Leaked MediaDefender Emails Show Student P2P Traffic Down

An anonymous reader writes "The MPAA and the RIAA have been targeting universities in a fury claiming that college students are causing them huge losses. However, some leaked MediaDefender emails show that may be a huge exaggeration. 'I also want to state that I am not for the illegal sharing of files. I am absolutely against it. I just want to make sure that the numbers presented in the media are fair numbers. I have a feeling they aren't fair at all. '"

Comments

Re:There's still a lot of copyright infringement

[martin-boundary]

Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists.

It's easy to understand _why_ copyright exists, but that doesn't mean that copyright is a good idea in the first place.

Lawmakers often write lofty goals such as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", but merely writing this doesn't make it so.

For example, if somebody wrote that we must subsidise deep underground gold mining operations "to promote the progress of technology to fly to mars", it would be obvious that they are full of shit.

The fact is that "promoting the progress of science and useful arts" is not verifiably helped by copyright law, there's no evidence: nada. zip. zilch.

Instead, copyright is simply one of the arbitrary economic rules we live under and that we inherited from our ancestors. Some people like it, because they have lucrative property contracts based upon it. Other people don't like it, as they don't have lucrative contracts.

What's changed in the 21st century is that those who don't like it are finding it easier to simply ignore copyright, and those who like it are whining about it.

Err, what are you complaining about again?

[Xenographic]

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists.

Oh, some of us understand just fine. It's the part where people don't agree with how the law is written or enforced that get you into problem territory.

In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

No, they usually say that IP isn't really property because it's not truly rivalrous. Sure, the law creates rights that are in rivalrous in an artificial way, but you can have two people listen to the same tune whereas two people can't eat the same grape. You may have heard people refer to IP as "imaginary property" recently. It's not because they don't know what IP is supposed to stand for, but because they don't agree with it.

It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Mind-boggling? That sounds more like a statement of ignorance to me. I don't have any trouble understanding why they'd think that, nor do I have trouble understanding those with views like yours. When I hear that something is "mind-boggling" I usually find out that people are trying to ascribe intelligence to something (or someone) that lacks it, or that they haven't thought something through. In this case, it would appear to be the latter.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

The GPL IS a subversion of copyright law after a fashion. RMS wrote against that notion that we need copyright because it's used to enforce the GPL quite specifically in one of his essays (yes, you can't enforce the GPL without copyright law, but you don't really need it, either). You might want to talk to the man who wrote it before you make claims like that. I did. [1]

Anyhow, to get back on topic, I don't see how you can say that not supporting copyright law makes them an infringer. I also don't think that that essay you linked to was written out of ignorance. It's written because people are fed up with this crap.

Perhaps you haven't yet realized this, but the more laws we make, the more criminals there are. Obviously, the more we criminalize the things people are already doing, the more people who are going to break them. And you can't have fewer than zero people breaking a law, so adding to the laws will certainly never create fewer criminals. The point isn't the ridiculous notion that we could just abolish all laws and have "zero" criminals. Some things, after all, are worth the cost of criminalizing them. But it's a mistake to think that laws are without cost. And here, a reasonable person can make the case that we're simply better off if we don't criminalize something, whether or not we like or agree with it.

Of course, you seem to find that "mind-boggling" :] I suggest you think it through a little more. The notion was not formed without the use of rational thought, so an intelligent person like you should be able to understand it... right?

[1] To prove it, I'll point out that I also read the confusing words manifesto. Whereas RMS would like us all to stop using the word, I have chosen to subvert it with the term "Imaginary Property" not unlike how RMS chose to subvert copyright with the GPL rather than hoping to abolish it. RMS disagrees with me about that term, BTW, in that it still lumps together at least three disparate areas of law, but you'd have a hard time finding someone with whom he agrees about everything :]