Library.nu and Ifile.it Shut Down

Ralph Spoilsport writes "A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg — one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power? Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in between?" Adds new submitter roaryk, "According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the server costs with the revenue."

Comments

I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[jesseck]

I've heard of these buildings, many even publicly sponsored, where books are shared, and one does not need to pay the publisher for the privilege of reading their work. I propose these houses of corruption be banned, so they stop stealing from the coffers of the rich!

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard that these places actually PAY for EVERY COPY of the books they have.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ScentCone]

Does it actually hurt, physically, to make such a bad analogy? Is it sort of like passing a kidney stone?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ScentCone]

Libraries mean you need never compensate an author for his work

Why is that - because the libraries have ripped off the copies they keep on their shelves? Do they have an inside contact at the publisher who sneaks them out in a backpack during lunch?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

A great deal of library books are donated, used books.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[bws111]

Which were still paid for by the original owner. And most donated books are not put into circulation, they are sold to raise money to buy the books they want.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[sgt scrub]

I hear most are donated by people who have read them. Do they not realize the economic devistation they are causing the public!?!

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

Wasn't the original ebook (that was copied) paid for to? I'm assuming someone didn't buy the book and type it all up (oh wait, this would require having bought the real thing, nevermind). How does one get the book without it being bought in the first place? These aren't leaks, are they? Someone had to buy it first, right? Just like at the library?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[bws111]

Even a donated book was paid for by the original owner. And most donated books don't go into circulation, they get sold to raise cash to buy books.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[HappyHead]

And yet publishers still complain about used book stores, and accuse them of being thieves. I have also seen complaints from big publishers (and one really stupid author) about their books being found in public libraries depriving them of income.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[bws111]

Uh, OK. You may not be aware of this, but when a person donates a book, he no longer has the book! Weird, huh? Furthermore, if someone else already has the book you want, you either wait, or the library must obtain ANOTHER paid-for copy of the book. And if the library in the next town over also wants the book, it has to get its own paid-for copy.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[jesseck]

Bad analogy? It was, I admit it. What is happening today is a precursor to the end of the current library model, though. We already see this with the ebook market- publishers need to decide if their works can be lent or not on Barnes & Noble (I own a Nook, so that's what I'm familiar with). Many books cannot be lent.

Other media companies (movies, music, and gaming is starting as well) are doing their best to eliminate the second-hand markets, and to end sharing of the media with others. Academic book publishers do this by making a new edition every year or two, many times with few changes, so that the used textbook's lifespan is short. "Traditional" book publishers are / will be looking for a way to monetize their product's lifespan as well- whether it is a licensing fee libraries pay for each book checked out or higher costs for books that libraries purchase.

My initial post may have been a bad analogy, but only time will tell. The safe bet is the publishers will find a way to remain profitable, and communities like mine will continue to reduce the number of libraries and associated services.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[CanHasDIY]

Uh, OK. You may not be aware of this, but when a person donates a book, he no longer has the book!

You sure about that?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

What is your point? All you've stated is that electronic books are different than physical books. Pretty sure both of us -- and everyone reading the article and our comments -- already knew this.

(Parody: When the author sells an ebook online, he still has it, even though he sold it! Weird, huh?)

I'm still not seeing a difference here:

Library gets a copy of a physical book (originally paid for by whoever bought it first) and loans it out as many times as it wants, forever.
Electronic library gets a copy of an electronic book (originally paid for by whoever bought it first) and loans it out as many times as it wants, forever.

In both situations, someone who really wants a paid-for copy for themselves can pay for it themselves; someone who really wants to just borrow one can borrow and return/delete it; someone who really just wants to steal one can steal it with great ease (I probably have an unreturned library book somewhere.)

Main difference I'm seeing is that one kills trees and burns gasoline.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[forkfail]

Unfortunately, in the eBook world, publishers are basically saying that an instance of an eBook needs to be replaced every year (26 lends at two weeks per lend):

http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/889452-264/harpercollins_caps_loans_on_ebook.html.csp

That's a lot more than a few pennies per lend, to say the least.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[jank1887]

I'm not donating a photocopy of my book to the library. I'm giving the actual legally purchased book to them. At that point they can lend it as they please, or sell it to make money to buy in-demand books.

the original ebook was (likely) paid for. however, it was copied to the library. Maybe the original owner deleted the copy, maybe not. no way to know or prove. And short of mailing them the harddrive or flashdrive with the ebook, no way to transfer without doing it via copying. That's just how digital computers work. sure, you may set up a lending site that imposes some strange way of verifying deletion, but that's just a lame attempt at deflection. it's still 'copy then delete' which unfortunately started with un-permitted 'copy'.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[robthebloke]

I propose these houses of corruption be banned

In the UK, those houses of corruption are in the process of being closed down. As our fearless leaders will no doubt inform you, 'Big Society' demands 'Big Spaces', and some of our biggest spaces are filled to the brim with stupidly big books. As part of on-going austerity measures, and in the name of weaning the UK off fossil fuels, those big books will be reused as part of a new initiative to create a carbon neutral winter fuel allowance for the elderly. Once cleared of the big books, the expectation is that Tesco and Sainsburies will become the custodians of those big spaces. Without big tins of baked beans on big shelves in big spaces, big society could never claim to be full of beans. It is a perfectly simple idea, and yet there are still people who are protesting all of this! Why can't they understand the flawless logic in this argument?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

In the US yes, not so much in Third World countries. Been to many places that there is a local building with a couple shelves of well worn donated paperbooks to serve as a local library. The locals read the books and make sure they get returned. Honduras comes to mind.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

Indeed. We have moved to the next paradigm, and the vultures want to make sure that we are not permitted to move forward by imposing their old-world rules that needn't apply in the new-world. While they may have their points, they want to change the paradigm into one where we are surveilled in order to make sure we comply with their best interests. Generally speaking, the right of privacy lets us commit crimes in the privacy of our own homes. So given someone who wants to steal the book either way - what's better for mankind? Having him waste energy resources photocopying a book (something i've done on several occasions) that he drove his gasoline-powered car to obtain, once someone killed a tree to create it? Or having him make a copy? The paradigm shift of moving to the electronic world has its implications, and the response is mostly a one of corporations trying to increase their influence. I mean, all those RIAA lawsuits, that money went to the artists, right?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[petermgreen]

A physical library never* copies the book. If one copy is donated the library owns one copy and can only loan it to one person at a time. If a user steals the book the library no longer has it and must obtain another copy before they can lend it out again. A user could copy the book themselves but doing so is generally a PITA so few people do unless they are really desperate to have a copy of an out of print book. One copy made and sold by the publisher equals one copy in circulation.

An electronic "library" must copy the book to even be able to operate. It therefore becomes FAR harder to enforce that the number of copies in circulation is the same as the number of copies made/authorised by the publisher.

I don't know if the site in this article even had the pretense of operating like a library or if they just let users download whatever they want.

* at least not for current in-print books, I beleive there may be exceptions in some cases/countries for rare books.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

Both of them are the same to me, in that both make an assumption that you, in the privacy of your own home, don't find a way to copy it. All DRM is defeatable, and all books are photocopyable (I have several of those).

One uses less resources/energy/environmental impact, one doesn't. Guess which one our taxes fund, and which ones our taxes (now, apparently) work against?

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

I still see no difference; both sites start with a paid version (even if you OCR a physical book into a pirated e-book, it was still bought originally; otherwise you paid for the ebook format, and it was still bought originally). Once a person has it in their own home, nothing can stop them from pirating it, regardless of the format (OCR/Xerox/photograph/scan/DRM-break). I see almost no difference other than ease of access, which doesn't change a damn thing philosophically (IMO). That a book can be copied is a function of the new electronic information age, and I see that as no excuse to shut down free literature under the presumption that everyone reading something wants a copy. I have photocopied books at home, yet we still fund the libraries with our tax dollars, despite how much gas and paper we'd save if all our books were electronic. So the same thing comes along electronically, and, uh, my tax dollars go to stop it instead. Just great.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ClioCJS]

s/That a book can be copied/That an e-book can be copied/

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[ThePhilips]

Even a donated book was paid for by the original owner.

Every "illegal" e-book was also paid for by the original owner (and later digitized).

And most donated books don't go into circulation, they get sold to raise cash to buy books.

That, last I heard publishers talk, is even more evil than the piracy.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[Bobakitoo]

You may not be aware of this, but when a person donates a book, he no longer has the book!

There is only one copy of the book. The internet is the computer, the local disk is only a cache for optimisation purpose. The same way that all your so called 'legit' files have copy all over the disk, ram and cpu. Essentially, the book is multiplexed and no user are accessing the same byte at the same time (not guaranteed but simultaneous access is very unlikely).

Why users sharing a computer system should not be able to access the same data? Why peoples in the same room should not share a book?

Yeah, computer allow to do amazing things that are not possible with paper. It's called progress, and you can't do shit about it.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[fafaforza]

I'd bet that every eBook that someone might give to someone else cost them twice what a library paid for the physical book.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[bws111]

If each purchaser of an ebook gave no more than one copy to one other person, and none of the recipients of the books gave any copies to anyone else, then you would have a point. So tell me, is that really what you believe happens on these file sharing sites? All the books uploaded are paid for copies, and only one person can download any given uploaded book? If so, you are incredibly naive.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[schwep]

End information sharing! Everything must be self taught, or you must pay for the knowledge each time you think about it.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[martin-boundary]

How is this fair? You're basically arguing that because the publishers don't compensate authors enough, the taxpayer should do it (via libraries) instead? If we're going to put authors on welfare, then let's do it properly. Have the government pay them a living wage, and let's cut out the publishers altogether. And let's stop with all that prohibited copying nonsense.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[cpt kangarooski]

The authors cut of a book sale is usually quite low (once they have paid for their advance)

That's between them and their publisher. The author is free to hold out for a higher royalty (whether from one publisher or another), or to self-publish. I don't see why it is any concern of the public whether the author gets a good deal or not.

As each book borrowed is potentially a book that the reader no longer needs to buy, it seems only fair that the author should get some recompense

I don't think it's fair. If the author can't make a living from sales of his book, even taking into account that some people won't read it, or will resell it, or borrow it, etc., he should try something else, e.g. raising the price to something he can live with, getting a larger share of the sales, writing something more popular so as to get more sales, or only writing as a hobby and not relying on it for an income. In the US, authors do not get a payment from libraries when books are borrowed, but we seem to have a successful literary industry, so I don't think that those payments are really necessary. Literature in the UK would probably not be harmed if you got rid of it, and it would free up some of the budget of the libraries to buy more books.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[AmiMoJo]

This is basic Tory policy. Anything the government does is a lost business opportunity for someone, so shut down or privatise as much of it as possible. Don't worry, this gives people more choice, they can pay for a private subscription library (which will naturally be better run and better value than a public one) or watch TV. Or maybe run their own Big Society library in their spare time, because we all have hours and hours a week to dedicate to libraries and learning the skills to run them so I'm sure there will be plenty of volunteers.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[Thing 1]

And most donated books are not put into circulation, they are sold to raise money to buy the books they want.

Contrary to your statement, if I sell a book, I consider it "being put into circulation". Perhaps you meant "library circulation"? Because used books (and CDs, and movies, and computers, and cars, and other goods) definitely circulate through the population.

Re:I propose an end to book sharing as well!

[KingBenny]

yea the local copyright temple here already had discussion over wether you could turn on the radio in a car from work if someone else was present ... next thing? the chair for criminals who listen to music with open windows or read a book out loud when people are present who havent bought it? time to stock up on e-books and lawyerbullyrepellant i'm afraid ... where does this end if not with the absolute refusal to buy anything anymore until this madness stops?

sooner or later

[Moheeheeko]

Seem like a matter of time before others join in on all the "fun". Encyclopedia Britannica sues to have Wikipedia taken down could be a future headline IMO.

Re:sooner or later

[Harry Nelson]

Wikipedia doesn't put works done by Encyclopedia Britannica on their site. It's completely different than having a site that allows you to download pirated ebooks.

Re:sooner or later

[ScentCone]

Encyclopedia Britannica sues to have Wikipedia taken down could be a future headline IMO.

So, your opinion is based on ... a complete misunderstanding of the case at hand, of Wikipedia, and of the Britannica? The Trifecta Of Not Getting It! Congratulations.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[what2123]

If you honestly believe what you are saying and/or are not a troll you need to get off the MegaMediaNewsSteam. I haven't heard anyone I know that still downloads their wares and were actually affected by MegaUpload going bunk. The best thing about the "pirates" is that they are extremely resourceful and have many, many different outlets to get their files. If you ask me, MegaUpload was probably the worst tool to use for this anyway. There are many more ways to get files and are just as effective. Hell, IRC was and still is better that MU.

Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[cornicefire]

Unless you have permission. It's called freedom of speech. It's for expressing your opinions. It's for communicating your thoughts. It's not for sitting on your rear end and downloading some movie without paying for it. Calling downloading a "human right" is an insult to Martin Luther King, Peter Zenger, and everyone else who fought for our right to express ourselves.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Nadaka]

Distributing your own creative works IS a right, and it is being infringed upon by removing the medium of sharing in order to fight piracy.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Baloroth]

Think for a moment...if we appoint adjudicators of what content is and isn't free speech, we've already lost it.

Have you heard of the "courts?" They've been doing exactly that for hundreds of years. CP, for example, is not free speech. Saying a politician murdered a prostitute? Not free speech. Saying you think a politician's opinion is wrong and stupid and you would like to see him die? 100% protected free speech (yes, even the "want to see him die" part, so long as you don't encourage someone to kill him or say you are going to do it yourself).

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[ClioCJS]

Do you have a reading comprehension defect? This site is for books. Why can I go to a library and get a book, but not download one? I have to burn gas and kill trees to read for free?

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[bws111]

What backwater do you live in? Most libraries will let you borrow ebooks.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[ClioCJS]

Inside the Washington, DC beltway. Why would I know libraries let you borrow ebooks? I've not stepped in one since I found out I could get the same content without leaving my house. Similar to a record store.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Pionar]

And what makes you think free access to books is a right?

Freedom of speech doesn't include freedom to free (as in beer) access to someone's writings.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[dkleinsc]

Saying a politician murdered a prostitute? Not free speech.

Sort of. It's a civil matter of defamation, not a criminal charge, assuming that you believed that statement to be untrue.

It is, however, perfectly legal to broadcast something like "This network has found no evidence that Senator Jones killed a prostitute." even if the effect of saying such things is for most people to think that Jones killed a prostitute but was careful to hide all the evidence.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[ClioCJS]

I refer you to the original comment I made, which you did not answer. If you can answer that question, then I will proceed to the next step of the discussion. Why can I go to a library and get a book, but not download one? (And actually, where I live, everyone does have a right to a library card, which gives them free access to books. And don't say the taxes pay it, because you don't have to be a taxpaying citizen to get a library card, just a citizen, period.)

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Pembers]

If you've written a book and want to give it away, perhaps you shouldn't distribute it (only) via a site that's used mainly for hosting or linking to pirated books. There are plenty of "show off your writing" sites that you could post it to, or you could spend a few dollars for your own hosting.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[ClioCJS]

The original downloaded ebook was paid for.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[rubycodez]

actually, only because of copyright law of a particular country or group of countries can I not distribute someone else's work. what if the United States falls? what if the UK does? then there is no restriction whatsoever. You seem to think that a bunch of (corrupt, power and money grubbing) guys can write something on paper (a law), and it is some universal god-empowered scripture. news for you, this business of "copyright" and "piracy" is totally an artificial construct of some nations.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[langelgjm]

You're absolutely correct on a legal level, no one can argue with that.

However, I think a lot of us pose the question the opposite way: what makes you think government-backed enforcement of monopoly is a right? The only reason it's a legal right is because of accidents of history and law... Unless you're taking a Rick Santorum-style approach where you generally think that US law was handed down by God almighty.

When you look beyond mere existing law and ask about fundamental human rights, there is a pretty hard-to-navigate conflict between the feeling that someone should be rewarded for their valuable effort, and the feeling that knowledge should flow as freely as possible.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[forkfail]

The logical conclusion of your premise, though, is that knowledge is a privilege.

The media (scroll, book, eBook) doesn't matter; what does matter is whether or not those who cannot afford huge fees to read are allowed access to books - or not.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Col. Klink (retired)]

What makes you think you need to leave the house to borrow ebooks from the library (other than once every three years to renew your library card): http://overdrive.dclibrary.org/

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[ClioCJS]

Hahaha, ok! Still though - fuel and energy is spent. That was my true point, personal-gas-expenditures aside :) Hats off to you tho :)

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[spire3661]

To me, the attempt to digitally lock text files is an affront to human rights. Im sorry you cant see this. Technology > copyright.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Fned]

Yes, it is. That's why the need to ask permission is an exceptional privelege granted by government for a specific, societally-beneficial purpose.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Fned]

CP, for example, is not free speech.

...unless it's entirely fictional.

Saying a politician murdered a prostitute? Not free speech.

...unless he or she did murder a prostitute.

Saying you think a politician's opinion is wrong and stupid and you would like to see him die? 100% protected free speech (yes, even the "want to see him die" part, so long as you don't encourage someone to kill him or say you are going to do it yourself).

This is correct.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[misexistentialist]

"Downloading" is just the transfer of information, which is speech in its purist form. Requiring "permission" for all transfers of information is censorship in its purest form. King and Zenger may be giants, but they are beneath our feet: we are past a minister's or a newspaper publisher's right to talk to the masses, it's now about the individuals' rights exercised simultaneously, ubiquitously, infinitely.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[ThePhilips]

Have seen few years ago a review of such sites by an author. The picture is not as rosy as you paint it. IIRC in the end, yes it is easier and cheaper to host it yourself. What is still not that simple for the most non-IT-savvy people.

Also, in some countries, with strong book "piracy" background (e.g. ex-USSR) many authors publish their books themselves on such local "illegal"/"semi-legal" sites. Culture preservation sentiment is very strong and litigation is a risk of angering the readers. IOW, the practice is uncommon, but not unheard of.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[chrb]

Perhaps you have not fully considered what your words actually mean. Think: what exactly is distribution of a work, in terms of "rights"? It is not an act in itself, it is a subset of a much larger behavior; it is an act of communication. And the right to communicate in privacy with another human being is widely recognised: Communication is recognised as an essential human need and, therefore, as a basic human right.

Here is the important thing to understand: when it comes to communicating through a modern, digital system, with privacy (encryption) there is no difference to an outside observer between two adults swapping love letters, and two adults swapping copyrighted works of art. It is just data. And hence, although you may not literally have the right to distribute someone elses work, you do have the right to communicate in privacy with another human being, and in practice you can use that medium of communication for whatever you want - even if you want to distribute copyrighted works of art. And that is the reason why file sharing is ultimately unstoppable in a democratic society. If people want to send each other songs and movies, and they have the right to communicate in private, then there is no way to stop them from doing it.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[Bobakitoo]

What backwater do you live in? Most libraries will let you borrow ebooks.

The Internet is the library. It is the greatest library of all time and we are allowing it to be burnt down.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[chrb]

if someone from your doctor's office wants to discuss your medical records with the local TV reporter who the fuck are we to try to stop that communication

Sure, you can try, but you won't succeed. If your doctor, or someone employed by your doctor, really wants to leak your medical records then there is very little that you can do about it. No organisation in a free society has ever eliminated leakers and whistleblowers.

By your wonderful logic, a democratic society should have no expectation of privacy at all.

The only reason we have an expectation of privacy with respect to medical records is because people don't habitually communicate them to others. This is the opposite situation to the content industry; it is estimated that around 75% of people pirate music and video. If 75% of the doctors in a democratic society were leaking patient's medical records, then, regardless of the moral aspect, we wouldn't have an expectation of privacy. The reason the vast majority of medical records are safe isn't due to technical countermeasures, or the diligence of our police and legal system - it is because, apart from maybe a few celebrities, there is no widespread demand for medical records.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[cpt kangarooski]

Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right[.] Unless you have permission.

Sure it is.

I can print up a bunch of copies of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' go down to the street corner, and start passing them out to anyone who wants one, all without getting any permission from anyone at all. If the police tried to stop me, I could go to court, assert my right of free speech, and win handily, because the government (here at least) recognizes my preexisting right to do this, and protects it.

Freedom of speech not only includes communicating your own speech, but also repeating the speech of others verbatim.

Copyright is an infringement of the freedom of speech, as it grants to private parties (and, in a way, to the government), the power to censor other people when they use the speech of others (under certain conditions, in certain ways, etc.). It's clear therefore that copyright is inherently a bad thing. However, it may nevertheless be tolerable if it produces an even greater benefit for the public that suffers the injury of that censorship.

Still, we should never forget that copyright is a very risky, very dubious practice. We should always be highly skeptical of any infringement on free speech, no matter how lofty the goal of the infringement is claimed to be. We should carefully measure the benefits and harms of copyright, in terms of both its scope and duration, to make sure that we not only have a system that produces a net public benefit (copyright with less public benefit than public harm should be abolished or reformed immediately, of course), but the greatest net public benefit possible. And even then, it is perfectly legitimate to call for the abolition of copyright.

Re:Distributing someone else's work is NOT a right

[SilentMobius]

Actually it is not just a right it's a natural law. Anything that is broadcast with the potential to be heard and/or seen is automatically in the public domain. That is the default! Some governments specifically added the grant of a limited monopoly on distribution of a work (copyright) "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" because the default was thought to not encourage progress sufficiently, this would not be needed without the recognition that the default is the public domain.

Now your legal or moral obligation to obey that grant is a highly relative issue, and as should be discussed, but the right to transfer knowledge and experience you have received is almost as basic as it comes, even if that happens to be a reproduction a performance.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[ScentCone]

Pay for and run your own web site with an audience, traffic, and exposure (generally, and legally) like this, and see what you think about that subject. If nothing else, just being able to junk the spam is essential. That you think of this as censorship shows that you have no idea what the word means (and what the practice of actual censorship is). This isn't a publicly funded service, crap posts aren't deleted by the government, and dealing with what's posted here is no more censorship than is choosing which letters to the editor to include at the NYT web site.

Sad

Well, something is. Just not what you think.

I borrowed a newspaper today

[captainpanic]

I borrowed a newspaper today. I didn't pay for it, but I still read it.
Also, I have 3 books at home which aren't mine (borrowed, not stolen).

Basically, that's at least 30 euro of lost revenue for the industry.

Yet I don't feel guilty...

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[Anonymous Coward]

I borrowed a newspaper today. I didn't pay for it, but I still read it.
Also, I have 3 books at home which aren't mine (borrowed, not stolen).

Basically, that's at least 30 euro of lost revenue for the industry.

Yet I don't feel guilty...

30? More like 3 million. Thats how piracy works, haven't you been paying attention?

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[captainpanic]

And did you scan them, run them through OCR, and then make some money off of "sharing" them with millions of your closest personal friends? No?

I read them, and I "paid" by giving some books to my friends in return. So yeah, it's actually quite an organization we've set up here. And it's decentralized p2p too. :-)

But if you imagine that millions of people are all doing this, you can get an idea of the huge damage to the industry. I'm only a small player. There are people who own and read way more books than I do.

So, your point is that you have no sense of what the discussion is actually about, right? Right.

Don't mock my comment. I know what I am talking about. We're talking about billions of euros/dollars... stolen from the industry by book-sharing people. And they've been at it for centuries!

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[oPless]

[Snip]There are people who own and read way more books than I do.

So, your point is that you have no sense of what the discussion is actually about, right? Right.

Don't mock my comment. I know what I am talking about. We're talking about billions of euros/dollars... stolen from the industry by book-sharing people. And they've been at it for centuries!

Oh Wait, there's those things called Libraries! Burn them down immediately!

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[jank1887]

I read them, and I "paid" by giving some books to my friends in return.

I'm missing the part where you made a copy of them. Hence violating copyright and artificially increasing supply thereby diluting demand. Hence violating legal copyright. Lending is just fine. They sold one book to be read, and it is read one person at a time. It is not reproduced and read by multiple people at the same time in different locations. Copyright is about artificially maintaining scarcity. you did nothing to decrease scarcity.

So, your comparison is off.

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

The big publisher's would if they could.

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Used to be that way. Not so much anymore that's why the daily paper is $1 and so thin a lot less advertising.

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[Vegemeister]

Artificially increasing supply? The supply of information is, by default, practically unlimited. Anything else is an artificial restriction.

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[spire3661]

I dont think you understand the media's endgame here. The goal is to make sure they get paid for every human mind that gets touched by their works, period.

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[Fned]

Copyright is about artificially maintaining scarcity.

See, that's the problem. Artifically maintaning scarcity of a digital file can only be done by breaking the computer it's on. Because digital files are inherently non-scarce.

So: Copyright or computers? You are making this choice, right now, through your actions.

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[Requiem18th]

Actually they are working on getting paid by every mind that didn't touch other people's works too:

http://bethestory.com/2005/11/21/storyline-patents

Re:I borrowed a newspaper today

[AmiMoJo]

We're talking about billions of euros/dollars... stolen from the industry by book-sharing people. And they've been at it for centuries!

It is only stolen if you consider them to have a right to it in the first place. If you by a chair the person who made it no longer has any claim over it. It is yours, you can do what you like, sell it, give it away, lend it, whatever. Books are no different.

What screwed everything up is the invention of an easy way to reproduce books. Similar to how the printing press did, only at much lower cost and available to everyone. Fortunately authors have been able to make plenty of money despite the fact that libraries and friends have been giving free access to books, or that second hand book shops have been profiting without giving them a penny, so it seems unlikely that things will change that much for the majority. The publishers might have a problem if they don't sort themselves out, but only because authors don't need them as much any more thanks to distribution being essentially free, or at least available on a per-copy-downloaded basis rather than a pay-upfront-to-print-X-thousand-copies basis.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a month now and literally every upload site has either closed down or shut down their affiliate programs that offered money for uploaders. Those who uploaded pirated material to gain money are devastated on forums and cannot find any good upload site anymore. This was highly successful bust against piracy, and rightly so.

It doesn't change anything. People were sharing copyrighted works before the whole "cyber lockers" came online, and will continue to do so after cyber lockers are history. Really the only idiots to have suffered are those that uploaded pirate material for financial gain. Anyone that puts up a sharing system using a centralised infrastructure is a patented idiot.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Harry Nelson]

MegaUpload and similar sites were used by general population, and outright made money from copyright theft. It was very similar to selling warez on streets, they just tried to hide it behind "clever" subscription models and affiliate programs. Yes, serious pirates will always be able to get their files, but when the circle is small enough companies don't care. They care about what most of population does, and they can easily make it harder and inconvenient enough for general population.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[MightyYar]

It's true - sure we no longer have to endure the GNAA posts, but there were only ever a few of those per story, and they never got modded up. Seems like a solution looking for a problem.

Public lending right

[langelgjm]

Actually, in many countries authors are already compensated for the lending of their books in public libraries by a public lending right. Although not in the U.S... I suspect if publishers tried to pull that here, they'd get some seriously negative PR.

Re:Public lending right

[Chowderbags]

Publishers don't need to implement that. They just need to support/bribe politicians into shrinking library budgets until libraries aren't able to be effectively run anymore.

Britannica 11th ed. Re:sooner or later

[Anonymous Coward]

There might still be some text from Eleventh edition (1910-1911) in there; as that is in the public domain.

Actually WP does use material from Brittanica

[langelgjm]

Actually, Wikipedia does use material from Britannica. It's just material from out-of-copyright versions of Britannica.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Nadaka]

The other people who have suffered are those idiots who used those cyberlocker services to store and share their own data that they had every right to do so with.

Library.nu was for book piracy, not films

[langelgjm]

It's not for sitting on your rear end and downloading some movie without paying for it. Calling downloading a "human right" is an insult to Martin Luther King, Peter Zenger, and everyone else who fought for our right to express ourselves.

Considering that library.nu was a site for book piracy, I think your comment is a bit misguided. Frankly, I suspect Martin Luther King would probably have been okay with someone downloading "Why We Can't Wait" from library.nu.

Re:Library.nu was for book piracy, not films

[Deep Esophagus]

King might be OK with that, but his estate... not so much

Re:Library.nu was for book piracy, not films

[langelgjm]

Next time don't post as AC and I might be willing to have a reasonable discussion with you.

Re:Library.nu was for book piracy, not films

[QuasiSteve]

Seriously off-topic post follows...

Next time don't post as AC and I might be willing to have a reasonable discussion with you.

I'm not that AC - but I once was an AC, had a whole discussion with somebody, until they said they were done talking to an AC and that I should just register, it was easy, etc.
So I did, and I replied again.
Never a reply back from him... her... it.

I will never know because although his post didn't read Anonymous Coward, he was practically just as anonymous as I was; the only benefit to having a completely fictitious username available to you is to see what else they may have said in the past, on different subjects - but as it's simple to register for multiple accounts, even that is, to an extent, pointless.

So why does the person posting as AC matter?

( The post of the AC in question was confusing, though. I'm not sure they read your post correctly. )

On the other hand, I guess I have that person ( kheldan ) to thank for lower post-repeat delays.. who knew anons had to wait hours while anon-registerds can post every 5 minutes or so based on various post metrics?

Re:Library.nu was for book piracy, not films

[langelgjm]

In my mind, a person posting as AC is not interested in having a discussion, for at least two reasons. First, there is no way to keep track of what is actually their contribution, versus the contribution of some other AC. Second, a person who is registered has a simple method to check for responses to their comments (e.g., I get e-mails alerting me to replies to my comments), so I feel they are more likely to see my response and respond in turn. An AC has to manually check a thread for responses.

Re:Library.nu was for book piracy, not films

[QuasiSteve]

Fair enough, especially the identification part; although that applies more to their (or is it?) reply to your reply.. than to your reply. But yes, in a back-and-forth, it does become a necessity to prevent others from impersonating.

And hey, thanks for responding :D

Its about more than piracy

[sl4shd0rk]

I cant help but wonder how much money the people behind ACTA/SOPA/PIPPA/MAFIAA are spending to get these sites taken down. Its got to cost some pretty big bucks to collaborate it all across nations and political boundaries. What's the payout for them?

Re:Its about more than piracy

[jesseck]

What's the payout for them?

Our freedoms

Re:Its about more than piracy

[lymond01]

What's the payout for them?

I would assume donations from the concerned parties.

Re:Its about more than piracy

[forkfail]

The payout is supposed to be a complete monopoly on all content of all types.

If you want to read/watch/listen to/experience anything, you've got to pay the owner for it.

That is what the whole "Ownership Society" touted by the previous administration really is about. Or to put it another way, the few owning the rest - the owned.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

The big question I hoped would be answered within a few posts, is where's a good ebook site now that those two have vanished?

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[sgt scrub]

Do you have a link to someone complaining they are not getting paid for uploading?

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Goaway]

You've gotta be pretty naïve to believe that MegaUpload was a respectable site that was going to stay around for a long time and that you could trust with your files.

Why is it...

[qzjul]

Why is it that I never hear about these places until they close?

lib.ru?

[stanlyb]

It is still online, and we are still happy to have it. You guys, i really wish you best luck shutting it down.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Bert64]

The people who have suffered most is those who used these services for legitimate content, and there were quite considerable numbers of people who did so... Quite a few open source projects used such sites, for instance its not uncommon to have downloaded linux based firmware images for various devices including android phones from such sites.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom doesn't die because people hate freedom. Freedom dies because people hate the work and nuisance that it brings. Freedom isn't for free.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Harry Nelson]

Especially since most of these sites deleted files that had no downloads during specific time frame, for example 60 days. They clearly were not meant for limited sharing of personal documents, they were looking for popular material, ie. warez.

Farenheight 451

[tekrat]

Bradbury was right on target.

But the firemen don't need to burn paper books, they just need to wipe your kindle (of 1984, if I recall (in great irony)), close down the websites and prevent your iPad from accessing anything outside the walled garden.

How long before Publishers and the RIAA are hunting down camps of vagrants, people who recite to others "I am The Grapes of Wrath" or "I am The Beatles" ?

We are headed for some dark times. They didn't have to burn our books. Instead, they gave us electronic toys, and we burned the books for them.... And they control the electronic toys. So now we are screwed.

Re:Farenheight 451

[afaiktoit]

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6450954.html "The author, interviewed last week by the L.A. Weekly, says the novel is actually about how television destroys interest in reading literature."

Re:Farenheight 451

[afaiktoit]

I guess instead of going on a tinfoil hat rant you could just bust the drm on any books you buy and burn them to a cd. problem solved.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[Ihmhi]

The flag is so subtle that I hadn't even noticed it...

Wasn't there a big shitstorm over *one* post being deleted a few years back? I think it was due to a court order or something of the like... maybe about the HDCP keys or something? Bah.

I think the fact that posts *cannot* be deleted makes people consider what they are going to post a little more carefully. Aside from the usual spam and idiocy, I generally find the commentary here to be of a higher quality in general than places like Reddit or the comments section in other news sites. I feel that this is going to go into the shitter now.

Just more proof...

[ZorinLynx]

This is just further proof that existing IP laws are sufficient and we don't NEED draconian measures like SOPA or ACTA to stop piracy.

The laws are there. They can be enforced without censorship and stepping all over peoples' rights.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Harry Nelson]

http://www.wjunction.com/95-file-hosts-official-support
http://www.wjunction.com/102-file-host-discussion

Everyone is afraid of being scammed by new companies because there have been so many since the busts and after every other site shutdown. And just look at the forum in general - file uploading sites have official discussions and support persons, they're clearly seeing what kind of files people are uploading and on what kind of stuff the forum specializes in (file uploads, torrent seedboxes, remote desktops for quickly obtaining new warez releases and uploading them to file upload sites and spreading those links)

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[forkfail]

All you've done is make sure that the dark nets are... dark.

Just like the war on drugs has not had any perceptible impact on drug use, the war on piracy will simply make criminals out of people who want to read a book, but probably won't stop them from doing it.

Enter the Readeasy.

[forkfail]

Overlapping circles of people who share books.

The thing about forcing certain goods and services into the area outside the law is that if enough people want those goods and services, it becomes socially acceptable to ignore the law. This both weakens the law in general (and thus the fabric of a government of laws) while at the same time turning the law into a tool of oppression for those in power.

It happened during prohibition. It happened during the war on drugs. And now it's going to happen in this war on piracy.

Money doesn't add up

[shuz]

Making up educated numbers here but you should be able to push a metric shit ton of traffic for 11 million annually.
~40k per month for an OC3 line 155Mbps.
I'll give you a million for your storage solution.
About 1.2mil for ~2000 or so CPU's and a terabyte of active memory worth of servers.
Figure 100k a sysadmin. Would be a good idea to not have a admin to cpu ratio higher than 1:250 so that nearly a million there
You need cooling and a place to house the servers. I'll give you another million.
Oh networking, ya that is another cool million. Oh you are going with Cisco? maybe a bit more.

I feel that I am really stretching it here but I don't see how hosting costs for a pretty big operation even come close to 11 million. Now the expensive parts are support and app dev but I don't see how a hosting service would need to change or create a complex app. I keep on forgetting "administrative costs" aka a couple people skimming the cream off the top for relatively little effort aka executive management. That is most likely where the other 4 mil went. Hey CEO's have to eat too you know!

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

MegaUpload and similar sites were used by general population, and outright made money from copyright theft. It was very similar to selling warez on streets, they just tried to hide it behind "clever" subscription models and affiliate programs. Yes, serious pirates will always be able to get their files, but when the circle is small enough companies don't care. They care about what most of population does, and they can easily make it harder and inconvenient enough for general population.

You have no idea what you are talking about. We make money showing ads that non-premium members see on the "landing pages" for file downloads. Good job spouting your uninformed bullshit though. You should look at http://sibsoft.net/xfilesharing.html - that's the script 99% of us use to setup and operate file sharing sites. The ads-on-landing-pages model is already there, just plug, play, and profit.

PS: die in a fire

Library analogy

[ClioCJS]

Library gets a copy of a physical book (originally paid for by whoever bought it first) and loans it out as many times as it wants, forever.

Electronic library gets a copy of an electronic book (originally paid for by whoever bought it first) and loans it out as many times as it wants, forever.

In both situations, someone who really wants a paid-for copy for themselves can pay for it themselves; someone who really wants to just borrow one can borrow and return/delete it; someone who really just wants to steal one can steal it with great ease (I probably have an unreturned library book somewhere.)

Main difference I'm seeing is that one kills trees and burns gasoline.

Re:Library analogy

[westlake]

Library gets a copy of a physical book (originally paid for by whoever bought it first) and loans it out as many times as it wants, forever.

The physical book is not forever.

Not with the kind of punishment it takes in a public library.

That implies purchase of custom bindings or multiple copies of books in heavy circulation.

Re:Library analogy

[b0bby]

Electronic Library (like Overdrive) uses DRM to ensure that only one copy of a purchased book is available for use at any given time, making it analogous to the physical library.

These sites seem like they were more like a library which would photocopy you a book anytime you wanted, not making you wait for the original purchased book to be returned first.

I won't buy files with DRM, but I'm actually ok with using my library's Overdrive system since it's pretty much the digital equivalent of the usual library service.

Re:Library analogy

[ClioCJS]

Digital files aren't forever either. (If they are, someone please send me those files I lost in the 90s.) That implies purchase of additional storage, or multiple backups of files in heavy circulation (I have my music on 3 harddrives because I lost it all before). Stuff that's posted on bittorrent often isn't available a few years later because nobody else is in there sharing it. Stuff goes away either way. But again, one burns trees and energy, and the other.... much less so.

Re:Library analogy

[ClioCJS]

I'm ok with it too, but there's nothing stopping anybody from photocopying a whole book from the library, so someone sufficiently motivated is going to do it either way. (Indeed, I got my father to do this for me several times - wasting federal taxpayer money, oil/gas, and trees.)

Mankind has to accept that we're in an electronic age, and certain things are easier.

We wouldn't accept having the police follow us into our own home to make sure we don't photocopy a book after lending it from the library; so the library stands in assumption that you don't do anything illegal. But when this is done online, the assumption is that it's all illegal, so the [online] library gets shut down. Congratulations, back to photocopiers and OCR. The tide will only ever be slowed, not stopped.

As stated in my original post, whoever wants to pay/borrow/steal can do it either way. One wastes more energy and resources, so I view that one as worse.

They're thiefs.... sorry

[Temujin_12]

If you copy media you purchased, you're smart.

If you copy media you didn't purchase, you're cheap.

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

We do have to be careful that this doesn't turn into a slippery slope but, c'mon, making a profit off of other artists material which you don't have the rights to is just good old fashioned stealing no matter how you slice it.

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[Vegemeister]

just good old fashioned stealing no matter how you slice it.

Please, regale us with your common sense folk wisdom.

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[misexistentialist]

Pretty much all piracy starts with someone buying a copy so even your simplistic formula doesn't work. Artists are only guaranteed to profit from one sale. Do it for the pussy, bros, and STFU.

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[Fned]

making a profit off of other artists material which you don't have the rights to is just good old fashioned stealing no matter how you slice it.

It's not that old fashioned... that's how most publishers made their money prior to copyright.

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[chrb]

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

No, you're still just a copyright infringer. Nobody is being deprived of their property.

thief: "A person who steals another person's property, esp. by stealth and without using force or violence."

steal: "Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it"

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[Brannoncyll]

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

If you copy media and sell it you are not a thief as nothing has been taken. There is already a perfectly good way to describe these people: copyright infringer. The media cartels have been trying to rebrand copyright infringers as thieves because everyone knows stealing is wrong. However as far as the law goes, there is certainly a difference (cf the section on "Theft" on the wikipedia page).

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[GreatBunzinni]

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

No, you are a copyright infringer. Stealing is based on the subtraction of property, and you don't subtract anything by copying something.

To put it in perspective, some people took video cameras to cinemas to record movies, and then sell the video recording of the movie for some change. Others took photografs of every page in a book, and sold copies of their photos. Do you believe that recording something with your video camera or taking photographs corresponds to stealing? Of course not.

So, don't be an idiot. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. It isn't stealing, no matter how you try to distort it.

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[cheekyjohnson]

If you copy media you didn't purchase, you're cheap.

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

Sorry, but I don't see that much of a difference between these two. What makes the latter theft while the former is not?

I see even pirates claim this, and I just don't understand it.

Re:They're thiefs.... sorry

[bky1701]

Sorry, no. You have to actually remove someone's property - take, not deprive of possible gain, not even profit, but remove and gain the same amount - to classify it as "theft." Otherwise, we have a term for that: piracy. Please stop butchering the English Language to suit your political ends. Just because you might apply it more narrowly than the **IA doesn't make you any less despicable for attempting.

Oh great...

[aaaaaaargh!]

These were absolutely essential for my scientific work, because I'm living in a very poor country and (if at all) academic publishers only allow authors to put papers and book drafts on their web page that cannot be used for quoting.

Now I'm really, really getting angry! As if Springer books priced at $150 or even $240 plus months of complicated ordering by the university to our library weren't already painful enough.

Thanks a lot, all you IP-property assholes. Eat shit and die!!!

(And yes, I have also published books including typesetting them in their entirety in LaTeX because the publisher was too lazy/saves costs/rips off academics. And no, I haven't seen a dime for any of this work...)

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Lunix Nutcase]

It's not made anyone a criminal for "reading a book" this is a crackdown on a site flagrantly facilitating copyright infringement. Boohoo.

No, it was Scientologists

[langelgjm]

It was a post containing text copyrighted by the Church of Scientology, and it happened in 2001.

Re:No, it was Scientologists

[Ihmhi]

Yes, this was the one I was thinking of.

To the other posters in sibling/child threads, thank you nevertheless for your efforts.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[guruevi]

MegaUpload was (to me at least) more a place where documents and other things got put by whistleblowers. There was very few pirated content on MU, it wasn't the place to go for your latest movie or video game.

Shutting down MU did more damage to whistleblowers, the Anon community and similar groups than to pirates. There was also a host of information on there that has now simply disappeared and needs to be re-uploaded elsewhere.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot

Yes, that was a big deal. Yes, that story was posted by CmdrTaco. It is well worth reading, if just to see how far things have deteriorated here.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[KiloByte]

There are very few cases of copyright theft: when media cartels deny an artist the right to use their own work, even if there is no contract between the artist and the cartel. The rest which you seem to be talking about is copyright infrigement.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Check your local library's web site. Many public libraries now have the capability to check out e-books for up to three weeks. My local library has them in .mobi, .pdf and recently added Kindle formats.

Plus if you go into the library your friendly librarian might be able to recommend material you would never have thought to read. That's how I found "The Windup Girl"

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Saintwolf]

They don't have to restrict it, that's the great thing about being digital. If all library books were digital, I wouldn't have to wait a few weeks for some guy to return it just so I can have the limited opportunity to read it.

Pirating File Sharing vs File Sharing sites

[aktiveradio]

There is a big difference between file sharing sites that are making money off file sharing services used primarily to share copyrighted materials and other file sharing sites like box.com, Dropbox, Skyfile.co, DropIr and SugarSync. There is a place for file sharing sites and Affilate programs seem to be the key indicator of a legitimate business site or a pirate haven. All these legitimate file sharing sites have a good system for dealing with copyright content that ends up on their sites, the pirate sites do not take it down because they are making money off it. So we don't need SOPA or PIPA they system works today, pirating sites are taken down seems like every week.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

I understand why Slashdot has started implemented the ability to delete posts and I agree they should have the capability.. Two ssues I see is if they now are looked at as a moderated site. Sometimes different legal rules apply to moderated vice unmoderated site. Also just hope they don't go overboard on the deleting.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[webmosher]

Many libraries do have ebook lending programs. They have a set number of licensed copies they can "lend". You must wait for people to "return" the ebook before you can get a copy. Yes... you have to wait. The main advantage I see is that I never have to pay overdue fees to the library since my book just expires when its "returned".

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[0100010001010011]

Basically just a bunch of kids that try to profit off of people that actually did the leg work. I don't know of any release groups that ask for money. They do it for the challenge and to be first. I've not noticed a single hiccup in anything. From SickBeard to CouchPotato.

That of which we do not speak is still going strong. The people complaining about MU and everything else being shut down are the same type of people that have difficulty with torrents.

The tip of a very big iceberg?

[microphage]

I don't think so, piracy is piracy whether movies, books or software. It's not a big deal unless they go after sites like Project Gutenberg.

Re:The tip of a very big iceberg?

[margeman2k3]

Considering how often they seem to be extending copyright, you can probably expect to see that in the next few years when we find ourselves dealing with perpetual copyrights.

Although, given that Congress can copyright works in the public domain, we might not need to wait that long before things like Project Gutenberg become a thing of the past.

Library E-books

[obsess5]

After I got an E-book reader several years ago, I went to my local library, got a new library card, and surfed over to the state of Maryland's E-book site (shared by all public library systems in the state). Slim pickings. Mostly recent fiction and self-help books - there weren't even subject categories for science and technology. Very disappointing.

Re:Library E-books

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

This has most likely changed in the last couple of years. The service a lot of libraries is known as OverDrive and it offers a lot of recent fiction. I usually download a couple of Dresden File books before going overseas.

Check that library again.

Re:Library E-books

[Digicrat]

The selection of DRM-free books (and specifically Android-compatible audiobooks) is highly limited on OverDrive, but they otherwise have a reasonably large selection now.

While all of MD uses OverDrive though, the availability of books does vary based on county. You must register at your local library, and that gives you access only to those books licensed by that County's library system.

More importantly, the interface for actually sorting through the books on OverDrive is still horrible. In particular, it gets annoying when you browse through and find for example books 3 and 5 of some series (on different pages of results), but books 1 and 2 are not in the system. Or at least that's what I routinely find with the audiobooks (great for long drives), even when I include the Windows-only file formats.

Re:Library E-books

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

DRM on items I purchase ought be outlawed but for what Overdrive does with it, controlling of lending periods it does serve a purpose and makes some sense.

You are correct about the Overdrive interface, I cringe whenever looking for stuff. As to the missing books try making sure you are looking for all items in the system not just available items. Each library is limited to a certain number of copies of each title. Some other user might have book 1 or 2 checked out and you don't seem them because you are only looking at available items, Just a guess it has happened to me numerous times.

Re:Library E-books

[aslagle]

I hope you've finished Ghost Story then, because Penguin has removed all of their books from Overdrive: http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,92091.75.html/

Re:Library E-books

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Nooooo, don't tell me that. Ghost Story was good but I have a few others I haven't read.

Re:Library E-books

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Looking at your link it appears to be the Kindle version not the Adobe version. Good for me as I use a Sony e-reader. Love it DOC and PDF files natively too. Do a lot of my Technical reading from PDFs supplied with the journals.

Re:Library E-books

[poity]

There's a legitimate argument against DRM on things you've bought, but complaining about DRM on borrowed books from the library is stretching it.

Re:Library E-books

[aslagle]

At first it was just the kindle versions, but Penguin has now chosen (in the past week) to not send ebooks to Overdrive, in any format.

Re:Library E-books

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Nooooo, don't tell me that. Ghost Story was good but I have a few others I haven't read.

It's not hard to find copies of all of Butchers work, You just search for a couple of sentences from the book you want to read. Every once in awhile I get bored, do that, then compile the list of sites that illegally have the book and turn it over to the one of the mods so he can kick it up the line to get the books pulled from the intrawebz.
.

Altho I haven't done that lately, ever since the hand of mod stuff started floating around the boards gone downhill.

Re:Library E-books

[AF_Cheddar_Head]

Sorry, I refuse to pirate. DRM is evil but so is pirating. YMMV

Sharing a book means only one of us has access to the book at a time, BTW photocopying an entire book is pirating in my world. Sharing a digital copy of the same book means both have access ie copying.

Re:Library E-books

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I have three copies each of the dresden books that I buy when they get released.

The "reading" book, the "book to store and never read", and the loaner book.

The only one that I have a single copy of is backup, since that was disproportionally expensive. I also had Jim sign Changes for my Mom and gave that to her for her birthday when it came out.

Good for you on not pirating - but I'm sure that if you locate copies, they won't mind if you take a peek when you turn the site link over.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[GameboyRMH]

Most of it? It's a temporary dip. The pro-culture-theft crowd was saying the same thing when Napster was shut down, I'm sure the idea of average Joes using something as technically complicated as torrents seemed at least as ridiculous back then as the idea of average Joes running their torrents over untraceable, unstoppable darknets seems now.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Qzukk]

Just roll over, shrug their shoulders, and say "oh well"?

No, Mr. Media Giant, I expect you to die.</Goldfinger>

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[Anonymous Coward]

Different AC here.

This isn't a publicly funded service, crap posts aren't deleted by the government, and dealing with what's posted here is no more censorship than is choosing which letters to the editor to include at the NYT web site.

Of course it's censorship (assuming it happens; I'm not taking the GP's word on that). If someone posts a comment and you delete it for whatever reason, you're censoring them, period. Censorship doesn't require government involvement.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[CastrTroy]

This

I really don't like copyright infringers. They give the rest of the internet users a bad name. I've downloaded share of illegal content but I've since stopped doing it for the exact reasons you point out. If I don't think something is worth the price the copyright owner is asking, I just simply don't watch/listen/read it. There's enough other media on the internet for free, or with price and terms that I do agree with that I don't need to pirate stuff if I feel it isn't worth the price. Sure I may not get to see all the new movies, but I really don't feel like I'm missing much.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Nyder]

It's been a month now and literally every upload site has either closed down or shut down their affiliate programs that offered money for uploaders. Those who uploaded pirated material to gain money are devastated on forums and cannot find any good upload site anymore. This was highly successful bust against piracy, and rightly so.

I don't know about that. the amount of stuff released on sites i've been to hasn't slowed down. While a few of the sites have changed that stuff is uploaded to, there hasn't been that much change.

I don't know about if the uploaders are getting money or not, because I don't care. The movie and music industry built their empire on milking their talent for as much as they can, while giving them back very little. But even if the uploaders are NOT getting money for their uploads, they are still uploading it.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they really build in artificial inefficiency by pretending that something that doesn't actually exist as an object has a physical form? I would think librarians would be more sensible.

I said it when MegaUpload went down,...

[J'raxis]

...and I'll say it again: Why do these centralized, single-point-of-failure websites even exist? I thought people learned from Napster back in the early 2000s that decentralized, peer-to-peer was a lot more resilient? And as p2p networks have been disrupted by the cartels and governments, people have further moved to encrypted p2p networks and the so-called "dark web."

What you're seeing here is someone losing a battle because they went up against a modern military... using a longbow. Or maybe even just a sharpened stick. It's 2012, censorship tools and techniques have evolved significantly, as have anti-censorship countermeasures. These guys were stuck in 2001.

Hopefully all the copies of the content that library.nu and ifile.it amassed haven't been seized, and they or someone else can upload all this stuff to a safer place. :)

Re:I said it when MegaUpload went down,...

[Xest]

Because it's pretty fucking funny watching the authorities try to play whackamole?

Part of the reason anti-piracy measures are failing are not simply about new technological tools outflanking the police, but also because as soon as you take your eye off the ball with one mechanism (i.e. P2P) then it'll pop straight back up.

They took down centralised stuff years ago and along came P2P, they focus on P2P and now centralised stuff returns. With the lack of focus on P2P sites and such lately I wouldn't be surprised to see it growing in popularity again.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[GameboyRMH]

I still see no evidence that posts are actually *deleted* when flagged. The FAQ seems to suggest that they are modded to -1:

How do I report abuse?

Below and to the right of each comment is a small "Anti" symbol; click on this, and (optionally) explain why you consider the comment abusive. (Slashdot discussions are and should be robust; only cry "Abuse!" for comments that are utterly without redeeming value -- spam, racist ranting, etc. For everything else, use the other moderation options.) Reported comments will be reviewed and moderated by the editors, if appropriate.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[NeutronCowboy]

Eh? The flag button that lets you repost to various social networks? The FAQ has had the delete for a long time. And the source of the comment page shows no delete link and no check-mark to allow such. Besides, why the hell would it? The proper way to do this is to create specific pages for specific users, not to hide elements via javascript. If the ability to delete posts exists, you can't see it - or you can be sure it would already have been abused.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[NeutronCowboy]

Interesting. The flag button is actually clickable and leads to a report functionality.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[hairyfeet]

Yep as someone that services and builds PCs 6 days a week I can tell you for home users the most popular is.....drumroll....plain old P2P. That's right, your fasttracks, your Gnucleus, although BT has gained some simply because of the high profile of TPB and the clients that are simple enough your grandma could use them. Next round i predict semi anon software that your grandma can run where they mix in some plausible deniability using encrypted cache stores just to make it extra painful for the *.A.As and may i say i hope it hurts.

Those bastards screw the artists, see meatloaf going bankrupt fighting the record companies for nearly 20 years because they had the brass balls to claim bat out of hell 1 never made a dime. Yeah the album that set a record for longest run on the top 200 never made a dime, and if you tickle my balls they play jingle bells. hell look at Cheap trick having to sue right now because the record company refuses to give them a cent of digital downloads because those didn't exist in the 70s therefor the record companies say tough shit. Pretty much ALL the major artists of the 70s aren't seeing a dime on iTunes, the record companies pocket every cent.

So until We, The People as well as the artists are given a seat at the bargaining table as a musician please rob these fuckers blind. Living a stone's throw from Memphis I've seen many a kid sign the record contracts with stars in their eyes only to get robbed blind by the record companies who take everything and use Hollywood accounting to give the kid a bill even if the album sells a million and they recorded it themselves. Honestly the fucking mob are more honest than those bastards and this whole thing is NOT about piracy, its about control and making sure they can continue to rob the artists. Hell artists got a bigger cut in the 1950s as a percentage than now, and thanks to "forever minus a single day" copyrights they can continue to rob the artist even after they are dead. But now they are scared, the combo of digital recording and the tubes mean new artists can just sign profit sharing deals with promotion companies and bypass the system, and thanks to digital they can't keep selling you the White Album like they did with album to 8 track to cassette to CD, this frightens them. Good DIAF you back stabbing leeches.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[nhat11]

Eh the point of regulations is NOT to stop stuff like piracy, it's to slow it down to be managable. I mean theres people that steal and kill all the time. It's impossible to stop stealing and killing, but if you regulate and slow it down to a reasonable level, it is managable.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[chrb]

they can easily make it harder and inconvenient enough for general population.

No, they can't. There is a fundamental contradiction that people like you don't understand: you can't have a population that has free, open access to digital communications, and at the same time restrict what data they are communicating to each other. Every single time the various agencies get together and close down one site, there are a dozen more that spring up to take its place. We have seen this pattern time and time again, every single warez group that has ever been closed down has been trumpeted as a "huge success against piracy", and yet here we are, in 2012, and piracy is everywhere. Remember DrinkOrDie? Operation Buccaneer - one of the largest, most expensive global anti-piracy enforcement actions in history, and yet here we are a decade later and piracy is as big as it ever was. And so it will be with MegaUpload.

but when the circle is small enough companies don't care.

You seem to have forgotten that PirateBay is still running... and if that ever goes down, there will be another ten to take its place. This battle is not winnable while it is still legal to own PCs and develop software. There will always be another Usenet, another BitTorrent, another Kazaa, and another PirateBay.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Loosifur]

Yes. Otherwise, there would be no possible way publishers would allow libraries to lend digital copies. Think about it: reverse the earlier question. What's the difference between a library that "lends" infinite, permanent digital copies of books for free to anyone with a login, and a pirate site? A library that can distribute ebooks with no limitations whatsoever is no different than a pirate site, essentially, and renders the idea of copyright moot. If you think that the very idea of copyright is in and of itself immoral or unethical, then that's probably fine with you, but even if you think authors should produce work without copyright in the hope and expectation of what would amount to donations from motivated readers, putting libraries in a position to distribute along such a model would just make it that much less likely that the original author would ever see a dime from readers.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Mister Whirly]

"very few pirated content on MU" - does not seem accurate to me. There may have been some "non-pirated" content, but "pirated" stuff far outweighed the non. Every one of my non-technical friends knew about Megaupload and has used it to download movies/music/applications. These are the people who have no idea what Bittorrent or USENET are. I personally downloaded a lot of music from MU becasue the filesize isn't too big and the speeds were generally decent. And as far as movies go, you are dead wrong. There were tons of recent movies available on Megaupload. You just needed to find the search engine front-ends that would find the copyrighted material on MU. They didn't want to make it too easy...

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[mcgrew]

Infringing copyright isn't theft. Copyright theft is when a record company takes the rights to their musicians' work. If I held a gun to your head and made you sign your copyrights over, that too would be copyright theft.

The publishing industries should stop listening to the advertiser's mantra "sell the sizzle, not the steak" and try to understand what the phrase means. You can't sell me a sizzle, but the sizzle might help you sell me a steak.

What's the difference between downloading a CD's worth of songs and checking the CD out from the library? It has dozens of movies, hundreds of CDs and thousands of books -- all free.

Since the invention of moveable type, the content sold the book. The music sold the record. Plays, concerts, and movies were the only exceptions. Study after study shows that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates. Attack piracy and you attack your best customers. I can think of little more foolish.

However, I agree that those making money from piracy or counterfeiting are in fact stealing. In that case, something is indeed lost.

Article 27 of UDHR is just fine

[melikamp]

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

By (1), non-commercial exchange of ANY information that is artistic or scientific in nature is a human right. Lending a book to a friend is a selfless act of sharing, just like uploading files to consenting strangers via BT from your home Internet connection. By (2), authors should have legal means to enforce proper credits and to get compensated when their works are shared commercially. Note that only authors are eligible, so there is no mandate for a transferable copyright. There is no mandate for a corporate-controlled copyright, as these are Human rights. Actually, there is no mandate for any kind of copyright, for as long as there is some kind of scheme for reimbursing authors, their human rights are protected.

The only contradiction is between the current copyright law and the UDHR: non-commercial sharing is considered infringing in many jurisdictions, but the law itself infringes on our Human right 27.1. If I and some other dude agree to share files we already have, and without exchanging any money, then we are clearly "participating in the cultural life of the community", "enjoying the arts", and nothing else, and should be able to do so freely. But if one party makes money in this transaction, then the act of making money is neither "participating" nor "enjoying", and can (but does not have to) be regulated by a copyright law.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[ScentCone]

If someone posts a comment and you delete it for whatever reason, you're censoring them, period. Censorship doesn't require government involvement

In any meaningful use of the word, yes it does. Nobody is stopping you from saying what you want to say. But they may, on their own web site, decide it's a not a good fit for how they run the place. You are not censored. You are, though, subject to someone else's whims when you make free use of their stuff. The slashdot editors have absolutely no influence over your free speech - only over the content of their own web site. Just like you can and should have (if you want it) influence over your own, should you decide to set one up. At no point is your liberty threatened by having a web site owner run a web site according to their own editorial policies. Suggesting otherwise utterly trivializes real censorship - of which there are many and horrifying examples in the world.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[GameboyRMH]

Well they better enjoy it while they still have the ability to lay down speedbumps.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

All the moaning about SOPA and whatever else - you brought it on yourselves and you deserve it, but you also brought it on everyone else.

Had you bothered to even read SOPA or PIPA, you would have realized how stupid that comment really is. It was about control, censorship, and narrowing the dissemination of knowledge. Piracy was the easy scapegoat as it is a thorn in their sides.

'It' was coming the whole time, nobody 'brought it on' other than big money and the politicians they paid for....but I don't hear you bitching about the corruption that allows this all to go down....nope, just the usual "if you have nothing to hide...." argument, which I personally think any American should be slapped across their face for even uttering. I'm fairly sure that the thousands of men who gave their lives to protect freedom over the decades would agree.

I personally do not support the 'model' that piracy claims to be, the force in opposition to the usual overpriced crap. The same crap the media hounds both seek to restrict and charge through the nose for because they are scared now that they have no control over dissemination.

Their biggest secret, untold fears?

That they aren't worth the money they claim they are, and that we( the general public) are slowly figuring this out, and this will affect their bottom line negatively, which was coming all along.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[hairyfeet]

Noooo...they should embrace the valve model and realize while you will NEVER get rid of piracy you CAN turn a hell of a lot of those pirates into customers by embracing the big three concept, which is make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap. I knew a LOT of game pirates, yet almost none of them actually pirate games anymore...why? because of Steam, Steam makes it simple as "push button to get game" and makes it easy with instant patching and matchmaking, and more importantly they make it cheap with constant promos and sales to entice those that wouldn't pay full price.

You could do the same with TV and movies VERY easily, there is no damned reason why i shouldn't be able to buy an AVI of any episode of any show for say 25c. that roughly figures up to about what you'd pay for a box set on Amazon and if you showed the episode free in the clear in the first place you sure as hell aren't gonna affect piracy by giving me an AVI that would actually play on my dad's media tank. Same thing for movies, why should I be able to buy that 4 year old movie out of the Walmart bargain bin for $4 but a digital copy costs something like $20 and is DRMed out the ass? if its on DVD you sure as hell aren't affecting piracy by selling me an AVI because the pirates will have uploaded it years ago.

This is no different than how the RIAA kept shooting themselves in the face screaming " Music downloads will kill music!" and now are setting record profits thanks to iTunes. In fact as valve showed when they mad over 1700% PROFITS by selling L4D at $1.99 if the RIAA would lower that MP3 down to say a quarter a song they would be raking in truckloads of money and wiping out the pirates. So my friend this has NOTHING to do with pirates, it has to do with control and the ability to sell an infinite resource as a scare commodity and therefor charge assraping prices. go DIAF media companies, we won't miss you.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[mcgrew]

Someone has a sense of entitlement - "I don't want to pay for this, so instead of doing without or being responsible I'll just take it" - and so they make more and more run-arounds just so they can get their stuff for free.

If that's the pirates' mind set, then why do all the studies show that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates? No, the pirates didn't bring SOPA and the other evils, YOU, the publishers, did.

What on earth do you expect the reactions of the media giants to be?

I always expected them to not be learning-disabled but my expectations were incorrect. It's simple: give the content away, sell the container like it's been done for hundreds of years. I've been reading since 1958 and never had to pay to read before. I paid when I wanted and could afford to, by going to the bookstore instead of the library.

The war on piracy is nothing but incredibly stupid greed. "Hey, look, we can sell an ebook or record for the same price we're selling it now and not have printing, shipping, and distribution costs! Now all we have to do is make people stop doing it for free."

Illegal? Yes. Immoral? No. The only immoral actors here are the publishers themselves.

Funny?

[DarthVain]

From what I understand this was exactly the case back in the day. Corporations tried to lobby and to make them illegal. The US basically decided that libraries were in the peoples best interest so they lost. Too bad government doesn't seem too awfully concerned about that anymore.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[kalirion]

Noooo...they should embrace the valve model and realize while you will NEVER get rid of piracy you CAN turn a hell of a lot of those pirates into customers by embracing the big three concept, which is make it simple, make it easy, make it cheap.

Yes, I hear it does work quite well.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Pope]

Legit users can go move their files to another hosting services.

If, as some of the biggest whiners have complained, MU contained their only copy of a file, then I have zero sympathy for them.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Requiem18th]

Actually the purpose is to crush the competition, gain control on innovations and facilitate a police state. Reducing piracy is icing on the cake.

Used Books

[DarthVain]

If industry had its way all used book sales would also be banned.

They might not go so far as to say "burn them", but "recycle" is a much nicer sounding word, but amounts to about the same thing.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[dead_cthulhu]

Well, the Zetas only kill you.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[sgt scrub]

I thought you had posts of people complaining that megaupload.com, library.nu and ifile.it were not paying them after they uploaded illegal content for other people to download.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[lgw]

I think you're just mistaken here. "Censorship" happens when anyone removes material that others would have had access to. Government censorship is a particularly pernicious kind of censorship, to be sure, but the phrase "government censorship" is not redundant.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[theArtificial]

Next round i predict semi anon software that your grandma can run where they mix in some plausible deniability using encrypted cache stores just to make it extra painful for the *.A.As and may i say i hope it hurts.

Share uses encryption to hide the identity of who is transferring or what they are transferring. It is non-centralized so it cannot be easily shut down and it supports multiple source "swarm" downloading. All files are transferred encrypted so they must be decrypted upon download completion. In the meantime they are stored in encrypted form in a "Cache" folder. This folder is also used to allow recently downloaded files to be shared among the network based on priorities.

WinNY is another app older app like WinMX.

There apps use strings to populate the menus and dialog text so they can be localized. I had an interest in this years ago, and simply put, it comes down to convenience and affluence. BTW Steam sale today, $2.49 for Magicka...

You can't cheat an honest man.

[westlake]

The people who have suffered most is those who used these services for legitimate content, and there were quite considerable numbers of people who did so...

You trusted your files to a 300 lb tub of lard who changed his name to Kim Dotcom?

You never asked how a dirt-cheap legitimate hosting service finances a life style that would have left Fat Elvis flat busted?

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Requiem18th]

Actually there is no need to introduce artificial scarcity, the scarcity here is the writer's time. Writers should be paid for writing rather than having readers tracked for charging. The analogy is having restrictions on sitting in chairs unless we pay a per/minute sitting fee, plus of course having a policemen in everyhome to ensure there is no uncontrolled sitting..

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cornicefire]

Innovation? That's always the claim but as far as I could tell, Megaupload was an FTP server and not a very stable one at that. That's 20+ year old technology.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[poity]

...more a place where documents and other things got put by whistleblowers. There was very few pirated content on MU, it wasn't the place to go for your latest movie or video game.

http://www.google.com/search?q=link:%22megaupload.com%2F%3Fd%22

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[Soulskill]

When a comment is flagged, it gets sent to the editors to review on a case-by-case basis. We then pick from two options: ignore and downmod. Nothing gets deleted, and reporting a comment that is already at -1 won't do anything either way.

Plenty of people have tried to abuse it already, but because it's not automated, they're just wasting their time. Feel free to test it out if you'd like.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[QuasiSteve]

there is no damned reason why i shouldn't be able to buy an AVI of any episode of any show for say 25c. that roughly figures up to about what you'd pay for a box set on Amazon

What box set is that?

Game of Thrones, Season 1
Episodes: 10
DVD: $34.99 or $3.50/episode
Blu-Ray: $44.99 or $4.50/episode

Chuck, Season 5
Episodes: 13
DVD: $29.99 or $2.31/episode
Blu-Ray: $39.99 or $3.08/episode ...perhaps some older material and bigger box sets...

Star Trek TNG, all episodes (cheapest I could find at Amazon.com)
Episodes: 178
DVD: $229.99 or $1.29episode

StarGate SG-1, all episodes (only seem to sell 1 these days)
Episodes: 214 (might actually only be 213 in the box set, I believe the pilot episode is left out of some versions)
DVD: $146.69 or $0.69/episode

$0.25/episode is nowhere near the price levels at Amazon that I've seen.

( Not a commentary on your argument. )

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Loosifur]

I disagree. The assumption is that each writer's time is of equal worth, and that the use of that time results in a product of equal value. If I spend an hour writing a postmodern analysis of the film Real Steel, and you spend an hour writing the Great American Novel that everyone loves, the thing you produced with that hour is more valuable than the thing I produced with that hour, making your hour worth more. If writing were like tightening nuts on bolts, then sure, all writers' time would be about equal. But, the only way you can really determine the value is by the interest audiences have in reading it.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me, when it comes down to ebooks, there's no way to stop it : It's very small, and contains an enormous amount of information for it's size.
And even if they find a way to block all sites, and DRM all pdf's , in the end, you could always scan a physical book and make a pdf from that.

Books have been copied since before the printing press was invented (by hand) , what makes anyone think they can stop it ?

There's also a very thin line when it comes to technical books : If I read a book on EJB 3.0 , and then write about it in a blog, I am putting contents of that book online. Is that a copyright violation ?

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[GodInHell]

Disagree -- you can stop /paid for/ piracy. The free shit carries on unabated.

-GiH

Re:good

[Requiem18th]

*sigh* I miss subtle trolls.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cheekyjohnson]

But it's not manageable. It's still not, and likely never will be. Anyone who isn't an idiot can find another website in five seconds flat.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Fallingcow]

It's still wrong

Sometimes.

it's still illegal

More often than not, yes.

and it's still immoral.

Sometimes.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cheekyjohnson]

I guess no website can have advertisements because of the piracy boogeyman. Someone, somewhere might be copying something! We should waste extreme amounts of taxpayer dollars trying to stop what amounts to jaywalkers.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cheekyjohnson]

However, I agree that those making money from piracy or counterfeiting are in fact stealing. In that case, something is indeed lost.

What would that be? I don't see anything that was lost that anyone originally had.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[ScentCone]

So would you consider the editorial process at a newspaper (say, the fact that a human being, with editorial authority, sits in between the web-based letter-to-the-editor form and the web-based display of letters-to-the-editor that the newspaper site's public visitors see) is censorship? Is deleting forum spam censorship?

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[cheekyjohnson]

So would you consider the editorial process at a newspaper (say, the fact that a human being, with editorial authority, sits in between the web-based letter-to-the-editor form and the web-based display of letters-to-the-editor that the newspaper site's public visitors see) is censorship?

Suppressing such information could be considered censorship (at least by me), even if certain people agree with it. Not all censorship must be deemed "evil" or other such things.

Is deleting forum spam censorship?

I think it is, yes. The fact that you or some others may agree with that censorship doesn't mean it's not censorship.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cheekyjohnson]

The pirate can't steal that. The time and money spent creating the original work is already gone. And it was the artist's own choice, at that. The pirate had nothing to do with that decision.

Taking the heat off torrents

[Pausanias]

I love these sites like MegaUpload and whatever its next iteration will be. By illegally making copyrighted files available for direct download from a unique source, they are easy to prosecute, easy to take down, which gives copyright owners a sense of satisfaction, and because of this focuses attention away from bittorrent.

Re:Taking the heat off torrents

[Hatta]

Bittorrent is easily traceable. All you have to do is ask the tracker who is seeding and it will tell you. Torrents are easily prosecutable as well.

Re:Taking the heat off torrents

[steve_bryan]

Have you heard of VPN? It is widely used by business and government so trying to prevent its use is very problematic. As long as there are locations on the net that are not 'owned' by the copyright cartel the darknet will continue to flourish. Ironically a side effect of this development is that all other internet activity of an individual using VPN becomes much less vulnerable to surveillance. Positive efforts to encourage people to safeguard privacy have been fairly ineffective but this sort of activity is doing that job rather well.

Re:Taking the heat off torrents

[HermMunster]

So many fools. The owners of Megaupload.com were not making copyrighted material available. The users were. Megaupload.com provided adequate and tools and time for the alleged content owners to take down the alleged illegal content. They were going after Megaupload.com for a couple of reasons. Primarily they were going to be introducing a music sharing system for artists that was far greater than any provided by the music industry as it exists. As well, Megaupload.com sued some in the music industry for illegally taking down content with the tools that Megaupload.com provided them. Let's get real.

Megaupload.com is a failure (so far) in regards to defending itself in court over these charges. They have money they should have the best attorneys, and they should be promoting their lawsuit against those in the music industry. They should spend their money on attorneys and when they are found to be innocent, begin again and sue the shit out of the RIAA.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[devent]

> However, I agree that those making money from piracy or counterfeiting are in fact stealing. In that case, something is indeed lost.

What exactly is lost? They are making the content available for a reasonable price. For example, in the Philippines you can buy DVDs with 25 films on it, for like 2Euro. I buy that and can enjoy the films that I never heart of or films that I would never see or buy. That is good for the film-makers because now they have a new fan. So for the next film maybe I go to the cinema or buy the DVD (the legal one) or tell my friends about it.

So, I ask you again, what is lost? Is it not so, that something was gained and not lost? Piracy is free advertisement. If you want customers, make it easy to buy your stuff and enjoy the free advertisement that piracy will give you.

Now, if you do plagiarizing, then I agree that something is lost and it's moral wrong to do it.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[chekkerness]

However, I agree that those making money from piracy or counterfeiting are in fact stealing. In that case, something is indeed lost.

And that would be? You can't correctly answer the question because nothing has been stolen.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cheekyjohnson]

I don't care what babies agree on (not that them crying means they think it's wrong, they're probably not thinking anything), and I don't see how it proves that absolute morals exist.

I believe all morals are subjective. Are you going to offer actual evidence to the contrary, or just state your opinion?

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[tunapez]

Damn, if enough people mod you up will it eventually go to 6? I'd try it but I am spent on points right now.

...except for the 25cents example, because they are intrinsically greedy I'd guess multi-$ per episode, perhaps cheaper by the set.

Re:Libraries

[Phrogman]

Its not the Libraries, its the publishers who are unwilling to license the libraries to distribute e-books without these limitations. As well, the Library can only distribute a book so many times before they have to buy it again.

Publishers already hate libraries for the most part because they limit their profits (all those readers reading books they didn't buy) apparently. This ignores the fact that no one is going to choose to buy all the books they get from the library instead if the library was shut down; they'd just read a lot less.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Hatta]

You can't slow it down that much. As long as the risk/benefit equation works out in favor of the pirate, piracy will be widespread. That is, as long as the expected payout is greater than the expected loss.

The expected loss is the risk of getting caught times the penalty. We already have enormous penalties, tens of thousands of dollars per song, which are arguably unconstitutionally excessive.

The only alternative is to increase the risk of getting caught. To do this, we'd have to prohibit general purpose computing. Only pre-approved applications would be allowed on pre-approved operating systems. Only approved crypto-systems with back doors for the government will be allowed.

Of course, general purpose computing is so important to our economy, that we'd be at a severe competetive disadvantage if we did that. So that's a non-starter. The only sensible thing to do is to understand that entertainment is a very small part of our economy, Google could easily buy the RIAA for instance. Even if you assume the worst case scenario, that piracy will totally destroy the entertainment industry, it doesn't make economic sense to fight it.

Re:Slashdot deletes posts

[bky1701]

Not only that, but I seem to have been blacklisted as a mod; probably for telling Bonch off or maybe foe'ing one of the editors. Excellent karma solid for several years, many up-modded posts, few down, yet no mod points in over 6 months. So much for moderation being what sets slashdot apart. It seems mods are getting solidly stupider, constantly modding up trolls for agreeing with them politically, and I don't doubt that more people have been blacklisted than me for saying the wrong thing. Just look at all the up-mods to idiots in this story... slashdot has really fallen.

Re:"Server costs"...

[s0nicfreak]

It is actually relevant. Weither they made a profit or not and how much a profit they made will be a big deciding factor in the case. At least, that's how things worked when I was sued for copyright infringement.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[s0nicfreak]

What about all the people that uploaded something and then died or left the internet? The world has lost a lot with the loss of megaupload. It's like the government burned down a library because it was discovered that the librarian stole a few books. Yes most of the books can be gotten at other libraries. Yes it was silly of us to not make a copy of the rare and last-copy-left books that were kept in that library. But the point is that the library should not have been burned, the offending books should have simply been removed and the other books released to be moved to another, law-abiding library.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[barc0001]

How about this counter? I pay ~$40 a month for my cable TV portion of the TV/internet bill. Everything you list with the exception of Game of Thrones has passed over my coax cable in the last 7 years, so in a manner of speaking I've already paid for access to it once. I see the economics as $40/month is what I am willing to pay for my television needs. I watch maybe 1-2 hours of TV a day, if that, but for round numbers let's pick 2 hours a day. For a TV show to appeal to me economically, it has to be cheaper than 66 cents per hour, because that's what it "costs" me currently based on my usage. That's why I will NEVER pay $2 for a 22 minute TV episode on iTunes. Never. Won't pay $3 for a 44 minute episode either. Prices have to come down for these kinds of shows before it makes financial sense. Everyone and their dog seems to be getting a PVR these days, which makes access to these shows even easier at the consumer's convenience, which makes the prospect of paying $2-3 an episode even less likely for a lot of people.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[aix tom]

Quite right. And once they have prosecuted and locked away or alienated anybody stupid enough to PAY for something, they will finally have saved their business model. Or something. ;-P

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Omestes]

So thanks a lot, pirates. (And I don't care if you call yourself a pirate, or insist it's copyright infringement, or whatever. That's all semantic nonsense. It's still wrong, it's still illegal, and it's still immoral. So stop arguing over what label you want to be applied to you.)

That all might be. But its gotten to the point where I just don't care anymore.

Furthermore the argument has gotten old, its just another "black or white" bunch of shit on both sides. The anti crowd is generally a bunch of unthinking moralizers, where the pro crowd are just throwing up week post hoc justifications to cover the actions they already do.

I personally think some piracy might be wrong, but I also think some might be completely moral, even if both are illegal. I have nothing against pirating things to format switch, I'm not ever going to buy another damn Beetles track, I've already bought them 600000 times (LP, Tape, CD, and NOW digital...), so screw you. I have nothing against "pirating" things I bought that are intentionally (DRM) or unintentionally broken. I have nothing against pirating things to "try before I buy", especially since I'm no longer allowed to make returns on items I purchase.

  I have nothing against pirating media produced by dead people, or people who will never see a dime of profit from it (Go pirate the Beetles or Louis Armstrong, or H.P Lovecraft, or T.S. Eliot, they don't care). Hell, I don't even have anything against piracy of media over a certain age (lets say 15 years). This one is the most important, since it touches the center of the issue. Copyright isn't a right to perpetual profit, it is carrot to keep producers producing, that is it. It balances short term incentives to creators with the public good. Well it did, and that is its stated goal in the Constitution, we've decided that we value profit over public good along time ago, and the corporations have done a very good job of convincing us that their best interests (perpetual profits and control) somehow align with ours. They also have somehow made us believe that this is all for the good of the creators, while they continue to screw them (too) over at every chance.

Hell, I still don't even understand why we decided the authors and musicians should have to have real jobs. How is that a bad thing?

Further, and this might be a bit extreme, I'm slowing gravitating towards the idea of piracy as civil disobedience. I thought this was stupid a couple years ago, but I'm beginning to see the merit, or at least the psychological merit. But then again, if I had three wishes I would destroy all the media middle men, and force creators to cope.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[HermMunster]

Total tool of the RIAA. There's no proof of anything being said. You guys modded them and insightful? Have you not even read the news about Megaupload.com in the months prior to this raid?

Shitload of Astroturfing

[HermMunster]

Some organized campaign of astroturfing is taking place in this thread. You can see that when those attempting to clarify are modded down.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[synthespian]

Here's my commentary to your numbers:

because "push" media is dead, I get to choose, and I choose I want Game of Thrones, Chuck, Star Trek and Star Gate all in the same month. "I want it all, and I want it now!" In the past, I used to have to stuff the piggy bank with coins. But before, I had to think real hard about what I wanted to buy, and THEN begin the process of saving. This isn't so anymore. As the machines allow for ever more room & speed for obtaining and keeping content, the process of merchandise-selection has been turned upside down.

With the explosion of content , which is only going to get bigger & faster, as digital media makers & outlets grow bigger in numbers & smaller in size, you can't expect media consumers NOT to overload their "shopping cart". Rather, they will load it with everything they can find and only select what they like later , and not BEFORE, in a "thoughtful" consumer manner, in a piggy bank savings way. They're gonna load it and shake it, and the best will survive by the process of the digital word-of-mouth sieve (ALL medias, not just social medias - they're all interlocked). Not only that, "niche" content gets to be eternal too, and "niche" content has no place in the current media-empires' spreadsheets.

This now only applies to cultural goods, but pretty soon we will witness physical goods being pirated (or transmitted) digitally, only to be made physical with 3D printers. Maybe farther along this trend we'll see circuit printers, food printers and cloth-cutting robots. With future tools being able to manufacture everything we could wish for - clothing, electronics, food and cultural goods, etc what is it exactly the corporation-moguls expect us to buy from them? In the past, we used to trade food recipes on Usenet. In the future, I might just download the CAD-like specs of your trademark hamburger, only to see it materialize in my digital-to-physical brand new kitchenware.

Your numbers do not add up to this new way of fast-consumption of content. You're talking old money. I'm talking new money - if it is money at all.

PS: In the 26th century, nobody works for money - everybody knows that. ;-)

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[synthespian]

I don't thhink you necessarily have to sell the "container". You could, for instance, like Netflix, sell me "easyness" - the quality of making it easy and cheap to deliver me content. Think, hmmm, gasoline or canned peaches. That too, has been that way for eons.

Re:Mod parent up

[synthespian]

Not always do they make money lowering prices. In the case of, say, automobiles or first-class airplane tickets, you actually make more money increasing the price. In fact, if you make sufficiently expensive cars, you get to make fewer cars, provided you have targeted the right consumer base. Most car manufacturers AFAIK make money with their high end products. The very cheap models are just for creating brand loyalty (i.e., your first car).

The thing with music and digital media is that the product is selected in an entirely different way. If cars were mp3, not even Saudi princes would have enough garage space to store them all. But, with current hardware and telecom technology, it's cheap to store, fast to download tons of stuff. The reason you have to make it cheap is because you are in fact nearing optimum cost (for consumers): zero.

It's gotta be sort of like shopping "green": the consumer has got to feel some sort of advantage, even if indirect, in giving away 0.99 cents - it's to support the band, for instance. Crowdfunding might change some dynamics in the middle-man game record labels play.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[synthespian]

Sure. This week I'm gonna go to the friendly librarian and ask: "can you reccommend me nice books on Markov chains? And what would you reccommend on Sobolev spaces?"

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[synthespian]

Sites that carry e-books have scanned material that is

1) decades out of print
2) the author is dead
3) the printing was never very big (2,000, 3,000 copies)
4) the book was never a commercial hit
5) the book is nowhere to be found in a 400 miles radius (say)
6) you can't even find used copies
7) the book was a fantastic book

Now, under those premises, what is so immoral about the human thirst for knowledge, when the only way to quench it, given the above, is through exchanging pirated material?

If that is a practice that damages society, then I say that to give hard-earned human knowledge away for insects to munch on, and for mold to grow on is a bigger crime!

If anything is immoral, given the above premises, then I say it is that under today's law the publisher can claim ownership rights to something he so blatantly neglects!

I don't know about the U.S. law, but I do know there are some currents of thought in Law that say (even for land) that if you have neglected something that has the potential to serve the public interest, and you have neglected it for too long, then no longer you get to claim ownership rights. If I'm not mistaken, in human history, that applied even to slaves or to wives...

Why not apply this to books?

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[pantaril]

I really don't like copyright infringers. They give the rest of the internet users a bad name.

What about copyright infringers who pirate stuff which can't be bought legaly? Do you dislike them too?
Remember, only tiny fraction of world intelectual property, which was ever created and published, can be bought today. Many publishers and distributors loose interest in their own goods after few years when it doesn't make enough sales. Those goods are usualy lost from public due to copyright.

Scary things happening

[PaleRider1981]

This is the really scary part:
"A coalition of 17 publishing companies has shut down library.nu and ifile.it"

seems like today we have government laws enforced by the police and the laws of publishers where they are the prosecutor, judge and the jury...
I taught they need SOPA for that, but obviously not...

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[tehcyder]

facilitate a police state

you're a poet but you don't know it

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[tehcyder]

If they arrest/fine/imprison enough people, one after the other, the allure of running an upload site is going to diminish greatly, especially if you're not even making much money off it in the first place.

I wonder how many slashdotters would be prepared to go to jail for the principle of being able to up/download copyright infringing files?

My guess would be: probably about the same number as would actually take up arms against the evil US government

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[mcgrew]

So, I ask you again, what is lost?

The media would have you believe that if I download a file for free, it's a lost sale. But it's not -- as you say, it's free advertising. However, if you BUY that file, the money you spent on that file should have gone to one entity and instead went to another.

Say you cleaned your mom's kitchen; even if you would have done it for free, would it be right for her to pay your sister for it? You did the work, she got the money.

If there's money changing hands on a work that's still under copyright, the artist should at least get a cut.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Omestes]

(which is as much what it's about as being able to 're-release' old works every dozen years or so in a new format with a slightly different length in order to obtain a new copyright, even though that ALSO breaks the spirit of copyright. (Just for clarification, adding, removing, or postprocessing a negligable amount of material in order to claim it's a newly derived creative work subject to it's own copyright.)

I actually would be fine with this, if copyright was sensible. The original work would lapse, and they could remaster it and claim a new copyright on the new version, this is fine since the new version would have to be significantly better than the old to actual profit from it since it competes with the old, free, public domain content. As it stands, though, this is just dumb and annoying.

Grrr... I wish big publishers, and their lobbies, would die.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Requiem18th]

Market innovation, Megaupload wasn't busted because of piracy, they were busted because they wanted to go legit by offering artists a distribution platform with 90% profit *for the artists*. Some sources:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/24/was-megaupload-targeted-because-of-its-upcoming-megabox-digital-jukebox-service/
http://cgarmstrong.me/post/16405025252/megaupload
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120123busta
http://www.deltaworld.org/technology/Megaupload-had-planned-to-pay-artists-to-create-a-new-online-music-service/
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=megaupload+artists+90%25&t=lm

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[cheekyjohnson]

If they arrest/fine/imprison enough people, one after the other, the allure of running an upload site is going to diminish greatly, especially if you're not even making much money off it in the first place.

Right. Because suing people for ridiculous amounts of money is working so well for us now. I think that's unrealistic. In order for civil liberties to not be violated, they actually have to investigate. Consider how long that pointless Megaupload bust took. Years. And likely lots of taxpayer dollars. For what? People allegedly copying media. My heroes!

I wonder how many slashdotters would be prepared to go to jail for the principle of being able to up/download copyright infringing files?

Putting people in jail for copying music sounds completely reasonable and a good use of taxpayer dollars. Doing that and making sure not to violate civil liberties is an easy task, right? Well, not as far as I know. I think what we're doing now (taking down websites which are quickly replaced) is about as far as we can go without circumventing due process (SOPA, PIPA, etc). Even the DMCA is being abused.

The downloaders likely won't be slowed down at all.

My guess would be: probably about the same number as would actually take up arms against the evil US government

The difference is that one is vastly more simple than the other.

Re:MegaUpload bust was highly successful

[Meski]

So tell me (again) if they can do this without PIPA/SOPA, why did they claim civilization (in their terms) would end without them?