line or have some of their employees run their pirate hunting software at home... and they will be virtually impossible to track down.
They will also be much less effective. Someone's DSL or cable connection isn't going to be nearl as effective as the corporate T3 when it comes to searching out file swappers.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The MPAA are, and the police in this case were going after the sites that host .torrent files, and whatever edonkey/emule uses to initiate transfers. So as long as your son wasn't running an actual eDonkey server (he was just simply a peer) out of his dorm room you should be fine.
You'll want to ask him if he is or not, it's not that hard - I set up a BT tracker on my campus LAN, and restricted IP access to only those from campus. Result: Very fast, semi-trusted file sharing network.
--J
Except no one is stealing anything.
They are MANUFACTURING.
Pirates merely exploit the same characteristic of "intellectual property" that Media Moguls do: production costs are trivial.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you are going to do the crime, be ready to do the time. It's well known that the charge of the crime is going to be based off the retail rate for the product. They are being charged with avoiding paying that known retail value. I don't see what's wrong with listing that.
So giving owners copyrights over their own work is a bad thing, eh? You're ready to throw out the GPL as invalid, then?
Yup. Read up on the history of the GPL sometime. If it weren't for copyright there wouldn't even be a *need* for the GPL. Hence it's jab at copyright in coining the term "copyleft".
The GPL is fundamentally an anti-copyright weapon that uses copyright laws to fight it's battles. The day copyright laws are abolished is the day the GPL has won it's final battle.
Kids these days don't seem to understand this...
You can download ipod files from apple and play them with the knowledge that your safe with DRM.
:-)
just buy a mac
DOWNLOADING STUFF FROM THE INTERNET IS NOT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Civil disobedience involves suffering the consequences of your action, to bring the public's attention to those consequences. Hiding in your parents' basement loading up DVD-Rs with ripped movies accomplishes nothing towards the goal of changing copyright law; if anything it strengthens the **AA's claim that copyright infringement is too easy and widespread and must be legally and programmatically curtailed.
As the grandparent suggested, you have almost certainly never been involved in the creation of anything that can be pirated. But I bet you're utterly outraged at GPL violations, too. Those damn copyright infringers and license breakers... oh wait.
Wow. Theft is equated to the American Revolution, and thieves equated to victims of Saudi Arabia's sharia enforcement thugs. If anyone ever needed an object lesson in the dangers of grossly inappropriate analogies, they need look no further.
What we are talking about here is THEFT. It doesn't matter if you shoplifted a DVD from Best Buy or download it. You're stealing. "Oh, these movies suck! I wouldn't pay for them!" Then DON'T WATCH THEM.
Illegally downloading copyrighted materials discourages the creation of high-quality materials. It reduces the overall value of the knowledge base our society can develop and provide access to. If that access has a fee, then pay it. Or don't access it.
Slashdot's comment boards would be a WHOLE lot better if each poster was accurately marked with age, employment status, and whether or not the poster is living with his parents.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Oh, spare me. If this is civil disobedience, we should be glad they got busted. That's the whole point. It isn't civil disobedience if you're trying to avoid getting caught.
Basically the reason people steal music is that the industry has failed to provide the service to us adaquately. Its not the users fault, they aren't evil. Greed is the only reason why we have suits and arrests right now, the RIAA refuses to address the problem and instead is fighting a war they can't win(sound familiar see: War on drugs). Furthermore everything seems to indicate that music and film piracy has little effect on overall sales and honestly I don't see metallica starving, maybe if they bought less coke they wouldn't need the tiny bit of extra cash... You can come back and say what about the indie artists all you want, if anything this increases exposure and sales...
Judging by any number of past gaffes - like C&D notices going out for Professor Usher's lecture, OpenOffice tarballs, etc. - it's obvious that nobody at the C&D farms is actually downloading the material to see if it really infringes. They're just doing searches, correlating filenames to IP addresses, and pumping out warnings. DSL or cable is more than sufficient for this.
If RIAA/MPAA aren't doing some of their scanning over consumer broadband lines, they're even more daft than I thought.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Those who want the law reformed need to posit credible alternatives, alternatives that ensure that movies (and music and books etc) can still be made, before arguing that there's something inherently unjust in having to pay to have access copyrighted material.
Right now, the only person I've seen who's made any effort to do this is Richard M. Stallman: his proposals only seem to apply successfully to computer software (I can't see a GPL'd movie being fundable, can you?); they do not require copyright reform; and he's demonised on Slashdot all the time as some kind of raving lunatic for his efforts.
Civil disobedience doesn't simply involve breaking laws that get in your way. They involve breaking the unjust parts of laws that are clearly unjust to begin with. Given copyright law, as it stands, gave people the movies they so deliberately set out to download without paying for, and given the lack of proposed alternatives that are relevent to that medium, and the hatred spewed by the same idiots who like P2P against those who make the efforts to formulate alternatives, I find it hard to accept there's any civil disobedience here. It's a simple case of freeloading.
