The Pirate Bay Comes To Facebook

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "According to a report I just read in Mashable, Pirate Bay is coming to Facebook. Writer Ben Parr says that The Pirate Bay site now includes links under torrents to 'Share on Facebook.' Once posted to a profile, the Facebook member's friends can click the link on Facebook to begin the download right away, provided he or she already has a torrenting client installed. I just hope people do not use this feature to download copyrighted materials which are not authorized to be downloaded, or at least not materials copyrighted to litigation-happy RIAA Big 4 record labels. No doubt, if their song files were downloaded through this method, the record companies would sit back for awhile, derive profit from the promotional excitement generated for their dying industry, and then — armed with Facebook's data — sue the pants off all the hapless Facebook users who fell for it."

Comments

Not Really

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

Nothing in the .torrent file itself is illegal. The **AA still needs to actually show that the person was illictly downloading the copyrighted material. If I downloaded every .torrent on TPB for archival purposes, I would be doing nothing wrong.

Re:Not Really

[coniferous]

are you enabling someone to download or find pirated content? Then the RIAA might have something to say about that. I'm not sure what the current legal stance on that is, but that's an argument that a layer would probably make.

Re:Not Really

[blhack]

If I downloaded every .torrent on TPB for archival purposes, I would be doing nothing wrong.

That doesn't mean that you wouldn't be doing something that the court feels is illegal.
We need to come to grips with the fact that our court system doesn't work based on facts, it works based on feelings.

Yes, but downloading a .torrent file, you haven't done anything to contribute to the piracy of any copyrighted materials.

But the courts feel like you did, so you can be convicted for it.
Its sad, and I think it speaks to the way that geek-minds work...we're analytical.

We look at a box and when somebody asks us to describe it, we say things like "It is royal-blue, it is 14cm tall and a perfect cube."
Sadly, the judges would respond by
"Well...I think the box is kindof squarish, it looks like it was probably used as a doorstop for a few years".

Facts vs. Feelings. This is the problem behind nearly every major legal battle that geeks are fighting. The facts support us, people's emotions do not.

Re:Not Really

[nathan.fulton]

Perhaps. But could **AA ask for a better "lead?" Take a look at some of the (blatantly illegal) things that the **AA and its cronies have done. They probably wouldn't shy away from using Facebook as a method to choose who to target with any new blatantly illegal schemes they come up with and think they can get away with.

Regardless, making it public knowledge that you pirate/support piracy is probably a stupid idea if you ever plan on having a job.

Re:Not Really

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

are you enabling someone to download or find pirated content? Then the RIAA might have something to say about that. I'm not sure what the current legal stance on that is, but that's an argument that a layer would probably make.

I know that Sweden != US, but this is the crux of the TPB case. Even if this were the case, if all that they could prove was that you downloaded the .torrent, it would be Facebook that is in trouble.

Re:Not Really

[Creepy Crawler]

I wouldnt quite agree, as the .torrent files are checksums derived from either DVDrips or screencaps, which are both derivative works.

Go read up on what lawyers talk about the The Colour of the Bits. It's rather interesting, but also states indirectly that one cannot know this type of colour easily.

I wonder what NewYorkCoultryLawyer would say about this..

Re:Not Really

[ledow]

"Enabling" downloading of copyright material is a highly dubious, very unclear "legal" standard. As such, it doesn't exist in the form that you think it does (or that the RIAA think it does) and it isn't present in a great many legal systems. You can see why - the person who supplies the computer keyboard/mouse is "enabling" the user to download a copyrighted work. So is the monitor manufacturer, and the ISP, and the electricity company.

Thus the legal standard that is required for proof of such actions needs to be substantially higher than "what the RIAA thinks is enabling". Additionally, jurisdictional boundaries greatly interfere here (the RIAA can be as interested in me as they like, but I don't live in America), as do other relevant laws (i.e. the "right" to free speech, fair use, etc.) and the requirement of hard evidence that not only do I have the copyright material in my possession without a licence grant, but also that my *intention* was to then breach copyright by distributing further etc.

Additionally, I have saved somewhere a news report from BBC News in which representatives of several major UK record companies state that they allow people to download/convert music they already own to use on their own devices, as many times as they like. This is quite damning and would protect certain usage of certain torrents, whether or not the official word on the copyright laws in my country say so.

Also, the legality or otherwise of a torrent file in even a single country has not been legally locked down (roll on April for PirateBay) and thus it's almost 100% certain that any court case would set a precedent in the particular country that hosts it. Until then, the whole thing is just a legal grey area and thus someone could easily do the above mentioned archiving, with a good technical knowledge and an intention of not breaching copyright, and not be breaking ANY existing laws at all, espeically if they can provide good reason (such as the whole "a torrent isn't its contents" argument which SHOULD damn well be correct).

Don't let every legal threat you ever hear form a legal fact in your mind. 99% of things never go to court and 50% of those that do fail miserably. Otherwise, bank charges in the UK would be in the order of £5, not £50, Linux would be cleared or convicted of breaching several hundred patents, Microsoft would be dead in the water and I'd be able to eat peanuts without having to read "May contain nuts".

Re:Not Really

[flyingsquid]

Don't worry. If the RIAA tries to sue you, just remove them from your friends list. That'll show 'em.

Re:Not Really

[Roskolnikov]

I am really surprised by this each and every time I hear it; if I provide a torrent to someone, I am not the violator, though the **IA argues that making available is a copyright infringement it is more a case of being an accessory to a copyright infringement; the funny part to me is that in trying to prove their case they pull files from said 'violator' and use that as proof; If they argue that they aren't violating the copyright because they are owner/agents the accessory charge is also null and void, if they argue they are, well, accessory is nearly always treated with less prejudice than the actual crime (excluding suicide, which is some cases means the only one punished is the one left living). If I have a legal copy of Pirates of the Caribbean that has been scratched to hell0 by my kids and I use a torrent to get a playable version, I could/would argue fair use, there really isn't a remedy other than re-purchase provided by the folks selling this garbage; if everyone hitting the torrent at the same time as I find that I have great bandwidth and pull from me, again the violation isn't mine; argue as they its not a violation its accessory potentially during or after the fact.

IANAL but I am pretty a lawyer might actually make a similar argument.

Re:Not Really

[Firehed]

That's true (well, depending on your location it may or may not be, but for the sake of argument we'll assume it is). But adding every one of those legal .torrent files to a BitTorrent client would result in a monolithic amount of copyright infringement. Finding who downloaded the torrent file is potentially very easy; associating that information with an IP address in the P2P swarm is equally easy. You do the math.

Re:Not Really

[ssintercept]

...if all that they could prove was that you downloaded the .torrent, it would be Facebook that is in trouble.

that is a really good point. would facebook be culpable if users utilize this method?

Re:Not Really

[v1]

are you enabling someone to download or find pirated content? Then the RIAA might have something to say about that. I'm not sure what the current legal stance on that is, but that's an argument that a layer would probably make.

I'm enabling them to download pirated content if I'm their cable provider. SueSueSue!

Oh wait, I'm enabling them to download pirated content if I'm their power company! SueSueSue!

And I'm enabling them to download pirated content by selling them a computer without rootkits preinstalled! SueSueSue!

Thankfully it doesn't work that way.

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I wonder what NewYorkCountryLawyer would say about this..

NewYorkCountryLawyer? He ain't sayin' nuttin'.

Re:Not Really

[basementman]

Even linking to copyrighted material is illegal in the United States.

Re:Not Really

[Darkness404]

If they were perfect checksums, yes, you might have a point. But there are potentially many, many, many different things that can have the exact same checksum but be totally different. For that to be true then the same people have the copyright of any of those things which doesn't make sense.

Re:Not Really

[g2devi]

IANAL, but this seems bogus.

Under your definition, the ISBN, number of pages in the book, number of spelling mistakes in the book, and even the letters used in the book, are all derivative works and are therefore is copyright. If that's then, every book out there is a copyright violation since all books other there use letters which are derivative works. Quoting an ISBN would also be a copyright violation, as would be a description of the book.

Fortunately there is such as thing as fair use (or fair dealing) which insures that such nonsense is not taken care of.

Re:Not Really

[actionbastard]

"'Enabling' downloading of copyright material is a highly dubious..."

If I post a piece of paper on a telephone pole with the addresses of all banks in the city in which it is posted and someone uses that information to rob one of the banks on that list, am I guilty of 'facilitating' said robbery?
If I leave a stack of CDs in a box by the sidewalk in front of my house with a sign that says' "Take one, leave one."; does that make me guilty of copyright infringement?

Re:Not Really

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

[citation needed]

Re:Not Really

[jhantin]

The crux of the difference between geek-think and law-think here is that typically the legal issues turn not on the assets themselves, but on their provenance -- which is not an intrinsic property of the assets, but rather a sort of implicit metadata that requires extra bookkeeping to track reliably.

The legality of a song-file depends on how you got it, not the fact that it's a song by a major label artist. Downloaded from a properly licensed online store? No problem. The same exact sequence of bits, downloaded from someplace shady? Problem.

Similarly, the legality of a stack of $100 notes likewise depends on how you got it. If you got it by, say, making and selling custom cabinetry, you're probably fine, but if you got it by unauthorized sale of controlled substances, and the law catches on, you'll have problems.

Re:Not Really

[Creepy Crawler]

Yeah, it seems bogus if you use your analogy.

But, the hashes used in the .torrent file are directly computed from frame data. This isnt a summary. This isnt a ISBN or UPC label.

These checksums serve only 1 purpose: and that is to properly put back together any number of files to their starting point. Hence, a mathematically transformed derivative work. And if there wasnt the movie file, those checksums would mean diddly squat, because those checksum numbers represent a cryptographic transformation of the source material.

Re:Not Really

[Anonymous Coward]

He ain't sayin' nuttin'.

So he is saying something?

Re:Not Really

[Creepy Crawler]

Cant say I blame you.. Copyright's been turned disgusting and in need of a good cleaning.

BTW, sorry for mis-spelling your nickname ^_^

Re:Not Really

[Creepy Crawler]

How about the 2600 DeCSS code linking decision?

Links to DeCSS found ILLEGAL.

Re:Not Really

[isaac338]

You can see why - the person who supplies the computer keyboard/mouse is "enabling" the user to download a copyrighted work. So is the monitor manufacturer, and the ISP, and the electricity company.

Not to mention the most supreme enabler of them all - the artist who created the original copyrighted works. If those works hadn't been created, nobody would download copyrighted material!

Re:Not Really

[EdIII]

If they were perfect checksums, yes, you might have a point.

Please don't hide behind the fact that most checksums are not provably perfect. I want to fight such ludicrous arguments from the other poster better than that.

Even if it were perfect, is still does not make a valid point. A checksum by its very nature is a fair use by-product. It exists *only* to verify that the sequence of bits (the copyrighted data) is most likely (usually highly likely) to be the same as the one the checksum was produced from.

Now, If the checksum was produced by somebody that did not have the legal rights, granted by the copyright holder), to the data in the first place, it also does not make a valid point. ISP's don't have universal copyrights to the data that traverses their networks, but they most certainly do create checksums to facilitate the transfers of data from one place to another.

To say a checksum is a derivative work is ridiculous beyond comparison. It's more apt to say it is fundamentally part of the distribution method itself. Otherwise, we are saying that I need to have *separate* rights granted to me by the copyright holder just to create a checksum. I don't think anybody wants to say that since it's ridiculous. How about this analogy:

You bought my book great. However, I reserve the right to control whether or not you can travel with it by automobile, boat, or plane. In that event, I want more money.

At some point we all have to "get real" and stop attacking the distribution methods and perverting what the copyright was supposed to be in the first place which is, "pay me, and you can use it any way you want, except to make money yourself, or prevent me from making money".

All these fancy arguments about how shit travels from memory, to hard drives, to computer speakers, algorithms designed to facilitate such transfers creating derivative works, is complete and utter bullshit and only serves to distract us all about the real arguments that need to take place about copyrights themselves and to which extent are we going to sacrifice our freedoms, privacy, and anonymity to protect copyright holders and the big business behemoths which have until recently enjoyed a profitable monopoly on the distribution channels.

Re:Not Really

[PopeRatzo]

Making Facebook a target of the RIAA may actually be a brilliant stroke for TPB, bringing to bear their extensive resources to the fight.

It is inevitable that the RIAA is going to bump heads with some huge corporations that won't push over as easily as the small-town senior citizens and college students that have been the RIAA's current targets. After all, one could say that AT&T and Verizon also "enable" people to download copyright-"protected" material. You could say that Cisco "enables" people to do the same. You could say that Microsoft and Apple are also culpable.

All this does is hasten the day when the RIAA is forced to realize they can't win.

Re:Not Really

[PopeRatzo]

Don't let every legal threat you ever hear form a legal fact in your mind.

Very well-put, ledow. You clearly don't need mod points, so I choose to commend you by name for such an insightful and informative post.

Re:Not Really

[EdIII]

Additionally, I have saved somewhere a news report from BBC News in which representatives of several major UK record companies state that they allow people to download/convert music they already own to use on their own devices, as many times as they like. This is quite damning and would protect certain usage of certain torrents, whether or not the official word on the copyright laws in my country say so.

Don't fuck around. Post that right now. I don't know what the laws are in the UK, but since that was a public announcement it could be very well seen as an interpretation of their very own legal contracts with customers. Everybody should have a copy of that to maintain that as a backup as it could be easily used against them in the future.

There is no other way to say it, that's wonderful :)

P.S - You just know those representatives got slapped later. You just know it.

Re:Not Really

[Tubal-Cain]

are you enabling someone to download or find pirated content?

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it.
-- Linus Torvalds

I'm making an offsite backup. One such backup may not be available when I need it, so I better make many dozens.

Re:Not Really

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

DeCSS isn't copyright infringement, its a DMCA violation.

Re:Not Really

[ssintercept]

i agree.

i always thought that the RIAA was kinda sleazy going after college kids and other poor people.

if this is TPB's endgame, it is a pretty slick move.

Re:Not Really

[g2devi]

> These checksums serve only 1 purpose: and that is to properly put back together any number of files to their starting point.
> And if there wasnt the movie file, those checksums would mean diddly squat,

In other words, once you remove all the voodoo-to-the-average-joe mathspeak, its just a glorified URL link.

Linking has nothing to do with derivative works, no matter how much you dress it up in math or tech or business jargon.

But leaving that aside a moment, as far as "math transformed derivative work", how is it any different than counting the number number of characters in a copyrighted work? If you need to be fancy I can write a five character math symboled APL program that treats each character as the number one and sums up the vector. This too is a "math transformed derivative work", but I don't see people claiming it's a derivative work. The Bittorrent metadata format is not, in fact a "math transformed derivative work". Investigate it yourself, or if you don't have the time, just look inside one. It really is little more than a glorified URL link.

Re:Not Really

[FlyingGuy]

Sorry, but you are wrong. Don't believe me, ask any lawyer.

Facts vs. Feelings. This is the problem behind nearly every major legal battle that geeks are fighting. The facts support us, people's emotions do not.

They are courts of Law where facts and feelings have very little to do with anything.

Re:Not Really

[RiotingPacifist]

But given that peanuts are peas not nuts, its important to warn you that the package may contain nuts due to a factory error.

Re:Not Really

[Kjella]

Who knows what straws they will stretch for but they'd really be pushing it. A torrent file is typically less than 1/10,000th of the file itself. If I wanted the movie or song or whatever I would have to download 100% of it in addition to the torrent file - the torrent file doesn't contribute anything by itself. What about an eDonkey key or a Freenet URIs? They're oneliners that point to more data that again point to the rest of the data.

ed2k://|file|The_Two_Towers-The_Purist_Edit-Trailer.avi|14997504|965c013e991ee246d63d45ea71954c4d|/
CHK@NtOYuY51tHzlUO5mJ2C8eYAzI55wYBorruqgVLgTjOc,1LjDaqe6NNHGc-JKBPbinmnI8kdwHLaO7VhJ6n2meLo,AAIC--8/frost-14-Mar-2009.zip

You just downloaded those links when you loaded the comment. Are you now guilty of copyright infringement? The torrent files themselves would be the easiest of all to replace, it's the tracker that is invaluable. It'd be a strike into thin air.

And trying to use a torrent to prove anything more should be trivially defused by the simple question: When? I don't start torrent files automatically, I might put them on when I go to bed. Sometimes I forget and do it much later, sometimes I change my mind and don't bother anyway. Judges may not like you but they got to have some evidence to hook you on. "He downloaded a torrent file and therefore he might at some later unspecified date downloaded the movie" isn't it.

Re:Not Really

[poopdeville]

Have you ever wondered what "DMCA" stands for?

Re:Not Really

[mrclisdue]

It's not theft, asshat - it's copyright infringement, and that's probably only true in your country, whose citizens seem to think that their rules apply to the whole world.

We're not criminals, neither, since there is no crime. Copyright infringement is a civil matter.

So, really, it's you fuckin' people who really continue to piss everyone else off, since you really are the ones who "don't get it."

You may continue to go fuck yourself, mister AC.

cheers,

Re:Not Really

[Runaway1956]

I'm glad we piss you off. You don't "get it" either, dude. Copyright infringement IS NOT a criminal offense. It is a civil infraction. Allow me to paing a picture for you. If you were to go through my hometown, and kiss the ass of every single person who has EVER infringed on a copyright, then you MIGHT HAVE kissed the ass of a criminal. However, there would be no guarantee that you had done so. Copyright is NOT a felony, it is not a misdemeanor, it doesn't even warrant a summons to court by a law enforcement officer. The ONLY WAY to be brought to court for copyright infringement is by way of a civil action, brought by the complainant's lawyers. IF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT WERE A CRIME, there would be police stings just like the pedophile stings that are aired on public television. Have you ever seen such a sting? No? Alright, stop talking foolishness. You people who THINK you know it all are very damned annoying to those of us who do.

Re:Not Really

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

Just because its called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act doesn't mean that everything in it is copyright infringement. If I post 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, I've posted what may be an anti-circumvention device, but it is in no way copyright infringement on anything.

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

He ain't sayin' nuttin'.

So he is saying something?

No he ain't.

Re:Not Really

[langelgjm]

I wouldnt quite agree, as the .torrent files are checksums derived from either DVDrips or screencaps, which are both derivative works.

That's an intriguing idea, and one that copyright scholars would probably have a field day with.

Checksums don't really seem to meet the idea of derivative works. For reference, the definition of a "derivative work" is:

a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a âoederivative workâ.

I'm sure a good lawyer could argue that a checksum might fit in there, but it seems like a stretch. A checksum certainly doesn't represent the original work in any meaningful form to a human (or for that matter, a computer - with something like MD5, you can't recreate the original work from the checksum).

Re:Not Really

[Anthony_Cargile]

the legality or otherwise of a torrent file

I just downloaded a .torrent enabling me to download an OpenSolaris ISO for work R&D the other day. I'm pretty sure the .torrent file is legal, as well as the content it points to. The same is true for TPB's .torrent files, it's the users the .torrent files point to that infringe.

Re:Not Really

[z0idberg]

After all, one could say that AT&T and Verizon also "enable" people to download copyright-"protected" material

AFACT (The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) obviously agrees with you filing a lawsuit against Australian ISP iiNet in November last year.

"The action was filed by Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Disney Enterprises, Inc. and the Seven Network, the Australian licensee of some of the infringed works".

Re:Not Really

[LingNoi]

To answer your question, no. A torrent doesn't enabled someone to download pirated content.

It's debatable where this actually happens however it would either be the peers or tracker server which are to blame.

A torrent file contains as much copyrighted material as an md5 checksum does, that is to say, none.

Re:Not Really

[shacker2762]

Interesting, but then the case could be made that every car company is enabling drivers to break the legal speed limit by allowing cars to go faster than 55 MPH (or, at least, had been since the 55 MPH limit was a nationwide law in the US until not long ago).
A good defense attorney should be able to get around the RIAA if they make this argument.

Re:Not Really

[Anonymous Coward]

Making Facebook a target of the RIAA may actually be a brilliant stroke for TPB, bringing to bear their extensive resources to the fight.

Are you kidding? Facebook will just cave and put piratebay on their blacklist.

Re:Not Really

[pha3r0]

good work NYCL

Re:Not Really

[pha3r0]

under the current methods i would assume the RIAA would just file a DMCA takedown on your facebook profile and poof no more U...

Re:Not Really

[meehawl]

Copyright infringement IS NOT a criminal offense. It is a civil infraction

in the US, that hasn't been true for over a decade and copyright infringement can be prosecuted on a Federal level.

Re:Not Really

[Anonymous Coward]

the requirement of hard evidence that not only do I have the copyright material in my possession without a licence grant, but also that my *intention* was to then breach copyright by distributing further etc.

Here's a quote from "The Public Domain" by James Boyle.

Doesn't "no harm, no foul" apply in the world of
copyright? In a word, no. Copyright is what lawyers call a "strict liability"
system. This means that it is generally not a legal excuse to say that you did
not believe you were violating copyright, or that you did so by accident, or in
the belief that no one would care, and that your actions benefited the public.
Innocence and mistake do not absolve you, though they might reduce the
penalties imposed.

Re:Not Really

[Shikaku]

Post a torrent of it.

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

good work NYCL

Thanks, pha3r0. Now here's the question I'm kind of afraid to ask, for fear of being laughed out of the room:

Is it paranoid of me to wonder whether The Pirate Bay is actually an agent provocateur, working with, not against, the record companies?

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I could have sworn the parent's comment referred to the "NewYorkPoultryLawyer."

An understandable mistake, since my RIAA adversaries are chickens and turkeys, and their methods foul.

Re:Not Really

[Creepy Crawler]

I'm sure a good lawyer could argue that a checksum might fit in there, but it seems like a stretch. A checksum certainly doesn't represent the original work in any meaningful form to a human (or for that matter, a computer - with something like MD5, you can't recreate the original work from the checksum).

Im not so sure that's entirely true.

The .torrent encloses a MD5sum for each chunk. Chunk sizes differ, but on a 700MB aXXo-dvdRIP would be 1MB chunks. So, we have ~700 MD5 chunks that describe a pack of files. We also know the sizes of these files.

The big question is if there's other coordinations of bit patters that would exactly match the file sizes, file names, and each MD5sum. I'm well aware of the Birthday Paradox, but I would like to see a mathematical analysis of "The Chances". I have an inkling that following those specific criteria would only describe one file pack : the movie torrent.

And I also argue that you cannot re-create a source material from a series of MD5 sums...We know the structure of the file and we know the header, so it's a game of making the appropriate header and structural information, and brute forcing the frame data. And be aware, that each 1MB section has a new MD5sum.

Re:Not Really

[gzipped_tar]

I wonder what's the legal viewpoint of Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote . (Orig. story: here)

Re:Not Really

[Creepy Crawler]

Perhaps my goal is a copyright that is so over-reaching and so ludicrously stupid that nobody pays attention... Its already starting to be that point, but further work of making such a mockery of it still needs to be done.

And lastly, people need to be showed how stupidly easy it is to do. The more people who do it, the better. And then when a few of these RIAA members and other artist-destroying companies start failing, only then will sane discussion on copyright take hold.

*Typed while listening to the album of Summoning of Spirits, a derivation on game music found in Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Symphonia

Re:Not Really

[Accursed]

Bad troll is bad.

Re:Not Really

[rawtatoor]

There may be no such stings now, but what about when they sign this super secret copyright treaty?

Re:Not Really

[uniquegeek]

Unless, maybe, there is an organization who is out there putting out junk files so that we are not completely sure of what we are downloading...

Ever download something and not be sure of what you're getting, or even resigning yourself to the fact it's pretty likely? The olden days of Kazaa: it happened more and more with music files, and was especially bad with porn file names.

Another similar concept is the "You are bidding on an Xbox box" days on eBay. Let's give that a twist: let's pretend, for instance, that it illegal to buy and Xbox on ebay. You bid on "Xbox box", and get an Xbox (not the box). Authorities bang on the door, and you say "Golly, gee, sir, I thought I was bidding on a box, that's what was advertised."

If you download something, you're never sure of what you got until you download it and actually open the damn thing... even if it is a file from a legitimate-looking source.

We could have real fun with this is there was legislation to make downloads of drive-by downloads and viruses illegal.

Re:Not Really

[Dgawld]

We should just send them mass amounts of Bumper Stickers then.

Re:Not Really

[pmarini]

STOP SELLING ALL THE XEROX COPIERS !

seriously, if you believe that something can be solely used for copyright infringement, then shut the business down. on the other hand if there is a 1% use of that software that can be deemed lawful, then I don't see any reason to punish the whole technology and declare that it always infringes on copyright...
I'm not going to make any silly comparison, but hey, cars kill more than anything...

Re:Not Really

[pmarini]

welcome to our subjective-laws overlord...

Re:Not Really

[Mista2]

Technically you are more likely to infringe copyright by the mere act of playing the file. Here in NZ there is no protectin for copying for personal use or media shifing to allow you to rip a CD/DVD you even own, so when my computer copies the file from harddrive into memory, is that is infriging the copyright?,

Re:Not Really

[I cant believe its n]

Will they claim ownership of the torrent file?

Re:Not Really

[hobbit]

You think it's civilised to protect the producer at the expense of the creator?

Re:Not Really

[hobbit]

Simply rename all of your torrent files "linux.iso.torrent" and claim you keep trying to get hold of a copy of this linux thing you keep hearing about but the interweb keeps sending you movies instead? I like it!

Re:Not Really

[migla]

"People who illegally distribute copies of materials for which they do not have distribution rights are criminals. Is that clear enough for you? Some people believe it is not theft because the original is unaffected and convinced themselves that they have not committed a crime. You know what? forget it, you fuckin' people really continue to piss me off."

Your mother.

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

you meant fowl, right? :P

It was a play on words.

Re:Not Really

[larpon]

if this is TPB's endgame

Which I'm pretty sure it is not :)

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Unless, maybe, there is an organization who is out there putting out junk files so that we are not completely sure of what we are downloading...

You mean like these guys.

Re:Not Really

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I'm sure a good lawyer could argue that a checksum might fit in there, but it seems like a stretch. A checksum certainly doesn't represent the original work in any meaningful form to a human (or for that matter, a computer - with something like MD5, you can't recreate the original work from the checksum).

Im not so sure that's entirely true. The .torrent encloses a MD5sum for each chunk. Chunk sizes differ, but on a 700MB aXXo-dvdRIP would be 1MB chunks. So, we have ~700 MD5 chunks that describe a pack of files. We also know the sizes of these files. The big question is if there's other coordinations of bit patters that would exactly match the file sizes, file names, and each MD5sum. I'm well aware of the Birthday Paradox, but I would like to see a mathematical analysis of "The Chances". I have an inkling that following those specific criteria would only describe one file pack : the movie torrent. And I also argue that you cannot re-create a source material from a series of MD5 sums...We know the structure of the file and we know the header, so it's a game of making the appropriate header and structural information, and brute forcing the frame data. And be aware, that each 1MB section has a new MD5sum.

OK. We'll just leave it up to the jury to decide.

Re:Not Really

[rohan972]

Is it paranoid of me to wonder whether The Pirate Bay is actually an agent provocateur, working with, not against, the record companies?

Do you think the RIAA executives are patient enough? TPB has been around awhile. I think if they were working for the record companies then by the time a million users had completed their downloads the lawsuits would have been flying. If not for lawsuits, then why?

Re:Not Really

[tomatensaft]

BTW, I gotta say that, unfortunately, in some countries, copyright infringement IS a criminal offense.

Re:Not Really

[xtracto]

Seriously people, this is just an opinion, and an insightful one at it.

I am sure that Facebook won't allow the PriateBay idea to progress a lot. They will shut it down as soon as they receive the first letter from the RIAA.

I understand that 90% of Slashdot do not agree with the pro-"intellectual rights" movement, but to mark a post as troll just because it differs from your point of view is immature

Re:Not Really

[xtracto]

Can you explain me why is it a Troll?
Is it a Troll because his POV does not coincide with yours?

At most, it might be a flamebait (flaming about Swedish laws) but the comment he makes is authentic and I am sure it will prove to be correct in a couple of months when FaceBook blocks the PirateBay app.

Re:Not Really

[cliffski]

LOST OF CAPITALS makes your ARGUMENT ALMOST SEEM SENSIBLE!!!!!!!!11111111111111111111

Re:Not Really

[cliffski]

wow.
this is insightful?
This truly is the end of days.

WalMart filled their shelves with food. therefore they are to blame for me shoplifting...

Re:Not Really

[davecb]

And it also reproduces the YouTube vs Viacom debate described at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090324125420761

Viacom objects to having to send YouTube DMCA notices, because they can't keep up. YouTube replies that only Viacom knows which of their videos are posted with permission (i.e., by their marketing department) and which aren't.

The same applies here: the RIAA now has the unenviable task of distinguishing between their owners' approved content, legitimate content and unapproved copyrighted content, and then launching an infinity of DMCA takedown notices and/or lawsuits. And only they or their owners can know what's approved copyright content.

Re:Not Really

[halcyon1234]

Something similar. I never kept the clip, but it would have been nice if I had. Back when Edge TV was still around, George Stroumboulopoulos interviewed a boardroom of MPAA execs. The woman said (paraphrase, again don't have the exact clip) "We aren't going to sue our consumers. That isn't the right move for any of us".

That was about eight months before the first suit went out. He revisited that with something along the lines of "So the MPAA has begun suing individual file sharers. Wait, what was that they said few months back on my special report? [roll clip]. I guess not."

If anyone has those clips, that'd be awesome to post. They aired around the same time Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt" was coming out-- so 2002-ish.

Re:Not Really

[poetmatt]

This isn't an app. It's just linking to TPB. Facebook doesn't have to do anything, and if they do, will draw attention to them as they are not liable for squat.

Re:Not Really

[ravenshrike]

No you're not. The person who picked up the firearm is responsible.

Re:Not Really

[pha3r0]

Yeah TPB has been around the block, problem is lawyers have them outdated by a thousand years still.

Did the latest round of restriction force them to do a back room deal? Who knows. We all know TPB's record when it comes to DMCA take down requests.

All you can really do is trust that the good guys are still good the bad guys are still bad and the lawyers are still figuring out how to make more money!

Re:Not Really

[pha3r0]

No they will call Facebook and "ISP" and require that they block you for "making available". We have seen this in dozens of forms already this is just the next iteration.

Re:Not Really

[Shagg]

The same applies here: the RIAA now has the unenviable task of distinguishing between their owners' approved content, legitimate content and unapproved copyrighted content, and then launching an infinity of DMCA takedown notices and/or lawsuits. And only they or their owners can know what's approved copyright content.

No, they just assume everything is unapproved content.

Re:Not Really

[davecb]

Yup, "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate ..."

Re:Not Really

[brkello]

And that makes it ok?

Re:Not Really

[theaceoffire]

"Regardless, making it public knowledge that you pirate/support piracy is probably a stupid idea if you ever plan on having a job."

Using Facebook is probably a stupid idea if you ever plan on having a Job.

Anything you post online *will* come back to haunt you.

Re:Not Really

[anyGould]

How about this analogy:

You bought my book great. However, I reserve the right to control whether or not you can travel with it by automobile, boat, or plane. In that event, I want more money.

Better analogy - you can buy my book, but you can't make that little card that libraries used to use to organize the stacks. Because making a card with the name, author, etc would be a "derivative work"

Re:Not Really

[Shagg]

That's a nice theory, except that there have been lots of companies that abuse the DMCA takedown notices, and the government never holds them accountable. "under penalty of perjury" doesn't hold any significant threat if nobody is ever penalized.

Re:Not Really

[Stratocastr]

Actually we should all sue god because he created everything and is therefore the enabler of all crime perpetuated

Re:Not Really

[skeeto]

you can't recreate the original work from the checksum

If you could, that would be an amazing compression algorithm!

Re:Not Really

[davecb]

As the grandparent said, attacking someone with enough money to defend themselves may be a bad thing for someone committing perjury. Not coming to the court with "clean hands" can affect whether you're heard at all.

Sometime I think the U.S. is drifting back to trial by battle... what should be a charge turns into a lawsuit, and people hire champions (;-))

--dave

Re:Not Really

[furby076]

1) There is such as a thing as the spirit/intent of the law - which works both ways (sometimes for the person being prosecuted sometimes for the person doing the prosecution)
2) Providing someone the ability to comit an illegal act CAN make the provider a criminal. Now someone above mentioned "what about the computer manufacturer who supplied the computer". The judge would then ask "well did the computer manufacturer give/sell the person a computer with the intent to help him download the copyrighted material? Or did he give/sell the person the computer to perform other tasks that are not illegal - like write a book report, play a video game, yank off to free pr0n?" Intent makes a difference. What is the purpose of someone having a .torrent file on their computer of a copyrighted material while providing that .torrent to others to use? The person housing the .torrent files and providing them to other people is enabling them to do one thing - download torrents of copyrighted material - which is illegal. Now if the defendent can prove there is another use they can get out of trouble - but having a .torrent file of the latest Hollywood movie really doesn't give other options (it might but I doubt it).

Another example. If I have the floor plans to a bank and give them to someone who will rob the bank - am I complicit in the crime? If my intention was to help them comit the crime sure. Now if I was duped by the criminals into believing they were construction workers upgrading the security of the bank then no. Intent matters. So does the spirit of the law.

Re:Not Really

[furby076]

What blatently illegal things did the **AA do? Where is the proof, the lawsuit, and the millions/billions of dollars that would most assuredly be awarded, to the victims, if the **AA did do these illegal things?

Re:Not Really

[MikeBabcock]

More importantly, you're just sharing a file full of MD5 hashes of files. You're not sharing any real data, or any Copyrighted works with this new button.

If the material the Torrent describes is Copyrighted and you have no download rights, then downloading it may constitute a Copyright violation, but the Torrent itself is no such object.

Re:Not Really

[MikeBabcock]

Meanwhile, having a stack of bills can get you put in jail anyway because you're "obviously" selling drugs.

Re:Not Really

[Runaway1956]

OK, or not, it isn't illegal. Extramarital sex isn't "ok", in my book either, but it isn't something for which you will go to prison, unless that sex involves rape or underaged persons, or public indecency. The IP Jihadists need to understand that something can be "wrong", but not "illegal". Something else can be "illegal", but not "wrong". And, everyone needs to realize how hard those jihadists are working to change the law to make commonly accepted practices illegal, voiding all fair use laws, voiding all due process requirements, voiding all privacy laws, even granting themselves powers reserved for the executive branch of government.

Re:Not Really

[Smauler]

The Pirate Bay would have the snot knocked out of them in any real, civilized country

Claiming Sweden is neither real(?!) nor civilised is trolling. Do you really believe that this is an insightful opinion, that people are marking troll because it differs from their POV?

Re:Not Really

[MikeBabcock]

Aside from NYCL's reply below, which I agree with, an MD5 sum not a reversible process.

The whole idea of cryptographically strong hashes (like MD5 and SHA-1) is to create a very unique string of bytes that can't easily be deterministically fooled, so it probably does only refer to exactly one Copyrighted music or video file if that's what the Torrent describes.

That said, its impossible to reconstruct the video or music file from the hash, as the hash file contains way too little information about the original data.

If I were offering a legal opinion, and I'm not, I'd say that an MD5 or SHA-1 hash is less a derivative work of a (say) DVD than a movie review's text is. The review is based on but does not contain the movie, and the movie cannot be reconstructed in any meaningful way from the review.

Re:Not Really

[borsodas]

conficker virus passes through pirate bay soon

Re:Not Really

[PopeRatzo]

because, of course, you would know.

Re:Not Really

[PopeRatzo]

but the comment he makes is authentic

No, it is not.

If the poster thinks Sweden is not a "real, civilized country" that only shows he has never visited Sweden or spoken to a real, live Swedish person.

Re:Not Really

[PopeRatzo]

Of course you are correct, Mr. Babcock. If anything, TPB (or the person who actually created and posted the .torrent file) has copyright over that file, which as you say, is just a "file full of MD5 hashes of files".

There is nothing in that torrent file to which any other content provider can claim ownership, including the "sponsors" of the RIAA.

Re:Not Really

[larpon]

"pretty sure" covers the fact that these guys don't seem to give up easily.
So, no... I wouldn't have any chance to know, but yes I'm pretty -god damn- sure.
Please don't nitpick just for the sake of nitpicking.

Re:Not Really

[uniquegeek]

every torrent must "free legal sample" in the filename. Samples somehow still seem to be 698MB or 4.1GB.

Re:Not Really

[Runaway1956]

<quote><p>LOST OF CAPITALS makes your ARGUMENT ALMOST SEEM SENSIBLE!!!!!!!!11111111111111111111</p></quote>

Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Strange.  My post didn't trigger that filter.  Maybe I talk a little to loudly for nurseries, churches, and hospitals?  I don't care, because I don't live in a any of the above.

Deal with it.

Re: Not Really

[gidds]

Anyone who hasn't seen it already should read What Colour Are Your Bits? which discusses this in detail.

Re:Not Really

[Lueseiseki]

Nothing in the .torrent file itself is illegal. The **AA still needs to actually show that the person was illictly downloading the copyrighted material. If I downloaded every .torrent on TPB for archival purposes, I would be doing nothing wrong.

You can't download something for archival purposes, the point of archiving is that you're taking it from your own content. You are not entitled to every copy of something just because you own one.

Why is facebook allowing this?

[coniferous]

Seriously. If I was in charge of facebook and even got wind of an app like this it would be blocked SO fast.

I'm not against pirating, just against the drama that goes with it. I really don't want the RIAA on my ass; I'm sure facebook doesn't either.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[larry bagina]

It's rather difficult (and expensive) to buy an automatic rifle in the US. Unless you're an illegal mexican immigrant. Then you just need to show up at a gun show and you can buy automatic rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, etc and take them back to mexico.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[johnsonav]

"Automatic" can also refer to a semi-automatic handgun. I believe that's what he was referring to.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[im_thatoneguy]

It's rather difficult (and expensive) to buy an automatic rifle in the US. Unless you're an illegal mexican immigrant. Then you just need to show up at a gun show and you can buy automatic rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, etc and take them back to mexico.

If I'm already breaking the law couldn't I add lieing to my list of offenses and claim to be an illegal mexican immigrant?

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[SkankinMonkey]

This isn't an app, it's just sharing (posting) a link which any user can do without installing apps. You can add your own comment to it, a thumbnail, etc. It's a 'mini-digg'

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[coniferous]

Oh Ok, Yeah. That makes sense. Are there any laws that protect Facebook from illegal content that a user might post?

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[Darkness404]

Yes, the DMCA actually has something beneficial to the world (a shocker, yes I know), it is the safe harbor provisions that basically lets FB say that they can't control what users post (though they do have to respond to takedown requests). But similarly, this is nothing but a link to a link that may contain copyrighted materials. I highly doubt that it is illegal to link to a link that may contain copyright infringing materials, it just doesn't make any sense if it is because that would be like saying that by linking to a redirect page to www.google.com I would be responsible if Google had any illegal content when I was simply linking to another page that contained no offending materials.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I highly doubt that it is illegal to......

Famous last words.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[tubapro12]

Its not really that difficult in the right places, even if you're not an illegal immigrant.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Are there any laws that protect Facebook from illegal content that a user might post?

I don't think it's Facebook that would get sued. As a general rule the RIAA prefers to pick on the people who have no ability to fight back, which in this case would be the Facebook customers. Also Facebook would likely have a DMCA defense, which would not be available to the customers themselves.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[tubapro12]

From my understanding of how the "Share this on Facebook" links work, wouldn't Facebook be able to block the referrer to impede these Share links from working?

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[Hijacked Public]

Only if you don't know what you are talking about.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[johnsonav]

What do you mean? It's fairly common usage.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[InsertWittyNameHere]

Users not customers. Facebook is crack.

More accurate.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[KahabutDieDrake]

You got some small portion of that correct. It is in fact expensive. It is not difficult, nor do I have any idea what mexico has to do with it. Fully automatic weapons can be purchased in the US by anyone that can legally own a gun. They are called "class 3 firearms". There are not very many of them overall, so they tend to be very expensive. OTOH, there are less than legal ways of meeting the goal too, but I'm not going to give anyone any ideas.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[stonewallred]

Thanks NYCL. Any way, what self-respecting pirate is going to be pulling torrents from facebook? My gawd it doesn't take much to get into private sites, or even into the warez top sites if you got an ounce of sense.Of course this is just an opinion and not from any personal experiences. i don't even know how these interweb tube things work.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[Hijacked Public]

Just because the term 'has been, or still" is used to refer to what you linked to doesn't mean it is correct. "Automatic" is modified by "semi" for a reason.

People call magazines clips all day, doesn't mean they are right.

I consider the blurring of automatic and semi-automatic small arms to be an Overton window thing, done on purpose, by people with an agenda.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[johnsonav]

Just because the term 'has been, or still" is used to refer to what you linked to doesn't mean it is correct. "Automatic" is modified by "semi" for a reason.

It is correct. "Automatic", when applied to handguns, refers to the automatic nature of using some of the force of the firing explosion to drive the works of the gun. An automatic handgun harnesses that force to eject the spent casing, bring another into firing position, and sometimes cock the gun. Previously, as with a single or double-action revolver, the cylinder was moved by the cocking of the hammer or by pulling the trigger. That's the "automatic" part. It need not refer to the continuous firing mechanism of a fully-automatic weapon.

The full name of the M1911 handgun is Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911. Indeed, there are even automatic revolvers. The use of the term "automatic" to refer to a semi-automatic handgun has existed for over 100 years, and continues to this day. Whenever someone says "automatic", and it is not followed by "rifle" or preceded by "fully", they almost always are speaking of a semi-automatic handgun. I have never heard it used otherwise. If someone says, "I shot off a few rounds with my automatic", or "I took my automatic to the range", it is safe to assume they are referring to a semi-automatic handgun.

I consider the blurring of automatic and semi-automatic small arms to be an Overton window thing, done on purpose, by people with an agenda.

No. The term "semi-automatic" is a neologism just like "wooden baseball bat". It did not need qualification until a newer technology became widespread. I have never sensed an ulterior motive from people using the term "automatic". It's simply a descriptive name, which has been used for 100 years.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[schon]

So you're saying that the best way to deal with bullies is to give in to them?

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I believe this is a trap not to catch sophisticated file sharers but the less sophisticated people who wouldn't be using BitTorrent at all.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[furby076]

If someone says, "I shot off a few rounds with my automatic", or "I took my automatic to the range", it is safe to assume they are referring to a semi-automatic handgun.

When it comes to guns it is NEVER safe to assume anything other then to assume the gun is loaded.

Saying "I am taking my automatic to shoot a few rounds" when your gun is a semi-automatic is wrong. While the historical terminology may have been correct the usage is different today. Automatic is referred to the type of weapon that when you hold the trigger it shoots more then one round, while semi-auto refers to a weapon that requires multiple pulls of the trigger to fire more then one round. To give you a different example - the swastika is known all off the world as a sign of hate, evil, oppression and Nazi Germany. Before that it was a symbol buddhists would use and it meant "good". Here is a link in case you are interested http://history1900s.about.com/cs/swastika/a/swastikahistory.htm

Symbols change over time, so do words. Remember the word "gay" used to mean happy, and now it refers to homosexuals. This change wasn't too long ago. The original Flintstones cartoons were "We'll have a gay old time", and eventually (somewhere in the 80's i believe) got changed to "We'll have a good old time"

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[MikeBabcock]

They should have, in all good conscience, blocked the Scrabble (sorry, Scrabulous) application as soon as it appeared too. They also allowed more than one app that used illegally copied ROMs running in emulators to let people play "Super Mario" et al via Facebook applications as well.

The Facebook application review committee doesn't seem to exist in any meaningful way.

Re:Why is facebook allowing this?

[johnsonav]

Saying "I am taking my automatic to shoot a few rounds" when your gun is a semi-automatic is wrong.

No, it's not. If you were to say "fully-automatic", "automatic rifle", or even "automatic weapon", it would be safe to assume that you were referring to a continuous-fire type gun. But, if you simply say "automatic", without any other qualifiers (as in the example you provide), you are referring to a semi-auto handgun. It is simply common usage, in addition to being correct.

Automatic is referred to the type of weapon that when you hold the trigger it shoots more then one round, while semi-auto refers to a weapon that requires multiple pulls of the trigger to fire more then one round.

No, that's a common misconception. If a gun is "automatic", it simply means that one or more of the actions usually required of the shooter is, instead, done with the power of the firing explosion. That can encompass ejecting the spent casing (or revolving the cylinder in an automatic revolver), bringing a new round into firing position, cocking the firing mechanism, and possibly firing another bullet (in the case of a fully-automatic weapon). Any gun which does one or more of these things can be correctly referred to as "automatic".

Symbols change over time, so do words.

Couldn't agree with you more. But, in this case, given the usage we are discussing, the meaning hasn't changed.

P.S. That being said, I'm not familiar with non-US usage of the term "automatic". It could be that in England or Canada the word has the meaning you describe. But, not here.

Incoming!

[MagusSlurpy]

I am waiting for the **IA to sue Facebook for "aiding piracy." That will be a fun one to watch.

Re:Incoming!

[boarder8925]

Then perhaps this is The Pirate Bay's way of getting the average joe to care about what the RIAA and MPAA have been doing?

Re:Incoming!

[palindrome]

I am waiting for the **IA to sue Facebook for "aiding piracy." That will be a fun one to watch.

This is exciting. I don't know who I want to lose most.

Re:Incoming!

[entgod]

I am waiting for the **IA to sue Facebook for "aiding assisting making available." That will be a fun one to watch.

fixed that for you :)

Re:Incoming!

[Patch86]

If only he can somehow get the *IA to sue Microsoft too and we can really have some legalistic fireworks.

It's like when Jerry leads Tom into the big dog's kennel, then ducks...

Re:Incoming!

[adona1]

And if that happened, I don't think we'd have long to wait before Facebook handed all and any user data they had to the MPAA/RIAA...

Re:Incoming!

[Arthur Grumbine]

I am waiting for the **IA to sue Facebook for "aiding piracy.

What do the Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA) and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) care about online piracy?!?

the **AA is still arround?

[crashelite]

they have been loosing money from their lawsuits last time i checked the ##'s

Re:the **AA is still arround?

[crashelite]

what about the ( at the beginning

Re:the **AA is still arround?

[interkin3tic]

they have been loosing money from their lawsuits last time i checked the ##'s

Who is going to tell them to stop? Someone who is going to be immediately sued, that's who.

Record companies: "Listen RIAA, we've decided your services are no longer needed, and we're not going to be giving you any more money. Frankly, you've been disgusting idiots, have eroded any sympathy we might have had in fighting piracy, and have been failing to even win in courts."

RIAA: "Under the digital millenium act, the patriot act, patent law, fourteen federal codes, and twenty one UN resolutions, we are presenting you with 4000 lawsuits to continue paying us and furthermore we have a court order to go fuck yourself."

Record companies: "Are you serious? This is absurd!"

RIAA: "We'll see you in court. Courts, plural, sorry. In every state at least 14 times."

Re:the **AA is still arround?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

they have been losing money from their lawsuits last time i checked

Yes but is it possible you are giving them credit for something they do not actually possess? The ability to learn.

Re:the **AA is still arround?

[Seriousity]

What about the ) at the end?

There, fixed that for you.

Probably no risk

[Jugalator]

I just hope people do not use this feature to download copyrighted materials which are not authorized to be downloaded, or at least not materials copyrighted to litigation-happy RIAA Big 4 record labels.

Knowing the Internet community at large, I think there is probably no risk of this happening. :p

Look for a swift response.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the *AAs are losing through piracy, more than sales and such, is control. The buzz "center" is moving from the old media into the piratebay's top100. Essentially. Such a development will eventually kill off the content-for-money industry (though a content-with-sponsoring may rise to take it's place, you'll notice that the TV industry is much more laid back).

This is a step in that direction, so look for a quick and angry reprisal, legally warranted or not.

Chances are

[spyder-implee]

The **AA will wait for facebook to generate that ever elusive revenue before it tries to sue them...

Re:Chances are

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

The **AA will wait for facebook to generate that ever elusive revenue before it tries to sue them...

That would be their style. Set the trap. Sit back. Wait a bit. Smile. Let the promotional value run its course. Then spring it.

Nefarious?

[TinBromide]

I always thought that the facebook link was a sort of civil disobedience type deal at worst, or at best, a humorous poke at how every site on the planet has Digg this, facebook this, mixx it, etc attached to every page generated.

Well you know what they say...

[Microlith]

at least not materials copyrighted to litigation-happy RIAA Big 4 record labels

If you're going to encourage people to screw someone over, screw over someone who can't defend themselves!

Re:Well you know what they say...

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

If you're going to encourage people to screw someone over, screw over someone who can't defend themselves!

Precisely. That is the core belief of the RIAA's clone army.

Re:Well you know what they say...

[Microlith]

So both sides are in the wrong here?

Good to know!

Facebook funnies thread

[taucross]

Fred has sent you a torrent. Download?

Send 20 more torrents to get a "FUCK THE RIAA" gift!

C'mon, gimme your best shot.

Re:Facebook funnies thread

[Repton]

"You've seeded 4.3x as much as you've donwloaded overall. Increase that ratio to 5x to gain Level 3!

Re:Facebook funnies thread

[Monsuco]

>C'mon, gimme your best shot.

Consider yourself superpoked!

What gives?

[krou]

I don't get it. The Pirate Bay launches a cheap, unlogged VPN in order to provide a more private service, but now they're encouraging sharing via Facebook?

You'd think that Facebook is the last place they'd want to be, since it just seems to be the complete antithesis of what I understood the Pirate Bay to be about.

Re:What gives?

[nathan.fulton]

Now that TPB is selling a service, it is probably prudent to evaluate their actions from a profit-motive perspective.

Cheap unlogged VPNs have been around for ages. TPB's service needs something to set itself apart -- like a brand name and viral advertising. Hence facebook links.

Or maybe it's just an early April Fools joke.

Re:What gives?

[Microlith]

it just seems to be the complete antithesis of what I understood the Pirate Bay to be about.

And what, exactly, is TPB about aside from helping people screw over the people who created the works listed on their site?

Re:What gives?

[Felix Da Rat]

Personally, I think they're worried about the court case.

Even if they win, the risk of law changes is pretty big. So I think they are going whole-hog while they can. The VPN? nice side business, and may allow them to keep going with their ideals. The Facebook thing? Spread the joy, make it easier for everyone to pillage while they can. Possibly even get the benefit of mixing Facebook (now a tracker) into the mess.

I hope the guys at PB win this one (and the next as well), because they are the boys on the front line for this fight. But I think they are really working every angle they can, while they can.

Re:What gives?

[Krneki]

Torrent =! illegal activity.

Do you know any better way to share large files?

Re:What gives?

[socsoc]

FB wouldn't a tracker in this instance, more like an index or directory, hell they're just links. TPB will still be the tracker.

Re:What gives?

[Creepy Crawler]

Thumbdrives.
W.A.S.T.E.
local wireless, in Ad-Hoc.
On a public FTP, encrypted to public key of recipient
Usenet, encrypted to public key of recipient

Re:What gives?

[the_one(2)]

It's election times soon and I doubt the sitting government wants to lose it's slight chance of getting reelected by enacting new copyright laws. Doing so would almost guarantee the pirate party a seat or two in the riksdag as well(they have a pretty good shot already)

Re:What gives?

[Mad Leper]

Umm, FTP and Usenet come to mind. Torrents are very slow and use an excessive amount of bandwidth.

Why people keep using them is beyond me, unless there's some other reason for promoting the installation of Torrent apps on people's computers...

Re:What gives?

[cliffski]

TPB is about making money, building up a global brand and making cash from ad-impressions.

Don't tell me people actually swallow this "sticking it to the man" drivel?

Re:What gives?

[houghi]

The Pirate Bay is in the business of spreading .torrent files. Some like to do that via VPN, so that is what they provide. Others would like to do it via Facebook, so that is what they provide. They also do it via a website.

Why would they NOT spread torrents via means that the people desire. You want and they can bring it, why not? Serious, why not? The content they deliver is legal as far as they are concerned.

I am sure facebook enables you to put pictures on their as well. I am sure you could even put copyrighted pictures on it. So why did that not cause an outcry?

Re:What gives?

[Krneki]

Torrents are way faster then FTP.

The problem of torrents are leechers who stops to share the same moment they got the file. Still the speed is improved by the uploading they do while downloading.

Re:What gives?

[anonymousmeatbag]

Sounded strange to me too. After Facebook changed terms of service in a way to allow them to license and sub-license whatever Facebook users share I was considering to leave the FB forever. It was rumored that FB could have backdoor allowing monitoring of the all communications between users. When I saw this headline http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/facebook/5046447/Facebook-could-be-monitored-by-the-government.html I decided to erase my account and leave the FB forever because I was afraid that new terms of service and looks was not all that has changed.

I guess that The Pirate Bay has nothing to lose. Facebook is probably the most closed community on the internet, so getting in the one such community might look like a good strategic move.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Vectronic]

I know your just trolling, but...

Whenever you download a torrent, you must simultaneously upload it.

No, downloading Metallica_St_Anger.torrent is the same as downloading Ponies_n_kittens_playing.jpg from a website.

If you send the downloaded torrent file to a torrent application and allow it to connect and download files, then you are downloading the (possibly) illegal content, and usually, but not always, uploading the same content to someone else. There are quite a few torrents that I've downloaded where the Upload is 0kb.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[morgan_greywolf]

The parent was talking about downloading the .torrent file, not actually using it with a bittorrent client. There's a difference.

OTOH, I agree with another poster on this thread that no matter how you view it, although the .torrent file itself does not violate copyright, you could still get into legal hot water.

I have an excuse ready to get out of any legal threats.

And no, I'm not posting it here.

99% of the excuses that Slashdotters have come up with for legal threats probably won't work at all. I sincerely hope you're one of the edge cases. In any respect, if I were you, I would run your excuse past a lawyer before attempting to use it.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Vectronic]

(Correction) Well actually it would be more like, copying the URL to the ponies & kittens image, and saving it to a text file.

Re:Idiot?

[muuh-gnu]

> ripping off artists so that leeches don't have to pay for their work.

Dude. Come. Fucking. On. We have 2009. Everybody and their dog has a computer, which is designed to copy stuff. Also we have broadband which is, again, designed to... move stuff around the world. So is what youre actually pointlessly advocating is that we collectively should... actually what? Abstain from using a common technology in order to make absurdly archaic 50's business models of "manufacturing and selling single copies" viable in day and age when everybody _can_ manufacture and distribute those copies themselves? Yawn.

If you and your fellow artists cannot bear the thought of your works becomming part of our culture and shared with other people, then stop producing and publishing them. If you cant manage to make money from the fact that people actually like your works and actively share them with their friends, go flip burgers, maybe thats where your real talent lies. However, wide-scale censorship, which is what you and your likes are proposing all the fucking time, wont work, so forget that idea really fast.

Re:Idiot?

[Rix]

Are you an idiot? Of course this is what it will be used for. It's the primary reason Public Libraries exists, ripping off artists so that leeches don't have to pay for their work.

I'm so tired of the naive facade people put on when talking about Public Libraries. We all know exactly what it's used for. Stop pretending you don't know.

until..

[nurb432]

Until the laws are changed to make downloading a torrent 'intent' to commit.

Then with that they have grounds for either a search warrant, or just grounds to sue outright.

Yea it was kind of interesting

[terbo]

I saw this a couple of days ago looking for a torrent
of a show I missed on discovery, and thought, kind of
interesting, everywhere else is adding bookmark this,
share that, so of course thepiratebay could become more
social ..

What is shared on TPB? A lot of content, its hard to
say that its mainly pirated, but of course HDTV shows
and any free software is probably indexed by it.

When I saw it I didn't think it'd be 'slashdot' worthy,
but it was peculiar, I'm sure that for pirates that use
facebook it is going to make sharing all the easier.

Block it? Thats utterly silly, I think it is a precedent,
maybe isohunt and mininova will add this feature, as they
seem to have larger communities that release their own
media through these portals.

Re:Idiot?

[Vectronic]

The pirate bay exists simply to share stuff, illegal or not. Show me something where the developers/maintainers of TPB have said they designed it with the main intent being to distribute illegal content. Just because 'illegal' content is prevalent doesn't imply it's initial intent.

Slashdot, has hordes of trolls, but it wasn't designed for trolling.

On another note, it doesn't mean that's what it will be used for on Facebook. Facebook currently doesn't have any way for people to share files directly, you can share links to images, links to video's, etc... you can even upload videos and images, but they get re-encoded/downgraded to low resolutions and high compression, so using TPB people could create a torrent of the stuff they want to share, and share it with all of their friends at the same time, or say an artist who has created a group, can share links to the torrents of their stuff.

Obviously sharing torrents URLS was already possible, but having a quick glance at the way it now does it, it allows for Icons/Images, and notes to be attached to the link as well, plus it's "easy", as easy as 2 button clicks, [Share on Facebook], and then [Submit]...

Re:Idiot?

[TheRealMindChild]

Sort of. A lot of people use it to break copyright of an still-being-sold bit of work. I'll admit, I do indeed download copyrighted material to things impossible to buy anymore from the copyright holder. BeOS builds, a copy of Trilobytes 11th hour, Adobe Photoshop 4. Who am I ripping off here?

Has anyone tried this?

[dsoltesz]

from TFA:

It works simply: The Pirate Bay site now includes links under torrents to âoeShare on Facebookâ. Once posted to your profile, your Facebook friends can click the link on Facebook to begin the download right away, provided they already have a torrenting client installed.

wtf am I missing? So, I used the Ubuntu example given by TorrentFreak (linked in the mashable article) and hit their Share on Facebook button. It posted to my FB profile as expected, but when I hit the link in my profile, it didn't start the download, it took me to the Pirate Bay page for the Ubuntu torrent. I have mutorrent installed... Is it just me? Maybe I need to tweek something to make the magic happen? Am I waiting for another FB redesign to go active? Or is the article completely wrong about this behavior, and then who really gives a fuck because I could have shared this on FB already through the Share on FB button I already have on my browser toolbar? (iow, this ain't news: Pirate Bay adding a link to a web page, whoopdeefuckingdoo).

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[TinBromide]

For as awesome as NewYorkCountryLawyer is with technical/legal issues, I think he didn't do precisely what you did yourself. Its the same for me, it takes me to the torrent page instead of the .torrent download. All it is is a specially crafted URL that instructs facebook to ask for your login, (or sample your cookies/authenticated sessions) and post the link to your profile. Nothing more.

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

For as awesome as NewYorkCountryLawyer is with technical/legal issues, I think he didn't do precisely what you did yourself. Its the same for me, it takes me to the torrent page instead of the .torrent download. All it is is a specially crafted URL that instructs facebook to ask for your login, (or sample your cookies/authenticated sessions) and post the link to your profile. Nothing more.

Thank you very much. Now we have a record of your visit. Now we can later claim that you are a copyright infringer, even though we have no evidence of your actually having infringed any copyrights, just as we did in our p2p file sharing cases.

Your cooperation is indeed appreciated.

Sincerely yours,

-Your grateful RIAA Overlords

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[TinBromide]

I'd love to see that argument show up in court. or even in bark letters. Preponderance of evidence just isn't on the **AA's side. It'd be like accusing someone who liked to go to gun shows of shooting holes in your walls, you have no evidence of gun ownership, use, or connection beyond browsing the stalls. That kind of argument would get thrown out of court, and if that was the basis of their case, they'd likely be on the hook for a juicy counter suit.

Besides, I think that facebook would be better at spreading knowledge of this than the previous limewire, kazaa, and bittorrent communities.

The real threat is to facebook. If torrent sites can be taken down in the US for merely pointing to caches of copyrighted material, is facebook susceptable to the same threats and action as was taken against torrentspy.com?

Perhaps this is intentional on TPB's part, in that if facebook becomes just as guilty of file sharing as trackers and torrent repositories, they might fight back harder than the small sites and possibly change the way the **AA's do things. Or, they'll comply with big content and take actions that are obvious to the average user and filter/remove the TPB links.

I'm just thinking that we're probably a month and a half away from the largest DMCA sweep yet as facebook cleanses itself of these links. (though how the **AA's identify the individual links for takedown requests posted by me will be interesting as i have no **AA friends).

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I'd love to see that argument show up in court.

I'll bet you wouldn't. Not if you were the defendant and had to spend a couple of hundred thousand dollars to show the Judge how frivolous it is. Do you know how many completely frivolous and nonsensical things the RIAA lawyers say every day in court, and get away with?

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

That kind of argument would get thrown out of court, and if that was the basis of their case, they'd likely be on the hook for a juicy counter suit.

You must be new here.

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[TinBromide]

that argument would take a hell of a lot of prettying up to get past all but the most stoneheaded of judges. I'm sure that there's plenty of case law to cite when answering motions involving baseless accusations, and that would come out during the settlement hearings of a properly administrated case. If the judge had an inkling of sense, they would lean heavily on the **AA to drop the case during this phase before hundreds of thousands of dollars would be spent by the plaintiff. Sure you might make the right expert witness a couple grand richer, but that's what cost shifting is for.

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

With all due respect, you live in an imaginary world of how things should be, while I unfortunately have to live in the world that is. For a description of reality, go here.

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[dsoltesz]

I might be moderately alarmed if the FB post linked directly to the download instead of the PB torrent description... but I still have doubts that would be interesting enough to call it news.

So now I wonder: how many links from a torrent must I stack up before I'm clearly not guilty of infringement (my blog links to your delicious bookmark links to Alice's blog links to Bob's /. journal links to Ted's FF links to Carol's FB links to PB links to the torrent which links to material which may be infringing simply because it exists)?

And is it limited to hypertext? What about a URL in a plain text file? What about a screenshot? Professional paper? Tattoo? What if I'm witnessed discussing a torrent (i.e., a "verbal" link)? What if I glance over your shoulder at a PB page on your screen, permanently embedding the image in my memory?

I give up. I'm gonna take my toys and go home now... Let's just shut down the fucking 'net.

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[ColaMan]

You must be new here.

Truly Ray, you have risen from the ranks of the technical illiterate and become one of us.

Because of this, my brother, your view of the world will never be the same again.

I'm so very, very sorry.

(lights candle, holds a minute's respectful silence)

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

You must be new here.

Truly Ray, you have risen from the ranks of the technical illiterate and become one of us. Because of this, my brother, your view of the world will never be the same again. I'm so very, very sorry. (lights candle, holds a minute's respectful silence)

I for one welcome the stern but fatherly leadership of Cmdr Taco and our Slashdot overlords.

Re:Has anyone tried this?

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I give up. I'm gonna take my toys and go home now... Let's just shut down the fucking 'net.

We were hoping you'd say that.

Sincerely yours,

-Your 'friends' at the RIAA

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[ssintercept]

please post link to - Ponies_n_kittens_playing.jpg

thanks in advance.

Re:Idiot?

[hal9000(jr)]

The pirate bay exists simply to share stuff, illegal or not. Show me something where the developers/maintainers of TPB have said they designed it with the main intent being to distribute illegal content. Just because 'illegal' content is prevalent doesn't imply it's initial intent.

This is a disingenuous argument. It doesn't matter what the creators or maintainers say or don't (ok, it matter legally, but ethically, it doens't). TPB is use *primarily* to distribute torrents, locators, to copyrighted material. Period. Copyrighted material is not a little bit of TPB torrents, or a small minority, or half. It's the main reason it exists. If there were someway to magically make illegal torrents go away, the TPB would cease to exist.

Denying that TPB is uses primarily for distributing locators to copyrighted material shows you are either painfully ignorant, blind, or are lying.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Jurily]

the (possibly) illegal content

I'm still having trouble with the idea that an arbitrary string of ones and zeroes could be "illegal".

If I generate a sequence of random numbers, write it to disk, and it happens to be, say, a copyrighted song when fed into an audio player, am I breaking the law? Who gets to determine if it's the same as the song?

Besides, any song can have an infinite number of representations. If I write an audio decoder that takes a Win32 dll and plays it as audio, am I breaking the law if one of the system files in my licensed copy of Vista can be played as a copyrighted song? Is Microsoft?

How about the same with Linux? If it's both covered by the GPL and some random music company, which one takes precedence?

What about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number>normal numbers? Are they partially copyrighted? If not, how am I breaking the law if I download portions of them? If I download "Champernowne's number, digits 6752138974562389465 to 6752938972565379465 in base 256.mp3", am I breaking the law if it's actually playable?

Re:Idiot?

[muuh-gnu]

> artists still have to make a living to continue to make art.

And its still their job to find out how to do that. Back in the 50s, they were able to sell copies of stuff, since copying was hard. In 2009, neither copying nor distribution is hard any more, so people make their copies themselves and distribute them. If the artist completely used to rely on selling copies to make a living, he now has to adapt. IF he refuses to, he'll have to go flip burgers.

> You seem to think all the people out there illegally copying files are somehow noble

Nope, never implied that.

> and if they liked it, pay the perform(s)
> or if they didn't like it, delete it never view it again.

Also never said that.

> 1) don't have permission to copy

We dont have to ask for a permission to exchange informaiton and share stuff. Everybody who thinks that, like you seem to, is mistaken.

> 2) have not paid

Since i do the copying and the distribution myself, i dont have to pay.

> 3) and are NOT exercising Fair Use

I am excercising Fair Use which _I_ defined.

> Committing a crime

I dont consider it to be a crime.

> Stealing from the artist and those who have invested money in producing/distributing
> the thing you want to copy

Copying stuff and sharing information with other people is not stealing, no matter how much youd like it to be.

> Removing incentive for the producers to renew the artist due to reduced sales

Their problem. (You know, you and they can still go flip burgers if you cant cope with the fact that we have 2009 and practically everybody learned how to use a networked computer.)

> If you think differently,

Which I do

> then you have the ethics of a common thief

But I have the luck that its not you laying out our ethics code.

> and I'd love to see you in jail wedded to Bubba the ass fucker.

Since you have to call for physical violence and violent anal rape of anybody who doesnt agree to your ageing ideology, you lose.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Vectronic]

lol, yeah i tried too, and in the text search it just shows my comment. Yahoo, ExaLead, MSN is 0/0

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Jurily]

Sorry, this is the link.

thanks anyway

[ssintercept]

kinda figured...that's why i asked for a link.

my kittens and ponies porno collection has become stale.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Vectronic]

http://yirmumah.com/webcomic/draw-anything-292.gif

Maybe that will satisfy you... it's kinda close to what my mental image of it was...

Re:Idiot?

[Darkness404]

Because it doesn't make any sense to keep library books. Because, by keeping a library book you are depriving someone else of that book. On the other hand, if I share somesong.mp3 and 400 people download it, me and those 400 people have a full, working copy of somesong.mp3, we can all listen to it at once. If I have Harry Potter checked out of the library, 400 people will have to wait for me to finish or return Harry Potter before they can read it. USA copyright law was based on that. In the 1700-1800s when it was written, to make a copy of a work under copyright I would have to have a printing press (or spend an absurd amount of time with paper and pen). When the photocopier was invented, people tried to apply the same law to it, it didn't really work, however, because copiers are not networked, enforcement was low, so the public didn't suffer much. Today though, we have the same ancient laws attempting to be applied to digital works while strictly enforcing them. This does not work, and today the artists who create works are suffering from it.

Re:Idiot?

[TheRealMindChild]

Pretty obvious why this is an anonymous reply.... Palm does not and will not sell BeOS. Adobe does not an WILL not sell Photoshop 4 (official reply "... is no longer supported, therefore is not being sold ..."). And "The Learning Company" DOES NOT hold copyright to these works. They bought overstock in bulk and sell them for a pittance IF you can even FIND THEM (Look at their website... "As of December 17, 2008, The Learning Company® products are no longer available via the Web and will only be sold at retailers until further notice.")

Your post is meaningless.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Vectronic]

True, but the URL to an image doesn't point directly to the file either, simply the server that (may) contain the file, or know which server does, and a way of checking to see its the right file (name).

The actual image would be something like C:\MySites\OMGPonies\Content\Images\Ponies_n_kittens.jpg

Re:Idiot?

[icebraining]

Radiohead - In Rainbows, pay what you want. Average value paid: £4.

And all those people who could just enter 0 in the price box actually have paid the band!

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[CarpetShark]

OK, all y'all are wrong, fer fuck's sake.

Yes, downloading a .torrent is not a big deal. You could simply argue that you clicked the .torrent link, had not client installed, and nothing much happened, so you went on with your day. That's not the issue though.

If you download a torrent, and your system loads a client and starts contacting a tracker, then THAT is when big media and their minions can notice. They connect to the trackers, and look at who else is listed as peers on those trackers. It's got nothing to do with downloading the .torrent file, and everything to do with not using public bittorrent trackers like The Pirate Bay.

Just get yourself a usenet account that supports SSL, usenet client that understands SSL and NZB files (analogous to .torrent files), and be happy.

Re:Idiot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I appreciate your efforts to give a smackdown, but its clear you don't fully understand the concepts either. Jeez, I must be in a "teach a man to fish" mood today.

Look, every piece of work created by someone has a copyright associated with it. It is up to the holder of the copyrighted material to decide how the materials and all copies of the materials can be distributed. You need to understand that even free software is copyrighted. It is the license under which the copyrighted materials are released that makes all the difference.

If you want to find a cool wallpaper for your phone, don't just save an image with your browser and transfer it to your phone. Check the distribution rights and respect them. Even easier is to go to Flickr and look for pictures released under a Creative Commons license.

There. That's your lesson for today. Every work of art is copyrighted. The key is to know and understand the distribution rights permitted by the license under which the materials are released. So please continue with your bashing, but don't call people idiots when you don't know what you're talking about either.

Facebook WANTS bad publicity

[CarpetShark]

Facebook has never given a crap about which apps run on it. They allow all sorts of apps on there that are nothing more than viral scams designed to steal user data. And, as a corporate machine, why wouldn't they? Every time one of those apps sends a message to a user, that user comes back to their site, might click on the invite friends link, and expand the facebook empire further.

Anyway... there's one good side to all this. Facebook is HUGE. Quite a big portion of the whole internet is using it, and if more of that portion starts using P2P, it pushes momentum in P2P users' favor, and away from big media's interests.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[CarpetShark]

On the level of philosophy and principles, I tend to agree: more and more, I'm seeing what amount to thought crimes being enacted in law. You're not allowed to write this, you're not allowed to look at that, you're not allowed to copy this with your own computer, your own electricity, and your own blank media... all of this is a violation of fundamental laws of supply and demand, natural rights, civil liberties, and the basic principle that adults don't need to be hand-held by other adults. I can only hope that one day, the powers that be will go too far, and citizens will wake up. Chances are it won't happen until the vast majority of citizens are online, and some simple mechanism allows easily whipping up that backlash under the right circumstances.

However, all that said... it's not really about that, when it comes to Joe Citizen being in court for something. Principles don't matter; legal precedent matters little. Rights? Most everyday judges probably don't even grasp the concepts well enough to consider them properly. Basically, if you piss them off, you're screwed. And trust me, arguing that downloading Metallica-St_CrapRIAALovingBand.torrent is the same as downloading an integer, however right you may be, is going to land you in some shit.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Vectronic]

But that's security, and pretty much off-topic.

The OP was simply stating that torrent files unto themselves cannot be "illegal" (not yet anyways).

Plus, this is about implications and possible consequences of using The Pirate Bay (public torrent tracker), and Facebook (public social network), not about which way to best circumvent authorities using something that is not TPB + Facebook.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[CarpetShark]

Ahh, right. Fair points :)

Re:Idiot?

[x78]

Is there any illegal content made avaliable via torrents on TPB?
Illegal content would be what, child porn? Not sure what else..
It may be illegal to downloaded copyrighted material for no cost but the material in the torrents itself isn't illegal afaik.
Just making a little distinction :) it makes TPB sound worse to say they are distributing illegal stuff than to say they're providing a means for one to get copyrighted stuff free of charge!

Re:Idiot?

[MLS100]

I dont consider it to be a crime.

(Un)fortunately the judge is not going to ask whether or not you considered it a crime at your trial.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[langelgjm]

You're not thinking like a lawyer. (You should probably be thankful for that)

If I generate a sequence of random numbers, write it to disk, and it happens to be, say, a copyrighted song when fed into an audio player, am I breaking the law?

If the sequence is really random (and not "really" in the sense of mathematically random, but "really" in the sense of not being some obfuscated way of recreating the song in question), congratulations, you've just independently created an identical work. Of course, the chances of this are very low, and I'm not even sure if having a computer generate a sequence of random numbers would meet the ever-so-low threshold for creativity to warrant a copyright. But the point is that copyright law allows for independent creation of identical works, whereas patent law doesn't.

Besides, any song can have an infinite number of representations. If I write an audio decoder that takes a Win32 dll and plays it as audio, am I breaking the law if one of the system files in my licensed copy of Vista can be played as a copyrighted song? Is Microsoft?

It probably depends on how you write the audio decoder. If you write it to use the DLL as a sort of hash with the intent of recreating a copyright song, you've probably infringed. If it just happened to do it, then no.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Jurily]

and the basic principle that adults don't need to be hand-held by other adults

They do, they just don't listen to us before passing laws.

I can only hope that one day, the powers that be will go too far, and citizens will wake up.

By the time a change happens that would seem "too far" now, it will seem like only a minor annoyance. Not only are the rights taken away, people are conditioned to believe that's how it's always been and there's nothing they can do about it. Plus any uproar is drowned out by things like American Idol.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Tokerat]

So this genius argument continues with, I was just downloading the .torrent files, not the copyrighted material.

Well that might work if you weren't actually downloading the copyrighted material.

Which has been the argument since the great great grandparent post, you illiterate troll.

If you find yourself agreeing with the parent...

[langelgjm]

FYI, if you find yourself agreeing with the parent post, you probably have not ever read a Supreme Court or Appeals Court opinion, or decent law review article.

There are of course a number of frankly idiotic opinions, but on the whole judges (or at least good judges, i.e., the ones whose opinions you read in classes) are a fairly analytical bunch. You kind of have to be.

The impression I get when I ponder the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative branches is that we have a lot of well-educated, well-spoken judges trying to make sense of laws that have been cobbled together by a bunch of monkeys flinging poo at one another. It's a little depressing.

I love it...

[IonOtter]

So many here are arguing legality, right, wrong, weather or not it'll fly in court...

It. Doesn't. MATTER.

The **AA can serve me with a lawsuit for raping the corpse of Pope John Paul II while wearing nothing but a purple party hat and pink woad.

It'd make a judge pop a vein from laughing so hard, but if I don't have a lawyer or can't afford one...

Then I'm shit outta luck and lose the lawsuit.

Remember, it's not how much justice you can get, it's how much justice you can afford. Or in the case of the **AA, it's how long you can hold out under sustained bombardment.

Re:I love it...

[laejoh]

... raping the corpse of Pope John Paul II while wearing nothing but a purple party hat and pink woad...

torrent?

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Jurily]

If the sequence is really random (and not "really" in the sense of mathematically random, but "really" in the sense of not being some obfuscated way of recreating the song in question),

I meant /dev/random.

congratulations, you've just independently created an identical work

What does that mean in the legal sense? Can I distribute it?

And if I download a .mp3, introduce some salt, recode it as an .ogg, and claim it came from /dev/random; how do you prove it?

Re:Idiot?

[brainfsck]

Your post assumes that "since filesharing is possible, it's moral".

Could you please justify this vast assumption rather than taking it for granted and then ranting about "censorship"?

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[langelgjm]

What does that mean in the legal sense? Can I distribute it?

From what I've learned, yes, you can. To take a more realistic example, if two poets, working independently, write two short poems that are "substantially similar" or even identical (meaning that had one relied upon the other's work, there would be a finding of infringement), they both have separate copyrights, and if one distributes the work, it's not infringing upon the other's copyright.

And if I download a .mp3, introduce some salt, recode it as an .ogg, and claim it came from /dev/random; how do you prove it?

Therein lies the rub. To return to the example of poets, if one of the poets is famous, and his poem has been widely published, the other poet will have a hard time convincing anyone that he actually created the identical poem independently. If he had drafts or notes from earlier versions, that would work in his favor, as it would support his claim of independent creation.

If some teenager read your comment, then claimed that his entire collection of MP3s were really just collections of output from /dev/random, obviously no one is going to buy that.

The other thing is, independent creation isn't really about the "source" of work. Whether your music came from /dev/random or a piano is kind of irrelevant. If you're doing it after a popular song has been published and played everywhere, and you're actively seeking out something that sounds identical to that song, it's clear your aim is to violate the copyright. If you had never heard of the song whose copyright you were violating, then you could claim independent creation, but merely using /dev/random as a trick to get around playing the song on a piano is a silly technicality.

Independent creation is there to protect people who legitimately create works that just happen to correspond to other copyrighted works. If the second poet looks for a string from /dev/random that corresponds to the first poet's poem, that's not really independent creation.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Faylone]

Legally, you would have the right to distribute it. You would need some damn good proof it was randomness that produced it for there to be any decent chance of it holding up in court, though.

Re:Idiot?

[Vectronic]

I suppose, although technically TPB doesn't host anything but code and text, so maybe in some countries the comments on the torrents, or words/links within the torrent could be "illegal".

But, there are other illegal things ontop of (a few types of) porn, like software/instructions that can by-pass/breach security, or documents and software that have been illegally obtained, and therefore illegal to distribute because you don't legally have the privileges to view, run or distribute but not illegal in the fact that it exists. In some (rare, maybe non-existent) countries it may be illegal to possess certain types of software that is legal elsewhere, like encryption/decryption, or maybe even certain types of calculating software.

Blueprints, satellite footage, signal decryption, nuclear physics, etc etc... "Anarchists Cookbook", and with some recently proposed and/or passed laws, even religious books.

Paint a big target on yourself

[wintermute000]

And do it on the post-modern narcissists' soapbox, the pulpit for the modern day lazy attention-whore, facebook.

Anybody who does this and then gets sued for it - well that's the elecronic equivalent of natural selection isn't it.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that facebook will remove this, esp. now they're a possible target with newscorp money to be had. They'll comply with anything the media corporations thrown at them as they have absolutely nothing to gain by fighting the good fight, so to speak. And they won't.

Besides this is not an issue of RIAA mafia tactics or innocent till proven guilty or even punishment does not fit crime, no loss in utility like caused by physical theft etc. - people are actively advertising their civil liability, whether you think that liability is fair or not.

And do we really have to rehash all this copyright != theft, fuck the RIAA etc. why don't we argue about the year of the linux desktop or in soviet russia whilst we're at it.

No I'm not new here :)

Re:Paint a big target on yourself

[wintermute000]

Correction: not newscorp money (got confused with guess who) but still the point remains.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Panseh]

The chances of a random collection of notes on a piano being a recognizable song is infinitesimal. Society grants copyrights to works which are not completely random, but have a certain organization of its contents, be it words or music.

Copyright may not be desirable for society, but that is a different argument. Arguing that music is equivalent to a random sequence of 1s and 0s is silly. And frankly irrelevant since people are being caught uploading music on torrents, presumably with evidence that the files they are sharing are in fact copyrighted material.

Re:Idiot?

[registrar]

400 books would need to be purchased. Were 400 mp3s purchased?

Yes. If you buy 1 computer file, it is the same as buying 2 identical computer files. With computer files, there are two relevant quantities: none (don't have a copy), and one (have a copy). If you have more than one copy, it is no more valuable than having one copy.

And it follows that if 1 copy was purchased, then 400 copies were purchased. That's how computers work, that's what they do. You can want reality to be different, but it isn't. You aren't getting something for nothing, because those 399 copies are worth nothing if you still have the first.

A corollary of this is that computer-copyable creative works are only worth as much as the first copy. I.e. they should be (and will be, and mostly already are) funded by commission, performance, micropayments, or similar means, rather than expecting to make a profit from each copy.

If you are an aspiring musician who wants to make money from CD sales, grow out of it. You should find a patron, charge for performances, or flip burgers---that's reality. Micropayments also work if they (1) guarantee that you get a good copy of what you want, and/or (2) allow people to be micropatrons, to fund the musicians they like.

Re:Idiot?

