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A Bit of Bittorrent Bother
Lave writes "A journalist at the BBC is replying to complaints about its recent Newsnight show, where it stated that using Bittorrent to download copyrighted material is theft. It's a very frank and honest account about the perceived realities of the internet and how traditional media represents it. From the article: '[One] answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end. So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate Freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.'"
The talk of encryption is what worries me. Given that it's regularly used for secure remote access (SSH), used for secure communications (S/MIME and PGP), and essential to commerce over the internet (SSL), I'd expect there's quite a bit of legitimate encrypted traffic flying around already.
Sure, it's buried amid the flood of email (80% or more of which is spam), web traffic, and P2P traffic. But encryption isn't a rare thing mostly used by bad guys, as the article suggests.
The attitude reminds me of one of the five or so episodes of Enterprise I saw, in which T'Pol got an letter from home and the crew spent the whole episode trying to decrypt it. The theme was very anti-privacy, with one of the characters actually saying to her, "Do you know how suspicious that looked?" It made as much sense as claiming that closed curtains were a challenge to look inside.
I'd guess that even without encrypted torrents, most encrypted traffic on the net is business traffic of one sort or another. So the bad guys using encryption are already lost in the noise.
A reporter who's actually honest, tech-savy, and not prattling on about the latest incarnation of Bennifer?
Now I've seen everything.
Why attack bittorrent for supposedly encouraging piracy when it has decidedly legitimate user as well, and there are many, many technologies out there being developed that are solely for the purposes of piracy, spam & exploitation. These technophobes should do a little more homework before selecting their targets, in my humble opinion.
Sounds more like BitterTorrent.
"If you ask the security services and the police why they monitor the internet, [pedophiles and terrorists] are the bogeymen they claim to be chasing.
In a four minute piece, we're sort of obliged to take that at face value"
No. As a journalist, you're obliged to think critically.
It's nice to hear that some "old media" organizations are slowly getting it. It may require all the old employees to retire or die off, but most huge cultural changes seem to require it. It was also refreshing to see that he admitted to downloading television shows via P2P, along with a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" that it was for research purposes only.
It's interesting times we live in.
Auntie Beeb usually has better standards than this. The response column at least admits they put their collective foot in it, and asks the question whether we've embarked on a digital arms race between the ISPs trying to ration bandwidth and the techs' traditional "censorship=blockage, route around it".
I think the ISPs are going to have to deal with their own success and open the spigots a bit wider; we *are* paying for our bandwidth, let us get to it.
"stated that using Bittorrent to download copyrighted material is theft" isn't it?
"Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?"
The author's initial response (because it sells copy) was dead on...
"Your computer may have already been taken over by terrorist pedophiles - details at 11..."
A Series Of Tubes - The Remix
What, instead of being more precise and saying "intellectual property violation"? The only people who bother to make that kind of distinction are A) lawyers and B) anti-social wankers trying to excuse their selfish no-cost acquisition of material against the wishes of those who created it.
The article assumed that it's ok for for security services to "manage" by monitoring, breaking decryption, and reading internet traffic.
The assumption here is that spying on the innocent is OK. I disagree. "Probable cause" in the US (used to) mean that the cops kept their noses out of situations until they had reason to believe that a criminal was involved in the situation.
"Reasonable suspicion" in the US used to mean that the cops did not hassle (or spy on) *anyone* that wasn't doing something suspicious, even when the person was in public. This meant that cops were not supposed to collar someone walking down the street and start asking them where they got the CDs for their walkman: Doing so presumes a crime was committed, and unless the cop had a genuine reason to think so, the cop was supposed to leave the citizenry alone.
The assumption that "it's ok to decrypt every frickin packet we can slurp up" throws out all of that, and privacy with it.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I am not sure, maybe we can ask Bram Cohen to find out.
I do know that it is written in Python, and it uses GTK for its GUI.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It is true that downloading copyrighted material using bittorrent is illegal... As is downloading it using FTP, or HTTP, or Carrier Pigeon, or any other means...
'[One] answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.
And near the bottom of the page:
What we'd really like to hear is a debate on the issue we did raise. If the ISPs can't now detect torrent data, then how will the security services manage it? And if they do figure it out, won't RnySmile and company just up the ante again?
And is this secret war between Hollywood and the ISPs on the one side and the P2P community on the other one that can ever end in a truce, or will the stakes just keep raising and raising to the detriment of us all?
Answers on a plain text postcard please.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
File sharing is not theft because copyright infringement is not theft? Sure, but it isn't EVEN copyright infringement if you have permission to redistribute the content, like with Linux CDs and content that you produce yourself.
[One] answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end. So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it. At some corporate Freudian level, there's some truth to that accusation.
Picture what is happening today with the RIAA/MPAA, publishers, writers, etc. vs. the Internet, BitTorrent, iTunes, etc. as what happened when the printing press first appeared. It used to be the church that controlled knowledge and only gave a few "educated" people access. Then the printing press comes along and the clergy called it Satan's tool because it was something they couldn't control. Well, the corporations are going to do the same FUD spreading to squash what they perceive as a threat.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
I wouldn't be shocked, and I'd be glad thay my friends and I have been burning cds and dvds of copyrighted media at a fever pitch for the last 5 years or so... I don't feel guilty, its a natural part of the evolution of the whole thing ;)
"File sharing is not theft."
Then in the next paragraph he states:
"If copyright infringement was theft then..."
The implication is that File Sharing == Copyright Infringement. What about public domain files? What about the Creative Commons? His apology is half-hearted at most.
However, most of what I use bittorrent for is for downloading copyrighted material that the copyright holder has already given permission for other people to distribute.
So here I am, using bittorrent to download copyrighted material... not only am I not stealing, but I'm not even doing anything remotely illegal.
Putting the misuse of the word theft aside for the moment, I think what they really outta be doing is putting some effort into qualifying statements such as these with the provision that it is being distributed without the copyright holder's consent. Because there's plenty of freely available material out there that has copyrights on it that are just as binding as the copyrights found on works that are not so free.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The fact that almost all BitTorrent usage is illegal isn't really BitTorrent's problem. They addressed the real problem with BitTorrent, and that's that it uses way too much bandwidth. Consumer network connections are not designed for large uploading, which BitTorrent requires. This places massive strain on the ISP networks. The obvious solution is traffic shaping or otherwise banning the protocol.
But now people are trying to "work around it" using encryption and other techniques. This is a problem.
