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Pirate Bay Operators Stand Trial On Monday
Anonymous Pirate writes "Operators of The Pirate Bay stand trial on Monday in Stockholm. The four defendants from the popular file-sharing web site are charged with being accessories to breaking copyright law and may face fines or up to two years in prison if found guilty. The four defendants have run the site since 2004 after it was started in 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. The Swedish public service television announced that they are going to send a live audio stream from the trial. It will be broadcast without editing or translation."
When a law does more harm than good it needs to be abolished.
Similarly, please end drug prohibition laws.
ktnxbye.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Some Swedish translators should add subtitles and put it up on The Pirate Bay.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
And the most obvious problem is that the music and movie industry did create this problem themselves by ignoring the customers and not providing the formats they wanted.
"Free" isn't a format...
to the true spirit of freedom. This is the actual front for liberty today. What guts. Lots of talk, but not many are willing to take a stand like these guys.
1) WOTDR
2) No, for most people, it's really about free as in beer. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that for the most part, people would literally prefer free beer over free speech.
"Hey, I'll give you a free beer if you shut the fuck up about politics."
"Sounds great!"
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
This should've been included in that 'You Are Not A Laywer' thing the other day, about legal fallacies 'techies' make.
Understanding how bittorrent and bittorrent trackers work is quite easy. Heck, there are explanations in the newspaper all the time.
Given an explanation your average person can easily understand it. Judges and lawyers tend to be a bit smarter than your average person. Add to that that it's their job to understand new situations all the time.
I think that if you go read actual rulings in these cases, you might be surprised at the depth of understanding you can find.
For one, you could well go check out the Norwegian DeCSS case ruling, which the prosecution lost. The judge had no problems understanding how CSS worked, or what the consequences were for issues like competition and fair-use rights.
You'd need to back your opinion up with some serious, verified statistics to convince me. Everyone I know who pirates (which with the exception of old people, is almost everyone I know except myself - even a musician I know pirates other people's work), they pirate because they don't want to pay. Yes, they download music they wouldn't have bought otherwise (the "no lost sales argument" so popular with piracy apologists), but they also download all the movies and music they would have bought otherwise. It even hits cinemas, as I try to get mates to go to see a movie that might interest them and get the reply "downloaded it and seen it already."
The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false. My experience directly contradicts it.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I think it does in aggregate. I know that for plenty of things I've pirated, I've ended up generating revenue for the people involved. For instance, I pirate a lot of books. If I like a book and it's something I think I'll want later, I'll go out and buy the dead tree version. I watch BSG on Hulu nowadays and generate ad revenue for the show (and when I have money I'll buy it on DVD), but I would never have gotten into it if I had started watching broadcasts in the third season. (Who's the woman in the red dress? What's a "frakking toaster"?)
Again, I'm perfectly aware of the fact that piracy exerts a net negative force on media producers, and that for everything I can think of that got money from me because of piracy, there are a gazillion things I might have bought but didn't. But it's not *entirely* bad for them, assuming the work is quality.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Google and every other search engine would be equally culpable.
eBay provides links to stolen items. I guess they're accomplicies to burglary and robbery.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I downloaded xvid / divx torrents of DVDs I already owned because ripping the content myself, and therefore bypassing CSS protection, would breach UK law.
I have 150 DVDs on an external drive which I watch movies from. I don't want to have to watch 15 minutes of trailers and warning before each movie, and I don't want to have to search through the collection for a disc which may or may not be too damaged (through use) to actually work. It's a matter of convenience. They have my money, I have my useable product. Why can't they leave it at that?
Anon for obvious reasons.
For most people it isn't about free as in beer, but rather, as Richard Stallman might say free as in freedom
........
I think slashdot can serve as a good example of how complete and obvious bullshit can be earnestly believed and endlessly repeated with total conviction by thousands of otherwise intelligent people. Please spare a second to think about whether what you just said is really true or are you just automatically repeating something you hear so many times here. Majority of people go to pirate bay in order to download free stuff that otherwise they would have to pay for. Simple as that. Nothing to do with freedom. If you want to get worked up about freedom there are plenty of issues for you that are far more important than some restrictions on DVDs.
