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Google Boots Transdroid From Android Market
fysdt writes with a TorrentFreak story that starts: "Google has pulled one of the most popular torrent download managers from the Android Market because of policy violations. Before Google booted the application, Transdroid had been available for two years and amassed 400,000 users during that time. Thus far Google hasn't specified what the exact nature of Transdoid's violations are, but it's not unlikely that they relate to copyright infringement."
Be prepared to never own anything.
Company can uninstall software on your phone,
Decide what you can have,
Localise you,
But you still got the right to pay...
You know, I have always held out like many others that torrenting was not theft, that purely virtual copies harmed no one.
But I have to admit feeling some kind of line is crossed with a system that can (as the article stated) scan a physical barcode of something in front of you and start fetching it in moments.
It's still not really theft but frankly, from a moral standpoint it's so close to theft I have trouble distinguishing the difference.
My own take on the matter has always been if I cannot buy something in some other way, I have no problems acquiring it; so the ability to do exactly the opposite, acquiring something when the physical presence of it exists right in front of you, just seems very wrong.
It's obviously that anyone with technical knowledge could easily set up something similar but I have to say I don't really have a problem with any company saying they do not wish to implicitly support something like this and thus banning an application from a store. I doubt this app will be appearing in an Android store either.
The really bad things about apps like this is that it appears rather like theft not just to me, but to the people that make laws, who will over time seek to make illegal that which should not be, using this as a basis.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was removed from the MARKET, not your device.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We all know bit torrent can be used for downloading Game of Thrones, pr0n, Microsoft COFEE or GNU/Linux distros... why would Google remove what is considered a "neutral" app all of a sudden?
The "it encourages to download copyrighted material through screenshots" argument does sound pretty week to me.
And anyway, what about the whole "it's pretty clear by now given the studies that downloading is not responsible for the downfall of civilisation as we know it and modern culture and is in fact quite beneficial for everyone involved considering the big picture" part?
A cue for someone else's rant?
By the way, you know which market still has Transdroid and plenty other nice FOSSÂapps? http://f-droid.org/repository
No wit here.
It was just a client for the various webservers in torrent clients such as Transmission. You could use the built-in VPN client AndroidVNC, too. Or the built-in webbrowser. Is Google going remove the built-in webbrowser too?
More likely than the copyright angle (or maybe in addition to it) is the explanation that they got rid of it after receiving pressure from the wireless service providers. Verizon and AT&T hate when people use bandwidth they actually pay for, and someone running torrents on their phone will probably end up using it in 3G mode at least some of the time. They want you paying as much as possible, and then they do everything they can to dissuade you from actually making use of what you buy. I see this as probably another manifestation of their entitlement mentality. I wish it were the most egregious and aggravating, but the sad fact is this is just one in a long line of abuses.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
FTA:
Although Transdroid itself isn’t infringing any copyrights, the screenshots on the app’s website do feature some copyrighted downloads which Google may see as a violation of the Android developer policy. As we highlighted previously, this is not a particularly wise thing to do.
Really? How is picking up my DVD off my shelf and then downloading a lower quality torrent on my phone so that I can take it with me "theft"?
You have problems differentiating between theft of real goods and the non-commercial personal use of copyrighted items
No, I have problems understanding how a physical means of acquiring something that lets me enjoy a project someone worked hard on and should be paid for without giving them anything, is any different than leaving the physical copy there but still enjoying the product without providing any revenue to the content producers.
Like I said, I only torrent things I cannot find a means to buy. I honestly don't even really care about the middle men at all like Best Buy, I just want to get money to the people who make the things I enjoy so they can make more things I enjoy.
Anyone torrenting to get a backup copy of something they own, I have no issue with. But I still think it's wrong to torrent something like a movie that you do not own and will realistically only watch once.
Do you really find there is no case where using a torrent is morally wrong?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not trying to offer up useless schlock, or waste time but google removing Transdroid from the app market hardly did anything that will remotely impact a savvy user. If one has their android phone rooted you can simply install aptoide and get all the apps you need. :) Just grabbed transdroid from there myself, forgot I deleted it!
It's immoral to pay the assholes who sell physical CDs, major labels, etc. To me, the moral question is more : How much more convenient & pleasant do they need to make it before I buy the product?