And, you know what, if everyone downloading a movie today who hasn't made some effort to directly fund it - bought the DVD, watched it at the theater, etc - spent a day in jail tomorrow for doing just that, I'd see it as just desserts.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
But my reply was more directed toward the parent posters scorn about blaming the actions of other countries' MPAA on the US body, even when that is obviously the case. The MPAA is certainly pulling the strings on this one.
Murphy was an optimist.
... but you don't do yourself any favours comparing what are basically selfish goals ...
I wouldn't call supporting the free flow of information purely selfish. Our society has the technology to almost freely distribute any kind of information. Big corporations try to prevent this progress, because they are scared that they lose their grip on people. Information is what advances our society, it's the essence of all progress. Making a sharing of information a criminal act is a very slippery slope towards totalitarism and intellectually poor society.
Small European
It is not anyone's right to break the law, no matter how silly the law is.
No. If a law is Immoral, it is everyone's Moral Responsibility to break that law.
And I bet you would just love intellectual property laws if you had any intellectual property.
Wow. This just goes to show that you have no concept of how anyone can have Morals.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Wrong. The day copyright is abolished is the day I don't have to release any source for anything I make from GPLed sources. While you will be able to copy the binary if I release it (and assuming you can break whatever DRM I use) I will not be required to give out the source.
That's not the case today. Because of copyright law I am required to give out the source
I agree with you there. But...
What we are talking about here is THEFT.
No. We are talking about copyright infringement, which---despite publishers' propaganda---is not even remotely the same thing. Copyright infringement ought to be a purely civil (not criminal) matter.
Illegally downloading copyrighted materials discourages the creation of high-quality materials. It reduces the overall value of the knowledge base our society can develop and provide access to.
Maybe, maybe not. The privilege (not right) of copyright was created to encourage authorship, but it is not necessary for high-quality works to exist, as demonstrated by all of human culture from prehistory until 200--300 years ago.
Slashdot's comment boards would be a WHOLE lot better if each poster was accurately marked with age, employment status, and whether or not the poster is living with his parents.
35, yes, no.
Whether it could have or would have been legally purchased isn't the issue for them. The issue is they own the copyright on the shows and they have contractual agreements concerning how the movies should be distributed. Distribution of movies or software which aren't in the public domain is illegal in most countries. If it's not in your country, it likely will be very soon.
The rise of the corporation in this world and their subjugation of governments around the world is an issue worth debating; however, as it currently stands they hold all the leverage legally speaking.
OK, someone in here has to play Devil's advocate and take the side of the RIAA/MPAA/etc (at least for a little bit!) Regardless of whether or not we like it, think it's fair, or intend on abiding by it, the rules say it's illegal. Same goes for speed limits. I think there are places where the speed limit that is posted is absolutely ridiculous, and (most times) I knowingly choose to ignore it and go the speed I think to be appropriate. Most times, I don't get caught, but when I do, I have no grounds to argue or complain about it. There is a law, I broke it, I need to be an adult about it and accept my punishment. That fine will determine my willingness to speed again. (It hasn't stopped me thus far! heh heh) Same goes for file sharing. If you get caught, you can bitch and complain about unfair, or technicalities but fact of the matter is there is a copyright law and if you are sharing copyrighted files you are breaking this law. As for the banter about copying rented or Netflix movies versus downloading, they are both still violation of copyright law, regardless of which is cheaper, easier, quicker, etc. Everyone just needs to admit to themselves that what they are doing is illegal and quit trying to justify it or explain it away. Now, this all being said, I agree that the laws are crazy. I also will say that they can sue people, arrest people, confiscate as many servers as they want, and the fact of the matter is, file sharing will never go away as long as we have an internet. Yesterday it was Napster. Today it's BitTorrent. Tomorrow it's ??? As long as FTP is a valid protocol, we will always be able to "share" files. And as long as I am participating in any of it, I am taking the risk of being caught...same as speeding. The post I agree with most is that rather than try to fight the beast, the powers that be should instead embrace the digital era and offer cheaper downloads, or some such. I think iTunes did a wonderful thing, and I think the MPAA should take note and follow suit. Will it stop file sharing and copyright infringement? No, but at least it's a way for them to get back some of their "losses". I would be more inclined to purchase a movie download for $5-$10 LEGALLY than to run the risk of getting caught trying to get it for free. The industries have brought this on themselves for overpricing the media we purchase (which is why they are huge money making conglomerates). If they intend on stemming the flow of copyright violation from the gaping wound of P2P file sharing, they need to make an effort to slow the flow, rather than apply a tournaquet and in doing so, have to sever the limb of interest in their material. If they can get away with successfully prosecuting the torrent site, then they also need to bring litigation against the torrent site's ISP (for allowing copyrighted material to be sent across their service), the user's ISP (for allowing the user access to the torrent site), the user (for possessing copyrighted material...this same logic applies to getting busted with a stolen VCR, even if you didn't know it was stolen), the maker of the user's network card (provides the PC access to the network, in much the same way the torrent site provides access to the shared files), the cable modem/DSL router makers (same as for the network card makers), the Bell's (for providing the backbone for the data to pass across), and the list goes on and on! There are lots of pieces involved in the transferring these files. To think that taking out the torrent hosting sites will even put a dent in stopping this from happening is naive on their part. I sincerely hope that nothing comes of the raids in Finland. I don't see how it could, but throw the right amount of power and money at anything, and you will be amazed at the results. However, at the end of the day, we are all still criminals. Shame on us.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: Those who know binary, and those who don't.
First of all, I love Netflix myself - but no matter how much you mess with the queue you are not going to get a movie before it is released. Sometiems I like to fetch movies on DVD before they are released (even after I've watched them in theaters!) to replay a few scenes. As you say it can takea while, so I usually only do with with movies I plan to buy anyway - if I'm interested enough to download it, I'm intersted enough to buy it. They just don't make movies avaailiable as soon as they should (i.e. before pirates get them out). I wonder if the movie industry has ever considiered that it might actually boost sales to sell a DVD at the same time as the movie is in a theater - you would know pretty quickly if it was worth seeing in a theater or not, and sales might be better than otherwise. Plus of course you can always release the "directors edition" later to re-sell DVD's...
But the other good reason to use trackers is for TV shows. Here you really have no recourse, since some shows are seemingly never going to come to DVD... plus you can get HDTV versions of shows you might not be able to get using HDTV locally, or if you just can't watch it at the time it's on watch it later (how am I supposed to record HDTV today without some pretty expensive equipment?)
Especially in the case where I have already watched a show with commercials and they are not selling episodes, I have no qualms at all about downloading TV shows.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In 100 years, who says you will be allowed access those history books?
22, not living with parents (I'm in a completely different state, in fact), and I make over $40k/yr.
I own over 300 DVDs.
and so, I say to you, get off your high horse.
I download from time to time, but I see more movies in the theater and buy more DVDs than any 5 people I know combined. Do I always buy/go see what I download? Hell no. Sometimes the movies suck. But I do if they're worth it.
"...for what essentially amounts to the distribution of ideas."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Ideas CANNOT be copyrighted, only the expression of an idea can. This is a VERY important distinction to understand and clearly you do not. Once I've fixed my expression of an idea in a tangible form it's mine. You can still express this very same idea in a different way and not violate my copyright. A great example of this is the way Pixar and Dreamworks both did films about ants. A Bug's Life and Antz both told the story of how a single ant was able to save their colony from disaster. The core ideas of the film were very much the same but the expression of this story was very different. A Bug's Life could even be a tribute to the old ant and the grasshopper fable, once again proving that there are still valuable works in the public domain even if copyright lasts as long as it does.
All of these ideas have a cost generated with producing them and real people, rather than faceless entities, that earn a living from their production. Anyone can have an idea, to dismiss all things as mere ideas once work is done to convert them into something more tangible, de-values the work of the people that carried it out.
The logic conclusion of your hypothesis is that the distribution of idea and derived works should be free regardless of the wish of the creator. I am assuming because of some right of the individual to those ideas and derived works. What of the rights of the creator?
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
I don't buy the "civil disobedience" argument for a second, but I don't understand your principle that someone has to contribute to the funding of a something to enjoy it. Obviously, people are free to figure out some legitimate way to profit from what they do or not, but it's not my responsibility to see that they do. If I notice that Sears is selling tires for less then they're worth, am I obligated to buy something else while I'm at the store to make sure Sears stays in business? This point has been made over and over, and I'll say it again. Technology giveth and technology taketh away; the media companies are abusing the law to maintain their (outrageous) profits in the face of the fact that they no longer have a monopoly on the means of reprodcuction and distribution of content.
They're going after people who supply illegal torrents. So yes, they're going to win a lot a lawsuits.
BitTorrent has many legal uses. Illegal trackers have exactly one, thouroughly illegal purpose. And those who host them have control over hosting them. It's not a common carrier issue. People who host illegal trackers are directly and deliberatly assisting people in a crime. It's not "just a pointer." If I started going around telling people very publically where to go buy drugs I'd get myself arrested. A pointer is telling people where the gas station is. A criminal pointer is advertising and assisting in finding and aquireing illegal goods.
I don't know where people get this rediculous idea that going after people who publish illegal trackers is an attack on BitTorrent itself. It's not illegal to tell people where the gas station is and nobody pushing these cases is pretending it is.
I guess it just makes it all the more sensational though when people say they are.
Work Safe Porn
Yes, of course it is the US that is to blame. The movies are created there, why would Finnish people even care about lost profits in the US unless there was somekind of external pressure?
I have to ask, since the article points out that police are also striking at eDonkey servers, when the cops are going to be knocking on my door. My son and half the kids in his dorm are swapping/swiping movies like crazy with eDonkey.
File swapping on eDonkey is not the same thing as running an eDonkey server. The network uses an architecture similar to napster, where there are numerous central servers that hold a cache of the list of files their clients are sharing and send back IPs that match any request they receive. There's about 1 server to every 10,000 or so users. I doubt you have much to worry about until they start prosecuting the sharers (as they have been doing for kazaa users in the past).
There is a lot of flaming going on here about the ethics of downloading these movies, etc, and not a lot of discussion about the implications of stated events. You might think that I'm one of those tin foil hat guys, but lets be serious.
The problem as the RIAA/MPAA sees it, with regards to file sharing, is not that you are depriving them of profits or that you have broken copyright law. They take issue with the fact that long-term use of file sharing to distribute their media will curtail their plans for purely subscription based services.
The RIAA, MPAA, cable companies, and other media companies are looking towards subscription based services where you are locked into a particular service. Right now, we have to pay a subscription fee to watch cable television. Its a steady, consistent form of income for the companies providing the service. The RIAA and MPAA would LOVE to migrate to subscription based services. Netflix and others are the beginning of this. Eventually, instead of getting DVDs in the mail, you will simply be able to punch it up on your TV for a monthly fee without the ability to copy it. Without an actual physical medium to distribute the content, copying becomes more difficult.
The real problem lies with the fact that a company (MPAA) can make a threat, and half way around the world a police force raids some place and arrests 30 people for an offence that is actually a civil matter, not a criminal one. The fact that the police and government forces are butting into civil matters is extremely frightening. It is one more nail in the coffin for civil rights and for freedom.
Call me crazy, but to me, this is the same thing as being arrested for slander. Sure, the person that I have slandered has every right to take me to court and work to receive compensation for my lies. But what right does the government have to come in and arrest you for it? There is a big difference between a civil offence and a criminal offence. It is a line that must be well defined in order to preserve individual liberties.
Seriously. All that would do is make it easier to seek out people that are more likely to agree with you. It would have the benefit of you not having to read things that you might not agree with. Which is really what it looks like you're asking for. And that does not belong on any intelligent forum.
Last I checked, Blizzard was using Bittorrent to distribute patches for their MMORPG, World of Warcraft. That sounds like a legal use to me.
If you're going to pass copyright off as bullshit, then you need to pass ownership of physical goods off as an artificial construct.
Hmm.. I don't think there's anything artifical about ownership of physical things. People have things that they consider theirs, and if anyone challenges them then they will fight for it. That's about as natural as it gets..
Our entire system of laws is based around artificial constructs. For example, "rights" are an artificial construct.
Ah, yes. I completely agree with you. Some people way back when decided that hey, lets not go around fighting with each other, and instead agree on some things that we all shouldn't do! Rights are just what we came up with,as a list of things that you shouldn't do to someone..
Copyright law benefits the copyright owners. That's abundantly clear. However, in the United States, commerce benefits us all.
Well.. to recap, it was Disney that lobbied to have the copyrights extended as far as it has been. Disney based a large portion of their work on works from the Public Domain, and then lobbied to have it killed.
Logicly, the point of extending copyrights was to keep those works in the marketplace -- it creates jobs and tax revenues and allows for government funded infrastructure.
Was it? Really? Or was it to prevent those ideas from becoming free, as they should have been?
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
They have a right to charge for their work if they want to. Just because they made it, that doesn't give you a right to it.
As a citizen of the Republic of Finland, I have to say that I would feel a lot safer if the police would concentrate on catching real criminals (murderers, rapists, thiefs, muggers) and public nuisances (drunk drivers) who harm real people instead of going after a bunch of nerds whose only crime is that they may have lowered the potential profits of some media corporations by an undefinied amount.
The police is hopelessly underfunded and understaffed as it is. They should be thankfull that someone is sitting in the front of their computer playing a warezed game, as opposed to driving over little children while drunk.
Yes, I'm annoyed; it's my tax money that's being wasted here.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This is only true for the crimes listed in Ch. 15, Sec. 10 of the Finnish Criminal Code. These are serious crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, high treason, terrorism. Copyright infringement is definitely not one of them.
Indeed. If you think music should be free, create some free music. Ditto movies, etc.