“In two years, this type of piracy will be over. After a ruling like this and all the pioneers start to get older and have children and families, piracy won’t occur to this extent.”
The only way I can see this type of piracy being over in two years is if the media industries up and die so there's nothing left to steal.
I wonder how much this case actually cost the media industries to litigate. The actual fines involved are relatively small, so it would be interesting to know whether the record companies will be able to use the fines to cover their legal fees.
Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource, e.g. taking money or property, using your time without paying an agreed price.
Copyright infringement happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules. You aren't denied any resource you had before my infringement.
Please stop calling copyright infringement stealing. It is not. Doing so is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of guilt in people (due to western notions of Stealing is Wrong).
If you jump the fence at a concert, or sneak into a movie theater, you are guilty of "Theft of Services". Note that this type of theft does not deprive the original owner that resource.
If you want to pretend you are not stealing something when you infringe on copyright, that's up to you; I'd suggest that this is an oversimplification of the issue designed to induce unwarranted feelings of innocence
One last thing: since when is "Stealing is Wrong" a "western" notion? The Buddhist prohibition on stealing is even more extreme in its condemnation of the type of behavior you are defending.
First of all, there is no such thing as a Buddhist 'prohibition' of anything. The precepts are trainings that describe skillful ways to live, and are much more like guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person and must be worked out individually
Secondly, while I can't know for sure, I think the 'Stealing is Wrong' mentality is not a statement about whether stealing is good or bad, but how strongly it is stigmatized in the west. So, likening some other unrelated activity (such as copyright infringement) to theft has a powerful mental effect.
Finally, if you sneak into a movie theater or jump the fence at a concert, you are actually taking up a seat or space that could have been used by a paying customer. This isn't the same thing as downloading digital goods, in which your use of these goods has no impact on the producer unless it prevented you from purchasing something you otherwise might have.
Copyright infringement is not an innocent act, but all acts of infringement are not considered equal. Honestly, I feel like you're the one oversimplifying things.
First of all, there is no such thing as a Buddhist 'prohibition' of anything. The precepts are trainings that describe skillful ways to live, and are much more like guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person and must be worked out individually
Umm, no. Some modern Buddhist traditions may treat the precepts as "guidelines which can vary wildly from person to person", but that's a fairly recent innovation. The precepts (including the lay precepts) are described in painful detail in the Pali canon, the Agamas, and some Mahayana Sutras, and although the details of the prohibitions differ somewhat between various traditions, all of them go far beyond "guidelines". Trust me on this one.
Second: I ask again-- do you know a non-Western culture where theft is not stigmatized?
Finally: taking up space or a seat is not a factor in the legal definition of "theft of services"-- theft of Cable TV holds as well. The salient characteristc (which coincidentally agrees with the Buddhist precept) is "taking that which is not given."
I understand that you'd like to divorce copyright infringement from the notion of theft, based on the physical deprivation of goods, but the legal notion of theft is (and as far as I know, has always been) a great deal broader than that, however inconvenient this happens to be to your conscience.
Sorry, but that is a big strawman. He never said "taking a seat is the definition of theft of services", he was replying to what made both of your examples theft of services. The difference is obvious and you know it.
Cable theft should probably not be called theft, because it is a combination of trespassing (to get the cable hooked up) and copyright infringement. Possibly, but I don't know the tech that well, it costs more to push the signal to more endpoints, which actually does work into theft of service then...
My point was, I'd rather not provide the citations, but I could. I'm just finishing up an M.A. in Buddhist Studies, and as part of a Buddhist Ethics course I recently did some work on the scriptural bases of the precepts in five different canons, but I really didn't think anyone here would be interested in the details. I was hoping that you'd be willing to just take my word on the issue.
This is quite interesting and I think that rather than saying 'trust me', by providing a bit of background it makes it much more likely for us to have a productive conversation. But for what it's worth, while I don't have an academic background in it, I'm a Buddhist practitioner.
Every retreat I've been on, and every book I've read has presented the precepts as a set of mindfulness trainings, and specifically distinguishes the concept of precept from the concept of 'commandment' or law.
We talked past each other, but to say that Buddhist ethics are stronger about things like 'not taking anything which is not freely given' is indeed correct. But equating that with theft is still not meant to be taken literally.
If we were to go down that road, much of what I've read about the precept not to commit murder also applies to speaking harshly to someone. I've always understood this as figurative, and valuable. But I am not going to call someone who harms someone through their words a murderer.
I feel like you are emphasizing too much on the words you are reading and not the intent or meaning behind them. That was the point I wanted to make, and hopefully I've done that now.
Every retreat I've been on, and every book I've read has presented the precepts as a set of mindfulness trainings, and specifically distinguishes the concept of precept from the concept of 'commandment' or law.
Let me guess: Thich Nhat Hanh?
Personally, I find the notion of "precepts as guidelines and not laws" to be attractive; I suppose a lot of Westerners do, too. Unfortunately, this is a very modern notion-- if you look at the (pre-20th-Century) literature, you'll find that the precepts are treated as laws, and that they go into explicit detail, and leave very little to personal judgment.
We talked past each other, but to say that Buddhist ethics are stronger about things like 'not taking anything which is not freely given' is indeed correct. But equating that with theft is still not meant to be taken literally.
I disagree (as you might guess.) I'd argue that "taking that which is not given" is, literally, theft, and vice versa.
If we were to go down that road, much of what I've read about the precept not to commit murder also applies to speaking harshly to someone. I've always understood this as figurative, and valuable. But I am not going to call someone who harms someone through their words a murderer.
I've never come across that reading of the precepts; usually, the prohibition on lying is taken to include non-skillful speech. That is quite a figurative reading, indeed.
I feel like you are emphasizing too much on the words you are reading and not the intent or meaning behind them. That was the point I wanted to make, and hopefully I've done that now.
I'd suggest that in your attempt to separate the words and the intent, you run the risk of redefining words to mean what you wish them to mean.
You'd like to make a distinction between copyright infringement and theft, based on a physical analogy; but, as I've pointed out, the notion of theft has always been broader than that. The intent is clear: you're not permitted to take that which is not given-- whether it is a physical object, or a service, or a copyrighted work.
Please show some examples of pre-20th-century Buddhist literature that goes into very explicit detail about the precepts leaving little to personal judgment.
I've been reading from modern teachers, because Buddhism is a living religion, not something that was laid down in absolute terms centuries ago. But I have read a bit of the older texts through English translation and just have not seen the sort of strictness that you are implying.
Providing some specific excerpts would really help move this discussion forward.
I'll be happy to. I'm at home now, and my texts are at my office, but I can email some references to you tomorrow, if your contact details are on your HN profile.
