Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Bay Court Loss Won't Stop the Flow of Files
Adrian Lopez writes "According to PC World, 'Hollywood may have won a battle, but the war against piracy is far from over. Unauthorized file sharing will continue (and likely intensify), if not through The Pirate Bay, then through dozens of other near identical swashbuckling Web sites. ... What Hollywood needs to remember is sites like The Pirate Bay are like weeds. When you try to kill one, they grow back even stronger. In this case, The Pirate Bay already moved most of its servers to the Netherlands, a move that could keep the site running even if The Pirate Bay loses its appeal.'"
I can look forward to a future with no more big-budget movies or mainstream e-books. What a relief!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
All the Pirate Bay is really, is a symbol; I'm not convinced this spectrial was ever about combating P2P, but more about a clash of ideologies.
This is typical of a situation, where a dinosaur on top of the food chain tries to defend its position.
I am pretty sure that MPAA/RIAA/Big Publishers would like to put the whole filesharing technology back to the bottle until they find a way to monetize it. Then, of course, it would be accepted.
And I can't get over the Swedish court's argument that making the service available is criminal, because it can be used illegally.
Every problem has a solution that is simple, easy and wrong. Selling our Liberty for a little Security is a much too de
Development of filesharing solutions is a bit like evolution.
Like new, more advanced life sprung up as a result of each disaster, new, more advanced file sharing solutions pop up each time after the media industry manages to kill one.
As Bittorrent is not a service, but a protocol, it will obviously never die. Darker and decentralized versions of it is evolving already, made strictly for "private" use.
What the industry fails to realize, is that the newer solutions is also *better* for the user than its previous counterparts. Remember Napster? It was only good for people who listened to mainstream chart toppers with crappy sound quality. It was not an option for people really interested in music.
The irony of moving your weeds to the Netherlands ...
A lot of 'casual' (non tech.) users are likely to be put off by the increasing application of EU directives against sharing/copyright theft. (The ones that the boys from PB were hammered under).
As EU Govs. progressively try and vote these into law, (a recent attempt in France was defeated at the last minute), users are going to find it harder to use file-sharnig services without getting cut off by their ISP, or worse.
I predict a growing interest in TOR and IRC...
You are a pirate!
They can trash on The Pirate Bay all they want, but public sites like that are mostly just for piracy tourists anyway thanks to their notoriously unreliable speeds that make the 'pr0' pirates steer clear of 'em except as a last ditch option. Sure you can try and stem the tide by taking down one of the big, well known ones, but that's really not going to help matters much. Another public site will spring up, having learned from the lessons of the prior one, and will be even harder to take down. The tourists will latch onto it and the whole mess will ramp up even more.
Besides, the guys doing the really heavy duty stuff (i.e. dedicated download boxes with a ritual morning tracker browse through with 24/7 downloading) are all rocking private trackers and encrypted file transfers anyway. Good luck to trying to crack apart the chunk of the piracy community that actually does know what they're doing and aren't 13 year old girls, grandmothers, or drunk, stupid, college kids.
"I am pretty sure that MPAA/RIAA/Big Publishers would like to put the whole filesharing technology back to the bottle until they find a way to monetize it. Then, of course, it would be accepted."
They had their chance a loooooong time ago. They thoroughly screwed that pooch and will have to stop basing their businesses on suing the crap out of people, which they really don't want to do (mostly because I think they enjoy it).
Technically it's not possible to stop p2p, and the harder you try, the tougher it becomes. My fear is as that happens, it all gets pushed further and further underground. There are millions and millions of teens and youngsters involved. As it all moves to anonymous p2p and darknets, what these kids are exposed to along side the music/games/films is going to get more and more worrying. There is already a lot of porn along side torrents. Maybe this is what the copyright enforcers want to use to strengthen their moral argument, call it gateway data or something.
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
I say bring it all out in the open so it can be regulated and taxed. Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites. On top of this, people will always want real world stuff to go with their data (think how much money the Star Wars toys made). On top of that, advertising worked well for existing TV. Good money can be made if free downloading is brought out in the open.
Not sure that it was such a good idea moving the servers to Netherlands.
The local RIAA (BREIN), have been pretty successful in having the law 'bent' to their will and having various torrent sites closed down.
Even now they've announced that the want to block the Pirate Bay in Netherlands [link is in dutch]:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/59677/brein-wil-na-vonnis-the-pirate-bay-in-nederland-laten-blokkeren.html
Rough translation: "Brein will use the guilty judgement against the Pirate Bay operators as a chance to try and convince the government to block Pirate Bay in Netherlands".
The current parliment act as if they're in the pockets of Brein, so I'm not sure why TPB thought it safe to put the servers here.
What we really need is some sort of decentralised torrent client.
It's a shame they didn't manage to buy Sealand.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I read the Pirate party has received three thousand new members since the verdict was announced. That's a /lot/ of Spartacus.
They could just get a boat but the problem would still be running a line to it. Since they have so much money I recommend they build a huge spindle in high Earth orbit, right near the rastafarian outpost.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The more you tighten your grip, Hollywood, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
That was supposed to be "Thoughts from England"
The MPAA better sue Google now, because Google has even more torrent links than Pirate Bay ever had, because it includes all Pirate Bay's links.
The establishment is never going to stop people from telling each other where to find stuff. And probably never stop people from publishing stuff they've got. People have the natural right to free press and speech; suppressing it ends only in revolution, even if just ungovernable sneakiness. The free speech about where to find stuff others have published is impossible to suppress.
And totally tyrannical to try.
--
make install -not war
Hey. Why are the authors' summaries always so assimilated by the MS/Disney/RIAA mindset? Yes, there are some that assert that there are problems with specific torrents, but they (the complainers) and they (the disputed torrents) are not everybody, every country nor every torrent. Stop bleating the technology == piracy mantra spread by Bill and his minions.
There are plenty of legitimate downloads via the Pirate Bay, such as the CCC 25 presentations. P2P in general is full of legit traffic. Just last week, apt-p2p was mentioned, though is has been around a while longer -- long enough for HOWTO Forge to pick it up.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Long live the leeches! FUCK artists, and FUCK their rights!
You should start a record company.
Real art cannot be made in a vacuum, no matter how much money you throw at the artist.
That aside, DeVotchKa may or may not be good. I haven't heard their music. But I can guarantee you there are lots of bands just as good and better, many of them making less money than them, who have been stabbed in the back by the very artists associations who are leading the putsch against a free (as in speech) internet.
You can't sell your work if you can't get it into the market. That's what this is about. Those so-called artists' associations are fighting to keep control over a market they never should have had control over.
And it's the people trying to keep the market controlled that are keeping the local bands from making as much as they should.
(But I still don't see anything wrong with artists having to have day jobs. It keeps them in touch with the real world, keeps their art meaningful.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If I said I didn't have an incentive to grow oranges unless I could plant a tree in your yard,
or if I said I didn't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I could own slaves on the
plantation, most people would see this is these as the worthless shallow arguments that they are.
But if I said I didn't have an incentive to to make beneficial or creative works without a
copyright monopoly, then all of a sudden people just take it on faith, they don't even question
it, they just assume that society would fall apart without them. In my humble opinion, this is
intellectually dishonest, especially considering that the entire Renaissance happened without
copyrights.
The simple fact is, there is no equivalence relationship between copyrights and property rights -
incentive does not a right make. The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the
fact that property has physical limits, while the foundation of copyrights dervives from kings
who granted publishers monopolies in return for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. The
history of copyrights is not one of rights, but control of sharing and restricting the open use
of knowledge.
That is why people who copy are not criminals, thieves, or akin to pirates who board ships and
murder people. No, infact they are really victims of a cruel deception. A deception that
copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every
artist that makes it "big" there are literally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit,
even hindered, or destroyed.
However, this is not the only failure of copyrights - it is just one in many issues related to
copyrights that are just blown off ignored, or glossed over. Like the failures of Hollywood
culture, the failures of big media to provide quality material, the failures to provide
reasonably priced books to college students while tabloids are dirt cheap, and massive anti-trust
behavior in the software industry to name a few.
While the problems associated with copyrights might have been bearable 20 years ago when the
biggest issue was Xerox machines, today we are in the information age where
information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no middle ground. Our society
will either have to control all of it or none of it. Our communications will either have to be
monitored or free, our privacy to be either continuously probed or protected.
In that sense, copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off our freedoms
until we cut it off at the root. The DMCA, infinite extensions, billion dollar lawsuits, are all
just symptoms of a poor belief system - not the cause. So the efforts to find a "middle ground"
on copyrights are a failure because they do not address the core issue. That contrary to
copyrights, the right to copy and distribute creative works and knowledge is a right!
Like freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, the right to copy things is a right that
exists above government. It is a moral right, it is an inherent right, it defines the very nature
of the human condition. It is beyond politics and the petition of leaders.
In fact, the entire foundation of politics rests on the notion that it's better to fight wars
with words than wars with bloodshed. But to copy things does not require coercion or violence at
all, the rules are not the same. We will not change the copyright situation by petitioning our
leaders, or voting to change the system. It can only be changed by defiance.
Defiance by holding the belief that people have rights, even if those rights appear contrary to
the popular mob or to the system. Defiance, by shedding off the guilt and shame that those who
try to impose copyrights on us and understanding that they are the ones who should be
guilty and shameful. Defiance by copying and sharing creative works whenever we have access to
them. Defiance by using technologies
.
Um, that is not how weeds act. When you kill a weed, it dies. You kill more of them, you have less of them.
Currently hooked on AMP
You can't stop the signal, Mal.
Even if they manage to stamp out internet filesharing through draconian means, people will go back to SneakerNet if they have to, like they do in Cuba as we speak. Get with the program, RIAA/MPAA/Television Networks/etc; it's here to stay, nothing you can do with ever stop it completely.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Piracy is what people do when they take over boats with threat of force of arms and accompanied by danger to lives. Copyright violation is exactly what the words describe. Ascribing a sense of romantic villainy by the use of loaded words pushes the argument into emotion, rather than common sense.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear