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Pirate Bay Founders Lose Final Appeal
therufus writes "Sweden's Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay criminal trial. This means that the previously determined jail sentences and fines handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström will stand."
Dear MPAA/RIAA drone,
You are cordially invited to lick my taint while working the shaft with one hand and the balls with the other.
--Slashdot Community
This is guaranteed to get modded down because it's anti-piracy.
No, it should get modded down because its a canned response from fucking Mafiaa shill.
Oh look, copypasta from fuck knows how many years ago. Slashdot isn't dead, the art of trolling is.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Simple black and white worldview horseshit.
There are more libertarians here than there are at a Tea Party rally. And while there are folks here who without a doubt pirate because they're cheap and build rationalizations around it, there's an awful lot more who wouldn't dream of stealing.
It's not about getting free beer, it's about freedom of ideas and expression. And it's about draconian, unworkable solutions that will only stifle freedom of expression, innovation and open communication without censorship.
Techniques like dns blocking, holding a repository site responsible for every single client's actions, enforcing search engine censorship simply won't stop piracy. But it will build a framework to further stifle freedom of expression on the web, and to enhance mega corporation and government control.
You are attempting to paint those who are for an open internet in simplistic black and white terms, to impose a simpleton's view on others.
Check your premises.
GPL code must be protected because it's free shit, yet copyright must also be abolished so we can get free shit--even though the GPL is a copyright license!
Result of GPL enforcement: More work available to the public.
Result of shortening copyright: More work available to the public.
Do you understand now or do you still have some homework to do?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You are stealing from artists who created content.
So what if i download some Michael Jackson or John Lennon music or how about the game L.A Noire. Am i hurting the artists who are dead or the game studio which is shut , where is the harm to the artist here ?
If I die should my job still pay me?
And while there are folks here who without a doubt pirate because they're cheap and build rationalizations around it, there's an awful lot more who wouldn't dream of stealing.
It's not about getting free beer, it's about freedom of ideas and expression.
I consider myself a Libertarian, and yes I make a living because of copyright. I also think that 100+ years is too long, I also think that piracy is rampant. A LOT of people don't realize it is wrong.
But the general feeling I get from the average slashdotter is "copyright is evil because I want free stuff." I hear time and again how the publishers are screwing the creators, or the general public, so the slashdotter is going to stick it to the man and copy the item anyways. Or the price is too high, so they will copy it. As long as they get their tv and music and games for free.
I think that things like SOPA are bad. But not that copyright should be abolished. I also think there are a lot of people here who thing they way you think in that it is a matter of principle. BUT the noisiest argument tends to "I want my shit for free" Of course these people then call the "mafiaa" greedy
Wrong analogy. The right one is: "If I die, does that mean you can come to my house and take photographs of my stuff?"
Not to feed a troll, but...
1) You have too much time on your hands.
2) The posts you linked are irrelevant.
3) Complaining about moderation, poll options, isn't going to make you any friends.
4) Your usernames in the citations relate to being a troll or a karma whore.
5) Trying to score FP with copy and paste drivel isn't going to make you any friends.
You may think you're smart, funny, and devastatingly handsome. Since we haven't seen a picture of you, all I can say is that you're wrong on at least 2 counts. In that, you've probably managed to get some people to specifically mod *you* down.
Finally, you don't seem to really understand who the "moderators" are. It's all of us. As long as you can manage to write something intelligent occasionally, you'll get mod points. It's not a secret gang of moderating thugs out to ruin your life. I've seen my own posts go from -1 to 5 with a couple dozen moderations, usually based on the controversy of the topic.
I fully expect this post to be modded down, because it did not lend anything to the topic at hand. That's fine, because I will post my opinion in another comment, which isn't tainted by your stench.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I've had anti-piracy comments modded up in the past. Despite what some people say, slashdot is not a hive mind with a single opinion on everything.
The problem that many people here have with anti-piracy efforts however are quite reasonable:
1. The legal liability of having committed some form of infringement can exceed by orders of magnitude the liability of shoplifting the same content.
2. The legislation aimed at stopping piracy has considerable collateral damage.
3. Copyright duration is excessive far beyond reasonableness. Two schoolteachers wrote a little song in 1893 called "Good Morning to All". A few variations later and it morphed into the more familiar "Happy Birthday to You". Copyright for this was later filed in 1935 and under current US law does not expire until 2030. I am not aware of actually having met anyone who was alive when this song was written, though I'm told I briefly met my great-grandmother shortly after I was born. She would have been a young child when the song was written.
4. There are many indications that it's not necessarily even a revenue loss, or that if there is any revenue lost that the amount is significant. All damage estimates go by the assumption that a download == a lost sale. There is no guarantees that someone who pirated something would necessarily have bought it otherwise. This does not make their actions legal or moral, but from a fiscal perspective no harm has been done to the copyright holder.
The dichotomy you think you see (or claim to see) on slashdot is not a matter of "GPL infringement bad, media infringement good!" It's a matter of commercial vs non-commercial infringement. Most here will be hesitant to punish or call for strong penalties on a non-commercial infringer of any stripe, while being perfectly willing to see commercial infringers strung up. That can include both a company claiming GPL code as their own, or a guy selling illegal burned CDs/DVDs out of a warehouse somewhere.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
At least the editors waited for the story to fall all the way to the bottom of the front page before duping it!
