Slashdot Mirror
Following up on Torrent Shutdowns
dantheman82 and others have submitted a number of links about the recent closure of torrent mega sites like suprnova and torrentbits.
The
Unofficial Suprnova Closure FAQ comments that some torrent site maintainers have been arrested and that Suprnova was closed over fear of similiar fate.
DeHavilland notes that the finnish police raided an unnamed torrent site. There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
> There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is? tid=153&tid=219
This may or may not be the case with suprnova.
> that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
This would be scary, if you think that taking sites down was not just and legitimate. I don't know the facts about finish rights, but under german right suprnova could have been shut down.
It's not always the US pushing and picking on people and maybe it is not in this case. At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
With Indymedia It actually seemed to be some tougher mobilizing:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/10/07/204217.shtml
So that makes two of us who are opposed to a unified world government.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
please note that if you are viewing this faq at any other location than http://www.silentdragz.net/suprfaq then it is not authorised. please report it to this address, thank you.
Isn't it slightly ironic a site, outlining the demise of a site to enable IP violations, is worried about someone stealing their IP?
Someone should put up some stats about the change in internet traffic due to these sites being down. I'm sure somebody is in charge of a university network or something?
If BT was accounting for 35% of traffic, what's it at now? Still declining?
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
I mean, c'mon. They were ostentatiously peddling links to illegal stuff. It was only a matter of time until the MPAA got its act together to scare these sites into shutting down, with little more than a threat. The submission of these sites (pun unintended) is what's scary.
A blog like any other.
see, slashdot effect.
So this is the "unofficial" one... but it's authorized? Or rather, they want you to report any other ones as not being authorized? Authorized by who? The same people who say it's unofficial?
I'm confused...
I find this one a good substitute:
http://www.donvitorrent.com/
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."
Well, I'm not sure how it's scary. If I'm the owner of some digital item that has a copyright on it and some other country where copyrights are valid has people breaking it I hope the police would do something about it.
What did you think they were paid to do, pull over and beat minorities?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
the "unnamed site" that was raided was FinReactor, there was a video (of something) about it on thepiratebay a few days ago
Not! The author of the FAQ must really want the other torrent sites to disappear, as well, or else he wouldn't be listing them for the MPAA to hunt after.
A blog like any other.
There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
MPAA & friends have offices in these countries and they use the laws that are available to them.
Boohooohoo American Corporations can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
What kind of fairy land do you live in? These sites were CLEARLY offering illegal content. Was it wrong now for the corporations to shut them down? OMG The corporations are out to get us! They don't want us to get their intellectual property for free anymore, whaat?? we have to pay?!!?! ONOS!!!!
Seriously people, Im pretty sure most people here aren't that naive to think that shutting down these sites was "the wrong thing to do", so why come up with these doomsday saying articles?
Media in 2014, you see the news you want to see I guess. I guess everyone here just wants to here about how evil M$ are, and horrible EA is, and woohooo go Open Source and whatnot.
The truth hurts.
>>but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
all of your police are belonged to U.S.!!!!
Not surprising, given this was proceeded by American oil owners mobilizing foreign military forces to do their bidding.
Hollywood only plays at being liberal - when it gets right down to the nitty gritty dark underside of capitalism, they can be every bit as nasty as the robber barrons on Wall Street.
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
This "trading" (theft) of copyrighted material needs to stop. Many of us depend on making money from this IP for income. As an independent software developer, I have seen my individual income from software sales drop from $1.25 million annually five years ago, to under $800,000 this year.
This has a large effect on who I can hire, and how I can grow my business.
To me, what is most scary is that people think they flaunt copyright laws on such a massive scale and get away with it.
Furthermore, this is exactly what should be happening: the government attacks those who break the law, rather than those who create the tools. Bit torrent and p2p applications have legal, useful purposes; by seeking those who use them in illegal ways rather than banning them altogther is appropriate, rather than trying to ban them.
I wonder why you didn't use your real name to put forth this information ...
Actually it has been reported that MPAA had NOTHING to do with the finnish raids.
The KRP (Keskusrikospoliisi = FBI?) has publicly said that the MPAA has not been in contact with the finnish authorities. Here is a site (in finnish) that says it all.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Sloncek decided to take SuprNova.org off line voluntarily. This will allow him and his fellow administrative staff to concentrate on other projects without worry of prosecution.
Do you think the MPAA really cares if you're still doing it?
I wasn't speeding when the cops pulled me over...
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
That's what the Finnish police themselves say. What's interesting is that MPAA has been attempting to take the "credit" for the raid. Sure, everyone knows they are lying bastards, but one would expect them to pick lies that are not so easy to check...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
suprnova was based in slovinia. not germany.
As much fun as American bashing is ... let us not forget that these companies are international and hold copyrights in Finland and most of the rest of the world.
I doubt anyone was arrested in Finland for breaking solely US law. I am sure the Finnish police had a Finnish law to justify the arrests.
With their constant outsourcing (to AU & CN, to name two popular movie studio outsource winners), these "American copyright holders" don't seem too interested in actually doing the US any favours.
I think many of the European countries wouldn't allow RIAA/MPAA/etc to go after individual downloaders, but would after the centralized tracker servers. However, what about re-locating to places like Russia, Eastern Europe, south america, etc? Not physically of course but the servers. Alternatively is anyone working on a more transparent P2P system? The advantages of BT (fast speeds, built in incentives to share upload speed) with higher levels of anonymity and a more distributed tracker? Its ironic that the movie, TV, and recording industry have this vast opportunity here (lots and lots of people worldwide want to see your stuff!) but cannot capitalize on it. I'd pay a few bucks a month if I could download whatever I wanted and see it whenever I wanted without going to crappy movie theaters or sitting in front of the couch when the TV execs want me to, but I guess thats heresy. (yes, I have a mythTV box)
It sucks that they shutdown the web sites... but IRC will forever remain the unstoppable force when it comes to obtaining illegal files... whether it's FTP, or torrents... IRC will always have the info available... Perhaps it's a good thing that the websites are being shutdown... Napster became too popular, killed the free MP3 system... The same thing happend to DirecTV and DISHNET... too easy for joe q. public to obtain pirated signals, again too popular... If we keep the methods of obtaining illegal things difficult, it keeps the popularity down, and more or less off the radar screen... Now I personally stopped pirating a while back... but my reasoning for it in the first place was the challenge... Now a days it's just a click here and a click there, and presto... what's the fun in that? I enjoyed the challenge more than the results... besides... 99% of the illegal stuff out there is GARBAGE anyways... and the stuff that isn't you need to purchase to actually use it...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
IANAL, but it seems odd that these sites which distribute the torrents can be held liable for the torrent's contents. The sites never actually host the copyrighted material, same goes for the trackers of the torrents. It would seem to me that the seeds of torrents would be the ones who are violating copyright law. But it is a shady practice, I dont know if I would really want the EFF to get involved with this one.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Nice camouflage. Thanks a ton, mate :H
Generally, those "American copyright owners" are also the German copyright owners, and the French copyright owners, and the Japanese copyright owners, and the Russian copyright owners. About the only place they aren't the copyright owners is Gilligan's Island.
All in favor of a missile strike against the MPAA, raise your right hands.
OK, now all those in favor of leaving in place a price-fixing organization of questionable political practices and shoddy professional demeanor, raise your right hands.
I'm sorry, you must have thought I was talking about the Bush administration. Let's try again.
All those in favor of defending organizations whose acronyms consist of four letters ending in "-AA", raise your right hands.
Pinochet would be the Chile molestor.
-mkb
According to a Finnish news site http://www.digitoday.fi/ (in Finnish), the cases are unrelated. At least this is the official statement of the Finnish Central Crime Police. The Finnish investigation was started a couple of months ago by request of an unnamed instance whose rights were violated. The unconfirmed assumption is that the request was made by Microsoft (of Finland).
Now, THAT is information I can trust.
Does due process still exist? Shouldn't this basically be a civil matter? Shouldn't the issues be put before the court so each country can apply their version of copyright laws and see how they apply to the posting of torrent links on a web site? Could some IANAL types please expalin it to me so I can stop being so naive!
Freenet is probably too slow to recreate a site like Suprnova, but how about this. Instead of using Freenet to distribute each individual torrent, could you publish on Freenet a torrent that contains other torrents? For instance, a torrent for each category of files, like what was on Suprnova - a "Movies-Drama" torrent that contained a zipped file of all torrents in that category? This way, you wouldn't be relying on Freenet to distribute every torrent file, just a much smaller index of torrents.
If somebody wanted to take ownership of this, they could create a Freenet page with an anonymous feedback form. When somebody has a torrent to publish, they could submit the info to the anonymous form, and then the publisher would compile all the new torrents into the next version of the index.
Sound feasible?
I've seen a lot of comments on this around "the internets" (yep, all of them ;), and most of them seem to be of the "noooooo... not my warez! Come back!" variety. To me, though, the better question is where the line is drawn. When the sites that -link- to trackers that -allow- people to download -possibly illegal- files from -each other- get shut down, I get worried. How long will it be until any technology that is used for illegal deeds is at risk?
The heavy and cruel hand of corporate censorship strikes again. Human rights are again overshadowed by the inhuman rights of these multinational monsters known as the MPAA and RIAA.
We should also shut down the phone system because people can use it to share pirated ideas.
That would burn.
Get a FREE Sony PS3
that this all seems to hinge on some rather dodgy legal decisions (120 year copyright anyone?) and to be very similar to the much-loathed approach of barratry.
Personally, I have trouble believing that the behaviour of these governments is in the interests of the majority, or, for that matter, anyone other than the RIAA fatcats. And that would imply that somewhere down the line there's been an abuse of the democratic process (no shit...).
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Everyone remember when anon.funet.fi was raided at the request of scientology?
With enough money to fund attorneys you can apparently get other countries, especially the Finnish, to comply.
As has been, and will be more, clear here is that the world has such different views on how property works. There's those who own the movies, and they want to squeeze every penny regardless of if it destroys the franchise. Then there are those who make the movies who themselves may be about money or they may be about the art. The creation of something that is worthy to share with the world. And finally there are the viewers. Do we need to pay to see a movie, something for entertainment. If it sucks do we in a way boycott the movie, or if we enjoy do we go and buy the movie anyway as a sign of gratitude. Or perhaps we simply can not buy the movie, don't we deserve to see it? All in all like this post it is too confusing to answer. But we whatever the answer we know the eventual outcome. The people who make the money win. While the viewer is out in the cold, no matter how many anonymous file sharing networks he may make or use, he will always lose; right or wrong.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
The public has a hard enough time in most first world nations keeping the governments that are over them in check, now imagine a global bureacracy. Ever wonder why it is that so many parties are opposed to the WTO? The irony of it is that the WTO, GATT, NAFTA and other deals are opposed usually by the most rabidly capitalist groups for this very reason. It's usually the "moderates" (whatever the hell that means), "liberals" (in America) and others with no strong support of property rights that support these groups. Michael Badnarik for example, opposed our involvement in all three of those groups and probably the UN as well for those reasons.
Face it, global government exists only to serve global elites. If you think that the UN really cares about the poor and destitute, then ask why Kofi Annan and company were personally involved in the Oil for Food scandal. "Mr. America sucks because we're rich and powerful" who then turns around and dips from a food fund for poor, literally starving Iraqi children. This is the face of global government. He won't get nailed by the ICC, but private Joe Smith who shoots a civilian under questionable circumstances will be all but denied due process under the ICC.
Global government: the worst of capitalism and communism mixed together under one roof, with no accountability and ultimately no pretense of the rule of real law.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Since they were hosting what amounted to links for pirted games/software, I think they got what they deserved. They can't say they didn't know people were using the torrents to download pirated software when the descriptions were right there.
I would imagine that any country that has any type of software lobby wouldn't need too much prodding to shut down a site like that. What they were doing pretty much amounts to aiding in thievery. Now maybe if they stuck to stuff that wasn't pirated software/movies they wouldn't be having such problems.
As they were, they'll get no pity from me. They knew what they were doing, knew it was against the law and did it anyway. If they didn't understand the consequences (being sued and such) then they better grow up quick and understand if you're robbing companies than you better believe they're going to get you eventually.
Cheers
> There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what
> is most scary is that American copyright owners
> can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
Probably about as scary as being the copyright holder of original works being distributed globally for free against your wishes.
Suprnova was up 2 years. I'm somewhat curious as to what a site with that much traffic would have made in ad revenue.
Anyone have a rough idea?
Those sites were havens for illegal material. The administrators of those sites had ample opportunity (and the ability) to remove torrents that linked to copyrighted material.. but they chose not to.
Good riddance to bad rubish.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
The sad part is that there were a fair amount of non-infringing torrents available through these sites. Obviously not the bulk of the content, but still a significant number of files.
It would be nice if one these places could be resurrected as a source for all sorts of legal torrents, but somehow I doubt many of the admins (or users, for that matter) would consider it worth the effort.
(rolls eyes) If you've seen a recordedmovie through legitimate channels in the past 2 decades, you've seen the copyright warning. This warning invariably says something about how the members of some mysterious fascist organization called "Interpol" voted unanimously to enforce copyrights. It may also mention the Berne convention as reason or impetus to do this.
Hint 1: The "inter" in "Interpol" stands for "international".
Hint 2: Berne isn't even remotely in the US.
... than bittorrent for such sites. If I recall, one of the features of BitTorrent was that it _did_ let you know where the source of your stuff was.
There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
No, that's not the most scary thing. Many here will critisize the current incarnation of near perpetual copyright and many will critisize how the Big Media have treated that right--as well as their customers.
But to say that I -- as an American -- should not be able to protect a work of art/media across a foreign boundry is a pretty extremest view. And in my view, it would be quite harmful.
Remember the ability to create your own terms of an open source project is made possible only because the creator is GRANTING those rights to add, change and distribute source code. It's copyright that protects that code from just being taken by Microsoft without the company agreeing to contribute back to the project.
Copyright is also what protects some huge media corp from stealing a young artist's song without even "signing" him. They just take it and give it to Pop Artist #122b.
What scares ME is that this is an attack on the freedom of speech and information. SuprNova was linking to illegal media, but it wasn't hosting it. It should not be illegal to say where the red light district is and it shouldn't be illegal to point someone to one of the prostitutes.
It should only be illegal when one actually gets into the act.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
The BBC has an interesting article on the suject of SuprNova going down, as well as some general information on BitTorrent and the MPAA.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."
Perhaps dantheman82 needs to understand the concept of international copyright law. Many countries, including those in the story, have agreements to enforce each other's copyrights.
The sites being shut down were rampantly violating the copyrights of an organization big enough to fight back.
What's scary is that the submitter thinks shutting these sites down is somehow wrong and unjust. There are a lot of things wrong with the big music companies, but this is not one of them.
If there's something to be angry about, be angry that these governments wouldn't take the time and effort to protect your small time products in the same manner they protect the big big time products.
And this is why!
This would be scary, if you think that taking sites down was not just and legitimate.
No, it's scary full-stop. The problem isn't that the sites were shut down, it's that police have been arrseting people. This should be a civil matter, not a criminal one. I was under the impression that copyright infringement was only a criminal matter in the USA - what are local police doing getting involved? It should be lawyer letters to their ISP, not people with guns coming to take you away.
Yet, more people then ever before have no health insurance, more children then ever are starving, AIDS is running rampant all over Africa, American kids are dying every day in Iraq because the govt. can't provide the proper armored vehicles, more Americans are homeless then ever before, people are having heart attacks from Aleve, gas and heating oil is almost twice what it was a year ago, and on and on.
What is America's response to this? To ignore all of the above and concentrate on such "important" things as busting movie and song 'pirates', drugs, and Janet Jackson's nipple.Something is wrong and really, really fucked up in America
Just wait till the Microsoft Empire strikes back, better hope the Lunix Jedi Knights show up too :)
roamingfeet
I checked out a few of the sites linked by that faq and they clearly are allowing access to copyrighted material using the BitTorrent network. This is wrong in the same way that if I give someone information on where and how to access a location where someone else's valuebles are stored, I would be considered an accomplice to the crime of theft if the person I gave that inforamtion to were to actually steal the valubles. Another way to look at it is, if I contract a hit man to kill another person, then later tell the hit man not to do it, I have still committed a crime. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime in itself. In this case, the conspiracy is between these web site owners and the criminals that trade copyrighted data.
The quickest way to kill the entertainment industry is to destroy the insentive to create good movies, music, or books. The insentive to create the works of art, is created by allowing the creators to profit from thier creations. That cannot be done if people are allowed to make copious copies of the art without compensation to the artists. I know some people are going to say that the MPAA does not represent artists. But they do represent the people that pay the artists. They will not continue to do so if they cannot profit from what they are paying the artists to do.
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding." Its been happening for decades...check out the UN.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome. - Isaac Asimov
that they haven't got an alternative delivery vehicle yet. Closing down P2P networks and not providing legal alternatives will only make people write different P2P aplications and push this thing on a step.
Reinventing the wheel since 1979
There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding.
Did you miss out on the CIA campaigns of assassination in the 1960's and 1970's? If the US government can mobilize foreign coups d'etat to snuff the democratically-elected leftist leaders of nascent democracies, then taking down a bunch of pimply-faced warez monkeys is neither surprising nor newsworthy.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
In a world where people seem to be all agog about having the UN be a world government, why do people have a problem with law enforcement acting like there is one?
I hope that we will see the authorities apply this logical to more areas than this. You see, they are considering the makers of the software that allows people to violate the copyright as the offenders. I think I will tell that to the next cop who stops me for speeding. "Well officer, Ford made the car that enabled me to speed, perhaps you have the wrong guy here." officer, "You are right sir, I apologize for pestering you while the real offenders go free."
Bitorrent is a good method for downloading files. So was Kazaa, the main drawback I find with MPAA is its reluctance to accept new technlogy. I mean file sharing is just a method of transport, if DRM and other technology is used with the files we could have another service which would be a source of revenue for the movie industry.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Does anyone have a torrent link to archived copies of the sites?
They weren't digitally signed.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
If I'm hitting some dude over the head with a baseball bat, and I hear the sirens outside and decide to stop before they bust the door down, am I now "safe from prosecution" because I ceased the illegal behavior before the authorities arrived?
What a ridiculous statement that was.
They maybe shouldn't have feared prosecution in the first place. Perhaps they should have fought the fight because they were really in the right, but neither of those things are the same as saying they are now safe from prosecution.
Oh, and lest anyone think I didn't RTFA, I quote:
"Considering that administrators of smaller, although no less significant, communities such as ShareConnector were actually arrested, Sloncek decided to take SuprNova.org off line voluntarily. This will allow him and his fellow administrative staff to concentrate on other projects without worry of prosecution."
Sure sounds like they are saying they are no longer worried about prosecution to me.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
>> This would be scary, if you think that taking sites down was not just and legitimate. It's not a legitimacy issue, its the fact that there is no clear law out there about P2P and they are still raiding them. If the police stormed into your home while you were P2P downloading, while you thought you were protected, wouldn't it scare you?
The more they try to destroy this, the more people will get involved and the more underground it will become. Destroying BT will just produce more innovation. Destroying their customer based... etc etc etc.
from the DeHavilland article:
"It [MPAA] has also filed suits against users of file-sharing programmes BitTorrent, eDonkey and DirectConnect in the US and Europe."