In the mean-time, the Wikipedia page on the Patimokkha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patimokkha) lists the monastic precepts for the Theravada tradition; even in schematic form, you can see that they are quite detailed. When you add on Buddhaghosa's commentary in the Kankhavitarani, things get quite detailed indeed.
From everything I've read and heard from teachers, the practices for monastics are extremely finely detailed specifically because it forces those who go that route to be mindful of what they are doing each and every moment.
But this is a voluntary practice and has to do with amplifying some basic foundational ideas of non-harming and mindfulness so that you can see them in minute details. Nowhere have I ever seen Buddhist teachings that imply that it should be the goal of the laypeople to take on the monastic precepts. Even throughout history the vast majority of Buddhist practitioners were bound only by the 5 lay precepts.
Again, I think that if you're a non-practitioner, from the outside it might seem strange that such things are meant as 'trainings' and not 'rules'. That having been said, there are certainly cases where these rules are taken very seriously. You can read the book 'Turtle Feet' for a contemporary look into how political and bureaucratic the Tibetan monastics can be.
What I've been told is that the Buddha taught in many, many different ways depending on his intended audience. So when he was speaking to plain, common folks, he gave them simple instructions to follow. For some devotional types, he constructed elaborate and complex rituals to help with practice. I think that you may be studying the more complex end of things and missing some of the less academic teachings.
I think that there are two phenomena here that we should distinguish with modern Buddhism. One is the sort of new-age culture that has taken the words of Thich Nhat Hahn and the Dalai Lama and turned Buddhism into a sort of 'feel good' spirituality that isn't very deep. This isn't the fault of the teacher, but of a mass audience hungry for some good feelings.
But then there are also people like Jack Kornfield, Steve Armstrong, Larry Rosenberg, Henepola Gunaratana, Pema Chodron, and many others who have taken a more westernized, but still faithful way of representing Buddhism in the West. This is again speaking from the viewpoint of a non-academic, but I'm also not just a 'true believer', so I've done enough of my homework to feel like you're making too strong of a statement about what precepts are meant to express.
The legal definition is not the same as the literal or figurative meaning of a word, which also may differs from its connotation.
Edit: Also while it might be called "theft of service" and considered larceny in US, in Sweden the same act is called "fraudulent behavior" and is a lesser form of fraud.
Well it's a two-way street. We could then argue that figurative meaning of "copyright infridgement is stealing" is not the same as it's legal definition, too.
>If you jump the fence at a concert, or sneak into a movie theater, you are guilty of "Theft of Services".
Perhaps, but it unnecessarily introduces a host of vague, subjective issues (to the benefit of the lawyers involved). The actual crime was being on someone else's real property without their consent, as such the correct charge should be "trespassing."
"Theft of services" requires obtaining a service without payment. Obtaining digital goods would therefore not qualify.
Copyright and copyright infringement are defined in specific sections of law. Any comparison to another area of law (theft, theft of services, piracy, patent or trademark infringement, or homicide) will of necessity be inaccurate.
If I jump the fence or sneak into a theater, I take the place of a paying customer. I am stealing the ability to sell the seat, so they are in fact denied the resource. If I copy a song, the original owner still has everything he started with (time, stuff, etc).
Also: I never said it was a strictly western notion. I don't know enough about other cultures to make claims. So I qualified my statement to those places where I know it is correct. I appologize for offending you by not making overly broad statements.
>Stealing happens when I take resource from you in a way that denies you that resource
Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app? Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design? Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item?
Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.
> Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app?
Yes.
> Are you saying it isn't stealing to copy my website's design?
Yes.
> Are you saying it isn't stealing if I take something out of your house for a day but return it before you need/notice the item?
No.
For stealing to have occurred, the owner of the item must be deprived of ownership of the item. Pirating software or design is (probably) wrong, but that doesn't make it stealing.
Agree, though the last one is more interesting semantically. It's not really stealing, it's borrowing without permission... Though the bigger deal there is home intrusion.
If I steal your car, and the cops find me, arrest me, and return the car to you, does that mean I didn't really steal it and just "borrowed" it, since you eventually got the car back? I think it's pretty clear semantically that stealing means depriving you of your property for any amount of time.
> Are you saying it isn't stealing to pirate my iPhone app?
Yes. And the law agrees with me. Copyright infringement != theft. You could, of course, say they're the same because they're both illegal, but by that logic parking on a double yellow line is the same as genocide.
In the outlandish scenario where copyright infringement would be theft, it can't be theft every time you copy something. If I give you something I stole, you are not also stealing it.
I don't understand how people can equate copyright infringement and stealing. Even if you're a proponent of current copyright laws, a quick glance at those very laws will inform you that they're quite different, and in fact copyright infringement can easily be committed accidentally and often commands much larger penalties than actual theft.
I think the argument is used so often because proponents of intellectual property protection realize that constructing an appeal to more axiomatic laws/rights breaks down very quickly. Traditional property rights are very easy to formally argue for by appealing to scarcity of resources. That obviously doesn't work for intellectual property.
> Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.
We can say we have rights, and the law supports us in that and in general we will use that to advance our goals, whatever they are.
But that does not mean that we can not have reservations about all this and that we think that there might be a better alternative (for instance, trade secrets).
I'm all for opening the floodgates and abolishing copyright, even if that will hurt me personally.
I'm all for opening the floodgates and abolishing copyright, even if that will hurt me personally.
Ditto. I love writing, blogging, etc. Maybe I can make money by selling my writing at some point in my life, even. But you know what, I'm willing to forfeit that possibility if it means that copyrights are no longer in existence.
An even better solution would be one that returns copyrights to their original limits (14 years, renewable for another 14), but before that happens every member of the RIAA will magically turn into a flying saucer and explode into a burst of maple syrup, I imagine.
I believe trade secrets can be protected by traditional trespassing and contract laws. To violate a trade secret you've got to either trespass on a company's property to obtain information, or be an employee who violates your employment contract and leaks secrets.
Trademarks are a bit of a snag for my philosophically. I have a big problem with intellectual property, but I can understand the problem that would arise if anyone could market their products with another company's name or logo. One option I've come up with is that stores themselves could enforce trademarks.
All it would take is for replicas to be simply marked as such. Then the intrinsic value of the goods and the quality are the place where the competition should take place.
Plenty of so-called knock-offs are produced right alongside the 'genuine' article, the only difference is in who gets compensated. The whole reason this idiocy exists is because goods are often traded well above their intrinsic value.