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
For your hours worked, yes. If I die feb 27th I expect my employer to pay my estate for all of the wages I earned to that point, and if I am due monies later for the work done in that period (say the contract isn't paid until june) my estate would still get paid for my portion of the work.
If my estate, which at that point is transfered to someone else (who may have legally paid for my services such that my work was work for hire for them) they may continue to be paid for that work even though I'm long since dead. My work is also never entirely my own. Michael Jackson and John Lennon are good examples. If they had gotten divorces rather than died they would still be obliged to pay child support and alimony up until today. Michael jackson was not the only person who contributed to his music. All of his investors, his spouse(s), other employees etc. He is credited with having been the guy on stage, but for him to be there hundreds of other people are involved.
Should you have to pay less for a car if one of the designers died 3 years ago even though they were paid by GM?
As to L.A. Noire. The studio is shuttered but money you pay *does* go to the studio. It didn't disappear. It still exists as a legal entity with debts (that's why they went out of business), and that money goes to the artists who are still owed back wages, the owners or investors who paid the artists in the first place to make it. As of october 75% of Team Bondi debts were to former employees who weren't paid. So not paying for the game is a giant fuck you to those guys who made the game and never got paid for it, when if you did pay for the game that money would be disbursed to them. The publisher (Rockstar) who contributed to the actual making of the game, paid team bondi and participated heavily in development also would get money which they are entitled to.
How do you think the basically bankrupt interplay stays afloat? People keep buying baulders gate etc. on gog.com or similar and that gives them a trickle of revenue.
The Pirate Bay is a search engine. I remember a time when that wasn't illegal.
Don't be surprised to see this bullshit come to more popular search engines. Hell, Google pulls search results because of DMCA notices -- who knows why -- and there's already a push from the content industries for search engines to "promote" "valid" sources of content over "invalid" sources.
Lawyers are the worst thing to happen to the Internet.
A LOT of people don't realize it is wrong.
Correction: A lot of people do not believe that it is wrong. This is the case despite the fact that we have experienced 20+ years of propaganda intended to convince us that violating copyright is exactly the same as physical property theft (e.g. "You wouldn't steal a car, would you??").
Copyright is evil because it puts a monopoly on culture. I'll argue that if older material were released to the public domain as the founders intended, there would be more than enough free material to bring down piracy on newer creations. People pirate the new stuff because the old stuff has been out of print for so long (which benefits no one), they've forgotten about it. Put it in the public domain rather than let it gather dust.
But do you believe in convicting people who run a website with links to such works to prision and fining them in millions of dollars?
Because that's what we're discussing here.
Dilbert RSS feed
> Monitoring "every single" thing on every site is impossible
How wrong you are. I suggest you read up about "Lawful Intercept" (which is as backward a term as you can get). The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms. What used to be impossible now is completely possible. Plus, many first world countries store the IP traffic that passes their borders. It wouldn't surprise me if this was shared (in the same way signal intelligence is shared via the ECHELON network). Do some Googling about those keywords I've mentioned. Oh, yeah, and welcome to 1984 for real.
Of course these people then call the "mafiaa" greedy
Ah ... excuse me, but they are greedy, to an extent that makes British Petroleum look positively philanthropic. The feeling I get from most Slashdotters is far more balanced than you are trying to portray: getting things for free is irrelevant. Being able to communicate and use the Internet as we see fit is of paramount importance, and keeping the media companies and governments in their place is necessary in order to do that. I'm a software engineer, and I make my living via copyrights and patents as well ... yet I recognize that the needs of the copyright industry should not be placed above all else.
... they tried to make it illegal. In fact, anything that they perceive as a threat to their hegemony, their iron-fisted control of content distribution, is to be eliminated regardless of cost, and regardless of who gets hurt.
... or a few rich sociopaths with all the vision and foresight of a toadstool.
Frankly, entertainment is just not that important in the overall scheme of things, in spite of the megalomaniacal mental state that seems to permeate that industry. You may find this hard to believe, but the Internet is actually used for other things than copyright infringement (that's the correct term under U.S. law, you know: "piracy" is reserved for those who commit infringement for profit.) But PIRACY just sounds so much nastier, doesn't it? Evokes images of swashbuckling, one-eyed peg-legged types murdering and raping and pillaging and all that. It's just cartel PR, though.
What I would hope you would do, before commenting upon this subject any further, is research the history of the content industry (all of it, books and print media, music, and motion pictures.) What you will soon discover, if you're sufficiently intellectually honest, are organizations who need to be opposed, at all levels, out of simple self-preservation. This is not about free stuff. This is about having any stuff. Yes, it's that serious.
