BTJunkie No More?

First time accepted submitter AWESOM-O 4k writes "It seems like the popular file sharing site BTJunkie.org is gone. On btjunkie.org you are greeted with the following: '2005 — 2012 This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we've decided to voluntarily shut down. We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on. It's been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best! '"

Comments

who?

[Osgeld]

n/t

Re:who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right to "communicate". Is that like right to "surprise sex"?

Re:who?

[mwvdlee]

It's like your right to equate assisting in copyright infringement to rape, yet not be sued and banned from the internet.

Re:who?

[Anonymous Coward]

more importantly, what's the alternative to btjunkie.org?

Re:who?

[owenferguson]

torrentz.eu works for me.

Re:who?

[cffrost]

While I'm disappointed to see btjunkie go, at least they're (seemingly) closing voluntarily; not smashed up by a militarized police squad.

In response to your question...

Torrentz matches btJunkie's characteristics and features better than any other site I could name. Torrentz: Public, non-US, meta-search/aggregator, full HTTPS, tracker validation/display/uTorrent-formatted list d/l, category tags scraped from source sites, configurable "home page," and user-initiated account deletion.

Below are all of the the .torrent sites I use which are both encrypted and public:

• https://eztv.it/
          Prompt and fast English-language TV shows.

• https://isohunt.com/
          Simplistic, low-frills meta-search.

• https://thepiratebay.se/
          A honeypot for IP-profiteers... A pot o' honey for cultural buccaneers.

• https://www.kat.ph/
          KickassTorrents, an aptly named site. Voluminous metadata and effective presentation.

• https://torrentz.eu/
          A good alternative to btjunkie. =)

I hope this is helpful, and I hope that you seed, UL>DL.

Re:who?

[BasilBrush]

Actually, the rejection by the pirates of the analogy of "theft", does pose the question of what other crime is closest to piracy.

The rapist wants pleasure (sex and power) for free.
The victim has what the rapist wants.
The rapist doesn't care about the victim's right to give permission or not.
The victim doesn't lose anything physical.
What the victim loses is virtual (self respect, feeling secure) and potential (future happiness).

(Note: I'm expecting the intellectually challenged not to be able to cope with the concept of an analogy, and to make the mistake of thinking this is saying one thing is as evil as the other. Post a message along those lines and you're just being a predictable fool.)

Re:who?

[Darinbob]

The closest crime is indeed theft. Just because the pirates reject that analogy does not mean it is not the best analogy. Pirates have a long history of justifying their actions.

Re:who?

[BasilBrush]

It's a bad analogy, because in the case of piracy, the victim loses nothing;

The victim loses nothing physical in either case. They lose things which are not physical in both cases.

Re:who?

[TranquilVoid]

He was equating the use of euphimisms, not the actual acts of those two euphimisms.

Your right to what?

[multiben]

Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.

Re:Your right to what?

[spikestabber]

Unlocking of our excessively locked up culture perhaps?

Re:Your right to what?

[mattventura]

Sending information to other people isn't communication?

Re:Your right to what?

[DesScorp]

Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.

When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

Note: yes, I know that torrents in and of themselves are useful and not illegal. But come on. We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

Re:Your right to what?

[DAldredge]

Something you can buy for little money from many different stores doesn't exactly count as being locked up.

Re:Your right to what?

[Totenglocke]

We also know that in the absence of said torrents, people won't start fishing out thousands and thousands of dollars for that software / movie / music - they'll simply not use it at all.

Re:Your right to what?

[Elbereth]

Sharing copyrighted material is not illegal or immoral. Linux and Wikipedia are both copyrighted. If something is not copyrighted, it's public domain. Just because you have permission to distribute something doesn't mean that the author has renounced copyright.

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

It's a very high price compared to cost of distribution, and copyright has gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress. Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

Re:Your right to what?

[X.25]

When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

Yet, 99% of people will see murder as illegal.

And file sharing of copyrighted material (unlimited good, basically) as legal.

Do you think people will change their opinion on what is legal/illegal, just because some corrupted cronies pushed the law through?

Re:Your right to what?

[multiben]

A typically pedantic response from a typical pedant with no coherent argument for why copyright material should be shared to millions of other people without the copyright holder's consent.

Re:Your right to what?

[buddyglass]

Yeah. I think this is wrong. Imagine a magical world where it is literally impossible to get a digital copy of a song or movie without paying for it. You think all these kids with ginormous music collections would go without all their tunes? No. They'd purchase some of it. Now it's certainly reasonable to argue that such a world will never exist, but that's not the same as saying, "If people couldn't get it for free they'd just go without."

Re:Your right to what?

[Curunir_wolf]

It's a very high price compared to cost of distribution, and copyright has gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress. Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want. I agree with you that copyright has gone too far in favor of corporate rights with excessively long time periods and too unbalanced in policy. But I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to think they don't already purchase some of it.

I guess they don't, and that means Justin Bieber and the music industry must be robbing banks - where else would they get all their money since nobody's paying them?

Re:Your right to what?

[nabsltd]

We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

Same for Google.

BTJunkie was nothing more than a search engine with a comment and results rating system (not unlike ./). It hosted no torrent files and was not a torrent tracker. You could get almost the same results by entering your query into Google and appending "torrent".

So, what, exactly, makes a site like BTJunkie "illegal" while Google doing the same thing is OK?

Re:Your right to what?

[spikestabber]

Theres way too much out of print stuff that you cannot find legally unless you're lucky enough to track it down used....
I would say at least HALF of the original NES library of games are like this as a quick example....
And for arcade game PCB's, then that number is off the charts....
Most of our past culture would be inaccessible if it weren't for the internet.

Re:Your right to what?

[buddyglass]

Where did I say nobody was purchasing content? That's idiotic. My experience with heavy torrent users, though, is that they legitimately purchase very little of the media they consume. They might buy a few songs on iTunes, but you won't catch them buying DVDs or CDs (or renting them, or streaming them).

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bittorrent is fine, sharing files with your friends is fine, but I'm somehow saddened that slashdot will defend those who profit from it. It's no longer an altruistic activity when someone is making 6-figures a month in banner ads. Honestly.

These jokers just got out before they got busted, something Megaupload should have likely done with their 8-figure revenue some time ago...

Re:Your right to what?

[hairyfeet]

Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.

You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!

Re:Your right to what?

[mattventura]

A typical strawman respone from someone with no actual argument. Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.

Re:Your right to what?

[TheInternetGuy]

Patent Violation is not copyright violation. Patent FUD, even less so.

Re:Your right to what?

[Osgeld]

damn I knew I shouldnt have downloaded that freebsd iso from torrent =)

Re:Your right to what?

[iluvcapra]

Communication (which is to say, unidirectional data transfer from a non-human entity via a billion-dollar computer network) is human nature!

Re:Your right to what?

[Ihmhi]

NES? Heh, try stuff even as recent as the Playstation. Good luck finding one of the (seemingly) dozen copies of Suikoden II they seemed to press for the entire North American continent...

Re:Your right to what?

[NeutronCowboy]

Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content

Re:Your right to what?

[MimeticLie]

Your experience doesn't mesh with reality. Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person in multiple studies.

Re:Your right to what?

[multiben]

So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good? Clothes are also an artifical construct. Do you wear clothes? Laws, language, money, social mores and on an on are all artificial constructs. The computer you used to post your comment is built on all sorts of artifical constructs. There are very few people who would consider downloading movies from a giant server to be a good example of human communication. I feel sorry for you if you feel that doing so satisfies your needs for human communication.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Actually, you can't buy it if it's in "the Disney vault" where they use copyright to accomplish nearly the opposite of it's intended function. Especially for works now out of corporate favor.

Many other works are similarly locked up where they're out of print but still under copyright. In some cases nobody is really sure who to contact even if interested.

Re:Your right to what?

[bmo]

>Also, there are lots of things that are out of print, but copyright still covers that.

This is what the real problem is with current copyright law. Stuff that would go to the public domain is simply locked up, never to be seen again.

There is no balance anymore between the right to culture and the right to earn a living. The right to culture has been obliterated. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain.

The powers that be are now stealing from the public, far more so than they are losing to "piracy."

--
BMO

Re:Your right to what?

[cheekyjohnson]

Before starting up a website, your first question to yourself should be this: "Will my website enable someone to... copy something?"

If the answer to that question is yes, cease all operations immediately. Copying will bring about the apocalypse.

Re:Your right to what?

[cheekyjohnson]

You think all these kids with ginormous music collections would go without all their tunes?

Depends on the person. I'd bet there are quite a few people who wouldn't pay a cent. And it's not always just because they want to save money. Sometimes they simply don't have the money to begin with.

Re:Your right to what?

[cheekyjohnson]

Well, if it's illegal in their country, and they think it's legal, then they would indeed be wrong about that. But whether it's "immoral" or not is a completely different matter.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want.

Given that it flies in the face of the intended purpose of copyright, it's an issue that should be addressed. The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Yes. It is also human nature to invent things to facilitate our nature. Thus, as a communicative species we invented the telegraph, radio, television, the telephone, and the internet to facilitate our communicative nature.

Re:Your right to what?

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Yes, it is. And you're confusing the message with the medium.

Re:Your right to what?

[microbox]

Good point.

Not a black and white issue.

I think the file-sharers should play ball if the MAFIAA play ball.

Otherwise fuck it. Not going to loose sleep over it.

Re:Your right to what?

[DaFallus]

Note: yes, I know that torrents in and of themselves are useful and not illegal. But come on. We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

In a number of countries this is perfectly legal. Or at least it was before the US quietly annexed the rest of the world.

Re:Your right to what?

[jmcvetta]

for little money

What are you thinking? The average college kid today has cultural data stored on their computer that would cost tens, in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars if licensed (you can't really purchase copyrighted data) at current retail prices.

In the age of the Free Internet, a backward nobody in any insignificant town has cultural horizons orders of magnitude broader than than those enjoyed in the Bad Old Days by the most privileged record store geeks in the biggest cities. Do you really want to undo that historically unparalleled cultural advance just so a handful of greedy media execs and has-been ex-popstars can continue to cash fat checks?

Re:Your right to what?

[tftp]

The government may unleash ridiculous laws upon the citizen. It can force the citizen to obey those laws (or be jailed.) However it cannot make the citizen believe that those laws are fair (short of a massive brainwashing.) People are guided by moral norms far more than by laws. People don't even know about most laws; even lawyers can't claim to know them all.

Re:Your right to what?

[symbolset]

The right of the common man to appropriate and adapt stories goes back perhaps to the second campfire, if not earlier. The notion that this is something that should be prevented is a rather recent invention. It is also quite absurd since a modern work that isn't derivative of Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy in 420BCE is ridiculously rare and it's well known (and obvious) that Sophocles' work was a fusion of all the trends of popular art of the time - that he condensed everything into three plays is his signal contribution.

We don't even think about these things much any more, and we should because it has become absurd. That lie your sister told you in an email about her one-night stand gone bad with megafail dweeb photo attached? That email is a creative work of fiction, her own work protected by copyright - and though she owns the rights to the photo megafail dweeb owns the rights to his likeness. Your repost to Facebook or Twitter or Reddit of the attached image (even photoshopped) is a derivative work proscribed by law without permission, and a violation of the law. In reality she's an attention whore and she's hoping you'll leak the megafail dweeb story to get her Facebook friends - but Megafail dweeb still has rights to sue you under the current ridiculous system.

Modern copyright is saying "here, I have stood on the shoulders of giants as have the 200 generations before me, but my addition to this work is special above all works that came before, and none who come after may stand on my shoulders ever until my work is lost to time. No more art shall pass." It is also saying that all other authors from ages past must be included in the enforced forgettery, whether or not it was their wish. It also means that something as simple as a textbook on mathematics, physics or chemistry published 80 years ago - long since the authors are dead cannot be reproduced to teach our children now even though so little has changed in those arts and sciences that they would still be far more useful works than the crap that passes for primary education today. My own son's high school world history texts omits the inventions of gunpowder, firearms and cannon as forces for social change. His chemistry texts omit so much they may as well be "Alice in Wonderland" - and that's for fear he might use them to discover how to manufacture explosives or drugs. Civics? That's not meaningfully taught at all, as the responsibility of the citizen to correct his government is entirely omitted.

That's what this is: an establishment of enforced forgettery for the purpose of selling us new lamps as old. The whole thing is a fraud and a theft of our intellectual property. The Commons is a property owned by all and removal of a work from the Commons is a theft of each work from each citizen whether it's sanctioned by the US Supreme Court or not. The extension of copyright is the theft from each citizen the right to read each of the works so stolen from the public domain, whether he would have read the work or not. If an incidence of a work is worth a mere $1, and we are 300 millions, then every single work so stolen is $300 million. For the theft to be a mere Trillion dollars fewer than 4,000 texts must be so stolen. In the aggregate this theft must be many $quadrillion at least and growing every day, and this very post is included in the theft because the presumption it's my property until 80 years after I die (until copyright is extended yet again to forever less one day) prevents others from using it. It beggars belief. The extension of copyright beyond the reasonable 14 year term is a taking from each of us of the millions of works that are rightly our culture. It is wholesale IP theft on the grandest imaginable scale, Piracy institutionalized in law for a privileged few who had the money to buy the law. It's also a way to prevent our children from learning things our great-grandparents knew before they finished primary school. That scares me because it by necessity creates a dead-end know-nothing consumer cultu

Re:Your right to what?

[muuh-gnu]

> Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.

According to the copyright creation myth, copyright came into existence when free men, who could freely talk and exchange every information freely with each other, agreed that it is better for everyone to allow creators to censor free information exchange of their works in exchange for creating those works and making those works available. That wide and far agreement between free men, that we have to tolerate a bit of culturally beneficial for-profit censorship then allegedly became a law. We (our ancestors) _agreed_ (and if you didnt get it by now, the emphasis is on the fucking agreement) to give up a part of out natural, god given right to freely communicate with each other (even if the content of this free communication is an Avatar Blue-ray) to encourage creators to create more works than they would do otherwise.

Our ancestors agreed to give up those rights, but maybe we today do not agree any more? What if we today think otherwise and want out god-given natural right back, that our ancestors sold for more books? I personally do not see that kind of far and wide agreement existing any more between free men. Today, only a tiny minority of influential stake-holders violently pushes it, and the majority of free men is merely subject to enforcement, without having a bloody chance in hell to be allowed to re-evaluate that 300 yr old agreement any more. (What do we learn from this btw: Never sell your fucking rights, moron, 300 yrs later you might regret it.)

Re:Your right to what?

[Totenglocke]

Or they just don't value it enough. Some people can buy music, but torrent it because the don't find it worth paying for. If they can't get the new album from *insert band name here* for free, they have no problem not listening to it because they're no worse off if they don't hear it.

Re:Your right to what?

[muuh-gnu]

> So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good?

No, that artificial restrictions are good only when there is a overwhelming agreement that they are beneficial for everyone, especially for those subjecting themselves freely to those artificial restrictions. I dont think that such an agreement, that strict enforcement of for-profit censorship (copyright) on the internet is beneficial for all of us, exists today.

Re:Your right to what?

[Samantha Wright]

Confucius say: man made of straw should not bait flame.

Re:Your right to what?

[muuh-gnu]

> When what you're doing is illegal people are often

Stuff is not simply "illegal" by itself. In a so called democracy, people allegedly far and wide agree that something should be illegal, because they think that it is wrong, and then it becomes illegal by law.

But freely sharing copyrighted stuff is today illegal although a majority of people doesnt really object to it and doesnt think that it _should_ be illegal. The really only reason why filesharing is illegal is not because of a societal consensus that it should be illegal, but because politicians make the policy together with a few stake holders behind closed doors under the exclusion of the public, because the policy will be enforced _against_ the public.

An influential few make the laws, the public is expected to simply STFU and obey. With respect to copyright policy and enforcement, the so called "democracy" here absolutely isn't working.

Re:Your right to what?

[thegarbz]

We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

BT Junkie was not a tracker which relied on posting new torrents to it's site. Actually I don't think it even ran a tracker. It indiscriminately searched a large number of trackers both public and private for a large amount of content and then linked to the content on that tracker. This is one step even further removed sites like The Pirate Bay and makes BT Junkie more like Google than any other site, which also made it a very good source to find Linux ISOs

But since we attack BT Junkie, why not shut down all of bit torrent? I mean it's used for piracy more than anything else right? When that's shut down lets ban ftp (the backbone of the warez community of years gone by). But why stop there? People could send files to each other over chat programs, fuck ban them too!

I'm not defending the actions of copyright thieves, but I'm calling out the absurd actions and opinions of those against copyright infringement.

Re:Your right to what?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that yes, Congress *can* pass copyright laws that rip culture out of the public domain."

Bravo.

I propose that we limit not just the Executive and Legislative branches back to their original Constitutional limits, but also the Judicial, so they can't keep ruling themselves more and more power.

And yes, they were supposed to have limits. As historical evidence, see Madison's Report of 1800.

Re:Your right to what?

[Plunky]

Perhaps if copyright length was judged by promotion and sales figures.

No, because that is vague and open to interpretation. For simplicity, copyright should be a fixed term. Then, when you buy something, and see it says right on the package that "This item is Copyright 2006" and you know that after X years you are free to copy it and distribute all you like. You can keep that original work as reference and if somebody comes to you with a lawsuit saying that you are copying their derivative work (with a later copyright) then you show it in court and the judge tells them to leave you alone.

Vague laws with loopholes are bad

(I favour 10 years, its a nice round number and most people can count that much on their fingers)

Re:Your right to what?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Today, only a tiny minority of influential stake-holders violently pushes it, and the majority of free men is merely subject to enforcement, without having a bloody chance in hell to be allowed to re-evaluate that 300 yr old agreement any more."

The thing is, there wasn't much wrong with that "300-year-old" agreement, and IT probably doesn't need to be re-evaluated. It is modern changes that have messed everything up, like the now-automatic grant of enforceable copyright. (Prior to that, in most cases you had to publicly CLAIM copyright, with a notice, before you could enforce it. No notice meant no enforcement power.) Then there's the DMCA, and all the extensions...

Things were MUCH better the way they were, before legislators in modern times began mucking around with them. If we merely put them back the way they were, our lives in relation to copyright would be much better. How do I know? Because they were.

Re:Your right to what?

[thomst]

hairyfeet blathered:

Except you can't use "I have a dream" or "Ask not what your country can do for you" in a video without cutting a big fat check. PBS had a great special years ago on the civil rights movement...yet you can't see it, why? because its all behind paywalls now. This isn't just about the latest titney spears pop song you know, this is about media cartels locking the entire history of modern society behind paywalls. Nearly every spoken word of any note is now behind a paywall and all for Walt Disney, a man whose been dead longer than many of us have been alive, so that his first works which were made when planes were made from cloth and antibiotics were but a dream, all so his works can stay behind a paywall.

This drivel was rated Insightful +5? You have got to be kidding me. Kennedy's inaugural address is available on Youtube. So is MLK's "I have a dream" speech. And Kennedy's address to the nation cannot be copyrighted. It's public domain by law.

You want something to have one of those petitions for on the White House website? demand an end to the sonny Bono act, and demand that copyrights take sane terms again. watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you. It is time we really start voting third parties across the board, its obvious to anyone with eyes that the two party system is simply no longer functional. We frankly need four five and six parties but lets start with three and work from there. I urge everyone to vote green across the board, they have already made gains in many states, lets give the shills a reason to fear for their jobs again!

Yep, waste your time petitioning the President to do something he has no power to do. Congress passed the Sonny Bonehead Act, and only Congress has the Constitutional power to repeal it.

And simply voting Green is an equal waste of time - and your vote. Want to do something that will actually make a difference? Contact your local Green party headquarters, and volunteer to campaign. Then, put your time and effort where your mouth is and actually DO that. Bone up on the talking points for your local Green Party candidates, then go canvass for votes the old-fashioned way: door-to-door. It's not sexy and it's definitely NOT easy, but it wins hearts and minds in a way that posting drivel to /. simply doesn't. That's how the wingnut right took over the Repugnican party back in the Reagan administration, and those inmates have been in charge of that asylum ever since. (Ever wonder why obvious loonballs like Santorum and Gingrinch seem to have such appeal to the Repubs? It's because EVERY state-level Republican central committee is absolutely dominated by "social conservatives" and evangelicals. Reagan got them fired up to do the grass-roots organizing necessary to, for instance, actually field a slate of candidates for local and state Republican central committees - and that gave them control over the party's MONEY and its endorsements at a state level. That's why Schwartzenegger had to run without their endorsement in California's gubernatorial races - because he's a moderate, pro-choice Republican, and the California Republican Central Committee HATED him for it. It's also why Romney is pretending to be a super-conservative right now - because Nixon's advice to Reagan still holds: "Run as hard to the right as you can, until you get the nomination. Then run as hard to the center as you can until the election.")

But NONE of that will help in the upcoming Presidential election. It's far too little, and far too late. Vote Green, and the Republican party will take over all three branches of government again. Look at how well THAT worked out in 2000 and 2004. Nader voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush - and that got us th

Re:Your right to what?

[matunos]

Similar to how those who wish to demonize a thing come up with their own terms, like "piracy", as if sharing a Beatles song is the same as hijacking a tobacco ship and slaughtering all of the crew.

Re:Your right to what?

[TheMathemagician]

The genie is out of the bottle and it isn't going back inside. When digital content can be disseminated globally at virtually zero cost it's the end of copyright. Asserting it's illegal is like King Canute ordering the tide around.

Re:Your right to what?

[xenobyte]

Why do you think Google is in hot water with Congress and the MPAA/RIAA? It's precisely because of this. Make no mistake: RIAA and MPAA will kill any search engine for the sake of the protection of their content

And Google's lawyers will fight them every step of the way. The argument basically is this: If the content is illegal is the country where it's hosted, have them remove it from the servers. If it's illegal where you browse it, have a local filter deny access to it. If it's online and wants to be indexed, it's indexed.

This is of course the right stance. A search engine cannot and should not be be policing the net. Laws differ and it would quickly become an unsolvable problem to have the search engine sort data both at indexing time and a result presentation time according to more or less clear local laws and precedence around the world.

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

Society, in general, is making the point that the price is to high. Are you even paying attention? SOPA and PIPA were shot down, thanks to a grass roots movement to kill them. They aren't dead yet, but they were definitely shot down. ACTA is in the process of being shot down.

Our cultures, around the world, are beginning to react to the outright greed of corporate entities, who value their "products" an order of magnitude to highly.

And, yes, copyright laws do indeed "lock up" society's right to innovate or to emulate performers.

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

I hate that term, "rights holder". No one has more rights than a citizen of the United States. That term alone is justification for a revolution.

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

"he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you."

That merits a minor correction. Yes, it is still us, the little people, who pay all their wages. The problem is, we've overpaid the entertainment industries for so long, that they have amassed some of the biggest fortunes in the world. That money permitted them to draw up laws, which effectively allow them to tax us, so that they can pay those salaries in our place.

If people would just wake up to the fact that they don't need what Hollywood and the other entertainment cartels have to offer, they could be brought to heel in a few years.

Black March would be a good start, if enough people get on board. If Black March doesn't get their attention, then maybe we could have a Black Summer, then a Black Autumn, and a Black Winter.

How many seasons of no sales could those cartels survive?

Re:Your right to what?

[jamstar7]

The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

And the creator isn't obligated to create at all

And you're not obligated to sing 'Happy Birthday(C)' at birthday parties. Now that copyright needed to expire 40 years ago, but somebody's going to make money off that til the Sun dies.

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/opinions/the-mpaa-must-die-and-how-you-can-help-make-that-happen.php

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

Actually Bittorrent sites are a great place to find scans of all kinds of out of print gaming books.

The old Battletech stuff, Rolemaster, previous editions of D&D, previous editions of Warhammer/40k, Paranoia, and other lesser known settings, campaigns and source books, scenarios and what not that appeared in magazines...

All out of print. All under copyright. Some of it notoriously difficult to find due to limited print runs.

Re:Your right to what?

[ciderbrew]

A lot of piracy on mp3s and films wasn't about price. It was about distribution, DRM and convenience in the modern age. People wanted to hear tracks there and then and services like napster grew to meet that demand. The software was easy and worked well. If a music company invested in a digital distribution system in the 90s and monetised it, then they would be the biggest player today. BUT Instead of helping the consumer spend money they punished them. Adding layers of DRM inconvenience-ware, giving a worse experience to those who paid.
Still, it is stupid for a company to expect the same amount for a CD with packaging and a downloaded file. I know servers cost money too.. but come on!

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Sure, but I'll bet they would still do so with a 20 year copyright. For movies, I'll bet they'd do it with a 10 year copyright. They make most of their money in the first year or 2 anyway.

I am absolutely certain that no amount of extension in copyright will cause Walt Disney to rise from the grave and create more.

Re:Your right to what?

[Kjella]

My experience with heavy torrent users, though, is that they legitimately purchase very little of the media they consume.

Heavy P2P users have been found to pay for more legal content than the average person

Just note that these positions are not mutually exclusive. If the average person will buy four albums and pirate one while the music buff will buy ten albums and pirate ninety then both are true. In fact, I would think the assumption that the more massive your consumption is, the less likely you will pay for everything seems likely. Imagine you have two people who spend all their time on music and WoW, the latter being a flat rate no matter how much you play. Now the first guy is playing WoW 90% of the time and will buy the few albums he listens to in the remaining 10% of the time. The other person is playing WoW 10% of the time and listening to music the other 90%, my bet would be that he's far more likely to supplement with torrents than the other guy.

This is of course assuming there's no Spotify or similar service available, that acts more or less as a cap these days. Talk to a music buff and he sounds like he's died and gone to heaven, all this music for only $X/month, compared to all the albums he used to buy and/or download. The average person on the other hand didn't spend so much on music to begin with, so it's not the same kind of killer offer to them. Still at least they have it better than with movies and TV series, give me an iTunes Plus for that - 1080p and no DRM, available where I live. That's what i'd wish for, but I'm not holding my breath....

Re:Your right to what?

[pantaril]

What about something i cannot buy?
Majority of stuff linked to from btjunkie which i downloaded cannot be bought legally in my country.

Re:Your right to what?

[EvilIdler]

I favour 10 years, its a nice round number and most people can count that much on their fingers

For similar reasons, I'm in favour of 1 year :)

At the very least some sanity is needed in maximum copyright. Not more than a year beyond the lifetime of the creator, and no amount of rights transfers should change that. This could still be abused in a Mickey Mouse-like case, with constant spin-off products being created. Somebody smart finish this train of thought. I'm getting off at this station.

Re:Your right to what?

[LaRainette]

Megaupload or BTjunky made money offering a service that the industry was incapable of offering for a decade : convenient, instant access to medias.
I for one think their money was well earned.

Re:Your right to what?

[LaRainette]

So what if it is mainly copyrighted material ?
Most people use their car to go much faster than the speed limit, should we ban cars altogether ?
Some people use MSN and mobile phones to plan bank robberies or murder, should we ban those to ?
And more to the point : it's not because it is legal that it is good and vice and versa. Not so long ago in a country not that far away it was illegal to harbor Jews in your house.

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, btjunkie did host the torrent files. Then again, Google caches a ton of results, so it's still not very different.

Re:Your right to what?

[Dekker3D]

Just to back up your argument: a little while ago I wanted to play Mechwarrior 3 again. I have no working CD of it. Guess what my only option was? ... Hell, when I bought Dungeon Keeper 2, the original CD started getting all weird on me after maybe a year. So, what... am I supposed to stop playing the games I love when they're past their expiration date, maybe buy some new shitty shovelware to amuse myself until the next Skyrim-minus-DRM thing comes out?

Oh wait. Wait. That is EXACTLY what they want me to do. Bluh.

Re:Your right to what?

[gl4ss]

of course breaking the law is an ideological statement. how the fuck it couldn't be?

having access and giving access to the modern alexandrian library of culture and information is still worth it even if it's illegal. it's not like I, or you, or the authors, are going to live forever. I ain't got time to make enough money to pay for it all - and it's not most certainly going to lead to the fall of civilization, quite the opposite - culture as in entertainment is just fluff but it makes it for possible to produce the relevant things cheaper(that is food, clothing and medicine), if everything written about wheat, monsanto, tractors and others is available on your palmtop you can farm a lot easier and cheaper than you could have without that information.

Re:Your right to what?

[Plunky]

At the very least some sanity is needed in maximum copyright. Not more than a year beyond the lifetime of the creator, and no amount of rights transfers should change that. This could still be abused in a Mickey Mouse-like case, with constant spin-off products being created. Somebody smart finish this train of thought. I'm getting off at this station.

Problem for me with your suggestion, is that anything depending on "lifetime of creator" is vague and open to twisted interpretations. If I have a work that I wish to copy, it would be better to have all the information available in that work as to when its copyright is expired, not have to research if the person is dead or not (which is not always clear, especially if facts have been obscured). Also, it requires a separate law for "works for hire" where an corporate entity who cannot die owns the copyright. It is far better to have a single rule that applies to all copyright than it is to try and cover works depending on who owns the copyright. That way lies confusion and when it is unclear when anybody owns a copyright (cf. "Happy Birthday") then people can be harassed endlessly.

Re:Your right to what?

[gl4ss]

I'd just listen to a lot more .mod's and other stuff creators wanted me to listen to.

that's what I did before mp3's as a kid anyways..

Re:Your right to what?

[delinear]

If we're going to address misuse of language to disguise your motives, let's first discuss "piracy"...

Re:Your right to what?

[delinear]

GP wasn't defending copyright, he was stating that some facilities are so useful we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water by closing them down just to prevent those who chose to misuse them.

Re:Your right to what?

[GameboyRMH]

Even the PC isn't safe. If anyone can find a seeded torrent for the first Spy Hunter remake (2001) please email it to me.

I'd like the version of Terminal Velocity with the hi-res textures as well, I can buy that at any EBgames right?

I may also be the only person in possession of a fully patched copy of BattleZone II: Combat Commander (I bought the original game and have all the patches), many years ago the developers removed all copy protection with a final patch so I don't think they'll mind if I share it.

I've also been trying to find the NTSC version of Destroy All Humans 1 for the PS2. I found the PAL version but it doesn't work properly in the emulator.

Re:Your right to what?

[buddyglass]

So what? That doesn't tell us how they'd behave in the absence of piracy. Maybe they'd buy even more media.

Re:Your right to what?

[Larryish]

But I am a master of baiting my straw!

Re:Your right to what?

[Like2Byte]

We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.

Same for Google.

BTJunkie was nothing more than a search engine with a comment and results rating system (not unlike ./). It hosted no torrent files and was not a torrent tracker. You could get almost the same results by entering your query into Google and appending "torrent".

So, what, exactly, makes a site like BTJunkie "illegal" while Google doing the same thing is OK?

In a word....intent.

Mind you, I've never used BTJunkie but from what I've read here.....

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

also consider the fact that people in the past have made all kinds of published work before without any kind of copyright protection at all.

Re:Your right to what?

[Curunir_wolf]

Actually Bittorrent sites are a great place to find scans of all kinds of out of print gaming books.

The old Battletech stuff,

You can actually download PDFs of the out-of-print Battletech stuff right from their web site.

Rolemaster,

Well the publisher sells modified versions of the original Rolemaster books, and if you want the true originals there are places to buy them.

previous editions of D&D,

No, now you're just being ridiculous (or trying to justify infringement just because you don't like the publishers). There are no editions of D&D that cannot be had from the copyright owner directly.

Seriously, if you're going to make a case for the issues with copyright, you've got to come up with legitimate issues. The stuff you've come up with are not.

Re:Your right to what?

[nebular]

What's interesting is that no one here has the same argument for books. I have paperbacks that are falling apart. My only option is to buy another copy.

Just because you bought it before doesn't mean you have it in perpetuity. If you don't maintain your copy you lose it. What is bad is restrictive DRM keeping you from backing up

Re:Your right to what?

[Moryath]

And I am absolutely certain that MORE people would be creating derivations of classic, public domain works if Disney hadn't started raping the public domain and then trying to sue everyone who used the same public domain works that they'd ripped off.

No amount of extension in copyright will cause Walt Disney to rise from the grave and create more. A de-extension in copyright WOULD cause a host of new creators to start creating works "derivative" of classic Disney movies, of classic novels (think Lord of the Rings, or Animal Farm, or a thousand other novels and characters from the 1920s-50s).

Society is poorer, not richer, for the monster that Copyright has become today.

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".

That statement does not describe an ideal, but rather a 'law' of nature.

Information wants to be free just as Nature abhors a vacuum. Things tend to move from high concentrations/pressures to low concentrations/pressures. If you have a liquid with a high concentration of salt, and introduce fresh water, the NaCl molecules were intermix and become evenly distributed. If you have a hot body and introduce a cold body, the energy will move from from high to low to produce an equilibrium.

If you have one place that has information (movies, music, rumours, gossip) and another place that does not, the information/news will travel and reach it at some point. It takes energy and effort to prevent that travelling--just ask the InfoSec folks in the military about the amount of effort needed.

Given the effort needed to protect "state secrets", unless Hollywood is planning on spending as much as the CIA/NSA/DoD to protect data, the information will spread. So trying to fight against a 'natural phenomenon' is quite pointless, as at the end of the day you'll lose.

Re:Your right to what?

[shaitand]

"No, now you're just being ridiculous (or trying to justify infringement just because you don't like the publishers). There are no editions of D&D that cannot be had from the copyright owner directly [wizards.com]."

I see a memorial first edition of a couple core books but hardly all of them. Elsewhere I see 4th edition. Where is the 3.5 ed books that the copyright owner recalled from bookstores before releasing 4th ed.

Re:Your right to what?

[Hatta]

No amount of reduction in copyright will cause piracy to cease either.

Re:Your right to what?

[fortfive]

". . . a right to charge . . ."

What kind of right?

And most importantly, what is the source of this right?

Re:Your right to what?

[PIBM]

If you have a book that is falling apart, take it to your local library. At least around here they repair books free of charge. Beside, why buy books, when you can get them for free at your local library ? Beside, you can also get the latests blu rays, and you can even request them so that you will be notified of when you can come pick it up. Usually, as not many people do so, you can get it on the
(blu ray) release date, which is totally fine with me =)

 

Re:Your right to what?

[Hatta]

Shortening copyright to 10 years won't change anything about the economics of pirating. People will still desire newly released works. It will still be easier to get these works through piracy. Therefore, there will still be tremendous amounts of piracy.

Re:Your right to what?

[Hatta]

Nader voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush

By the same token, Gore voters in Florida handed the 2000 election to Bush.

Make no mistake: the coming election is a choice between Tea Party-style kakistocracy, and the center.

This is exactly the kind of good cop/bad cop rhetoric they rely on to keep you voting for one of their guys.

If you think voting Green in 2012 will accomplish anything other than to give the USA entirely to the Repugnicans for the next four years,

The Republicans have the country already. There's no difference between an Obama administration and a Romney administration. And you KNOW this is true because:

because Nixon's advice to Reagan still holds: "Run as hard to the right as you can, until you get the nomination. Then run as hard to the center as you can until the election.")

It's all posturing.

Re:Your right to what?

[Hatta]

His point is that copying is communication. You cannot communicate information without copying it. And therefore, you cannot prohibit copying without damaging our ability to communicate.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

Something you can buy for little money from many different stores doesn't exactly count as being locked up.

Yes, it does. Culture should not be something you rent, it should be something that everybody is free to participate in.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

The people aren't obligated to offer copyright at all, the Constitution merely permits it, and then only for the promotion of science and useful arts.

And the creator isn't obligated to create at all

That post was moderated flamebait but it isn't. It is a valid point that should be addressed.

Here's my take on it.

True, the creator isn't obligated to create. However, it is society's choice whether to offer the creator incentives to create and the decision should be based on cost/benefit considerations. In the 21st century, the life+70 copyright terms can provide absolutely no benefit to society over the original 14+14, or even a flat decade. The cost (to the public domain), on the other hand, has skyrocketed.

So I say let the creators that depend on absurd copyright terms stop creating, we will all be better off.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

also consider the fact that people in the past have made all kinds of published work before without any kind of copyright protection at all.

This.

Re:Your right to what?

[stating_the_obvious]

Lots of movies (everything except the blockbusters) make most of their money in back catalog. There is huge money in owning a massive library of old films.

So while I agree that copyright has lost all sense of 'fair use', I don't think you'll win arguing that there is no value in long copyrights.

Re:Your right to what?

[pD-brane]

No one has more rights than a citizen of the United States.

WTF? I am from another country than the United States of America and I am offended by this statement. What about using the phrase world citizen or human being? You watch too much 24.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

No amount of reduction in copyright will cause piracy to cease either.

Cease, as in "completely disappear", no.
But it will be significantly reduced if the public domain becomes rich enough to provide people alternative content form their generation .

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

That's ridiculous. Zero copyright means zero copyright infringement. And, even if we just reduce it to something less insane, like 10 years, many people might start to respect the institution since it has stopped disrespecting them.

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

The theatre and initial home release are where most of the money is made. Most films don't make significant amounts of money after a few years, which is why you see them in the bargain bin. Furthermore, even if a film does make constant money year after year, that money is made in the future, and is less of an incentive to the author at the time of writing.

Re:Your right to what?

[CohibaVancouver]

also consider the fact that people in the past have made all kinds of published work before without any kind of copyright protection at all.

Sure, but the majority were either impoverished (Van Gogh) or had a mentor (Salieri). ...and if you were someone like Charles Dickens you didn't have to worry about mass free distribution of your works. For most it was cheaper to buy a copy of his books than to attempt to duplicate it.

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

I don't know about cost - if you have a monopoly on a unique work (regardless of how that monopoly is secured), then you have a right to charge whatever you want

That's the price, not the cost of distribution. Bittorrent represents the cost of distribution of a work.

But I also think you would have difficulty defending BTJunkie as a place to find "out of print" copyrighted works.

I haven't used BTJunkie, but torrent sites in general are a good way of finding rare and out of print works. I'd say that in general, private trackers tend to be better for finding the obscure things, though.

Re:Your right to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Something you can buy for little money from many different stores doesn't exactly count as being locked up.

BT Junkie NEVER forced people to download torrents, but the government is FORCING people to go to jail, into bankruptcy, and completely offline. You are under-valuing how immoral copyright is.

Think about it; these copyright zealots aren't hurting people because they want to make the world a better, more culturally diverse and enriched place. They are harassing people because they want to extort money from people. Money is the root of all evil (or at least the part involved in banking, copyright, patents, the War on Drugs, Corrections Corporation of America, and prison economy, the war/oil economy, etc).

If I had a choice between being poor and being free, I would rather be free. Unfortunately the Right Wing is forcing me to be both poor and burdened with their over-bearing laws and prison systems.

But the Right Wing has the money and the weapons so they call the shots.

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

I propose that we limit not just the Executive and Legislative branches back to their original Constitutional limits, but also the Judicial, so they can't keep ruling themselves more and more power.

And who exactly is going to do that?

Re:Your right to what?

[alexo]

If your culture is defined as movies and canned music, then something is rotten...

If the draconian copyright terms applied only to "movies and canned music", they would be less of a problem.

That said, movies and music can influence -- even define -- culture just as well as literature and plays. It is not the medium, it's the message that matters.

Re:Your right to what?

[LordLimecat]

Pretty sure a large portion of the NES stuff is available on Wii.

Re:Your right to what?

[fostware]

+1 Oh, for some mod points...

Re:Your right to what?

[Runaway1956]

WTF is 24? Forget that, I don't give a crap. Did I suggest that a citizen of another nation should, could, or would have fewer rights than a citizen of the United States? No, I didn't. I stated that no one has MORE rights than a citizen of the United States. Most certainly not some self-proclaimed "rights holders". That shit is for the old world aristocracy, for whom I have nothing but contempt.

Re:Your right to what?

[LordLimecat]

And as a communicative species we invented copyright.

How is this getting us anywhere, again?

Re:Your right to what?

[LordLimecat]

Which is fine, because theres no fundamental right to own and enjoy the latest expansion to StarCraft 2 (complete with key and no-CD crack).

Re:Your right to what?

[brianerst]

This drivel was rated Insightful +5? You have got to be kidding me. Kennedy's inaugural address is available on Youtube. So is MLK's "I have a dream" speech.

King's "I Have a Dream" speech has rather famously been the source of numerous copyright lawsuits by the King Estate. See here for example.

The PBS special the OP was speaking of was "Eyes on the Prize", which was out of print for years until the producers got nearly $1 million in grants in order to pay off copyright holders after their original five-year rebroadcast rights had expired.

I would think that most everyone here knows that just because something can be found on YouTube doesn't mean that it's there legally. The vast majority of music on that site violates US copyright law.

Re:Your right to what?

[LordLimecat]

I think intention has a great deal to do with it, both in common sense terms and legally.

Re:Your right to what?

[BoberFett]

Actually, buying it does mean owning it forever.

Remember, these companies are claiming that you're not buying a piece of software or a song. You're purchasing a license to use that software or listen to that song. That's why you're not allowed to resell it.

So if I'm purchasing a license, then you're damn right I own it forever, and when the physical media degrades I had better be able to get a new copy for free.

No, these greedy bastards want their product ot have the best of both the physical and intangible worlds. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

Re:Your right to what?

[king neckbeard]

The problem with the Judicial here is that they aren't willing to stand up to the other branches using the power that they have. SCOTUS has the power to tell Congress that the CTEA and URAA were unconstitutional, but they refused to do so. The Judicial branch is unique in that their power, at least at the top, is mostly to limit the power of other branches. The worst they generally do is interpret a law more broadly than it is written, which is arguably what has happened with some patent cases.

Re:Your right to what?

[BoberFett]

Another option is an IP tax. Owning physical property requires one to pay a tax on it. Why is IP different? The owner wants to have all the rights of ownership, let them pay for it. Property tax pays for local police and fire protection, then IP tax can cover the costs of defending their property that IP owners are currently attempting to foist onto the public.

The first year is free. Every year after that the tax on copyrighted material goes up. If it's worth it for the owner to pay the tax because they're making a signficant amount of money on it, they'll continue paying the tax until it's not economically viable at which point it falls into the public domain.

Re:Your right to what?

[mcgrew]

It hasn't just gone far beyond the scope required for it's nominal purpose of promoting literary progress, but has gone so far that it inhibits literary progress.

Terry Pratchett could probably sue me for writing this story.

Re:Your right to what?

[Asmodae]

Good lord man, you have to post this gem while I have no mod points. Someone please mod this post up!

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Van Gogh wasn't impoverished because people were copying his paintings, he was impoverished because like many artists, his work wasn't very well appreciated in his lifetime. Nobody was clamoring for the original, much less copies.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

There are people out there who would actually rather grab a free sample out of someone's hands than take the one being freely offered. However, I'll bet a lot more people would respect copyright if it was reasonable.

Re:Your right to what?

[Curunir_wolf]

I see a memorial first edition of a couple core books but hardly all of them. Elsewhere I see 4th edition. Where is the 3.5 ed books that the copyright owner recalled from bookstores before releasing 4th ed.

Not sure if you're just nit-picking here or not. All the 3.5 edition rules are freely available, and I thought that version 4 was supposed to take care of all the complaints from people about 3.5??

And if that's not good enough, the printed books can be found, so I'm not sure what the point is in complaining about not being able to get scanned images of those books from a bittorrent site - that would seem even less useful than the stiff Wizards provides for free.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

Yes, there is huge money in owning a massive library, not so much in any one of the individual films. That's why you see holders of individual films willingly selling to those massive collectors.

Further, from the standpoint of the society, we should be trying to strike the best bargain we can, not the worst. If we can get the work produced in exchange for granting a 10 year copyright, we'd have to have holes in our heads to offer 80. That would be like offering the used car dealer four times bluebook value on a used car. I have no doubt he'll take the deal.

The value provided to society by the curators of large film collections evaporated the day it became possible for any interested individual to preserve a copy for a cost of under $1. It's like we were granting a billion a year in tax money to the buggy whip industry to make sure every citizen has one.

Re:Your right to what?

[Plunky]

Another option is an IP tax.

Problem for me with your suggestion is that this is complex to administer and requires work to find if IP is in public domain or not. A work may be under copyright or in the public domain in different jurisdictions and it will be very difficult to determine which. Why should I need to apply to a government department in order to find out if what I am going to do is lawful or not?

I wouldn't necessarily oppose an IP tax, but that is separate.. You don't pay property tax to keep your land from becoming part of the commons, you own the property and you pay tax based on the value of it because the government wants a cut. If you don't pay the tax, they might take it away from you and sell it to somebody else but it remains property and it is still valuable, it does not become free for all to use. If you want to try to implement an IP tax that is based on the value of the IP because you want a cut of the money then please, feel free to go ahead. The government has a massive department dedicated to collecting tax revenues already and they would no doubt be able to accomodate that just fine.

Re:Your right to what?

[sjames]

We have pretty much stopped using runners (other than for sport) and smoke signals now that we have better ways.

Re:Your right to what?

[Plunky]

Shortening copyright to 10 years won't change anything about the economics of pirating.

I think it would. With a short copyright term, there would be vast amounts of IP that is still culturally relevant available to distribute. There would be money to be made distributing that legally, and the organisations that would be making money distributing that would not be interested in illegally distributing protected IP.

Yes, piracy would still be possible and would still exist, much as counterfeit goods are available today.. but really, is it a problem when the real thing is available legally and cheaply? The vast majority of consumers are not going to bother seeking out the illegal suppliers, which really marginalizes them.

Re:Your right to what?

[BasilBrush]

Lets take Shakespeare as an example. He predated copyright laws. He wrote his works as a work for hire. He was paid a lump sum, and then the theatre company owned the play, and Shakespeare would get no royalties. The theatre company may in turn have sold the play to a printers for a lump sum. However that would be a dangerous thing to do, as once published, the theatre company and the printers had no further control over it. Other printers could print it, other theatre companies could perform it.

People who wanted to copy the play, for publication or performance could not get a copy of the script. The scripts were never given in full to the actors. They only got their own lines and cue-lines.

And the ability to record a performance hadn't been invented then. No tape recorders, and not even any shorthand. Someone could try and write down what was said, but with a quill, ink-pot and parchment he'd be spotted pretty easily. And could never have kept up anyway.

Nevertheless people did try to copy. From memory. And so an early bootleg printed script of Hamlet had the most famous speech starting:

"To be. or not to be, I there's the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? I all.
No, to sleep, to dream, I marry there is goes."

Few of Shakespeare's plays were published in his lifetime. Were it not for the 2 actors from Shakespeare's company taking it on themselves to assemble the first folio, some years after Shakespeare's death, we could have lost some of the greatest works written in the English Language.

As it is, at least one of his plays was lost. "Love's Labours Won".

I imagine if copyright existed back then, Shakespeare would have seen the value of publishing his own works in his own lifetime. Which would have made their survival less of a matter of good fortune.

Re:Your right to what?

[metamatic]

Problem for me with your suggestion is that this is complex to administer and requires work to find if IP is in public domain or not. A work may be under copyright or in the public domain in different jurisdictions and it will be very difficult to determine which.

I don't see the difficulty. If the copyright owner wants copyright protection in a given jurisdiction, it's up to them to submit the tax. If they don't, after some small number of years the IP goes into the public domain.

The cases where nobody knows who the owner is are exactly the works that ought to be placed in the public domain so that they can be preserved.

Re:Your right to what?

[snadrus]

Beyond that, when the governance of a people by a government "for the people" varies drastically from how those people see a government should behave, it's time for the government to change.

Re:Your right to what?

[Jane Q. Public]

"SCOTUS has the power to tell Congress that the CTEA and URAA were unconstitutional, but they refused to do so."

Yes, which is part of my point. By doing things like that, they have been "voting" the Federal government ever more power, and thus indirectly themselves. Considering that they are, after all, a branch of that same Government.

Re:Your right to what?

[Plunky]

I don't see the difficulty. If the copyright owner wants copyright protection in a given jurisdiction, it's up to them to submit the tax. If they don't, after some small number of years the IP goes into the public domain.

The complexity here is first that there must be a government organisation for each jurisdiction set up and maintained which keeps track of IP registration (vs "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights). Further complexity is that as a potential distributor of a potentially out of copyright work, I must contact this government organisation to check the status of every work (vs "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights), and how often should I contact them regarding a certain work that needs tax paid regularly? (of course, "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights) They could of course just make the data available for free on the internet, but see below..

Government organisations cost money to setup and maintain and yes, you could make them self-funding but then they start to become motivated differently. Why would they let you look something up for nothing? They could be forced to, but then you are talking about another law for that.. why do you want so many laws on the books? Its complicated when that happens..

Re:Your right to what?

[Dripdry]

DAH is gone!? Man, i really wanted to play that back in the day. Same with SpyHunter.

I just figured that they'd be around, and I could get a copy off ebay or something in the future when I have time to play.

Re:Your right to what?

[Hatta]

Yes, piracy would still be possible and would still exist, much as counterfeit goods are available today.. but really, is it a problem when the real thing is available legally and cheaply?

"The real thing" would not be available legally and cheaply under a, e.g., 5 year copyright term. Because "the real thing" are the newly released items. That's where the demand is highest.

If I want to see the new series of Doctor Who, what am I going to do? Am I going to wait 5 years for it to be legal for me to download, or am I going to straight to The Pirate Bay?

Re:Your right to what?

[chilvence]

I am absolutely certain that no amount of extension in copyright will cause Walt Disney to rise from the grave and plagiarise more from classic fairy tales.

There, thats better.

Re:Your right to what?

[metamatic]

The complexity here is first that there must be a government organisation for each jurisdiction set up and maintained which keeps track of IP registration (vs "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights).

Most governments already have a copyright office that tracks the copyright status of works.

Further complexity is that as a potential distributor of a potentially out of copyright work, I must contact this government organisation to check the status of every work (vs "its obvious" for fixed term copyrights), and how often should I contact them regarding a certain work that needs tax paid regularly?

Well, yes, fixed term copyrights are easier, but that's not what we have now. I was responding to the idea that IP taxes were in some way too complex to be workable.

Re:Your right to what?

[Altrag]

If by a "large portion" you mean 92 games (directly from the Wikipedia page you linked) out of somewhere in the 8000 range (I don't have an exact count but I believe it was a little over 8400 last time I checked..)

Of course that number includes all games released everywhere in the world, including a bunch of fan hacks.. but even if you give a large benefit of the doubt and say only 1000 of those were legitimately released in the US, the Wii store is still only offering a measly 1% of them. Hardly what I'd call a "large portion."

(Though you could probably argue that many of those games don't deserve to be re-released!)

Re:Your right to what?

[HeckRuler]

A good portion of my childhood was wrapped up in these Big Blue Monthly disks we got in the mail. It was like a magazine, but with disks. It made sense before the Internet.
Dad thought it would get him cutting edge accounting software or something (well, he DOES still use that damn DOS convert program, even in Win7). But what made it magical is the slew of small, no-name games that came with it. I've tracked down some gems like Legends of Murder, and I think Dark Designs, but there was just a slew of stuff that I couldn't find.

We had all those 5.25" disks in a closet, but sadly, they had succumbed to bitrot. Or a magnet hit them. Or something.
That was really crushing, you know? It was like finding an old stuffed animal was eaten by moths, or that old wooded ravine where your friends hung out was turned into a parking lot. Old, I guess, being the keyword there.

I think back and some of these were more influential/a better influence than a lot of my friends.

Re:Your right to what?

[symbolset]

Huge verbose stretch.

I do go on, don't I? But I try to entertain, and I get away with it often enough.

Re:Your right to what?

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, that one caught me by surprise. It's one of the biggest arguments for abandonware. When Nintendo came out and directly distributed their older titles for a cheap price, I was surprised. It's a fantastic move for everyone involved.

My only qualm is that they're arguing that because it's available for purchase, I shouldn't be able to play my copy of Legend of Zelda on the platform I choose. I already own it. I'll play it where I damn well choose. They can take their "product as a service with strings attached" and shove it. Cue the fanboys who are eager to buy every Zelda game over and over again for every system they own.

Re:Your right to what?

[Altrag]

Spin-offs do not have any effect on the original copyright. If they did, Disney could just make a new Mickey Mouse cartoon every 10 years and they wouldn't have needed to extend copyright terms to the point of silliness.

Trademarks are another story. And no one (that I know of at least) has made any useful claim suggesting that Disney's trademarks on Mickey & co should be revoked.

That is, its not about Disney losing the image of Mickey Mouse, its quite literally about Disney losing the ability to horde the specific film Steamboat Willy.

You know, just in case people on the Enterprise get such mass nostalgia for crappy cartoons from the early 20th century that Disney can make a huge profit on re-release.

(Replace Disney, Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy with your favorite examples as needed).

Re:Your right to what?

[shaitand]

4th ed wasn't even D&D anymore its a new game. There is a reason 3.5 was forked and called Pathfinder. Scanned book pdf's can be taken to staples and printed. Thus recreating the actual book. Some people don't just want something that allows you to figure out how to play, they want the books.

There are dozens of out of print game modules and books that you can only get via P2P sharing like torrents. It's a fact and not open to debate. People want them, nobody cares if you think what wotc makes available should be good enough.

Re:Your right to what?

[mcgrew]

Copyright wasn't needed until the invention of moveable type, and moveable type's widespread use. Copyright came about when technology made it necessary.

Re:Your right to what?

[thomst]

brianerst pointed out:

King's "I Have a Dream" speech has rather famously been the source of numerous copyright lawsuits by the King Estate. See here for example.

The PBS special the OP was speaking of was "Eyes on the Prize", which was out of print for years until the producers got nearly $1 million in grants in order to pay off copyright holders after their original five-year rebroadcast rights had expired.

I would think that most everyone here knows that just because something can be found on YouTube doesn't mean that it's there legally. The vast majority of music on that site violates US copyright law.

Now, this deserves a +5 Informative mod (although it actually got a +5 Insightful one, instead).

The King estate copyright claim (and MLK's original claim) IS abuse of the copyright system. I'm old enough to have watched the "I have a dream" speech live on TV, before a crowd that covered the Mall, and it seems to me that a challenge to the original copyright claim could and should have been mounted right after King made the speech - and I think it would have succeeded, then. The other part of the problem here is the concept of legal precedent, which idiotically holds that, once a court has ruled on an issue, that decision is somehow graven in stone, and, in subsequent trials of approximately-similar cases, the judge must abide by the arguments advanced by the judge who presided over the original case, no matter how fallacious his/her logic might be, and irrespective of actual facts.

For example, take the odious decision in State of Ohio v Anderson (please forgive the horrible PDF scan), where Justice Resnick, writing for the Ohio Supreme Court, retails a laundry list of supposed characteristics unique to pit bulls that includes a staggering number of misrepresentations (e.g. - pit bulls are the only dogs that bite and hold), assertions unbacked by evidence of any kind (e.g.- pit bulls are the only dogs that can climb trees!), and outright fabrications (e.g. - pit bulls bite with a force of 2000 pounds per square inch, a bite force unmatched by any other breed). These canards, in turn, are all based on State of Florida v Peters (a much-better-quality PDF), a case in which the Peters's defense counsel should have been shot for gross incompetence for not challenging the assertion of fairy tales as fact. And the U.S. Supreme Court denied review of Anderson, despite the clearly-unconstitutional assertion by Resnick that any law enforcement officer is capable of determining whether a mixed breed dog is or is not a pit bull, and that anyone who is unsure whether the dog they propose to adopt is a pit bull in the meaning of the law can definitively determine that question by asking any clown with a badge to pass judgement (totally ignoring the excellent possibility that some other cop will reach a different conclusion, and charge you with violating Ohio's requirement that you maintain $100,000 in liabilty insurance for each pit bull you own - insurance that it's impossible to obtain, unless you're a licensed breeder, btw). And this is not a mere theoretical conundrum of which I speak. I'm currently charged with exactly this crime, for owning a bullmastiff mix, even though the Ross County Dog Warden has evaluated her and stated (before four witnesses), "There's no pit in this animal." (I'm also charged with the same "crime" for owning a boxer that my wife and I adopted from the county animal shelter two years ago.)

It's not just copyright law - the legal system itself is broken. And the MAFIAA is no worse than your typical local prosecutor - because, just like the MAFIAA, the prosecutor's favorite exercise is overreaching.

None of which obviates my point that only Congre

Re:Your right to what?

[westlake]

And I am absolutely certain that MORE people would be creating derivations of classic, public domain works if Disney hadn't started raping the public domain and then trying to sue everyone who used the same public domain works that they'd ripped off.

No matter how thin you slice it....

Search IMDb for any familiar fairy tale, legend, story or character in the public domain and you most likely discover hundreds of motion picture and video productions from the silent era onward.

The quintessential Rags to Royalty story, the best known versions in the western world are based on the one written by Charles Perrault in the 17th century. If, on hearing the name Cinderella, you think of fairy godmothers, glass slippers, and a pumpkin turned into a coach, you're thinking of Perrault. In 1950, Disney adapted Perrault's story into a movie, cementing it in people's minds as the story of Cinderella.

Seven years later Rodgers And Hammerstein adapted [Perrault's tale] into a musical for a television broadcast, starring Broadway royalty Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney, Edie Adams, Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley (as the King and Queen, Fairy Godmother, and stepsisters, respectively) and Jon Cypher (of Hill Street Blues fame) as the Prince. One particular young lady took a week off from her starring role in the most popular play on Broadway at the time to play Cinderella - Julie Andrews in her on-camera debut.

Cinderella

The Jim Henson version aired in 1969.

Re:Your right to what?

[LordLimecat]

My only qualm is that they're arguing that because it's available for purchase, I shouldn't be able to play my copy of Legend of Zelda on the platform I choose. I already own it. I'll play it where I damn well choose.

You can argue that buying a Honda Civic gives you the right to reproduce them at will, but dont be surprised when society and its judical system disagrees with you.

Re:Your right to what?

[nukenerd]

You can argue that buying a Honda Civic gives you the right to reproduce them at will, but dont be surprised when society and its judical system disagrees with you.

No, he is arguing that he can drive it on what what road he likes. And this bit of society (me) agrees with him.

Re:Your right to what?

[GameboyRMH]

Guess you can't see my sig, I've never bought an Apple product in my life and don't see it ever happening.

Also I don't live in the US so eBay's right out.

Re:Your right to what?

[ToddInSF]

Exactly, copyright was never intended to be wielded in a manner which compleatly prevents any access at all.

An industry that relies on such hostile activities towards consumers simply does not deserve to exist.

Arguably, it's immoral to patronize such an industry at all.

Nooooooo!!!!

[scottbomb]

WTF? FBI breathing down their neck?

Re:Nooooooo!!!!

[Curunir_wolf]

Not really, but they did put on a big PR stunt where a big, popular file-sharing site, seemingly out-of-reach on the other side of the world, were shut down and the operators arrested. I'm not convinced that is was anything but a scripted reality show, but it seemed to have convinced the operators of BTJunkie that they should quit while they're ahead.

Re:Nooooooo!!!!

[jginspace]

Not really, but [the Feds] did put on a big PR stunt where a big, popular file-sharing site, seemingly out-of-reach on the other side of the world, were shut down and the operators arrested. I'm not convinced that is was anything but a scripted reality show, but it seemed to have convinced the operators of BTJunkie that they should quit while they're ahead.

Yes indeed, just after the Megaupload circus Btjunkie removed all the latest torrents from their home page - it became Google style, with basically just a search box. This was before Rapidshare restricted their functionality. Btjunkie were obviously being very cautious.

Source code and database?

[Smirker]

Publish one last torrent please? I'm sure someone would love to bring it back to life.

Re:Source code and database?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well be asking why Che shirts are so popular as capitalistic merchandise, and countless other examples.

Every movement has figureheads. No figurehead is perfect. Some only mildly so. Others horrendously a figurehead for the exact opposite of what they believed. In the defense of those two, making profit doesn't matter. Because Andy Warhol made quite a bit of money doesn't mean he wasn't an artist. Profit does not mean they aren't freedom fighters.

One person's freedom fighter in the copyright culture wars is another's dirty pirate stealing candy from paraplegic babies.

Re:Source code and database?

[cheekyjohnson]

Making money off of advertisements is just awful! No one should be allowed to do that. After all, what if someone uses your website to... infringe someone's copyright?

Re:Source code and database?

[LaRainette]

To paraphrase a well known meme : Still a better freedom fighter than the RIAA/MPAA.
When you've got to bad choices you pick the least worse.

Re:Source code and database?

[GameboyRMH]

I was thinking the same thing.

Re:Source code and database?

[mister_playboy]

They certainly managed to get Google results hits consistently, regardless of whether or not they actually had anything even remotely resembling my search query.

That search results spam never endeared me to those sites.

Not a huge loss

[Anonymous Coward]

To be honest, most of the time, when I was linked to btjunkie, I ended up having to log in to their site only to be sent to a closed tracker where I couldn't log in and get to the torrent. I'm sorry they've had to close, but with DHT and magnet links, I hope that sites like btjunkie will become less and less necessary.

Re:Not a huge loss

[wisnoskij]

??? you don't have to log into BTJ for anything other then profile management.

Re:Not a huge loss

[wisnoskij]

Well they did have a few spidered private torrents, but that is all about logging into the private website not btjunky (to be fair I never used those torrents, maybe you had to log into both or somehow add your external private torrent site to your btjunkie account?).
My best guess was, if you are logged into the private site those links will just magically work.

Best

[wisnoskij]

Best torrent site ever.
I don't know if anything new one has come up in the last few years but it is the best torrent site I have ever used.
Pirate Bay and Demonoid got nothing on btjunkie.
Or at least they didn't.

R.I.P old friend, or better yet go all zombie and come back to life.

Re:Best

[CaseCrash]

I totally agree. I pretty much always use torrentz.com for searching, but btjunkie was always the site I went to from there to grab the torrent file because the comments were useful and the download link was so obvious and right there at the top with scrolling down or trying to figure out if "download" was actually an ad link

Re:Best

[CaseCrash]

damnit, with == "without"

Re:Best

[perryizgr8]

piratebay>>>all else

Re:Best

[GameboyRMH]

btjunkie certainly had a wider and older selection than TPB. If you needed something old or obscure, btjunkie had it.

HAH!

[idbeholda]

Sounds like they got a letter in the mail. In all seriousness, there are literally hundreds of torrent sites on the internet, with many of them being outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. I don't see what the fuss is about, honestly.

Re:HAH!

[jginspace]

They shut down MegaUpload recently, and they were in New Zealand. The operators were arrested, too, ...

MegaUpload was in Hong Kong, the fat guy and his fleet of cars was in New Zealand. At least one of their servers was in the US and so were their domains.

Re:

[CelticWhisper]

The Pirate Bay is still alive and kicking, but I'm wondering the same thing. My go-to sites were always BTJunkie and The Pirate Bay. I tried Monova once or twice but they always seemed lacking by comparison. Either they hadn't indexed what I wanted or it was never seeded - always some ancient torrent from years prior. Who else is still a major player?

Crickets

[RobinEggs]

I sincerely don't mean to be a dick, but was btjunkie ever that good? Or that relevant? I tried to make serious use of it around 2009, and I don't remember being impressed. Nor was I disgusted. It was just another site. I moved on pretty quickly

The comment features and such were better than average, I suppose, but the time for public search engines passed years ago. There are so many private trackers with open signups. So many wonderlands where all of the comments are in comprehensible English and your download takes off immediately instead of slooowwwly ramping up.

So I guess I don't miss it, and don't recall that it was ever a big deal. But maybe I'm wrong?

Re:Crickets

[Zouden]

Yes, it was that good - BTJunkie had a much larger index than any other site because it indexed private trackers (they appeared with a lock icon, and a portal page let you log in and get the torrent from those sites). Even excluding the private torrents it had a bigger selection than other sites such as Mininova or TPB.

Re:Crickets

[bwhaley]

I used it exclusively. For me it was the best place to find torrents that where properly categorized with many seeders and, most importantly, ratings and comments so that you could be confident in the files you were downloading. It was an aggregator of other sites so it had an extensive database. I had been using it since it's inception in 2005. I'll miss it dearly.

Re:Crickets

[jamstar7]

Well, it was my experience that if you couldn't find a link on BTJunkie, you couldn't find that torrent anywhere.

Re:Crickets

[jamstar7]

Most private trackers aren't open. They're invite-only, and if somebody invites a *AA agent, they lose their access too.

Re:Crickets

[delinear]

Killing Napster was the biggest mistake RIAA ever made. Instead of taking advantage of this established, centralised hub of distribution and cutting some good deals for DRM free, inexpensive content, they killed it and caused a slew of replacement sites to rise in its stead. They've been fighting the same battle now for over a decade with no end in site, meanwhile they've slowly been dragged down the route of cheaper, DRM free, convenient content that they could have chosen from the start, and as a result they've alienated a lot of people in the interim.

Re:Crickets

[littlebigbot]

Plus the lack of porn ads made it more reputable looking.

A few battles will be won, the war will be lost.

[Anonymous Coward]

For over a decade, the MAFIAA et al have utterly refused to follow the winning strategy of going along with the modern age and giving consumers what consumers want. In the end, the MAFIAA et al will die.

The current wave of sometimes successful temporary oppressions will do the same thing as killing the original Napster did. That is, it will result in an explosion of new and better means to do the same thing and so-called "piracy" will increase again by orders of magnitude.

Soon, it will be game over for the dinosaurs. At the current rate and without a huge change in direction (and it may already be too late for that), I predict the demise of the MAFIAA et al by 2020.

It will serve the dumb fuckers right.

Suprnova 4 lyfe bitches

[RobinEggs]

Best torrent site ever. I don't know if anything new one has come up in the last few years but it is the best torrent site I have ever used.

I can respect your opinion, but nothing will ever match suprnova in my eyes. It didn't necessarily have the best features, but it had that glorious time when it seemed like the entire freaking pirate world (you know, outside of the pirates who actually originate the content and only use private ftp servers) used the same site. I don't think I ever looked for something on suprnova that I didn't find, and I can still remember the amazement of leaving kazaa and seeing a dozen torrents with tens of thousands of people a piece the week Doom 3 came out. No scrounging around in some shitty internal search engine or anything; just out there, on a regular searchable website like God intended.

Man, I'm getting all misty eyed.

Re:Suprnova 4 lyfe bitches

[slowLearner]

What about Google, it never fails to provide.

Re:Suprnova 4 lyfe bitches

[kangsterizer]

mininova was a very good replacement, til it "died"
but yeah, suprnova will stay in every pirate's heart :)

Re:Suprnova 4 lyfe bitches

[liposuction]

Oh man those were the days....

Pirate bay decision is probably why

[Anonymous Coward]

BTJunkie was based in sweden, and with the final word on Pirate bay's case handed down last week, it is now most likely illegal for BTJunkie to operate in sweden.

But in the end, what does it matter. It appears the next generation of technology is already here: Magnet links. Good luck shutting that down.

Re:Pirate bay decision is probably why

[GumphMaster]

They'll find a way to call a file hash a derivative work and sue anybody hosting a hash. In their eyes: the hash corresponds uniquely to a particular file they claim infringes their copyright, and it is derived from 100% of the file and therefore cannot be fair use. Long bows are the best (aka most profitable) bows in legal circles.

Re:Pirate bay decision is probably why

[jginspace]

So straight after this case, Pirate Bay move to a .se domain and continue operating; Btjunkie close down. This Sweden connection doesn't work out.

Magnet links are still links. They require much less space to host but they still need hosting. According to the US Immigration and Customs guys, linking is a crime - you lose your domain - or if you happen to live in the US (or UK) ... your freedom.

Re:A few battles will be won, the war will be lost

[Osgeld]

you bother to spout this in the year where "digital" (god I fucking hate that term, I guess all those CD's of music and software I have purchased since the early 90's were god damned analog) sales have surpassed physical sales

They made their money and they're running.

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Take the money and run

Re:They made their money and they're running.

[GodfatherofSoul]

You mean Bobbi Sue and Billy Ray.

Re:They made their money and they're running.

[TapeCutter]

Take the money and run

Please don't tell me a story about Jack and Diane.

How about a little ditty, or has the trill of living already gone?

Re:They made their money and they're running.

[jamstar7]

That's two songs you owe RIAA royalties on now.

Re:Just once...

[bug1]

"Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing"

Im sure there are lots of programmers here that make a living from creating software (a creative work) and support file sharing.

Or are you only interested in hearing from copyright holders that dont write Free software ?

Re:Just once...

[wizeman]

Check out Paulo Coelho, a brazilian writer who has sold more than 100 million books in more than 150 countries:

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/28/promo-bay/

Re:Trying to find Autocad 2012

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask and you shall receive.

Something needs to give

[EmperorOfCanada]

Copyright does need to change somewhat. A key to human success is where one person invents something cool and others build on that in an endless chain. I think we do need copyright to prevent a publishing company from stealing a book from an author and printing away or a Chinese company taking that same book and flooding the market with knockoffs. But it has gone too far where a modern musician can't play with some distinctive riffs from a 40 year old Beatles song without being in the center of a lawyer pile-up.

Many of Gutenberg's first bibles were burned as work of the devil. I suspect that this was the Church not liking their loss of bible creation control. I doubt that any of the upset priests thought the devil had anything to do with their printing.

Re:Something needs to give

[LaRainette]

I do agree on the citation needed, but on the second point you're utterly ignorant.
Before printing, the almost all of the writing was done by monks, and the Bible was of course their very best seller.
Why do you think all the great figures of the 1000-1600 (Descartes, Pascal, Erasmus ...) were monks or priests ? because they controled all the knowledge and all the writings, and they were among the only who could teach how to read/write.
So yes the church lost most of its control over the writing of the bible with printing, one could argue that it was one of the major aid in the develloppement of the Reform. Printing also put and end to the constant rewriting of the scriptures (which the Catholic church controled) because with so many identical bibles now everywhere making changes became more visible

Re:Something needs to give

[LaRainette]

...
Coming from a citizen of a country that is younger than the times discussed and who's 8th grade history lessons consisted of the tale of the pilgrims and thanksgiving, it really hurts...
You're lecturing me on the history of my fucking country/continent you ignorant pedantic arrogant idiot!
PS: 8th grade is for Antiquity in France, that would be what you called the Jesus story back where you hillbillies come from.

Re:Just once...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing. Everytime you so much as hint that copyright should be respected on this site you get modded troll, or flamebait. Why? So, people can't enter into a debate about it, and you never have to have your perceptions challenged? For a community which seems so passionate and open about free communication, it certainly seems to shut down people who don't agree with the majority pretty quickly.

there is nothing to debate about.. every argument made by copyright trolls has been to some extent if not completely refuted but they go around repeating it to people that have heard them a thousand times, know that they are invalid and never want to hear them again... where? on places they like to hang out like here... it's equivalent to someone coming to your house, forcing his way in and then preaching to you about some nonsense you know for a fact to be invalid.. is there a reason we should sit around in a circle calmly and repeat the refutations over and over again to these ignorant cunts? i think not.. when you have a new argument.. one with some merit (ie. not you downloaded this $20 movie from torrents so we lost $20 in profits, or you downloaded the $10 album so now they musician lost $10 (lol).....) and maybe we'll listen.. until then, feel free to fuck off

Re:Just once...

[multiben]

Are you being serious? If I was making money from Free software then of course I would want to get it distributed as widely as possible - that's the point of Free software. That is how it works. I would be fascinated to hear from a programmer who writes Free software and *doesn't* support file sharing.

Re:Just once...

[multiben]

Nice work anonymous. Big tough internet bully. When you are ready to post with an id, then I will address your reply.

Record companies said radio was piracy too

[leftie]

Broadcasting the live recordings of musicians was stealing from their musicians.

Sheet music was stealing from musicians before radio.

Re:Record companies said radio was piracy too

[SethJohnson]

Nobody much says this, but when moving pictures came out, it literally crushed the livelihoods of thousands of live vaudeville performers. Instead of traveling their acts all over the country, one act would get filmed and then that would travel the country being projected for screens set up on stages in the same theaters that used to host the live performers.

Seth

Re:Record companies said radio was piracy too

[Mal-2]

And the trade-off for this was that the film could be seen in every city simultaneously, at far less cost than moving a vaudeville troupe. Also, it allowed for things to be done that simply can't be done in a live setting. The art itself improved. The number of people seeing that art increased. Overall, it was a net positive. Just because there is damage to one sector does not mean that progress should be held back, else we would have banned cars and light bulbs for buggy whip and candle makers.

Re:Record companies said radio was piracy too

[SethJohnson]

Oh, I entirely agree with your observations.

I think the irony I was commenting on was that the movie studios themselves had grown up by usurping the content provided by live performers and at the same time, taking the profits of these performers while even physically displacing them off their stages with screens. One of those 'turnabout is fair play' scenarios.

Seth

Re:Just once...

[cheekyjohnson]

every argument made by copyright trolls has been to some extent if not completely refuted but they go around repeating it to people that have heard them a thousand times

What's humorous is that some of these "copyright trolls" probably feel the same way about you that you do about them.

Thanks and so long for all the fish.

[BenJCarter]

mmmm fish...

Re:Just once...

[Ja'Achan]

You wanted debate? That's two doors down the hall on your left. This is slashdot.

Eerily like Cheggit

[erroneus]

Very recently, a similar message came from the operators of Cheggit. They are either being bought out of operation or they are being issued "offers they cannot refuse" is my guess. They never say exactly why beyond saying things vaguely like "no longer worth it" or things to that effect. Never saying exactly why is the hallmark.

Re:Eerily like Cheggit

[Anrego]

I suspect it's more the whole seeing sites shut down and people actually going to jail thing.

Maybe there is some back room threatening going on, but I think it's as simple as seeing where shits heading and not wanting to be in the way when it gets there.

Re:Eerily like Cheggit

[misexistentialist]

These sites are run by businessmen, not pirates of the high-seas who lives lives of danger and adventure, so they actually need an environment of rules and laws so that they can profit from their investment. The global triumph of plutocracy means that only certain wealthy parties have any control over their lives.

Re:Just once...

[unity100]

you have been challenged properly by the guy you responded to, dude. now reply to him.

Re:Just once...

[guitardood]

Just once I would like to hear from genuine copyright holders on slashdot who both make a living from their creative works *AND* support un-regulated torrenting and file sharing

Sir or Madam,

I apologize for the length and I know some will feel this is irrelevant, but I feel the background is important to the point.

I am a professional software engineer of 25 years ( AST-Cons @ http://www.sco.com/support/docs/openserver/506/rnotes/ipxrnC.install_configure.html & many other non-published works) and a semi-professional musician of 30 years ( http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=7&ti=1,7&SAB1=Chuck%20Fletcher&BOOL1=all%20of%20these&FLD1=Keyword%20Anywhere%20(GKEY)%20(GKEY)&GRP1=OR%20with%20next%20set&SAB2=&BOOL2=as%20a%20phrase&FLD2=Keyword%20Anywhere%20(GKEY)%20(GKEY)&CNT=25&PID=wKzqQlM4-haqA4MgAO7ElXsllTO36&SEQ=20120206023617&SID=1 , http://www.soundclick.com/ChuckFletcher & http://www.musicpreview.com/ )

I am 100% behind the free sharing of all content and for searching out alternative methods of payment.

The most blatant and egregious circumstance that has helped form my opinions are my own experience with copyrighted works and infringement of said works.

In 2006 my company did extensive work for a law firm. The firm had a service agreement in place (since 1996) with my company, under which they purchased time at an hourly rate & licensed our proprietary technologies for which they paid a monthly fee. They purchased a new server for about $15,000.00 and requested our expertise to configure the new server, and their network of about 80 workstations, in order to replace their current 5 or 6 varied-platform servers with this huge AIX-based server. What they forgot is that $15,000.00 was the price of the server & Informix software. When they received a bill for $65,000.00 for time, they proceeded in typical lawyer fashion to sue my company and myself personally for incompetence and a slew of other trumped charges (which were eventually dismissed) in order to avoid payment. For 10 years we provided outstanding performance and overnight became incompetent?

After installation, my company maintained the 'admin' passwords and continued to provide support for the new configurations. During this time there were a few issues which were resolved and their systems were otherwise working flawlessly with 100% access to their data. After three months of non-payment from them, their workstations began displaying a simple non-repeating license non-compliance message upon reboot. They perpetrated a fraud on the courts and acted like their data was inaccessible due to our maintaining the admin passwords. I could really go on, but the main point that I wanted to make is in regards to the proprietary email/firewall extensions, custom Samba Active-Directory extensions & custom tools which were all protected by the admin passwords and the subsequent handing over of said works. The lawyers proceeded to bring us into court under a mandatory restraining order and the judge compelled my company to turn over the admin passwords and in turn all of our protected works. They then proceeded to give that admin password to one of our competitors, in turn giving that competitor access to all of our protected configuration & administration tools including sources & binaries.

My next move was to hire a copyright attorney in pu

Am I the only one?

[atari2600a]

Anyone else check the source to see if there was a hidden message, only to be terribly disappointed?

DNS

[gd2shoe]

Well the U.S. controls the DNS system, so that puts pretty much the entire world under US jurisdiction...

Only if they tried to reclaim a ccTLD to enforce their will. THAT wouldn't be tolerated, and would cause the DNS system to be immediately forked.

So, no. The entire world isn't under US jurisdiction for that cause alone. (only so far as the world let's our leaders bully them around.)

Re:Just once...

[gd2shoe]

I have something valuable to say.

"Don't feed the trolls."

hmm... comments?

[Tom]

On most of the other stories, the main parts of the comments was dedicated to talking about alternatives and providing links.

This one? Whining, misty eyes on good old times, copyright discussions. Are we getting old?

I found it on the commons.

[TapeCutter]

For a community which seems so passionate and open about free communication, it certainly seems to shut down people who don't agree with the majority pretty quickly.

Depends on the veracity of your point and how you word it. At worst you will get modded down, which is very different to shut down, and the complete opposite of the insightful tag your post is currently displaying. Sure there are plenty of immature black/white posts on slashdot, my guess is most of them are from people (say) under 25 who still have not outgrown the belief in silver bullets.

However, I disagree with your entire premise, in fact I would go so far as to say that most slashdotters who earn a living in IT do not want to throw the copyright baby out with the bath scum. And this goes doubly so for developers like me who have made a comfortable living writing copyrighted software and building corporate systems from other peoples copyrighted software. I would consider any developer (independent or corporate) to be under-qualified if they couldn't tell the difference between a proprietary license and a OSS licence. As a developer you may often have the responsibility to advise your boss/client of the costs/benefits of competing third party software providers, the type of license can (and often does) have a large impact on that analysis. Of course both the boss and the developer know that IP law is a complete dog's breakfast so they also get their interpretation ratified by the lawyers to armour plate their arses.

Just to round it out, I'd say there is a third major category of copyright posts on slashdot; the complainer. Like the government complainer, or the AGW psuedo-skeptic, they believe any fault (real or imagined, titanic or trivial) is reason enough to nuke the whole thing from orbit

But I suspect at a much deeper "social order" level, people in general subconsciously see the internet as a public space, and by extension downloading becomes - "I found it on the commons". And to a very large degree that is how the law works in most places. If not by letter then at least in practice, since everything is copyright by default and there is no authoritative 'evil bit' that allows the down-loader to discern if he is forbidden to download it before he has downloaded it. I'm sure someone will post a link to contradict the following claim but - I'm not aware of anyone who has been prosecuted anywhere for downloading alone, (re)distribution is always the rope they hang you with.

Having said that, the nuking of megaupload has sent a political chill across the net like a cruise missile hitting Al-Jazzera, they've demonstrated they don't need SOPA or the ISP's to start a 'war on pirates', I expect more sites will have received that message via more explicit private channels and will 'voluntarily' close down in the near future. OTOH, the whole thing is yet to be tested in court and I can't see how the search giants will lay down and let the MAFIAA and Murdoch steam-roll them with a "linking is theft" precedent set against a weak competitor.

Re:I found it on the commons.

[Taco Cowboy]

Having said that, the nuking of megaupload has sent a political chill across the net like a cruise missile hitting Al-Jazzera, they've demonstrated they don't need SOPA or the ISP's to start a 'war on pirates', I expect more sites will have received that message via more explicit private channels and will 'voluntarily' close down in the near future. OTOH, the whole thing is yet to be tested in court and I can't see how the search giants will lay down and let the MAFIAA and Murdoch steam-roll them with a "linking is theft" precedent set against a weak competitor.

What you've described, and what we're all witnessing, is the online version of Darwinism

The principle of "Survival of the fittest" does apply, and we will see who will be the ultimate winner.

If the media/MAFIAA/murdock camp wins, it'd signify the begin of the end of the Western civilization - for valuable knowledge that might benefit younger generations will be locked up behind security vaults

Who are we gonna blame this time ???

[Taco Cowboy]

watch how quickly our media shill of a POTUS tells you to go fuck yourself, he knows whose paying his salary and it AIN'T you

Are we gonna blame the media ?

Was the POTUS elected by the media ?

What the fuck are we going to the polling station for, if the media gets to hold the sway, no matter who end up being the POTUS ?

It's the voters who are to be blamed for this sorry state of affairs

Yes, it's US, you, and me, and millions of fucking assholes like us who have allowed the media to take over our lives

It is time we really start voting third parties across the board

So you think by voting third parties across the board the whole mess will magically cured, just like that?

The media will control WHOEVER gets elected, because, again, WE LET THEM !!

Re:Just once...

[FrootLoops]

Is it just me, or has the mod system been failing more than usual in the last few weeks? I've seen crap rise to +4 and +5 before sinking down to oblivion a couple times and wow I've seen a post with a valid point do essentially the same. And it seems like the ratio of +4/+5 posts to all posts is higher than it used to be. Perhaps the system got tweaked to give out mod points more often? If so it should be reverted.

Re:Just once...

[LaRainette]

R-A-D-I-O-H-E-A-D.

Re:Next best site?

[Anrego]

Small, purpose specific private trackers. The kind you hear about from a friend.

To be honest, these were always the best. The annoying ration enforcement stuff meant really damn good speeds.. and the community aspect meant good quality stuff. They are also somewhat less likely to be taken down due to "not being worth the effort".

(before someone goes blasting me for downloading media .. I tend to only download stuff which can't easily be obtained legally).

Re:Just once...

[LaRainette]

Slashdot is about free speech.
Free Speech is about letting people talk, not acknowledging any retard opinion backed by counterfactual, flawed, aging arguments who feel like a repost of a repost just because you posted it.
You can voice your opinion as much as you like here, just don't expect people to agree with you just because you're saying something, and don't expect either that people will let you say something and not respond if they think you're wrong.
Or to make this shorter : You're entitled to your own opinion, and the right to voice it, not your own facts and the priviledge to be praised whether you're right or wrong.

Re:Just once...

[cyclomedia]

I'm a musician, and don't expect to make a living from my work: you can download and share my stuff all you like. I have a day job. Does that count?

Re:Just once...

[perryizgr8]

i'll tell you why i and most other people who download free stuff do it: because we can. if it becomes too much pain in the ass, my media consumption will go amazingly down, i'll mostly start listening to fm radio. its already happened with games. the new stuff is just to heavily drm infested to bother. so i don't buy them. i play only the older games that i can easily download and play without any hassles. note that my games expenditure is still zero bucks.

Re:Just once...

[ElusiveJoe]

I also feel that the history and culture of humankind should be available to humankind without some clown asking for a handout every time you see a picture or hear a word.

Absolutely. But even if they want to stick to old locked down copyright model, there must not be a monopoly like *IAA. Monopolies always, always become public enemies, trying to screw everyone up, reaching for even more power, spreading like cancer through every other market and system. If I was an artist obsessed with controlling my work, I would expect to be given a choice of who will defend my interests, and not obliged to pay 95% of income to some rich assholes controlling the market.

Re:Just once...

[Kjella]

Sad story, but it sounds like most of this is from dealing with the lawyers, law firms and the court system, with probably a far greater dose of contract law than copyright law. And "trumped up charges", "perpetraded a fraud on the courts" and a lawyer that wasn't actually filing a counter suit doesn't sound like a problem with the laws on the books. Here's the short, brutal facts of it:

The worst possible opponent you can have in a court of law is a law firm.

It doesn't have anything to do with what law you're dealing with. You are up against an opponent that has absolutely no incentive not to take it to courts, because they're experts at it and it'll cost you money but not them. I bet if you got experts to look at them, they'd find the charge were not ridiculous enough to make them illegal, the claims in court not so incorrect they'd amount to perjury, just distant enough from the truth to exhaust your resources. If you finally found a lawyer to counter sue, he'd be drowned in motions and depositions and counterclaims at every turn and they'd ride it to the very end of appeals.

A former employer of mine had one such dealing with a law firm. In the end, it came down to one sentence in the relatively huge contract that turned out to be a Pandora's box. They had shown us a component, the functionality they showed had been planned and estimated but instead of listing all the functional requirements of that component the contract said it would replace it. Guess what, it also had a lot of functionality they didn't show us, most likely because they didn't realize it was there but they did later, and rather than make an expensive change order they read the contract with a lawyer's eye and insisted we'd implement everything. And AFAIK we eventually did, even though it was a fixed price bid and we got exactly $0 for the job.

That lead to some new contract rules, we would specify the functionality you will get and the client will sign this will cover his needs but we would never promise to replace anything ever again. But it also has a lot to do with law firms, I don't think one company with a corporate lawyer would ride it that way against another company lawyer. But when you're dealing with a company full of them, I'd grow eyes in the back of my neck. They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You should apply that to lawyers...

Re:Just once...

[guitardood]

I agree with most of your post but I would hate for folks to lose sight of the point of my post which was not so much about the law firm nonsense, though they did perjure themselves when they claimed they could not access their data.

The point was about the same government who traveled to the other side of the world to capture someone who was "hurting" Hollywood ( though I haven't seen any Hollywood exec needing foodstamps) and yet literally laughed at me about the exact same type of theft with a perpetrator who was within walking distance of their downtown Chicago computer crime division.

What I hate....more than any other injustice is the double standard. We're all supposed to be afforded equal protection under the law. I could have even understood had there been an investigation and a "sorry, not enough evidence to prosecute" response. However, my complaint was held in the same regard as if I walked into their offices wearing an aluminum hat and complained of being followed by aliens. Adding insult to injury, it was specifically a 5th amendment issue:

nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Had the headlines read: HOLLYWOOD TRIES TO TRACK DOWN OWNERS OF MEGAUPLOAD TO SERVE THEM A SUBPOENA, US GOVT SILENT, I would at least have the comfort that the Constitution is protecting us all the same.

Anyway, I could rant on and on. All I would really like to see is a change to copyright law saying that if you publish your works, you have exclusivity for 5,10 or 20 years or maybe only days-to-weeks for more volatile material and then said works enter the public domain with no residuals for platform changes.

I hate to pick on Aerosmith as they're one of my favorite bands (and one of the first to release music digitally for those old enough to remember), but: In 1972 I bought a copy of "Toys in the Attic" on vinyl. When I got my first car with a cassette player, I bought "Toys in the Attic" to have a quality version for the car. When CD's came out I bought "Toys in the Attic" to have a crystal clear version. I've already paid my licensing fees twice more than I should have, however the RIAA wants me to buy "Toys in the Attic" again in MP3 format so I can listen on my iPod/iPhone. When is enough....enough? I even have a Foreigner CD that has a disclaimer about the sound quality not being what one would expect on a CD because it was made from the original unclean-able studio masters. So basically they ripped the album and charged me again for the same quality I could have gotten if I ripped my vinyl copy myself.

Copyright until year X. Not starting year X.

[AliasMarlowe]

For simplicity, copyright should be a fixed term. Then, when you buy something, and see it says right on the package that "This item is Copyright 2006" and you know that after X years you are free to copy it and distribute all you like.

I would much rather see the package say "This item is copyright until 2020" and know that on 1 January 2021 it would no longer be under copyright and be freely copyable.

Re:But they require email

[IonOtter]

10minutemail.com

1. Go to 10minutemail.
2. Get email address.
3. Sign up with torrent site and give them the email address.
4. Check 10minutemail in 30 seconds.
5. Complete registration on torrent site.

Done.

Note: don't lose your password, or you'll have to make another account.

Re:Just once...

[bug1]

"If I was making money from Free software then of course I would want to get it distributed as widely as possible - that's the point of Free software"

And if the point of creating a song or movies is to share a story then they should want it distributed as widely as possible as well.

Sounds like you want to here from people who care more about the money they make from copyright than they do about their art.

You dont understand art.

Re:But they require email

[cffrost]

All these sites require email and that makes me very uncomfortable. I don't give my email to anyone unless I know them.

No, you don't have to register at any of those sites unless you want to upload new .torrents.