There is financial incentive to create free software. I'm not saying that companies that only sell proprietary software would be fine without intellectual property laws, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
There is a financial incentive to create free software primarily from companies that build closed server side software on top of free software, like Google. Or from companies that use free software in closed platforms, like Apple. If that's where you want the world to go, then well, ok...I don't.
Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.
I ran a business selling software to small business for years. When I was selling software I'd written, I never tried to restrict the rights of my customers to resell copies of what I sold them. To say that they didn't really own what they'd bought would have been very insulting.
Sure, and if you want to do software as a service, I have no quarrel with it. But if, when someone pays you, you then give them possession of a good, you shouldn't be able to maintain control over the good.
If copying physical objects were as easy as copying software, the practice of renting a car wouldn't make a sustainable business, in exactly the same way. That doesn't mean we should restrict the production of automobiles by law; it just means another business model is required.
If you aren't particularly crazy about some band,and they release an overpriced album, you will not buy. You will borrow from your friend and listen a couple times.
> Most of the people on HN sell/create digital goods and to say that we have no rights over the things we create is very insulting.
Most of those involved in the ACM and IEEE also sell/create digital goods for a living, and yet in their ethics literature they conclude or imply that treating intellectual property like actual property makes little sense logically or philosophically. Of course, they stay safe by admonitioning us to obey laws unless there's ethical compulsion otherwise.
So what is the difference between stealing and copyright infringement? That the scarcity in the latter case comes from artificial rules? If you have a piece of land with oil in the ground then what makes that oil scarce is the government artificially protecting your property rights, just like copyrighted content is scarce because of the government's protection of copy rights. Your ability to sell the oil depends on the artificial rules set by the government (or on your private army), just like your ability to sell a book depends on artificial rules set by the government (or on a private army).
The argument that if somebody takes the oil out of your ground you don't have the oil anymore is not important in a discussion of whether it's ethical to do so, because the effects are the same for copyright infringement. If you write a book and I put a copy of it online, then the net effect is that you can't sell your book effectively anymore. Just like the case where I take the oil that's easy to get out of the ground and you can't sell your oil effectively anymore.
So saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, while perhaps law technically true, is a dishonest presentation of the issue. The feelings of guilt are not unwarranted.
> If you have a piece of land with oil in the ground then what makes that oil scarce is the government artificially protecting your property rights
No. What makes it scarce is that it is some limited number of kilograms of oil. If two people want it, each can only have half. There is no limited number of copies for data. If two, or two million, people want a copy, they can all make one -- or they could if the law allowed them: which is the point: the scarcity is not imposed by physics but by legal choice.
To make things clearer, change it from oil to a lake that you own. Access to the privately owned lake is scarce for artificial reasons. Property means control over something, and if you cannot maintain control then in many cases there is no benefit in possession/creation. In this respect property is always the same, whether physical or intellectual: owning the land or copyright only works if you control access/distribution.
Of course with a limited thing like oil there's also the fact that not only would you be unable to capitalise, you would be unable to even be the end-user of the resource, when people steal it. But that's just an extra dimension to consider, not relevant to the core ethical issue, as the grandparent poster was trying to say.
> Access to the privately owned lake is scarce for artificial reasons.
Again, No. Ultimately, access is limited by physical limits: not everyone can easily travel to the lake and not everyone can fit in or around it. These things do not apply to data: everyone can make a copy.
> and if you cannot maintain control then in many cases there is no benefit in possession/creation
And data/information (abstract goods) are exactly a case where this does not apply. Abstract goods are nonrivalrous: your use and benefit from them does not limit mine.
Of course, there are probably various ways to construe 'property' to accommodate abstract goods, and whatever else, and they may even be useful and practical. But with abstract goods there is something different in physical fact. Surely that is the most important thing to have in mind if you want to consider ways of handling it.
As to the ethics, the physical basis is critical, because it is where the buck stops. Since copying renders no direct physical harm to the copyright 'owner' it must make us think differently about it.
The physical limit is still irrelevant to the debate: the number of people who want to use the lake could easily be far less than the number of people who potentially could use the lake. In this situation, the lake is artificially scarce according to the owner's property rights, not because of any physical limitations.
The physical basis is just an incidental detail. The ethical basis is that individuals must use their minds to survive, meaning they must have ownership over the produce of their minds to survive, meaning they must have property rights. To say that somebody who creates a work, whether intellectual or otherwise, should not have control over its access/distribution, is to argue against property rights and indeed the right to survive.
As the previous poster argued, pirating/stealing my intellectual property amounts to removing my ability to profit from my creation/property, which amounts to direct (physical) harm to me, the copyright owner. True, it doesn't stop me using my creation, but that's hardly the point. What if I invent a perpetual motion machine, should just anyone be able to then tap into my non-scarce energy source without permission? Besides, saying property should be granted on the basis of physical scarcity says nothing about why it should be granted to a particular person - it's a poor criterion all round.
I agree scarce is not the right word. What I meant is that your ability to sell the oil depends on artificial rules by the government. The ability to sell the product is what's important here, not "having" the product. Having the product just allows you to use it yourself, which in the case of oil and in the case of copyrighted material is mostly useless.
(but it's not true that scarcity of oil is only imposed by physics, it's also decided artificially by OPEC)
That analogy doesn't apply because it's not the same thing. If I take some of your oil you lose some of your oil. Now if I went out and cloned it that's not stealing under the stated definition. This is the same nonsense the GPL tries to shove down peoples throats and I don't know why so many people are buying it. It's not about wrong right in this case so there's no need to bring pre-concevied biases into it.
The works of Shakespeare (died 1616) were written without copyright protection (Statue of Anne 1709). It can be argued, based on the amount of copying from previous authors, that they could only be written because there was their sources were not subject to copyright.
Although copyright is one mechanism to create incentives for creative activity, it is far from the only mechanism.
It used to be hard to copy. This greatly limited the effect of copying. For example in the 18th and 19th centuries, books made almost all of their money on the first print run. By the time a copier could get a copy out, there wasn't much money left to be made from the book, and so it was hard for the copier to recoup his copying costs.
Justice Breyer, back when he was a law professor, not a Supreme Court justice, wrote an interesting article about this, arguing that copyright throughout most of its history was in fact unnecessary because of the delay and costs of copying.
From the latter half of the 20th century onward, copying technology has gotten cheaper and faster. That has shifted the balance. The copier can now, especially with digital goods, get their copy out to the market fast enough to reduce or eliminate the sales of the original.
There certainly was less creative production, but history was different. Until recently copying and distributing something wasn't free and effortless. So it used to be that you could still make a decent living out of something even if somebody else copied you. This is no longer the case.
As a result many software companies are turning to server based applications, where they can physically enforce artificial scarcity. Now consumers are not only disallowed from copying and distributing the software, but (1) they are no longer even able to (2) they often lose control of their own data (3) they lose control over their usage of the software: the company can suspend their account at any time. Is this a good thing? In my opinion it is not.
Yes, because of all the issues surrounding the prevalence of copyright infringement, surely the pedantic argument around it being referred to as "stealing" is the most pressing issue to lay to rest.
Does anyone actually care about this oh-so-important issue other than people who are regularly committing the crime?
When people say copyright infringement is "stealing", they are speaking English, not Legalese. In ordinary English usage, "stealing" generally means taking something you should not take.
For instance, when a baseball team positions someone so that he can see the signals that the opposing catcher is sending to the opposing pitcher, we say he is "stealing their signals". You generally don't see people jump in to correct that and argue we should be saying he is invading their privacy or some such.
Or when your best friend makes a move on your girlfriend, no one generally nitpicks if you say "He tried to steal my girl!" and argues that since slavery was abolished in this country around 150 years ago, he cannot steal a girl--all he was doing was betraying your friendship (unless he physically tried to take her away, in which case he was trying to kidnap her, not steal her).
There are many more possible examples of common usage of "steal", but I think the above make the point.
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's a little more nuanced. Widespread copyright infringement causes those who would otherwise purchase to not purchase, which DOES deprive the copyright owner of money. There's no reason to believe all pirated IP could have been a potential purchase, but even if 1% or 2% of it was, and I'd wager to say that this figure is much higher, that's a significant amount of money.
Of course, there's also the argument that piracy increases music discovery and perhaps is a form of fair use (as a backup, alternative to a streaming service you purchase, etc), which might drive revenue in other ways. I have yet to find or hear of any substantial empirical evidence for this, though.
EDIT: by the way, I think the best way to argue this is that you are never actually given ownership of any IP, only a LICENSE to use it, therefore you are simply violating the license agreement.
Yes it is, in my opinion. It's up to the owner of the intellectual property to decide who can have access to his or her property, not you. If you refuse to accept the conditions that's fair enough, but in that case still accessing the copyrighted material is taking something that you're not entitled to.
I don't agree with the behaviour of the recording industry or with criminalizing the general public but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion.
You are missing out on the fact that 'intellectual property' is a figment of our collective imagination.
Would you respect intellectual property on the wheel or the hand axe in a stone age setting ? I know that sounds ridiculous, but intellectual property has its basis in 'information can be property' and that's so fraught with error that we would still be living in the stone age if it were true.
If you want to keep your stuff to yourself: don't publish. Have it die with you, please do not make your thoughts/writings/music/movie/whatever available to the public in order to then turn around and claim it as your own again.
Would you respect intellectual property on the wheel or the hand axe in a stone age setting ?
In such a setting there was no notion of "property" at all beyond brute force. Eventually it was discovered that greater things can be accomplished when people adopt the polite fiction that taking something doesn't always make it yours.
Do you realize that every government in the world is basing their power on their ability to hold on to what they claim is theirs by 'brute force' and that all the laws that derive from there have this 'brute force' as their direct or indirect foundation ?
If you don't believe that then try to declare independence over your garden and claim that since you are now a sovereign state you no longer need to pay tribute to the country that now surrounds yours.
I'm confused and disappointed by this comment. I can't decide if what I wrote was that unclear or if you're just flaming me, as I didn't say anything about sovereignty, anything about law not having foundation in force, or anything about desiring to declare the independence of my garden. I thought we were talking about individual property rights and have had the rug pulled out from under my feet.
Though it feels like I'm bringing a pen to a flamethrower fight, I'll attempt to clarify.
In describing property as a "polite fiction" I am acknowledging that it is not real. Brute force is as real as it ever was, but in practice the abstraction of property means it is usually the option of last resort. We've all benefited from that. To wit, I consider the present notion by contrast a few degrees beyond (more advanced than) brute force, though you are right to say that it is not beyond (free of) brute force.
So, to venture back to the original context from which we've so far strayed: although you try to cast the concept of intellectual property in an absurd light by putting it into an era of development in which it did not and could not exist, it remains true that the more fundamental concept of property was crucial to the same development beyond that era you claim intellectual property would have prevented. We grew by adopting a fiction, and now have an abundance of recorded history indicating that being a "figment of our collective imagination" is not a bad thing when it reflects the human perception of value better than reality. I trust you can see the parallel in the three centuries that ownership of a book has been distinct from the ownership of a copy of the book, or that at the very least you would not regard our intellectual development in that time as having languished.
It's not really a fiction, it's merely recognizing that humans fundamentally need to (be able to) use their minds in order to survive, must use logic, and that the only logical way to deal with other humans is therefore mutual non-aggression.
They follow some logic and can be deduced from first principles.
We would not have culture or have achieved the level of society that we have if 'intellectual property' were the normal mode and could be deduced from first principles.
Copyright and patents are supposed to foster creation and innovation but it seems they are hindering rather than helping our development in these areas.
> They follow some logic and can be deduced from first principles
Well. Some of these follow when you accept certain axioms and work from there. Not everyone accepts those axioms (at at least the same ones), if the vast variance in "human rights" across the globe is any indication.
Now of course it can be argued that only a few countries in the "civilized western world" understand logic and can come up with the proper first principles. (People have told me that)
It's logically fine to reject axioms. You could argue, for example, that torture is morally good because you disagree with the axiom that suffering is bad. That's logically consistent, and logic alone is built on axioms and therefore cannot discern which axioms are "better."
> " but simply taking something that's not yours is not the right solution, in my opinion."
I think that was his point - you're not taking something that's not yours.
Say I take a photo of your cup, then feed the 3d image into a 3d printer, so that I have an exact replica of your cup, I haven't stolen your cup have I.
It could be argued that you have stolen the design, in as far as the concept of stealing applies. Just as if you download a movie ripped from a dvd, there is no argument about whether you have stolen the DVD. The content is separable from the medium.
I agree with you, and indeed that is where the argument lies. You have deprived the owner of the design of their right to determine how that design is distributed, in a sense. Whether there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of intellectual property and whether this right in itself is legitimate is a different question. All I ask is that we do not conflate ownership of the copy with ownership of the rights to the design.
>> You have deprived the owner of the design of their right to determine how that design is distributed, in a sense.
But the whole notion of 'right to determine how IP is distributed' is an artificial, and very recent creation. Why should people have such rights? Why do we need them when we functioned fine as a society for so many millennia without them.
Sure. And I'm in no way arguing for that notion. What I am arguing against is confusing the theft of a copy or object with interfering with said right, legitimate or not. My point is that you have not deprived the owner of the copy/object/medium of anything, but that is a straw man. The real question is whether these rights, which are in fact being violated by the reproduction, are legitimate. I agree with you that they are generally not, from my own moral perspective at least.