Should anyone else on my network segment use BitTorrent, I'm effectively knocked off the Internet. Web browsing slows to a crawl. I can't play any online game, and if I was, I get disconnected. Forget trying to download anything, since it's likely to get disconnected in the middle.
The only way to make BitTorrent work is to traffic shape it or otherwise ban it, simply to allow other people to use the network at all.
BitTorrent will kill the Internet if it can't be made to behave well and not totally flood the network it's running on. The new technologies to prevent that will kill networks.
My Internet connection is already barely usable thanks to other people using BitTorrent on the same network. And it's only going to get worse...
(Anyone know why Slashdot refuses posts from Konqueror? Invalid form key my ass.)
Carrier pigeons are legal because no copy is made. That's just one of the ways they're superior to smoke signals.
No. You can legally share copyrighted files if you have permission from the copyright owner. Even if you didn't, it would only be copyright infirgment not theft.
sing Bittorrent to download copyrighted content is
"stated that using Bittorrent to download copyrighted material is theft" isn't it?
I have never seen a better reason to use punctuation.
In answer to what I think is your question. No - copying something (even against the copyright owner's wishes) is neither morally nor legally theft.
Its not legally the same - you won't get charged with the same crime as a thief.
Not morally the same - you don't deprive the person you are 'stealing' from with the item you are 'stealing'.
Not the right thing to do - but not theft.
My pics.
I write software licensed under GPL. It is definately copyrighted, it is also definately legal for anybody to download and share.
It is very dangerous to allow the big conglomerates to subvert the language like this and I recommend taking more care about it in the future.
... to aid in the stealing of a car is theft.
Fucking coat hangars! Oh.. they have legitimate uses too? hmmm
He says file sharing is not theft, but copyright infringement is still .. well .. copyright infringement.
Of course the material has to by copyrighted for that to matter. But let's not pretend what the vast majority of data flowing over these networks are. Movies, Music, and copyrighted software. You can't tell me that internet bandwidth is being 30% consumed by people sharing Linux CDs, the Gimp, and OOo with torrents. Why would you when you can so easily download those things directly from their respective sources without searching for them on a Mule server? At that rate every computer in the world would be running Linux by now, and being refreshed with a new version weekly.
Now we've got that out the way, let us ask you a question. Why is it that every time the media starts to talk about the internet they feel compelled to bang on about paedophiles and terrorists and generally come over like a cross between Joe McCarthy and the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
Well here's one answer - it sells copy. Another answer is that we're totally scared of new media, because new media is railways and we're canals, and you all just know how that's going to end.
So we seek to equate the internet with all bad things to scare you off it.
However, he admits that they were wrong to equate copyright infringement with theift, but never mentioned that most BitTorrent traffic is legit, the likes of Red Hat, Mandriva, and Star Wreck: In tThe Perkinning (which must be giving Hollywood cold sweats and nightmares).
It's also indie bands trying to get their music heard, which is the REAL reason the RIAA hates P2P.
As a man who hacked his first home internet connection back in 1994 (my then boss used his daughter's name as a password) and downloaded his first Star Trek off Peer to Peer back in 2000
So how could he not know this? The best liars tell a truth first.
A bartender friend of mine was conned out of $100 yesterday, and the cons used the same tactics as Adam Livingstone's puppetmasters.
One paid his bill, and the other asked if she could cash a hundred. "Sure," she says.
As she's counting the change back, with the hundred still on the table, man #1 says she forgot to collect from him. So he pays her a second time, and in the ensuing confusion, somehow man#1 got out of there with his hundred and change for a hundred.
As bad as it is that Cassie was scammed out of a hundred bucks she couldn't afford, it isn't nearly as evil as the lies the multinational corporations tell us through their media outlets.
(MRC?="islets")
Indeed, the last few torrents I've downloaded were "bootlegs" of King Crimson concerts.
Never mind that I got them from DGMLive, which is owned by Fripp amongst others and that I paid for them. So not real 'bootlegs'.
It was easier and faster than ordering CD's from the KC Collector's Club.
Only 'bad' thing is I wish they'd include a 400x400 or so 'cover.jpg' instead of making me crop it out of the pdf file they supply for making your own covers (including front back and spine..).
It wasn't theft, it wasn't illegal, it was, in fact, the recommended way of transfering a dozen files that I paid for; ensuring data integrity, a complete download and continuation if interrupted.
No, no, no.
. ..heads...are JUST as geeky... but they DON'T get made fun of.
Shatner talks like this:
And you....don't HAVE anythingthatyou're.... passionate about? Give ME a break. People who...can...QUOTE...baseballstatisticsoutoftheir.
Take...some..damn....tactlessons.
Never confuse volume with power.
without a torrent, here you go
Bittorrent on Newsnight - BBC2
or try this one on mininova, no reg required.
BBC Newsnight Bittorent clip 2006 02 26
Like this is news?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Theft, the dishonest taking of property belonging to another person with the intention of depriving the owner permanently of its possession
Collins Concise English Dictionary, Third Edition
Yes it's illegal but please don't drink the **AA Kool Aid and conflate it with theft, theft is nicking some old dears purse, shoplifting etc etc. Rather more serious in my opinion, that's why the **AA like to confuse the two. Got to go, dinner is served.
I'm glad to see this apology, I saw the original report and I was shouting at the television. Not only was there the "theft" line, but they also wheeled on a "former CIA security agent" yada yada. He said, and I quote, "the majority of crimes in the US and the UK are solved by the use of telephone intercepts". Which I didn't believe for one minute. He used that line as a justification for banning or severely restricting VoIP. Did people cry upon the invention of the telephone, claiming that it'd be so much harder to catch criminals now that they can't intercept their post? If by telephone intercepts he means "referral to telephone call records", well the statement might be true, although the 7-year data retention rules for ISPs should help in that regard.
Adam Livingstone, the author of TFA isn't the person responsible for the original report. That dubious honour falls on Justin Rowlatt, who in a fit of irony is also currently running a series of reports where he tries to live as an "Ethical Man" - first up, Justin, try checking the definition of 'theft' in the dictionary. Then stop spreading lies about legal technology.
Nope.
Looks like SOMEONE forgot to wear their tin foil hat when they walked past a record store this morning!
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Last time I went to see a movie they aired this annoying add - it showed guy stealing a car, person stealing a purse and person shoplifting and they equated it all to downloading movies, and all of this they showed to audience that already paid to see this movie in a theaters. Why stop here, equate copyright infringement to genocide and rape?
I'm really not getting the purpose of your post.
Your first point is to quote his statement about railways and canals, and saying it is ironic.
However, he is simply saying that new media is making traditional media obsolete, and since he works for the BBC television program newsnight, his post is not ironic in the slightest.
Secondly, it was simply a joke, he wasn't being stupid at all. In Britain a popular children's show called Blue Peter used to ask the kids to send in their competition entries "on a postcard". He was making the joke that kids no longer send in postcards because Blue Peter allows the children to email the show.
Trip, you often make some very valid points, but there is no need to reply to absolutely every discussion.
I agree with you, but there have been several articles that have had quotes from teh MPAA/RIAA that dispute the argument that if you have a copy at home you can download a copy from the net.
Their argument being that what you are downloading from the net is NOT from the copy you own and is therefore illegal.
ISPs shouldn't offer "unlimited" services if they don't intend to give their customers unlimited bandwidth. If I have a 200MB/s pipe, and I promise each of my 1000 subscribers 2MB/s, then clearly I'm promising more than I can deliver. It's no use advertising an unlimited internet service, and then complaining when your customers take you up on your offer.
The only thing Bittorrent impacts is ISPs overpromising. That's it. It's not going to kill the internet. It's not a menace that should be stamped out. Bittorrent doesn't magically use more bandwidth than the ISP allows you. It's just another protocol.
The problem lies at the door of ISPs, not Bittorrent.
NOT from the copy you own and is therefore illegal.
Where did that come from? Is downloading Linux from a torrent illegal if I've already got a CD of it? Nowhere did the grandparent mention that he was downloading things that he already "owned", he said he was downloading things that the copyright holder had given permission for him to download.
Last time I checked, copyright infringement carried a pretty stiff penalty. One could argue disproportionate to the apparent severity of the crime, even.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In the US at least. That alone should tell us how warped the view of file sharing on the internet is. CZ
The simple fact is that ISPs must do something to block or throttle BT, or it will simply take over their networks completely. The legality of the content is secondary. They simply can't afford the strain that this traffic is putting on their pipes. And adding more capacity isn't a solution, because BT will soak up as much bandwidth as you can throw at it.
ISPs have started to throttle, and the client developers have responded by encrypting the stream. Want to know what will come next? Transfer limits. I just hope that they drop the throttling or blocking when they bring in (or start to enforce) these caps.
A few $200.00 internet bills will have people re-thinking how much they need to download the latest "Survivor" episode.
grnbrg.
Correction, the greater than got taken out...
So I miss a couple of episodes of Veronica Mars. I grab them out of the ether using Tomato Torrent. It's a beautiful picture - better than my TV, and no commercials. The networks don't want that. But the alternative (when their prime money-making fare is episodic, either fiction or reality) is that I lose interest in the story arc altogether and never bother to turn the program on again. So take your pick, suits. Either tolerate my catching up or say goodbye to my eyeballs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Downloading copyrighted material via Bittorrent without permission of the copyright holder is illegal. Linux distributions are copyrighted material, but permission is granted via the distribution license.
Yeah, and they also say that I can't copy the one I have at home onto other media, either.
Fortunately, they're just a bunch of greedy slimeballs shooting off their mouths. They aren't the judge or the jury.
The comments about "...was giving his in-laws their weekly fix of Desperate Housewives..." and "...are looking at a big hole in their metaphorical dyke." would generate more outrage than anthing about encryption. :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I've got to agree with this guy at the Beeb. Furthermore, if terrorists meet in person to make their plans, then it's completely impossible for the FBI to track them online. We should outlaw people meeting face-to-face. I'm writing my representative today!
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
"Some internet service providers aren't very pleased about that, because although they sell their internet connections as unlimited usage, if people actually take them up on the offer then they can't actually cope with demand." :)
What is Historic Use? I've never heard that term before, but it sounds deliberately misleading and designed to mess with the whole copyright debate. (a quick google reveals something by the EFF about it here)
As a community of individuals who believe in freedom, we should be very careful about furthering such terms (ie: making use of them) since it only lends them power.
I'd much rather see this thing die now than have to sit down at the dinner table a year from now and discuss the relative merits of "Historic Use" and "Fair Use" with my aging mother while at the same time explaining there's absolutely nothing historic about "customary historic use".
Advertised transfer speed = total network bandwidth / total number of customers.
...because new media is railways and we're canals...
More like "new media is the Internet and we're TV and Radio, and we all know how that's going to turn out". The only parties that decry new media are those that don't understand the Internet. Apple understands it. That's why iTunes is so successful. Microsoft understands it. That's why Xbox Live is so successful. Most other companies just don't understand it.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
Law enforcement _never_ has been able to stop crime, and at best has been able to catch stupid crooks. This give the illusion of enforcement and really does provide an effective deterrant.
More specifically, there's lots of legit crypto traffic out ther: HTTPS you might want to use with your bank is probably the biggest. Streaming video is mostly MPEG2 or MPEG4 and is indistinguishable from crypto -- a pseudorandom stream that is incredibly difficult to analyse by machine. Crypto or no, a sniffer can't tell "Desparate Houswifes" from OBL issuing a fatwa. Let alone stego.
This horse gone. Trawling won't work. So the cops have to go back to targetted surveillance. Boo hoo! It's expensive, and so will need at least internal justification. If not external via warrents.
The parent is right, copyright infringement is not theft. It's more like sneaking into a half empty movie theatre without paying (disregarding the trespassing angle). It doesn't deprive the theatre owner of anything tangible, but you do get to see the movie without paying.
Making infringed material available for others is like holding the door open so all your friends can come in too. And their friends, and their friends, and their friends...
Yup, all over the world early tv was recorded, edited and then erased because who on the world would want ever to see it again eh?
Oh there are other reasons as well but the simple result is that the early seasons of some of the best shows have holes in them.
Just in the last decade both shows I mentioned however have had lost episodes recovered. How? Because somewhere in england somebody had enough money to have the earliest VCR style equipment and made home recordings of them. Badly eroded and of course not exactly made with broadcast level equipment and recorded from a for consumer source it isn't exactly WOW! Except they are the only copies around.
So the BBC took those tapes, thanked the family that offered them and put them through some magic and then aired the lost episodes. TV history came back to life.
Of course nowadays we are smarter and everything is archived BUT the fact remains, home recordings were used by a gratefull BBC to make up for its screwups.
