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Interview With Suren Ter From 'You Have Downloaded'
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."
Oh well I used to believe there was a difference between theft and copyright infringement; but now that someone's called the distinction BS I'm changing my views. Heh, my captcha is "proofs"
I'm just surprised this service hasn't been acquired by the MAFIAA. It could easily lead to the largest John / Jane Doe lawsuit ever filed; just make a little script to generate a legal document for every IP address matching one that downloaded something they think they own.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
..n. Of course, if you use it as an argument to say that 'pirating' is OK, then it's BS. But making the distinction surely isn't?
When I copy your DVD, you still have a copy that you can try to sell to someone else. When I can't copy your DVD for free, I won't pay for it, I won't bother acquiring it, I don't end up having it, and I haven't wasted my time watching it. You still have a copy. You still don't have my money. That's the difference.
The idea that you can sell your product and retain control over what people do with it. That's BS.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My result, dozens of recent and hundreds of historical "infringing" torrents later:
Hi. We have no records on you.
This means you are using a private torrent tracker or, of course, you may not be a torrent user at all! It happens. Please, entertain yourself. Feel free to see what other people have downloaded. The search box is on the top. If you have any friends who use torrents, use it to scare them off. We also have a widget that you can install in your website, blog or Facebook page. Or you can just send them a link to this site. They will see a table similar to what you see below. The only difference — they will see their downloads.
I have about a dozen mod points to spend for the flood of "-1 Redundant" mods that are due when dozens of slashdotters rush to explain how "copyright != theft" isn't BS. Even the first person doing it could be modded redundant because it's so blindingly obvious (even if some of us don't agree with that, everyone knows exactly the point they're trying to make) but we'll have way more than one as people get turned on by cheap karma. ;)
The RIAA/MPAA take things too far, but that doesn't mean everything digitally created has to be open for all to have. Seriously, take it to the extreme. What is the difference between information on a disk and the information in your genome. Should you get your DNA sequenced for any reason be open for all to peruse?
This is BS:
Hi. We have no records on you.
This means you are using a private torrent tracker or, of course, you may not be a torrent user at all! It happens. Please, entertain yourself. Feel free to see what other people have downloaded. The search box is on the top. If you have any friends who use torrents, use it to scare them off. We also have a widget that you can install in your website, blog or Facebook page. Or you can just send them a link to this site. They will see a table similar to what you see below. The only difference — they will see their downloads.
I have downloaded so much off Bittorrent, without any sort of "disguise" or "cloaking" - primarily because a grand total of [ 0 ] successful claims have been brought in the English courts.
Its been proven before and is still true. IP doesnt mean anything. I just put in my printers IP and it downloaded Twilight... I never knew my printer likes crap vampire movies
Copyright infringement is not theft and cannot ever be theft. This is an absolute and irrefutable fact, and it is impossible to even disagree with it. Anyone who claims to is lying. No exceptions can ever exist.
However, just because it can never be theft doesn't mean it is not wrong. I am not necessarily saying that it is, I am merely pointing out that "is it theft?" and "is it wrong?" are two entirely separate questions, the answers to which are independent of one another.
which displays all downloads on the public BitTorrent network associated with an IP address.
Bittorrent is a protocol, not a network. Failed my BS detector right there.
It's got trackers, which keep track of who has and needs which chunks, and that's it. You can always set up your own tracker (getting people to use it is another matter), and nobody knows who is using it except the people who are using it. There is no requirement for trackers to talk to each other, and I don't even know if there is even an option for that.
I'm pretty sure you can't even get info on who is participating in a particular torrent unless you ask the tracker specifically about that torrent, and that there's no wildcard mechanism to ask the tracker for a list which torrents it serves.
So they could download a bunch of .torrent files off of popular sites that are using popular trackers and snoop into those, but there's no way they can see everything.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
a) NAT
b) dynamic IP ranges
But authors are so full of themselves it hurts :). Good luck for them and maybe-buyers, once they try to litigate with mostly false data.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
For anyone who knows math, logic, or who is rational, can you please answer this question as to whether stealing becomes right if everything is owned?
Not even the author of the work. It is a government-created *privilege* not a right, and it is revocable and limited in scope.
Someone who copies your work has not stolen anything..... they've merely infringed upon your government-granted monopoly. That's life and part of the cost of doing business (like when 80s-era Microsoft, Commodore, and others copied Apple OS's look-and-feel).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I expect to get flamed and modded down for this. But if I had any mod points right now, I'd mod Suren +5 insightful.
Well except, I could only mod him +1 insightful.
And except for the fact that making copies of music/movies you own and sharing with others isn't really piracy, but sharing with unlimited strangers is simply wrong, and y'all know it is. Whether you will admit it or not.
And except for the fact that breaking DRM to make legitimate copies of your stuff is totally not piracy and should by all accounts be a fair use right. Oh wait it is, except for that vile DMCA.
So, perhaps the Movie and Music industry brought some of this "piracy" on themselves. Still doesn't make filesharing of others copyrighted work right. I too prefer the "piracy" over tyranny. Until such time as media companies figure this out, they won't see one penny from me.
The idea that you can sell your product and retain control over what people do with it. That's BS.
I would like for anyone on Slashdot to logically and mathematically answer this from a consequence based risk analysis perspective.
Why is it wrong to download music if no one is hurt by your consumption of it? Is artificial scarcity worth it and why do we have to maintain artificial scarcity? Is it a religion or tradition to maintain artificial scarcity in certain industries?
I don't see how it's unethical. I do the math and I don't see the fans of music/movies/art losing, I don't see the artists/actors/ losing, as people will always go to concerts, movie theaters, or buy copies to see them before everyone else.
So what is the point? Can they squeeze a few percent more profits by artificial scarcity? Probably, but these profits aren't enough to justify putting the entire file sharing industry out of business and totally changing the face of the internet.
What good is tracking IP addresses when every computer on the internet can become a proxy so that it's impossible to know who downloaded what?
The proxy service could be built into file sharing apps themselves or created as a chrome plugin which uses onion routing to hide file sharers behind other file sharers and then download the file in bits and pieces and reconstruct it. This could even be done in a way so it looks like ordinary port 80 traffic.
Work filter blocked for "Proxy Avoidance"
I'm curious about the site. I entered to see what had agreggated on me (yes, I download quite a bit).
Instead I was struck with such a list of crap movies that I felt it was bordering on slander.
But nothing I've actually downloaded. And I have a fixed ip.
The site doesn't seem to work very well. And I'd hate to get sued by MAFIAA for allegedly downloading "Superhero Movie".
I looked.
I've had this IP for awhile and I (and especially my gf) have never downloaded Nirvana's Greatest Hits. False positives.
I've even received notices of abuse from my Internet provider for Vampire movies that I have supposedly torrented. Nuh-uh. More false positives.
We now live in a world where anyone can be turned into a criminal by simply appending an IP address onto a file.
Should fingerprint scanners be used to allow someone to download and listen to a particular song or watch a particular movie or unlock a particular game?
Well, the key is that if you spend all your time debating whether or not copyright infringement is theft, you never actually have to discuss whether copyright infringement is wrong. Arguing definitions lets you avoid addressing the real issues!
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Others said torrents throw in a few sprinkles of fake IP addresses. They should throw in a lot more! Maybe when we have a few more grannies 'downloading' The Hangover 3 and Eminem people will start to realize this IP address thing is garbage. I only hope the government isn't too dumb to figure out this list is worthless.
Their website says my home IP address downloaded two files I've never heard of: ... p.BRRip.Xvid.AC3-SiNiSTER (2.08 GB)
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine - EP (45.02 MB)
30 Minutes or Less.2011.7
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine? Lol. I'm a fricking skinny white guy. I'd much rather listen to Pink Floyd or Foo Fighters than some heavy rap. But I just bought the CDs instead of downloading them. Maybe I'm actually funding the real root problem by giving the **IAA groups my money.
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."
But how do you about adressing real issues if people argue with mismatched and illogical definitions?
That's the problem. If you can't agree on a common definition for things, you can't move forward in the discussion. Problem is, both sides know this, so the situation never gets resolved. "It's stealing!" "No, it's infringement!" "Same thing!" "No it isn't!" ad nauseum.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Read that as Saren at first. Too much Mass Effect for me. :3
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-05/31/scotland-gets-first-file-sharing-conviction
and the article also alludes to "This is the fifth conviction in the UK for filesharing. Four of the five man team behind the BitTorrent tracker OiNK pleaded guilty to filesharing in early 2010. "
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
For me, some copyright violations are ethical and most aren't. My ethics probably also disagree with the law on finer details of what constitutes Fair Use. In general I try to follow the though.
Ethics and Laws are fundamentally different though. Law simply implies somebody with authority made a rule for others to follow. Ethics implies a value judgment and will vary somewhat from person to person. The ethics here aren't a simple black and white case of right or wrong. If it were, our discussions on the topic would be short. But right or wrong, it's illegal to violate copyright, so long as the copyright laws are applicable to you. And that's the issue to both those who support and those who are against copyright as it stands today. Legal Ethical and Illegal Unethical unless the world is ideal.
We need to find a way to reward the initial creation of an idea, not it's distribution
Your right, but there is slightly more since that reward has to come from somewhere.
We also need to find a way to share the rewarding for the initial creation of an idea amongst the people who find the idea useful fairly. Maybe not everyone should have to contribute something to the reward but someone has to, how do you choose who contributes and who does not?
Do you just allow people to contribute whatever they feel like? Surely that relies on everyone being honest wanting to give something back and unfortunately this is not currently the case in the world we live.
I dont read
Civilization is based on the principle that you take somebody else's effort and use it, improve it and teach your children about it. If humans wouldn't copy each others behavior and products, we'd still be "sitting in trees eating bananas". Copyright was "invented" to protect the small man against big corporations getting off with the brink of the money of what their effort was. It took less than 100 years for corporations to find a way to bend that concept to their benefit and essentially screw the small man out of almost all of the money. For every millionaire music artist, there are thousands that ended up paying more to the record company than making their record cost in the first place. For every millionaire music artist, there are at least three millionaire music industry executives. Try finding funding for a movie that won't make the movie industries millions for certain. It's not about how much it will make the actors or the people making the movie, or if there might be a profit in it at all, or even the artistic value of the movie. It's about profit for big record companies, that will all go to people that won't need to work a day of their life anymore and still not be hungry, needy or poor.
Maybe, just maybe, there is virtue in copyrighting medication, but that industry tends to be mostly focused on erection pills and symptom suppression, not on curing important diseases.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I think a lot of people miss the point here. The authors of the site call it "a joke", but that's only because the extent of the monitoring is small, and the ability to trace to a dynamic IP (which is most of us) is largely nonexistent. An organization with a bit more presence could grab MUCH more information, and/or find a way to sync with you in real time.
This site is really a warning about how much personal data is leaked- assuming you consider your IP personal- when you use torrenting. There are ways around this (discussed in this thread), but I really think the folks who check and say "well, it thinks I downloaded this video about making wine, but I never did, so the site is useless" are missing what the site implies is actually possible.
And it is true, it is plain theft of a purchase.
It would be like going in to a shop, scanning some bread with some futuristic device, then printing your own one right there, and not paying either.
You are still consuming a piece of content, be it food or music, without an official transaction happening. It is outside the avenues that said creator opened up for you to consume it.
Note that I say this even though I myself do it, because of the last part of up, the fact that content producers have a narrow avenue of output for their content, which forces me to find other ways.
Worse still, even though I want to pay them, I'd have to go through a billion hurdles just to do so, and would probably still get punished for it!
Not hard to get someone to handle donations to your company, set it up on a site, done.
Honestly, I cannot wait hard enough for the internet content age. It is on its first steps at the moment.
With projects like Kickstarter being a huge success just there for Double Fine Adventure, now Wasteland 2 (which is fantastic to hear about), with projects like Vodo and Netflix trying to create content from donation-based funding, and many music sites, things are looking up.
Who knows where we will be in a decade from now, or 2 decades and beyond.
Yeah, sometimes the amateur productions are a little shaky, but the fact that it exists and it likely wouldn't have on TV, for example, because of a niche market , it automatically makes it a better avenue for hundreds of differing genres that aren't mainstream.
Yeah yeah, 'when I steal your DVD, you have no DVD, but when I copy a file, you still have a file'
The real issue here is not that copying is stealing or otherwise a lost sale, the real deal is that the world has changed and the business model for media creation and distribution is DEAD. FULL STOP. No ammount of lobbying, no matter how many laws Hollywood can get of their payed puppets will change that. It's like the railroad owners of 19th century were sen't on destroying that new "invention" called automoviles and trucks that let anybody achieve transportation without giving them their share. Let's face it, I can go to the west coast without needing you, train company. Let's face it, I can get content without needing you, big media company. BUT!!!!! Big media produces the media I want, and the actors, directors producers etc. etc. needs their food too, so... What is needed is a new way to monetize content CREATION, note the word creation, not DISTRIBUTION. Nowadays distribution is FREE, as the roads are "FREE"... you owned the railroads, but you don't own the roads anymore, so for everybody's sake, stop trying to charge me for using the road and go invent some new way to get my money (Sell gas, sell insurance for my car, and so on). Because, like it or not, being fair or not, being legal or not, charging for distributing media is NO LONGER POSIBLE, and trying to "regulate" this is like trying to pass a law that abolishes gravity... it will not work.
As a software engineer and a musician, I disagree with your assessment that "no one is hurt by your consumption". It's the tragedy of the commons. If just you download my software, or download my song for free, Your right, I'm not really hurt. But the problem comes when that behavior becomes widespread. Software is hard work, and so is music. I need someway to be paid for those efforts. With software in particular, There isn't always one person that is willing to pay 500,000 dollars for a piece of software without that kind of return. Something like Photoshop: no one person wants to fund that, and just let everyone else copy it. But it still a useful piece of software that is worth something to a lot of people. So how else do you do it? You make it so everyone that wants it pays a piece of it. And when you download it for free, that 1) is not fair to the people that do pay, and 2) is not fair to the people who developed that software. You're saying that their hard work is worth nothing to you, but you still want the work. The "It's not stealing" argument is BS. You can argue it all you want, and it is actually an easy point to argue, but that doesn't mean you're not just trying to explain away why people like me should give you our work for free.
Yeah -- on both sides. This is why copyright proponents spend so much time declaring theft += copyright infringement, so they don't have to formulate a persuasive argument as to how the total harm done by a (small, yes) restriction on EVERY SINGLE PERSON's property rights(1) is justified by the increased "incentive", AKA profits, for megacorps(2) to put out new remakes of the same old ideas, and even to retain their control of old works indefinitely.
In a world of tea-partiers (who hate (1) on pop-libertarian grounds) and OWS (who hate (2) on a variety of pop-liberal grounds), current copyright law is far from a safe sale. If everyone in the US who bothers to consider piracy at all (whether from practical, semantic, legal, or moral grounds) started concerning themselves with what level of copyright is morally acceptable, it's likely it would be cut way back (probably not abolished, as I'd like, but I'm a freaky libertarian radical), likely below Jefferson's limit, the median life expectancy from the age of maturity; he took 21 as the age of maturity, and came up with a 19-year limit; we might take 18, and come up with perhaps as much as 30 years. (The logic is that the dead have no right to rule the living, so each generation can only make laws affecting the time in which they remain mostly alive.)
Information may want to be free, but IP producers want to pay the mortgage.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You use the Kickstarter model.
It's really not that difficult to figure out.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Suren Ter (me) I’m a producer of the site. Like a movie producer, I made the site. Ruslan is a visionary. He did the necessary research and invented the technical tricks. Ilia is a programmer. He does the code. You see those tables, html and widgets? He did it. Me? I don’t do code, I don’t do research, I don’t do design — I do sites. Drop me a message if you’d like.
This guy's attitude is right in line with any "producer." They market other people's work to earn fame and/or money for themselves. Now, the two programmers, they actually MADE something and I don't see them complaining about "IP theft." A producer makes money from selling the product, the more money the product makes, the more successful they are. Actual creative minds (the programmers in this case), might make a bit of money, might get a job offer, but most importantly they have pride for having created something! Suren has nothing without being the gatekeeper.
Well, what would happen is this (applies to both music and software):
- Those in it for the money get out of it
- Those in it for the love stay in it
- The world will find balance, because
- Either everyone is fine with the new situation
- Or there becomes a renewed demand for engineers/musicians.
Now, the days of middle men and a lifetime of royalties, selling one piece of software a million times, may be be coming to an end. There will however always be people paying for an engineer to solve their problems, or a musician to perform at their venue.
But even this is exaggerated, since we're far from there yet. Do you think the average Joe would not prefer to spend a dollar and instantly watch the new episode of House at 1080p on his big screen TV ? Or pay 4,95 for iPhoto on his iPad ?
The BS is that the content is not available, we still have prehistoric models of region-based releases and 'this item is not available in your country' BS, and deal with stupid DRM schemes that only hurt the paying customers (so why become one?)
Apple has already shown there is a market for software and media content, the fact that it is easier to torrent something than pay a reasonable amount for it is what the problem is.
Sensi fucks Kerry Louise in the Jacuzzi.mp4 (280.26 MB) Nov, 2011
Ahahaha, looks like someone wasn't quite working that day.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Don't forget that the mythos around Robin Hood was stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
When you cause your storage hardware to take on a unique information pattern that I brought into being, and you have copied this pattern against my will and consent, you now have an actual physical instance of my pattern, one that can do real work and/or really entertain you, that I am 100% justified in erasing from your storage hardware -- by force. After all, by your own reasoning, you don't own the pattern, so you have no right to retain or maintain it, and consequently you have no right to protect the physical instantiation you have caused to come into being.
If you don't like the terms I offer in exchange for providing that pattern to you, then you can legitimately refuse the terms and the pattern. If you take the pattern anyway, you have now qualified for a visit from the police, who operate -- quite correctly -- under the guidance of the constitution, which specifically provides for legislative mechanisms to protect those who generate new value for society in the form of art or invention.
Society will always benefit from invention; society will always be harmed by discouraging inventors. This means that your simplistic so-called philosophy that "information patterns cannot be owned" will always be at odds with society. Legally speaking, the behavior you champion here should result in fine, and/or imprisonment when detected -- and that is just how things should be.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Is he a monkey and does he eat cheese?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My IP address is copyrighted. Prepare to be hit with thousands of DMCA notices, my friend.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
As a software engineer and a musician, I disagree with your assessment that "no one is hurt by your consumption". It's the tragedy of the commons. If just you download my software, or download my song for free, Your right, I'm not really hurt. But the problem comes when that behavior becomes widespread. Software is hard work, and so is music. I need someway to be paid for those efforts. With software in particular, There isn't always one person that is willing to pay 500,000 dollars for a piece of software without that kind of return. Something like Photoshop: no one person wants to fund that, and just let everyone else copy it. But it still a useful piece of software that is worth something to a lot of people. So how else do you do it? You make it so everyone that wants it pays a piece of it. And when you download it for free, that 1) is not fair to the people that do pay, and 2) is not fair to the people who developed that software. You're saying that their hard work is worth nothing to you, but you still want the work. The "It's not stealing" argument is BS. You can argue it all you want, and it is actually an easy point to argue, but that doesn't mean you're not just trying to explain away why people like me should give you our work for free.
I'm a software engineer and musician too. Nice try.
As a musician I know most money isn't made from digital sales. In fact every musician knows this. And software patents don't actually make it easier for software developers.
And also the problem is that Photoshop costs so much that everyone I know has to take out a loan to buy it. If we simply don't have the money to buy every single song we listen to then it's not our fault it's your fault and the markets fault.
I'm all for spreading the wealth but when the wealth doesn't exist what is there to spread?
He called it "BS."
Surely his opponents have all changed their minds now? They know in their hearts that they're 100% wrong.
If someone else called "stealing" "murder," I would try to correct them on that, too. If you don't like that, then stop using words that I feel are incorrect.
Except, of course, it isn't, the implications are completely different, and even the law thinks they're completely separate issues. Just like with copyright infringement. The only difference is that people take "rape" already seriously as is, so it doesn't have to try to _co-opt_ the term for another, separate crime. 'cause that's what the whole business with conflating copyright infringement with theft is _all about_. Nobody gives a shit about copyright infringement, so they try to leech off the badwill for the word "theft". Hell, maybe they should just say that copyright infringement is raping the artist. It's just as true, and there's even more badwill to be gathered.
Only reason they don't is that it'd take an even bigger moron to buy it.
So fuck this douche with his support for the copyright newspeak.
Well, what would happen is this (applies to both music and software):
- Those in it for the money get out of it
- Those in it for the love stay in it
- The world will find balance, because
- Either everyone is fine with the new situation
- Or there becomes a renewed demand for engineers/musicians.
Now, the days of middle men and a lifetime of royalties, selling one piece of software a million times, may be be coming to an end. There will however always be people paying for an engineer to solve their problems, or a musician to perform at their venue.
But even this is exaggerated, since we're far from there yet. Do you think the average Joe would not prefer to spend a dollar and instantly watch the new episode of House at 1080p on his big screen TV ? Or pay 4,95 for iPhoto on his iPad ?
The BS is that the content is not available, we still have prehistoric models of region-based releases and 'this item is not available in your country' BS, and deal with stupid DRM schemes that only hurt the paying customers (so why become one?)
Apple has already shown there is a market for software and media content, the fact that it is easier to torrent something than pay a reasonable amount for it is what the problem is.
Digital sales and licensing structures can change. People can be paid. We might even get paid more when all is said and done, it depends on how we structure it.
But the way the record industry is currently set up, even most big time stars aren't getting paid.
Well, the key is that if you spend all your time debating whether or not copyright infringement is theft, you never actually have to discuss whether copyright infringement is wrong.
Why can't you do both?
Aside from when you're arguing with people who say things like, "Copyright infringement is theft. Theft is bad. Therefore, copyright infringement is bad." of course.
File sharing is not inherently illegal in its own right. It has both legal and illegal applications. How does this site distinguish between copyrighted and non-copyrighted materials, if at all?
The site is littered with phrases along the lines of "You used bitTorrent, therefore you are bad" -- presupposing that BitTorrent use is always illegal.
Since the web site's rhetoric presupposes that all BitTorrent use is illegal, I find it hard to immagine that its data gathering is any more selective. Anybody know?
Except it's really not a problem, because there IS a common definition.
Fact: copyright is entirely a legal construct
Fact: the legal term for illegally copying something that is copyrighted is "infringement". It is not and never has been "theft".
If you're going to accept the legal construct of copyright, you must also accept how that law defines it.
There is no argument. There is only what is correct, and what is not.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
If Photoshop seems overpriced to you, there's a very good chance that you could do whatever you're trying to get done in The GIMP or Paint.net.
For those who actually do need it, Photoshop more than pays for itself.
artificial scarcity is the biggest problem, i think. they want to argue it has the same rights as a physical good (copyright is theft), but they don't want to apply the basic economics to its near infinite quantity (which should drive prices into the ground) that would apply to a physical good.
I'll call you on your elitist BS. This used to be probably true, back during the days when only a few monks or scribes could write. But when we have the scourge known as Facebook, not to mention YouTube and Twitter, every damn Net-connected person is a producer of IP. Oh, yeah, you'd probably say it's mediocre IP, but so is much of the rubbish that comes from Hollywood and the RIAA. So, are you suggesting that we pay only for those works that have been certified as worthy of some dubious award (Nobel, Oscar, etc)?
The difference between my YouTube video and that of Lady Gaga is the massive promotion behind hers.
We came up with the idea of building a crawler like this and keeping the maintenance price under $300 a month.
The FSF believes that use of software per se does not require a license, anymore than a license is needed to read a newspaper. They believe that it is perfectly legal to use software without agreeing to any sort of EULA, contrary to what proprietary software makers would lead you to believe.
The paragraph in the GPL above simply makes it explicit that anyone can run an unmodified GPL program for any reason. It doesn't mean that the authors of the license believe that use wouldn't be allowed if that paragraph weren't there.
Just for the heck of it, I tried searching for downloads of known 100% legal content -- Linux distributions, kernels etc.
Sure enough, there are people (well ok, IP addresses actually) accused of being thieves because they downloaded perfectly legal materials. Nowhere on Ter's web site did I see a single mention of the distinction between merely using file sharing (which is legal) and using it to violate copyright laws (which is not).
This distinction is apparently unknown to Suren Ter, or more likely deliberately ignored. His rhetoric clearly states that if you ever use file sharing, under any circumstances, you are a thief!
What a bozo!
That's the beauty of jokes -- you can make them out of anything.
Or claim anything is a joke when it isn't.
We also need to find a way to share the rewarding for the initial creation of an idea amongst the people who find the idea useful fairly.
No we don't, because obviously no idea is useful to everyone ... fairly. There are always those who need it more badly then others. Whoever needs it urgently and relies on it being done, supports it. If none needs it that bad to step up and suck up the fact that there'll be others who freeload, then it is not done, as it shouldn't be. Effort is spent on things whose importance is above whining threshold.
and give some regard for the fact that it's people like me these laws are designed to support.
Uh, sir, I've got a Michael Eisner on line three who would like to talk to you about that...
(i.e., it's people like you that these laws should be designed to support, but it's people like Eisner that these laws are designed to support -- designed by the best lobbyists money can buy.)
Bananas are not seedless. Slice a banana down the length in the center, and you'll see the seeds. They're very small.
Those aren't real seeds, though -- they're where the seeds would be, if the banana had any seeds. No modern cultivated food-grade banana has real, viable seeds, precisely because they're so big and hard that you really wouldn't want to try eating a banana that did. See this image for an example of a wild variety with real seeds.
Have a look at the book Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World for more fruity fun.
Most highly rated comments are repeating the tired old mantra of "zOMG piracy isnt thef!!" Wouldn't it be great to see more comments that actually address the other issues with piracy?
Sure there are real differences between theft and piracy. There's also real differences in the marriage of two different genders and the same gender, but spending all your time focusing on that is pretty pedantic when the bigger issues are sitting next to the elephant in the room.