I strongly disagree. Anonymity is a necessity for true freedom of speech, in order to ensure that people can speak their minds without fear of any consequences whatsoever. Anything else gives you a chilling effect on speech, wherein people may censor themselves because they don't want to be ostracized by their community, or fired from their job for going against the corporate political position.
What support do you have for your assertion that you should always attach your identity to anything important that you publicly say? Do you realize how many important historical figures have used anonymity and pseudonymity to publish their speech without fear of oppression?
Smaller government also has less hold over corporations, who will grow to fill the power vacuum filled by shrinking government. End result: The consumer is raped by the corporate world.
Larger government may be better able to contain corporations, but the end result of that is that the citizen is raped by federal power.
You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. What exactly is a free society to do?
> Now lets say a cop gets on FreeNet and downloads CP and traces the line and part of the CP came from your IP address.
I thought the latter action was impossible on FreeNet. It's been a while since I messed with it, but I remember strong anonymity being one of its selling points.
Read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Billions of dollars of chemical and food additive research goes into making fast food taste good. It kind of creeped me out to learn that.
I saw "Project Icarus: an Interstallar Mission Timeline" and thought we were finally going to research a way to dial the ninth chevron. Alas, disappointed yet again.
On the contrary. While I am not a LastPass user, I think more highly of them knowing that this is how they react to even/possible/ intrusions. I appreciate their cautious attitude given the sensitive nature of the information they handle.
> [Joe Downloader] it's not theft. It's copyright infringement.
Actually, I would call this an instance of data theft. I, too, believe that calling copyright infringement "theft" or "stealing" is ridiculous rhetoric, but there's a difference between music/movies/software available on BitTorrent and personal information kept on Sony's servers. Copyrighted material is meant to be available to the public, even if it's not supposed to be distributed over file sharing networks. In theory, anyone can legally obtain a copy and be able to view it to their heart's content. Sony customer data, on the other hand, is (supposed to be) carefully guarded and kept safe from unauthorized viewers (which I imagine would be just about everyone except certain Sony employees). The unauthorized copying of the latter is, in my opinion, much closer to actual theft, although I nonetheless feel a small chill using the word theft to describe the copying of data.
Furthermore, there is no copyright protection for personal information, so that rules out infringement as well.
The funny thing is that you're actually right. From a certain point of view, copyright infringement is freeloading. From a certain point of view, copyright infringement is theft. The problem is that making claims like "it's theft/freeloading, pure and simple" do nothing whatsoever to address the issue itself; they only exacerbate the giant Internet flamewar that is the piracy debate. Most people consider "freeloading" to be a negative term, so when they hear "pirates are freeloaders", they automatically assume that "pirates are bad" without asking themselves "Is noncommercial, nonprofit copyright infringement really such a serious issue that we should be scrambling to make it impossible?". It's the lazy way out, and I wish we would avoid such terms for the sake of intellectual honesty.
Such a definition was probably not intended to apply to making digital copies, which costs the 'wronged' party nothing. Traditionally, freeloading has carried a cost, which is why it became a negative term to begin with.
Calling pirates "freeloaders" is an unnecessary ad hominem designed to turn everyone else against them without applying critical thought to the issue at hand. It's the same as calling it "theft" or "stealing". The terminology may technically apply, but in the circles in which piracy is usually discussed (such as Slashdot), saying these things quickly makes you look like a troll.
I'm disappointed in the submitter and the editor for allowing the term "freeloader" in the headline. If you wish to oppose piracy, that's your call, but do it without the use of hyperbole and emotional arguments.
Alright, that's not so bad. But TFS gave me the impression that the conversation itself counts as, for lack of a better term, a sexual offense, and I find that hard to believe.
60-year-old John Jacques has appealed his conviction for engaging in sexually graphic online conversations with a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl
Explicit conversations with people under 18 are illegal? And can get you on the sex offender list?
Am I the only one who sees that as rather ridiculous?
> Pirates love to pirate but if they keep it up, someday they may not have anything worth pirating. The things I mentioned in the previous post are likely consequences of pirates winning.