[brit74]

And Radiohead's manager said they wouldn't be doing that again. Apparently, it didn't work out well for them - except as a one-time publicity stunt.

Re:Idiot?

[brit74]

I'm always amazed at how people twist logic in order to justify getting stuff for free.

"If you and your fellow artists cannot bear the thought of your works becomming part of our culture and shared with other people, then stop producing and publishing them."

I think you meant to write, "If you and your fellow artists cannot bear the thought of working for free (forget about paying a mortgage or buying groceries like the rest of us), then stop producing and publishing them."

"If you cant manage to make money from the fact that people actually like your works and actively share them with their friends"

The funny thing is: artists don't get paid when people "share". The whole "sharing" trick is way overplayed. Companies don't *share* your mailing address, your email address, or your credit card when you do business with them. Stop pretending that you're doing anyone a favor when you *share* digital works. In fact, I think it would be poetic justice of companies shared your credit card numbers with the world whenever you shared digital media. Hey, it's all just ones and zeros in both cases - how can there possibly be laws attached to ones and zeros, right?

A society that refuses to pay their artists will eventually learn the true cost of their selfishness.

Re:Piracy

[brit74]

Piracy encourages you to be an artist, not a professional.

I assume you mean "starving artist".

Re:Idiot?

[Hemogoblin]

> 3) and are NOT exercising Fair Use
I am excercising Fair Use which _I_ defined.

"Committing a crime"
I dont consider it to be a crime

I won't state my personal opinion, but philosophers such as Rawls would argue that by being part of society you don't have the right to do "whatever you want". You have implicitly agreed to a social contract and if the rest of society thinks that it is a crime, then what you personally consider it to be doesn't matter.

Of course, there are other philosophers who don't agree with social contract theory. I'm not sure they'd stand behind you though.

Another thought:

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Another thought I've had, what if this is all part of the RIAA's strategy of going after BitTorrent?

1. Until now, out of 40,000 cases, not a single one has involved BitTorrent.

2. Every single case has involved Gnutella (e.g. LimeWire) or FastTrack (e.g. Kazaa).

3. Maybe this is the RIAA's way of finding a method of creating some new BitTorrent users, and catching them using Facebook's data.

Re:Piracy

[wintermute000]

95% of artists fall into that category

How many artists do you know who make a comfortable living doing solely their art?

And how many do you know work mundane low level jobs and play gigs on the weekend or whatever?

How many burnt out artists have you met on the wrong side of 40 who are still stacking shelves and all bitter that they never became rock and roll superstars?

And how many artists do you know who are still not making any decent money despite having released several indie albums? (by decent money I mean having same kind of income stream as a middle class professional).

This capitalist society is rigged against people pursuing the arts. You heard it here first (sarcasm)

If it's on Facebook, it's not distribution...

[foniksonik]

If it's on Facebook, it's sharing... not distributing.

An interesting potential point of view, and possibly within fair use rights? These aren't strangers you're giving out links to... they're friends. It's no different than emailing a link to a file to someone you know, or writing it down on a napkin at a coffee shop... it's sharing, not distribution.

Now with Facebook, RIAA would have to tackle the fair use scenario of friends sharing with friends. It could be a whole different story.

Re:Idiot?

[Splintax]

The parents were arguing about ethics (which are a matter of opinion), not law.

This will help my LEGAL self created media!

[cimmerian]

This will come in handy as I release all my LEGAL self created media as torrents through Pirate Bay. It's an excellent tool to help promote independent artist's work.

Thanks Pirate Bay!

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Cathbard]

This is precisely the absurdity of it all. Any song, video or program on a computer is simply a number (albeit in binary). What they have effectively done is copyright a number - I want to copyright the number 5! (sorry, i mean 101) And does Douglas Adams own 42?

I know that lawyers try to twist it around so it doesn't look this way but in fact it is. Isn't this one of RMS's arguments to illustrate the absurdity of copyright law as applied to applications? I'm afraid that we have all fallen through the looking glass. Can somebody please send me the red pill? I want out!

Re:Idiot?

[gokwyjibo]

I actually agree with you, at least in terms of musicians. I'm assuming that's the basis of your argument but what about movies, books and to a lesser extent even TV? Musicians have the ability to tour and sell merchandise to make a living. This is not applicable to the others and I personally see no other way for them to make money other than by the selling of their actual product.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[koiransuklaa]

This is the problem with geeks, everything needs to be formally and absolutely defined... The nice thing about law is that many parts are actually quite well written -- written in ways that allow new inventions to be handled within the the same legislation. Some specific areas of copyright have some problems at the moment, but your questions aren't really problematic.

Something that might help understand copyright, is realizing that it really is about "right to copy": It's not about bits, bytes or codecs, it's about whether you copied another work or not.

There are grey areas of course -- this is sort of intentional to keep the law books from overflowing -- but usually common sense gives you a fairly good approximation of the situation.

April Fools!!!

[purpcicle]

HA. Tricked you!!! Early April Fools joke.

Oh I sure hope they do

[Yfrwlf]

I hope unauthorized material is shared, without the consent of the creator.

First off, please get this right. All things are "copyrighted" immediately upon creation/composition/whatever, whether or not they wanted it to be, or so the law states. Secondly, you never know if someone has the consent of the copyright holder. It's perfectly legal for me to download a movie if the movie creator told me that I could, or if I have a "right" to do so as defined by law. Regardless of what the stupid law says (dumb DMCA, go to hell please) if you purchased a movie and want a backup or want to restore a lost disc or whatever it may be, that definitely should be completely legal, and there's no way for Facebook or any of those retards to know if your need is a "legitimate" one or not.

Regardless, everyone should keep sharing ideas and utilizing them to their full potential. Copyright and patent laws be damned.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[koiransuklaa]

This is precisely the absurdity of it all. Any song, video or program on a computer is simply a number (albeit in binary). What they have effectively done is copyright a number

Not true at all. Copyright covers the original work (in this case the song). This means that the actual sequence of data is irrelevant: The song can be transformed to almost infinite number of other sequences that also sound somewhat like the original song: all those are under the same copyright -- in other words the number does not matter at all.

If I'm "twisting it around" as well, please let me know...

Re:Idiot?

[cliffski]

Only a tirade of abuse like this, basically telling the people who make entertainment to go fuck themselves, gets modded insightful here at slashdot.

Telling people who make music and movies that they should fuck off and flip burgers if they can't pay the bills when everyone takes their work for free.

and you wonder why artists don't give a fuck about the attitudes of pirates?

Even shoplifters have the common fucking decency not to abuse the store manager and laugh in their face, so I guess the anti-copyright crowd are a step below even that.

Let me ask you this:
If you are prepared to pay the people who grow your food for their work, why are you not prepared to pay the people who entertain you?

Face facts, its because you've found a way to steal one commodity and not the other.
Any other rationalisation is just bullshit.

Re:Idiot?

[cliffski]

couldn't agree more but here on torrentfreak (sorry slashdot) pirates and kids stealing music are heroes, and people who actually make stuff are scum.

In an amusing side issue, there is a lot of whining from the 'heroes' that all music and movies suck. This is obviously because the guys who made the music and movies they like now flip burgers.

They don't comprehend this, so they end up torrenting 'serenity' with one hand, whilst signing on-line petitions for a sequel that will never happen with the other hand.

One day, they might make the connection.

Re:Idiot?

[Richard_at_work]

Even if the copyright holders no longer wish to sell copies of their older works, why are you entitled to them?

Re:Idiot?

[koiransuklaa]

In the long run legality is a matter of opinion: the point of copyright is (in most places) to promote the advance of arts and science. How to accomplish that is purely a matter of opinion.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[Cathbard]

Okay, now apply that to a computer program. It IS a unique number.

Re:Idiot?

[muuh-gnu]

> and if the rest of society thinks that it is a crime

Thats ok, since my whole point is that it actually doesn't. Only the written letter of the law does, but since it is, at least in the case of copyright, that much detached from the actual sense of right and wrong of the society around me, i do not at all have a moral urge to feel bound by it.

Re:Idiot?

[houghi]

The majority of the 'fellow artists' play covers. Even most of the real 'artists' do not play their own songs. We are talking copyrights, so that is the importand part. Do not infringe on copyrights by copying songs.
Real musiscians make their own music and see that they can keep their fans close.
So close, no matter how far couldn't be much more from the heart.Forever trusting who we are and nothing else matters.
Never opened myself this way,Life is ours, we live it our way.All these words I don't just say and nothing else matters.
Trust I seek and I find in you. Every day for us something new. Open mind for a different view and nothing else matters.
Never cared for what they do. Never cared for what they know but I know.

So close, no matter how far couldn't be much more from the heart. Forever trusting who we are and nothing else matters.
Never cared for what they do Never cared for what they know but I know.

Never opened myself this way. Life is ours, we live it our way All these words I don't just say.
Trust I seek and I find in you.Every day for us, something new. Open mind for a different view and nothing else matters

never cared for what they say
never cared for games they play
never cared for what they do
never cared for what they know
and I know

So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No, nothing else matters

Re:Idiot?

[muuh-gnu]

It assumes that, since exchange of information, learning from each other, passing on of culture, sharing things you like with people you like and P2P-ing have been basic human deeds and activities from the beginning of time, they are moral by nature. Since filesharing is nothing more than an electronically amplified form of the above, it can not become morally wrong for the sole fact that someones business model (manufacturing and selling single copies of stuff like it were biscuits) based on yesterday's scarcity, breaks down today when that kind of scarcity is overcome.

Artificial scarcity, like in "you must not use your own copy machine and must pretend you didnt have one in order for someone else's yesterday's copying-based business model can still work like it were still needed" is for-profit censorship (aka ban on information exchange), on a wide scale.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[koiransuklaa]

Are you just trolling me? Either that or you need to do some reading... There are various ways to copy programs without ending in the same exact binary:

• use a hex editor to modify the binary in insignificant ways
• change the source code slightly
• rewrite the same code in another language (not just imitate, but copy the code function by function)

All of those end up in a different binary (the last one even ends up with totally different source), yet they are still under the same copyright.

How to piss off the RIAA

[JohhnyTHM]

Why are all the comments about sharing torrents of copyrighted work?
Use this to share torrents of non-**IA affiliated artists.
Facebook claims to have 175 million active users. 175 million people sharing torrents of indies, music recommended by your friends, is the best advertising these artist could hope for.
It is also the record industries worst nightmare. Music they have no control over being shared (legally!) on a scale they cannot match.
It has been stated many times on /. that the lawsuits were about control. This is your chance to take that control away. Don't screw it up sharing Britney and Metallica. Share indie, get your friends to share indie, fuck the **IA.

Re:How to piss off the RIAA

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

Why are all the comments about sharing torrents of copyrighted work?
Use this to share torrents of non-**IA affiliated artists.
Facebook claims to have 175 million active users. 175 million people sharing torrents of indies, music recommended by your friends, is the best advertising these artist could hope for.
It is also the record industries worst nightmare. Music they have no control over being shared (legally!) on a scale they cannot match.
It has been stated many times on /. that the lawsuits were about control. This is your chance to take that control away. Don't screw it up sharing Britney and Metallica. Share indie, get your friends to share indie, fuck the **IA.

Excellent point. As I said in the article, "I just hope people do not use this feature to download copyrighted materials which are not authorized to be downloaded, or at least not materials copyrighted to litigation-happy RIAA Big 4 record labels." However, I should caution you that, although I am unaware of any indie labels, even those affiliated with the RIAA and hence not exactly 'indie', suing end users like the Big 4 have, there is no guarantee that they won't start doing it. I believe some of them are already starting to go after web sites.

Re:How to piss off the RIAA

[JohhnyTHM]

I was thinking more about those artists (signed or unsigned) that are wanting their work spread far and wide for free, to get the exposure and bring people to their shows/websites.

My bad for using 'indie' in the wrong context.

Re:How to piss off the RIAA

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

I was thinking more about those artists (signed or unsigned) that are wanting their work spread far and wide for free, to get the exposure and bring people to their shows/websites.

That's who I'm thinking of as well. If you're going to use the software, use it for these up and coming artists, not for those who collaborate with the Big 4 record labels.

Re:Idiot?

[muuh-gnu]

> What exactly is the "absurdly archaic 50's business model" you're referring to?

Making the natural usage of computers and networks (passing information and content) artificially (without actual public support) illegal in order to simulate the 50's content distribution.

> If nobody wants to pay for digital copies, that's fine too, but they'd have to say
> goodbye to a very large group of creative enterprises.

I and large, large parts of the public are obviously ready to say goodbye to parts of the creative enterprises which business models rely exclusively on enforcement of artificial scarcity and for-profit censorship.

> but it wouldn't exist in the first place without support from my customers.

So find out a non-forceful way to get their support. If you can't, they obviously do not _want_ to support you, fully knowing that you wont be able to continue your art.

> How does this help the freedom of artistic expression you seem to be advocating?

Arguing against large-scale censorship, lawsuits and mass punishments of people who use their computers for what they're designed for doesnt have to do anything _at all_ with your freedom to express yourself. Youre confusing funding and freedom of expression. All I'm arguing for is, that if you can get funding for your art without relying on means of goverment-sponsored network-surveillance, censorship and mass punishments, the better for you. If you cant, better quit because it wont work in the long run, because most people value their freedom to share information and communicate freely more than the commercial viability of someones censorship-based business model.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[ciderVisor]

Whenever you download a torrent, you must simultaneously upload it. This is required for .torrents to work.

Not if there are enough seeders. Some BT clients (Transmission for one) allow you to throttle your upload speed to zero kb/sec. You can therefore leech 100% of the desired content without seeding a single byte to anyone else.

