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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.