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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
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!
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/
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"
Nobody "took" anything. The content was bought and then shared.
Dilbert RSS feed
"Should you be allowed to" is virtually never a valid question. We should be allowed to do everything except what we AREN'T allowed to do. Most reasonable rationales for why something should not be allowed are based off of harm caused or intended to be caused. If I stab you, that harms your body, so that is something we should not permit. There is no such harm with copying, so it shouldn't inherently be stopped like actual theft should.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You jumped ahead of the question. You are already defining bought, shared, ownership, content and implicitly effort. The point is the base definitions do not work any more, the technology and methods of distribution have moved beyond the scope of our general legal understanding. Copyright has been used to try and combat that, but it is flawed in many ways. Start from the beginning, define everything with your logic and see what you get.
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable. What do you propose those industries do then? I'm not saying it's gonna happen tomorrow, but outline to me how "sharing" would not eventually kill these intangibles based industries we all love so much?
Sharing and buying are not incompatible:
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable.
You're falling for the mental trap they've set up. That situation simply won't happen. People who share also pay: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music
Hell, they buy it even before it's made: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure/
The "copyright or bankruptcy" dichotomy is simply false. Maybe there will be less money to go around, but that's all.
You know who will really suffer? People who sell shit and don't take refunds, because pirates try before they pay. But should we really give a crap about them?
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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."
"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
-- Howard Scott
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Li'l whitey get accused of downloading shitty crap
Says he neva listen to no muthafuckin' rap
Buys his CDs like a good li'l homey
Realized what evil suits doin' with his precious money
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It breaks the notion of the market as a level playing field. All investors should have access to the same information. Therefore, all investors except those with the inside information, are disadvantaged and thus opened to potential financial harm.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
People that want it. I want a some songs to party to. I call up DJ Bob and say, "Hey man, I'm having a party. Here's $N1. Can you provide me with N2 hours of entertainment for that?"
Kickstarter is another method. A developer says, "I'd like to make this game. Do you want it?" "Yeah, I want it. Here's what I'll pay." If it's funded, it happens. They cover the costs of development. Any lost sales to sharing don't matter. They got paid what it cost to make the product. Maybe a little more.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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?
> 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.
Why should I give a damn thing about the industries? Do the industries care about me? Do they care about the workers they fire when they move manufacturing to overseas sweatshops? Do they care about how they make their own country poorer when they move their capitals into tax havens? Did we care when cars destroyed the economy of the horse? A failed business model must be failed for a reason, and therefore it's best to let it die.
If people love the industry so much, then those who do can pay for it by themselves. It's absurd that the Government must pass laws, spend money to uphold them, and limit the freedom of all its citizens, to create an imaginary property for those industries to sell.
All property, tangible or not, exists only because the Government defines and protects it. Tangible property needs to be protected because it can't be duplicated. Intellectual property hasn't that problem.
Except there is harm done to one or more party. The buyer(s) that ends up buying the stock ends up paying a higher price than they would have if they had known the same information as the seller. We can pretty accurately nail down a specific victim(s) and a specific amount of harm inflicted.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
You can engage in copyright infringement as an act of civil disobedience because you disagree with the specifics of copyright law while still believing copyright infringement is wrong.
Exactly. "We all know that it’s BS too." Fuck that guy.
What's the difference between me downloading a movie or going over to a friend's house to watch his copy? Either way, I wasn't going to pay $14.95 for it. I've never bought a movie. And the few times I go to the movie theater it's the dollar theater, or $1.20 redbox. If I could watch any VCD quality movie I wanted for $1, I would pay it, because that's what it's worth to me. And I do, when possible. I pay for netflix.
Point is, watching a movie is not a crime. Neither lending a book, nor humming a tune. Civil disobedience I say! You can pry my eyes and ears from my cold dead hands.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
The value of a good idea is directly related to how widely it is used.
This system prevents the value of an idea from being maximized. The food, shelter, power and material goods that the creator of intellectual works receives is not created by restricting it's dissemination. Those materials exist, regardless of how far the idea spreads. The purpose of the system is to determine who gets support and who does not. Anyone with a brain could think of a half a dozen different ways to make that determination without requiring the good idea to be restricted in its use.
This system is STUPID. It is WASTEFUL. It DESTROYS VALUE. And, with the onward march of technology, the percentage of the population with idle time to create goes up, and the amount of idle time goes up. So, the rarity of the producers of IP continuously decreases, and that rarity would decrease even faster if good ideas were spread wider and faster.
This system is indefensible. Period. It has to go.
I'm a creator of intellectual works. My creations have dramatically improved the quality of life for all mankind. And I've sat in many round table discussions where I was forced to come up with ways to artificially destroy the value of my own creations. It makes me FUCKING ANGRY that I'm forced to do that for such stupid and unnecessary reasons.
So, take your BS about protecting the rights of creators and SHOVE IT UP YOUR FUCKING ASS. Find a way to determine that I deserve to be fed and clothed and sheltered and I'll weave magic that makes everyones life better till the day I die. Because THAT'S JUST WHAT I DO.
Fucking scumbag.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
but sharing with unlimited strangers is simply wrong
Wrong how? Wrong according to who?
and y'all know it is.
Oh, I see. The "you know in your heart that you're wrong" argument that religious types seem to love to use.
You know in your heart that you're wrong, celtic_hackr.
Then pay them, as you would pay a farmer to grow crops, which too have value.
Don't you think you're being a bit elitist by assuming that intelligence isn't equally distributed among mankind? Intellectual jobs are jobs like all the others. Remember that we're not talking about designing a nuclear power plant here, we're talking about IP in general. My grandfather didn't finish elementary school, and was a carpenter. In his spare time, he made paintings and acted in the local theatre.
That's why I never said that IP producers shouldn't be paid by those who need their services. At the same time, if those services are already available at no cost, then their customers should be able to get them for free, and pay IP producers to solve other problems instead. That's how mankind progresses. If governments want to contribute to the scientific or artistic development, then they can fund public education, research and entertainment.
Well, I am a part of society, I'm all for paying IP producers for their work, but not for them living on the profits of their past work without producing new one. Therefore, I see sharing of already existing IP not only as a non-criminal behaviour, but as a positive one, to be encouraged in the interest of the progress of mankind. Instead, I see defrauding people of the right to use their intellect to solve their problems, for the sole reason that someone else had reserved the rights for that procedure, as unethical behaviour, even unhuman in certain cases.
That's a desire IP producers share with bricklayers, gardeners, doctors. The latter manage to get a living without governmental protection, perhaps IP producers could do the same. By defending the status quo as "the best possible world", we'd be still living in the ancien régime.
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.
Intellectual property has value
Actually, much IP is worth nothing or less than nothing. For instance this post is IP, are you going to pay me for writing it?
Therefore, we want people to produce it
Not really. We want people to produce quality scientific advancements and entertainment. Most IP is neither and much only becomes valuable when a government granted monopoly restricts other people from using similar material or methods.
Compared to the population at large, producers of IP are rare
Nope. Pretty much anyone who can write, talk, or operate a camera is an IP producer.
Also, IP can be expensive and/or time-consuming to produce
Some IP can be expensive, most is created automatically via copyright and costs nothing. Creating the work the IP is derived from may be expensive or time-consuming but the work is not the IP.
If the producers are not repaid in a manner that sufficiently encourages them they will be less inclined to produce
And if the producers are paid too much they will also be less inclined to produce. Why continue working when your one hit can guarantee that your great-grandchildren never have to?
So we should make sure that said production is rewarded, not shared without recompense
Says who? Most media companies will give away free copies to garner interest in their product. It seems like they know the value of sharing when they want to.
Hence, society rightfully sees "sharing" as criminal behavior
Actually, society does not see "sharing" as criminal behaviour. Certain people with a commercial interest in preventing sharing have been running a propaganda campaign to convince the easily swayed that it is so. Most of the people who believe sharing should be criminal belong in one of two categories: fools or profiteers.
Information may want to be free, but IP producers want to pay the mortgage.
"I did it to pay my mortgage" is likely to be the 21st century's "I was only following orders". It's not a justification for sending people to prison for the crime of "sharing". The current copyright regime is unsustainable.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Hence, society rightfully sees "sharing" as criminal behavior
Law sees "sharing" as criminal behavior. Society is much more divided: 34% are opposed to any kind of punishment, and even in the 52% who think punishment is due, 75% only support relatively small fines (less than $100) and most don't support disconnections or throttling.
And that's now: in younger people (18-29), 70% have committed copyright infringement, so we'll see in a few years how large is that support.
http://piracy.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/AA-Research-Note-Infringement-and-Enforcement-November-2011.pdf
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
fine, but they must add these little stipends:
1. reasonable copyright limits. no one should be able to milk a work for their entire life. 10-15 years, maximum.
2. to be protected, the product must be available for purchase. fuck that out of print (or worse, back in the vault) bullshit in this digital age.
3. get rid of all regions. this is the internet age and old school barriers have no place in it. play globally or gtfo.
4. make the purchased media easier to use than the pirated goods. this includes format shifting. digital is digital, double and triple dipping can diaf.
5. make the recording and archiving of television as easy as vcrs were. i can timeshift into the next decade if i so choose.
6. cutting out the middle men (pressing, packaging, shipping, retail logistics) should cut the prices of digital distribution in at least half, if not more.
once these are met, the playing field becomes more even. they don't get to have their cake and eat it too. i buy plenty, but i also download every tv show i watch, as i come from a generation that is used to being able to record and keep anything i am subscribed to. just because they found a new revenue stream (tv on dvd) and put up many roadblocks to record the stuff (disabling firewire on dvrs and such), doesn't mean i'm going to stop hoarding my media. broadcast quality, lack of generational degradation, and ease of reproduction have no place in this discussion, btw.
...
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.
Among other things, my code co-ordinates distributed translations teams that make medicine and medical equipment accessible to the world. The largest drug company on earth uses them exclusively. I wrote the code that handles every step of the process, and integrated everything into their internal infrastructure, and when it needs maintenance, they call me. So, chances are pretty fucking good that someone you know enjoys good health because of work I did sitting in my living room.
What you owe me is to show some respect for the gift I've given you and give some regard for the fact that it's people like me these laws are designed to support.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Not just law. Also, the constitution. Also, the senate. Also, the house. Also, the executive. Also, the judiciary.
All of each represent a very small part of the society.
Also, pretty much anyone who is well educated, formally or otherwise.
Oh, I couldn't find data that showed the acceptance of copyright by level of education, is it online?
Also, pretty much anyone who has created significant IP.
Well, that's called "biased people". I'm sure horse breeders disliked the car as well.
Yes, we will. And if they manage to defeat the ideas of copyright and patent without a suitable replacement, we'll see how many great new movies and songs they get to enjoy as well. Because the relationship there is very solid.
But is it really? It's kinda hard to believe when e.g. film piracy has been rising and at the same time the MPAA was having record profits, year after year, when studies like this appear or when people pay millions for a product that doesn't even exist yet.
I don't doubt that getting money is sine qua non for the development of new content, but I find the claims that copyright is necessary for that money to flow to be far from proven.
Dilbert RSS feed
Well, perhaps that is so. In which case, legislation will have to change. You can write congress (pretty much useless) or lobby them (better, odds of success are strictly a matter of how much funding you can apply, and how widely) for change, or, you can engage in civil disobedience -- lawbreaking on principle -- at which point you need to be prepared for fines, or jail, or both, while not being assured in any way of success.
You're not quite there yet. If I want to share data with someone over the internet (say, a friend, family, etc..) I can. I just send an email, a SMS, I set up an FTP server at home, etc.
From there, using encryption to hide myself is trivial. And then, nobody will ever be able to say what I sent to my friend.
So: In the internet days, sharing data is secure and easy. The IP you're talking about is also just a bunch of bits. Therefore, I can "pirate" with my friends all I want.
That's one to one sharing. The process can be declined in n to n sharing very easily.
Conclusion: No amount of legislation or technology is ever going to change piracy. Actually, it's not quite true, but the only change will be that more and more pirates will press the 'encrypt' button. At that point, noone will be able to see what amount of the data that transit over the internet is piracy anymore.
That will suit Hollywood which will be able to claim that 1234 petabytes of pirated media are being shared every day (a guesstimate) representing 1254785214587 quadrillion dollars of lost revenue hence levying for more taxes to be redistributed to Hollywood.
But the bottom line is: Piracy is here to stay.
Now, is it the end of content creation? No. Because most people that pirate are not looking for something cheaper than the legal alternatives, they are looking for something simpler. So there is still a way out of this that will be a win-win.
They will get it, don't worry. It'll take the time that it'll take, but they'll get it. The question is: How much damage will they have done to society with their crappy laws in the meantime.
Write boring code, not shiny code!