Ah but homerecording wasn't actually illegal? Well not for want of trying and what certainly is illegal is to make a homerecording for anything but private use. Giving it back to the original content owner IS NOT private use. Yeah I know it is in "normal" terms but not in lawyer speak.
Frankly the entire problem with the media is one that this guy touches upon but doesn't seem to realize. It is the whole 4 minute idea to get a point across. If an issue is complex and can't be made in 4 minutes THEN USE MORE MINUTES!
This is not the first time the BBC and newsnight spouted the ??AA crap without fact checking. If they added all those crap 4 minutes segments together they could have made a evening filling in depth report on a changing world.
But no, that doesn't sell.
Frankly all this article tells me is what I know has been true of the BBC for a long time. Only intrested in selling copy in short flashes to keep the punters happy. For in depth, look elsewhere. The net for instance. What exactly stopped the canal owners from investing in rail networks?
The same thing that stopped the ??AA from investing in the digital music stores when they had the chance.
Oh well, at least one person seems to realize that the BBC is old and obsolete. Pity he seems unable to then take the next step and so do something about it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The printing press was "Evil" from a Catholic perspective because it opposed the church and eventually help strip their authority on "educating" the masses:
n ter.html (pbs documentary)
http://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/renaissance/cou
"With the advent of the printing press Luther's manifesto spread far and wide and garnered widespread support. The challenge from Luther caught the Pope by surprise. The leaders of the Catholic Church were also frightened by how confidently the Princes of Germany resisted Vatican pressure. These leaders, supposedly subject to the authority of the Church, now declared themselves independent of Vatican rule. Ultimately the Princes' defiance ensured Luther's survival,and prompted the birth of a Catholic movement known as the Counter-Reformation."
Stop making excuses for stealing music. You are a thief. A music stealing thief who steals music, because you are a thief. Stop stealing MP3s if you don't want to be called the thief that you are, since you steal music.
In a couple years BitTorrent will seem like gangster stuff because they made you sign contracts when you rented that movie. You will only be allowed to watch that movie with your wife, a dog, and one child. The extra friend will cost 50 dollars extra.
"brix_zx2, What is your sole purpose in this forum!?!?!"
"To do whatever you tell me MODERATOR!!!!"
yes, and the darknets will prevail..... not to call them dumb or anything.... but they are going after Bittorrent......
Nevermind that these are the same people screaming for blood when some rinky-dink company violates the GPL, which is, of course, based on the same copyright laws.
Maybe I just know an odd group of people here, but I seriously doubt it, the biggest "pirates" I know are windows users who don't give a damn about the GPL, but they will sure argue for their "right" to "pirate".
I'm not sure where this illusion came from, that gpl=pirates, but given the sheer numbers of people on the torrents, I think it is entirely safe to say that over 90 percent of them are Windows users who don't give a shit about the gpl.
I myself grab 2 types of copyrighted material from the torrents, episodes I might miss of Battlestar Galactica and an album I want to listen to to see if I want to buy it. That's it. And I don't feel bad about it, because I purchase the box sets of BSG as soon as they come out because I want that show on the air and to continue being made, and I purchase albums that I like and delete what I don't. I don't even do this often though. The last album I downloaded(and subsequently purchased) was Green Day's "American Idiot".
Anyway, point is, all the Linux users I personally know who care about the GPL, are not big pirates at all. The windows guys OTOH, just don't give a rats ass at all. They will download and keep and share stuff they don't even like. For what reason? It seems that's how they "feel elite" or whatever. I feel elite building Suse RPMs for apps they didn't exist for previously.
So until I see some real evidence, I think what you said is a load of crap. The windows guys are the pirates(and most of them are ass pirates too - obligatory windowsbasher flame).
The "valid" uses of encryption you mentioned are largely commercial, and require an actual business to do things like get an SSL certificate. Very few people outside of paranoid the tinfoil hat wearing crowd do things like encrypt their e-mail traffic. E-mail encryption is justifiably considered a red flag, for the simple fact that so few people see the need to use it. How many businesses really encrypt their communications? None that I know of. Hell, from what I hear the CIA and NSA still use so called "plain text" e-mail for most electronic communication.
An Uncomfortable Truth
Virtually every application I write sends and stores encrypted data. Given that storing the data in my environment is a gimmie, why would I store it any other way.
The header is always encrypted, the data encryption is optional. See this.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Visit your average bittorrent web site. How many of those downloads are LEGAL??? The article focused on bittorrent because it's the piracy technology of choice. The valid, legal use of bittorrent probably accounts for less than 1% of the total traffic.
An Uncomfortable Truth
They'd want to use shorthand?? (Stenography==shorthand, Steganography==hidden messages)
And why shouldn't the government monitor network traffic? Times have changed dramatically. By the time you've gotten a warrant to decrypt a packet, the criminal hiding things in that file could have committed the crime they were orchestrating or discarded that online identity for a new one. This is an information technology arms race, and your ability to keep your letters to your mistress a secret is trumped by my desire to have the CIA catch the next suicide bomber of airplane hijacker BEFORE they kill me, not after. All this bellyaching about piracy is absurd. Which is more important, the government using an automated system to decrypt some e-mail, or NOT being murdered in a terrorist attack? Would you rather let a pedophile rape and murder a few kids, so long as your precious e-mail isn't decrypted and read by a computer? I'm sorry, but your Eric Raymond Slash fiction isn't worth the life of my nephew.
An Uncomfortable Truth
We live in age of institutionalized marketing deception and the ISP "unlimited" LIE is the problem here. The solution is simple: ISP's need to put up and shut up or cut the b.s. and charge customers by the gigabyte.
+---+ /|
|\
| X |
|/ \|
+---+
Ooo... Nice try, thank you for playing.
All humor aside, if an ISP offers 15x2Mbit peak bandwidth, they'd better by god GIVE that bandwidth or be guilty of false and misleading advertising. I don't care if they're budgeting for only 30% of the advertised bandwidth ever being used or billing at the rate that reflects that they only really have that much behind the offering. That, folks, isn't your problem- it's THIERS . If they can't deliver on it for whatever reasons, they should have thought about what they were marketing and what they were actually selling and made the reality match the pitch.
Don't be selling 6Mbit, 15Mbits, or whatever unless you mean it totally.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
/. newspeak
We don't like the pejorative implication of associating copyright infringement with theft, so we'll cite the most narrow definition of the term theft and show it doesn't apply to copyright infringement. We'll ignore common epressions in the English language such as "You stole my idea", "cable theft", and "identity theft", which also do not involve physically depriving someone of an object, and we'll ignore the economic impact by saying that the holder doesn't lose anything when copyright infringement occurs.
Vote for Pedro
I use bittorrent to timeshift tv shows (or essentially record shows) that if I had the means (a TIVO or similar DVR) I would record in another way. But why should the right to timeshift a show be only given to those that can afford the technology. I would just record a tv show (in the most cases Scrubs) but then I would be stuck only watching it on a VCR equipped TV (unless I then copied the tape.) This lets me watch the episodes if I miss them or re-watch them over and over until the DVD comes out which I would then purchase.
Check it out. Guy from Boing Boing was invited onto CNN for this:
And here's the transcript. Do a search for "boing". The entire segment could not have lasted more than a minute. In fact, just as it was getting interesting and into the heart of the matter, the host says, "quickly, answer this question in ten seconds."
If you ever manage to rent the documentary called "Jockeys" (it's on Netflix), this one famous horse jockey had had kidney failure due to the drive of horse owners to reduce jockeys' weights. Jockeys regularly starve and dehydrate themselves, and force themselves to upchuck in order to lose weight to race in order to win races. And they do this before every race. Some jockeys' teeth have been dissolved down to nubs from stomach acid because they upchuck so much. Anyway, CNN had a segment with this jockey's plea to increase the required jockey weight by only a few pounds. And sure enough, just as the jockey was getting into why weights had to be increased, the good ol' CNN host said, "Ooh, sorry, we have to cut you off, we ran out of time." And that was that. In the documentary, the jockey just sat there, with this unbelieving look on his face. Then he said, "I didn't get to tell them anything!"
And that pretty much summarizes news programs today. They don't get to tell you anything.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
For years we've known that encryption protects our freedom. And the more traffic that's encrypted, the more effort it will be to decrypt it all, the harder to find the sensitive information, and we'll all have more freedom of speech.
But with the recent revelations about the US government's domestic spying program, I think that encryption will have a secondary benefit in requiring police and three letter agencies to return to more traditional methods of data collection. The way the laws are written, spying can be done on an individual suspect, but the temptation to do mass spying is too high and the US has decided to capture it all and sort through it later.
Encrypting all the data forces the police to return to more traditional methods of spying on an individual (through keyloggers and tempest).
While I think we need to stop terrorism, hopefully through the use of encryption and other technologies, we can keep ourselves safe and move back to legal spying.
Copyright infringement and theft are two different crimes.
With similar "logic"...
Stop making excuses for breaking into other people's houses. You are a murderer. A baby-eating murderer who eats babies, because you are a murderer. Stop breaking into people's houses if you don't want to be called the murderer that you are, since you break into people's houses.
>Then the printing press comes along and the clergy called it Satan's tool because it was something they couldn't control.
h annesGutenberg.htm
Considering that the Bible was one of the first books to benefit tremendously from the printing press, I find this hard to believe.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blJo
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I think we must have a very public debate on the nature of cyberspace. :-P
Well, then let's just start now
Currently the police seams to treat cyberspace like a public area and does pretty much what they want to do in it. I'm against this attitude. However, is the solution really to have a "everything in cyberspace is private" policy? After all, most people accept police patrols and even think that they are a good thing, that they keep the streets safer.
Maybe what I have here will work as a viable "middle ground" between completely private and completely public internet.
E-mail is more like a post-card.
Continuing the analogy, is encrypted email like a sealed letter? Would that make it illegal to intercept and read it? And how strong must the encryption be? Does ROT13 count?
Is IM more like a phone call or like a conversion in the street?
I'd say that IM is more like a phone call. It (generally) happens between people who are in their private spaces (exceptions -- cell phone/laptop users).
Anybody can walk up and, with no real effort, listen to a conversation in the street. Work is required for both phone calls and IM conversations.
Is a webpage like a journal, a mall or a playing ground? Does it depend on the website?
I would argue that content made available to the general public is public content, and nothing else. Private/access-restricted blog entries are not made available to all -- the information is clearly being kept confined to a select few.
If a run a webserver on my home computer, is this like having something in my house, on my lawn, or something else?
IIRC, some court has already declared that unauthorized access to a computer system is best described as trespassing. Either way, I am inclined to set file access permissions as the standard. If you have an ftp server in your basement, anything available to Joe Public is "out in the open." If only certain accounts can access it, it's private.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
BitTorrent has legal uses, yes. But OVERWHELMINGLY it is used illegally. Not just in a minority or half of cases, overwhelmingly. Surely, if people don't want BT to be blocked/banned, maybe they should, you know, do something about all the people using it for illegal purposes?
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
But then people could actually have a copy on hand, easy to refer to. They didn't have to rely on the church's access and interpretations of the material; they could much more easily make their own interpretations.
Omnes stulti sunt.
I'm so glad we had this reasoned discussion, and am deeply proud that my response is as witty, informed and to the point as your first response to me.
P.S. You may want to read my original post again, at no point did I make excuses for 'stealing' music, I in fact explicitly pointed out that copyright infringement is illegal. I did however state that it was, in my opinion, a less serious offence. I appreciate that a fuckwit such as yourself may have problems with complex ideas, so in closing, thanks for the attempt to contribute but do put some work in on your basic comprehension skills, OK?
Then you may be in the minority. I just picked a game (Quake 4) and searched a p2p network to see what had the top numbers of seeds. The top 10 was mostly cracks of the full version. It would be nice to think that the top 10 was just the legally distributable demo, but its not the case. There are lots of good, legal, legitmiate uses of p2p, but to suggest that its mainly used for that is just wrong.
that doesnt mean p2p is evil, but if we respect copyright, then we must agree that it badly needs some policing.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
... we'll cite the most narrow definition of the term theft and show it doesn't apply to copyright infringement. We'll ignore common epressions in the English language such as "You stole my idea", "cable theft", and "identity theft"...
Gosh, you're right! You seem to have a firm grasp of the nuances of language.
Maybe you could help me explain to the customers at my restaurant why they get tuna when they order chicken. You and I both know tuna is the "chicken of the sea", but these customers just don't seem to get it! They keep citing the most narrow definition of the term "chicken", even though I'd rather use the vague, metaphorical definition implied by a common English phrase because it supports my business model (1. buy surplus cat food, 2. sell to humans, 3. profit!).
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Plusnet have been the worst British ISP at traffic shaping, which is why I, and a lot of other users, left their service in droves. To be replaced by their target customer of someone who uses only web and mail... What was most infuriating was the amount of backtracking they did about traffic shaping, and the "unlimited" service they were previously marketing. Ftp, usenet and p2p apps were targetted, but the traffic shaping technologies used (ellacoyas) seemed to have a knock on effect to other usage patterns. Besides the fact that people object to being told what to use their connection for, unless that message is communicated very well. Which, in the case of plusnet, it wasn't...
Nice to hear a journalist stop peddling the Kool Aid. On the other hand, the more they try to hold back the tide, the more furious it will be when the dyke bursts. After all the suffering the press and *AA's have inflicted, it would be gratifying to see all their shiny mansions repossessed and their delusions of grandeur punctured.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Not morally the same - you don't deprive the person you are 'stealing' from with the item you are 'stealing'
In the western mind all crimes against property begin as theft and the definition of property itself has a very broad reach: "He who steals my good name steals all."
It amuses me when phrases like "Identity Theft" are used here without a whisper of dissent. But everyone shys away from such thoughts when the intangible property belongs to someone else.
Piracy, in the sense of copyright infringement, came into the language while the Black Flag was still being flown across the Caribbean.
What the infringer steals is the right to control distribution and profit from one's work.
In a middle-class society accustomed to the ordinary rules of trade and bargain, that is understood on so elemental a level that the counter-argument will always seem fraudulent.
Jefferson can take the high road and proclaim that achievement in the arts and science should be free to all, while it is unpaid and unacknowledged slave labor that builds and sustains his Monticello.
Little did you, or other Starfleet investigators, realize, but it was NOT just an ordinary family message to T'Pol encrypted and then disguised as noise. It was, in fact, highly sensitive data scattered using steganography over an ordinary family message that was then encrypted and then disguised as noise. I alone have discovered this, but the writers failed to blossom this treachery in a future episode.
- Klingon
I'm paying for high speed access that's around 500K/S downstream and 75k/S upstream.
Note that that's not unlimited speed up and down, it's capped. The reason that the article states that there's an issue is that they don't expect anyone to ever use all that bandwidth all the time, so they oversell the lines. Then the torrents came along, making it easy to max out your bandwidth all the time and suddenly the overloaded pipes can't handle it any more.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
The BBC shows no ads since it is publicly founded with a stealth tax on households with TV sets in the UK.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is bittorrent not designed to be fast by using lots of peers that are downloading the same file? Would spreading terrorists plans over a protocol like that make any sense? I mean shouldn't you want to involve as few people in your nefarious plans as possible, thus would be a system that share the load around like bittorrent be an unnatural choice? As far as I understand Bittorrent it is only a way of distributing files and not a whole network inside a network like Freenet, am I wright? When using Freenet you don't know what you are sharing with Bittorrent you do AFAIK.
shut up shut up shut up!
I fully realize that the primary use of p2p is infringing on copyright law.
But my point is that it's unfair to say that downloading copyright content is illegal because it is a fact that copyrights exist on freely available content which are just as binding as the copyrights on material that's not free.
What they *SHOULD* say is something like "using peer to peer filesharing software to download and distribute copyrighted content without permission from the copyright holder is illegal". The provision of "without permission from the copyright holder" is what makes all the difference here. Since without that provision, the statement is actually completely false (and defeats the very notion of copyright, since copyright holders are of course allowed to copy their own works without restriction). But of course, as soon as you add this provision, the whole statement seems to become self evident, as copying any copyrighted work in any way without permission from the copyright holder is illegal anyways (barring specific exemptions from infringement that are outlined in the text of the Copyright Act).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But before Gutenberg, buying a bible usually ment building a chapel for hosting it and hiring a priest or monk to read and interpret it. This is of course much better from the clergy's point of view than just picking up a personal copy from the printing press. The choice between God and Mammon is usually an easy one (see any random televangelist for more proof of this).
WOW - Best response ever. You OWE it to Slashdot to continue to post things like this.
If there's a tagline to attract flames, I think that's got to be it! :-)
I love the BBC, and in this case (I didn't see the original broadcast), the BBC have stated, on their own bbc.co.uk domain, that they oversimplified a very complicated issue in a 4-minute segment. Ergo, I love the BBC even more.
I'm surprised at the "30% or more" stats for BitTorrent (or is that P2P in general?), but the argument that legitimate users shouldn't use encryption simply because "bad" people might use it also is crap. I don't agree with USAian gun laws ("we can all have guns because any other guy could have a gun"), but I reserve the right to use encryption for anything I choose to send over the internet.
I agree that ISPs (within their published Terms and Conditions) can choose to restrict (say) unencrypted BitTorrents, and that adding encryption to Torrents in order to evade detection is a pain for the ISPs, but to say that the use of encryption in itself is either immoral, illegal, or against T&C's, is not a good way for an ISP to go about Public Relations.
If the security services have a problem with many users using (admittedly weak) encryption - just enough to get it around the ISP's current set of firewall rules - then the security services have a problem.
If we all agreed to encode our phone conversations for the next week, would GCHQ say that we can't use phones, simply because they can't tell the difference between:
1) Legitimate sharing of information
2) Illegal sharing of corporate data (not strictly in the Govt's remit anyway)
3) Terrorist activity
If the security services can't tell the difference between "A Bug's Life" and "Let's fly planes into Canary Wharf", do we all need to change our private contracts with whatever ISP we choose to use such that we agree that we will never encrypt anything, so that the encrypted stuff sticks out like a sore thumb? There goes the entire telecommuting workforce, who depend upon encrypted VPN access into corporate VLANs, and the national economy takes a huge dive along with it.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Dude, you need to lay off the SMS for a while...
Furthermore, the journalist did not just say it was illegal. He said it was theft, and that is just plain false. Theft, under any juridic definition, involves the act of taking away something from someone, which downloading does not do. So while downloading the latest tv series episode off bittorrent is illegal under current US copyright law, it is NOT a theft, by this or any other legal system.
BitTorrent will kill the Internet if it can't be made to behave well and not totally flood the network it's running on. The new technologies to prevent that will kill networks.
Imminent death of internet predicted. Film at 11.
Again.
As it has been every few months since there WAS an internet.
Since the engineering for the next generation of internet (in which I'm involved) plans on delivering enough bandwidth for several HDTV unicast streams simultaneously to EACH user, I suspect that even encrypted Bit Torrent won't "kill the internet".
WHY do you think they buried all that "dark fiber", eh?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
it was dang funny. If you get a chance to (shades of being on thread topic) find it on the net, BT it and laff at it. Shatner addressing a trekker convention.
Besides, who cares what NON TREKKERS think? Really.....buncha double dumasses...
Most people are simply not intellectual---to see this for yourself, watch a television for a while---and are therefore not able to discuss subtle questions of ethics and social policy. Instead, they turn to others for help and guidance, just as I hire a mechanic to fix my car because I lack that skill.
Until their coffers run dry, or a competitor they can imitate shows them it's possible, they will continue to do their utmost to sell the cheapest stuff at the highest price, and litigate, and lobby, endlessly to maintain this status quo.
The mpaa and co. are not entitled to their millions. They are not entitled to easy profitability. they are not entitled to a captive audience. Last time I checked there was no shortage of quality outside the uber-profitable mainstream. The sooner these self-righteous, rolling-in-money peddlers of stultifying orthodoxy go down, the better.
if all the 'products' of mass entertainment consumption disappeared tomorrow no one would be worse off. quite the opposite, actually.
maybe we'd wake up.
Yes, exactly. Their apology missed the point. What's more: the original show was broadcast to a nation for probably ten or fifteen minutes or so. The apology will be a quick mention at the end of a future show, and a well-hidden online page. It really doesn't make up for the damage they've done.
Everyone should make an official complaint -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
...that whatever method I use to download it is illegal. Wholly and completely with no redeeming value whatsoever and was created with the express intent of breaking the law. (yes, I know the US laws are going away from innocent until proven guilty, so don't worry about it)
BitTorrent is built upon standard Internet Protocol, which was also designed to facilitate the speedy and un-interruptable transfer of data between computers. BT just does it better and gets the users involved in helping to distribute said data. What the data is does not matter to the machines, just that it transfers it seemlessly and silently. The will of the user is what makes it good or bad, the same as with a gun or a knife or a bible.
I do agree that there is a lot of illegal traffic on just about every single file-transfer program you can name, from FTP and BT all the way down to good old HTML (see MySpace and every disgusting bad rendition of modern-music into MIDI form). And while I agree it is injurious to the copyright holders, blame the consumers violating those rights, not the people who make the programs. That is exactly like blaming the car makers for people speeding since they didn't make sure their products were unable to break the law by installing governors based on each states laws.
To correct you: Downloading copyrighted materials is indeed wrong, but it is not illegal. You are neither recieving stolen goods, nor are you violating the copyright laws. The person who is uploading is, by distributing the content without permission, but what you have done is not illegal. Yes, you may be using BT to get it, but if you are, it can be set to have no upload. Your downrate will suck, but if you are persistent and there are enough peers, you will get it. It is the distribution that is illegal. That is why the Feds traditionally only went after large-scale pirating outfits, because they were creating and then distributing, usually at cut-rate prices so as to profit from their activities, the content illegally. Now the Outfits want the Feds to go after kids on their computers and people who want to see this digital medium used to its full potential.
I am not saying they are heroes, they are still breaking copyright law by distributing, but I am personally sick of empty promises from Corporate America about how much better the future is gonna be, while they shit all over the present and stall so they can make a little more money, and I am disgusted by how much fear that same group of entities has towards change.
They could win this race, but they are Behemoths, slow and unwieldy and comfortable as they are now. Changing with the times is inevitable, or you simply get left behind. I think a good book the Boards of the RIAA and MPAA member companies should read is "Who Moved My Cheese" mainly because some jackass with delusions of adequacy thought phone-monkeys should read the thing so they would accept more work for less wages and bloat the Piggy-Corps(e) a little more. If they would decide as a group (funny how an association of companies cannot act as a group unless they are threatened and their money is at stake) and shift whole-hog into the digital race, there would be no need to have these arguments anymore, because it would be easier, more economical and (dare I say it? I dare!) FASTER to get it from source than from Susie.
I do blame the member companies for this whole debacle. They made their bed, and they are indeed lying in it. But they need to get off their asses, the sun is creeping ever higher and the last train leaves at noon whther they are on it or not.
Hobbies and interests are wonderful pastimes, but frequently no one else cares about any topic quite as much as everyone else. I am currently re-reading the Tolkien stories for the umteenth time. I might mention that I am doing this in conversation, but probably not. No one else gives a shit, and compelling others to share your enthusiasm is just rude!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Right, but in a four minute news piece it's a lot easier to say "copyrighted material" than "copyright material for which the copyright holder has not authorised redistribution". ;)
For this reason I prefer "unlicensed material", which is actually shorter than "copyrighted material", but captures the essential detail: if you have a license to download the material, it's legal, and if you need one but don't have it, it's illegal.
If they advertised 'No Limits' then they better sell without limits. They must provide what I paid them to provide or I and a lot of others will be taking them to the small claims court for a refund.
If they misjudged what capacity they needed to do that, then I understand their distress, but it doesn't make it OK to take my money then screw me over. Fuck 'em, fuck 'em twice and fuck 'em in the ear.
That's like saying "Unlimited free refills" on coffee, then charging after the third cup, saying "I didn't realise you might drink four". Give me my damn coffee!
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
The USA says file sharing of copyrighted material without permission is theft. USA is God, USA is juggernaut, all bow to USA-sama or die. This is hard reality, there is no might that could stand against America. The BBC should know better, how they have been decimated and decapitated after they tried to intervene with the straight path to second Iraq War.
File sharers force the authorities, who must protect the economic basis of the countries, to clamp down on the Internet, in order to preserve VAT revenues on music sales. File sharing is communism and there is no money in communism. Without money market economy is destroyed. Without market economy democracy is destroyed.
Files sharers for the reasons above described destroy the freedom of Internet to communicate legitimate isses. Because of file sharers communicating mp3 and divx rips, soon we will not be able to discuss stamp collecting or best methods to paint garden doghouses, because the Net will be entirely clamped down, as there is no easy and unobstrusive way to shut down media trafficking alone.
File sharers are provocateurs, anarchist-nihilists who should be shot on sigh so they cannot destroy our beloved Internet. I want the net the old honest way, without spam, scam and P2P. An Internet of usenet TALK, webpages that hold information, FTP of open source software. Bootlegged films and ripped MP3 are not in the picture.
