This is the scary part about bills like SOPA. Who cares if they're constitutional, who care if they could stand up in court, who cares if the public supports them? They do their job anyway, even if they don't pass.
Glenn Greenwald was right about this - we didn't win the SOPA battle; we lost it. The very next day after all the hullabaloo and protests, the government went ahead and showed that the powers that SOPA would have been redundant - it already has those powers anyway.
It didn't take Megaupload down without a trial, without due process. They took them down as part of a 2 year long investigation. While it's possible that they timed the takedown with SOPA, I would err on the side of coincidence. This wasn't an operation entirely within the US. They had the coordination of law enforcement in other counties. This isn't something where they just had a late-night idea that they decided to act on.
It did, in fact, take Megaupload down without a trial. You can argue about whether an indictment represents due process or not, but the Queen of Hearts seems to have set the rule here: sentence first, trial afterwards. The enormous libraries of users' data stored at Megaupload are likely to be burned (in effect) before the trial even begins, and it is very unlikely that the company can return to operation even if found not guilty on every count. Thus it follows in the footsteps of Veoh and Diamond. (Diamond produced the first portable MP3 player, you may recall. It was a huge market success, but defending it in court bankrupted them.)
Generally speaking, "due process" does not mean that a lot of policemen came to an agreement. It means the accused had an open trial in court at which they were allowed to defend themselves.
I didn't realize that the Megaupload employees had already been handed sentences. Could you point me towards this information?
> It means the accused had an open trial in court
> at which they were allowed to defend themselves.
All of this 'due process' talk comes across as to me like:
"Officer? Why are you arresting me? I haven't been convicted yet! Where's my trial? Where's my due process? I'm not supposed to be arrested before my trial, right?"
The Feds seem to be treating this like any other illegal business and busting it up prior to taking it to court. The only difference here is that whether or not the business is illegitimate or not is in a bit of a legal grey area.
If the Feds think that you're using your storefront to smuggle drugs, do you think that they'll wait for a trial to bust you up? Busting your business up is part of the process of taking you to trial.
> Generally speaking, "due process" does
> not mean that a lot of policemen came to an agreement
It also doesn't mean, "my life can continue completely uninterrupted until a court hands down a verdict."
> It means the accused had an open trial
> in court at which they were allowed to
> defend themselves.
That seems to be the plan. Could you point me towards your sources claiming that the Feds don't intend to bring a trial against MegaUpload + employees?
> I didn't realize that the Megaupload employees had already been handed sentences.
The site is down. The company has all its assets seized and is unable to pay hosting bills. FBI "gave permission" to delete the data (never mind it's evidence, BTW), inducing the hosting to get rid of this unpaid-for burden. The damage to their brand is enormous - mainstream media parrot the FBI line and report Megaupload as taken down pirate site, clear-cut case. The trust of legitimate users is forever lost. Even if found not guilty, when the case finally gets to trial in a few years, the company will never be able to recover and restart its business.
It doesn't matter how long they run for, how thorough they are, or what they find, investigations are not trials, nor do they constitute due process. Your statement is obviously false on its face.
due process. noun. "An established course for judicial proceedings or other governmental activities designed to safeguard the legal rights of the individual."
The law, and due process, were followed to the letter. A grand jury indicted MegaUpload of racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit copyright amongst other charges.
A grand jury hears just one side of the story. Prosecutors use a GJ when they don't have solid proof of wrongdoing, but just think that there's something going on.
This is perhaps the most naive statement I have ever read on Hacker News. Domain seizures don't have temporary consequences, and law enforcement knows this. Once they've seized the domain, they've done all the damage they need to do. Everything else is just window dressing. Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead.
As much as prosecutors would love to, we don't put people to death before they are found guilty. We should not allow the equivalent to happen to websites without giving them the opportunity to present counterarguments to a judge. They should be given notice that the domain is going to be seized, and arguments should be scheduled. Domain seizures are far too easy to obtain given that they mean the absolute and total destruction of the target business, without recourse, regardless of the ultimate outcome of any trial. That is hardly fair and certainly not the way the US system of "justice" is supposed to operate.
Tomorrow morning, the feds could release Kim DotCom, give him all of his money, apologize, and immediately return their domains, and it wouldn't matter. The site, and the multi-million dollar business behind it, are dead.
I find that difficult to believe. If tomorrow, the people behind MegaUpload were released, and their assets were released, and they were told they could go back to running MegaUpload as they had done so, I suspect they would, and the users would flock back to it.
Your claim is that websites require unique protection with regards to seizures. I have difficulty granting that, because if you seize all of the assets of any business, that business is, at the least [1], temporarily on hold. So, unless you can provide an argument for why websites are unique, then the process you propose would have to apply to all businesses. I have difficulty with that.
[1] I mean "at the least" literally, as a lower-bound. I don't want to get into a side argument about the likely fate of MegaUpload, since my point is that MegaUpload's fate is no different from that of other businesses.
I think an argument can be made that domains do require special protection. Web-based businesses are living, breathing entities that are permanently damaged when offline. Simply look at the before/after traffic statistics of the few sites that have been wrestled back from the claws of the government after seizure. The sites are dead.
