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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.
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
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.
5 years ago? That would have been just before the dot com bust, when idiots with buckets of cash were spending free money like Soupy Sales threw confetti. Not to say that your software isn't any good, but consider how the entire IT market cookie has crumbled, and not just your own meager piece.
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
Well, if anything was actually being stolen, then you might have a reason to get PO'd.
And if you think you have the "right" to own the expression of ideas, then all I can say is that you should get over yourself.
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.
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make install -not war
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."
You probably wouldn't be downmodded if you had posted your opinion without being such a sanctimonious prick about it. Keep that in mind for next time, sparky.
And by the way, if the copyright holder was deprived of his right to distribute his own work, then the one who "stole" that from him was the person who chose to make the $MEDIA_FILE available for downloading .. not the person who is receiving the copy. That person is just accepting something that is being offered.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.