I'll admit that I still order math or c.s. books from amazon or abebooks once I'm seriously reading the gigapedia download. I just enjoy the printed form factor more than a djvu or pdf on my ebook reader. I make an effort to (1) buy used before new, so the publisher sees no money, and (2) buy form abebooks before amazon. I naturally feel some anti-consumerist pang of guilt when forced to buy new.. and wonder if a better ebook reader might make me a more moral person. I would never purchase music or movies except from a truly independent artist, like PJ Harvey. And I've feel extremely guilty even paying for a theater. I've otoh spent maybe $80 at the xkcd store.
I'm obviously happy going the extra mile to avoid paying the immoral assholes & their lawyers running the content industry, but not everyone takes life nearly as seriously as me. It's therefore easy to imagine a developer writing this to help user kids into piracy, prevent them from wasting their money, etc., but it's quite hard to imagine ever actually using this software. If I had kids who hung out at a mall, then I'd install this on their phones, but otherwise it sounds useless to me.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Just how is this different to the Apple app store again?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
That "moral Geiger counter" seems to be broken at the other end, however, when content creators use political muscle to extend copyright terms again and again; when they prevent content from getting into the public domain through legal tricks; when they force consumers to buy the same content again and again through technological obsolescence; when TV and movie studios raid the literary classics for ideas and then try to claim copyrights on the resulting stories; when they demand fees and taxes in order to compensate them for private copying and then still go out and prevent that copying.
Morality and decency has to be a two-way street, but right now, consumers are by-and-large treating the studios and publishers morally, while they are screwing consumers over again and again.
If I owned a hardware store and advertised hammers by displaying the use of the hammer in breaking into a house/safe whatever, then maybe there would be some not unexpected bad blood from people who experienced some damage from hammer wielding thieves, or were even just worried about the possibility.
Whether the recipient seemed like they deserved such treatment because they did bad things to kittens is moot, being seen to promote illegal activities as a positive use of your product is just a bit silly, even if you vehemently disagree with said law.
Arguing about the pros and cons of banning hammers in a particular store because in some cases the use is wrong but seems justified seems even sillier to me.
I find it a delicious irony that Google has no problem hosting Transdroid source at Google code.
What the fuck are you talking about? I have a nagging feeling that this is not exactly a warez site. Using your logic, HTTP and HTTPS should also be banned because people up- and download warez over it, and so should be SMTP because most e-mail is spam these days. It's a data transfer protocol, stupid. That some people are transferring data illegally is not very relevant to your argument.
to your garden, I am sure they wont get any taller later and they are pretty far away...right now. I know you let anyone come in and plant what they want and tend it as they line, so you have a lot of creative and interesting things going on at once, but the walls seem... familiar somehow have I seen them elsewhere before maybe?
Considering there are nearly a dozen other torrent managers still on the market - some with over a quarter of a million downloads - I'd say that it is not unlikely the submitter is talking out of their ass.
Yes, I remember the trial where it was proved that the tool was being used to infringe copyright. Oh no hold on, I don't because there wasn't one. Thank god our freedoms are being preserved by allowing private companies to decide whether or not the law is being broken.
If this was a clampdown on torrent clients, then they'd all be toast. As it's one particular client, it is likely an issue specific to that client.
Google shouldn't have the power to decide what people can (easily) install on their device.
As Transdroid is FOSS you can get it from F-Droid.
http://f-droid.org/repository/
The bedrock argument of the modern economic system is contained within a famous sentence by economist Baron Lionel Robbins in his 1932 essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science - "Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Scarcity is what is supposed to give a commodity value, and is a bedrock reason for most of the structures of our economic system and against the socialist ideas which were prevalent at the time - a commodity either belonged to me or you, it couldn't belong to both of us. Only one of us could have it, and who would use it to greater utility?
Of course, in our modern world, our system of economic production is changing. Mechanization and biotechnology has caused the percentage of people working on farms to drop from over 70% of the population 150 years ago, to less than 3% nowadays. And the actual farm workers average less than $9 an hour pay - the money in agriculture moved away from the farm a long time ago, but it has since moved from mechanization and manufacturing like John Deere, to biotech like Monsanto. Yet the US grows more food than ever before, and is even a net exporter in agriculture. Again scarcity falls away - once the research is done, duplication of the end product costs next to nothing.