It's unfortunate that the original mistake was on television while the apology is on the website. I'd guess that far more people watch the Newsnight TV show than read BBC News Online, and most people probably do one or the other rather than both. The apology should be made in the same medium that the mistake was made, to increase the likelyhood that those who recieved the misinformation will recieve the apology and correction.
Not to mention that copyright violations are *infringement* not *theft*.
Ethically speaking you can call it whatever you want. I'm not commenting on the ethics at the moment. But, at least in the US, the legal term for copyright violation is infringment. All the media FUD in the world can't change that. Only, in the US anyway, Congress can change that.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
While doing certain things with BT, you just place some pictures of some paparazzi site you find anywhere, on your own website, usenet or somewhere else, and you could be hunted down, convicted and put in jail just because the pictures have been copyrighted... Well although this is IMHO an overblown example, but the sanity is just the same I guess
The OP clearly didn't read the article properly.
The article effectively said:
"File sharing is not theft."
"If copyright infringement was theft, then would happen."
Whoever modded the OP insightful hasn't got their glasses on...
I was careful to put "in the US" to make the distinction. Although I used the US terminology from US-based law, I think the same concepts *used to* be part of British law as well. I think that's where the US got the idea - since King George III's England wasn't respecting this (among other things) in the colonies, the upstarts there had a little tiff they called "revolution".
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
You assume that gov't ability to read every innocent's communications somehow equates to the ability to catch the guilty before they commit a crime. Well, let's examine that. Where's the proof? The US govt knew about most of the 9/11 bombers before 9/11, but thru ineptness in handling the data they already had, they were unable to stop it.
This is very analogous to Dec 7,1941: The US military had plenty of clues and enough information to prepare, but beaurocratic bungling prevented anyone from seeing all the data in one place at one time. Also, a warning from the radar station on the northern end of the island was disregarded by the officer of the day. Even in the absence of everything else, that radar warning would have given about an hour's notice, plenty of time to sound an alert.
The lesson is that information already available should be put to good use, and collecting more data from innocent sources doesn't help.
Next assumption: Times haven't changed. There have been spies in the US since before the US revolution - even Nazi and Japanese spies in the US before Pearl harbor. The Nazis killed more Americans in US waters before Pearl Harbor than were killed at Pearl harbor - by sinking US shipping in the US intercoastal waterways on the east coast. They got their targets from both periscopes - and spies in the harbor towns who would find out where the best targets would be.
Today, the treatment of innocent Japanese as a result of Pearl Harbor is considered a shame to the US.
Next assumption: The gov't will use the information *only* to prevent a suicide bomber from killing you. This is demonstratably false - kids in middle school are being charged with "terroristic threats" for being bullies. Equating school yard bullies with suicide bombers is an abortion of justice, but that's what your gov't is doing.
What's more important? Freedom is. Thousands of Americans have chosen death before giving up freedom. Being left alone isn't the same thing as being free. If one person who works for the gov't somewhere decides they don't like you, do you want that one person to have these kinds of powers to intrude on your life? Don't think that somehow, magically, someone else in gov't will stop abuse. Branches of the gov't govern themselves, and laws are set up to protect them from legal interference. For example, cops accused of brutality are investigated by other cops. Congressman accused of abuses of power are investigated by other congressman. All such "self-enforcement" policies softpedal abuses, not stop them.
Never forget the nature of the beast. Governments are groups of people controlling other people with violence and the threat of violence. All the laws, regulations, etc, are there to try to ensure that the violence and threats are only used when it benefits the greatest number of people. But the people who benefit most are those with the greatest capacity for violence, and the least to fear from consequences. This is why gov'ts must be very closely watched by the citizens.
I could go on, but I think you were just trolling, not thinking.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Point well taken. "Unlicensed material" is much more concise, and conveys virtually everything I was arguing needed to be said.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'd guess it's cuz the sig isn't actually stored with the post, but with the profile ONLY. So when you post, the s/w sees your profile has a sig, and serves it up too. So it seems "retroactive" when really, it's never stored with the post at all. Saves space, etc.
Just a guess.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
To those who fought and died for American independence, "independence" meant:
"...that [all men] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted...Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government...it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a [despotic] Government...
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America...mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
Specific causes of their struggle are also listed in the Declaration of Independence.
And if you think this was cynical exploitation on their part, remember, *they* who signed the document were under threat of death, they *did* fight alongside those they "suckered", and yes, some of them even died doing it. For more information, you can also read the Federalist Papers.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
But saying "using Bittorrent to download copyrighted material is theft" just sounds so much better than saying "using Bittorrent to infringe copyrights is copyright infringement", despite the fallacious assumptions contained in the former. It makes a better sound bite. I think the latter is better, myself.
They're taking their dog to get its two shots before it's too late. You're taking your dog there too, right?
What they do have a say in is protecting their copyrights, and they have every right to be upset about people infringing on them.
But, get this, the Copyright act explicitly says that personal copies made for the private use of the person that made the copy DO NOT INFRINGE on Copyright. So whether you, I, or anyone else makes a copy, even if we defeat some digital protection in place to do it, we do not infringe on Copyright unless it turns out that the copy that we made is not for personal and private use (intent on the part of the person making the copy mattering a lot here... if somebody happens to steal your personal/private backup copies of your CD collection (that is, take them without your implicit or explicit acquiescing to the exchange), you won't be accountable for copyright infringement).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
...banks using encryption. Bottom line, if something is important to you, you don't mind it being protected. The goverment and many companies don't care about our privacy if it in any way infringes on their ability to get what they want, be it information, power, or money.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Gandhi
Don't buy a DVD player that does not let you skip.
If you do buy one, take it back and make a fault claim.
I've spoken to the people at the local stores. I've told them that if I buy something and one of several things happen then it is being returned. Their view is that they can't do anything about it.
Australian law states that DVD region coding is illegal. Yet, the PS2 is still region locked. I'm wondering what Sony will do with the PS3.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Thanks for the tipoff.
Before I buy the Australian version I will check to see if this is also the case here. It appears that at least one of the DVD players in my house does not allow the skipping of useless junk before the movie.
Strange, since I *paid* for the DVD. It's mine. I don't see any reason why anyone should be able to prevent me from fast forwarding, skipping, or whatever at any time during playing a DVD.
If this is the case I probably won't buy it. I'll do without it thanks. I see enough of that crap at the cinema (although not so much anymore - I rarely go these days. I hate it how they show whole movies in the previews + other annoyances).
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.