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Exeem "Successor" to Suprnova Announced
First, Exeem really isn't an extension of Suprnova as the hype might have you believe: the connection between the two seems more marketing than anything else. Sloncek has been hired to promote their product as the heir apparent to his popular website, but his involvement really seems to be almost entirely PR. It'll work obviously: my headline on this story mentions Suprnova, and so will hundreds of websites around the world in the coming days. "Yet another p2p app" would not create anywhere near the waves that "Successor to Suprnova Announced" will. I hope that people judge exeem by its own merits and not by its (clever) marketing.
Second, Exeem is pretty much what was rumored earlier: a blending of the tracker, the BitTorrent client, and decentralized indexing. It's Windows only. It's in beta now, and will be out at some indeterminate date in the future. It also has a rating and commenting system which appears to be somewhat rudimentary. It's unclear to me if the rating system will be as useless as other attempts, and I think this is the critical thing: Suprnova succeeded because the content available on it was verified and trustworthy. Suprnova was as much the work of a few dozen editors as it was a list of torrent URLs. So far no other p2p system has achieved that level of accuracy. Exeem supports magnet sites which is a start, but not exactly p2p either. And did I mention that it's adware?
Third, there's a mystery company. Someone is paying Sloncek. He won't say who, but there's a history in the p2p world of secretive development. Since Exeem is to be adware, someday it will have a billing address, which means the legal issues faced by predecessors like Napster and Kazaa will be forthcoming, which is of course why we have a mystery company that Sloncek won't talk about in the first place. We definitely haven't heard the last of this.
Personally I was hoping for more: source code and cross platform compatibility never hurts. These are the things that made BitTorrent a huge success. I guess I was hoping for a new protocol instead of just another Kazaa. I guess I was hoping for a monumental leap, and instead Exeem to be a more incremental step. I'm sure we'll learn more in the coming weeks.
So it's Windows only and adware. This is nothing like Suprnova.
The parent article is a Troll.
... from the remaining BitTorrent tracking sites. Now all the kiddies can go download Exeem and the MPAA/RIAA/ can cook Exeem over the coals of the SuprNova fire while the rest of us keep using the many other tried and true tracking sites. I doubt Exeem will be around very long if they're advertising themselves as the new Suprnova.
"In Europe, he would have been a just lawyer, an original philosopher, a bold psychologist, an influential teacher. In Russia today, he could only be a novelist."
In some alternate universe, suprnova would have been the next indispensable web site, the next Google, the next platform for innovation, the next great leap forward for human knowledge. But in today's world, it's nothing more than hype for some new bullshit adware.
"It'll work obviously: my headline on this story mentions Suprnova, and so will hundreds of websites around the world in the coming days."
Yep. You couldn't have chosen another title for the article that wouldn't have worked for them. Nope. Had to go with that one. And then complain that it's just a marketing scheme. Yep. I'm feeling really sorry for you for being duped here!
Some of us DID use 'nova for legal stuff...
Me personally, for both 'freely distributable' software, and 'timeshifting' of broadcast TV programs that are available in my market..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I cared before, and now I know I don't need to care any more. So to me, this news story was useful, even though like you I no longer care.
501 Not Implemented
Hysterical. Shutting down networks giving people the ability to easily pirate your materials is now "censorship?" What valuable free speech are tracker sites providing other than giving pirates easy clickable links to pirate stuff?
In reality, it has nothing to do with ideals about censorship. That's just a ruse invented to cloud the real root cause--people want to protect the websites that let them freeload stuff without having to pay for it. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not about free speech or fighting back against invented enemies like the RIAA. It's just basic thievery and wanting to get stuff for free because you can, without regard for the people making the content (notice how those poor saps are never, ever mentioned in these discussions?).
"Sufferin' succotash."
Do you surf the web? Do you use IRC or any chat service? What exactly does bittorrent, a web or IRC server or client do to make sure that no one is using it to distribute child porn? What does any technology actively do to make sure it isn't being used to distribute child porn? *crickets* That's what I thought.