Re:Idiot?

[rohan972]

Let me ask you this:
If you are prepared to pay the people who grow your food for their work, why are you not prepared to pay the people who entertain you?

If food became infinitely copyable through consumer technology you can be sure I would be distributing copied food all over the world wherever there was still any lack. I do not raid farmers paddocks or stores to steal produce though, troll. I've had conversations with you before so I won't reply again. I'm well aware that you have no intention of allowing anything to change your mind.

Maybe one day, because you went broke clinging to an outdated business model, you'll be starving, and I'll come by with a truckload of fresh copied fruit and vegetables.

Re:Idiot?

[cliffski]

Wow what infantile drivel.

So in the medium term, when music is copyable and food is not, thieves like you will just swipe the music and not give a flying fuck how the musicians afford their food?

People like you are fucking shameful. At least shoplifters admit what they do is wrong.

Re:Reverse the question

[Richard_at_work]

There is a potential loss - the copyright holders may decide, at any point up to when their copyright expires, to put the old version on the market. Take a look at gog.com for a good example.

Re:Idiot?

[Richard_at_work]

And by not selling the item, they are indeed exercising the right to control how and when copies are made. You answered your own question.

Re:Idiot?

[hal9000(jr)]

So your argument boils down to:

• I can do what ever I want because I say so, laws be damned
• People who spend their time, talent, and energy who want to control the rights to their work either play by YOUR rules or they can go flip burgers.
• And because you CAN illegally copy stuff, it's OK

That sum it up correctly?

What you want to do with your creative works is your business. If you want to give it away under a license, or no license, that is your choice. The world benefits from all the people who create and distribute works under licenses like creative commons, GPL, etc, and other open source initiatives.

But they choose to make their work freely available. Imagine the uproar of someone came along and said, "Nope, sorry, you have to charge money for what you do. No exceptions." The problem in that scenario is the creator has lost control of the distribution and licensing their work. Just like your ignoring their rights to require payment for use.

Respect the copyright holders wishes.

And by the way, you may not want to call copyright infringement theft, but if someone sells an electronic file, and you copy and use it without paying for it, you have stolen money from them. I am not going to quibble definitions. Just admit what you are and be done with it. Or are you ashamed of the truth?

Re:Idiot?

[hal9000(jr)]

> but it wouldn't exist in the first place without support from my customers. So find out a non-forceful way to get their support. If you can't, they obviously do not _want_ to support you, fully knowing that you wont be able to continue your art. Your assumption is that IF people liked what they downloaded, THEN they would pay for it in some way.

So where are all the checks flooding into artists pockets? They don't exist becuase people WON'T pay for what they can get for free. Face it.

Hey, I am all for the utopian vision where IF people would act ethically AND if they downloaded a file that the copyright holder charged for, AND (they liked it, AND they paid for it) OR (they deleted they deleted the file and never used it again) then I think you have a argument. But that is generally not what happens.

Re:Idiot?

[ccubed]

If software is worth $20 and I can download an ISO of that software where I would be paying $20 to buy it, it stands to reason that if 300 people download it instead of buying it, that company has lost $6,000 in potential profits. if those 300 people had gone to and bought it, they would have paid $20 a piece. Therefore, the software has value. In another example, copies of famous works of art are worth money. Not as much as the original, but still something. If we follow your logic, the copy is worth nothing, zilch, nadda, $0.00. Does anyone else see a problem here?

Re:Idiot?

[brkello]

Despite being popular opinion on Slashdot and being modded up, you are wrong (and kind of a jerk). You considering it to not be a crime doesn't make it any less a crime. It either is, or it isn't. You can whine about it being unfair, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a crime (depending on where you live).

Fair use allows for copies to be made as backup for your legally purchased copy. It does not provide for you to copy or distribute things that you have not purchased.

I would not want to live in your world. Many talented people would get out of the arts because there would be no profit to be made. Very few people would write software anymore since they couldn't make a living. It would hurt Linux because the number of people going in to C.S. and C.E. would plummet and there would be no one to work on it. We would have music, video games, etc., but for the most part, the quality would be crap since there is no profit in it.

Listen, I understand that a lot of copyright law is really screwed up. With distribution and copying costs being near nothing, the price of music should have dropped significantly. People abuse copyright to make it something none of us want to be. But your arguments against it are thin at best. You just want to pirate software. It is just unabashed greed. You are showing similar ethics as a CEO that would run his company in the ground and then take his million dollar golden parachute. You want whatever you can get for free and ethics and laws be damned. That's fine for mod points in Slashdot, but if you get outside of the groupthink in this site, you are being immature.

Re:Idiot?

[brkello]

I think public libraries are important because they allow the poor to access information and knowledge and that can help elevate society. I don't really think the poor are missing out on the latest Britney Spears album (actually, I think most music these days probably reduces IQ).

There are plenty of legitimate uses of p2p. But I don't think we should turn a blind eye to the fact that the majority of it is used for copyright infringement.

Re:Idiot?

[skeeto]

If there were someway to magically make illegal torrents go away, the TPB would cease to exist.

Bzztt! Wrong! If the "illegal" torrents were suddenly removed, only a mere 20% of TPB's torrents would go. 80% of the torrents are legal.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[anyGould]

Besides, any song can have an infinite number of representations. If I write an audio decoder that takes a Win32 dll and plays it as audio, am I breaking the law if one of the system files in my licensed copy of Vista can be played as a copyrighted song? Is Microsoft?

Better yet - if you translate random.dll and "perform" it, is *Microsoft* now distributing your copywrited song?

"sue the pants off all the hapless Facebook users"

[rusl]

Utter nonsense, one would expect more from a Lawyer. The **AA can only sue symbolically because there is no cork big enough to dam the ocean. Sure they could figure out a way to send out 100 million scary threatening letters to most users... but like most spam most people ignore it.

Hapless my ass

[furby076]

sue the pants off all the hapless Facebook users who fell for it."

1) Very few people out there are clueless to copying, without permission, copyrighted material. Anyone whose watched a movie from video store rental, or service like on-demand, bought a DVD, or bought a cd has seen the labels has seen the copyright warnings (which have been around for at least two decades). Then there is the news. If you have a torrent client I would wager you are aware of the laws. There may be a few people out there, but really let's get serious about "hapless". I'm not buying the "i didn't know", neither does the law.
2) The RIAA said they are not sueing downloaders anymore, they are going to work with ISPs to warn and then punish people by disconnecting their ISP service. BTW, I've seen these letters (downloaded tv shows) and they are accurate. They know exactly when, what tv show, what episode, where it was from and my IP number. It came from my ISP provider.

So cut the villainy crap for once. I just love biased news. Slashdot = Fox news for liberals (btw i am a liberal, but i can't stand stupidity). Fair and balanced should be SLashdots new tag line.

Lost Potential Profit

[rusl]

And by you driving a car to work making it harder for me to cycle you are depriving me of a happy livelihood and therefore owe me $80 Gazillion Dollars.

Lost-potential-profit is the art of lying.

However, I do need to disagree with "registrar." A copy certainly does have some value. That is the backup value which is immeasurable if you have some kind of all to common data disaster. But it seems like the best backup these days is the collective memory of the internet. No storage solution is foolproof. But if something lives on as a healthy torrent pool then it can be available almost indefinately (or until the power runs out) because the more copies you have the more likelyhood that one will survive and as you correctly point out one is enough to propagate as many more copies as you like.

Copy use to be a word meaning wealth and richness: copious bounty of the harvest. Nowadays the **AA liars whose primary value seems to be lost potential profit all have us believing that copy means fake or less than real. Whereas all good geeks know the primary function of a computer is copying data around while changing little bits of it - without the copy function there is no compute function.

Re:Idiot?

[rusl]

Carnegie was a robber baron pirate. He funded so many libraries because of this. Libraries are from the devil, that socialist.

Re:If you find yourself agreeing with the parent..

[furby076]

Really? dude - judges are prone to dumb ass mistakes and assinine rulings just as much as legislatures prone to dumb ass mistakes and assinine laws. Judges may also not have the benefit of time like legislatures do and may not have as many people giving input. Remember a judge makes a sole decision, while your congressmen needs to get a consensus. That is why the legislative branch is the most powerful branch (by design) and the executive branch is the weakest branch (by design). Our founders didn't want a king making all the rules. Judges are the referee's. Yes reality muddles things a bit - but for the most part it's a fairly good model. So yea I did agree with the parent post and I am not one of those people who fell into the "probably have never ever read a Supreme..."

Re:Idiot?

[themusicgod1]

Hell, in many areas of the world copyright law is in the process of being updated. Whether through ACTA in much of the developed world or specifically in the US (with their super DMCA laws), or Canada(C-61) --- it isn't long term at all, the opinions will determine the law, short term.

Re:Wrong Wrong Wrong

[furby076]

If I generate a sequence of random numbers, write it to disk, and it happens to be, say, a copyrighted song when fed into an audio player, am I breaking the law? Who gets to determine if it's the same as the song?

If you randomly generate a series of 1's and 0's which exactly portrays a copyrighted song then you need to go back to church and account for your sins cause god just set you up. The chances of that happening are so freaking small it's not even worth giving any form of consideration. Also, any judge/jury that buys this story should replace the face on this picture with their own.

Re:Piracy

[brit74]

I'm using the word "artist" to mean anyone living on their creativity - and given the context ("Piracy encourages you to be an artist, not a professional."), his statement actually applies to anyone and everyone making digital content. This includes: digital "artists" in the traditional sense, musicians, movie producers, TV producers, software developers, etc. And, yes, as a software developer, I do hope to earn a living based on creating digital content (software).

Re:If you find yourself agreeing with the parent..

[langelgjm]

Well, there are always exceptions, thus why I said "probably."

My point was that the OP really trivializes the work of the judicial branch. Yes, there are bad judges (probably more the lower in the system you go), and yes, there are good judges who make bad decisions. But to say that the entire court system works on feelings, not facts, is kind of absurd.

I don't see how you can read more than a few opinions and not come away with the impression that judges are an analytical bunch. Unless maybe you're reading Clarence Thomas? (ducks!)

A lot of geeks might find that Posner or Easterbrook really resonate with them. I like Breyer and Stevens. But whomever you like, it's pretty much certain that their writing is going to be more analytical and well-thought out than that of almost any Congress critter.

Also, I think it's false to claim that all of the legal battles geeks are facing are due to issues of fact vs. feeling. When it comes to stuff like copyright and patent law, a lot of it has to do with a legal system that hasn't caught up to modernity. That's not "fact vs. feeling" at all.

And while legislators have "people giving input", it seems like most of the time those "people" are industry lobbyists.

I might agree with you on Britney Spears

[Rix]

But I don't think it's our place to judge, and there certainly is plenty of music out there that would elevate society.

We need to get over the idea of personal copyright infringement. The idea that people could infringe copyright for personal use was de facto legal up until quite recently. It shouldn't suddenly be actionable now.

Re:Idiot?

[brit74]

It assumes that, since exchange of information, learning from each other, passing on of culture, sharing things you like with people you like and P2P-ing have been basic human deeds and activities from the beginning of time, they are moral by nature.

Nonsense. If you did business with someone and they shared your credit card number, you'd quickly decide otherwise. Exchanging ideas is good, but when you get down to the level of detail that you're copying entire works, you're screwing the creator.

The problem is that all your talk about "artificial scarcity" ignores the fact that it costs money to make this stuff. If you keep on with that filesharing, you'll get to really know what it means to have digital content that is scarce - nothing is more scarce than stuff that doesn't get made because you insisted on not paying for it.

Artificial scarcity, like in "you must not use your own copy machine and must pretend you didnt have one in order for someone else's yesterday's copying-based business model can still work like it were still needed"

I have to wonder why you're not copying dollar bills. Oh no - another instance of "artificial scarcity". Clearly, it's your right to make counterfeit money.

Re:By Neruos

[brit74]

And this is no joke, there is only 1 industry big enough to take on the MPAA/RIAA and that is the porn and video game (whats left of it, the MPAA/RIAA have been busy buying up all the game companys) industry. Make no joke about it, those 2 have to unite for the common good of the people.

Huh? I didn't know the MPAA/RIAA were buying up game companies. Anyway, the video game industry hates pirates, too. The game industries are most definitely on the side of copyright - actually, most everyone (with a few exceptions) who makes digital content wants copyright enforced and piracy eliminated. (I could provide you a long list of game companies - big and small - complaining about piracy.) Why do you think game companies use DRM? It's because they desperately want to protect their existence against the onslaught of non-paying pirates. The game companies are not going to align themselves against the RIAA/MPAA. They simply have too much common interest in protecting copyright (as they should).

Re:Idiot?

[rohan972]

thieves like you will just swipe the music

Will you never stop trolling? By what reasoning do you call me a thief? Because I have a different opinion to you? My stuff is properly licensed. Just because I disagree with current implementations of copyright law doesn't make me a thief, unless we have introduced thought-crime into our justice system.

Even though I don't agree, I can understand your assertion that breaching copyright is theft, but to say that making an argument against you is theft is ridiculous. Nevertheless, if others choose to spend their time working unprofitably that is hardly my fault. Guess what, I like to do things that people won't pay for too. Wah wah wah! Pay me because I'm an artist!

People like you are fucking shameful.

In contrast with people like you, who have no shame.

At least shoplifters admit what they do is wrong.

and yet you can't even tell me what I've done wrong. You've just called me a thief for disagreeing with you. Your false accusation puts you in the position of being the one doing wrong, but I've seen your trolls too many times to think you will admit it.