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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.
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
The irony of moving your weeds to the Netherlands ...
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.
I read the Pirate party has received three thousand new members since the verdict was announced. That's a /lot/ of Spartacus.
I've always thought public consensus of a law was integral to that law. If people don't believe a law is just, they'll ignore it. If you criminalise enough people over things they don't consider wrong you erode respect for all laws.
In the UK it's illegal to rip CD's to your MP3 player and yet I'm betting 99% of the MP3 players in the UK have ripped music on them. By criminalising CD ripping you cause people to lose respect for the law, in this case when your average citizen finds out they instantly see it as the fault of the stupid record companies. Which in turn makes it easier to "steal" from those same "greedy" companies.
In comparison most people hate speed camera's but they agree with the idea of having a speed limit and sticking roughly to it. Heck even when I got caught speeding recently my outrage wasn't about getting the speeding ticket but because Dorset/Somerset's police attitudes towards bikers (which borders on harassment) annoyed me. As for doing 40MPH in a 30, well I should have stuck to the limit.
I believe you can have unpopular laws like speed limits but people understand the need for them and so they work. On the other hand people don't understand copyright and its application these days.
The media companies have been so hell bent on treating all customers like criminals and subtracting value, that people see them as an evil faceless corporation (see Slashdots view on Microsoft) and that makes it ok to take from them. This particular ruling has probably done more harm to the Media companies cause then anything they've done. Just go to the BBC's Have your Say section (or any newspapers) and 99% of the comments are against the media companies and how laws can be bought. The sheer amount of effort required to force these companies to provide the customer what they want has annoyed a lot of people.
I believe in copyright, I'm a software engineer I've worked on a variety of TDL and UXV applications and know how expensive and difficult it is make good software. But software/media analogies aren't perfect, if my company didn't keep improving their software and adding new capability to it another competitor would get the future sales. With music/movies you could make one great movie and people will still buy it even if new movies come out. Which is the big difference between software and media.
I honestly hope that in time politicians release than reducing the copyright length to something closer to twenty years (I'd prefer ten) and decriminalising non-commercial copyright, will be in the best interest for everyone. Since it would help maintain respect for law and encourage more media.
As for the internet age stopping the big blockbusters and the current pop stars, I can only hope. Hollywood has fallen into the same black hole as games, where more special effects are the equivalent of adding more polygons. At a certain point it adds nothing new and the fixation often means more important things are forgotten.
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