In actual fact, there's more 'slaves' today than at any time in history.
For one, legalized slavery in the US - prisoners are forced to manufacture household appliances, number plates, military uniforms etc. If they refuse, they get solitary confinement and other punishments.
Perhaps the concept of 'freedom' is a good one, but it doesn't map in any way to the real world.
It's not like they created the concept of 'freedom' and then slavery ended.
A definition of traditional (tangible, physical) property is easier to formalize than your vague notion of a "design." Basically, traditional property is an item with mass that is scarce (can only be in one location at a time).
What's your definition of a design? If I simply think of "the first prime number with 500 billion decimal digits," do I instantly command the right to control the distribution of that number?
I'd define a design as the information sufficient to produce a copy that is to some degree recognizable as the original (in terms of visuals, aesthetic effect, etc). An ornamental cup is separable in a sense, you can make a matching saucer with the same pattern of ornamentation, and you can also make a cup without the ornament on it. In one case it is a copy of the function, in the other a copy of the design. There has been some degree of discussion about this in relation to the 3d printing revolution that is currently happening (which I'm very happy to be part of, my printers are happily replicating). Here's some links if you're interested in the sense in which "design" is used in relation to physical objects:
I do not believe there is a counter-argument to the "treating data as large numbers makes it ridiculous to assert control over it". I agree with you on this point. Unfortunately, the law will need to be modernized to take that into account, and that has not yet happened.
It's in society's interest to compensate creators for their work. But it was a terrible idea to grant them the power to control which other people use that work, and how. It should be work for hire, or supported by a tax, or anything that doesn't so severely damage the work's value to society and especially to other creators.
> Copyright infringement is not stealing. ... [it] happens when I don't follow your artificial scarcity rules."
These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible.
Yes, copying is a good thing; it's how the human race makes progress. But life is a movie, not a snapshot; even in the not-so-long run, it would be counterproductive to elevate copying to the status of an absolute, preemptive Good Thing.
Consider:
1. Someone has to invest money in creating intellectual property. At a minimum, the actual creators have to come up with enough money to buy food, shelter, etc., for themselves and perhaps their families while they're doing their creative thing.
(I won't even get into whether the creators' investment of their time is deserving of compensation; I happen to think it is, but that's not important here.)
2. The harsh reality is that investors normally will not make such investments unless they have at least a reasonable expectation of getting their money back (purely-altruistic motives being rare).
3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money for the fruits of the creative process, they're highly likely to give a thumbs-down to that particular request for their money.
(As an analogy, imagine the effect that Hugo Chavez's 'nationalization' -- read: confiscation -- of foreign oil companies' interests in Venezuela has had on the willingness of those and other companies to risk any more money there.)
4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect.
5. That's why intellectual property law tries to strike a reasonable balance between the interests of creators and their backers and the interests of the public. EXAMPLE: The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights, but only for limited times. EXAMPLE: Copyright is limited by the fair-use doctrine.
6. There's often room for argument about whether any particular aspect of IP law is productive in supporting creativity. For example, it can be legitimately debated whether patents for business methods are a net positive or a net negative.
7. But a blanket statement, implying that egregious copyright infringement should never be punished as criminal behavior, is short-sighted.
>These artificial scarcity rules help make creativity economically possible.
This is the common utilitarian refrain, though utilitarian arguments usually include some cost-benefit analysis. In the IP debate, it is simply (and erroneously) assumed to be a net positive.
>3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money...
Then perhaps it's not a sustainable business model. Perhaps that's why they spend money on such things as DRM, or making online-only services. Perhaps, in the absence of state coercion, some other things will be invented to deal with the potential loss of profit.
>4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect.
What "effect" would that be, less profit? And thus activities of others which result in less profit for you should be illegal? I'm sure you don't think that, but it necessarily falls out of your utilitarian position.
The curious task of economics
is to demonstrate to men
how little they really know
about what they imagine they can design.
That's not really relevant to other industries though, for several reasons:
- It doesn't cost zero dollars and almost zero effort to copy a piece of clothing.
- It's not even allowed to make a perfect copy of a piece of clothing, because of trademarks.
- People decide which clothes to buy primarily based on the brand. Much of the value to a lot of people of a piece of clothing is in the little brand name on it, which you are not allowed to replicate.
If everyone could copy and distribute her clothes verbatim including the brand name instantly and for free, and distribute them to millions of people, then I think her opinion might be just a tad different.
I'm going to mostly ignore your claims that intellectual property protection are required for innovation, and just mention these: quicksort, most network protocols, loads of page replacement algorithms, tons of programming languages and implementations, etc.
I disagree with your claim that intellectual property laws are a continuum and that a reasonable balance can to be found. When it comes to digital software/media, any intellectual property protection at all boils down to authorizing the ownership of an integer. I don't mean this metaphorically or rhetorically, I mean that a patent/copyright/etc. on a piece of software or a digital media file is quite literally a claim of ownership of a natural number.
If someone else wants simply to distribute a list of the natural numbers in order, they would legally have to omit the numbers which represented patented/copyrighted works. You might brush off this argument by saying "that's silly, since the numbers representing a song or operating system would be so large that it's highly unlikely for anyone to accidentally stumble on such a number." That's not good enough for me. People have constructed (discovered) proofs of concept of several illegal numbers.
The illegal number argument is a red herring. First of all it depends on your encoding. Second most humans in the world seem to be able to understand the difference between a number and e.g. a piece of software. There might not be a difference theoretically, but in practice it works fine.
Would you want to allow people to print their own money? After all that's just arranging a series of atoms in a particular way. You can't disallow arranging atoms, or the world will come to a halt. Yet in practice these arbitrary rules seem to work fine.
Saying that you understand the difference between a number and a piece of software is incorrect if you are unable to voice or in any way formalize the difference. I don't see the difference: if I store the number 82 in binary as a byte of memory, it is physically identical to storing the letter 'R' encoding as ASCII. If I concatenate thousands of these bytes, I'll have a huge binary number, which isn't illegal, right? What if that number happens to be the ASCII encoding of a novel protected by copyright? Not only is there no theoretical or intuitive difference, there is literally no physical difference at all. The same bytes are stored in memory; the same exact positioning of bits of silicon (or magnetic particles, dark/light spots on a metal disc, etc.) exist.
If we had the technology to make copies on an atomic level, I believe this would indeed pose a fundamental philosophical and legal debate, especially for patented things like manufacturing materials and drugs. With money, however, intellectual property has nothing to do with it, and (at least in the US) counterfeiting is a completely separate orthogonal crime.
Can you provide a formal definition of murder? I take it you cannot. Does that mean that we should allow murder?
That a law with a different name is protecting money is irrelevant. The point is disallowing manipulating atoms in a certain way. Another one: can you give a formal definition of what constitutes a $1 bill? Again, you cannot. Does that mean that we should allow copying money?
A formal definition is not necessary for something to be put in the law.
> I'm going to mostly ignore your claims that intellectual property protection are required for innovation, and just mention these: quicksort, most network protocols, loads of page replacement algorithms, tons of programming languages and implementations, etc.
IP protection might not always be required for innovation, but if you compare countries that have "fair and balanced" IP protection -- really, property rights generally -- against those that don't, you find that the former seem to do better in fostering innovation.
Certainly there are people and companies who create things for the joy of it, for reputation, for the indirect benefits that come from the existence of a widely-adopted standard, for purely-altruistic reasons, etc. Good for them; the world needs more of them.
But sometimes creators need to get actual money, from others who don't necessarily share the joy, to buy equipment, travel, hired help, and other things. And that usually entails a legal system that helps innovation investors recoup the 'capital' they put at risk.
--------------------
> ... a patent/copyright/etc. on a piece of software or a digital media file is quite literally a claim of ownership of a natural number.
Does that mean that JK Rowling is claiming ownership of the letters A, B, etc.?
There may be confounding variables when comparing nations' IP protection laws.
I don't think that, in a world without IP protection, people would only create things for joy, reputation, standard adoption, or altruism. Companies would still want software, and would be willing to pay people to develop it.
Lack of IP protection isn't the same thing as the Free Software Movement. In a world with IP protection, you could still sell proprietary software without disclosing source code. There would still be an incentive for competing companies to constantly improve their software to outdo each other.
I don't understand your Rowling analogy. What I'm saying is that Rowling's copyright of one of her books is equivalent to ownership of, for example, the natural number equal to the ASCII encoding of the text of the book.
> If someone else wants simply to distribute a list of the natural numbers in order, they would legally have to omit the numbers which represented patented/copyrighted works.
That is not correct. A list of natural numbers in order would not infringe any copyrights. If, by coincidence, one of the numbers on that (very large, completely impractical) list happened to match what you get when you take some copyrighted work and encode it as a number under some particular reversible encoding, it would not be an infringement, because it would not be a copy of the copyrighted work.
Copyright does not protect against independent creation. As a practical matter, of course, if a latter work B is similar to a prior work A, most courts will believe that B'a author had access to A and copied (perhaps subconsciously). However, if B's author could show that he really never had access to A, never had anyone describe A to him, and so on, so could not possibly have been influenced by it, then B would not be an infringement of A.
What you propose is inconsistent and vague. An MP3 file of a copyrighted work is literally a natural number. That's the way it's represented on disc, in memory, etc. If surrounding that number with predecessors and successors somehow makes the number not an infringement, then why don't we create a p2p network that does just that?
I'd argue that a time-limited copyright on a excessively complicated number that you worked very hard to find is reasonable. Certainly, ad-infinitum ownership of a number, which is what copyrights effectively are at the moment, is not. A good starting point would be the original copyright terms of 14 years. I would have no objections to copyrights that expire after 14 years.
> 1. Someone has to invest money in creating intellectual property.
Most intellectual property takes the form of time invested rather than a monetary investment, and plenty of 'art' as we know it today was just commissioned work ('work for hire') when it was first produced.
> At a minimum, the actual creators have to come up with enough money to buy food, shelter, etc., for themselves and perhaps their families while they're doing their creative thing.
This is true, but between the stereotypical 'starving artist' and the 'rockstar milionaire' there is a broad range of normalcy that plenty of artists can aspire to. Britney wouldn't be one of those though.
> (I won't even get into whether the creators' investment of their time is deserving of compensation; I happen to think it is, but that's not important here.)
I think it is, but only if they can sell their product the first time out. The ransom model is an interesting concept that has a direct measurement of perceived value to a group of fans or some other form of market or audience. Once released the product becomes part of the public domain.
> 2. The harsh reality is that investors normally will not make such investments unless they have at least a reasonable expectation of getting their money back (purely-altruistic motives being rare).
This is true. So the quantity of works will go down, hopefully the quality would go up. That remains to be seen of course, but I'm fairly sure that if it were not for subsidized art we'd see either a larger unemployment level or more people in the workforce (where I live).
> 3. If prospective investors know that copiers will quickly destroy the ability to charge money for the fruits of the creative process, they're highly likely to give a thumbs-down to that particular request for their money.
No, they may have to find a way to get their moneys worth at the moment of release knowing that if they don't do it then they will never do it. This will reduce the avenues available to them, and will likely result in a lower margin but that does not mean that it won't happen at all. It's a matter of degree, not an absolute.
> (As an analogy, imagine the effect that Hugo Chavez's 'nationalization' -- read: confiscation -- of foreign oil companies' interests in Venezuela has had on the willingness of those and other companies to risk any more money there.)
Contrary to your view on this in the longer term this may actually benefit Venezuela more than it may hurt it in the shorter term. Oil will likely get more valuable, if Chavez' antics cause Venezuela to be one of the last oil reserves on the American continent that might work out very well for them. I'm cynical enough to suspect that being the people in charge of a valuable resource is probably a health risk because a 'war of liberation' is a viable option when you're sitting on a resource that someone else wants badly.
> 4. So while copyright infringement may not seem like stealing, it can have a remarkably similar economic effect.
No, it does not have a similar economic effect. Copyright infringement in any particular case could only be shown to have an economic effect if you can actually prove that a sale would have been made and as far as I know that is not possible without visiting alternative universes. You can make a statement to that effect by observing aggregates but you'll never be sure of it.
> 5. That's why intellectual property law tries to strike a reasonable balance between the interests of creators and their backers and the interests of the public.
Right, which is why Mickey Mouse is still not in the public domain and singing 'happy birthday' is copyright infringement. The interests of the public went out the window as soon as the various organizations realized that copyrights (and patents) are licenses to print money in very large amounts.
> EXAMPLE: The U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and inventors exclusive rights, but only for limited times.
Which have since been extended multiple times, and which now can be assumed to be extended indefinitely until the opposite is proven.
> EXAMPLE: Copyright is limited by the fair-use doctrine.
Which is further and further eroded.
> 6. There's often room for argument about whether any particular aspect of IP law is productive in supporting creativity. For example, it can be legitimately debated whether patents for business methods are a net positive or a net negative.
Try to argue they're a net positive, I'm really interested in how that could ever be the case.
> 7. But a blanket statement, implying that egregious copyright infringement should never be punished as criminal behavior, is short-sighted.
No, I think that's just fine. Criminal laws are supposed to be used to weed out the 'worst' people and to protect the 'good' people. We have civil laws for everything else and this should be a civil matter, after all, you don't have a time machine, you can't visit that other universe, any damage assessment is purely speculative, there is no victim, there are no bodies, there are no crimes.
Just some people that may have received less money than they assumed they were going to make. And most of those people are not the 'starving artists' who routinely get shafted by the exact same groups that pretend to have their best interests (and ours!) at heart.
> Most intellectual property takes the form of time invested rather than a monetary investment ...
Certainly that's true in the case of some Web-based businesses. It is assuredly not the case in medicine, energy, pharmaceuticals, etc.
And even if it were true in general, the people who are investing their time -- sometimes for months and even years -- have to put food on the table, pay the light bills, buy shoes for the kids, etc. Forcing everyone with an idea into the starving-artist mode is a good way to discourage people from pursuing their ideas.
------------------
> Copyright infringement in any particular case could only be shown to have an economic effect if you can actually prove that a sale would have been made and as far as I know that is not possible without visiting alternative universes. You can make a statement to that effect by observing aggregates but you'll never be sure of it.
Society makes a lot of decisions by observing aggregates. We require kids to go to school through age 16, even though we'll never be sure that any given kid wouldn't do better by dropping out and going to work at age 14.
In the case of medicine I would hope that we have better motivations than just profits to keep us going, in energy the profit motive will suffice (and it will do so even when there is no financial gain).
Scientific discovery was here long before intellectual property and scientists were not so much driven by profits as they were driven by curiosity. Nowadays in academia ego is also a big factor (it may have been in the past as well).
> This is true. So the quantity of works will go down, hopefully the quality would go up.
Why do you think that less investment will lead to higher quality? That seems like wishful thinking to me. Lower quantity does not imply higher quality.
Investment in for instance music is not to bring new great music to light but to make money, pure and simple.
Check out the latest top 100 and tell me that more money leads to higher quality with a straight face.
It's all about safe bets and marketing, not at all about quality.
True, lower quantity does not imply higher quality but it will put the focus on those that are driven to create, which tends to have a bias towards quality as compared to simply those that want to make lots of money.
Denying a resource would also include denying benefits from that resource, right?
In that case, if you distribute say, a movie, for free without permission from the publisher, you're effectively "taking" his "money" that he would've earned from the display of his material in a controlled environment. Wouldn't that be stealing?
For that to be true in individual cases you'd have to come up with some pretty hard evidence that a sale would indeed have been consummated.
In the case of the pirate bay the quantity is so large that some aggregate effect can be postulated without stretching credulity, and I think that is the major reason why this judgment sticks even if there is not a single item of hard proof of any lost sale directly caused by the pirate bay.
Sweet. I now have a way to get back all money I have ever put into bad stocks. The "stole" my "right" to earn money from a good stock by sucking! Put the bankers in jai!
Thats a false assumption in that it assumes that without copyright not only will there be no more media, all currently existing media (which is already far, far more than you could ever experience, even once, in an entire life) will disappear.
Hint, it won't. And at this point we might want to ask ourself if it isn't worth taking the hit that will result from removing copyright on already existing goods, since there is a limit to how much media we can consume, and we already have plenty.
But assuming you don't want to read an actual book... basically, the original reason that copyright was created was to encourage contributions to the public domain. By giving incentives to creators, we'd enrich the commons. However, the system does nothing of the sort today. This indicates to me that at the very least, we need to re-think the way we handle intellectual property. Even if you disagree, there are still many flaws in the implementation of intellectual property laws. Mostly, there are large questions as to who 'wins' if two people invent something simultaneously in different parts of the world (this happens quite a bit), the assumption that we can have a single repository of all useful knowledge that's been created, and that we can have skilled enough individuals working in said office to determine if something is novel.
In addition to reform, I'd actually go a bit farther and say it's not necessary at all. There are a few different arguments, actually, depending on which angle you'd like to pursue. For those on the far, far left, IP seems to have the same accumulation and exploitation problems that private property has, but worse. Big companies have entire divisions that are basically IP farms, then abuse those portfolios to keep new, innovative companies out. Then, there's the leaky abstraction argument: IP law is trying to shoehorn existing property laws onto the concept of knowledge, but I'd argue that this abstraction is exceptionally leaky, to the point of not making sense. There are also the examples made in Against Intellectual Monopoly, showing many instances where IP was actually harmful for society, and where people actually made more money by disregarding their abilities to enforce infringement.
Anyway, I'm almost to the point of rambling. My point is that this is a complicated and nuanced topic, and one can be opposed to IP without simply yelling "LOLOL I WANT MOVIES 4 FREE!!!111"
If you infringe my copyright, you ARE taking away a resource I had before the infringement: the right to negotiate the terms under which you would be granted access to my work.
I just had a small vision when I read this article.
In two years time Voddler (or something like it) will be big for movies, Spotify will be big for music and people will stop purchasing things entirely.
The "Pirate movement" will see this as progress and smart people going around the old geezers in charge, because we don't have to pay outrageous amounts of money for a piece of plastic we don't even want.
The media industry will call it a success in their anti-piracy harshness and will cite cases like this as the reason for the new ways to crop up.
Both parties will think they're right, and in the end the only thing that has changed is the distribution-system.
The 2 year timescale is probably off, but i'm pretty sure everything will end with those idiots saying "It's a good thing we put kids in jail because otherwise we wouldn't live in the wonderful world we do today."
"As far as I remember these guys declared never to pay the fines."
Not quite sure what you mean by this, but once the collector comes, he'll just take whatever you have. I don't know about Swedish personal bankruptcy law but even in the best case if debts like this can be discharged by bankruptcy, going to jail for half a year, being flat-out broke for something like 5 years after that, having all your wages and possessions confiscated, and then having to re-build your life at 40 doesn't seem like a sacrifice the 'intellectual property is evil' cause is worth.
Does anyone know something about these guys? Do they have families, companies, jobs? Eventually something like this had to happen of course, but still, I'm sure these guys were 100% convinced they were the Good Guys and Good Guys Prevail In The End, so this must be devastating...
Their involvement with the pirate bay were well known, and I suspect known by their respective employers. They are also rather well-known within the Swedish Pirate movement.
I suspect the people who won't hire them after the verdict wouldn't have hired them even before it since their involvement with the pirate bay was no secret.
The pirate movement in Sweden is one of the most vocal movements about civil rights and against host of laws that are considered to be in dispute with civil rights, so for this movement they're more or less martyrs rather than just some nerds who built a tracker and a trademark.
Recent laws (mass-surveillance, corporations being given more investigative rights than the police, etc) and events in Sweden have in a way bridged current civil rights and rule-of-law issues with the pirate movement.
It'll be interesting to see wheter this connection remains now that Sweden has a new liberal party which tackle many of the same issues the pirate party does, or wheter they'll become more separated with time.
[Edit: Rephrased section into 'considered to be in dispute with civil rights']
AFAIK, every one of them lives in Thailand/Cambodia except for Carl Lundström.
I think they were all aware (except Carl Lundström) that luck would run out sooner or later, and from what I've seen, they had the plans all laid out on how to skip jail and fine.
I would be surprised if any one of them except Lundström would serve any of their prison times, or pay any sum of money to pay for their fines.
Great, so now they are basically exiled out of Europe to a third-world country where they can only legally stay for 6 months (with a few possibilities of extensions but still), and will have to restrict themselves to the ever-shrinking list of countries that do not have automatic flag systems set up for signaling people that are wanted on international warrants. This includes not being able to visit family for the rest of your life and not being able to visit your parents' funerals.
Furthermore, any social security or pension entitlements they may have had will automatically be confiscated so they will have to provide for themselves, in fore-mentioned third-world country, presumably without a sizable starting capital, and without being able to take on any consulting jobs that require them to travel to Europe, and potentially other Western countries (I'm not familiar with international agreements on this matter, but most countries have no problems extraditing foreign nationals, especially not when they're convicted in criminal cases).
Sounds like a great "plan to skip jail and fine".
This ain't Prison Break. There's no way to escape from convictions that don't require profound sacrifices for the rest of your life. I can't understand why everybody is so dismissive - "oh they'll be fine". No they won't, they're fucked for the rest of their lives.
Well, I didn't say it was a good plan. ;)
I was merely pointing out that I thought they were anticipating that this was how things would turn out.
I would like to add:
The statute of limitations here in Sweden for a jail time of <1 year is max 10 years or so (according to Swedish Wikipedia it's 2 years, but I'm not sure if the fines complicate the matter).
So the punishment is that they basically can't return to their homeland (or likely Europe) without being declared bankrupt?
That's still a fairly hefty penalty. Even if I chose to live elsewhere the idea of never being able to return home without a fairly major sanction would be a bummer.
Not really, they simply converted their monetary holdings into fame and high social standing; its a trade many people do small-scale when they by expensive dresses and designer-furniture in the hope of impressing others. These guys simply went all in.
The prison-sentences are short, and will only get them even more respect and higher-social standing within their peer group, broadly defined. Since girls tend to like such people, they can expect to be able to get young and pretty girlfriends and will have no problem becoming writers for various blogs/magazines.
I am quite serious - Scott Peterson got a marriage proposal an hour after he was sent to death row, and while they haven't committed any murders, lots of girls fall for "bad boys" and they will have some reputation.
A couple of nerds are going to get laid for going to jail over file sharing, in a case most famous only on slashdot and a few other niche websites? Their 'social standing' with a couple of visitors of said websites, most of whom they never met, never will meet and don't even know the names of, is going up, and this is beneficial to them how? They have (as far as I can tell) no demonstrated writing skills, no recognizable name to speak off, and they're going to get jobs based on that? And even if they get a job, anything they'll make will still be confiscated!
The reality distortion field is strong on this one. Just going to jail doesn't make one a 'bad boy'. I happen to remotely know a couple of people who did jail time over fraud charges (which is the 'crime class' there guys fall in, and the group they'll hang out with inside), and let me tell you, they really haven't turned into women magnets all of a sudden just because they've been in jail.
One of them, Carl Lundström, has quite some money. For the other guys, I think they don't have very much in terms of personal means (unless the prosecutions version where they earned lots of money is true).
30 million kronor is around 4.2 mil USD. I'm guessing that's not going to happen.
I lost track of the story shortly after they were found guilty. Did they get scooped up by the police or are they in refuge somewhere?
I applaud these gents for standing so tall against their attackers, even against the threat of a judgment like this.
It's just a shame that the music industry is still wasting time on issues like these. Thank god I wasn't arrested for sharing cassette tapes in my early teens.
And the RIAA lands another awesome strike of the sword into the ocean.
The more they fight piracy in this way, the further they push file trading into completely untrackable recesses of the internet.
It's actually a good thing in the long run, I suppose. Between this and the Homeland DNS grab, soon we'll have an alternative internet where everything is encrypted, routed through ZKS systems, untrackable, and completely outside of government control.
'Cept it won't be for long - as soon as a program is written that works like freenet but allows you to download songs like napster did, any teen-age kid will get their hands on it, and it will replace napster as the worlds most used program.
I'm sure an influx of a few million well-connected nodes on college campuses (running on standard ports of other services and disguised to look like valid packets of those services) would help sort out the speed issues.
It's easy to build alternatives to file sharing. You can be as inventive as you want. DNS on the other hand is a standard. No matter how many alternatives you cook up to it, you have to replace to many things in too many places for them to work.
Either that, or simply install something at the client's place that bypasses the whole system. Works, but somehow I doubt DNS is so easy to replicate.
Good question. The verdict actually states that you normally shouldn't be sentenced to prison for this type of crime. Instead the court motivates the prison sentences with upholding "law-abidingness" as file-sharing has become "a problem for society". Which is a bit scary if you ask me.
> As a citizen of neighbouring Denmark, I find this a truly grim day. How can something like copyright infringement result in a prison term ?
I'd guess it is similar to the US: if you aren't doing it commercially, you can't get prison--it is purely a civil matter. If you are doing it commercially, then it can be a crime punishable by prison.
TPB was/is commercial, making millions a year monetizing copyright infringement via advertising.
Murdering bits (deleting them) will get you nothing, but copying bits (creating more of them) will get you a jail sentence. And in this case it's allowing access to bits that allow other people to copy bits,
It's a bizarre world, and I think stuff like this is a direct consequence of subscribing to legal fictions.
Between rulings like this and the pressure that these companies are exerting on small websites, it would be impossible for a Youtube to emerge today. What's more, this has a sort of chilling effect, with more and more companies shying away from potentially dangerous ideas and moving to safe, consumer internet applications like a million twitter clients that bore you to death. I fear for the future of the internet as I know it.
The only way I can see this type of piracy being over in two years is if the media industries up and die so there's nothing left to steal.
I wonder how much this case actually cost the media industries to litigate. The actual fines involved are relatively small, so it would be interesting to know whether the record companies will be able to use the fines to cover their legal fees.