You are free to have your beliefs, but that does't mean that they aren't absurd.
You are right about the speed issues with Freenet though; I'll give you that.
Just because you're paranoid does not mean that the world is not full of assholes.
IF, you could create a freenet that only hosts torrents, and not the files themselves, had searching for torrents (which they don't have), and then somehow tracks the downloads totally anonymously, then yeah sure why not.
Somehow I don't think it will happen, currently freenet doesn't have indexing / searching of contents, you need to find a link to the content through other means. Isn't that all that a torrent actually is? a link and identifier to the content and the tracker?
I don't want to host contents of unknown origin, I shouldn't need to keep a node running 24/7 in order to find and download the occasional file, and I don't want to wait in a queue of 1000 leachers to get what I want.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Sure, I bet you could find child porn on any major P2P service; the difference is that Freenet almost *encourages* it because of their philosophy. With any other P2P service, you can choose to avoid it, you don't have to download OR upload it. With Freenet, apparently you don't have that choice. I think we can agree that all Slashdotters here would not want to aid unwillingly in the distribution of child pornography, which is why Freenet has been received with cold reviews in the past here.
Yep, and the lack of virus/trojans was because of the open sourcedness. At least that was the reason the clients were not cluttered with adware and spyware, which I believe contributed to its success.
> most bittorent users don't even know what 'source code' is.
but they do know what Azureus, Bittornado, and ABC are, because they were allowed to be written due to the openness of the original Bittorrent's source code.
-------
Chunky Bacon
What the RIAA/MPAA don't realize is that they are trying to close the barnyard doors after the animals have already left.
Information and content is a lot cheaper and more easily accessible than it was a few years ago. The RIAA still sells CDs for $10-$20, when a CD holds 700MB of music/data, tops. Meanwhile, a DVD, with 8GB of Video/Music/Data, is usually in the $20 range. Already, CDs seem overpriced.
But now take the cost of a high speed internet connection ($30/mo. for cable modems around here), and how much data you have access to in how much time, and you realize that the world has definitely changed. These aren't the days of the local library and record store, but of Google and Kazaa.
The RIAA/MPAA are dinosaur organizations who don't realize the meteor has already struck and they are soon to die. So they go around frantically foraging all the food they can while the doomsday clouds loom above. Information and content is cheap. Dirt cheap. Users want fast access to it. Message to the RIAA: adapt!
People have the connections, they have the big powerful computers, all they don't have is the service. If the RIAA had the foresight to realize that a) CDs are overpriced, b) too much of CD profit goes to marketing/advertising firms and the cushy CEOs of record labels and c) they can readjust the price of music, offer it online, and dominate the market, then today we would probably have an immensely popular online music service that offers songs for $0.25, compensates artists adequately, and keeps the RIAA in business.
You have to keep up with the technological innovations if you want to survive. People pirate movies, but not nearly as many people as those who pirate music. Why? Pirating a movie is a pain in the ass right now. You get a low-quality DVD rip that doesn't easily play on your TV. Music, on the other hand, you get at near-CD quality (or CD quality), and you can easily burn a CD or put it on your MP3 player. The day that one can download 8GB of DVD video in a few minutes is the day DVD videos in stores will be severely overpriced at $20/pop.
As to your other point, the reason this research focuses on censorship-resistant systems, and uses the word censorship, is because as it stands today using no fancy techniques, one cannot be assured that the publication of any document will not be censored by those who can control access to your particular server. And if the government or any other agency wants to censor the publication of a document on the Internet, currently it can (maybe not 'legally', but technically). So this research does have a place, and is well-named.
A lot of kiddie porn has relative innocuous names. I lost track of the number of pre-teen pics I ended up downloading from Kazaa back in the day while trying to download pics of entirely legal "teens" (most of them are probably in their early twenties and just look young.) Mind you, I deleted it all immediately, so don't send me email asking for it :P It can be hard to tell the difference before you have the file.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, the iTunes Music Store is an excellent option for music. But currently there's no good way of downloading TV shows or movies legally. We need something along the lines of an iVideo Store. The ability to download individual TV episodes for $1 or $2 would be great.
I, for example, want to get Stargate Atlantis legally without paying an extra $30 per month to get a "good" cable TV package. I don't want all the other crap, just this one program. But like audio CDs, the problem with the existing system is that you have to buy it all just to get the one or two things you want.
yes, because we are all part of a single group overmind, and it is entirely impossible that DIFFERENT PEOPLE at a discussion website might hold DIFFERENT OPINIONS.
That was sarcasm, just in case.
You Idiot.
The suggestion is to use freenet to distribute torrents, not to actually serve as a tracker. It can do that, surely, since torrents are tiny and one-shot downloads. This makes the MPAA's whack-a-mole game more difficult, since they have to go after each individual tracker rather than any centralized site hosting torrents (pointers to trackers).
So the suprnova's of the world are being corporatized by "secret companies." The question comes down to, will it work? Does anybody care about napster.com since it was corporatized?
What about MUTE?
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/
Thank you for generalizing that everyone with an opposing viewpoint from you is some type of spoiled rich kid. Actually, I have met quite a few people who are in favor of changes to "intellectual property", from liberals who have spent years helping with poverty-stricken families in third-world countries and have little sympathy for CEO's who don't make another million, to archconservatives including my father.
Which one I am, if either, is not really relevant to our discussion here. I do not understand the concept of "intellectual property". Want to "own" an idea? Keep it in your head with your mouth shut, and if you write it down or otherwise record it anywhere, make sure that it's somewhere no one will ever find it.
An idea, spoken in public, is public property. Period. Doesn't matter if the "idea" is a song, a computer program, a movie, or anything else.
Awwwwww, big corporation can't make money? Too bad. No one has a "right" to the continued success of their business model. They have the right to adapt and find a way to provide what the consumer wants, the way they want it, and make money, or die. Copyrights and patents create artificial scarcity and give "ownership" and exclusive rights to the first person to come up with something which cannot be owned-an idea.
But it'll stifle innovation? Biggest load I've heard. Those who have great ideas and are passionate about them need no reward. Socrates was KILLED for putting forth his thoughts, but even facing that he would not back down. And we suggest massive amounts of money are necessary to encourage this? It never was before.
Of course, there are those who can consistently do a great job at coming up with and putting into practice great ideas. They'll make a living. (No, I didn't say "killing").
All "copyright" creates is a massive media monopoly capable of controlling the distribution of 98% or so of creative work. The "little guy" doesn't even get heard amidst their marketing noise.
No one has a right to make massive amounts of money for the REST OF THEIR LIFE plus 75 years because they do a good job one time, or even several times. Most of us must go to work, every day, and do our job well each and every time. I don't get to say "Well you know what, boss? I've done a damn good job, and this company will benefit from that work for quite a while, so you owe me royalties for the rest of my life while I do no more work." If an artist/programmer/filmmaker/whatever is out of ideas and can't do his job anymore, it's not time for him to retire and profit at 31, it's time for him to find another job.
As for the **AA's, they are as animals whose ecosystem has been radically changed. They can either a. Act like nothing has changed, and face extinction, or b. Adapt. Right now, they're thinking they'll roll back the clock, and that does not constitute option c. or any other.
Collective license would solve this whole problem. If the "IP Industries" are unwilling to embrace this model, they have chosen option a., and I won't mourn their passing.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
See, I just don't fucking get this. You are basically denying the premise of capitalism with this attitude. If you don't put money into the movie/music/doughnut industry, society and capitalism fail to perpetuate, and the system crumbles. This is a "big picture" scenario, not based on your particular case alone.
If you intend to enjoy the fruits of our society/social system, why do you not feel obligated to abide by its rules and laws? That in itself makes you a not-good person, in my opinion. You feel really bad about the disaster in Asia? Have you donated any money to a relief fund (whatever you could afford as a college student)? I'd venture to say no. Bleeding hearts don't get much done, except self-delusion that they're so concerned with the world's problems.
And before I get a hundred posts about how messed up our system is: I know. I support change. Drastic change. Like, revolutionary change. But the fact remains that while I choose to be a member of this society, and while I choose to partake in its distractions and pleasures, I respect its rules and laws. This is the pretense of a society. Take it or leave it.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
Then don't watch it. It's that simple.
Your flawed analogy to donuts and a Tim Horton's is just another illogical rationalization by yet another person who doesn't respect the hard work of others yet can't see that what he does is stealing. If there are donuts in a dumpster behind a TH's that is because the people working in the TH value the donuts at $0 and consider them garbage. The stuff you are downloading wasn't tossed out by the people who made it. It was stolen and redistributed. Your analogy would be more properly stated as, "I view it as taking donuts from an anonymous person who walked into a Tim Horton's and stole them off of the shelf."
I'm glad you feel bad about the people in Asia. That's great. Why don't you tally up all of the money you've kept from deserving people who worked both behind and in front of the cameras on those movies you watched and send it to a charity in their names?
I tried freenet a couple years ago as a bit of an experiment, but the transfer speeds I was experiencing were akin to dialup... On a 300baud modem.
Seriously, it was painful to use. I think I had it installed for a couple days before I announced it as a "failed experiment" and erased it.
Maybe it has improved now, but it would take far faster speeds, and a self-contained native windows client with built-in browser before I'd be interested in trying it again.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I'm basically trying to get kids to by as much of a product that I know has a good chance of helping them die premature so that I can make a fast buck and the share holders get rich. every time I see that add on TV I remember my dead fat gran in hospital and in agony all over her love of corn-flakes.
Again, child porn is what you make of it, you make the worst of it which is probably often true, I haven't seen any child porn, but things like naturist videos are often taken as child porn, no child is being traumatised there, just saying don't use freenet, 'child porn' is like me saying don't eat sweets, diabetes.
--ot---
I don't condone 'forced' child porn, or taking advantage of children but I don't have a problem with someone jerking off over a picture of a child(or child lookalike or anamie) in a swim suit, any more than if they were doing it after seeing me walk down the street (horrible thought!).
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
ouch. So if I can't afford to buy food because i was laid off because a big company came to our town and shut down the only industry our little town had just to increase the price of their own products then I dont deserve to eat?
I hope you burn in hell.
What goes around comes around, kid.
Can you be absolutely certain you won't run that risk with IRC or Usenet ? Perhaps the next file you download has Bin Laden's latest prayer steganographized into it; ignorant of this, you feel compelled to share the file further !! Even worse, could the true legal name(s) of children who have been pornographed be hiding in there? Unless you are a pure leech, you might be complicit in trafficking said material. It is probably best that we switch off all the internet's myriad routers now, as they might possibly be used to transport "illegal" data at some future moment in time.
sincerely, one of the devil's advocates...
I think that stuff is done by the child porn distributors to act like radar chaff, if you see preteen incest rape tagged on 10% of everything on the network when it's unrelated, the .1% that really is will be harder to find.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Yes, I have lived much longer than 6 months without seeing a new movie. In fact, I did it quite often while I was poor and in college. That's not to say that I didn't download stuff. I sure as hell did. Did I feel bad about it, kind of, but I was tight as hell on money, and I would never have bought that stuff ever. I just didn't have the means to do it back then. But now, whenever I'm at a store or something and see a DVD that I had fond memories of watching the downloaded version, I buy it. Simple as that. Now I have money, so I buy them. In the long-term, I didn't deprive anyone of money. In fact, there were many movies that I discovered when downloaded, which I have now bought.
I agree with the idea that if there were no theft there would be no DRM. I also agree that you can not legally justify downloading a movie/game without reimbursing anyone for it (or getting permission from the creators to have it for free).
One of the carrots that's dangled every so often, though, is the idea that if piracy of a product were 0, the price of the item would be drastically reduced. This is a lie.
Souring the game industry:
Case in point, the Nintendo Gamecube. It was thought of as "unhackable" by the PR folk at Nintendo and yet the cost of their games was just as much as any other console. Do actions like this not foster cynicism among both paying and non-paying gamers? People were already expecting a price drop as the alleged source of high prices with Nintendo before was the fact that they used cartridges instead of CD-like media.
Souring the film industry:
Putting red dots on the screen to psychologically interrupt a movie experience is ridiculous. This form of copy protection should be the bane of any film director who respects his or her works as art. Can you imagine the Mona Lisa having these dots over top its portrait? Does interpolating the frames before and after the dots as a way of removing them make this form of protection all that effective when you consider how the work is marred in contrast?
Souring the TV industry:
The industry itself is inherently sour. The medium of network and cable television is not a delivery vehicle for content, it's a delivery vehicle of advertisements to viewers (who are the end product). If any form of entertainment needs to go pay-per-view on a per-episode or per-season basis, it's television.
Again, I'm not saying any of this justifies theft of artists' works, but I do think there are serious problems on BOTH sides of the fence. Simple finger-pointing by industry lobbyers / sycophants at pirates in order to justify artificially inflated prices and obscene forms of copy protection is morally -- and should be legally -- wrong.
It could also be done by the good guys to make it that much harder to find child porn. If 99.9% of labeled child porn was fake, it would be pretty pointless to search for it.
The RIAA/MPAA are dinosaur organizations who don't realize the meteor has already struck and they are soon to die. So they go around frantically foraging all the food they can while the doomsday clouds loom above. Information and content is cheap. Dirt cheap.
It's worse than you say. The RIAA and MPAA are cartels of content distributors. Sure, they may finance the production of some content and play favorites with the content they've got their fingers in, but they were built to distruibute content because in the past that was hard part for the people who made music and movies. Now, you don't need trucks, newspaper ads and shelfspace to distribute anymore. Distrubution is cheap and easy. There is no reason to pay them for it anymore. The message shouldn't be "adapt" it should be "go away". It's worse for the RIAA than the MPAA because arguably you still need the MPAA around to deliver huge spools of film to theaters, but that will change soon, and when it does you'll start to see movies get funded by people outside the film distribution industry just like you're currently seeing a new explosion of independant music with financially successful musicians. As the creators of the content (think directors, producers, actors, writers) see that they aren't dependant on the cartel anymore they'll realize they can make more money and gain greater artistic independance if they cut them out of the loop. The noose will close from both ends. The only way the traditional distribution cartels will continue to exist is if our governments grant them guaranteed profits through legislation, and even that can't last forever. This is the end game.
...without regard for the people making the content (notice how those poor saps are never, ever mentioned in these discussions?).
I mention them all the time. And I'll ask you the same question I ask the others. What makes them so special that they need special entitlements to do their work? It's no more valuable than my work, yet I have to show up and work if I want to get paid. They should be working the same damn way. Content producers don't need copyright to make their money. The government entitlement of copyright is thievery from the public. It is you who is clouding the real issue of self-distribution with nonsense like piracy(which the industry makes great use of itself) and infringement. It's the copyright holders who are demanding the free gov't handout of monopoly and control of information. That's your real issue right there. They want to insure that they own and control everything you see. Any program that enables a person to distribute information without going through the gatekeepers is a good thing. It matters not one bit that it can be used for disagreeable purposes to me. You can cry all you want about legalities. I'm going to do what I can to insure that people are able to communicate anonymously and freely, regardless of what is being communicated. No one person or group has right to control that.
What?
