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The Pirate Bay is Here to Stay?
vitaly.friedman wrote to mention a Wired article about The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing crewe out of Sweden that thumbs its nose at the MPAA just for kicks and has yet to be shut down. From the article: "The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers. That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment."
Of course socialism doesn't truly protect the most important of all rights: the right to earn and keep property.
You can't do a whole lot if you're taxed at 50-60% except hope that some of that money is redistributed to you in a fair way. Fair is subjective, "mine" isn't.
Your honor! My client will not plead guilty to murder. He did no such thing! He simply stole the person's life. He will accept a sentence for theft, but not for murder.
Clever signature text goes here.
this is so like two day old news!!!11111one ;)
The site is engaged in theft, they are not performing the theft themselves they are helping others to steal. Sure that makes them popular with the beneficiaries of the theft but it does not make what they do right.
A person who sells spam tools to a spammer is engaged in spamming even if they never use the tool themselves. A fence who receives stolen goods is engaged in theft even though someone else does the actual stealling.
Sure you can rationalize a set of values where taking a movie off bittorrent is different from stealling a DVD off the shelf of a store. But the reason people have moderated my original comment down as troll even though it is nothing of the kind is because they know deep down that what I am saying here is correct and they don't like to hear it.
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...is exactly why things like the DMCA get passed and we're stuck with DRM systems that overcomplicate playing a CD or DVD. You have no rights to distribute intellectual property in any way shape or form, period. To go beyond that and thumb your nose at the MPAA only exacerbates the problem. You want legal digital downloads and on demand content from the MPAA? Then the online community is going to have to prove that they are a responsible group and are willing to play by the rules. So far, the willingness of the community to replace P2P distribution servers which were know for illegally distributed intellectual property only serves to strengthen the argments the MPAA.
The sad part is that Slashdotters mod a critical, but well-reasoned and coherent statement down as "troll". Sad, sad sad.
And yes, I have used TPB extensively before I got decent broadband (I now use DC++ instead - 10mbit+ hubs ftw!) - yet I never deluded myself to the point that I believed that I was involved in some sort of great cause.
You appear to intend permanently depriving the copyright holder of the payment that they would expect to receive for their services.
From a moral perspective this is plain theft. You know you are taking something that does not belong to you.
But you don't want to call it theft because you don't want to think of yourself as a theif. So you call it other things, you insist on calling it 'copyright infringement'.
That is exactly the type of thinking that led the Bush administration to Abu Graihb. They didn't want to think of themselves as torturers so they had a corrupt lawyer provide them with a convenient definition of torture.
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Surprisingly very wealthy people such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett support the death tax.
Well death tax is sick twisted and amoral, so is it a suprise Bill gates supports it?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating