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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.