If anyone has seen any details on this feel free to post, I thought they were just cracking down on the web sites.
Why is this anymore scary than American oil interests setting policy in places like Nigeria or Iraq or many other number of countries. Or America killing it's own people in brutal and often unnecessary standoffs.
I have said it before and I will say it again, and I will get labeled a troll. Over the entire history the USA has proven it willingness to acquire military force and use the overwhelming advantage to destroy anyone who opposes it. This is no different from the superpowers that preceded it. Therefore, anyone that pisses off the US, or cuts a special deal with the US, and then is surprised when the US acts with overwhelming force, is in a dreamland. It is probably not right, it is probably not a healthy way to exist, but it is not surprising.
When the FBI comes in and annihilates a group of people that has been taunting the US government, this is not surprising. When the military comes in and bombs a a city back to the dark ages, killing untold number of civilians, this is not surprising. When the US policy makers create a system that will allow a retail chain to create a class of indentured servants, this is not surprising.
Many of us believe this is wrong, and are trying to change it. But this is the way it is right now. If you want change, use your wallet and your feet. The system only works because consumers buy the products of the people who want to oppress us. Stealing *AA products is not going to help. Buying non-*AA might. Complaining that an illegal warehouse has been raiding is not going to help. Help creating a competing counter culture might.
Complaining about this when international humanitarian rights are being violated on a daily basis is just narcissistic beyond belief. Corporate music and video is not a basic human right. Try to make you won jam.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It sure is convenient that American law enforcment can mobilize foreign law enforcement to do their bidding with the situation benefits large corperations, but refused to do ANYTHING when I lost a laptop to escrow fraud. The FBI wouldn't do anything withou FIVE HUNDRED complaints first.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
The problem here is that BitTorrent will be viewed as negative, by the communities, by law enforcement, by your employer.
Basically it's viewed as illegal, and is going to take a major shift (if it's possible) to make people understand what it really is. The same still goes true for other like things (ie Guns).
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
When people are stealing my stuff, I would do everything in my power to stop them whether I was a large company or a single individual. The law exist to protect us from people stealing our stuff. If you establish a site that essential does nothing but facilitate the stealing of stuff then you should be arrested. If people do not like the current market arrangements, prices, etc, then they should not buy the product, not steal the product and self-riteously say the theft was justified. This behavior harms me as a huge user of leagal bit torrent sites, which will now be under unjustified scrutiny.
These recent developments are extremely scary and make me think at what point justice is still justice or rather plain business interest of a shady industry and corrupt politicians. Any opinions/solutions on that?
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."
What makes you think that Americans were behind the arrests? Has it occurred to you that maybe Japanse animation companies are sick of their work being ripped off by people too cheap to buy it on DVD? Or all of the Indian movie companies? What about all of the software companies in Europe who want people to PAY for commercial software?
While the MPAA and RIAA are the big names in the war on IP piracy, there are plenty of companies all over the world with a big interest in shutting down torrent aggregators. The big difference is that, unlike the MPAA and RIAA, other groups don't issue a press release and advertising every time they ask the cops to crack down or file a lawsuit.
To me, what is most scary is that people think they flaunt copyright laws on such a massive scale and get away with it. You mean "flout" not "flaunt". The meanings are nearly opposite.
Shit walks
As long as it is relatively easy to obtain piratated commercial software like Photoshop, Office, etc. people will do that.
However if it becomes almost impossible to download pirated commercial software online, open source/free alternatives will become more used.
-- This tag may be copied freely (C)
Slashdotted after 147 posts, must be a new record.
This story was posted under a heading of "YRO," which I'm told stands for "your rights" something.
Isn't that just a bit misleading here? Whose rights are we talking about, exactly? I thought we were talking about the rights of content owners, rights that are being ignored en masse by pirates all over the world.
I'm pretty sure you're going to have a hard time spinning this into a "me me me" situation.
I write in my journal
It is interesting to note that the MPAA is going out there and shutting these sites down. They are definately working to work with these groups in other countries to crack down on these people. And I understand why. Recently in India the CEO of Bazzee was arrested and put in jail. Bazzee.com is India's ebay.com ( it is administered and run by ebay etc...), and the CEO was arrested and put in jail because some guy was selling a video of some girl blowing him. So what makes it all so funny is that the guy went to the coutry to help figure out who was selling pornographic materials etc.. This is absurd, there are diffrent laws in different countries and they look at copyright and other violations differently, but I do agress that criminal law should be done by the police protect women getting beaten by there husbands, violent crimes etc.. And all these forms of "slynes/civl" law breaking activities let them be handled by people who know the law. Have any of you tried to explain the law to a police officer. He has no idea, his thing is to keep peace and to avoid property damage. But then you can argue that copyrights are a type of property and that the police must go out and stop these acts. I personally think stop downloading music make your own. 2ndly stop watching downloaded movies read a book go outside, flirt with the neighbors wife ( I try ).
I am totally against copyright violation, but I must say that this story made me think of the following:
All that need be done is build a torrent client that can also torrent these catalog pages...
td
hard core geek-ware
Depends on your definition of criminal... go down to your public library, and pick up a copy of 1984, please.
I was over reading the 10 Top Urban Legends in Film History and I thought this was interesting
h ttp://www.jerrylewiscomedy.com/film_clown_cried.h tm
"URBAN LEGEND #10. Jerry Lewis hides his "Clown."
"The legend: Jerry Lewis is hiding "The Day the Clown Cried" because it is such an atrocious movie.
The truth: "The Day the Clown Cried" was never completed due to a flurry of lawsuits between Lewis and his film partners during the final days of the film's production in Sweden. Lewis spirited the final reel of the film out of Sweden, but the rest of the footage was seized by the Swedish government when the lawsuits were filed locally in 1972. The only version in Lewis' possession is the video capture which he simultaneously shot while making the film, but this was meant for reference purposes only and was not designed for exhibition. After three decades, the litigation involving the film has not been settled and this bizarre concentration camp clown adventure has yet to find its way into a projector."
http://www.filmthreat.com/Features.asp?Id=932
Before everyone goes, Huh? The United States, which I know is responsable for everything bad in this world from a lack of Splenda reserves to Michael Jackson to Blood for Oil, isn't the only Nation-State to use it's legal system to hamper the rights of the viewing public, there are treaties that bind the various Nation-States togeather in regards to what laws and copyrights and trademarks and patents are honored and this dates back well over a hundred years, it's not just the evil forces of the MPAA and RIAA blitzkreging through the rights of the Everyman on the Internet.
I live in finland and AFAIK it's lawful to download anything, but sharing is illegal. Finreactor (the site that was raided) had moderators so (according to the law) they knew they were distributing illegal stuff and the raid was legal. IANAL, though.
yes >
As many of you crazy /.'s know, Canada's Supreme Court has decided that downloading copyrighted matirial is permitted. But the uploading is not.
.torrent files aren't copyrighted matirial, only the data they find, how would this fair in the great white north?
The rationale as I understand it is the Internet is a broadcast medium, the broadcaster is required to have the rights to distribute the works, not the reviever.
Are there any Canadian hosted BT web sites? Since
The idea being, running a community website in Canada for non-Canadians who break a Canadian law is allowed. It wouldn't be our responsibility to make sure everyone was following each of the laws, or would it?
Of course, everyone participating in such a website would be left to their own means to adhire to their jurisdiction's laws.
What? people involved in the Hollywood taking a factual story and twisting it around to make it more exciting but factually incorrect? Wow, that's heavy :)
It means the TFHB (tin foil hat brigade) thinks whenever police in another country do something bad, the US *must* have caused it.
Arbitrary sig
Check out boxofficemojo. It is not the US release alone that makes money. Most of the movies esp. big hits and even some abysmal failures such as Troy or King Arthur are making good money abroad. Forget MPAA; these movies are big revenue generators for the local economy abroad. Foreign govt/police will be happy to shut down for two reasons -
make sure local theater owners are happy
take advantage of any opp. to brown nose MPAA
Freedom of speech - screw it - it didnt work for the Americans - it will never work here.
I'm one of the authors of Kenosis-BitTorrent that provides trackers with a way to organize themselves into a p2p network so that no one tracker is the central point of failure. There's also trackerbt, which provides a real distributed tracker service with multiple trackers sharing peer info.
Can your IM do this?
The same three hispanic looking women are still selling hundreds of in and out of theatre DVD's and CD's in the Times Square subway station.
These people of whom I speak not only are profiting directly from copyright infringement, but are doing it in broad day light in a public space and indangering their childrens safety while doing so. Police have yet to respond.
Why does the submitted think the Finnish police need prompting from the US copyright holders for going after illegal activities in Finland? Copyright violations, as perpetrated by the Finns running the BitTorrent site taken down there, is not a civil matter, but a criminal matter. The police are obligated to act when they observe a crime in progress.
That's the way it works in US and that's the way it works in Finland.
Even if it was a civil matter, you might be surprised to find out that all major record labels have representation in most western countries. Something to do with the fact that they release music by artists of those countries...no need for RIAA to get involved.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Suprnova had much more than just copywrited works. Its music section was a great way to distribute your garageband's latest Album. Its Game section was a great way to distribute your latest shareware game. And its movie section was a great way to distribute your latest film. Someone should really start a suprnova for truly free indie content.
It probably wouldn't require all the fancy stuff that modern P2P applications need because of the size of the torrent files. Additionally, because of their limited size, bandwidth wouldn't be quite an issue.
Just a thought...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I used SuprNova for the documentaries and other independent video. Not RIAA, MPAA, or warez content. Yep, fer real yo.
SuprNova, yee were Supr till ya went Nova.
under American law (yes the dreaded DMCA) suprnova was safe from lawsuits because it just acted like google as a clearing house for information and didn't actually run the trackers with infringing material.
Are you sure a judge wouldn't call it contributory infringement, relying on A&M v. Napster?
It's probably somewhere in between. The MPAA tries to get everyone to take action when possible. If anyone does take action, regardless of whether they even read what the MPAA sends them, the MPAA takes credit and feels good about itself.
...the United States of America.
I suppose the United States Postal Service will assign the two character abbreviation "FI" to Finland.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
And you don't have to "Worry about foriegn countries doing the US's bidding(laf)"
Totally redundant are your assertions. A wise man of strong moral character doesn't need to consult the law before he takes action.
I suppose your counterpart in colonial America 200 years ago walked around yelling "We are clearly all British subjects and any talk to the contrary, besides being treasonous, is flatly ridiculous!" Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong and vice versa, ass.
If always taking the safest route were the best idea then all the glory would go to the most mediocre people. Go back to posting on Fark about lib-ral activist judges and toasted cheese if you don't want to read the opinions of a web community devoted to something real that is of daily increasing importance.
The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
Lokitorrent.com appears to be down as of now.
In Finland it's legal to download movies and music (but the law changes soon), but not programs.
Who is John Galt?
Er, there was a </annoyance> in there but it got ignored. Sorry.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
I don't know why people assume that every nation is an island unto itself, but that's just not the case.
I agree with the author - it's scary that the politicians who have control over the police, military, etc. are motivated by greed, even from a foreign source, as if money could be converted or something...
I mean, I never thought of this. I assumed all officials (elected or otherwise) only cared for the rights and privacy of the Common Man.
[sarcasm detector breaks...]
what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding
:)
Actually what they do is send out a multinational enforcement team.
I think their name is "Rainbow," but don't quote me on that.
So public sites with torrents are down. What is stopping you from creating a private tracker and distrubuting torrent files among your friends? If you have a VPN and a site that is available only to several people, nobody is going to notice you. Keep it quiet, keep it low and MPAA will not bother you.
Here is another tip: have "external hard drive" parties. Sites like suprnova.org have been known for quite some time and I bet you there are many people with terabytes of information that you may be interested in. Get a Firewire drive, put all your movies and music files there and then get your friends do so the same. Chances of MPAA knocking on your door to bust a party where several friends are swapping hardware are minimal.
No, American coincidence theorists, throwing around cute denial buzzwords like "tinfoil hat", think that the only bad things foreign police do are those reported on Slashdot's front page. When the MPAA announces it hates its customers so much that it's arresting them worldwide, targeting BitTorrent, then foreign police arrest BitTorrent admins, it's obvious that "the US" caused it. BTW, there's more to "the US" than the MPAA and its wholly owned subsidiary, the global American police state.
--
make install -not war
I don't know where Linus wrote his code, but let's say most of it was in Finland. Now, if somebody was breaking his copyright (by e.g. not complying with the holy GPL) in the US, would US police react? Would it be "scary that [Finnish] copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."?
The day companies manage to prosecute people for violating foreign laws, I'm worried. But this is local law enforcement acting according to local law, and is exactly how the judicial process is supposed to work (that those laws might be bad, is a problem with the legislators, not the police).
As for suprnova not violating copyright law, feel free to go there and take over. I'm sure they'll let you run it on your liability. Test your faith in slashdot pseudo-lawyering and take a stand.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
>>At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
>That's what the Finnish police themselves say.
IIRC the Finnish police said they acted because copyright holders (Microsoft) had filed some kind of complaint against the site (FinReactor) back in 2002...
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
Lets just look at this from a market point of view. Did your market (customers who would "need" your product) shrink, grow, or stay the same over the last 5 years? If it shrank, well, guess what, that is why no one is buying it anymore. If it stayed the same, well, that too is why no one is buying it anymore (they already bought your product, there is no need for them to buy it again!). If it grew, then, how much did it grow? Who are your customers? What are their current financial issues (we are still in a recession and as a result spending is still being cut). How important is this product to your customer's business? If it is not EXTREMELY important, then it will have been cut.
Competitors? Do you have any new ones? Are there now open source products that do the same thing as your product? Are there other solutions by other companies that do the same thing as your product? Are the features that other competting products have that your product does not?
Innovate? Are you still innovating? If you are not creating new things that are truely must have, then customers are simply going to not buy it, and the ones who have already bought it will have no reason to upgrade (are you even upgrading your product?).
Is your product really a magic money printing press? Did you truely believe that people will pay whatever you want for your product and that they would continue doing so indefinetly? How do you know this is a "must have" product that everyone needs and no one else can supply? Five years is an extremely long time for a software solution to some problem. A LOT changes in five years. How do you know that it is because people are copying your product that you are making less money now then five years ago? The reason Microsoft continues to make money is because they have a whole new product every 2-3 years.
Do yourself a favor and get some true market annalysis done before saying that such-and-such is the reason I am not making as much money this year off this product as I did five years ago for the same product.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I've been reading a lot of these comments, and many people are complaining that the major companies are going after the creaters of the tools, and not the users.
This is false.
Approximatly 2-3 years ago, my ISP shut off our internet service, because I was downloading movies, clearly copywrited by the MPAA.
I had the idea that the MPAA would go after the people distributing the movies on a larger scale, and not the people downloading them. I couldn't be more wrong.
Before you go and bash the compaines, saying they should go after the offenders, know that they infact are!
(I'm not even European, but I'll take the bait.)
How's life behind the Moron Curtain of Obliviousness?
The anti-American whining is making you look stupid. Stop it.
I was the turkey all along
A quick Google turned up this explanation (as opposed to writing my own).
Contributory infringement and vicarious liability are court-created theories (i.e., not specified in the Copyright Act) designed to hold a company liable for its participation in unlawful copying. The theory is analogous to the getaway driver in a robbery; everyone knows that the person who drives the getaway car will be in trouble, even if he does not rob the store. The imposition of secondary or indirect liability [1] is common throughout the law. Those who aid or abet the commission of wrongs, or who benefit from them, are frequently held liable.
Secondary liability is an especially important tool in copyright enforcement. Often, alleged contributory infringers may be in the best position to prevent or police violations. And suing many individual direct infringers may be impractical or expensive. However, secondary liability can create disincentives to innovation and entrepreneurship. Generally products have legitimate uses as well as infringing ones, and liability may inhibit firms from serving beneficial purposes. The Supreme Court's decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios limited the circumstances in which liability for contributory infringement may be imposed on a technology company simply because it provided a product that was used for infringement.
The copyright laws do not expressly provide for secondary liability for copyright infringement. But the courts, in a long series of cases, have imposed liability on those who facilitate or profit from copyright infringement. Thus there are two main strands of secondary liability for copyright infringement: contributory infringement and vicarious liability.
CONTRIBUTORY INFRINGEMENT LIABILITY
The standard definition for contributory copyright infringement is when the defendant, "with knowledge of the infringing activity, induces, causes or materially contributes to the infringing conduct of another." [2] In other words, the record labels must not only show ownership of a valid copyright and unlawful copying but must show that the P2P company 1) had knowledge of the infringing activity and 2) materially contributed to the infringing conduct. Again, this is for the purpose of holding someone other than the infringer liable for copyright infringement.
VICARIOUS INFRINGEMENT LIABILITY
Vicarious liability is another means of holding someone liable for copyright infringement even when that person or party is not the one who did the infringing. In order to find a defendant liable under the theory of vicarious liability for the actions of an infringer, it must be shown that the defendant 1) has the right and ability to control the infringer's acts, and 2) receives a direct financial benefit from the infringement.[3] Unlike contributory infringement, knowledge is not an element of vicarious liability. However, courts have determined that the combination of the right and ability to control the infringer's acts and the receipt of a direct financial benefit from the infringement suffices to hold a defendant vicariously liable for copyright infringement, even if the defendant had no knowledge of the particular infringement.[4]
Imagine if the police forced Yahoo! To take down their site when France's law against trading Nazi memorbelia was found to make their auctioning illegal. I know Yahoo! isn't a necessity and occasionally a necessary evil, but it still contributes a lot to the 'net, and it would be hard to imagine the internet without it. Who knows what suprnova could have become some day.
Don't be too sure of that. Unfortunately, we live in Orwellian times. Even some of my fellow social conservatives are none too happy about the way things have been going.
I may agree with you, but I'll defend to the death my country's rich folks right to exploit you.
--Citizen of Dumbf***istan
Sounds like you're more of a fascist than a capitalist.
Damn right.
In Finnish law, distributing copyrighted works for free is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. When money is involved, it becomes a crime with a maximum penalty of two years in prison. A house search can be carried out when the maximum penalty of the suspected crime is atleast 6 months in prison.
Finreactor was accepting donates, thus money was involved and the raids were justified according to the law. Regular p2p users have no reason to worry about the police coming to raid their houses.
Keskusrikospoliisi (National Burearu of Investigation), which performed the raids, has stated that they acted because they got an investigation request from a plaintiff they've not identified, except that it's not the MPAA even though they have so claimed.
There is absolutely no evidence that Kofi Annan has personally profited from the oil-for-food program.
Remember, this program was set up at the behest of the US, with support from the UK and was, according to UNICEF, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?Sectio nID=15&ItemID=6861
Mod parent up +1 informative.
Found a pretty good article about it in Finnish:
3 112086749679.html
:-)... But anyway it says the infringement was first reported to the police in January 2003.
http://www.dnainternet.fi/id/pelit/artikkelit/110
It doesn't say it was Microsoft that filed anything, maybe that was just one of the several fake news about this
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
Be a man Hulk Come on don't be scurred
Your runnin' from Macho that's what ah hurd!
Be a man Hogan Come on don't be a chump
I never thought Hulk would go out like a punk
Be a man Hulk Come on don't be scurred
You're runnin' from Macho that's what ah hurd!
Be a man Hogan Boy you's a chump
Cuz Hulk Hogan is a real big punk
VERSE II
They call you Hollywood (hugh hugh) don't make me laugh
Cuz your movies and your actin' skills are both trash
Your movies straight to video the box office can't stand
While I got myself a feature role in Spider Man
Ya hidin' man but when I find you it's on
And when I slam ya to the dirt you'll wish you's never born
I smell a coward mmmm is that you Hogan
Macho's gonna kick ya butt is the slogan
You try to ignore me thinkin' I'll go away
But I'm a keep on messin' wit ya dude day after day
And once you step to Macho you're through
The joke's on you so Hulk what you gonna do
Probably nothing cuz you're a real big punk
You called my dad up on the phone man you's a chump
Cuz if you really got static take it up with me
And I'll punk ya butt out for the world to see
I don't know anything about Finnish law, but it's a criminal matter if Finnish law says it is.
In the US, you are exposing yourself to civil *and* criminal penalties depending on the infringement.
Look, mommy, I can Google! Here's a page at the US DOJ about it.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
they are not American Copyright holders.
they hold those copyrights in each and every country they are shutting sites down (yes due to american foriegn policy, but hey, those countries went along with it, because they are just as corrupt as american politicians)
Why does all this hoolah over what police should and shouldn't be doing, how it's "scary" that they arrest people, and so forth seem like little more than piracy justification to me?
I find it a sort of double standard that the morality of police actions are always brought up while completely ignoring the morality issues inherent in trading illegal P2P files. It just mysteriously disappears from the equation, because when you demonize the opposition, you don't have to address their argument as much.
"Foreign police arrest massive piracy rings? They're the BAD GUYS! Never mind the 'massive piracy rings' part. Let's start off the article by distracting and framing the issue with talk of how I'm scared of the foreign police, instead of letting people discuss a P2P ring being shut down."
Americans also need to worry about US police enforcing copyrights held by entities in other parts of the world.
-Rich
Under the DMCA, specifically the section 512(d), sets out the criteria under which the 'search engine ' examption applies. The following key points are worthy of note:
Thus, this can only apply if the site owners are never aware that the material they are indexing is infringing.
A simple look at the front page of Suprnova.org is enough to belie that.
If a site wished to claim 512(d) as a defense, they would have to demonstrate to the court that they did not know any of the material they indexed was infringing.
Now, there might be a defense, under the multiple layers of abstraction, in that Suprnova indexed
Simple rule of thumb: If it's common knowledge that a site is were to look to find infringing materials, and is of little other use, 512(d) won't apply (on the grounds that it beggers belief that a site owner would have no grasp on _why_ so many people were using thier site).
Disclaimer: You're not paying for this, this is not legal advice. If you want legal advice, contact a lawyer in your juristriction.
Sounds like an idea to me... I am not into p2p myself and if I was I would prob go with WASTE, but above is at least worth thinking about...Sounds cool to me...
"but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding. "
It' scary to you that we - as Americans - are preventing illegal trading of copywritten files that are being stolen and distributed for free over the internet?
Jesus Christ what have we come to?
Originally there was Napster and people shared music. The music industry put a stop to that, so then we got all the Gnutella clients (Bearshare, Kazza, Limewire, etc.) which broadcast searches and requests all around the Internet wasting insane amounts of bandwidth. Although new versions of the gnutella protocol minimize the wasted bandwidth, it's still pretty bad and now the industries are going after individual users who share media.
Bittorrent was never designed as a file sharing protocol, but websites like supronova.org helped pave the way for it. Bittorrent is efficient and semi-anonymous (you can never tell who the original uploaded is and you'd have to design systems to keep extensive logs in order to prosecute one person for sharing massive amounts of stuff).
Now with bittorrent sites being shut down, we're likely to see a combination of the two (i.e. distributing torrents and trackers via a gnutella style P2P network). In other words, the MPAA and RIAA are going to be responsible for people making more inefficient, bandwidth wasting protocols.
In light of all of this, think about where the money is going. Why the fuck should the movie industry care? Their actors get paid in the millions for a year or two of work. Acting is not work and to be honest, many of the actors at the playhouse at my university can do just as good a job as some of these big names. It's ridiculous how much they get paid for Acting!.
The movie industry are a bunch of money grubbing whores. We measure a movie's success in how much money it makes, however ticket prices keep going up! There's no way a modern movie can compete with the classics when movies were a dollar for new releases. I truly wish movie success rates were based on ticket sales and not on how much money they make.
Instead of shutting down sharing sites for poor college students who love movies, how about paying the actors a reasonable amount, distributing more money to the pre-production effects crews and camera-men and then reducing ticket prices back to $3 ~ $5.
the main reason for Finnish police acting was donate button on their page,
which made under finnish law, the copyright infrigment into copyright crime, since they were making money with piracy.
True that the money was spent on paying their expenses running the dedicated server abroad, but it was still income from distributing copyrighted material.
Point being you're not allowed to receive any income or donations from illegal material or byproducts of such, no matter what your expenses are while getting the material.
You're allowed to download such material under current fair use laws for personal use, as long there's no intention for profit.
The line of intention was crossed on this occasion because of the donate button.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Where a 'busness' has more power than a government.. And exerts its will with out any concern for the law, knowing it can sue anyone into oblivion if they overstep the boundries.
It will only get worse until the people stand up and say 'enough'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought they just made 1-2 hour siggraph presentations and remakes of older films since they apparently do not employ any writers anymore.
Napster too. It was essentially only providing a directory and search service. The same applies to most P2P software.
.torrent files are showing people where to obtain files, and the sites were showing people how to get to .torrent files.
The Torrent sites marks yet another layer of abstraction. The
Note that in Finland, nobody was arrested (AFAIK), and even the SuprNova FAQ doesn't mention anybody in Slovenia actually getting arrested. ShareConnector (whose admin was arrested) is based in the Netherlands. However, I don't know how much of an offense ED2K link sharing is under Dutch law. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it was perfectly legal to arrest them.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
The website in Finland should have arranged a way to have dozens of Finnish works available on their site, both modern and classical national works. It would also help if they also acted as a home site for a Finnish language open-source translation program [Suomi-English; Suomi-Chinese; Suomi-Spanish; etc...].
The local police would be far less willing to shut down a website that was acting as a global outlet for national culture.
Even if they did shut down the site at the insistence of the five global media corporations, the newspapers would pick up the story and play it as cultural imperialist corporations smashing a 'grass-roots' patriotic web portal.
Although it might seem transparent pandering to the flag-waving mentality that is out-of-tune with the geek mind-set, these tactics should not be ignored when setting up a cultural library (a file-sharing website) on the web.
I heard on NPR (National Public Radio, a non-commercial broadcast network in the USA) that the city of Salinas, California decided to shut down their public libraries in order to save some money. This will become increasingly common in the USA.
The closed library facility should be used as a place where people can come and trade CDs, CD-Rs, and DVDs that they freely copy and trade. When global media corporations, several that are based in California, lobby governments to lower their taxes to the point where communities are forced to close the libraries, they lose all moral and ethical authority to claim that they have a right to prevent people from copying and freely distributing books, music, and movies. People obey laws not only to avoid punishment, but because they believe in the legitimacy of the laws. Closing the libraries removes all legitimacy of the copyright laws. There is no longer any moral or ethical reason for honest citizens to uphold them.
Why does all this hoolah over what police should and shouldn't be doing, how it's "scary" that they arrest people, and so forth seem like little more than piracy justification to me?
What, are you stupid? Read what I wrote: "The problem isn't that the sites were shut down". I support stopping these illegal actions. How on earth is that trying to justify copyright infringement?
I find it a sort of double standard that the morality of police actions are always brought up while completely ignoring the morality issues inherent in trading illegal P2P files.
I didn't mention the morality issues regarding copyright infringement because that is a separate issue. And get your story straight - if I was ignoring the morality issues regarding copyright infringement, then I cannot possibly have been trying to justify copyright infringement, can I?
It just mysteriously disappears from the equation, because when you demonize the opposition
Please point out where I demonised the opposition. I am saying that they overstepped their bounds and it's a disturbing trend, not that they are evil people who are automatically wrong.
Foreign police arrest massive piracy rings? They're the BAD GUYS!
And if you pay attention, you will notice that I never said otherwise. But in a civilised society, even people accused of being "bad guys" have the right to be treated fairly.
I want to use torrents to share stuff where the creators have freely given their permission, and to share stuff which I create. And I want to do so without fear of the rich and powerful.
Suprnova can claim that it didn't have the time to download every torrent file that was posted and check the material for copyright violations. Which they obviously didn't because of the sheer number of torrents.
No more then google can check every website for infringing material.
The fact that there was a wide verity of torrents, including many legal ones really helps their case. Linux distros for example.
It's not an open and shut case but a good lawyer should be able to keep them safe.
Because on the most basic level they were a search engine; one that happened to specialize in torrents, and is no different then if you went to google and search for torrents.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
How About Ants p2p it has swarming ,resume encryption point to point and end to end ,a Http tunnel for posting hashes and a embeded IRC chat for one of its bottstraping methods its in beta so the user base is small but it has potential . .Its open source and heavily developed at this current time .Only one drawback for most users ,its a JAVA app
.0 /~gwren/h ome.jsp?page=custom&xmlName=ants
Azureus and Ants developers are colaborating on a hybrid client useing some sort of distributed trakers and the Ants core for plusible deniability
Ants Developer Grwen personal webpage
http://www.myjavaserver.com.nyud.net:809
You're absolutely right. Human rights were violated. Give me a minute, and I'll publish a list of sites where kiddie porn is readily available. And remember, I'm just publishing links, not the actual kiddie porn.
Oh yeah, and look up the definition of censorship, kid. That's the kind of word that shouldn't be thrown around lightly.
I don't respond to AC's.
Are content producers being hurt by torrents? Marginally.
When people say this, they're missing the point. It doesn't matter how much you think content producers may or may not be hurt. It is their content, and they have rights that are being violated under the law. If you were an artist, wouldn't you want to have permission over how your works are distributed?
Why does Lars Ulrich's position over how his music should be distributed not matter? I'll tell you exactly why--because people have grown so used to the convenience of the technology of illegal P2P that they've justified and created an entire belief system in their minds to make themselves not feel guilty over it. There are no actual noble positions on illegal P2P; they are all facades masking the protection of piracy so that person can continue to get free stuff. It all boils down to people just wanting stuff for free, and it amazes me how many people choose to disregard this basic human instinct.
Do you think it's okay to steal GPL source code? If not, then that contradicts the pro-piracy position.
Those who disregard the wishes of content owners while pretending to be "for the artists" are just towing a partyline that justifies piracy in their minds. It's up to them to decide what to do with their works. It's not like they create something, then there's a sudden magical flash of light where everyone else in the world has ownership and distribution rights to do whatever the hell they want with the content. If someone writes a song, they get to choose what to do with that song. Not pirates who insist they are not thieves.
can't just pay for your music and movies? There is almost no legal reason to use such services as bittorrent. You can get far more movies, books, and songs than you ever could need at a reasonable price (even free!) via legal methods, and you darned well know it. Quit whining and start paying.
...is that governments (ineffective and beurocratic) is being shafted by multi-national corporations (insensitive and protective). You might not notice it as much in the US, which is a fairly large country, but smaller countries do. You think Wal-Mart is screwing US companies around? Try being a small country, who gets essentially blackmailed "Hmmm should we place this in your country, or your neighbour? What's your offer?"
All the trade organizations are against world government because it would rival their own world-wide economic power. Want to dodge emissions standards? "Sorry, all global" Want to employ child labour? "Sorry, forbidden globally" Want to employ (wage) slave labour? "Sorry, minimum standards on worker's rights" The list goes on.
Yes, you have the problem of who watches the watchers. Since ultimately you have no "bigger" to watch over you, on top you place a system of checks and balances. This is nothing new and is essientially what exists at the top of every democratic organization, including national (USA) and supernational (EU) governments.
None of them work perfectly. But I don't see any reason why a world government should have to be worse at it. In fact, a world government would have a lot more power to actually raise standards without affecting competition. Take a look at how many proposals are rejected because it would put them at a disadvantage to the rest of the industry. A level playing field is a good one.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Wait...whose copyright was being infringed on? As much as I visited suprnova, I never noticed any copyrighted material. All I saw were a bunch of .torrent files, none of them large enough to hold copyrighted material. Were they hiding it in some special folder on their web site?
How quickly we forget the lessons of the Cult of Scientology vs. Julf's infamous anon.penet.fi remailer.
INTERPOL and the Finnish cops were more than happy to raid Julf when the cult snapped it's fingers.
In 2000 during the Napster lawsuit, everybody--including CmdrTaco--was saying they should be suing the individual file traders, not the app itself (Napster). Now they're doing just that, and suddenly they're bad guys again. It's just demonization to distract from the issue of the inethics of illegal P2P.
When people were saying they should sue individual downloaders, it was a facade to suggest they leave piracy alone, because nobody thought they'd be able to enforce the networks and sue anybody. It was indirect protection of piracy because they were purposely suggesting something they thought was impossible. The copyright holders have shown that it is not.
Read any of the upmodded comments from that era and laugh to yourself at the change in positions. From "Go after the downloaders!" to "Going after the downloaders makes them 'scary'!"
The online equivalent of stealing should be a crime. But copyright infringment is not stealing. It's reproducing duplicates.
1.61803398
The job of cops is ultimately to act in the best interests of our society - that's what we have laws for in the first place. If we see our government acting as hired guns for whichever lobby group has the most cash, I would say we have a good reason to get pissed off.
I consider this to be a decent example of said phenomenon. As far as independent (non-RIAA-funded) studies can find, filesharing hasn't harmed the music industry at all. On a personal level, I can vouch for filesharing promoting quality - the "free demo" theory. This is a good thing for society as a whole, but not for the RIAA.
Hence, when the police and judiciary start to stamp heavily on people whose actions are not (IMO) particularly immoral, I consider it to be acceptable to protest loudly and often.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Sorry, but like it was said before, the library is now closed due to budget cuts! Lawers cost alot of money these days.
I'm sure this will get mod'd a troll or flamebait, but let's face it. These torrent sites may of not of been hosting copyrighted information, but they were definately providing people the means to download copyrighted content without paying for it; often against their local laws.
I have hard time pittying them trying to make money by selling ads while trying to help others to break the law. Note that "helping someone break the law" is generally considered an "accomplice" which is illegal in many countries. Not to mention trying to profit from such assitance often incurs additional penalties.
The reality is that they knew they were helping people break the law and they tried to rub the noses of the RIAA/MPAA/etc in it and their bluff was called.
Honestly, if these sites contained a significant percentage of torrents for works which could be freely shared (freeware, BSD, GPL'd, software, etc) then I'd be upset at their closure. But at least 95% of the torrents were for porn, games, movies, music, etc for which the creater wishes to be paid for.
I agree with most people's opinion though, all this means is that someone will come up with some new P2P technology that either decentralizes the indexes or allows them to hide (freenet or tor anyone?)
As long as I can keep downloading Linux distros, I have no sympathy for movie downloaders. Come on, people. You don't need a third of the Internet bandwidth so you can watch movies for free.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Did this idea JUST come to you? Because your fav pirate software site goes down, suddenly it's on your radar? You can't get your latest movie or game for free, and NOW you suddenly discover your "rights" are being walked on? You can't steal anymore and now you're pissed? Well guess what? This has been going on for some time.
Slashdot covered the Indymedia bust, but it faded from the headlines because they are just a bunch of Communist news junkies. But God forbid they take your free games and music!
I guess we should feel lucky that at least people are now seeing what is going on with respect to our freedoms, I just find it sad that the thing that brings it to the average Slashdot reader's radar is the loss of stuff they had no rights to anyway.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why do not use FreeNet? Isn't it secure and free of censorship? http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ They could post the torrent files in FreeNet without that fear. Even eDonkey's links could be on the net. I know it's kind of crapy search and go thru this net, but maybe it can work and we all be a little bit out of MPAA reach.
That's the beauty of it. When winter comes around, the gorillas will simply freeze to death.
DNA just wants to be free...
And that pretty much sums it up doesn't it?
Agile Artisans
> There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is > that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding. If the (American) copyright owners can mobilize Finnish shops to sell the music and Finnish consumers to buy the music, why is it suprising that Finnish police cannot be mobilized too? Incidentally: Sony Music - Owned by Sony - Japanese BMG - Owned by Bertlesman - German
Personally, I support the rights of many many poor Africans to live over the rights of Big Pharma to rake in extra dough. Any counterarguments?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
That's just more deliberate conspiracy-mongering by the loons who run Slashdot. Their position, and that of the crowd they want to attract is this: We don't agree with copyright law, so we think we ought to be allowed to violate the law with impunity and that anyone who enforces the law in their own interests is a Greedy Bastard.
/.legions rant about.
None of these clowns ever manages to explain how they obtain rights that they haven't purchased and that no one has given them. They're pretending that buying a copy of something also means they've bought the right to copy and re-market it. Most times that's not the case, obviously. Sometimes it is, though, if that's what the author wants, and his wishes will be protected by the same copyright laws that the
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How convenient for you to ignore the immorality of copyright, prohibition, or Jim Crow laws. Some of those laws were repealed(we're working on the rest) due to the "immorality" of the people who had the guts to tell the lawmakers and police to go to hell and to ignore or openly violate bad law. As one that's dependant on the status quo, you could hardly know or care who the bad guys really are. You just believe what the authorities tell you.
What?
It's not like they didn't know that many of their torrents were illegal.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
That's exactly the rationale the drug companies use to deny AIDS treatment to poor people. Would you argue against helping humanity as well?
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I applaud your poiting out well know facts. Now please explain how exactly do you know that
As mentioned elsewhere, the Finnish police acted independantly, with no input from any of those 'evil American copyright owners'
Please mention where is your elsewhere and how reliable the source is. Also, how can you prove this to be a fact ?
This highly selective fact finding is making you look stupid, stop it.
Although it was sad initially when suprnova died and i grieved for a few days i think im over it now. Ive found other sources of torrents and life is going on. It was hardly suprising that it died considering its popularity, but better alternatives will appear in the future. If napster had never been shut down would the motivation to develop something better have appeared? Perhaps it would have but i doubt as quickly. In someways it can be viewed as a form of natural selection or survival of the fitest. Superior methods of p2p networking will continue to evolve, wether a "perfect" system will evolve which can not be shut down in the future is not certain, but alot of smart individuals are putting alot of effort into it. As long as people want to download media for free, p2p networks will be in demand. If there was a legal way for me to download movies for a $ or so, 700mb rips would be fine, then id probably do it. I dont see why for tv shows they dont release digital versions for distribution on something like bittorrent maybe with transparent ads in one corner of the screen to cover advertising costs, enterprise for example displays a transparent UPN logo during the whole show, why not display a coke/imb/intel ad? Unless "they" alter there marketing model to distibute media in a digital age so they can earn some money from free/minimal cost downloads, they wont get any money out of me. The good times continue to roll...
Self-correction: pointed to infringing material
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
If that is correct about library closings then you are correct. The only reason for copyright laws is to encourage publication of materials so that they can be available to the general public. Close down the libraries and you've removed a major reason for IP law.
In America, copyrighted material owns you!
"Fair use," in and of itself, is nowhere clearly defined in the copyright law, and its interpretation is largely left up to judges in individual cases. Whether or not a given case of suspected infringement constitutes Fair Use is determined on the basis of several factors, including the nature of the work infringed and the purpose for which it was copied.
I can assure you that several of the examples you cite are most certainly not Fair Use; checking a book out from the library does not give you the right to give a copy to a relative. ("Unquestionably"? Are you so naive you actually believe that?) And I certainly hope you don't teach any classes, because if you do, you might want to do a little bit of research before you find yourself in a mess of trouble with your boss.
Breakfast served all day!
Referencing something completely unrelated doesn't prove your point. Jim Crow laws are somehow related to basic copyright protection? Am I violating your civil rights because I want to be protected in selling my music? Give me a break.
I note that you don't actually explain your position on what makes copyright immoral. Emotively mentioning prohibition and Jim Crow laws without actually explaining the relation just makes your argument nothing more than emotion-based piracy justification because you don't want the free ride to get taken away and get bitter at the suggestion.
You just believe what the authorities tell you.
Sure. I'm the one parroting the groupthink.
Yes, while we're at it, we should arrest people who plagarize anything.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
So how come we don't see torrent search engines popping up in safer locations, like Havenco? The MPAA would literally have to hire mercenaries to take down the server, and there's a pretty good chance that Havenco has spent a little money on defending Sealand from attacks like this.
Um, to them:
Going after pirates = more money.
Adding DRM to content = more money.
More money + more money = even more money.
Of course, "more money" is a short term thing, but they don't care about that.
You are jumping to assumptions. I have used SuprNova 10 or 15 times. Everything I downloaded was legal and SuprNova helped me find the tracker. I am not a typical user, but I was downloading Linux isos.
Good day,
The relevant section would appear to be section 506 (pages 139 and 140) covering what acts are considered criminal under the legislation. I can't see anything there about links to links to trackers to seeds to peers with copyrighted material. Hence I would conclude that the grandparent was justified in his assertion. Any counterarguments?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I note that you don't actually explain your position on what makes copyright immoral.
I actually agree with limited forms of copyright, but you seem to think that copyright could not possibly be immoral. I can't see why. You need to justify laws against their absence; i.e. the state of nature. Copyright is the act of taking away people's right to copy. That alone is an immoral nasty act. To justify copyright laws, you need to explain how it is adequately compensated for.
I am happy with the justification that it helps promote the public domain, however more recent revisions to copyright law and their poor application to computer software have sent them out of balance and I can't justify such extreme measures.However, I can easily see that people who value the public domain less, or believe that promotion of its growth is unnecessary would disagree with copyright laws.
"did willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage and private financial gain infringe the copyright's of various coprighted works"
Where by sharing these works are you gaining any commercial advantage or private financial gain. How is somebody sharing a movie or mp3 making money off of the endevour? Look at the key phrase here, "financial gain". In order to have a financial gain don't you have to make money?
This is what's been confusing me for awhile with the US laws about copyright infringment and the DOJ going after people for it.
You're going to completely ignore the actual meaning of the word "stealing" (that is, taking without permission) and define it as being dependent on deprivation.
Stealing involves taking. You do not take when you copy. If you choose to redefine the word "stealing", please explain your reasoning.
You could go even further. You could say that BitTorrent is a distributed protocol, such that no one host sends every block of a given file to a single recipient. If you an I are both in the same Torrent swarm, I might only send you a few blocks of the file, and almost never the whole thing. You could liken these blocks to the short clips and quotations from books that literary critics and scholars regularly reprint in their reviews and dissertations -- something that's well protected under Fair Use doctrine. Therefore, my sending you a few blocks over BitTorrent could be seen as protected under Fair Use. It's not copyright infringement, because I never even sent you a full copy. Just a couple of packets here and there.
Unfortunately, I think the real message from these raids is that this kind of hair-splitting just isn't going to fly with a sane, rational judge behind the bench. Sorry.
Breakfast served all day!
Why don't some of the index servers open source their website code so that motivated anonymous individuals can take over running them on Tor?
It should even be possible for trackers to run on top of tor. Any internet service can be turned into a tor service quite easily.
I guess the court case will show if the donate-button was crossing the line, but I bet it also helped that they had user registration and quotas. From the user stats the police could easily pick out the people who shared the most stuff, and aren't these probably the same 30 or so people, who's homes were invaded and computers confiscated (and some of whom were maybe also responsible for running the torrent-webpage)? So they CAN pin these people with actually illegally sharing copyrighted stuff, and not just "providing links to some kind of content"...
"The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand", or so I have read.
No, they generally won't. However, getting a human to Mars doesn't sound so noble when there are people starving on Earth. Local government (and that includes neighborhoods and community groups) are far better equipped to handle the "small" differences to mankind, like providing aid to the hungry, homeless, and destitute.
I think it's ridiculuous how the federal government can put a man on the moon, but can't balance its own budget.
I say take care of the "small" problems before you worry about space travel and cloned animals.
Transistors and Beer!!
At least I believe, that the finnish police made it's own independent decision.
Sounds like a politician's standard disclaimer.
Well let's see... Either we jail these geeks, or incur the wrath of the USA.
Sounds real independent to me...
Though it's easy to see why given how the word is pronounced.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Someone should create a .torrent that consists of that's day's submitted torrents
a simple search engine could tell you which daily torrent to grab. you could then use your software to limit the downloading of a specific file (the atual torrent of the file you want)
surely that would if nothing else, at least mask what's being pointed to, maybe buying into the "i had no idea what torrents where in there" argument
Trafficking in stolen goods is a crime. Why should the online equivalent not be a crime?
It should. But copyright infringement is not equivalent to trafficking in stolen goods.
In the US, you are exposing yourself to civil *and* criminal penalties depending on the infringement.
That's right, and you dont want us exposing ourselves.
-Valiss
How about novel idea. If you want something pay for it. Don't be a mooch.
Life in England's just great! Thanks for asking.
How about the idea that there is a link on a site to a torrent(not on that site, but a number of trackers) , that then contains a bunch of torrents, or even a single torrent? Does the indirection help at all for these sites? As it is, people post torrent site links here, which is the same level of indirection.
.torrent files a day in these packs.
Of course this means that a better method of managing torrents would be needed, with better comments, search functionality, etc, if you are downloading hundreds of
To illustrate the absurdity of your position, I will then define "murder" as "being a jackass in a public forum" and argue that you should be sentenced to life in prison.
You're then going to call me a troll and a tool of the establishment that's trying to keep you down.
No, I'd call you an asshole, and a retarded one at that.
I read an interesting comment below which referenced older technologies that have been shutdown and it gave me an interesting idea: could this just be a part of technological evolution?
First there was IRC (which still lives) and then there was FTP and then Napster and then other file-sharing mechanisms (edonkey, bearshare, mostly on similar/same networks) and the bittorrent to accomodate large files. One could make the argument that with each following technology there was an improvement and an evolution.
Where there's a will there's a way. I imagine that if bittorrents do face a large blowback from sites getting shutdown that techie's will find a way to adapt.
Here's a thought: being able to serve web pages in a distributed fashion (or at least a user-friendly index). I imagine you could build it on top of the existing bittorrent technology. This way the pages could be hosted on everybody's machine instead of one webserver that can easily get shutdown.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
C'mon.. police in ANOTHER country arrest people who are breaking laws in that country. Yet, somehow, it's OUR fault?
Great satan indeed.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
The online equivalent of stealing should be a crime. But copyright infringment is not stealing. It's reproducing duplicates.
Actually, it's reproducing duplicates without permission, which is expressly forbidden by the copyright covering movies and music. Unless the copyright holder says you can copy it for distribution, you can't copy it. Period.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I heard about a project for such a GAIM plugin.
This sounds like F2F (friend-to-friend, or neighbourNode-to-neighbourNode) networks like Ants, Mute, Waste, or Metanet.
MS call them darknets because they can't be shut down if they are well built.
F2F
that there *is* someone else to make it. And they can do it cheaper. And save more lives. It's the free market (sans artificial limitations) fixing the price, not the government.
You raise a good point about the recouping of research costs (or at least I think that was what you were getting at), but I strongly feel that the balance is tilted way too much in favour of big pharma at the moment, at the expense of real people's lives.
I can only comment on their activities cos I myself don't posess a government-backed monopoly on any major lifesaving products. However, I hope that, if put in that situation, I would behave a little more ethically than these companies.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
There's no recent(within 300 years) history to base this on, but I belive the public domain would increase exponentially without copyright. We shouldn't encourage greed as a way of motivation. Copyright was simply created to restrict access to new technology(the printing press). Corps and gov't were looking for a way to control who gets to be widely published. It's censorship by proxy.
What?
I know this is listed in the faq but for those who didn't check it: http://www.bi-torrent.com/ is pretty much a complete mirror of suprnova :) bit of a different gui. no pop-ups.
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
Just when I was looking for a tracker for my proprietary, binary-only distribution of Linux.
How about you read the rest of the posts on slashdot, by my count there were at least 10 posts that had links refering to the fact that finnish authorities acted alone.
You're just plain stupid.
So, it's been illegal to tape movies broadcast on television, all along? Illegal to tape radio? Illegal to copy your own VHS tapes?
No, it wasn't illegal! It never was. But the **IAs are convincing everyone it always was, and everyone is chanting, with glassy eyes, "it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy..."
America's memory hole is frightening. Our actions are becoming borderline insane, because we can't remember ANYTHING in the past unless someone in power tells us it happened. Copyright "crime", civil liberties evaporating, confusion about who attacked us on 9/11, reelecting a proven fraud... madness.
IF I steal your CD, you no longer have it. I've deprived you of the use of your property. If I copy your CD without your permission, YOU STILL HAVE IT. You've been deprived of *nothing*, except the highly speculative "loss" a sale (which presumes that I would have paid your asking price in the first place, and that I won't buy a "legitimate" copy later)
Look, the copyright is the RIGHT TO CONTROL COPYING. Do you understand that? THAT is what the copyright holder owns. That authority is government granted property which can be used, discarded, transferred, and yes STOLEN. When you copy that CD, you STEAL the holder's right to control copies. S/he NO LONGER HAS THAT AUTHORITY/RIGHT when copies are made without permission. S/he HAS been deprived of something. You have stolen something: it was not not yours, and the owner no longer has use of it. Of course copying doesn't steal the original--but the original is not the property in intellectual property (neither is the idea the property with a patent). The property is the authority. Deal with it, especially if you want to be heard.
None of this is in support of what copyright or other branches of intellectual property have become, which I do find offensive and simply wrong, but in an effort to stamp out the stupid things people emit when this comes up.
(Your understanding of fair use is also completely mistaken, but I'll let someone else field that.)
When it comes to the issue of copyrights, I like to discuss a similar problem. We all read sci-fi, don't we? Lets say you invent a matter replicator. That is, a device for copying real objects. You put into it some object, and some sand, and it makes a copy of the object for the price of the sand. What would you do with it?
a) Destroy it and records about it because that would ruin world economy, noone would manufacture anything and companies would go bankrupt, jobs lost and etc.
b) Replicate it and give it to all the people on the earth thus ending poverty in the world in 1 day. And possibly improving innovation, because it would enable open-source real-life projects.
c) Something in between. Like giving a short period for inventors to be sole distributors of their products so that they could pay for invention (the idea of copyright).
The thing is, there already is a replicator FOR INFORMATION. Tehchnology allows us to get any information from the internet for the price of the bandwidth. Now the question is what do we do with it. With current state of copyright laws, the situation is rapidly approaching A solution. Even worse, it allows to make huge profits for megacorps by introducing artificial scarcity when there could be none. I and many other people think this is highly immoral. It doesn't matter what the law says. If law is immoral, it should be changed. If megacorps are surviving on immoral laws, they should adapt or go bankrupt.
--Coder
Why? It's a valid point. I'm sorry you're a little too dense to understand logic.
When large numbers of people deliberately break the law using some technology that tech has the potential to be made illegal. So when the day comes that PCs are just stupid little DRMed entertainment boxes controlled by Microsoft, I'll be kicking people in the teeth if they tell me how they used to be able to download all kinds of great shit with them. If people would stop fucking with the law - "Look what I can get away with using this cool p2p" - the law will stop expanding to try to contain them. BTW, most of the files were illegal, and they weren't just "sharing with -each other-" they are available to the public.
There are links elsewhere on Slashdot. The Finnish police actually had a press conference in which they stated this.
But more importantly, why is the burden of proof on the grandparent poster? Shouldn't YOU be the one proving that the MPAA was involved? And in either case, why does it matter? He provided plenty of other information that would _justify_ the MPAA trying to get the Finns to raid the sites.
Paranoia is making you look stupid; stop it.
You're allowed to download such material under current fair use laws for personal use, as long there's no intention for profit. I thought this urban myth was dead. Unless you're talking about finnish law (which I don't know), "fair use" does not cover distributing OR downloading 'The Life Aquatic' without permission from the author--regardless of circumstances.
I always thought at the time service lines like 1-900-dial-a-porn @ $$$/min came that nothing coming to me over the phone line could be worth that much.
How do you think that it's possible to know anything about computers and the internet world without getting and exploring the stuff that's out there. I am seriously thinking about terminating my ADSL connection if the cops in this country can (Finland) aquire your IP and home address and bust through the doors because you're one of the admins of a site that distributes torrent-trackers.
This is f*ing insane. I'll also stop going to movies and buying DVD:s.
Yeah it's always disturbing when criminals get arrested for theft. What a terrible infringment of their rights.
5. Where can I download torrents from now?
http://www.tvtorrents.tv/
http://www.btefnet.net/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.tv-swarm.com/
http://www.bi-torrent.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentspy.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://uk-torrents.com/
http://torrentreactor.net/
http://filelist.org/
http://newtorrents.info/
http://demonoid.com/
http://elitetorrents.org/
http://lokitorrent.com/
http://www.lickmytaint.com/bt.html
http://www.420joint.com/bt/
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://www.bitconsole.com/
http://www.uknova.com/
#BT-GM on EFnet
So how long before we read about any of the above? Taking your bets right now....
Someone will surely create a new and better suprnova-like website in a *.su domain where no copyright law is going to touch them.All MPAA can due is sue and wait through 50 years of red tape. -- Resistance is futile --
Believe it or not, some things are illegal while others aren't. Recording a show off television for personal use was always legal and is still legal. This is why you can legally own a Tivo. Distributing copies of movies on a massive scale and getting moeny for it (as these advertising- and donation-driven sites are doing) was always illegal and still is. In the 1980's if you were selling pirated video cassettes or tapes on the streets of New York, you were doing something illegal and could be arrested. Today, if you are offering pirated movies or music online, that is a crime and you can be arrested. The fact that it is happening online does not magically change things. It would appear that it is you who can't remember the past. What these sites were doing has never been permitted.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
*PFWSH* WHOAH! there goes poland... someone better let denmark know its time to start smuggling GNU's into sweden.... okay, it was terrible i admit. but someone had to break godwins law.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Suprnova isn't gone. At least, not forever. I see it like this: Suprnova saw what was happening around to other Torrent hosting sites and thought it would be a good idea to drop under the radar. In this way, thay are safe. This much is known. But what I see happening is a sort of reqrouping, buying time to make sure that eXeem is just right, especially now. eXeem is like a sort of lifepod from a dying planet of torrent sites. It's the savior of massively indexed torrents and with the hostile environment, getting it right the first time is essential to keeping the movement's spirit from being broken.
Like the phoenix, form Suprnova's ashes will arise eXeem, unstoppable in the face of **AA.
Well, in case you haven't noticed...
/. reader?
American law is just that, American. It is not valid in other countries, but what can you expect from the average
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
It is illeagal to copy and give that coppy so someone else. But yes, you can make as many copys as you want as long as you keep them to yourself.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
He's talking about the Finnish Law, which allows the downloading, but not the distribution.
So they CAN pin these people with actually illegally sharing copyrighted stuff
Not necessarily. The stats may only track the total quantity seeded and leeched, and may not include the names of the actual files shared. Without that, no prosecutor would have a case (the members could be sharing Fedora Core for all they know!)
"fair use" does not cover distributing OR downloading 'The Life Aquatic' without permission from the author--regardless of circumstances.
Yet I can borrow 'The Life Aquatic' (once it's on DVD, that is) from a friend for no charge and it is perfectly legal and the same effect has been achieved (one person, who was not me, paid for access to IP which I then viewed for free).
Obviously the principle is not what scares MPAA/RIAA, because the principle cannot be reasonably argued against without constraining liberty. The problem is copies that do not generationally degrade, not the principle of sharing. At least, that was the *AA's stance in the 90s.
If you truly believe that the problem isn't generational degradation, but that information, once disseminated, should remain under the control of its originator, then from that principle you can posit a society where merely relating a remembrance of an IP work to another unauthorized individual (e.g. via casual chat) could be construed as piracy. If you think the problem is that digital media is 'too good' and lasts too long, you're in the buggy whip camp...
Stealing can have many definitions. Rather than dealing with those definitions, lets examine the possible harm to the "victim" to see if any crime was committed.
1 - Did the vicitm actualy loose possession of the item in question? No, online piracy involves making a copy, not removing or destroying the origional. As a consequence, the copyright holder has not been deprived of any property.
2 - Did the victim loose some future benefit? While many would argue that piracy cuts into sales, the argument is flawed. Pirated copies are free. At zero cost demand can be assumed to be at its maximum. Maximum demand is well above equilibrium unless you're selling air. Further, authorized copies are typicaly at a higher bit rate and exhibit superior characteristics in nearly ever respect. As a consqeuence few if any sales of authorized copies will be lost to the inferior pirate copy.
3 - The ability to control the distribution of a peice of information is the primary purpose of copyright and the primary benefit lost when piracy occurs. As a consequence pirates are liable for the monitary value of this loss. The question then is what is the monitary value of this loss. Moreover, once piracy has occured once the copyright holder has lost the monopoly on this distribution chain. Further copies beyond the first do not do further damage to this monopoly. In this case we could perhaps ascribe blame and liability to the first individual to break the copyright monopoly for each individual work. Of course, determining exactly what civil and criminal penalties were in order would involve placing a dollar value, not on the distribution of the work, but on the difference between a monopoly as the state of nature.
As no real values exist for this descrepancy, appropriate penality seems impossible.
At present, however, we must deal with what the law says as opposed to what the law ought to say.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
There is a debate about whether granting stock options should be an expense on a company's balance sheet: One strong argument for expensing options is that while difficult to value, they nonetheless have value. Similarly, while a pirated digital copy might be easy to create and difficult to value, it certainly has value. Wealth can't come from nothing. Consequently, the value of an original digital good is determined not only by its physical attributes, but by the optionality that it could be copied down the road. This is distict from whether it actually is copied down the road - just like a stock option may never be exercised, and yet it has value today. The current situation is likely that digital good prices are higher (than non-digital) not just because of piracy, but because of the possibility of piracy, as this optionality is somewhat priced in. Governmental protection of copyright and the fear of its consequences keeps this additional price small. Indeed, their purpose is to kill copy-optionality: take away copyright in the current model and the value of this option is "given away" entirely to buyers. Producers of course seek to retain the entirety of this value. The digital goods market is a different model than we've seen, but it's certainly not a doomsday scenario for digital content sellers, and it will stabilize, and the social mores will come to accept whatever it becomes. How will the sellers try to compensate for exactly what is being sold to buyers? First, by making the option (copying) difficult to exercise. But as this proves more difficult by technology I'm sure they'll get more inventive: after all, isn't ingenuity is driven by reward? (Or is it the possibility of reward?)
The EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive creates powerful new enforcement measures to be applied throughout the EU that permit Hollywood and recording industry executives to civilly prosecute consumers for minor and non-commercial infringements of intellectual property rights.
The enforcement directive creates a broad new Right of Information which requires Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to disclose personal information about their customers to recording industry executives for civil prosecution of Peer-2-Peer (P2P) file-sharing and other activities.
It also provides for Anton Pillar orders or midnight knocks that permit private citizens homes to be raided by recording industry executives, and Mareva injunctions, which freeze consumers bank accounts and other assets without the need for a court hearing.
The directives Rapporteur, French Conservative MEP Janelly Fourtour, will directly profit from the new EU law she rushed through the parliament without a usual Second Reading debate. Fourtours family owns the worlds largest entertainment company, Vivendi-Universal, and has today been granted powerful new enforcement provisions to prosecute consumers for minor and non-commercial infringements.
Copyright infringement != theft
Another P2P client is not going to solve the "protect corporation's potential profits" problem. What will solve anything is boycott them. Don't share, download, and consume their materials and they'll have nothing against you. They might even take a hint.
If anyone truly despise the entertainment conglomerates, why are you giving them your money?
Fight fire with Water.
So if a law is made that forbid you to breath, that means you should stop to do so?
Where is the freedom? I thought we lived in a "free country" I thought our soldiers are dying to help other people be free. But what kind of freedom are we giving them?
We the people have, or should have, more rights then companys. Yet, we don't. Why? Why aren't we fighting harder against this. This isn't my piracy, this is about control. Controlling what we publish, and what we download. We don't live in Nazi Germany but why are we treated like it?
I don't fear Big Brother, I fear Big Business, because no one is controlling it and no one is fighting it. God help us all.
The online equivalent of stealing should be a crime. But copyright infringment is not stealing. It's reproducing duplicates.
No, it isn't stealing, but it is damaging to the copyright owner all the same.
It's very similar to counterfieting money, only in the case of copyright infringement, it's not everyone being hurt, it's just a "bad" and "evil" corporation. And/Or artist.
The argument that nobody lost a sale to infringement ("piracy") is misleading at best, or a plain lie at worst. On average, people will go out of their way to obtain something of value for the minimum cost. It's simple human nature. I have seen people who obtain 100% of their music by infringement. To say that these people would simply not buy music if they couldn't get it for free is wishful thinking.
However, even if the argument were true, and every case of infringement was not a lost potential sale, merely having unauthorized copies in circulation reduces the overall value of the thing being copied, and this doesn't just apply to movies, music, and software, but also to paintings, photographs, sculptures, etc. Especially when the copy is *perfect*. If there were 200 Mona Lisas in the world, and nobody could tell which one was the original, they'd all be worth a lot less than the one original. This would be true even if the 199 fakes were owned by people who would never have bought the original Mona Lisa anyway.
At the very least, when you infringe someone's copyright, quite often you are benefiting from someone's work without paying them for their labor.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
As someone who uses BT to get latest episodes of TV programs that I missed (yes I realize there is something called the VCR or Tivo, but I like watching some shows at my PC), I can vouch for why BT is a great service and can be used for very legit reasons. Certainly BT is primarily used for distribution of copyrighted material, but if you look at the number of forums that sites have dedicated just to TV programs and Radio shows I think that there is a large enough minority that you are overlooking here.
Are they going after the programs and/or the creators of bittorrent, bitcomet ABC, etc? Or are they off scott free?
Eventually it will be illegal to link to even knowledge.. or ideas that are not 'permitted for the public to know' or 'could be used improperly'.. Or 'improper concepts'
Free speech goes out the window..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Counterfeiting usually means copying government money. Show me a law that makes it criminal to "counterfeit" monopoly money and distribute it for free in the real world.
I think children who copy each others' work in school should be shot to death on the spot. Damn criminals.
I don't even remember seeing Linux isos on Suprnova.
Tough, 'cause I saw plenty. I even saw torrents for Firefox.
We expect ignorant, half assed remarks from people such as yourself who have no ideas of treaties signed between two or more countries which cover exactly this type of stuff...other countries sign treaties, some of which say that other country ALSO agrees and will enforce this law....now go back to your mommy and thumb suck u asshat
http://files.andreib.com/2004/12/21/suprfaq.html
The hacked site made me lol.
lol
well the faq is gone, replaced by:
OWNED BY YOGI! MOUAHAHAHAHAH
You fucker steal artists !
REAL FAQs ARE HERE AND HERE
Greetz to : b, th*m*r[ChezLeCoiffeur], Croc-La-Pute
FREE TORRENTS HERE
----------------------
with links to riaa and mpaa documents.. anyone want to post what the faq originally contained?
going to http://www.silentdragz.net/ now lets you browse all the directorys... joy
The biggest reason is that their products can be had for a small *percentage* of a penny per dollar that they are charging.
Yes, there are costs to downloading movies off the Internet (bandwidth, getting a "ripped" copy workable, etc.) But the costs are so *low* in comparison to what businesses are offering that they can't justify in their minds paying thousands of percent the real value of the movies.
That's what no judge or lawyer has really hit.
People are carrying their own expenses on distributing movies and music. And it is cheap. Really, really damn cheap. So cheap that they can afford an "entertainment" budget in their ISP high speed costs for the most part.
And until the "real" costs that the movie and music industry come down to what people are willing to buy for purely electronic copies, piracy will be rampant.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
the brainchild of Victor Hugo, a French author.
Another brainchild of Victor Hugo was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a public domain work that was "reimagined" as an animated film by Disney, an American company, which itself will never enter the public domain, due to the vast sweeping power that large copyright holders hold worldwide.
Why is it that Disney's film gets more protection than Victor Hugo's book ever did? Have the arts changed so drastically? No. Huge corporate entities, be they American (Disney), Japanse (Sony), French (Vivendi), or whatever, are abusing the copyright system. It's a global problem -- the US just happens to be the biggest battleground.
wow it looks like someone hates warez :)
The unofficial FAQ was just hacked a few minutes ago. Annoying.
Anyone notice the page has been hacked?
Let's assume that you have just developed some fancy new piece of closed-source software that everyone really wants and you are intending to sell it online for a hefty price. Then someone manages to make a copy of the source and starts distributing it for free, thus removing commercial market for the product. However you still have the original copy. Now I'd love to see you try and convince me how you wouldn't be royally pissed off at this act of piracy, even though you still retain the originals.
I find this logic just as flawed as the BSA's version of the same. IMO piracy does lead to significant lost sales but not every pirated copy equates a lost sale.
First example: a friend of mine used to rent lots and lots of movies. Now he doesn't anymore because he can download high-quality copies of those movies via P2P-networks. That's lost sales right there.
Another example: I used to copy lots of games when I was younger. Some of those games I would have bought if a pirated copy would not have been available. So clearly piracy lead to some lost sales, but not in 1:1 ratio.
Basically the question comes down to reasonable profit margins, or how much money can copyright owners expect to make with their intellectual property. Now the problem is that copyright owners are making more money than ever but still want more while lots of consumers want everything for free. Also, consumers are not yet used to the idea of licensing a creative work for a certain amount of time instead of buying a physical copy that becomes their property for ever. I believe it just takes a while for the demands of consumers and producers to converge.
What are we going to do tomorrow night? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!
the faq seems to have been defaced, as we speak.
"OWNED BY YOGI! MOUAHAHAHAHAH
You fucker steal artists !
REAL FAQs ARE HERE AND HERE
"
i have censored a oh so original link to that other site...
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
OWNED BY YOGI! MOUAHAHAHAHAH
You fucker steal artists !
REAL FAQs ARE HERE AND HERE
Greetz to : b, th*m*r[ChezLeCoiffeur], Croc-La-Pute
FREE TORRENTS HERE
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
http://files.andreib.com/2004/12/21/suprfaq.html
;)
Look at HTML code, the real content was just commented out. Clever
Were they hiding it in some special folder on their web site?
No, but you are.
does anybody know any good torrent sites hosted in a country not ruled by copyright-whielding corporations?
...I've completely stopped purchasing any music. Their actions will only serve to cause others to do the same and seek out more secure ways of trading.
"the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
...and it is factors that follow which decide whether or not this is fair use. Your lawyer's guide dog would bark, should you try your legal reasoning in court. What did you think? That the uses listed are exempt from copyright? That I could add the comment "I think this movie is great, what do you think?" and distribute it as I please? Please. It doesn't even pass the slashdot bar exam, and the bar is as low as limbo sticks go. At carnival time.
Sounds pretty clear to me.
The quote above is accurate, but you didn't understand it at all. It states that fair use, which can take such form are not violations of copyright. Note that is fair use, not use. It then goes on:
"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include"
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Whoops, guess I should have check the source. I like the "No, I didn't delete what you typed. SAY THANK YOU. Moron." Thanks for the link
Anyone else notice that the link to the FAQ has been hacked? Anyone braver than me figure out what they hid behind the link to "free torrents"? I have a hard time imagining hackers siding with MPA*, but the internet takes all kinds.
I thought this urban myth was dead. Unless you're talking about finnish law (which I don't know)
You gotta love Americans. Even in a discussion of matters happening in another country, they can't believe that the discussion might actually be about their laws, and not those of the US.
If you didn't see Linux iso's on suprnova, you weren't looking.
They always had a Debian torrent list going, and usually had Mandrake and SuSE torrents as well.
If I write a book, it originally exists only as a manuscript or a computer file. You have no right to it. No one does, except me. That's not established by a law or any state. That is simply reality.
The only way a publisher gets the right to print and sell copies of my book is from me, in return for cash. No one else gets that right. I sell the right to make and distribute copies to a single publisher, not you. What you get to buy are copies of my book, not the right to copy it.
If you think you have a right to copy and give away copies of my book, tell the world how you got that right. Tell the world how you got that right when it is mine and I haven't given or sold it to you.
I know we're supposed to get weepy eyed because you say you're just "sharing" what you bought with your friends. But that's not true. You haven't bought the right to make copies of anything.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The link to the Unofficial closure FAQ is really f**ked up. Has it been hacked? It has plenty of offensive material on it.
I really strongly suggest someone fix this (at least don't display the link on the main story).
Thanks,
Beetle B.
After all these takedowns we can rename it to BitTrickle.
What about legit uses like getting Linux distros?
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
Apparently a nobel information hacker hast stepped forth on the link, and proclaimed "You fucker steal artists!", followed by rancid anti-torrent links and notes. Oh yes, keep the free spirit alive for us all, man.
What surprises me the most about all of this, is that no one has bothered to make use of Sealand's co-location service. It undoubtedly costs an arm and a leg, but it's certainly not an easy target for a raid.
The site now reads:
I haven't included linkage... I think we've all seen gotse.cx.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I personally *will* mourn the loss of SuprNova but not for the reason you think.
A large number of downloads of my own self-produced TV Show and band originated from SuprNova and helped provide an easily accessable portal for distribution. My works are free to copy and distribute and in no way were infringed upon by being listed on the SuprNova site. I also remember seeing many many other Internet distributed TV shows and movies. If they are looking for an example for legitimate uses for their service, please come see me.
Quick note: I live in Finland. If you accuse the police of misdoings here, you hopefully have some real evidence. Corruption within the police is not a joking matter here, nor in many other European countries. Random fictional bullshit accusations of that aren't cool either.
Was something missing?
Reporting details is an enabler for those who would imitate... I got it! How about arrests for thinking a crime!
Seriously, I thing that it's rediculous to calculate the "lost" revenue from something that would never have been purchased. I will watch the Matrix DVD that my brother gave me for my birthday a few years back - but I wouldn't have bothered to buy the damned thing, not even for two bucks.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Do a "view source" on the hacked page and you'll see that the old site has been commented out.
I actually agree with limited forms of copyright, but you seem to think that copyright could not possibly be immoral.
No, that's a projection of opinion you're putting on me; cite where I said that at all. I simply asked what makes you think all copyright is immoral. You're evading the question by directing the burden onto to me.
I can't see why. You need to justify laws against their absence; i.e. the state of nature. Copyright is the act of taking away people's right to copy. That alone is an immoral nasty act.
To which I repeat my earlier question--what makes it immoral?
The law has taken away my right to come over and take your car. The question then becomes, what makes you think you had a "state of nature" right to begin with? And so, what gives you a natural right to make copies of the work created by someone else? Why even have laws at all? All laws are taking away your rights to do something. What a ridiculous argument to have. My "right" to go 85 mph on my neighborhood street is being taken away from me, but that doesn't make the law immoral. The issue is not a "right" to copy, as there is none; it's the protection of a capitalist system that has thrived so far and produced products like the computer you're using to type your posts. Laws are intended to maintain the stability of the system under which they're formed. Murder is illegal because it's counterproductive to go around killing people. I can't drive 85 mph on my street because it's counterproductive to put lives at risk. You can't shoplift a book because it prevents the store from making a living. And so on. If you disagree with any of these, then you are an anarchist, and there is no reason to bother debating with you.
To justify copyright laws, you need to explain how it is adequately compensated for.
I am happy with the justification that it helps promote the public domain, however more recent revisions to copyright law and their poor application to computer software have sent them out of balance and I can't justify such extreme measures.
There are aspects of copyright law I disagree with. Such changes come and go as laws come and go that revise the original system. You still have not convinced me that all copyright in the world should be obliterated because of unnamed immoral problems with the core idea.
Your argument seems to be, "I have the natural right to do anything I want, and laws are immoral obstacles in my way." That may work for the college dorm room anarchist, but when you work a career in the real world, you realize the mechanics of the system and how things really work in order for you to make a living, feed your family, and survive.
Personally, I don't think it's that great of a FAQ. Too short. (Yes, this is a joke. Laugh)
Like most of these other losers, you are under the delusion that my right to control something I make depend on some law. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If I write a book, no one has a right to copy and distribute my original manuscript unless I give them that right. If I want to, I can sell that right to a publisher. But that doesn't mean anyone who buys a book from the publisher also buys the right to copy it. If I want to sell or give you that right, I will. IF I don't, you don't have that right.
If you disagree, explain how you get that right. I don't believe you can unless it comes from me.
Meanwhile, all this talk of corporations and copyright law is either a demonstration of ignorance or a deliberate subtrefuge.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"There's a lot of scary things here, but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding." Anyway, these are NOT my thoughts, but posted by CmdrTaco. How can you tell in the future?
a) I don't post singular/plural grammatical errors like the above quote
b) I am not so anti-copyright
c) I'm a noob - it was my first submission, so for a few years expect me to be quoted, rather than quoting others.
FYI, the Unofficial SuprNova.org Closure FAQ was hacked, with the following message:
OWNED BY YOGI! MOUAHAHAHAHAH
You f*cker steal artists !
REAL FAQs ARE HERE AND HERE
Greetz to : b, th*m*r[ChezLeCoiffeur], Croc-La-Pute
FREE TORRENTS HERE
Don't click on the "FREE TORRENTS HERE" link - you've been warned...
Oh, and the FAQs point to the RIAA and MPAA websites. Someone had fun, I guess...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Freenet is fun. I set up a 10gb permanent node yesterday just for kicks. Too bad it is so freaking slow and hard to use to really be.. well.. useful, I guess.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
The main link in this article, pointing to the Unofficial Suprnova Closure FAQ, seems to have been rendered useless. Anyone have a mirror, saved copy available?
So the article doesn't say whether the RIAA was involved. The police here don't usually kiss and tell about such things.
Move along, nothing to see here.
So if I break into your netbanking account and drain it, I'm not stealing because I don't actually take anything tangible?
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
How does that even make sense? Downloading is a TYPE of distribution. Whoever's hosting is obviously breaking the law unless they have permission from the copyright holder, are the copyright holder.
And obviously, if you're doing bittorrent, you're both a downloader AND a host distributing the torrent to the other peers.
So Bittorrent (of copyrighted works that you don't have permission to distribute) is apparently illegal in Finland, then?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
No, I didn't delete what you typed. SAY THANK YOU. Moron. Last updated 21/12/04 5:50:14am GMT
Forums Link Contents:
1. Has SuprNova.org really closed? top Yes, it has. 2. When will SuprNova.org be back? top Never as it was. If it eventually does come back up, it won't feature ANY links to torrents at all. 3. What about the torrents I'm currently downloading/have queued, will they still download? top Maybe, probably. However if they don't, it has nothing to do with SuprNova.org's closure. If the tracker for that particular torrent is still online and there are seeds, your file will still download. 4. Will joining the IRC channel and spamming about some random nonsense and/or "BRING SUPRNOVA BACK UP" help at all or bring SuprNova.org back? top NO. So don't. Really, don't. 5. Where can I download torrents from now? top http://www.tvtorrents.tv
http://www.btefnet.net
http://www.fulldls.com
http://www.tv-swarm.com
http://www.bi-torrent.com
http://isohunt.com
http://torrentspy.com
http://thepiratebay.org
http://uk-torrents.com
http://torrentreactor.net
http://filelist.org
http://newtorrents.info
http://demonoid.com
http://elitetorrents.org
http://lokitorrent.com
http://www.lickmytaint.com/bt.html
http://www.420joint.com/bt/
http://www.torrentsearch.com
http://www.bitconsole.com/
http://www.uknova.com/
#BT-GM on EFnet 6. Who is the owner of SuprNova.org? top Sloncek is the owner. I advise you leave off mailing/PMing him for now, he will be flooded with them and this is likely to be a very emotional time for him. He has feelings too. G
If you drain my bank account, I have lost money. If you somehow duplicate my money but leave it usable by me, I wouldn't even notice.
The original page code before it was 'owned' is still in the page source, just commented out.
Ctrl-U to view source in Firefox =)
As mentioned elsewhere, the Finnish police acted independently, with no input from any of those 'evil American copyright owners'
Yea, you keep telling yourself that, until you believe it. Mean time, who the fuck cares about the distribution model of copyrighted works accept.... Guess who? RIAA, and the MPAA?
Really!? Can I setup a server there? Gilligan's Island - the new data haven. Mary Anne can monitor my hardware and I can check out her coconuts. Mmmmm.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Wow, that's about a perfect example of the Ultimate Perspectiveless Slashdot Post:
... Jim Crow laws".
"the immorality of copyright,
That's right, someone making it illegal to distribute endless perfect copies of copyrighted material is similar to Jim Crow. I'm just hoping that someone will do a sit-in to save all those poor oppressed upper-middle-class computer nerds, college students, etc. from their horrible fate.
