What the administrators set up the site for and what the users use it for can be different, albeit related, things. This post was pointless- it's undeniable that TPB is mostly used for piracy, but the point that personal data != public data is, again, still valid.
Even if that is true, not only does it not matter because it was likely a user that posted them and not the site itself, but my point is still valid: we make a distinction between personal data and public data.
Part of Krebs's story is that he joined TPB's IRC channel in order to bring the issue to the mods' attention. He says he was taunted by mods who didn't believe he was a journalist or that he actually had anything, and then was kicked/banned after he posted the md5 sums for some administrative passwords. In this manner he makes the channel mods look like immature jerks, but I talked to the mod that actually kicked him not long after the story broke. Evidently the guy was typing like an idiot (multiple messages per sentence) and acting in a rather unprofessional manner. Too, the kick was not because of the hashes, which he posted over half an hour before the kick. I just want people to know the other side of the story.
Oh, and for the record, this leak isn't as big a deal as some might think. IP addresses can be gathered from the swarms themselves, email addresses used by TPB users should hopefully be throwaway addresses, and torrent hashes are inconsequential. Login details might be a problem for Trusted/VIP/staff accounts, but any serious users are not that concerned about this and would have changed their passwords/emails by now.
Nice troll, but there's a difference between publicly available information (copyrighted works) and private information (peoples' personal info, login credentials, etc).
It may be against their ToS to pay for someone else's account. I've never played World of Warcraft or any other Blizzard game, so it's just a speculation, although I know that Jagex (the company behind RuneScape) does this.
I would certainly discriminate against potential employees if I saw that they were a WoW geek.
What the hell for? All other things being equal, why is Applicant A inferior to Applicant B if Applicant A plays an MMO? Furthermore, why is it any of your business in the first place? Why is anything your applicants do in their spare time your business, insofar as it does not affect their performance on the job?
[citation needed] on pretty much your whole post. You're the first person I've ever seen who suggested that copyright is supposed to last the life of the author. Why should it? Why should someone get lifetime income for producing one copyrighted work? If the purpose of copyright is to encourage the production of new works, doesn't it make more sense to have short copyright terms, thereby compelling artists to create more works in order to keep making money?
Yeah, people like that are "extremists" and "radicals" just like George Washington, Gutenburg and Martin Luther King Jr. were. I mean, how dare they challenge the status quo.
Face it. Many Slashdotters are against copyright and patents just because they want to freeload.
Looks like it's categorically impossible to have a rational debate with you about copyright, because anyone who disagrees with you is automatically a pirate.
Hollywood's profits have actually been increasing year after year. They hit $10 billion in profits (or was that revenue?) in 2009 and I doubt that trend is going to slow down this year, what with Avatar and such hit movies. Oh, and 3D.
I'm not going to read the full report myself, but earlier today I did read Ars Technica's piece on this subject. The impression I get from that article is that the federal government is going to largely stay out of the battle between rights holders and file sharers:
The Administration believes that it is essential for the private sector, including content owners, Internet service providers, advertising brokers, payment processors and search engines, to work collaboratively, consistent with the antitrust laws, to address activity that has a negative economic impact and undermines US businesses, and to seek practical and efficient solutions to address infringement.
According to Ars, reaction to the report has been positive, even from Public Knowledge. You know, one a-them digital hippy organizations that campaign for peoples' rights. There won't be any gov't-sanctioned three-strikes or Internet filtering, and they're going to get the Department of Commerce to put together an ultimate report on financial harm from piracy (good luck with that, but A for effort since they mentioned that the media industries are basically making shit up). It really doesn't sound all that bad, and it could have been much worse.
And then we have this Slashdot summary, making it out to be all doom and gloom, as though the feds weren't even going to try to hide that they're in bed with Big Content. As the subject line says, am I missing something here?
Yet surely you agree that, all other things being equal, a user running on a limited user account is more secure than a user running as root.
I never said that you'd be immune to malware if you were logged in as a limited user. My point was that the policy of Windows systems to automatically set up the user with an administrator account substantially contributes to Windows's craptastic security reputation.
They were built to be backwards compatible with DOS. I mean, even modern Windows systems still create an administrator account for the initial user instead of a limited user account and a separate admin account. The problems are still there.
So what are the architectural differences in OSX or Linux that would protect everyone from malware if they were the dominant platforms?
How 'bout the fact that UNIX- from which OS X and Linux are both derived- was designed from the start to be a multi-user system and therefore had system security in mind, and that DOS- from which Windows is based- was designed to be a single-user system and security was less important?
Um, you're still assuming that piracy would or does kill industries because everyone would just hop on p2p networks and content creators would stop getting paid. That, too, is an unsubstantiated claim.
How does this realistically differ from the current situation? The fact that it's illegal doesn't stop millions of people from doing it, and I'm not sure a colossal number of people would flood the p2p networks if noncommercial downloading and distribution of creative works were legalized. Piracy does not kill industries, and neither would your hypothetical world.
I don't think you know much about the file sharing community.
No interest in serving an audience older or younger than himself.
Uploaders don't give a shit who they're uploading to. I dunno where you got the idea that they somehow only want to share with other fifteen-year-olds.
The product he offers is second-rate.
Not in the case of anything that's normally DRM'd, or movies with unskippable previews and "You wouldn't steal a car" ads. Ripped copies are easily superior to the legit versions in that the ripped copies actually work the way you want them to.
The amateur's DVD rip. Distributed through networks which are slow and fragile.
Slow, perhaps, in some cases, but what is your definition of "fragile" with respect to p2p networks?
Netflix can keep 100,000 videos in its catalog, 20,000 on-line, and contract to have its service built in to every Internet enabled video device priced over $100.
Whereas The Pirate Bay hosts a.torrent for almost everything I've ever searched for. Movies downloaded from TPB will play on anything with a USB port or its own hard drive, and music is virtually without limits in this regard. There's an unrivaled selection and no bullshit restrictions of any kind.
Forgive me, but I'm afraid I've lost track. This has what to do with piracy again?
Indeed, let me amend the question. What's the difference between the two when I go out to buy something not indie? If I wanted to buy Spore and support the artist, do I get a special method of paying for it that ignores the middle man?
Buying retail? No, as far as I know, there is no such option that lets you skip the publisher and put money directly in the developers' pockets. I see this as a flaw, for what it's worth. I imagine that some games allow you to buy online and download them instead of buying a physical disc from a store; perhaps there are some of those that are sold directly by the devs, but it's almost certainly not mainstream practice for obvious reasons (publishers would have fits).
One workaround is to donate money directly to the devs if possible. In that situation it could very well be argued that it's okay to download a copy of the game- if you sent Maxis $60 for Spore, for example, bypassing EA entirely.
Yes, you seem to see the pirates as a universal force of good, that supports the industry without taking anything else into consideration.
Not really. My position is that I consider piracy a relatively benign act when all things are considered. Everyone agrees that there is some measure of lost sales from noncommercial file sharing. Measuring it is impossible, and it's stupid to just assume that every download is a lost sale. I personally think that the percentage of downloads that would constitute lost sales is rather small, because there are several reasons one might download something from a p2p network that don't involve simply getting the content for free. On the other hand, you can't discount the idea that file sharing helps artists, mostly by spreading their content to a wider audience and the "try before you buy" ethos (essentially the ethical pirate you mentioned earlier). Again, measuring financial benefits from piracy is impossible, which would put us back at square one- but then consider that, as I said earlier, none of the creative industries that have been crying foul about piracy have tanked. In the US, at least, the recording industry has lost a bit of revenue, but there are other explanations for that (such as artificially high sales after the CD first debuted) and the motion picture industry is actually doing better than ever, despite a decade of p2p. Video games are doing fine as far as I know. Same with software and books. This leads me to conclude that piracy does not cause the financial harm that it is purported to cause, which removes the biggest justification for condemning it. For this reason it gets under my skin when people criticize file sharers, because they are attacking a subset of people without good cause.
Some places, not all of them. All of South Korea, China's growing middle class, well parts of any Asian middle class could easily afford to buy legit instead of bootleg, but it doesn't matter, they still buy bootleg/pirate. And I'm not just talking about expensive imports here, I'm also looking at stuff produced locally that's fairly affordable.
Then let's be honest- I know that copyright law gives the rights holder the right to determine how their work is sold, etc etc, but if the price is high enough to discourage people from buying the legit product and to drive them towards a pirated version, why not lower the price? Or otherwise make the offer more attractive?
No you are not depriving the original owner of the data from their copy of the data, however, you are getting for free data which should be paid for which pretty much amounts to theft
Theft is an attribute to property. Do you believe that information can be property? If the two are the same, when does your house become public domain?
You can argue that maybe he wouldn't have bought it so it isn't a lost sale but that is beside the point the fact is he has your $20 product and you received no compensation for your investment of time/energy/money whatever.
Terrible argument. It would work in a situation where the product is scarce (ie, a physical object) and actually creating a copy of it requires resources and investment, but when you're dealing with digital files, the cost of reproduction is zero and it can be carried out by people other than the manufacturer/artist. Expecting to be paid for every single copy in such an environment is unbelievably stupid.
Slashdot seems to be full of all these twits who think they should get all their software/music/movies/games for free.
It's much easier to pretend that there's a Slashdot groupthink conspiracy against you than to admit that your beliefs are not centered in reality, isn't it?
If the creators are not profiting from the things they create they will stop making it. Then where are you going to get all your software/music/movies/games from when no one makes it anymore because it is a collosal waste of time because it is completely unprofitable.
Excuse me, but people were making music long before copyright was thought up. People are making free content- lots of it- nowadays that can be freely copied and distributed without paying the artist a cent. People will continue to produce creative works long after copyright is gone. Your assertion that financial compensation through sale of copies is essential to the creative process is total bullshit: real artists create out of love for the content itself, not to make money.
Slashdot Mirror
What the administrators set up the site for and what the users use it for can be different, albeit related, things. This post was pointless- it's undeniable that TPB is mostly used for piracy, but the point that personal data != public data is, again, still valid.
Even if that is true, not only does it not matter because it was likely a user that posted them and not the site itself, but my point is still valid: we make a distinction between personal data and public data.
Part of Krebs's story is that he joined TPB's IRC channel in order to bring the issue to the mods' attention. He says he was taunted by mods who didn't believe he was a journalist or that he actually had anything, and then was kicked/banned after he posted the md5 sums for some administrative passwords. In this manner he makes the channel mods look like immature jerks, but I talked to the mod that actually kicked him not long after the story broke. Evidently the guy was typing like an idiot (multiple messages per sentence) and acting in a rather unprofessional manner. Too, the kick was not because of the hashes, which he posted over half an hour before the kick. I just want people to know the other side of the story.
Oh, and for the record, this leak isn't as big a deal as some might think. IP addresses can be gathered from the swarms themselves, email addresses used by TPB users should hopefully be throwaway addresses, and torrent hashes are inconsequential. Login details might be a problem for Trusted/VIP/staff accounts, but any serious users are not that concerned about this and would have changed their passwords/emails by now.
Nice troll, but there's a difference between publicly available information (copyrighted works) and private information (peoples' personal info, login credentials, etc).
It may be against their ToS to pay for someone else's account. I've never played World of Warcraft or any other Blizzard game, so it's just a speculation, although I know that Jagex (the company behind RuneScape) does this.
What the hell for? All other things being equal, why is Applicant A inferior to Applicant B if Applicant A plays an MMO? Furthermore, why is it any of your business in the first place? Why is anything your applicants do in their spare time your business, insofar as it does not affect their performance on the job?
...no. [citation needed] again on your whole post.
[citation needed] on pretty much your whole post. You're the first person I've ever seen who suggested that copyright is supposed to last the life of the author. Why should it? Why should someone get lifetime income for producing one copyrighted work? If the purpose of copyright is to encourage the production of new works, doesn't it make more sense to have short copyright terms, thereby compelling artists to create more works in order to keep making money?
Each use is stealing? You want to be paid every time someone listens to one of your songs or reads one of your books?!
No wonder you think copyright infringement is theft.
Yeah, people like that are "extremists" and "radicals" just like George Washington, Gutenburg and Martin Luther King Jr. were. I mean, how dare they challenge the status quo.
Orly?
So basically, you have no substantive counterargument? I'm not surprised.
Looks like it's categorically impossible to have a rational debate with you about copyright, because anyone who disagrees with you is automatically a pirate.
Hollywood's profits have actually been increasing year after year. They hit $10 billion in profits (or was that revenue?) in 2009 and I doubt that trend is going to slow down this year, what with Avatar and such hit movies. Oh, and 3D.
Just sayin'.
According to Ars, reaction to the report has been positive, even from Public Knowledge. You know, one a-them digital hippy organizations that campaign for peoples' rights. There won't be any gov't-sanctioned three-strikes or Internet filtering, and they're going to get the Department of Commerce to put together an ultimate report on financial harm from piracy (good luck with that, but A for effort since they mentioned that the media industries are basically making shit up). It really doesn't sound all that bad, and it could have been much worse.
And then we have this Slashdot summary, making it out to be all doom and gloom, as though the feds weren't even going to try to hide that they're in bed with Big Content. As the subject line says, am I missing something here?
Copyright law prevents me from using the creative works of others to express myself.
Yet surely you agree that, all other things being equal, a user running on a limited user account is more secure than a user running as root.
I never said that you'd be immune to malware if you were logged in as a limited user. My point was that the policy of Windows systems to automatically set up the user with an administrator account substantially contributes to Windows's craptastic security reputation.
They were built to be backwards compatible with DOS. I mean, even modern Windows systems still create an administrator account for the initial user instead of a limited user account and a separate admin account. The problems are still there.
How 'bout the fact that UNIX- from which OS X and Linux are both derived- was designed from the start to be a multi-user system and therefore had system security in mind, and that DOS- from which Windows is based- was designed to be a single-user system and security was less important?
Um, you're still assuming that piracy would or does kill industries because everyone would just hop on p2p networks and content creators would stop getting paid. That, too, is an unsubstantiated claim.
How does this realistically differ from the current situation? The fact that it's illegal doesn't stop millions of people from doing it, and I'm not sure a colossal number of people would flood the p2p networks if noncommercial downloading and distribution of creative works were legalized. Piracy does not kill industries, and neither would your hypothetical world.
From people who download the movie to see if it's good and then go out and buy a copy to support the filmmakers.
From people who don't have access to p2p networks or choose not to use them.
From theater ticket sales.
From people who have any one out of dozens of reasons to buy hard copies of movies.
Piracy does not kill industries. This isn't tough to understand.
Uploaders don't give a shit who they're uploading to. I dunno where you got the idea that they somehow only want to share with other fifteen-year-olds.
Not in the case of anything that's normally DRM'd, or movies with unskippable previews and "You wouldn't steal a car" ads. Ripped copies are easily superior to the legit versions in that the ripped copies actually work the way you want them to.
Slow, perhaps, in some cases, but what is your definition of "fragile" with respect to p2p networks?
Whereas The Pirate Bay hosts a .torrent for almost everything I've ever searched for. Movies downloaded from TPB will play on anything with a USB port or its own hard drive, and music is virtually without limits in this regard. There's an unrivaled selection and no bullshit restrictions of any kind.
Buying retail? No, as far as I know, there is no such option that lets you skip the publisher and put money directly in the developers' pockets. I see this as a flaw, for what it's worth. I imagine that some games allow you to buy online and download them instead of buying a physical disc from a store; perhaps there are some of those that are sold directly by the devs, but it's almost certainly not mainstream practice for obvious reasons (publishers would have fits).
One workaround is to donate money directly to the devs if possible. In that situation it could very well be argued that it's okay to download a copy of the game- if you sent Maxis $60 for Spore, for example, bypassing EA entirely.
Not really. My position is that I consider piracy a relatively benign act when all things are considered. Everyone agrees that there is some measure of lost sales from noncommercial file sharing. Measuring it is impossible, and it's stupid to just assume that every download is a lost sale. I personally think that the percentage of downloads that would constitute lost sales is rather small, because there are several reasons one might download something from a p2p network that don't involve simply getting the content for free. On the other hand, you can't discount the idea that file sharing helps artists, mostly by spreading their content to a wider audience and the "try before you buy" ethos (essentially the ethical pirate you mentioned earlier). Again, measuring financial benefits from piracy is impossible, which would put us back at square one- but then consider that, as I said earlier, none of the creative industries that have been crying foul about piracy have tanked. In the US, at least, the recording industry has lost a bit of revenue, but there are other explanations for that (such as artificially high sales after the CD first debuted) and the motion picture industry is actually doing better than ever, despite a decade of p2p. Video games are doing fine as far as I know. Same with software and books. This leads me to conclude that piracy does not cause the financial harm that it is purported to cause, which removes the biggest justification for condemning it. For this reason it gets under my skin when people criticize file sharers, because they are attacking a subset of people without good cause.
Then let's be honest- I know that copyright law gives the rights holder the right to determine how their work is sold, etc etc, but if the price is high enough to discourage people from buying the legit product and to drive them towards a pirated version, why not lower the price? Or otherwise make the offer more attractive?
Theft is an attribute to property. Do you believe that information can be property? If the two are the same, when does your house become public domain?
Terrible argument. It would work in a situation where the product is scarce (ie, a physical object) and actually creating a copy of it requires resources and investment, but when you're dealing with digital files, the cost of reproduction is zero and it can be carried out by people other than the manufacturer/artist. Expecting to be paid for every single copy in such an environment is unbelievably stupid.
It's much easier to pretend that there's a Slashdot groupthink conspiracy against you than to admit that your beliefs are not centered in reality, isn't it?
Excuse me, but people were making music long before copyright was thought up. People are making free content- lots of it- nowadays that can be freely copied and distributed without paying the artist a cent. People will continue to produce creative works long after copyright is gone. Your assertion that financial compensation through sale of copies is essential to the creative process is total bullshit: real artists create out of love for the content itself, not to make money.
-1 flamebait.