I support change. Drastic change. Like, revolutionary change. But the fact remains that while I choose to be a member of this society, and while I choose to partake in its distractions and pleasures, I respect its rules and laws. This is the pretense of a society. Take it or leave it.
The Boston Tea Party was pretty illegal, I'm sure.
It looks to me more like the **AA will sue everything under the sun ... the site that indexes the trackers, the site that hosts the trackers and the individuals that are ul/dl the files. I don't think they are thinking about bang for the buck anymore -- Their whole approach seems to have become very emotional.
Ideas flow From Other Ideas. :"
Nothing is Truly New.
Popper States that the Scientific Method is one of revoking and revising previous ideas.
That is how Progress is Made in All Disciplines.
Science, Programming, Art.
Feudalising Ideas by making Ideas Property, ring fences them with law - ideas stemming from that idea now are illegal to have, or cost to implement by paying a liscense fee for that technology.
If the Property Rights assigned to Ideas takes a long time to ( or never ) expires then you have a pyramid of taxes paid to Rights Holders to use that technology.
It exists today, a portion of the cost of many commodities is patent liscencing fees.
It slows the development of soft technologies as well: look at how GIF stalled the InterWeb, how proprietry formats stop the Interoperability and Interconnectedness of the Internet or even just information flowing from one office to another. Until recently everyone pretty much had to ( to stay within the law ) pay a tax for the right to Operate their Hardware - many people still choose to.
But patents expire Copright expires less now than it did and this means that whole areas of the Hilbert Space of Ideas are cut off legally until the Intellectual Property Revokes to the Public Domain.
This is why Universities are Publically Funded so they Discover and Publish Things making them Forever Public Domain.
The Science of Culture, that Dark Art of Creative Endevour must be freed from Feudalism. We Must be allowed to have certain ideas, deal with our local cultural environment as we feel we need to.
We need to Be able To Mash up Music, Sample it, Modify The Mona Lisa, Write Fan Fiction, Draw Cartoons containing Mickey Mouse do what we want.
And Tech. is an Art according to Steve Jobs, he made his hackers sign the Original Apple Mac Case Die Press.
Access to Information and the Ability to Use it and Create Derivative Works is a necesssary Human Right if we want to make progress.
Information is a lot more valuable than mere money.
"Copyright was mean to encourage artists to release into the public domain, that is why we gave up some rights to copy. That no longer applies."
"People who risk Federal Jail to let others have access to stuff for free are heroes."
Bring on the Free Market - End Information Ring Fencing, destroy the economy of scarcity gravy training Feudal Overlords.
Mash it Up Big Time.
Creative Commons W00t"
To Quote RMS http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
"
- Anonymous COward & Proud of It.
But it'll stifle innovation? Biggest load I've heard. Those who have great ideas and are passionate about them need no reward.
At least here in the US, we were founded on exactly the opposite idea. You are right, many great thinkers did not ask for any reward. But the vast majority know that there's something in it for them to come up with a great idea. The "right", if you will, to be compensated for one's hard work and critical thinking inspires many minds to excel when they would otherwise flounder. Modern business, which churns out impressive innovations at a remarkable rate, would not be viable without a compensation system. Even in academia there are (non-monetary) compensation systems, such as noteriaty, which I suspect is important to a lot of researchers. The desire to be rewarded for hard work is innate and perfectly natural. (Think of the caveman who figures out how to set a trap, so he can catch animals more safely - he's certainly not obliged to walk to the next cave and share his insights.)
Although I agree with you that copyright terms are horrendously long, and that regulations on media empires are laughably flimsy, being able to own an idea is still essential to our economy. Consider the alternative - a world where all you can own are widgets, and your wealth is measured by how much material stuff you have. Doesn't sound like fun to me.
Plus, no one would have ever heard of the GPL.
I must agree with you in spirit, but I must also tell you that you are, at least in some respects, quite wrong.