Keep in mind that the Internet, to the content cartels, is just another annoying technology to be opposed, limited, neutered, and if possible eliminated. Cassette tape, VHS, writeable DVDs and CDs, Digital Audio Tape, you-name-it
So get it out of your head that this is about free copies. It's not. It never has been. It's about whether the greatest invention in human history will be continue to be used for the good of all
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Don't be evil story - Jan 24th.
http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/01/23/2045235/facebook-twitter-and-myspace-to-google-dont-be-evil?sdsrc=rel
Even the first few comments after the announcement article on google+ integrating search were not what you'd call positive.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/01/10/1627213/google-merges-google-into-search?sdsrc=rel
Google+ Antitrust lawsuit discussed as well..
http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/01/14/1726244/ftc-expands-its-google-antitrust-investigations
Original Google anti-trust lawsuit.
http://search.slashdot.org/story/11/06/23/2137243/ftc-to-open-antitrust-investigation-against-google?sdsrc=rel
While the iOS/Android market share stuff is harder to find, a quick search finds
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/01/24/230257/apple-announces-most-profitable-quarter-in-history with the first few comments quite favourable in apples direction, but also noting its hard to compare from this data android/apple numbers - and then it descends into some M$/Apple argument.
I do however recall reading on slashdot about the entire iOS/Android market share swinging in Apples favour by a few fractions of a percentage, I'm just lost trying to find the actual article I read this in.
I'm not too sure where you're getting your information from, but maybe you don't read the same slashdot I read. If anything, you are more likely to be modded down because you ARE a troll and simply trying to spread disinformation.
If that's true, I'd like to steal Star Wars Episode I from Lucas so he won't have it anymore.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Just like sex, I believe in paying for it. (joke)
But, seriously, if you use someone's work, then you should be willing to pay for their work. That can take any number of routes, but the emphasis is on 'being fair'. (This implies that work not be overpriced.)
Well ... you just left the content cartels out right there. "Fair" really isn't in their vocabulary.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Way to fall for his reverse psychology. I guess because he accused us of being biased we should all turn an about face and donate money to Chris Dodd's presidential campaign.
You know, there are places in the world where copyright infringement for personal use is perfectly legal and explicitly guaranteed in law. So, chastising the folks from the pirate bay for doing stuff which is quite legal in most of the world is not a good way to try to demonstrate your worldly knowledge.
And moreover, the only reason there is this hissy fit due to copyright is due to the US's pressure on the world to pass legislature which forces a perfectly legal, acceptable and even desirable act, particularly to copyright holders, to become illegal, all this without providing any shred of reasoning to back it up. Well, at least if you don't count blackmail as reasoning.
The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms.
Would you care to estimate what the world's internet traffic amounts to, per day.
One day I hope you work in a field which suffers from incessant piracy and you remember back to when you thought it was OK.
Heh for a moment I thought you meant an actual field on a farm, and I was very confused.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I'll bite.
If you want to play the car analogy, it can't be about stealing the car. Pirating software diminishes the value of the work to the author, so to do a proper car analogy, you would need to do something to the car that diminishes its value to its owner, while not actually taking anything physical away.
One example is keying the car. I can be an ass by taking a key, pressing it against the side of the car and walking along, minding my own business. After I'm done, the car is still driveable, it gets the owner from point A to point B just fine, none of the performance characteristics are diminished and I'm all the happier for having revelled in the screeching noise I got to make. Did I physically steal the car or any piece of it? No. Was I within my rights then?
A second example is taking the car for a joyride, but taking care not to demolish it. After the joyride I respectfully return it to the place I stole it from before the driver gets back. Now, the driver still has his/her car, there are just a few miles on it... I'm all the happier for having driven it without having to buy. Was I within my rights? I didn't *steal* it after all, did I?
So no, pirating isn't stealing in the common sense, but it is taking something of value from the owner. How do you quantify that? Well, if the owner gets a lawyer after you, they'll try to make it into the most horrendous theft of property and argue that the car is almost worthless after your escapade. That's what lawyers do, they try to extract the maximum that the law allows for their client. I will be the first to argue that the owner cannot argue any more damages and loss of revenue than the car's resale value (actually, just a fraction of it), but I will not stand up for you if the court decides you need to do some time and neither should anyone else.
You are extremely ignorant
a) of laws in other countries.
In Canada is is perfectly _legal_ to download copyrighted material.
b) of the breakdown of /. and their 3 camps ...
i) The small minority who say abolish this nonsensical artificial "right". _Publishers_ invented copyright because they didn't want _other_ publishers from printing & making money.
ii) The majority who say copyright is reasonable, but its current duration is absurd.
iii) The extremely minority who think the current duration is just fine.
> You are stealing from artists who created content.
You keep using this word 'stealing.' I don't thin it means what you think it means.
How am I "stealing" when I share a number?? Who's property have I deprived??
> No system can work in which nobody gets compensated for their work.
And your proof is where again?
> You're not contributing anything back when you pirate something.
So if I buy a DVD/Bluray and let my family watch, are they "leeching"?
What if I invite 50 of my friends over? Are they leeching?
Why am I not allowed to share with strangers?
What about libraries? They sure as hell share content with many, many people, yet the original artist never receives compensation. With your logic libraries should be illegal.
--
AC = Arrogant Cunt
This is a bit of a whoosh.
The "You wouldn't steal a car, would you?" line is directly from anti piracy clips included on many DVDs and possibly back on VHS tapes.
If I have a copy of Word and I give a copy to my friend, how does that diminish the value of my copy? It doesn't. It may diminish the value to the author of Word, if he's trying to sell it, but not to me. Who's the "owner" of software? The license owner? The author? And that's the problem with physical analogies - they don't work because of one fundamental difference: you can not make physical copies at virtually no cost. If at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
Well ... you just left the content cartels out right there. "Fair" really isn't in their vocabulary.
That I did, and I agree. The bands that I've seen all *seem* to prefer your going to their concerts. Album revenues just don't 'trickle down'.
Chock it up as yet another market that, under current conditions, doesn't operate optimally.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
IIf at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
We are working on it ( http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set ), but it will not be a single device, at least not in the near term. It will be an "ecology" of devices that will make parts for each other. That is because ceramics, metals, plastic, wood, etc. generally need different processing techniques, and it's not easy to put that all into one device. But nothing stops you from having a large workshop with various machines, and then a robot does the assembly at the end, and have it all driven by a single 3D object file.
As a practical matter, there will always be some parts you have to buy. For example, you won't be replicating what intel does in it's factories any time soon. But you can place bought parts on storage shelves for the assembly robot to grab when it needs them. What needs doing is lots of grunt level design and programming to make the "ecology" as closed-loop as possible and minimize the bought items.
I'll reply to both above posts here. As to whoosh.. What I was trying to say is that although the "stealing" analogy is a simplification, it's not entirely wrong as it does cause loss to the owner of the car.
As for copying: you aren't the owner of the game. You are just paying for the privilege of playing (license). It's a little like renting or timesharing the said car. You don't exactly own the game, just like you don't exactly own a timeshared car even though you do get to drive it around and you can tell your friends it's yours. This is not an exact analogy, but I think you get the idea. Now if you let your friend have a copy of the game, the person losing the value is the owner of the work, i.e. the author. In the case of the timeshared car, if you let your friend joyride the car off the record you are putting the other co-owners in a losing situation that is probably against the agreement you have with them about using the car.
So, in both of the above situations, you yourself aren't losing value, you're absolutely right about that! But when the MPAA puts its "you wouldn't steal.." motto, they don't mean stealing from an owner of a copy of the tape. They mean themselves, of course. They are basically saying that by copying you are robbing them of the opportunity to charge you. Although that is not stealing literally, if someone robs you of your right to make a buck (note that you do have that right), you can sue for damages in the amount that you justifiably argue that you would have earned, if you weren't robbed of the opportunity.
Now, the amount of damages that the MafiAAs are asking for is usually ludicrous, since all the pirates would NOT buy their music. Quite often these associations just multiply the number of downloads by the price. While this is obviously wrong, you can still argue that someone putting up an operation like The Pirate Bay is actually providing the product for free to a significant number of folks who would otherwise buy, if they couldn't get it for free. How significant? The Swedish court seems to think this to be about $7M, which equals "only" about 350-700k CDs. Now, you and I know that The Pirate Bay probably facilitates for people the download of a fair bit more CDs than that in a week. The court (thankfully) seems to recognise that not all the downloaders are potential buyers. This is why the actual damages are "just" $7M and not some ludicrous number in the billions that the propaganda folks would like the public to believe. Still, I'd hate to owe 7 mil, as I'm finding a $300k mortgage to be plenty.
You went awry with your analogy as soon as you considered how piracy diminished value to the owner. You need to rewrite your analogy in terms of how it affects the manufacturer. For example, instead of asking how the joyride scenario affects the owner, how does it affect Ford?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Thank you.
If it's any consolation, I made it to 5 anyway.
Randomly aside, I've yet to receive 15 mod points in one shot. I'm guessing it's because I rarely use up all 5 when they give me that much.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
So get it out of your head that this is about free copies. It's not. It never has been.
Yes it is. The stuff about an open Internet is 50%genuine principles, and 50% a pompous rationalization from greedy geeks who want free copies.
entertainment is just not that important in the overall scheme of things
Agreed. And you'll see that here on /. when people get all supercilious and uppity about how bad movies are, they're all rubbish, etc., etc.
But they still pirate it.
In the case of Michael Jackson, I remember a time when he received a billion dollars up front for his next 7 albums (tried to find a link, but google is saturated with current stories...). He hadn't even made them yet. The idea is that they pay him up front and then they receive money afterwards. He gets a reduced payout, but it is also de-risked. No matter what kind of crap he put out, he would still have the money.
Clearly the people who payed him (I believe it was Sony) was expecting to make a profit. The more money they think they will make in the future, the more money they can afford to pay the artist up front. It is true that you can't hurt someone who is dead, but if the studios feel that they will make less money, they will offer less up front. It is also true that reduced sales (for whatever reason) by the recording companies will reduce the amount of money they offer to artists in the future.
I don't like the way the recording industry works. I don't like the current copyright laws (especially the length of copyright). This, despite the fact that for most of my life I have made my living off of copyright (as a programmer). I especially don't like the direction that copyright law seems to be going. I believe there are other, better ways to do business.
But, I also believe it is completely factual to say that artists who rely on the existing system will be hurt by any lack of sales resulting from copyright infringement (whatever that may be).
Your car analogies are *idiotic*. The actual analogy would be a device that you can point at any car, which creates an exact copy(minus any personal items) back in your garage. It doesn't affect the original owner of the car, aside from resale value, which was never guaranteed. The device would obviously be a miraculous boon in many ways, and the car manufacturers would find themselves in the exact same position as the **AAs and be falling over themselves to push for ever-stronger penalties and more heavy-handed preventative measures against people copying their designs, and would call the scanning "stealing" (and it would still be a misnomer). And yes, their old business model would be rendered rather obsolete. Independant groups would undoubtably arise to design their own cars which could be freely copied, although without the money and expertise of the large manufacturers behind them, most people would probably still perfer copies of the big names, at least initially. Things like custom-designed cars for each person and susbcription services where you can go into a showroom to scan a new car each month, or have the car dealers' scanners deliver new cars automatically, would undoubtably become a larger part of the business of the car companies that survived the transition.
(I should note I'm ignoring negative exernalities [increased pollution, etc.] for the purposes of this analogy, as digital data transfers are a bit different from physical objects in that sense. You could actually make a decent connection between increased traffic congestion due to free cars and increased bandwidth usage due to piracy, though. Still a net positive on that front in my opinion, especially as things like legal streaming services are making more bandwidth necessary anyway)
No, actually Janimal was bang on. Answer his argument if you can, rather than making specious non-sequiturs.
OK. I download some MP3s from a friend because I want to hear them. I decide I don't really like them very much and don't listen to them anymore. How is the value of the work diminished to its creator? It isn't. I probably wasn't going to buy the MP3s to begin with, and having confirmed that I don't really like the music, I won't. No net gain or loss to either myself or the creator.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD? If I do, the value to the creator is actually increased, isn't it? Admittedly, most people who download a lot of MP3s probably aren't going to buy the CDs, but some do. Therefore the act of possessing MP3s does not itself diminish anything.
The problem here is that, even if a reasonable person can understand that getting music without paying for it is wrong, there's a disconnect between the law as written and promoted and people's innate sense of morality. It's like saying "marijuana must remain outlawed because we did a survey of one hundred rapists and all of them were high on reefer, proving that dope smokers are violent rapists." Now, we already KNOW that marijuana is against the law. We don't really WANT to think of ourselves as lawbreakers. But we hear this ruling, and we think, "Wait a minute. I smoke weed. Gary over there smokes weed. So do Janet and Steve. In fact, everybody I know smokes weed, and nobody has ever raped anybody." Thus, contempt for the law grows.
In the case of file sharing, movie studios are reporting record profits, rap stars are bragging about all the hundreds of millions they make and renting out entire floors of hospitals so their wife can give birth in private, and yet the content lobby is telling us that your 16-year-old son is a criminal because he didn't pay for the Korn MP3s on his iPod, and libraries are stealing because they want to let people borrow the same e-book more than 20 times. To a reasonable person, even one who believes that taking things without paying for them is wrong, these assertions just don't add up.
Breakfast served all day!
DPI and filtering in hardware does NOT sink the whole stream to disk. the whole point is to set smart triggers and capture the 'sensitive' traffic.
I've turned down more jobs that are DPI related than I can shake a stick at. makes me puke to think of my field being perverted to 'serve' bad governments. ie, ALL of them!
every single core and high speed router has intercept and triggering/thresholding. no gov agency would buy 'dumb' routers anymore. again, makes me sick to think what datacomm (the field) has become ;(
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
But you need to concede that there is a very big difference between stealing a physical object and stealing a virtual one.
Let's look at the car analogy.
Let's say that pirating something is similar to keying a car.
When something is pirated, a potential sale is lost. The owner/distributor of that product loses the potential to make money, but there is no real damage caused.
When a car is damaged, you have the quite real cost of repairing it.
So you're equating the actual cost of repairing the damage caused by someone keying your car (which is something you pay to repair) to the loss of potential income (which you probably never would have received, based on the reasons why people pirate).
Want to compare piracy to someone joyriding in your car?
First, let's just assume that whoever takes it replaces whatever gas they use, just so we don't end up quibbling over details like that.
Cars wear out with use. The more you use your car, the more maintenance it needs.
By using your car, there is the actual cost of repairing it, whereas by pirating software, there is no maintenance that must be done, and no damage caused to it.
And of course, this wear on the car is something that I need to pay for in order to keep using it, but if your software is being pirated, there are no costs involved.
You do not need to maintain it better or repair it in order to keep selling it.
So again, we come down to the issue of comparing an actual cost to a potential profit, which cannot readily be compared. I can just as easily blame negative reviews for a lack of sales, but we would hardly call that theft or vandalism, even though it indirectly causes a loss of sales.
Let's turn the question around though. What if I could "steal" your car the same way that I can pirate something?
What if I had a magic box that could create an exact duplicate of your car, but without causing any damage to it, and without causing any direct loss to you.
Would that still be theft?
Better yet, who would I be stealing from if it was? Would I be stealing from you, the owner of the car I copied, or would I be stealing from the company who sold you the car?
Would the $30,000 that I did not pay the company for a car I never bought be considered damage? What if I never had any intention of buying that car, and only copied it because it was free?
I'm not trying to suggest that one is better or worse than the other, but trying to explain copyright infringement with "Would you steal a car?" is naive and absurd.
There is a considerably difference between capturing and storing the data and parsing it and operating logic on it in real time. As you point out the government stores the information. If it was so easy to process they would catch on to every (or at least a very high percentage 99+%) dangerous communication that hits the wire. The reason they don't get hit rates nearly this high is because they CAN'T process in real time that much information within their budgets. This is, however, exactly what the MPAA/RIAA expect the search engines to do and to do it on the search engines dime.
I should mention that storing all that data is really only useful if you know who you want to investigate. If you have a tip or a target you can most likely find something incriminating on them but picking out complex communication patterns automatically is much much harder to do with that much data. I know I sure don't feel any safer having these systems around.
The parent was only asking for a citation to countries that allow copying for non-commerical purposes. I never claimed it was relevant to TPB case. That being said; Isohunt is hosted here. Their case is still being argued in the Supreme Court, however ATM it's all legal and legitimate.
The stuff about an open Internet is 50%genuine principles, and 50% a pompous rationalization from greedy geeks who want free copies.
Ignoring the 'greedy' part, which is a gratuitous characterisation, yes, emphatically yes. I want free copies. It's called sharing; you might have heard about it.
What people who bitch about piracy never adequately explain, when they're busy deriding the so-called pirates, is why according to this report at least, widespread copying is actually making things better for said writers/musicians/artists/designers/videographers. Even the content distributors (who are the ones we're really talking about when we mention SOPA/PIPA/ACTA) are profiting more than they ever have, deriving more 65% of their revenues from technologies they swore would kill them.
Sharing is a public good; everyone from Jesus to Hobbes to RMS[*] has espoused this principle. And you know what kind of person is most likely to share? The ones with the least. I live in a Least Developed Country, and the generousity shown here makes society in North America look absolutely sick.
And yet here we have the so-called content owners, who insist on transfer of authorship before they'll even consider distributing your material, telling me I can't have a working Internet because I wanted someone else to listen to a song? Imprisoning people just because they want to help me share? Fuck that.
And before you dare call me selfish or a thief, and before you accuse me of taking crumbs from the mouth of the poor, starving artist: I get paid to write, code and take photos, and yet I still manage to give almost all of that output away. If I can do it, then so can others. The plain fact is that others are thriving in this gift economy. The only ones who aren't are those complacent, sclerotic few who think that artificial scarcity is valid economics. Well, as far as I'm concerned, they can go rot.
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[*] Okay, visually that's not much of a gamut, but you get my point...
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I must have missed the part where we went from, "We want a criminal investigation of someone that openly admits to bribing members of congress", even if that was a fruitless request directed at the wrong people, to "the rule of the delusional internet crazies who think that millions of people should die"?
I'm among the first to say the rhetoric gets pretty stupid around here sometimes, but equidistant from rational in the opposite direction isn't right either.
Oh, I saw. The shouters were out in force. I probably would've even agreed (at least in part) with your sentiments if you'd limited it to a few ignorant slashdotters.
However, attributing that disproportionate level of noisy stupidity from a handful of goofs (that probably couldn't competently operate a firearm if you wrote an O'Reilly book for it) to everyone that wants something something done about corruption in government... well, that's just unfair.
I agree with most, that SOPA was a disgraceful thing. But most people are not cowardly basement revolutionaries clamoring for rivers of blood. We're just normal people that want our representative government to work for us.
Ideas do not share this property, in so much that entropy can only effect the artifacts that are used to contain such ideas: books, CDs, human memory, etc.
Calling them "ideas" is weasel wording. Ideas can be a flash of inspiration, an idea can come in a moment. But works such as movies, music and books, that are the things that are generally pirated take a lot of hard work, time and skill to produce. That's why they're generally called works, not ideas.
Creators need to earn a living. To put a roof over their head. To feed their families. I'm damn sure you don't do whatever work solely for "reputation" and not money. (If in fact you're old enough to have responsibilities.) And you shouldn't expect the people who create the art and entertainment you enjoy to do so either.
I absolutely agree that copyright shouldn't extend beyond the life of the author. But that justification doesn't have any weight on the pirating of the works of living people, which comprises the vast majority of what's pirated.
aww com'on. that's comedy
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I think a lot of us believe that stealing the metaphorical car in this case is wrong. But we also believe that the penalty for stealing the metaphorical car shouldn't be 10 consecutive life sentences. We don't like that researching car security systems is a crime and that simply telling someone where there is an easily-stealable car is viewed no differently than actually stealing it. We're worried that if that precedent is set, we might one day inadvertently help someone steal a car and be subject to these extreme penalties.
I think it's a bit of a strawman argument to claim that most people here advocate piracy. We don't like it and we want to see content creators fairly compensated. We want to pay for DRM-free content that gives us the flexibility to consume it however we'd like. And we want to see those responsible for the piracy punished fairly. We see an industry that should be able to provide their product to customers at a price they're willing to pay and, seemingly, refuses to do so and blames customers for looking elsewhere to find the product they want.
I, personally, support filing lawsuits against torrent users, but I believe the potential damages should be limited to the maximum value of sales lost by the infringer's actions. If there are 100 people downloading a torrent of a movie that could be bought for $20, the damages should be capped at $2000. I don't believe in jailing people that index or help other people violate copyright. It may make illegal downloading more convenient, but the transgression belongs to the person actually violating the copyright. However I also support anyone's right to research pretty much anything...the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of curiosity are basic human rights. And we're social beings, so I support our need to share our cultural experiences.
As an example, about a year ago, my father passed away. I spent the better part of 2 days putting together a slideshow for his memorial that included photographs of him, our family and friends and also his artwork and artistic photographs. I set the slideshow to 4 of his favorite songs...songs that he loved and that had become associated with many fond memories for myself and many others. I received no less than 100 requests at the memorial for a copy so that they could re-watch it. Currently, copyright law does not allow me to do so, but I did it anyways. Considering that my father bought each song in question 2-3 times (CD, iTunes and one on vinyl as well), I don't feel that I'm in the moral wrong on this one. We've let copyright law get in the way of creating new art and I disagree with that.
So there you have it...my shade of grey as an answer to your black and white. Most of us are not immoral people. We want to do what we feel is right. But what we feel is right does not conform perfectly to the law's version of what is allowed and what isn't. I'm sorry I can't relate that back to a car analogy.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Pirating software diminishes the value of the work to the author, so
Well, that post died very early on, right there. There is absolutely no guarantee that a person downloading a certain content, would have paid for it if it weren't available as a download. In fact, it's highly likely exactly the opposite. It's also highly likely that, once you hear a certain CD or see a certain movie, you'll go and buy a copy on legitimate media - because it often (not true for software "protected" by DRM shit) adds value. That's how I ended up buying Wall-E special edition DVD and went to the movies with that hot asian chick to see it *after* I've seen the version I downloaded via torrent. Same thing goes for half of my classical music CDs. The big media have lots to thatnk Bittorrent and TPB.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
All those things you mentioned-- shoplifting, burglary, littering, etc-- involve physical items, cause harm, are difficult to hide, and take effort. They are not the same as copying. Copying occurs every time anyone speaks to more than 1 person. Every instant that light shines on an object produces many images of that object. Radio and TV stations can broadcast information to a wide audience because that's the way the universe works. Trying to control copying is like trying to make water flow uphill.
You might argue that copying causes harm to the authors, but you can't prove it. You can't prove that someone who made a copy would have paid for a copy if they could not make one for free. In fact, we know that many people would not pay. Simple law of supply and demand. And you can't prove that their actions did not in fact lead to more sales because of the unintentional endorsement and advertising.
That definition of harm is too broad. Under that interpretation, every time someone walks instead of drives, that harms the oil companies, auto manufacturers, road construction contractors, and anyone else connected to transportation. If you shop at WalMart, you harm KMart. If you eat at McDonalds, you harm Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you cook your own food, you harm both restaurants. If you skip a meal, you harm the restaurants and the grocery stores. Similarly, whenever art is borrowed from a public library or bought used, that could be interpreted as harmful to the authors. So this cannot be the meaning of harm. If no one lost anything that they didn't already have, no harm is done! The act of copying does not cause a loss of anything already in someone's possession.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Your analogy fails to account for the reality of copying. Had you looked at the pattern of the pants, and proceeded to make your own pair out of materials you rightfully own, then your analogy would be accurate.
You, like the original poster, assume that all infringers that are unwilling to pay, must be all converted to fully paying customers or you will be unable to stay in business.
Impossibly false assumptions:
- all infringers are not unwilling to pay
- all infringers could ever be converted to non-infringers
- all infringers act for the same reason
Therefore, we should break down different sets of infringers:
+U – Those who do want to use the product
-U – Those who do not want the product and only wish to collect it, weird pack-rats
+P – Those will to pay at a lower than existing price point
-P – Those who would never pay, regardless of price point
+M – Those who will use the product repeatedly
-M – Those who will use the product only once
+C – Those who will use all features of the product
-C – Those who will use only some features of the product
+D – Those who will buy products with DRM
-D – Those who will not buy products with DRM, reasons withstanding
And on, and on...
There is much overlap between these sets, and it can be argued that under certain conditions members of +U, +P, +M, -M, +C, -C, or -D can be converted to paying customers, but the conditions for each is not the same. There is no silver bullet to the solution, any attempts at such will only create more divergent sets of infringers.
Now the original poster asked how infringers could ever be considered not harmful to his business. The answer to this is obvious, they are not harmful, in fact they are incapable of causing direct harm because they are secondary effects of law and the business decisions that have already been made. The only harm caused is by the decisions that lead to such effect: high prices increase group +P, DRM increases group -D, etc. The law may also cause direct harm, but this outside the direct control of business, or should be. Wither such actions are moral is irrelevant, they will occur in every system: create draconian laws, increases law breakers, and so on. Decisions must be made that maximize the chances that a particular individual will fall outside the reasons that may drive them to infringe, at least from a business perspective.
Attempts to change law or public perception, may also be a valid if not dubious way of creating a solution, but they require the spending of large sums. Bribery to alter laws to gain yourself monetary advantage over your current situation, is generally frowned upon, also known as lobbying.
So I think this explains the situation: bribe your way to greater entitlements, make better business decisions to maximize your paying user base, or cry about how in a perfect world designed for you, you could make so much more money.
Hope that helps.
I just thought of a way that search engines could pay for processing lots of extra information. Pull ALL search results apparently related to any content represented by MPAA/RIAA and then charge them per appearance if they want anything related to content they represent to turn up in search results anywhere ever. Moreover, once the search engine charges them for allowing their content to turn up, the search engine can then require them to agree to a service license indemnifying the search engine against accusations of harm regardless of the nature of the search results provided. Practically, would there be much difference between filtering out references to content represented by the MPAA/RIAA and the sort of filtering they're doing for the Chinese?
And THAT is why encryption and stenography exists. Want to google for CP? Just need to know the trigger words du jour and you will find. And let's not even start with freenet. It is naive to think that they will catch well organized criminals with these approaches, they only get the low hanging fruit. The more they pressure it the more they go underground. What really breaks the organized crime is real police work, like infiltrating the crime ring.
What exactly is it about his post that makes you think this? I'll give you a hint: if it's because it's anti-piracy, then his point is proven.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
No, anyone can contribute to culture with or without copyright. You can't copy other people's contributions to culture, but you are free, and always have been free, to contribute your own original works. The monopoly has been on copying specific works, but then again, it's hardly immoral to put a monopoly on something that very likely would not have existed without it.
Why is it that the anti-copyright arguments almost always brush over or outright ignore the issue of the work existing in the first place? Oh right, because without doing that, there really is no moral or practical argument against copyright. Gotcha.
(I do agree that we need to release more to the public domain though.)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
But if people have tons of old quality movies available they won't watch "I know what you transformered last Star wars 8".
Essentially, the pirate bay is in the wrong because they encourage piracy. It's as simple as that. It's the artists' right not to have their works copied, and the pirate bay has built their living around robbing them of this right. It is completely within their interests to make the problem significantly worse, especially given that it has earned them multiple millions so far. Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.
I like to think of them as a documentary film-maker filming the exploits of a serial killer. He watches, and profits from, every kill made. The serial killer will ask him about the locations of certain individual, and the film-maker will happily oblige him (after all, he wasn't to know they'd necessarily be butchered, right?). In fact, if anyone pulled the film-maker up on this behaviour, he would simply cite the many times the killer asked for the nearest petrol station or convenience store, painting himself as a dumb source of information that couldn't be held responsible for how the serial killer used his information. But, in the end, he knows exactly how the serial killer will use the information, and every time he commits another heinous crime, it's more money in the film-maker's bank.
When the film-maker is finally placed in jail where he belongs (but the killer escapes justice), the serial killer turns to this nice guy at an information kiosk (let's call him, say, Google). His job is to hand out lots of information to lots of people. The serial killer asks him about various locations of people and places, and he happily obliges, the same as he would any other customer. Google is aware that a serial killer is on the loose, but he has no more reason to suspect one person over another, and so instead of stopping (or severely restricting) service to everyone, he decides to keep his job and just deliver people what they ask for. Google may have aided the serial killer many times, but unlike the film-maker, Google really is just a dumb source of information. He has as much reason to believe the information he provides will be used for the benefit of everyone, rather than to murder people, and this is the source of his income. His position is perfectly morally justifiable.
Now, let's see how much this gets torn apart.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Firstly I don't have a big problem with TPB being shut down. I consider TPB to have been a net cost to society.
It's not a morality thing. Never has been. The point of copyright is simply to provide an incentive to publish. You are publishing. Copyright is working. Not perfectly, but adequately.
If we actually explicitly allow large scale piracy then the system breaks down. It's hideously naive to assume that absolutely nobody will choose a pirate copy over an original, or that the "advertising" benefits outweigh these losses. If we punish people too harshly for copyright infringement then we end up with a totally unjust system. So we need to tolerate, grudgingly, a certain amount of infringement to balance these objectives. Still not a perfect system but one that apparently works in that people are publishing.
As for harm to consumers, I am pretty certain that piracy is largely responsible for films and TV shows coming out in Britain at about the same time as the US. I suspect that streaming services exist because the media companies recognised the need to compete with downloads. It's pretty rare that the price has any relation to the production cost (otherwise, why do popular musicians not sell their albums at a fraction of the price of less popular ones?) so prices aren't pushed up that much
Pirating content is like watching a street artist from the back row: you are not taking anybody's space, because the people that can see from that distance and above the heads of people in the front row have enough room at the same distance.
You see no value in the street performance, it's more of a catchy distraction from the real purpose of your passing through the market square or town court. Standing is inconvenient, your old meniscus soccer injury is killing your knees, you are in the crowd and you don't like to be crowded.
You would not even think of attending this street performance if it would be under an improptu tent and a burly bouncer would take the money from people coming.
That's what modern entertainment content EXACTLY is, minus obscene amount of money revolving it.
The only people who give power to MAFIAA are users, and the only people who can take power from them are users.
Start with pirating, get tired of the idiocy of the content, realize that rare "exceptions" that you think are good, are just more thoroughly masqueraded bullshit, lift your ass from your lazyboy recliner and finally replace this content with more fulfilling entertainment: friends, creativity, etc.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
However, attributing that disproportionate level of noisy stupidity from a handful of goofs (that probably couldn't competently operate a firearm if you wrote an O'Reilly book for it) to everyone that wants something something done about corruption in government... well, that's just unfair.
The worrying thing is that these goofs probably can competently operate their collection of firearms if they're American. However, anyone who thinks that a revolution is primarily about out-shooting the government has obviously read very little history, or indeed even concentrated on world news in the last year or so. As long as the military support them, the government will always have more helicopter gunships, tanks, fighter bombers, etc than even the most well armed local nutjob militia.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it