If I purchase a movie then I expect
You can expect anything you like, including but not limited to a free vacation on the international space station and an erotic massage from Natalie Portman but that doesn't mean you have any right to. There is a difference between desires and rights. Movie studios (to take one example) make a movie, hence they set the rules for how that movie will be sold. You are free not to buy if you don't like those rules.
The only reason we have crap such as "license agreement" is because of lawyers and lawsuits and consumers who are too meek to grow a pair, stand up, and demand their property rights.
Not exactly clear on what you mean by property rights here. On one hand you say you want the "rights" to share the movie with your friends, on the other hand you acknowledge that public distribution is not included in those rights. Well the issue here (as in with regards to the pirate bay trial that we are talking about) is in fact public distribution. I don't think movie industry really has a problem with you sharing it with a handful of friends, it's more of a technical problem of how to allow you to share it with your friends but not with the rest of the world. The problem with that, which is almost too obvious to even have to spell out and yet so many people don't seem to get it, is that if you have the right to freely share your movie with everybody in the world through a widely available, simple to use and quick download it would mean that only one copy of the movie will ever be sold, which means than no movies can be made with any expectation of profit, which means that almost no movies will be made anymore.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
"What about downloading stuff that the local television networks are too cheap to buy themselves"
If you want to see movies that arent on TV yet, buy the DVD. Or rent it. or borrow a friends DVD.
Don't think you are magically entitled to have every piece of entertainment delivered to your eyeballs for free the minute its finished.
Your last statement is just "everybody does it". Hardly an excuse. Is that how you judge how to behave in society? You just do what everyone else does, regardless of the harm your actions have on others?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
What does porn advertising have to do with anything?
Google provides links to infringed copyrighted content. So does Pirate Bay.
Google makes money from advertising. So does Pirate Bay.
OOoooohhhh! But Pirate Bay's advertising is PORN!!
Oh, well. That settles it, then. We find the defendant guil-cup of the charge of accessory to copyright infringement.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Why? Because google links to other than copyrighted material? Well go ahead and punch yourself in the face. The comparison to google is not stupid, it's not identical since no fucking comparisons in the world are, but it's close enough to make a point, which you don't get. This makes you stupid my friend. Now go troll somewhere else.
I am the lawn!
Pirate Bay specialises in what other people tell it exists. Google trawls everything, looking for itself.
/. if everybody posted links to iso's of the latest Windows release.
In many ways, this makes Google more culpable, as it is doing all the legwork. TPB is just a forum where people post links.
It'd be like shutting down
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Or time to...you know... get copyright back to something that at least resembles its original intent, at least in the US. There's no reason whatsoever to justify the Beatles recordings still being under copyright, for instance.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
No, but DVD is an awful, user-abusive format.
Ever heard of "user prohibited actions"?
Yay, I'm forced to watch previews on a movie I paid for. And I can't skip the FBI warning. And I can't skip the stupid menu animations. How about region coding that generally forces you to buy a more expensive copy that you don't actually own?
The alternative is to download a DVD/blu-ray rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
DVD and Blu-ray couldn't compete even if they were free.
Free may not be a format, but a non-DRMed data files are a blessedly versatile format whereas DVD & Blu-ray is incredibly restrictive by comparison.
Question everything
That's one of the reasons I don't have such a problem with copyright infringement is that copyright has become so stupid.
Remember that in the US copyright was originally 14 years or rather 7 + 7 (7 when you registered, extensible by another 7). Now this was seen as good enough back when the world was large. By that I mean it took a long time for information to move. If one wrote and published a book in New York, it could be a long time, years perhaps, before someone on the west coast got to buy it.
Now the world is very small. Information moves instantly across the globe. It is trivial to release something to the whole world at the same time. IT is easy to reach all your potential audience very quickly.
Well if anything, you'd think this would mean shorter copyrights. However it hasn't. Copyright is now life plus 50 years. Apparently just being able to sell your work for your entire life isn't good enough, you need to be able to keep collecting money after you are dead.
Now that's retarded especially since the Constitution doesn't grant unlimited right for copyright. Congress is allowed to create copy right law to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." The whole reason they are allowed to do it is because we want to promote science and art. So that means you give someone exclusive rights for a time so they can make money, and thus have an economic incentive to create. However it does not mean they should have rights for an unlimited time for three reasons:
1) If someone can release one thing and use that as a gravy train for life, what is the economic incentive to keep creating? In other fields, people must keep working to keep making money, why should art be different?
2) It stands in the way of progress. Part of the progress of the arts (and science) is building off of that which came before you. Disney is a great example, some of their most beloved movies are based off of old fables. Well if people can't do that, it stands in the way of progress.
3) It runs contrary to the Constitution which says "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Note the "limited times" part. It doesn't say forever. The idea here is you get to have exclusive rights for a little bit, then everyone gets it, like with patents.
So given the absurd state of copyright law, I have trouble thinking that those that break it are all that bad. Copyright law has reached a totally bullshit state, and a bad law really shouldn't be a law at all. If copyright was more reasonable, well then maybe I'd be more willing to condemn those that break it. However as far as I'm concerned current copyright law is downright unconstitutional and thus should be struck down.
After all, they're advertising to pirates; why pay for porn when you can just grab a torrent of the stuff?
This is why the adult industry has done so well on the internet: they're smarter than the average businessperson.
Just because lots of porn is available illicitly doesn't mean people pirating it won't also pay for it. If someone gets hooked on some site's material, and can't get everything they want illicitly (not everything is available, and it's frequently hard to find), they may very well turn to paying the $20/month or whatever for a subscription, because it's a lot easier than trying to track it down on all the sites and places where people trade illicit copies. It might not be a majority of pirates, but it's still enough for a nice profit.
Mod parent up. The adult industry (or at least the vast majority of it), seems to understand that people will buy some stuff and pirate others. If anything is heavily torrented on the net, it's porn. Tons of it. I certainly download tons of it. And from that, I start to notice certain girls that I'm interested in. Faye Valentine, Scarlett Pain, Jenna Haze, Eve Lawrence, etc, etc. The list goes on for a long time, and it's a list that I've formed primarily from seeing these girls in pirated content. That said, once I notice a girl that I like I'll had on over to IAFD.com and look up what movies she's been in, and in particular, if she's done any scenes with another girl that I particularly like. Due to the sheer volume of porn produced, a lot of the videos that I lookup like this simply aren't going to be on a torrent site. Sure it has a lot of porn, but it doesn't have THAT video. So, I head on over to a Neflix-like subscription service that I pay for, and put the movie in question down in my queue. Once it comes in I rip it, and send it back. I also subscribe to a pay website that posts random DVD's each day (5 per day specifically, split by scenes), and will download stuff off of there just fine.
Now, here's the thing: I'm not paying for every little piece of content I obtain. It doesn't work that way. What I AM doing though, is putting, along with many other people, plenty enough money into this industry for it to survive, and make a healthy profit while doing so. Porn companies make up for this with relatively low production costs, but honestly, their pay is much closer to reality. Most of the female talent makes a few thousand tops for a movie. Virtually nobody is going to pull more than $25k-30k, but then again: why should they? Why should Tom Cruise make $15+ million for working on a movie for 4-5 months? Sure, it's because "he brings in that much in revenue", but that's only true because of the artificial nature in which copyright law has propped up that whole industry. Allowed to run a natural course, an actor's salary would actually start to look sane again. Now, a lot of the big name blockbuster's like Titanic wouldn't be possible without such strict copyright laws, but honestly, why should we legislate people's freedom's so strictly just so that we can get heavy special effects? People put on plays, and did it well, for centuries before the video camera was invented. They certainly can continue to do so with a video camera rolling, and still product plenty of content.
The music industry is even worse. There, music quality is simply a measure of the talent of the artists. You don't need particularly expensive budgets simply to lay a good track down - you simply need good talent. Again though, a talented musician shouldn't magically make 300x what a talented carpenter makes simply because the carpenter has to deal with the unchangable laws of nature while the musician gets carefully crafted laws to make sure he (and only he) can keep copying his now infinite resource.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain