Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Interview With Suren Ter From 'You Have Downloaded'

Posted by Unknown on from the you're-all-criminals-but-i-like-you-anyway dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Suren Ter discusses privacy, piracy, and the future of filesharing. Suren produced the virally popular YouHaveDownloaded.com, which displays all downloads on the public BitTorrent network associated with an IP address." When asked about his views on piracy: "Just like I told a French journalist and to the lady at the Washington Post, pirates are thieves and they do steal. Yeah yeah, 'when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file' — I get that BS. We all know that it’s BS too. However, SOPAs and PIPAs create tyranny. If given the choice between thieves and tyranny, I’d rather stay with the thieves."

3 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. The site is a joke - the authors say it themselves by sam_paris · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the site:

    "Don't take it seriously The privacy policy, the contact us page — it’s all a joke. We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month. There was only one way to prove our theory worked — to implement it in practice. So we did. Now, we find ourselves with a big crawler. We knew what it did but we didn’t know how to use it. So we decided to make a joke out of it. That’s the beauty of jokes — you can make them out of anything."

  2. Re:Right, because BS is a thorough refutation by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

    The GPL grants rights to everyone. Copyright takes rights away from everyone. That's the difference. The GPL currently relies on copyright as a legal hack to ensure those rights, but really those rights should be part of consumer protection laws, and copyright should be done away with entirely.

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  3. Re:I can't wait to start moderating by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Informative

    > You can argue semantics all you want, but the base argument
    > is very simple and straight forward: Should you be allowed to
    > take another person's efforts and do whatever you want with
    > them?

    Sure. The progress of all of human history would not exist otherwise. Even much celebrated "innovators" and "inventors" stood on the shoulders of others.

    Copyright exists to serve the public good. It was never meant to be a form of property.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.