In fact, I think that's too weak a metaphor. Perhaps the fact that the MPAA and RIAA do the occasional annoying thing on the net should be characterized in terms of slavery? Ecological destruction? Wait - I know: Stalin, or Hitler, or the Holocaust. Leaving copyright issues to the RIAA is like leaving Europe to Hitler. Ah, that's better.
Ah, the NET Act! Good cite!
But you got it wrong.
But the way it is now, if I burn a copyrighted CD and just plain give it to you, the FBI could make a federal case out of that.
NET Act, Section 2, Criminal Infringement, sub a:
"(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $ 1,000 shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.'"
So unless that's a really valuable CD, you're in the clear. Same goes for computer software. Your warez copy of Doom 3 isn't a criminal offense, but if you're stealing Enterprise licenses for Photoshop or Windows 2003, you might be in trouble.
How long will it be until any technology that is used for illegal deeds is at risk?
Is there real evidence of some technology being at risk?
The bittorrent raids were not targeted at bittorrent, they were against sites where the vast majority of stuff was covered by copyright and not legally redistributable.
Set up a site that truly and honestly distributes only legal Linux distro bittorrents and other such legal stuff. All tin foil hats aside, nobody will bother you if you do that.
Cars can be used in bank robberies. The use of a car in a bank robbery is a no-no. Owning a car is ok. It's not about the technology, or the device, it is about the particular use of that technology in a specific case. As long as the technology has at least some reasonably legitimate use (see e.g. silencers on hand weapons, or privately owned nuclear weapons.)
I think they mispelled "pwned"
So if I setup a site to distribute copyrighted content all over 14 years old you'd support me? In this digital age when the majority of income for IP is made within the first year after the release of that IP it seems that the original 14 years of protection would more than cover what is needed to make sure artists are making a living.
A law that is constantly twisted to give power to one portion of society at the expense of the rest of society is an obvious sign of a corrupt government. A majority of people want to copy content and their voices are not being heard. May as well tax us without representation.
I'm a capitalist but I still am aware that pure capitalism will eat itself up if not kept in check by sensible laws. Giving a monopoly on IP rights for hundreds of years is just insane. You're not protecting an artist's right to feed themselves anymore. You're protecting the rich's right to milk everyone else out of their money even if it hinders the wellbeing of society in general.
Here's another idea. What if I wanted to use BT to distribute media but I only allowed one person to have a copy at a time. The media files could use DRM to make it difficult to copy so that most people couldn't keep a copy when they were done. They'd have to 'return' their copy before they could check out anything else out. It'd be an Internet-based library system. Why shouldn't that be legal? Should we try and see how long it'd be before the MPAA and RIAA came at me with their lawyers? I have hundreds of legally purchased DVDs so I could put up quite the library.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I keep seeing comments like this, and they confuse me a bit.
Is the implication that one type of crime should not be investigated if another randomly selected type doesn't first enjoy a 100% solved rate?
That can't really be it, can it?
How can someone prove that they "did not know" something. That is like proving pigs don't fly or WMD don't exist.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You are correct, sir.
That is the KEY distinction. When someone steals from you, they have done two bad things.
Thing #1 is that they have unfairly acquired something of value. Copyright infringers do this as well.
When you do thing #1, you have the potential for great personal gain. The only potential for loss that you have caused is that you have decreased the potential for how much of the stuff you might have bought from someone -- since you already have it now.
Thing #2: You have deprived the rightful owner of whatever possessions it is that you have gained.
Copyright infringers do not do this.
Therefore Copyright Infringement is not stealing, and is less bad than stealing. Even if you considered Things #1 and #2 as being of equal badness weight.
That is not to say that copyright infringement is OK. Just that it is less bad than actual theft, because it has less of a damaging effect on its victim.
http://www.silentdragz.net/suprfaq/ It seems to have been *hacked*, but the content is still there, under some comment tags
Still think it's not cool for suprnova to be gone.
but we all know Money = Power
ALL YOUR GOV. BELONG TO US...
If the "counterfeit" is good enough to make people think it was printed by Parker Bros., they'd have to C&D you or risk losing their trademark. Granted that's under civil law, not criminal law....
You are quite right.
/. I'll pull some numbers out of my ass and say that, on average, 1 illegal copy results in a loss of about 0.10 - 0.15 sales.
This being
So, if I have a $50,000 piece of software, and you illegally distribute 100 copies, you've cost me between $500,000 and $750,000.
Neither the $5,000,000 that the ??IA like to pretend, nor the $0 that the parent post likeds to think.
I know a few people who never buy any movies anymore, because they can get a free DivX. I also know a few people that have 500 DivX movies in their binders that they will probably never watch, because they have a piracy addiction, and download everything they can find because the actual accumulation of illegal movies excites them. They would never have bought all 500... they might have bought a few dozen or so... in some cases, they actually do by the few dozen they really like, in some cases, not.
just for fun:
Since the image on monopoly money is copyright Parker Bros. or, possibly Hasbro now (I forget), it is illegal to duplicate and distribute Monopoly money in the US. If you duplicated so much of it that its actual value was $1000 or more, you could even go to jail for it.
"Copyright is the act of taking away people's right to copy."
Simply making a statement does not make it a true statement. Please provide some evidence that there is such a thing as the "right to copy". Elsewise, you're just excusing ripping someone's work off for free.
I'll be looking in interest to the trackers in sweden:
/. is not going to help them any!
http://www.thepiratebay.org/frame.html
Their response to legal threats is hilarious!
http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/
Since the nova site is down the site is real slow, posting to
Name one Finn who's ever done anything useful for technology. And can it run Linux?
Please provide some evidence that there is such a thing as the "right to copy".
What are you talking about? You have the right to do whatever you want in the state of nature. That's its very definition.
Elsewise, you're just excusing ripping someone's work off for free.
I already told you that I agree with copyright. Please keep up, you don't seem to have read a single thing I've written.
someone manages to make a copy of the source and starts distributing it for free, thus removing commercial market for the product.
There is no `removal of markets when someone copies a source and distributes it for free. Linux is a working example of a freely distributed package. Guess what, the people who profit from it, profit from it regardless the free distributions.
Similarly, when a closed source product or a CD or a Movie is pirated, there are those who wouldn't buy the product anyway, those who'd pirate the product and not buy it, those who pirate it and buy it and those who don't pirate. These people always exist no matter how strict the copyright holders or the law. The same people who bought CD's, Movies, Computer programmes and other intellectual property will nevertheless buy them whether there are pirates or not. And the sales rise, not the other way around. If these IP-manufacturers really lost money because of piracy it should show as a drop in sales, but those numbers clearly show they are not making a loss.
The thing probably is, all the piracy and `free circulation' of songs this year has probably promoted more new music than the commercial advertisement has done in last 5.
If the music industry for example is losing money it's because of investing in bad technology and bad business tactics (e.g. non-working copy protection schemes, legal subpoenas and raiding teenagers' homes), Not because someone is downloading the latest Madonna.
I'm putting my faith in new licensing options (EFF Open Music License, Creative Commons & others) and free distribution over the Internet. When buying something I need to know that something is worth it. After all, the artist should be rewarded for talent, not for glitter.
- Voice of Ambience -
- Voice of Ambience -
fuck those mpaa idiots. i wish i could fucking beat the shit out of them. anyone who agrees post here.
Frankly this invalidates the claim that all downloaded copies are depriving anyone of income on the face of it. Some downloads are likely displacing purchases, but certainly not all.
Besides that, downloads aren't free. The consume bandwith that people pay for. My bandwith isn't free--is yours? I pay a good sum monthly for DSL, and when I'm online gaming, I don't want all that used up by downloads, etc.
Of course for people who don't want to acknowledge the laws of economics that's an extremely difficult concept to grasp.
Independent my ass. Are you saying it's a coincidence that all of this occurred around the world at about the same time?
For once, please, for the love of god, do NOT RTFA! Or to be more precise, click on the last link. I'm blind!
"but to me what is most scary is that American copyright owners can mobilize foreign police to do their bidding."
Haven't you figured out what EMPIRE means?
If I steal your CD, you no longer have it. I've deprived you of the use of your property. If I copy your CD without your permission, YOU STILL HAVE IT. You've been deprived of *nothing*, except the highly speculative "loss" a sale (which presumes that I would have paid your asking price in the first place, and that I won't buy a "legitimate" copy later)
/. crowd that keeps spouting this same old story, it's not true.
I see this over and over again. Sadly, for you and the rest of the
You have made up your own definition for "stealing". No common dictionary agrees with you. You can steal thoughts, ideas, and even, by a very obvious use of the word, IP and copyright.
Look, I hate the RIAA and all the other draconian orgs that care more about the bottom line then a quality product or their customers. I wish the world wasn't so full of them. But that doesn't give you the authority to redefine words in an attempt to bolster your presupposition.
I'm sure **AA will take credit for it anyway.
You're so right. The GNAA people are always ruining things for everybody.
I always thought it was illegal in the UK, but checking the appropriate government website I find that I was wrong
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (c. 48), section 70 says
The making for private and domestic use of a recording of a broadcast or cable programme solely for the purpose of enabling it to be viewed or listened to at a more convenient time does not infringe any copyright in the broadcast or cable programme or in any work included in it.
http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_1988004 8_en_4.htm#mdiv70
This is certainly a factor. Remember, both ShareReactor (Switzerland) and ShareConnector (Netherlands), the largest ed2k link sites were closed shortly after receiving ~10000$ in donations for new servers. That amount was transformed into 50-100 grands by creative retelling and the police had the reason to become involved.
The lesson learned - keep P2P decentralized, so that there is no need to run expensive servers, as every user foots a small share of the total bandwidth bill.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Is it just me, or was the "Unofficial FAQ" raided by the RIAA, who put a goatse link there? Anyone saved a FAQ and can provide a mirror (if you are not afraid of a copyright violation lawsuit)?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
After all these shutdown notices Bit Torrent is seemingly dying, I have a proposal. I dont really want to spell it all out here but if you visit : http://forum.muphin.net/viewtopic.php?t=12 it will make more sense. In short i'm looking into a datacenter of shore in international waters (offically their own country) where the MPAA and RIAA or any other government cannot touch it. Please visit the url to voice your ideas. Registration NOT required.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
I don't have time to go up and down this story repeatedly posting the same thing but in around a dozen cases people here are conflating AMERICAN morality, law and ethics with some "world standard" of morality and ethics and laws that simply don't exist in many countries. As long as America continues its illegal blockades, wars and protectionism its copyright holders can FOAD as far as I'm concerned. If the US won't cooperate with the world, the world needn't bother cooperating with America.
You can take my music, OK. You can take my movies, maybe. You can take my porn, NEVER!
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
So they get angry enough to get police jailing people, clearly we are doing something right but not exactly. People should not have been jailed. So I guess its time to evolve the strategy on way hurt the hollywood , MPAA, RIAA and other evil offsprings. Peace.
Still, foreign police will work to stop copyright infringement, but not to crack down on criminals. Does anyone else find this strange?
Scott Simontis
And I've got a Swans scarf to prove it, Boy-o!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
PLEASE NOTE THAT IF YOU ARE VIEWING THIS FAQ AT ANY OTHER LOCATION THAN HTTP://WWW.SILENTDRAGZ.NET/SUPRFAQ THEN IT IS NOT AUTHORISED. PLEASE REPORT IT TO THIS ADDRESS, THANK YOU.
Forums Link Contents:
1. Has SuprNova.org really closed? top Yes, it has. 2. When will SuprNova.org be back? top Never as it was. If it eventually does come back up, it won't feature ANY links to torrents at all. 3. What about the torrents I'm currently downloading/have queued, will they still download? top Maybe, probably. However if they don't, it has nothing to do with SuprNova.org's closure. If the tracker for that particular torrent is still online and there are seeds, your file will still download. 4. Will joining the IRC channel and spamming about some random nonsense and/or "BRING SUPRNOVA BACK UP" help at all or bring SuprNova.org back? top NO. So don't. Really, don't. 5. Where can I download torrents from now? top http://www.tvtorrents.tv
http://www.btefnet.net
http://www.fulldls.com
http://www.tv-swarm.com
http://www.bi-torrent.com
http://isohunt.com
http://torrentspy.com
http://thepiratebay.org
http://uk-torrents.com
http://torrentreactor.net
http://filelist.org
http://newtorrents.info
http://demonoid.com
http://elitetorrents.org
http://lokitorrent.com
http://www.lickmytaint.com/bt.html
http://www.420joint.com/bt/
http://www.torrentsearch.com
http://www.bitconsole.com/
http://www.uknova.com/
#BT-GM on EFnet
6. Who is the owner of SuprNova.org? top Sloncek is the owner. I advise you leave off mailing/PMing him for now, he will be flooded with t
No, that's a projection of opinion you're putting on me; cite where I said that at all.
You said:
I note that you don't actually explain your position on what makes copyright immoral. Emotively mentioning prohibition and Jim Crow laws without actually explaining the relation just makes your argument nothing more than emotion-based piracy justification because you don't want the free ride to get taken away and get bitter at the suggestion.
While you don't explicitly say that copyright cannot be immoral, you do utterly disregard that point of view in order to accuse somebody of just being greedy and selfish without any good reason.
I simply asked what makes you think all copyright is immoral.
Err, no, you asked somebody else that. Read my post again, I think it's obvious that I'm not the person arguing that all copyright is immoral. I said "I actually agree with limited forms of copyright". That can't possibly be construed as thinking all copyright is immoral.
You're evading the question by directing the burden onto to me.
That's because that's where the burden should be. Is something moral or immoral simply because it happens to be the law today? Of course not. You need to measure the value of the law against its absence.
The laws against murder, for example, are very easy to justify. Their value is that they keep people safe, at the expense of being able to take another person's life. That trade-off has a very high value to society.
What I am pointing out is that the value copyright laws bring are not so easy to demonstrate, and that it's very easy to believe that somebody thinks that the restrictions on what people can do are unfair and unwanted without bringing any external factors like greed into play. Thus, your harsh criticism is unwarranted.
To which I repeat my earlier question--what makes it immoral?
What makes copyright immoral? I don't think it is immoral. Don't put words in my mouth. I explicitly said "I actually agree with limited forms of copyright". You quoted it above.
However, what I did say was that it was easy to see why somebody might think so. And I thought I was very clear about that - it takes away freedom to do certain things, and the value it brings in return is not considered to be enough. Surely that's a simple enough concept to grasp?
The law has taken away my right to come over and take your car.
Yes. Property law makes all of us less free. However, the value provided to society is considered more than enough to justify that loss of freedom to virtually everyone, including myself.
The question then becomes, what makes you think you had a "state of nature" right to begin with?
That sentence doesn't even make sense. Please familiarise yourself with the concept of the state of nature before replying.
And so, what gives you a natural right to make copies of the work created by someone else?
That's the wrong question. The question should be "what gives somebody the right to say that I cannot make copies of certain things?" You have to justify a law against its absence, not justify its absence against the status quo. That's backward.
Why even have laws at all? All laws are taking away your rights to do something.
Right. You're beginning to get it. Why even have laws at all? Because they provide value to society that is worth giving up certain freedoms for. We have law because we collectively value some things more than some freedoms. We have laws against theft because we value the ability to own property above being able to take other peoples' property.
What a ridiculous argument to have.
A ridiculous argument? It's an argument many, many philosophers have struggled with for thousands of years, to which there is no one correct answer.
And Alt+V+C in IE =)
Where can I download torrents from now?
http://www.tvtorrents.tv/
http://www.btefnet.net/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.tv-swarm.com/
http://www.bi-torrent.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentspy.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://uk-torrents.com/
http://torrentreactor.net/
http://filelist.org/
http://newtorrents.info/
http://demonoid.com/
http://elitetorrents.org/
http://lokitorrent.com/
http://www.lickmytaint.com/bt.html/
http://www.420joint.com/bt/
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://www.bitconsole.com/
http://www.uknova.com/
#BT-GM on EFnet
I agree, and as someone who is Black, and is old enough to remember real discrimmination (not being entitled to entertainment isn't discrimmination) I'm horribley offended by our youth's hijacking of all that we've fought for. I know that holocoust survivors are offended, every time someone uses Hitler and the Third Reich in order to justify illegal and immoral acts. And to double our pain, they don't even have the decency to be ashamed about how they use the pain, and death of others to get free entertainment.
Well, there are places in the world today such as modern Russia where it is perfectly legal to copy and distribute just about any work without royalty. This is how allofmp3.com works, btw, perfectly legally.
There were places in the past such as 19th century and early 20th centure USA, of all places, which had no copyright law. That's why Charles Dickens was so unhappy about the US because he couldn't get any money from the US market. People would just copy his new books and sell them there without any kind of royalty paid to him.
Even the early works of Tolkien got copied under similar circumstances by an American publishing house without any royalty to Tolkien. He complains about it in his "authorised" edition.
Copyright law is not natural law. In those places and others there exists or there existed a pretty much unlimited "right to copy".
In the modern USA there exists a limited right to copy even copyrighted works, for fair use reasons.
All of this is revolving around the needs of big business. Now that there is significant business regarding the quick and easy trade of material, the sale of quite expensive items such as mp3 players or divx consoles, sales to be made from internet connections and monthly download bills, don't you think there is a bit of hypocrisy going around?
Sony and Apple would like both the businesses of selling various bits of equipments such as computers and players *and* the sale of material. How this is going to be resolved is left as an exercise to the reader, but I wouldn't hold the current copyright laws as sacred and untouchable.
I hope this answers your request.
I almost completely agree with you, but:
Thing #1 is that they have unfairly acquired something of value.
I don't think that just because somebody infringes on copyright that it can be characterised as unfairly acquiring something of value. I infringe on copyrights that are older than a certain amount of years because I believe that copyright should not last as long as it does. I'm acquiring something of value, sure, but I think that it's unfair that copyright has been extended by so much. I believe that if the world was fair, those works would already be in the public domain.
The law as it stands doesn't agree with me of course, but the law has little to do with what is fair and what isn't.
Uhh, BitTorrent defines peers, trackers (the central part), and metadata files.
Here, I define "index" as any site that distributes a plurality of .torrent metadata files.
Indexing sites and metadata files mean nothing if the specified tracker(s) are down
Trackers being down means little if a torrent is run with the multiple-tracker metadata extension, with each tracker each on a separate residential high-speed Internet account.
And dead torrent metafiles will not expire
If the schema for distributing these files assigns each a Last Modified date, they might.
Nice dancing
Thank you. Do you want to learn to play DDR too? Here are some torrents to help you get started.
i'm not him, but let's take a stab at it:
1. copyright in itself is not immoral, but
2. recent changes to it, e.g. extending it every time the disney corporation comes close to lose its monopoly over its cash cow and changing it so that traditional fair use rights become illegal bring the current version pretty close to being so
3. the basic form of copyright law was established when producing pirate copies was a capital and labour intensive process. this isn't true anymore, but instead of modifying it to take changed technical realities into account, the changes are trying to preserve the assumption that held when copyright was originally established
4. combined with the practises of the big copyright holders, the public (i.e. the individual user) has the choice between being ripped off and ripping off the copyright holder and the actual creator (if the copyright holder leaves him anything). i would consider reducing the individual user to this sorry choice immoral
"And yeah it sucks. However it's completely predictable esp. considering that "IP" is pretty much all America manufacturers anymore. Well and food and cars. But IP has the biggest margins."
Well considering that manufacturing is considered "buggy whippish", and that the "information economy" is here (and just what did you all think IT was?). Plus it's digital nature means anyone else can have a digital economy too (India, China, Taiwan). We really shouldn't be surprised that people are fighting over it. All of you wanted the future? Well it's here. Time to take your medicine.
Okay, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned source code, but that was beside the point anyway. My point was that if you're trying to sell a product to people but those same people have the option of obtaining the product for free, you will lose sales. This applies to products like movies, music, computer games and generally stuff that's targeted for private customers. I'm also assuming that the product is such that people actually want to use it.
By the way, Linux is by definition open source, it was meant to be distributed freely, so I don't see how it fits the picture when talking about stuff that's not freely distributable. The business model for Linux is quite different from the business model for movies or computer games.
What about the people who would buy it but now that they can pirate it, don't have to? Seriously, it's not just that one friend of mine, I know lots of people who used to buy lots of music but don't anymore because it's so easy to download all that stuff instead. In this sense the world has really changed. For many people downloading stuff for free has only recently become a viable option, so instead of paying for stuff they are learning how to get it for free.
Yes, I agree that all that free circulation has a promotional effect also, but I still stand by my opinion that piracy causes more lost sales than it promotes new sales. This is based solely on my personal experience and the fact that given a choice, most (please note: most, not all) people would rather not pay for anything they can get for free.
What are we going to do tomorrow night? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!
"Everyone seems to be saying that "oh, it's no surprise that all these sites were taken down; they deserved it; blah blah". What wouldn't be a surprise to me is if the copyright holders simply went into economic ruin because of their totally flawed busines model."
Translation: The exchange of money for goods, and services. The basis of economics before there was a US is flawed.
Translation, translation: The one-sided giving away of goods and services. Usually to the one demanding everything is the correct model.
Translation, translation, translation: Gravity has been rewritten to more accurately reflect the current perception, that people who jump from buildings shouldn't go *splat*.
It's not "greed" to want to make money to survive.
Never said that, but you and all the other drones prefer to ignore that and choose to mis-interpret what was said in order to justify your arugment, which is bogus. The manner in which you expect to make your money is important. I do have a job when I want it, and I get paid when I show up and perform(work). I can't perform my job once and get paid for that job for next 75 years. Why should you? Why should you be granted special privileges that I don't get? That's the greed I talk about. You try to maintain these laws in order to make other people's work subservient to yours. You want to star on the E! channel so you can look down on the "little" people who don't measure up to your "creative genius". This way you think you can justify your arrogance. If you haven't gotten that far yet, you don't want any changes as long as there's a chance you can cash in. Well the time has come to level the playing field. You better come down to earth before it all comes crashing down upon you.
What?
I can safely say that this marks the beginning of the end of trying before you buy, whether it be a movie, a CD, or a piece of software. I guess this hurts the people who actually used BitTorrent to be exposed to new artists and cultures.
...
"With enough money to fund attorneys you can apparently get other countries, especially the Finnish, to comply."
Microsoft has enough money. Why are Torvald's kneecaps still intact?
"French police have at least temporarily shut down Youceff Torrents, one of the largest torrent sites and recently listed in Slyck's Top 10 SuprNova Alternatives. Arjan, the site administrator, was given no warning. The first signs came Monday afternoon when the site went offline. The hosting company initially said it was due to an electrical fault. This morning, Arjan received and e-mail explaining that the servers had in fact been deliberately terminated and the police where on scene. Slyck spoke to a rather nervous Arjan, who explained that the police would find nothing on the servers but torrent files. He does not host any FTP servers or warez. Arjan does not live in France, or believe he has done anything wrong, but he is naturally apprehensive that the local police will make a visit to his door." http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=624
PS - This is what part of the alphabet would look like if the letters Q and R were removed. ~Mitch Hedberg (1968-2005)
the Berne Convention, which first established the recognition of copyrights between sovereign nations, was the brainchild of Victor Hugo, a French author.
The aforementioned agreement was first adopted in Berne, Switzerland. - Berne Convention [wikipedia.org]
The European Union extended copyrights to life of the author plus seventy years in 1993, a full five years before the US did with the Sonny Bono act - European Copyright Harmonization [wikipedia.org]
Not of which contradict what he said.
As mentioned elsewhere, the Finnish police acted independantly, with no input from any of those 'evil American copyright owners'
This might, if its true - but then its hard to know the real facts. The timing is odd, of course they are unlikely to admit it even if they were "asked".
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Bad law is bad law. You are no better than me, and your work is no better than mine, and it's certainly not deserving of any special privileges that I don't recieve. See my other posts on the subject of piracy. Copyright holders should not talk about free rides. That's what the gov't gives with copyright.
What?
Misguided security council sanctions against a tyranical dictator, feverishly pursued by the US are what killed so many Iraqi kids, not Kofi's imagined greed. Saddam would not capitulate so the west punished his people by witholding food and medicine. The moronic expectation that Saddam actually cared about his countries stomach was the biggest mistake by all involved. Sanctions like those only serve to starve the most hepless civilians so that the military can remain well fed.
Your whole post is (deliberately?) back to front, "due process" for instance is what the US is denying to detainees. You must be the sole person on earth who actually belives the "oil for food" mud that Bush's underlings were throwing about as revenge against Kofi, even the Adminstration backed away from that one at full throttle. Not only do you belive and regurgitate this crap, you then go on and attemp to use it to justify shooting civilians.
The US and the entire security council were made aware of the corruption by UN investigators at the time it was happening. The security council (including the veto wielding US) pointedly chose to ignore every single reported instance of corruption. Now (many years later) a vocal minority of Republicans are baying for Kofi's blood. Why? Because he said the Iraq war was illeagal just before the US election or because he won't call for more UN involvment in Iraq until it is secure, take your pick. It is pathetically obvious that the mud is political and aimed at Kofi because he is vocal in his disagreements with the administration.
To the rest of the world, the blind nationlistic belief that the US can do no wrong is what "sucks". Money and power might have bought the Whitehouse but it cannot buy the respect or support of those who are interested in promoting humane and equitable dealings between nations.
"Rule of law", don't make me laugh and cry at the same time. Pay attention to the court battles and how the administration cries "liberal judges" every time thier plans are dented by said "rule of law".
Property Rights: This particular "liberal/moderate/commie" would slide out from under the bed and kick the shit out of anyone who touched his stuff.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Any attempt of "protection" on the ADC level will be something between simple and trivial to swiftly cut through - just add a reversible analog transformation to the signal that wrecks the watermarks. The result doesn't have to be perceivable by humans (which is typically the transformation set watermarks are designed to withstand), but has to be reversible - just perform the inverted operation on the digitized data stream. Voila - reconstructed stream, and the "cop in the ADC" is not any wiser.
For the beginning, I'd start with an off-the-shelf analog phone scrambler, maybe with construction modified to perform better on full 20-20,000 Hz range instead of only on 30-3000 Hz, and a math model of the descrambler.
If you can get some data from/to the box, you can get any data from/to the box.
We live in Orwellian times, that's true. But the temperature of the tip of the soldering iron does not depend on the political climate. (Those nitwits who want to mandate lead-free solders that fall apart in couple years and have higher melting point are subject for a different discussion.)
"It will only get worse until the people stand up and say 'enough'."
Enough! We want everything to be free....oh yeah, and I still want to get paid for my work.
...is an imaginary one that is devoid of overblown egos and never goes to war.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Until a few years ago it was illegal to drive in downtown Seattle at night without someone carrying a lantern running a couple blocks ahead of your to warn pedestrians. Discuss.
The Farewell Tour II
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you're duplicating money, that's called counterfeiting. Actually now that you mention it, counterfeiting is a better term for copying music/games/movies than piracy.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
As of 10:18 pm EST, the site appears to have been hacked. Note of caution, don't click on the free torrents link.
Looking at the front page of Suprnova or any other place doesn't mean the link is undisputedly honest, accurate, truthful and without question. Just because a link to a file says favorite-artist-here.mpg doesn't mean the link leads to an mpg by that artist. The record companies themselves, among others, name files other than what they really are. Record companies (or their agents) routinely do this to prove that a file is not always what it says, although their reason is to make it hard for downloaders to get the actual material. Fact is, saying something doesn't make it so. Ad banners tell you things like "Your hard drive is low on space" or "You have Adware on your PC". That doesn't mean it is true. Having a link to ABC.mpg is no proof that ABC.mpg was actually what the link pointed to.
So at what point were the slashdot editors planning to tell us that the link they posted in this front page story went straight to goatse? Thanks guys!
[o]_O
I don't agree, and hope they kick your free loading asses.
So, it's been illegal to tape movies broadcast on television, all along? Illegal to tape radio? Illegal to copy your own VHS tapes?
/. frequently champions) so neither should an unscrupulous consumer have the right do whatever they want with copyrighted works (a cause /. frequently tries very hard to ignore).
Perhaps you should calm down a moment and re-read my post. Personal copies are OK and always have been per Supreme Court decisions. Distributing those copies is not legal and never has been.
No, it wasn't illegal! It never was. But the **IAs are convincing everyone it always was, and everyone is chanting, with glassy eyes, "it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy... it is illegal to copy..."
Again, I'm going to ask you to calm down a moment and re-read my post. I never said it is illegal to copy. I said it is illegal to copy and distribute, which is entirely true, correct, and above all fair to the copyright holder. Unscrupulous companies do not have the right to do whatever they want with GPL'd code (a cause
America's memory hole is frightening. Our actions are becoming borderline insane, because we can't remember ANYTHING in the past unless someone in power tells us it happened. Copyright "crime", civil liberties evaporating, confusion about who attacked us on 9/11, reelecting a proven fraud... madness.
You really should get that knee looked at before it injures someone.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
So if a law is made that forbid you to breath, that means you should stop to do so?
Look closely, everyone. Here is an excellent example of (a) making an irrelevant analogy and (b) proving that any analogy, taken too far, is absurd. Bravo! You've proven two stupidities for the price of one post!
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
These sites were not doing anything illegal. These sites were pointing to where someone said they would be sharing certain content.
In some cases, the content was legal to share such as *nix distros, freeware programs and so on. In other cases, the content was illegal to share such as movies, extremely overproduced and sub-standard songs in the mp3 format and so on.
The sites themselves were not doing anything illegal. They were telling you what a tracker uploader wanted you to know: the content being shared by the tracker uploader.
That is all. Sharing copyrighted material without express permission from the cp holder is a crime in many countries and should be treated as such unless the population gets the respective gov'ts to change the laws.
In Dallas, the first Saturday of the month sale is where you will find a lot of stolen computer and electronis parts. Telling you about the whereabouts of the sale is not illegal. Selling stolen stuff there _IS_ illegal.
Most people are bent out of shape not because it should be legal to share cp material but because the elite (*AA) being in control of such a huge cash cow can force the gov'ts to blur the boundaries of definitions and arrest people at their homes.
"You fucker steal artists" - now that is an unusual request if I ever heard one. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
The whole argument about linux being open source and free and thus movies and music should be free is flawed.
Linux and other flavors are developed by people because they're willing to. Or because they simply love to. Nothing more is required in addition to what the developer already has. A machine and time. Each they donate to the cause willingly.
Movies or music on the other hand requires expensive equipment to be put in recording. Sure Tori Amos can record everything on a 4-track at home but that doesn't mean every artist can or does or even wants to.
Then movies and music need a lot of finance to be publicized. This is something new and people won't go watch/buy it unless they know about it. So you buy advertisement slots in different outlets. This also costs money.
You also need the medium that the material is copied on. You pay all the involved experts. Sound engineers, logo creators, scene arrangement managers, and so on.
The movie-maker or the musicians don't have money for any of this. They can only hope to pay off these if they can get the money from somewhere. In this case, they will sell their work and generate the income. A lot of it is going to go to pay off the *AA jerks. But if you take away their revenue stream and expect them to distribute music for free, this won't fly. As a recording musician, I'd rather that 10 people buy my CD and pay me, instead of 1 buying and uploading it and having 100 people listening to it. If I don't have the time to tour, sell t-shirts with me and fancy logos on the front and back and make money, I won't be making anything. I'd rather go thru an independent distributor and sell something while I work at my daytime job.
And yes the music industry _IS_ losing money if someone is downloading the latest madonna. Out of the 100,000 people that downloaded the music world-wide, even if 5,000 were gonna buy it that would be a loss of $75,000. If this were true of a 100 other artists, this 7.5 millions dollars.
Now that means nothing, but then again my numbers are all fake also. Just to prove a point. Not all people downloading will buy but some would have.
'nite Voice of Britney.
the site you linked to was hacked...
I fixed it - sorry about that, I was at work. /SilentDragz
The legetimity is only true when it is put in context. Perhaps what is legitimate in the USA is not elsewhere. The habits are valid with each country/cultures.
I do not think that you would appreciate to have to wear the beard and to pray at certain hours if this is not your religion only because one foreign country had sent a letter asking it. It would be ridiculous, but it would be legitimate in their country.
Doesn't matter anyway, I have a local copy ;)
How does that even make sense? Downloading is a TYPE of distribution.
.torrent files which are nothing but addresses and factual information. And for very good reason that sort of activity has pretty much globally been ruled as non-infringing and non-criminal. Sites hosting .torrent fioles have been attacked before, and have won. There is a good likelyhood that this latent round of attacks on .torrent servers will be thrown out of court as well. (Of course this may vary from country to country.) To rule otherwise would mean that the New York Times would be liable and/or criminal for writing a news story listing the street address of a copyright infringer, or of a crackhouse, or of a currupt politician. If it is appropriate to call out the police then it is only appropriate to send them TO THAT ADDRESS. You do not send them to the person publishing that address.
No, uploading is distributing.
Lets say you walk by your local record store and someone is there burning and handing out free music CDs. *THEY* may or may not be commiting copyright infringment. There is no reasable way for you know whether they have permission from the copyright holder to make and distribute those copies or not. Hell, there's no way for you to even know for sure what it is that they are copying and distributing until you are given a copy and play it. It is not your responsility (nor within your reasonable capability) to check if that the record store is not infringing anything, just as you are not responsible (or reassonable capable to check) whether they are complying with minimum wage laws or pollution regulations. In no case have you violated any law by accepting the free promotional CD they handed you.
The person making and giving out copies may or may not be committing copyright infringment, but the person being GIVEN that copy is never an infringer. It does not change anything if there happens to be a computer invloved. It is appalling and severely broken when they constantly try to say the the law somehow functions differently when "mystical magical computers" come into the picture.
The RIAA is constantly engaging in a deliberate disinformation campaign to claim or imply downloading as infringment, especially their fraudulant characterization of the MP3.com case. And despite all of the missleading information in their press releases, they have never even attempted to sue anyone who was only downloading. I expect they know they'd likely lose.
However in this torrent case we aren't even talking about infringing uploaders. We are talking about websites hosting and uploading non-infringing
There is certainly "a problem" with the current infringment situation, but just because the publishing industry would like to attack centralized targets, attack VCRs, attack P2P, attack PVRs, attack ordinary computers, sue non-infringing people, and criminalize non-infringing fair use, does not make doing so valid. They cannot do those things simply because they find it ugly to go after the people actually commiting infringment, to go after millions of the general public.
That ugly course - suing millions - is the only valid route. And if that's the right thing to do, then ok, that's what they have to do. And if they don't want to do that, if that is ugly, unacceptable, and wrong, well that would mean the "the problem" has actually arisen somewhere inside copyright itself.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
propably the main reason Finnish police acted was that there was huge amount of copyrighted material very openly available on the website.
.torrent side cases have been tossed out of court - because there was not a single infringing file available on their website. These "raids" are a travesty, and primarily a means for the copyright lobby to harrass and intimidate non-infringing people associated with any P2P system.
There was doubtless plenty of copyrighted material avaliable on their website. They hosted their own copyrighted materials, and materials supplied (and obviously authorized) by the copyright holder of said materials.
However that is obviously no reason for the police to do anything, and the cases will probably get thrown out of court as other
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The Finnish copyright law allows making personal copies of published works. Computer programs are an exception, covered by a later addition to the law. This makes downloading movies and music legal, since it is considered equal to copying library CDs or taping radio broadcasts.
However, providing copies of copyrighted works is generally prohibited without permission from the owner of copyright. This makes sharing music and movies illegal. It it admitted that using BitTorrent to download material is in the gray zone, since you are (most probably) also uploading material at the same time. As far as I know, no court has taken a stand concerning BitTorrent downloads, but I guess we'll have one soon.
The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.
-Bertolt Brecht
There's a large difference between devaluing someone's work and stealing from that person.
The MPAA knew about your favourite .torrent site before you did!
;D
That's because they probably run it!
Keith D.
Let's talk about fair, I would say saving ones life would surely come under "fair use" but it seems taping brodcast TV is a more important. Even though there is no profit to be made in Africa, (1% of world GDP), the drug companies still wont allow the Africans to make drugs for use on thier own people. Not because they think they will loose a hypothetical African market to a new cheap competitor. They belive allowing free/cheap IP licenses for Africa is the thin edge of the wedge against thier global bussiness. What Africa needs from drug companies is not more charity, it needs some political relief from IP lobbyists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But that's even more US-centric and even less insightful. Don't you think there are local copyright laws applicable to Hollywood movies in Finland or the Netherlands? The fact that MPAA or RIAA are based in the USA doesn't change this. These sites were violating local copyright, which is why local police are getting involved.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Uploading is downloading. There's no distinction, it's just what side of the data you're on, giver or receiver. It's not really possible to distribute something unless you have a party who's willing to receive it. I'd say that makes the downloader an accomplice.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Don't give them any ideas!
You have it backwards... the torrent file is the pointer to illegal goodies. The tracker has zero idea what you're trading; it only has the info_hash to tell things apart. So, to what infringing material does "B093EBF1 EAA7BF6D 1DC12BC7 6580E724 B2458208" pertain? That and maybe the filesize is all the tracker has to go on.
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True that the money was spent on paying their expenses running the dedicated server abroad, but it was still income from distributing copyrighted material.
Point being you're not allowed to receive any income or donations from illegal material or byproducts of such, no matter what your expenses are while getting the material.
Hosting torrents is not distributing copyrighted material. There isn't one single bit of copyrighted material in any of the torrents, ergo on the entire site. All the can be accused, logically, of is from profiting by aiding and abetting a crime, which is copyright infringement.
Phillip.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Having criticized you for not reading carefully, I just re-read your own original reply and I think I understand your point better. You were saying that even civil matters might warrant police intervention in other countries. Somehow that didn't sink in until just now. Sorry for the confusion.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
This is an excellent reply showing factually that the bust is responsible for a number of people in our field losing revenue. Sure, maybe the AC Parent above loses money to IP theft, but that doesn't make him a hero and it doesn't make Mudcathi a villain for pointing that out.
Moderation is a responsibility, not a tool to silence opinions you disagree with. Whoever marked Parent as Flamebait needs to remember that.
OK, OK, so I'm putting in a cheap plug. Anyone have a WoW trial account they wanna donate to me please? I wanna try out the game, but I'm not gonna buy ANOTHER MMO to find out I don't like it within the free month (a la WW2OL, EnB, Lineage2, SWG, CoH etc....) If you do, I'd love it if you'd drop me a line ;)
Now this freeloader wants one of the games he can't pirate. So he asking for a hand out? Why doesn't this pirate buy something to support software development instead freeloading off the rest of us who pay for software??
I said it is illegal to copy and distribute, which is entirely true, correct, and above all fair to the copyright holder.
It's not true at all. There are a number of factors that decide whether a copy is fair use or not. Under some circumstances, you can copy and distribute while remaining within the boundaries of fair use. Parody is the usual example.
What are you smoking?
A large portion of the FLOSS community would not be doing anything if it weren't for copyleft which is based on copyright.
Now, if you're talking about the time extensions of copyright, I'd agree with you.
Care to clairify?
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
Nonsense. GPL isn't needed without copyright. Freeware has existed long before anyone dreamed up the GPL. GPL was developed to counteract proprietary copyrights.
What are you smoking?
I'm not. Got any loco weed?
What?
Someone who goes into McDonalds and gets a hamburger is not distributing hamburgers. Someone who clicks a link and views(downloads) a webpage is not distributing that webpage.
The person distributing that hambuger is responsible for complying with healthcodes and other laws. The person receiving that hamburger has no way of knowing, and no responsibility for, whether that hambuger was was made and sold in compliance with the law.
The person distributing a webpage is responsible for complying with copyright and other laws. A person who clicks a link and views (downloads) that webpage has no way of knowing, and no responsibility for, whether that webpage was made and distributed in compliance with copyright and any other law.
By your logic you are guilty of countless copyright violations merely by your normal websurfing. You are guilty every time you read slashdot and you view a post where pasted in the text of a New York Times story, and your guilty every time you come across a page containing a copied icon or anything else.
It's not really possible to distribute something unless you have a party who's willing to receive it.
(A) That's a pretty serious brainfart. Have you ever received a flyer on your cvar windshield? Have you ever received spam? Have you ever received junk mail? Have you ever clicked on a link and had goatse or some random file type pop up? I can't believe you even suggested that it's not possible to distribute something without a party who's willing to receive it.
(B) Even if you have a "willing receiver", only the giver knows what he's giving and it's source and whether he needs and has the rights to distribute it. If you go into WalMart and buy a novel, you are not a copyright infringer if it turns out the author of that book copied dialog from someone else's book. You were a willing receiver of that book, and even if you spotted that there was copied dialog from another source your legal presumption is that the author licenced that dialog. You are not expected to hunt down the author/publisher of that book and attempt to verify that he had the proper licence for that dialog. And it is that author that copied that dialog that is liable for copyright infringment damages, not you.
It's the exact same thing with trademark infringment. If someone sells you a Rollex watch *you* are not guilty of trademark infringment if they weren't licenced to make and sell Rollexes.
Case after case your claim that receiving something makes you guilty is absurd. The law places the responsibility and liability on the person making and distributing copies, only that person knows the source of the material and whether he obtained any required rights. And if he didn't have the required rights then he is the one who owes damages to the copyright holder to compensate for those copies.
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Parody is the only Constitutionally-protected form of copying, although even that can and has been restricted in certain instances. However, parody by definition is not a copy, merely an imitation so close as to be easily recognizable as the real thing, just more humorous. Or more political, which is why parody was protected in the first place -- to allow unfettered political satire as a form of free speech.
However, parody has no relevance to a bit-for-bit copy of a piece of music or a movie. If you wanted to spoof Star Wars, just as Mel Brooks did in Spaceballs (although he quite carefully refrained from using the word "Star Wars" anywhere in the movie). But you cannot make a copy of a Star Wars movie and sell it -- at least not without giving George Lucas and the rest their legally-required dues after first obtaining permission.
So, not to be argumentative, but your comment of "it's not true at all" is hogwash.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Thank God for living in a lawless third-world country that pumps shitloads of oil.
There's a large difference between devaluing someone's work and stealing from that person.
True, but:
There's a large difference between negligent manslaughter (due to an accident) and first degree murder (wanton killing), but try explaining the difference to the victim's family.
It's not the best analogy, but the point is that infringement is damaging *someone*, at the very least it cheapens someone's labor. The person who made the original work still feels cheated (which is true) and victimized (under the law, also true), even if the person posessing the copy would never have bought the original.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Actually, lending is illegal in most countries. Read the small print on your DVD.
In Dallas, the first Saturday of the month sale is where you will find a lot of stolen computer and electronis parts. Telling you about the whereabouts of the sale is not illegal.
No, but if you know that somebody there was selling stolen hard drives, a friend asked where he could get cheap hard drives, and you told him, that might be illegal. Remember, the torrents are clearly labelled and refer to a specific file. You can't even claim that they are mislabelled as they contain a cryptographic hash of the file.
It might not be feasible for the Suprnova admins to be absolutely certain about everything, but the sheer scale of the infringement would make it virtually impossible for them to convince a court that they didn't know about any of it.
PS: Please try and avoid theft in copyright infringement analogies. It only brings out the "copyright infringement is stealing!" trolls.
Parody is the only Constitutionally-protected form of copying
I didn't realise parody was in the Constitution, but you are dodging the point, as the Constitution is not the only law in the land. From copyright.gov:
Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances.
So you can copy and distribute stuff, and it does depend on the circumstances. Huh. That sounds almost identical to what I said, doesn't it?
However, parody by definition is not a copy, merely an imitation so close as to be easily recognizable as the real thing
You have an overly-narrow definition of parody. Parody may include copying, for instance rearranging video footage for ironic purposes.
If copying is not involved in parody, then why does copyright law have to exempt it?
However, parody has no relevance to a bit-for-bit copy of a piece of music or a movie.
That depends on the context. Given the right context, I believe John Cage's 4'33" could be parodied with a bit-for-bit copy, although personally I don't believe that it merits copyright protection in the first place.
However, I was only using parody as an example. Fair use doesn't just cover parody.
So, not to be argumentative, but your comment of "it's not true at all" is hogwash.
You claimed that you can't copy and distribute legally. That isn't true at all, and if you read the two links I've provided, you will see that.
The person who made the original work still feels cheated (which is true) and victimized (under the law, also true), even if the person posessing the copy would never have bought the original.
It doesn't make sense to equate copyright infringement and theft because of that though. It's like saying "cheating on your wife hurts her, and hitting your wife hurts her, so we might as well call people who cheat wife-beaters".
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I don't think it is actually called out in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has established it as a protected right covered under free speech.
So you can copy and distribute stuff, and it does depend on the circumstances. Huh. That sounds almost identical to what I said, doesn't it?
Key emphasis on the "almost" there, AC. Your statement, quoted exactly, said "it's not true at all." Something "not true at all" is false. However, my statements were not false and you've even provided evidence to support that in your own follow-up posts. If you'd said something like "that's not entirely true" I would've had no beef with it, but your very first sentence made it seem like everything I stated was false. You should be more careful in your blanket statements.
You have an overly-narrow definition of parody. Parody may include copying, for instance rearranging video footage for ironic purposes.
You seem to have an odd understanding of the English language. I used the phrase "imitation" of the real thing. Merriam-Websters defines imitation as:
and just to make sure I'm not misusing "imitation," let's see what Merriam-Websters has to say about "parody":
Hmmmm...seems MW thinks the "imitation" thing is so useful it's used twice in the definition. Far from me having an overly-narrow definition of parody, you seem to have an overly-narrow definition of "imitation."
That depends on the context. Given the right context, I believe John Cage's 4'33" could be parodied with a bit-for-bit copy, although personally I don't believe that it merits copyright protection in the first place.
Remind me again why you claimed this "[isn't] true at all"? You're actually re-affirming what I said, just in case you're unaware of it.
However, I was only using parody as an example. Fair use doesn't just cover parody.
I never said it did, but Fair Use is not law, it is a concept, a principle. As your very own Stanford link shows, Fair Use is quite the gray area, open to lots of interpretation. Further, you can be sued for infringement even if you feel what you're doing is within Fair Use. The court will decide on a case-by-case basis whether or not you're really infringing, and screaming "but it's Fair Use" is not a defense likely to win the day.
You claimed that you can't copy and distribute legally. That isn't true at all, and if you read the two links I've provided, you will see that.
Your eye doctor needs to be fired. Or perhaps a shipment of Hooked on Phonics is in order. I did not claim you can't copy and distribute legally, I claimed you can't copy and distribute copyrighted works without permission of the copyright holder. Here, let me quote the original post just in case your memory is as bad as your ju
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yes, and some people release theirs freely licensed, what's your point?
http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/
Computers can cost a lot of money too, thus many programmers use expensive equipment.
Can you see the contradiction in your own words?:
First of all, most of the advertising made for music artists is done for those that have already been noted by the audience. New and unknown artists hardly ever get get advertising from the big record companies. Now let's imagine you're that unknown artist, would you rather have those 10 people buy your record and be the only people on planet earth to ever hear your music, or would you consider the option of one buying it and making an illegal copy, having 100 more listeners who'd then recommend it to their friends, possibly making 1000 more listeners over night, who again recommend it to their friends.. There are bound to be more than 10 of those who'd buy your record. Don't go telling me that those thousand people who heard your music stole an income worth of 1000 sold CD's. They didn't, since you didn't have that income in the first place.
Not all people downloading would have bought, but many have.
Spammers have a point.
- Voice of Ambience -
Spammers have a point, actually...
The more to hear an artist the more to buy, the less to hear an artist the less will buy. The promotional effect is included in the sound, not in the advertising. Good artists get rewarded.
- Voice of Ambience -
- Voice of Ambience -
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Frankly, I'm not that worried that a 'busness' has decided to protect its property from theft.
I am disappointed that the crackdown on copyrighted material is making it difficult for me to download free TV programs.
This could be a problem: part of the GPL's protection revolves around claiming rights over derivative works of copyright material placed under the GPL - and while a .torrent does not contain the copyright material, it certainly is a derivative work, since it's a set of hashes of parts of the file. In addition, the police could probably make a good case that they're aiding and abetting a copyright infringement, in the same way a bank robbery getaway driver is guilty even if he doesn't enter the bank at all. (I know Finnish law has a concept of "aiding and abetting" a crime, but don't know what the details are.)
These "raids" are a travesty, and primarily a means for the copyright lobby to harrass and intimidate non-infringing people associated with any P2P system.
Perhaps - but they'd be much worse if/when the xxAA starts going after the people who are actually infringing. Remember, anyone joining the swarm get a list of all the IP addresses of everyone in the swarm: it would be trivial for the MPAA to grab the list of all IPs sharing a given file, subpoena their addresses and sue them instead, or just go after the people seeding it - and of course, they'd have much less of a defense, since they are actually distributing the material themselves...
a .torrent does not contain the copyright material, it certainly is a derivative work, since it's a set of hashes of parts of the file
I'm rather certain hash would be considered a peice of non-copyrightable factual information (the same way files names are treated), rather than as a derivative work.
Finnish law has a concept of "aiding and abetting"
The copyright lobby is certainly trying to push that route, but it generally fails in court in this sort of case for good reason. A torrent is essentially equivalant to an ordinary web link, which is essentially equivalance to a newspaper publishing an address. You cannot find a newspaper liable for publishing the factual address of say a drug house, or the address of a currupt government official who takes bribes. It rapidly becomes extremely broken if you try to hold people liable for simply stating the fact that X is at address Y.
but they'd be much worse if/when the xxAA starts going after the people who are actually infringing
Worse? I certainly agree that is an ugly situation, ugly for the RIAA/MPAA, and ugly to the public. But is it worse than attempting to outlaw things like VCR's and P2P becuase some use ends up being infringing? Is it worse than attacking non-infringing people? Is it worse than distorting the entire established legal system into knots in order to make people liable for publishing non-infringing factual information?
The only valid route is for them to actually go after the people who are infringing. You don't go after non-infringing people and attack technology itself and infringe people's rights simply because that's an easier target than actually going after the people commiting the infringement.
And if they don't want to actually go after the infringers, if the public finds doing so ugly and unjust, well then maybe the problem actually lies in the current form of copyright and definition of infringment. Either these tens of millions of people are guilty copyright infringers and are felons and should be sued/imprisoned, or these tens of millions of people should not be sued/imprisoned and what they are doing and should not be infringment.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Perhaps, but with hashes there does come a point where you can deduce the original input (trivial example: hash each byte individually...) - and since the whole point of BitTorrent is to use the hashes in conjunction with the tracker's data to reconstruct the original file, it's closer to that situation than the md5sums on kernel.org. If I give you a .torrent file, you can convert that back into the original data; from a legal point of view, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to treat torrents as a compressed form of the original data. An MD5 hash in itself would probably be OK, but once you add enough information to get the complete file, I think you've crossed the legal line.
You cannot find a newspaper liable for publishing the factual address of say a drug house, or the address of a currupt government official who takes bribes. It rapidly becomes extremely broken if you try to hold people liable for simply stating the fact that X is at address Y.
I suspect you can, actually; once the court judges it reaches the point of advertising something (such as helping you find a drug dealer), you certainly should be liable IMO. If I were to give you detailed information on how to carry out a robbery on a particular bank, I go to jail as well. (The legal test is "knowledge aforethought": did I know, or should I have known, you were going to use the information to carry out that act?) There's a legal precedent for this in the US, in which an anti-abortion activist had been publishing information about abortion doctors, and was found legally liable for the resulting violence against these doctors; if publicly stating something like "Dr John Doe of 1234 Some Street, Chicago is an abortion doctor" is enough to result in a guilty verdict, I doubt a .torrent with a tracker location and hashes would be treated differently.
I certainly agree that is an ugly situation, ugly for the RIAA/MPAA, and ugly to the public. But is it worse than attempting to outlaw things like VCR's and P2P becuase some use ends up being infringing?
They did try - many years ago, in the now-famous Betamax case - to outlaw VCRs, but they are not attempting to outlaw BitTorrent or P2P in general: they're going after specific infringement services such as Suprnova. Suprnova wasn't a technology, just an online meeting point for people wishing to infringe copyrights - and that's what they were going after. As for "worse", going after the users would certainly be worse for me, since I was one of them :-) More significantly, I think it would have a far more chilling effect: kill off one hub server of whatever network, the users will just move to another - scare the users themselves out of doing it, they're gone. Napster and Suprnova going offline doesn't scare their users, just inconveniences them - users appearing in court would be a very different matter.
The only valid route is for them to actually go after the people who are infringing. You don't go after non-infringing people and attack technology itself and infringe people's rights simply because that's an easier target than actually going after the people commiting the infringement.
I disagree. If you're offering space in a big building marked "get drugs here" to people doing what the sign suggests, I think you should get nailed for it. Should the inventor of BitTorrent - the technology itself - be attacked? No: they should go after the people involved in actual copyright violation. The legal position of Suprnova, whether it is technically guilty of "infringing" (directly or indirectly) isn't yet clear, but - unlike the technology itself - it would be a big stretch to claim they're uninvolved in the infringement. It has been argued that the getaway driver wasn't actually committing a bank robbery himself - and that's been ruled legally irrelevant, he's still part of the crime. You don't attack the technology (the car), but you do attack those involved in its use in the crime.
A .torrent doed not provide enough information to reconstruct the file. It could not do that unless it was big as the file itself, or at least as big as an ordinary zipped or other compressed format of the file.
.torrent is an address where a file may (or may not) be located, along with some checksums to detect accidentall (or intential) curruption of that file.
.torrent link or even a direct web link to a file being distributed by some other site, and a newspaper or website publishing the addresses of crackhouses and drug dealers.
A
once the court judges it reaches the point of advertising something (such as helping you find a drug dealer)
Please define the legal criteria you intend to use to discriminate between a website with a
If I were to give you detailed information on how to carry out a robbery on a particular bank, I go to jail as well.
No, not merely for giving that information. At least not under US law. Unfortunately I'm going to have to get US-centric on this detail, so there's the obvious cavet that other countries may handle this differently. There is a an excellent report from the US Department Of Justice to the Senate and House of Representatives. It details that they do not have the power to pass a law making it criminal to publish bomb making information. Providing the information itself cannot be criminal, under 1st amendment protections. What they can pass laws against are providing that information in a specific intent to cause that crime, or with specific knowledge that the specific person they are providing it to intends to use it to commit a crime.
It is the person distributing the file who may or may not be commiting copyright infringment. Aside from any potential copyright holder, the person ditributing the file is the the only person who knows or even can know if he is commiting a crime. It is his responsibilty to ensure he is in compliance with the law before making and distributing copies.
If you receive a free CD in your McDonalds Happymeal, you have no need to check if McDonalds has obtained the proper licence to distribute those files. And you certainly are not commiting a crime by posting the address of McDonalds' that are giving away those files.
And if it turns out the McDonalds had missed getting a proper licence for one or more of those files then they are the ones responsible and infringing. They are the ones liable for damages to the copyright holder to compensate for those copies. You do not go back and round up everyone who received one of those CDs or anyone who published the addresses were those CDs were being given away.
If you walk down the street and a record store hands you a free promotional music CD, you are innocent in receiving it. Your presumption is that they have the right to do so. They are responsible for ensuring they are not violating the law.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I'm well aware of that (I didn't sleep through all those Information Theory + Coding lectures...); the whole point of that file, however, is to allow you to obtain the original file(s). Unlike a URL, it doesn't just identify a location: it identifies a specific set of data, so distributing that .torrent file indirectly distributes that specific dataset - which, as far as I can see, does meet the legal requirement for involvement in a specific illegal act you alluded to later.
A .torrent is an address where a file may (or may not) be located, along with some checksums to detect accidentall (or intential) curruption of that file.
Actually, it's the location of a tracker, which in turn holds the location(s) which have or want some or all of that particular set of data, but you're close.
Please define the legal criteria you intend to use to discriminate between a website with a .torrent link or even a direct web link to a file being distributed by some other site, and a newspaper or website publishing the addresses of crackhouses and drug dealers.
I don't: that isn't where I draw the line, nor do I believe that's where it should be drawn. The law draws it - as you almost cited later in your post - when there is knowledge of a specific act. Basically, "5th Street is full of hookers in the evening" is fine, sending you to meet a hooker named Daisy on the corner of 5th and E tonight is not. If that newspaper or website crosses the line, it's illegal.
It details that they do not have the power to pass a law making it criminal to publish bomb making information.
Correct: that information is not tied to a specific act. That's the aspect which protects BitTorrent itself - but it does not apply to individual .torrent files. Me telling you how to make a bomb is fine, me telling you the specific amount of Semtex to plant in a specific point on a certain bridge results in jail time if the court considers it serious rather than a joke.
What they can pass laws against are providing that information in a specific intent to cause that crime,
Now, how do you distinguish between that and providing information in a specific intent to cause a specific act of copyright infringement?
If you walk down the street and a record store hands you a free promotional music CD, you are innocent in receiving it. Your presumption is that they have the right to do so. They are responsible for ensuring they are not violating the law.
Trying to convince a court that this should apply to Internet downloads would be somewhat difficult, I think. Could you really claim to believe Suprnova's content's distribution had been authorized by the owners? I'm pretty sure that would achieve nothing more than some laughter in court.