With how economics has been discussed in our institutions for over a century, there is really no economic argument for why books, DVDs and other media should not be copied once the initial commodity containing them is sold. It is only by going back to the older economic arguments of the labor theory of value, the idea of Adam Smith, and David Ricardo, and the classical economists, that this makes any sense. If a commodity is valuable due to the labor embedded in it, and not due to its inherent scarceness, then yes, your idea that it there is some problem with it, a "moral" one you say, makes sense. That commodities have value due to the labor used to make them is the bedrock of Marx's analysis of capitalism - he took the analysis of Benjamin Franklin, Ricardo, Say, Malthus, Adam Smith and so forth and added his own interpretation to their work. In many ways the modern hegemonic discarding of all of their ideas of the labor theory of value is a reaction to Marx.
Our modern economic arrangements, where it is said it is best that almost all capital be in the hand of a few capitalists, and that government's role in the economy be small, and that social programs be discouraged and so forth is all built on a bedrock of economic arguments of scarcity. You can not just say you have some funny feeling there is a moral problem with sharing a commodity since the arguments for all of these things is built on the concept that commodities are scarce - that is a bedrock economic argument of a capitalist economic system. If you accept the arguments for our economic system, then sharing a commodity you bought with millions of others is not "wrong". if you feel that there is some moral issue with it, or that there is some economic unfairness to it, then you are saying commodities are worth something not due to scarcity but due to the labor embedded within them. But then this knocks out the pillars of argument of justification for our modern economic system. Such things as policemen forcibly ejecting families from their homes, due to lack of money to pay rent, because the person lost their job in a Michigan factory, because the profit rate of the factory owner had gone down due to a world overproduction of commodities - this would be unforgivably cruel and have lost whatever piece of justification it had if we were had elements of a post-scarcity economy where value from what used to be called commodities had value in them due to the labor embedded within them.
I wish I better at explaining these economic issues to layman. But the arguments the RIAA/MPAA MAFIAA make against file sharing are truly anti-capitalist arguments. They are trying to have their cake and eat it to. I wi
but isn't this just a logical conclusion from having barcode scanner sw in the phone and the ability to have scans from that as input? what would be okay then, having two different pieces of software , this utorrent clone and then as a different sw something called barcode-search-to-text-field? are we doing intentionally shitty apps now? yes.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I can follow your argument quite easily. However, I totally disagree with your assessment that imparting some value because of embedded labor is wrong. In fact your entire argument seems backwards in fundamental ways.
To start with, a family being ejected from a home has nothing to do with this argument really. It might be the case the family has put some work into a home, but if so then you are still measuring the marketable value of that labor vs. the remaining amount of money owed on a home. If a family cannot make mortgage payments then they can sell a home for more than the loan if they have added enough value; otherwise it will be repossessed and it's not "cruel" but understandable since they still owe more than the labor they have put into a home.
Indeed thinking about a product of thought as commodity is what is cruel, you treat the person producing it as no more than someone who glued a cog onto a watch. But the reality is that intellectual work has a much higher value than mere labor or a physical artifact produced. If you claim something that takes 30 million dollars to put together is free to all once you have produced a single DVD, then that in fact is what would cause the economy we have to collapse because many things of value that take many resources and people to produce, would never happen - and our entire society would be intellectually poorer as a result.
But there's another flaw in your thinking on the other side. The other possible side of value you claim is work put into it; but that too ignores the only side of the equation that really matters - the value to someone interested in AQUIRING.
I think in the end the issue of value begin a matter of the physical resources taken to produce a commodity, or labor put into something is wrong going and coming. The true value of anything is how much people value it, so if millions like something enough to pay $10/each for it, that is the true value. It doesn't matter how much labor is put into something; a 30 million dollar production might bomb and only make $10 million. A house that someone left as ramshackle might be found to be in a highly desirable area over time, increasing value through no effort on the owners part and not being inherent to the commodity that exists so much as the context.
Value then is something that can only be truly measured by desire. And that in the end is what renders the free download of something you could pay for un-ethnical and a kind of thief; because you yourself placed value upon the object that you are acquiring without transfer of anything to the one that produced it.
I still do not find sharing something to be an issue, because there was to start with some transfer of value from a purchaser to producer. But the issue there is that traditionally it was a one-to-one transfer of sharing, not sharing en masse. There needs to be some factor that keeps sharing from being an exponential instead of linear loss of returned value.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley