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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."
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.
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.
I am waiting for the **IA to sue Facebook for "aiding piracy." That will be a fun one to watch.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
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
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Fred has sent you a torrent. Download?
Send 20 more torrents to get a "FUCK THE RIAA" gift!
C'mon, gimme your best shot.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
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.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
please post link to - Ponies_n_kittens_playing.jpg
thanks in advance.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
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?
> 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.
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...
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
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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?
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
[End Of Line]
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.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
> 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.
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.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
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.
> 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.