> don't connect to the playstation network and you won't get the firmware upgrades. Or play any new games.
> they patch a flaw for security reasons and they tell you this if you connect to psn. Yeah, the security of their ability to control your device.
> keep a standalone ps3 and you can mod to your hearts content. this is why i owned 2 xbox 360s You shouldn't have to buy two consoles just to exercise your consumer rights.
What the technology is designed for is irrelevant in the face of what it does and what it's used for. And there are substantial legitimate reasons to jailbreak your PS3 that aren't piracy, including game backups and homebrew. To say that it is somehow wrong for someone to crack their PS3 purely because they might use it to pirate is silly.
> First of all, this is just used for pirating purposes. In fact that's the only thing the hack allows, so drop the homebrew bullshit.
My [CD/DVD ripper, portable music player, old console emulation software, BitTorrent client, external hard drive] is just used for pirating purposes. In fact that's the only thing the device allows.
Clearly we should ban all those things because they enable piracy.
> There has been no evidence presented, he's not been put on any trial. While it is possible he is the victim of a campaign, it is equally possible he is actually guilty of something.
While that's true, don't forget about presumption of innocence. Without evidence to the contrary, the status quo is that Assange is innocent.
Righthaven did not create the article in question. They bought the rights from the creators solely so they could sue the infringer and profit from her. That sounds like copyright trolling to me.
Yet another poster asserting that everything that has happened in the War on Piracy is the fault of p2p users, and by implication, that the big media corporations and various governments are blameless. They don't exactly have a gun held to their heads in the matter- all the crap they pull is their choice, and therefore their fault.
I do not believe the Brazilian proposal seeks to legalize commercial copyright infringement, so the for-profit piracy is still illegal. On the other hand, if it's legal to distribute works for free, then the market for the illegitimate, commercial copies should immediately dry up. Why are there so few file-sharers in Brazil?
Additionally, having your work downloaded for free is not necessarily a bad thing. It could spread word-of-mouth of your work and draw more attention to you, something that smaller/indie artists need the most. In fact, in today's political climate, artists who actively support p2p are often rewarded for it, whereas artists who publicly condone file sharing are criticized.
If it weren't for copyright, record labels wouldn't bother investing in a very few marketable musicians while shoving anyone else out of the market. Those very few marketable [m]usicians wouldn't be famous due to heavy advertising, and no one would come to their concerts. In this case, copyright benefits the people who allow artists to perform, organises stage hire, ticket sales, promotion, legal issues etc (basically, the record labels).
If it weren't for copyright, book publishers would have no way to recouperate their losses from the writer's payment without having to actually adjust to modern times and change their business models, as opposed to forcing everyone else to adapt to their wants.
Fixed that for you.
If I steal your bicycle, I've taken something that isn't mine without permission, and it's disadvantaged you in some way. If I copy your song, I've taken something that isn't mine without permission, and it's disadvantaged the general public in some way. If I copy your money, I've taken something that isn't mine without permission, and it's disadvantaged the general public in some way...
Surely you're capable of understanding that the harm from actual theft is degrees of magnitude higher than the harm from copyright infringement. Additionally, nothing has been taken, only copied. Lrn2distinguish.
Yeah, cheap/free technology to record artistic works, reproduce them, and distribute them to millions of people via the internet didn't kill artists in the 16th century, therefore it must have no affect on artists today!
Do you mean to assert that Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, J.S. Bach, Li Bo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other famous artists wouldn't have created their works if they had the Internet during their times? If you don't, the quoted section of your post is pointless and borders on trolling.
That's right, and they've also changed in the last ten or twenty years or so. You can no longer expect to be paid for every copy of your work that someone makes.
"We don't expect actors to use films just for advertising, and to perform their works live in a theatre."
That's correct, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with a discussion about music. Apples and oranges.
The distinction is both important and meaningless. File sharing itself is not illegal, but the term is usually applied to what the protocols are used for: copyright infringement. It's a much less loaded term than "piracy" when used in a formal sense.
Ladies and gentlemen, time to play Let's Count The Fallacies.
1. I do not believe that noncommercial copyright infringement should be illegal. However, if there is to be a fine, it should be proportional to the damages caused. Your sarcastic question of "the penalty for ripping things off should only ever be what you would have paid anyway?" is a false dilemma. It's also a strawman argument: Nobody said at any point that the punishment should just be the cost of the media. 2. You refer to illegal downloading being a "ripoff." As has already been pointed out to you in this thread, would a given download translate to a lost sale (and therefore an actual ripoff)? No. Does a given download cause financial harm? Not necessarily. Does it therefore make sense to characterize a given download as a lost sale to the copyright holder? Nope. 3. If most people pay for their goods and their entertainment, as you claim, then why is there a problem with regards to file sharing? If most people pay for their goods and entertainment then there's no possibility that those comparative few who use p2p without paying (as some people who download are huge customers) are going to sink the industries or even cause substantial financial harm. If most people pay for their goods and entertainment, then it would seem that those who target file sharers only do so as an extreme money and power grab. Do you wish to defend such people? Do you believe that an industry can repeatedly sue its customers and survive? 4. You state that large fines are okay because they're meant to be punitive. Would you therefore agree that fines for copyright infringement should not be statutory? This would seem to contradict your assertion that large fines for copyright infringement are acceptable. 4. It's ironic that you call the parent a troll when you refer to file sharers as leeches and thieves.
Yes. Let's feel bad for poor Sony, the little company who's being bullied by those evil pirates into simply trying to protect their property. Obviously they have no choice of how to respond to hobbyist tinkering except to continue to push anti-consumer restrictions after the fact. Let's point the blame at those who see Sony boasting about their unbreakable system and think "O rly?", then work on hacking it. They're all just pirates anyway, pirates holding a gun to Sony's head.
And it wasn't just "a particular CD"; it was a nice list of titles; 102 different albums in total according to Wikipedia. Millions of CDs. MediaMax alone went out on 20 million discs.
Your point that other IT concerns outweigh the problems with Sony's rootkit is valid, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. And the way you dismissed the seriousness of the rootkit makes you look like a fool or someone with an agenda.
Subsidise copyright infringement cases. Make it a criminal affair, forbid, or at least discourage, civil suits. That should take care of overzealous and sloppy RIAA enforcement of their copyrights, as well as help indie artists get equal protection for their copyrights.
Absolutely not. Firstly, I will not have my taxes, nor anyone else's, going to support the old business model of a media corporation who thinks that suing its customers is the way to go. Second, criminalization of copyright infringement further exacerbates the problem that the punishment for infringement does not fit the crime. People going to jail for copying files is simply unjust. Finally, it puts a massive burden on law enforcement to deal with all of, or even a substantial amount of, the infringement that goes on. The only good things about this are that defendants would be entitled to legal counsel and the burden of proof would be higher, but that doesn't excuse the fact that corporations would be able to make the feds- and by extension, us- do their enforcement for them. Since I do not buy the RIAA's music, I do not pay for their court cases, and in no way is that going to change.
Monitor P2P networks; keep publicly searchable logs of the files traversing them. All these networks are public, and can be monitored by anyone, so there is no privacy risk. That takes care of public P2P networks.
Not only does this already happen, but it's not enough. For one, there's an awful lot of traffic out there to monitor, across every single network of every single protocol. Second, an IP address is not proof of identity. A given person may own the network from which the IP originated, but that in no way means they did the downloading. Third, and relevant to the second point, some of these networks, like BitTorrent, will throw out false IPs to misdirect people who maliciously scan the network. Sorting through those would take time and hinder any wide-scale investigations.
If two people wish to share something over a private network, there isn't a whole lot a person can do to detect or prevent such a transaction, but at the same time, there isn't a whole lot of copies that can be made over a private network, so we basically let it slide (unless, of course, they are stupid enough to share privately with the copyright holder or a policeman).
Assuming that the definition of private network in this context is a direct connection that is not publicly viewable, there are plenty of ways to use p2p through private networks. We have email, instant messaging, DCC on IRC, http downloads, and of course darknets. Aggression against p2p causes it to move further and further underground, becoming more and more difficult to trace, monitor and stop.
University and college networks are a hotbed for piracy. Again, provide incentives for efforts to filter such activity. Again, university and college networks are not private networks, and so there is no privacy issue there.
If the university or college were a public school, monitoring of the internal network for copyright infringement would likely violate the Fourth Amendment. Having all your traffic watched by a government agency in order to look for copyright infringement is an unreasonable search and constitutes wiretapping, just like if they were to open your snail mail or listen in on your telephone calls. And even then, how do you stop people from obtaining files on another network, then physically distributing them via a sneakernet? Are you going to install mandatory software on everyone's computers that somehow watches for unauthorized copies? That would certainly be unreasonable, to say the least.
Privately owned universities can get away with monitoring their networks, but as I said, that doesn't stop the problem. Network monitoring places further burdens on the school, and the costs for it will be passed down to the students- meaning the students
We can't stop computers from copying bits, but only the narrow-minded would suggest that this is the only method to enforce copyright on the internet. There's DRM, which uses cryptography to make it computationally infeasible to make use of the copied bits. It's distasteful, but it's not like pirates have left us with much of a choice.
DRM doesn't stop piracy. Every DRM scheme that has been released (with the exception of a few schemes like the PS3, which has hardware support for the DRM and is therefore irrelevant) has been cracked. Ubisoft's new always-on DRM was partly cracked 24 hours after its release, with a full crack out within a month. DRM is fundamentally unsound: You're trying to give the customer the keys to the media while simultaneously hiding the keys from them. It just can't work. All it does is piss off legitimate customers when they find that their movies won't play, or their games refuse to start, or their software cripples itself. So it's not only ineffective, but anti-consumer. There's no good business reason to use it.
We can also detect copying and identify copied works, especially when done on public networks.
You can, but the flaw is that this requires an Internet connection to an authentication server- a form of DRM because it means the customer can't enjoy their media offline. If there is no Internet connection involved- for example, with a music CD, which has no business connecting to anything online- you have no chance whatsoever of detecting copies. Installing software to the user's machine that looks for copies is not going to be a popular decision because such software is basically spyware and you couldn't force someone to install it in the first place.
I started doing exactly that [slashdot.org] not long ago.
I will have to respond there after this, because some of your points need addressing.
Mind you, we actually have a semi-decent method of enforcing now, i.e. allow copyright holders to sue any infringers they suspect, and let any victims of inappropriate investigation techniques countersue.
How is this a semi-decent method? One, the chance of getting caught on p2p is very very small, especially if you're at least a little careful about how you do it. When 90% or more of infringements go unpunished, that is not effective enforcement of copyright. Two, the lawsuits are incredibly unfair because of the high cost of defending yourself in court. As we've seen with the US Copyright Group, some rights holders have no problem with indiscriminately targeting people, guilty or innocent, and putting them through the substantial expense of showing up in court and defending themselves, even if they're completely innocent. Rights holders, on the other hand, often have powerful corporate legal teams behind them, with a budget that no single individual could hope to match.
It is not as though such a change would be the end of creativity, as the media companies like to claim.
You know, I haven't seen anyone genuinely support this strawman. Do you have a quote of anybody claiming this?
Below:
If it ends up that professional musicians cannot make decent money in such an environment, then, as much as I dislike saying this, they need to go out of business.
So what you're saying is, in order to maintain continuity with the rest of the free market, we should just do without art and entertainment?
^
What people do claim, myself included, that it is entirely plausible that our culture will regress all the way back to the times before copyright. That is, when the only works of any significance are results of commission and hoarded by rich people, and entertainment for the common man comes from a handful of wandering bar
As for the distinction between non-commercial and commercial piracy, this is a subject I have argued about here many times before. It simply comes down to the fact that commercial infringement and non-commercial infringement have no practical differences to the artist. Both cause the same reduction in demand for their product, and both incur an opportunity cost from a lost potential sale. In fact, it would be, if anything, preferable for the artist's work to be commercially pirated, since at least the artist can compete with a non-zero price point. If anything, non-commercial should be banned instead (but preferably both).
The core justification behind anti-piracy is that file sharing deprives artists of revenue. This has never been substantiated because it's extremely hard to prove such a claim, but it seems to be the assumption everyone has. Thusly, the idea that piracy causes substantial lost sales is not an idea I accept just because the entertainment industries say it does. Lost sales are the key: Of X downloads, how many of those (Y) would have translated into sales had the downloads not been available? If the price of a work is Z, is Y times Z enough lost revenue to justify anti-piracy provisions? Furthermore, what if X downloads had a beneficial effect on the market, such as increased market share for the work, that partially or completely cancels out Y*Z? Personally I tend to think that noncommercial piracy simply does not have a huge effect. No industries have crashed in the last decade since Napster's debut. Some are, in fact, doing better than ever.
If we removed the law (or weakened it enough so that people could share as much as they liked), then all that would stand between us and paying for nothing is our consciences.
Maybe this isn't such a bad thing. Most people believe in fair deals and are willing to pay for value received. I've had people unexpectedly hand me money after I performed for them some minor task for which they required my assistance, although I was fine with doing it for free. Realistically I don't think the situation then would be all that different from now, because I think most people know that you can find free music and such online, yet iTunes is huge, Amazon is a bit less huge, and as I said, no industries have tanked. Additionally, I believe we are discussing this in another thread, but if artists were able to find a new business model after such a change in law, it would provide further support for them.
Notice how flimsy the reason can be in order to justify turning to piracy. They are drunk on their own power, and their moral centre can easily be overwhelmed as soon as they find out that the companies are exercising their own powers in a way that they (the pirates) don't like.
For most people it's not about little things like how a release is taking too long (I've honestly never seen someone say they're going to pirate something because of this), but huge things that cause massive uproars among even casual fans. Things like... Ubisoft's always-on DRM, which requires you to stay online just to play a single-player offline game. Things like Blizzard's decision to force people to use their real names on the official forums, which they retracted after the public backlash. Things like Sony's music CD rootkit, or Spore's limited-activation DRM, or any of dozens of other examples. The point is that people get pissed off when entertainment companies employ blatantly anti-consumer practices, and this leads people to pirate the media out of principle. In those cases, the piracy itself is not damaging, since there likely wouldn't have been a sale anyway.
Just boycott, and encourage others to do the same. It does all the damage of piracy, but legal, morally sound, and much safer.
Boycotting is the free-market response to customer-hostile media companies, and theoretically it would be the way to keep s
Ah, I don't think the programmers behind these applications meant for their little signature to knock down GRUB. That sounds like an unintended action to me.
At least some occurrences of this are with software which writes a signature to the embedding area which hangs around even after uninstallation (even with one of those tools that tracks everything the installation process did and reverses it, I gather), so that you cannot uninstall and reinstall the application to defeat a trial period.
So once again DRM is fucking with peoples' abilities to use their computers. Except this particular bit of DRM doesn't just screw with Windows; it could potentially screw with every OS on your drive (or screw with your ability to access them, at any rate).
Yeah, it's not conventional DRM, but it's a form of DRM in that it restricts the user in some arbitrary way (and, I ought to add, breaks something else in the process... that too should be part of the definition of DRM).
As for the movies situation, that's kind of a black-eye for your position. You're still relying on movies that, even if they shouldn't be under copyright at this stage, were at one point under copyright. That means that you're still relying on the fruits of copyright to support your entertainment, which means that suggesting the abolishment of copyright would almost certainly harm you (and people like you, doing the same thing) in the long term as well (although not as much as the rest of us).
Ah... I don't recall arguing for the complete abolishment of copyright. I most certainly will argue for a drastic reduction in its length, and would also argue that noncommercial infringement should not be punished as harshly as it is (or at all), but I understand that in a commercial sense copyright has its advantages. Our implementation of it is just really really fucked up.
Well, I can't possibly if they stop selling recordings, and they can't possibly continue to sell recordings if nobody is buying them (this is a very real concern, and you need to prove that this wouldn't happen in order for us to change to your new system)
What makes you think this would happen in the first place? Piracy is rampant today, it has been for a decade, and yet the entertainment industries are doing just fine. The success of iTunes in the face of Kazaa and BitTorrent and such demonstrates that people are willing to pay for their media to support creators they like. Reports that people who download also buy more do this as well. The billion-dollar losses the media giants purport that piracy causes are simply false. There is no basis for the idea that if it were legal to download music for free, nobody would buy music.
I have to ask, if you're already reaping the benefits of a free culture, why are you pursuing this? What benefits could you possibly receive under a different system? I mean, you wouldn't have the faint legal threat when you download your old movies, but if the influx of new movies (all but) stops, then surely that would be a bad trade-off, right?
I follow this subject because it sickens me each time I see another news article about a copyright-related abuse from a big corporation, or from anyone else. I want copyright reform so the abuse will stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though they outsourced the software, they were still responsible for it. They even denied at first that they'd done anything wrong.
> don't connect to the playstation network and you won't get the firmware upgrades.
Or play any new games.
> they patch a flaw for security reasons and they tell you this if you connect to psn.
Yeah, the security of their ability to control your device.
> keep a standalone ps3 and you can mod to your hearts content. this is why i owned 2 xbox 360s
You shouldn't have to buy two consoles just to exercise your consumer rights.
What the technology is designed for is irrelevant in the face of what it does and what it's used for. And there are substantial legitimate reasons to jailbreak your PS3 that aren't piracy, including game backups and homebrew. To say that it is somehow wrong for someone to crack their PS3 purely because they might use it to pirate is silly.
> If they don't get off their ass and release it I'm going to have to go buy a Sony 3D Blu-Ray player...
Ah, that isn't exactly incentive for them to update PS3s to support Blu-Ray. It is, in fact, the exact opposite.
> The "OtherOS" was never more than a very small part of the PS3 story - and it is the Move controller that is making headlines now.
Which has what to do with his point?
> A firmware update will render every single one those hack versions useless.
Then why hasn't Sony released one yet? If it's so trivial to patch the flaw you'd think they would have done so by now.
> First of all, this is just used for pirating purposes. In fact that's the only thing the hack allows, so drop the homebrew bullshit.
My [CD/DVD ripper, portable music player, old console emulation software, BitTorrent client, external hard drive] is just used for pirating purposes. In fact that's the only thing the device allows.
Clearly we should ban all those things because they enable piracy.
> There has been no evidence presented, he's not been put on any trial. While it is possible he is the victim of a campaign, it is equally possible he is actually guilty of something.
While that's true, don't forget about presumption of innocence. Without evidence to the contrary, the status quo is that Assange is innocent.
Righthaven did not create the article in question. They bought the rights from the creators solely so they could sue the infringer and profit from her. That sounds like copyright trolling to me.
Yet another poster asserting that everything that has happened in the War on Piracy is the fault of p2p users, and by implication, that the big media corporations and various governments are blameless. They don't exactly have a gun held to their heads in the matter- all the crap they pull is their choice, and therefore their fault.
I do not believe the Brazilian proposal seeks to legalize commercial copyright infringement, so the for-profit piracy is still illegal. On the other hand, if it's legal to distribute works for free, then the market for the illegitimate, commercial copies should immediately dry up. Why are there so few file-sharers in Brazil?
Additionally, having your work downloaded for free is not necessarily a bad thing. It could spread word-of-mouth of your work and draw more attention to you, something that smaller/indie artists need the most. In fact, in today's political climate, artists who actively support p2p are often rewarded for it, whereas artists who publicly condone file sharing are criticized.
If it weren't for copyright, record labels wouldn't bother investing in a very few marketable musicians while shoving anyone else out of the market. Those very few marketable [m]usicians wouldn't be famous due to heavy advertising, and no one would come to their concerts. In this case, copyright benefits the people who allow artists to perform, organises stage hire, ticket sales, promotion, legal issues etc (basically, the record labels).
If it weren't for copyright, book publishers would have no way to recouperate their losses from the writer's payment without having to actually adjust to modern times and change their business models, as opposed to forcing everyone else to adapt to their wants.
Fixed that for you.
If I steal your bicycle, I've taken something that isn't mine without permission, and it's disadvantaged you in some way. If I copy your song, I've taken something that isn't mine without permission, and it's disadvantaged the general public in some way. If I copy your money, I've taken something that isn't mine without permission, and it's disadvantaged the general public in some way...
Surely you're capable of understanding that the harm from actual theft is degrees of magnitude higher than the harm from copyright infringement. Additionally, nothing has been taken, only copied. Lrn2distinguish.
Yeah, cheap/free technology to record artistic works, reproduce them, and distribute them to millions of people via the internet didn't kill artists in the 16th century, therefore it must have no affect on artists today!
Do you mean to assert that Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, J.S. Bach, Li Bo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other famous artists wouldn't have created their works if they had the Internet during their times? If you don't, the quoted section of your post is pointless and borders on trolling.
"Things have changed in the last 200 years."
That's right, and they've also changed in the last ten or twenty years or so. You can no longer expect to be paid for every copy of your work that someone makes.
"We don't expect actors to use films just for advertising, and to perform their works live in a theatre."
That's correct, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with a discussion about music. Apples and oranges.
Fine. I left out a "usually" in my post. As in, what the protocols are usually used for. Cut back on the flamebait a bit.
The distinction is both important and meaningless. File sharing itself is not illegal, but the term is usually applied to what the protocols are used for: copyright infringement. It's a much less loaded term than "piracy" when used in a formal sense.
Yeah. Hollywood's going to close down because people can freely share their movies in another country.
Ladies and gentlemen, time to play Let's Count The Fallacies.
1. I do not believe that noncommercial copyright infringement should be illegal. However, if there is to be a fine, it should be proportional to the damages caused. Your sarcastic question of "the penalty for ripping things off should only ever be what you would have paid anyway?" is a false dilemma. It's also a strawman argument: Nobody said at any point that the punishment should just be the cost of the media.
2. You refer to illegal downloading being a "ripoff." As has already been pointed out to you in this thread, would a given download translate to a lost sale (and therefore an actual ripoff)? No. Does a given download cause financial harm? Not necessarily. Does it therefore make sense to characterize a given download as a lost sale to the copyright holder? Nope.
3. If most people pay for their goods and their entertainment, as you claim, then why is there a problem with regards to file sharing? If most people pay for their goods and entertainment then there's no possibility that those comparative few who use p2p without paying (as some people who download are huge customers) are going to sink the industries or even cause substantial financial harm. If most people pay for their goods and entertainment, then it would seem that those who target file sharers only do so as an extreme money and power grab. Do you wish to defend such people? Do you believe that an industry can repeatedly sue its customers and survive?
4. You state that large fines are okay because they're meant to be punitive. Would you therefore agree that fines for copyright infringement should not be statutory? This would seem to contradict your assertion that large fines for copyright infringement are acceptable.
4. It's ironic that you call the parent a troll when you refer to file sharers as leeches and thieves.
Yes. Let's feel bad for poor Sony, the little company who's being bullied by those evil pirates into simply trying to protect their property. Obviously they have no choice of how to respond to hobbyist tinkering except to continue to push anti-consumer restrictions after the fact. Let's point the blame at those who see Sony boasting about their unbreakable system and think "O rly?", then work on hacking it. They're all just pirates anyway, pirates holding a gun to Sony's head.
How did you get modded up with a comment like "No one was affected by that silly rootkit?" Apparently enough people were affected that the Texas Attorney General sued, class action suits were filed in New York and California, and even even Italy, the EFF, and the FTC investigated Sony over the rootkit scandal. Dismissively saying that nobody was affected by it is just ignorance or trolling.
And it wasn't just "a particular CD"; it was a nice list of titles; 102 different albums in total according to Wikipedia. Millions of CDs. MediaMax alone went out on 20 million discs.
Your point that other IT concerns outweigh the problems with Sony's rootkit is valid, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. And the way you dismissed the seriousness of the rootkit makes you look like a fool or someone with an agenda.
Subsidise copyright infringement cases. Make it a criminal affair, forbid, or at least discourage, civil suits. That should take care of overzealous and sloppy RIAA enforcement of their copyrights, as well as help indie artists get equal protection for their copyrights.
Absolutely not. Firstly, I will not have my taxes, nor anyone else's, going to support the old business model of a media corporation who thinks that suing its customers is the way to go. Second, criminalization of copyright infringement further exacerbates the problem that the punishment for infringement does not fit the crime. People going to jail for copying files is simply unjust. Finally, it puts a massive burden on law enforcement to deal with all of, or even a substantial amount of, the infringement that goes on. The only good things about this are that defendants would be entitled to legal counsel and the burden of proof would be higher, but that doesn't excuse the fact that corporations would be able to make the feds- and by extension, us- do their enforcement for them. Since I do not buy the RIAA's music, I do not pay for their court cases, and in no way is that going to change.
Monitor P2P networks; keep publicly searchable logs of the files traversing them. All these networks are public, and can be monitored by anyone, so there is no privacy risk. That takes care of public P2P networks.
Not only does this already happen, but it's not enough. For one, there's an awful lot of traffic out there to monitor, across every single network of every single protocol. Second, an IP address is not proof of identity. A given person may own the network from which the IP originated, but that in no way means they did the downloading. Third, and relevant to the second point, some of these networks, like BitTorrent, will throw out false IPs to misdirect people who maliciously scan the network. Sorting through those would take time and hinder any wide-scale investigations.
If two people wish to share something over a private network, there isn't a whole lot a person can do to detect or prevent such a transaction, but at the same time, there isn't a whole lot of copies that can be made over a private network, so we basically let it slide (unless, of course, they are stupid enough to share privately with the copyright holder or a policeman).
Assuming that the definition of private network in this context is a direct connection that is not publicly viewable, there are plenty of ways to use p2p through private networks. We have email, instant messaging, DCC on IRC, http downloads, and of course darknets. Aggression against p2p causes it to move further and further underground, becoming more and more difficult to trace, monitor and stop.
University and college networks are a hotbed for piracy. Again, provide incentives for efforts to filter such activity. Again, university and college networks are not private networks, and so there is no privacy issue there.
If the university or college were a public school, monitoring of the internal network for copyright infringement would likely violate the Fourth Amendment. Having all your traffic watched by a government agency in order to look for copyright infringement is an unreasonable search and constitutes wiretapping, just like if they were to open your snail mail or listen in on your telephone calls. And even then, how do you stop people from obtaining files on another network, then physically distributing them via a sneakernet? Are you going to install mandatory software on everyone's computers that somehow watches for unauthorized copies? That would certainly be unreasonable, to say the least.
Privately owned universities can get away with monitoring their networks, but as I said, that doesn't stop the problem. Network monitoring places further burdens on the school, and the costs for it will be passed down to the students- meaning the students
DRM doesn't stop piracy. Every DRM scheme that has been released (with the exception of a few schemes like the PS3, which has hardware support for the DRM and is therefore irrelevant) has been cracked. Ubisoft's new always-on DRM was partly cracked 24 hours after its release, with a full crack out within a month. DRM is fundamentally unsound: You're trying to give the customer the keys to the media while simultaneously hiding the keys from them. It just can't work. All it does is piss off legitimate customers when they find that their movies won't play, or their games refuse to start, or their software cripples itself. So it's not only ineffective, but anti-consumer. There's no good business reason to use it.
You can, but the flaw is that this requires an Internet connection to an authentication server- a form of DRM because it means the customer can't enjoy their media offline. If there is no Internet connection involved- for example, with a music CD, which has no business connecting to anything online- you have no chance whatsoever of detecting copies. Installing software to the user's machine that looks for copies is not going to be a popular decision because such software is basically spyware and you couldn't force someone to install it in the first place.
I will have to respond there after this, because some of your points need addressing.
How is this a semi-decent method? One, the chance of getting caught on p2p is very very small, especially if you're at least a little careful about how you do it. When 90% or more of infringements go unpunished, that is not effective enforcement of copyright. Two, the lawsuits are incredibly unfair because of the high cost of defending yourself in court. As we've seen with the US Copyright Group, some rights holders have no problem with indiscriminately targeting people, guilty or innocent, and putting them through the substantial expense of showing up in court and defending themselves, even if they're completely innocent. Rights holders, on the other hand, often have powerful corporate legal teams behind them, with a budget that no single individual could hope to match.
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The core justification behind anti-piracy is that file sharing deprives artists of revenue. This has never been substantiated because it's extremely hard to prove such a claim, but it seems to be the assumption everyone has. Thusly, the idea that piracy causes substantial lost sales is not an idea I accept just because the entertainment industries say it does. Lost sales are the key: Of X downloads, how many of those (Y) would have translated into sales had the downloads not been available? If the price of a work is Z, is Y times Z enough lost revenue to justify anti-piracy provisions? Furthermore, what if X downloads had a beneficial effect on the market, such as increased market share for the work, that partially or completely cancels out Y*Z? Personally I tend to think that noncommercial piracy simply does not have a huge effect. No industries have crashed in the last decade since Napster's debut. Some are, in fact, doing better than ever.
Maybe this isn't such a bad thing. Most people believe in fair deals and are willing to pay for value received. I've had people unexpectedly hand me money after I performed for them some minor task for which they required my assistance, although I was fine with doing it for free. Realistically I don't think the situation then would be all that different from now, because I think most people know that you can find free music and such online, yet iTunes is huge, Amazon is a bit less huge, and as I said, no industries have tanked. Additionally, I believe we are discussing this in another thread, but if artists were able to find a new business model after such a change in law, it would provide further support for them.
For most people it's not about little things like how a release is taking too long (I've honestly never seen someone say they're going to pirate something because of this), but huge things that cause massive uproars among even casual fans. Things like... Ubisoft's always-on DRM, which requires you to stay online just to play a single-player offline game. Things like Blizzard's decision to force people to use their real names on the official forums, which they retracted after the public backlash. Things like Sony's music CD rootkit, or Spore's limited-activation DRM, or any of dozens of other examples. The point is that people get pissed off when entertainment companies employ blatantly anti-consumer practices, and this leads people to pirate the media out of principle. In those cases, the piracy itself is not damaging, since there likely wouldn't have been a sale anyway.
Boycotting is the free-market response to customer-hostile media companies, and theoretically it would be the way to keep s
Ah, I don't think the programmers behind these applications meant for their little signature to knock down GRUB. That sounds like an unintended action to me.
So once again DRM is fucking with peoples' abilities to use their computers. Except this particular bit of DRM doesn't just screw with Windows; it could potentially screw with every OS on your drive (or screw with your ability to access them, at any rate).
Yeah, it's not conventional DRM, but it's a form of DRM in that it restricts the user in some arbitrary way (and, I ought to add, breaks something else in the process... that too should be part of the definition of DRM).
Ah... I don't recall arguing for the complete abolishment of copyright. I most certainly will argue for a drastic reduction in its length, and would also argue that noncommercial infringement should not be punished as harshly as it is (or at all), but I understand that in a commercial sense copyright has its advantages. Our implementation of it is just really really fucked up.
What makes you think this would happen in the first place? Piracy is rampant today, it has been for a decade, and yet the entertainment industries are doing just fine. The success of iTunes in the face of Kazaa and BitTorrent and such demonstrates that people are willing to pay for their media to support creators they like. Reports that people who download also buy more do this as well. The billion-dollar losses the media giants purport that piracy causes are simply false. There is no basis for the idea that if it were legal to download music for free, nobody would buy music.
I follow this subject because it sickens me each time I see another news article about a copyright-related abuse from a big corporation, or from anyone else. I want copyright reform so the abuse will stop.