No, they are examples of the nonsense spread by the antipiracy groups in order to scare people away from the idea of free distribution. You are making the assumption that if the end user does not pay for the content, then creating that content is not possible. I'm typing this comment on an operating system composed entirely of software that I legally downloaded for free; the creators have chosen to give their work away to the world, and I find their software to be of a very high quality. I listen to music that I similarly acquired freely and legally, with the artists' blessings. Hell, even Wikipedia and similar wikis are a perfect counterexample to your points, as the contributors give freely to the sites, which give their content freely to the public via copyleft licenses. You will notice that in none of those cases do I pay a dime to anyone for their work, and yet, for some reason, I still receive software updates, I can still browse for new music, and people still edit Wikipedia.
The old business model of artificial scarcity is not the only way of doing things. In fact, in an environment that does not acknowledge the existence of artificial scarcity (the Internet, where everything can be copied), it's a bad business model.
> Secondly, high criminal penalties probably would stop piracy.
Ridiculous. First, an article was just posted a couple of days ago which completely disproves your point and states that the only really good way to minimize piracy is for content creators and distributors to lower their prices and remove artificial barriers that drive people to piracy (such as 'not available in your region' messages and DRM). Who would have guessed that suing and criminalizing your customers isn't a good business strategy?
Second, why do you support 'high criminal penalties' for something as minor as copyright infringement? Is downloading a song really such a massive offense that you deserve to be subject to 'high criminal penalties'? I hope you realize that you're playing right into the hands of large media corporations by supporting their nonsense. And when all is said and done, they would be happy to throw you in prison along with a huge chunk of the world population. (What, did you think that pirates were anything but your average Joe and Jane?)
Third, what sort of penalties are we talking about here? Naturally, you have a good idea of the legal measures that should be put in place to smash pirates once and for all. Naturally, they will be effective at their stated purpose. Naturally, there will not be any chance of punishing an innocent person. Naturally, these measures will not impose any restrictions on rights that are more important than copyright protection, such as free speech, due process, fair use, and personal privacy rights. Naturally, these measures will not impede technological advancements or innovation. All of this is correct, right? Because I've never seen an antipiracy measure that does all of those. Good luck trying to stop the copying and sharing of certain strings of bits without unjustly interfering with the copying and sharing of any other strings of bits.
> The points I'm trying to make is just because something can be done easily doesn't mean you should do it.
It doesn't matter. Antipirates can rage all they want about the sheer immorality of file sharing, but it cannot be stopped. If people want to pirate, they will. Everyone else needs to adapt to this truth and find ways to live with it, rather than vainly trying to fight it back to the stone age.
> Ignoring for the moment your use of that absurd euphamism ("share")
Antipirates use much more intellectually dishonest terms to describe p2p. "Stealing" and "theft" come to mind, despite that copyright infringement is neither. You yourself are fond of saying "ripping off".
> This is about people who are in the busines of ripping off other people's work so they can draw visitors to their own web sites and generate their own ad revenue without having to invest money in creating the content that brings eyeballs in.
Considering the context of the grandparent's post, it is you who are missing the point. The injustices listed by the grandparent (causing massive economic disruption, torturing people, and unconstitutional wiretaps) are orders of magnitude worse than copyright infringement, even for profit. I have to assume that you know this, and yet you are pushing emotional arguments against copyright infringement as though it were more important than any of the aforementioned issues. This, too, is dishonest... unless you truly believe that copyright protections are of the utmost importance, relatively.
A thousand CDs in a small cardboard box? Let's see.
I'll assume that you're storing your CDs in a standard CD case. Measurements in inches: 5.5 x 5 x.375. This gives each case a volume of 10.3125 inches squared.
A thousand of these would be 10,312.5 inches squared, or almost 860 square feet.
A square box of nine feet on each side gives you a volume of 729 square feet. The box would have to have a larger volume than this to accommodate a thousand CDs in their cases. This is not "small."
If you are invited by a private party to speak or otherwise express yourself, and your speech or form of expression is removed after the fact due to its contents, this is censorship.
If Flickr honestly cared about upholding this policy, would they not take down every instance of its violation they found, rather than only going after the low-hanging fruit?
Flickr staff members often upload content that is not, by strict definition, their original work. They may be justified in doing so as it is their service, but not abiding by your own rules undermines your authority to enforce those rules on others.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly disagree. Anonymity is a necessity for true freedom of speech, in order to ensure that people can speak their minds without fear of any consequences whatsoever. Anything else gives you a chilling effect on speech, wherein people may censor themselves because they don't want to be ostracized by their community, or fired from their job for going against the corporate political position.
What support do you have for your assertion that you should always attach your identity to anything important that you publicly say? Do you realize how many important historical figures have used anonymity and pseudonymity to publish their speech without fear of oppression?
Smaller government also has less hold over corporations, who will grow to fill the power vacuum filled by shrinking government. End result: The consumer is raped by the corporate world.
Larger government may be better able to contain corporations, but the end result of that is that the citizen is raped by federal power.
You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. What exactly is a free society to do?
As you know very well, copyright law has nothing to do with peoples' personal information.
> Now lets say a cop gets on FreeNet and downloads CP and traces the line and part of the CP came from your IP address.
I thought the latter action was impossible on FreeNet. It's been a while since I messed with it, but I remember strong anonymity being one of its selling points.
> I do believe Julian Assange should be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for what he did.
Which US law did he break again?
>1999 called
Did you warn them?!
About Haiti and Japan?!
NO? YOU ASSHOLE!!
> Sorry, but Apple (alongside IBM) are the corporations that can Do No Wrong in the eyes of Groklaw.
Evidence?
Read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Billions of dollars of chemical and food additive research goes into making fast food taste good. It kind of creeped me out to learn that.
I saw "Project Icarus: an Interstallar Mission Timeline" and thought we were finally going to research a way to dial the ninth chevron. Alas, disappointed yet again.
On the contrary. While I am not a LastPass user, I think more highly of them knowing that this is how they react to even /possible/ intrusions. I appreciate their cautious attitude given the sensitive nature of the information they handle.
> [Joe Downloader] it's not theft. It's copyright infringement.
Actually, I would call this an instance of data theft. I, too, believe that calling copyright infringement "theft" or "stealing" is ridiculous rhetoric, but there's a difference between music/movies/software available on BitTorrent and personal information kept on Sony's servers. Copyrighted material is meant to be available to the public, even if it's not supposed to be distributed over file sharing networks. In theory, anyone can legally obtain a copy and be able to view it to their heart's content. Sony customer data, on the other hand, is (supposed to be) carefully guarded and kept safe from unauthorized viewers (which I imagine would be just about everyone except certain Sony employees). The unauthorized copying of the latter is, in my opinion, much closer to actual theft, although I nonetheless feel a small chill using the word theft to describe the copying of data.
Furthermore, there is no copyright protection for personal information, so that rules out infringement as well.
The funny thing is that you're actually right. From a certain point of view, copyright infringement is freeloading. From a certain point of view, copyright infringement is theft. The problem is that making claims like "it's theft/freeloading, pure and simple" do nothing whatsoever to address the issue itself; they only exacerbate the giant Internet flamewar that is the piracy debate. Most people consider "freeloading" to be a negative term, so when they hear "pirates are freeloaders", they automatically assume that "pirates are bad" without asking themselves "Is noncommercial, nonprofit copyright infringement really such a serious issue that we should be scrambling to make it impossible?". It's the lazy way out, and I wish we would avoid such terms for the sake of intellectual honesty.
And it doesn't count if he or she is not aware of it. The app is a Trojan.
Such a definition was probably not intended to apply to making digital copies, which costs the 'wronged' party nothing. Traditionally, freeloading has carried a cost, which is why it became a negative term to begin with.
Because eating food and not paying for it is comparable to downloading software and not paying for it. Yeah.
Calling pirates "freeloaders" is an unnecessary ad hominem designed to turn everyone else against them without applying critical thought to the issue at hand. It's the same as calling it "theft" or "stealing". The terminology may technically apply, but in the circles in which piracy is usually discussed (such as Slashdot), saying these things quickly makes you look like a troll.
I'm disappointed in the submitter and the editor for allowing the term "freeloader" in the headline. If you wish to oppose piracy, that's your call, but do it without the use of hyperbole and emotional arguments.
Alright, that's not so bad. But TFS gave me the impression that the conversation itself counts as, for lack of a better term, a sexual offense, and I find that hard to believe.
60-year-old John Jacques has appealed his conviction for engaging in sexually graphic online conversations with a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl
Explicit conversations with people under 18 are illegal? And can get you on the sex offender list?
Am I the only one who sees that as rather ridiculous?
Logical next step - unapproved encryption is illegal.
They already tried that in the 1990s. It didn't work because of the sheer ridiculousness of regulating encryption.
> Pirates love to pirate but if they keep it up, someday they may not have anything worth pirating. The things I mentioned in the previous post are likely consequences of pirates winning.
No, they are examples of the nonsense spread by the antipiracy groups in order to scare people away from the idea of free distribution. You are making the assumption that if the end user does not pay for the content, then creating that content is not possible. I'm typing this comment on an operating system composed entirely of software that I legally downloaded for free; the creators have chosen to give their work away to the world, and I find their software to be of a very high quality. I listen to music that I similarly acquired freely and legally, with the artists' blessings. Hell, even Wikipedia and similar wikis are a perfect counterexample to your points, as the contributors give freely to the sites, which give their content freely to the public via copyleft licenses. You will notice that in none of those cases do I pay a dime to anyone for their work, and yet, for some reason, I still receive software updates, I can still browse for new music, and people still edit Wikipedia.
The old business model of artificial scarcity is not the only way of doing things. In fact, in an environment that does not acknowledge the existence of artificial scarcity (the Internet, where everything can be copied), it's a bad business model.
> Secondly, high criminal penalties probably would stop piracy.
Ridiculous. First, an article was just posted a couple of days ago which completely disproves your point and states that the only really good way to minimize piracy is for content creators and distributors to lower their prices and remove artificial barriers that drive people to piracy (such as 'not available in your region' messages and DRM). Who would have guessed that suing and criminalizing your customers isn't a good business strategy?
Second, why do you support 'high criminal penalties' for something as minor as copyright infringement? Is downloading a song really such a massive offense that you deserve to be subject to 'high criminal penalties'? I hope you realize that you're playing right into the hands of large media corporations by supporting their nonsense. And when all is said and done, they would be happy to throw you in prison along with a huge chunk of the world population. (What, did you think that pirates were anything but your average Joe and Jane?)
Third, what sort of penalties are we talking about here? Naturally, you have a good idea of the legal measures that should be put in place to smash pirates once and for all. Naturally, they will be effective at their stated purpose. Naturally, there will not be any chance of punishing an innocent person. Naturally, these measures will not impose any restrictions on rights that are more important than copyright protection, such as free speech, due process, fair use, and personal privacy rights. Naturally, these measures will not impede technological advancements or innovation. All of this is correct, right? Because I've never seen an antipiracy measure that does all of those. Good luck trying to stop the copying and sharing of certain strings of bits without unjustly interfering with the copying and sharing of any other strings of bits.
> The points I'm trying to make is just because something can be done easily doesn't mean you should do it.
It doesn't matter. Antipirates can rage all they want about the sheer immorality of file sharing, but it cannot be stopped. If people want to pirate, they will. Everyone else needs to adapt to this truth and find ways to live with it, rather than vainly trying to fight it back to the stone age.
> Ignoring for the moment your use of that absurd euphamism ("share")
Antipirates use much more intellectually dishonest terms to describe p2p. "Stealing" and "theft" come to mind, despite that copyright infringement is neither. You yourself are fond of saying "ripping off".
> This is about people who are in the busines of ripping off other people's work so they can draw visitors to their own web sites and generate their own ad revenue without having to invest money in creating the content that brings eyeballs in.
Considering the context of the grandparent's post, it is you who are missing the point. The injustices listed by the grandparent (causing massive economic disruption, torturing people, and unconstitutional wiretaps) are orders of magnitude worse than copyright infringement, even for profit. I have to assume that you know this, and yet you are pushing emotional arguments against copyright infringement as though it were more important than any of the aforementioned issues. This, too, is dishonest... unless you truly believe that copyright protections are of the utmost importance, relatively.
A thousand CDs in a small cardboard box? Let's see.
I'll assume that you're storing your CDs in a standard CD case. Measurements in inches: 5.5 x 5 x .375. This gives each case a volume of 10.3125 inches squared.
A thousand of these would be 10,312.5 inches squared, or almost 860 square feet.
A square box of nine feet on each side gives you a volume of 729 square feet. The box would have to have a larger volume than this to accommodate a thousand CDs in their cases. This is not "small."
If you are invited by a private party to speak or otherwise express yourself, and your speech or form of expression is removed after the fact due to its contents, this is censorship.
> As for the examples in the second FA of a flickr staff member posting things that aren't his own work - they're a huge stretch. It's FUD.
How do you know?
If Flickr honestly cared about upholding this policy, would they not take down every instance of its violation they found, rather than only going after the low-hanging fruit?
Flickr staff members often upload content that is not, by strict definition, their original work. They may be justified in doing so as it is their service, but not abiding by your own rules undermines your authority to enforce those rules on others.