The purpose of copyright is in no way to create false scarcity. You are missing an extremely (and I mean that truly) important distinction. It is a distinction that most people don't understand, and like to scoff at because they think they know how things work. It's the difference between what copyright was designed to achieve versus the mechanisms people have devised to abuse that original goal to serve their own ends.
Money is in fact a good motivation for innovation. The U.S. is a good example of the power of "opportunity". People believe money can be made here, and it can, based on innovation. A huge percentage of the major innovations in the last century were made by innovators motivated by money in the U.S. (mainly immigrants from other countries). This is a good thing, though your post would make it seem like it is bad.
But you make a very good point: copyright as we know it has been twisted and bastardized into something that just makes the rich richer, and the money they make is often at the expense of the public and the true innovators. This was never the intention of copyright. Read what the U.S. congress had to say about copyright in 1907, or what the judge said about copyright in the 80's in the Sony/Betamax case. Folks that make a living understanding the law recognize that not all business is bad, and that not all law is bad.
Copyright is being abused. But the idea of copyright is a good one: incentivize those that innovate to *continue* innovating. Don't pay them so much that they don't have to work anymore; pay them enough to sustain them while they continue their work, which ultimatly will benefit the public as a whole, often for generations to come.
But some big business has abused this system, and the question is: what are we going to do about it? It's too bad that people are so fed up with the status quo that they believe that copyright is evil and the answer lies solely in a system based around have our biggest innovators work for no money. I believe it does not - I believe it lies in bringing honesty and refinement to a broken system built around a essentially important and *good* idea.
So while I agree with your sentiment, don't drag down copyright because some corporations (and corporate alliances) abuse it to hurt others and ruin lives for their own gain. We must recognize them for what they are, but also recognize that there was a certain measure of insight and wisdom in the original ideal that copyright represents, and seek to find ways to restore that ideal in practice.
An idea, spoken in public, is public property. Period. Doesn't matter if the "idea" is a song, a computer program, a movie, or anything else. Are you engaged in the production of one of these ideas? Because simply saying that "passionate people" will fill the production of ideas.. well, some ideas are harder to make than others. Movies with high production values cost millions to make. Games and programs do too. It's all well and good to say that they should be free, but I don't know any companies that are willing to risk millions in production if their competitors can legitimately sell the same thing on zero-day. I know a lot of individuals who would, granted.. but I don't know any individuals capable of "The Incredibles."
Anonymity--or the possibility of it--is also the foremost requirement of free speech. A few people doing things that are illegal is a tiny price to pay for supporting freedom.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
So we should ban it b/c it allows privacy? Allowing privacy encourages child porn? Bullshit. Just because privacy scares you, don't hide behind "Won't somebody please think of the children" crap.
When I tried it, speed was not too bad. Latency was a big problem, but still faster than the likes of emule. But as you are using a web browser and browsing what looks like web sites, you expect something a lot faster.
I can argue, similarly, that a hammer practically *demands* that I crush your skull, with the flat end and the pointy ends practically *designed* to do you mortal harm. However that doesn't make it so, regardless of my present point o' view..
You can make ridiculous arguments forever without actually proving any tenable link between the desire for privacy (which is perfectly normal and absolutely OK) and outright crime (which is deviant from the social norm, totally NOT OK).
Really now.
Heh... you *DO* realise you need to install the I2P application and an I2p node, running on your puter? It won't work if you just browse to it with your standard settings like to a www website .
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
"And the comparison would be closer to valid if the colonists had stolen the tea for their own consumption, instead of destroying it."
;-)
Who can actually be sure non of the involved *did* take some tea for their own use?
And would that make it less of a good (or bad) thing?
Civil disobedience often has a personal and sometimes even downright egotistical aspect. People are disobedient because they think they will get something out of it, at least potentially. "Personal enrichement" after all, does not has to be monetary wise per sé - as it is arbitrary to decide that 'money' (and saving it) is somehow less of a reason then, say, not paying taxes.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---