The real world equivalent of domain seizure isn't temporarily restraining a business from certain questionable activities. It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty. If they are found not guilty, then, after more legal wrangling, they'll get the empty lot back. They are then "free" to resume their former operation.
It's more like shutting down a restaurant for sanitation violations.
If they open up, they might have trouble getting business if everyone thinks there are probably still rat turds in the food. So they need to advertise, maybe "change management", maybe change the name.
Who cares if the old domain is dead, if a new one can be set up that runs the same way and is just as popular?
It is to fire missiles at the corporate headquarters the moment they are indicted, destroying the building, and then posting a billboard on the empty land saying how the company that used to be there and all of their customers are criminals even if they haven't yet been found guilty.
I find that characterization both hyperbolic and inaccurate. An analogy I am much more comfortable with is seizing a business's physical store, locking the doors and keeping the key during the trial. I'm more comfortable with it because it smells like the kind of analogy a judge would make when interpreting how existing laws should apply to the internet.
So, can you provide an argument for why seizing the physical building is okay, while seizing the domain and servers is not okay? If you cannot, then what you propose would have to also apply to physical buildings, which means you're proposing a fundamental change to how seizures work before a criminal trial.
The logic behind unannounced seizures is valid. If announcement was given and MU were violating the law, it's reasonable to believe they would immediately take action to obfuscate and obscure any evidence against them. It is also likely there is little to no physical evidence against them, and as we all well know, electronic evidence can easily be disposed of without trail.
Corporations are not people, and by seizing assets and personnel the authorities have committed no murder. If anything MU has now become a household name and I find it very hard to believe their business would simply vanish overnight if acquitted.
By the time these seizures occur, they have already collected all of the evidence they can from their public website, and there is nothing that would preclude the government from serving search warrants prior to serving notice of a domain seizure.
As to your comment about Corporations not being people...may I introduce you to Corporate Personhood. According to Wikipedia....
Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations under the law, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person.....
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a headnote—not part of the opinion—the reporter noted that the Chief Justice began oral argument by stating, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."
Yes, corporate personhood is a useful legal construct so that you can do business with a company, and not just a person within a company. It doesn't mean a corporation is a person who can be killed by bankruptcy or who can marry or vote.
If you sold 10,000 widgets to FooCorp you don't want FooCorp to claim your contract was really with one specific person within FooCorp that is no longer there. If they do something wrong, you want to be able to sue FooCorp and not its 67123 employees.
Wasn't btjunkie used primarily to violate copyright?
If so, it seems you are mistaken about the outrage regarding SOPA. The outrage was not defending our right to free movies. When Megaupload got taken down I started seeing all these posts that seem to be under the impression that the Internet had rallied around the right to get everything digital for free/cheap against the creators' wishes, which is not the case.
So a knife is an arms. But it does not mean It's unlawful. If you are after copyright violators, go for them. Declaring knives outlaw is not the solution.
In this analogy, somebody tried and failed to make knives illegal. Meanwhile, the government has gotten more serious about going after those who willingly supply knives primarily to those who will use them illegally. And one such supplier has ceased business volutnarily
No it's not an exact analogy. For instance, knives can be made from any substance, and by anybody. This site, btjunkie is not a supplier of knives. It's a place where someone can find who builds and sells knives.
The point is, nobody has made file sharing in general illegal. But the government is going after sites that primarily enable illegal file sharing. And some sites that do this are shutting down voluntarily.
Injustice is making people close sites and get out of business even if they are not doing anything illegal. For another analogy, this is like a pawn show deciding to close because some unrelated guys makes drug dealing inside. In this situation does governments go after pawn shops? or only after dealers? Better yet why not make drugs legal and receive taxes for this deals?
> Injustice is making people close sites and get out of business even if they are not doing anything illegal.
Is there any evidence that anyone made btjunkie shut down? It sounds voluntary. Presumably they know they are doing something illegal and have chosen to shut down.
> For another analogy, this is like a pawn show deciding to close because some unrelated guys makes drug dealing inside. In this situation does governments go after pawn shops? or only after dealers?
If it can be shown that the pawn show was designed primarily to facilitate illegal conduct inside, then it's not really "some unrelated guys".
> Better yet why not make drugs legal and receive taxes for this deals?
Why not make murder-for-hire legal and tax it? Let's not make analogies just so that we can appeal to whether some other activity should or should not be legal in the analogy. And I don't even know what your point about taxes would since btjunkie likely paid taxes on their ad revenue and donations.
We can just discuss whether copyright should exist rather than resorting to silly analogies. I am not even close to happy with the current situation with copyright. My personal view is that copying for personal consumption should not be illegal. But copying or enabling copying for profit is much more nefarious to me.
I gather you think copyright should be entirely abolished and it should be legal to profit from distributing content created by someone else against their wishes. I'll respect that opinion. But it has nothing to do with SOPA, and nothing to do with people engaged in entirely legal activities being pursued.
If you believe the current laws are unjust, then please be clear that this is your stance rather than pretending that they aren't being broken. And please don't pretend that Wiki pedia and thousands of other sites blacked out for a day in support of illegal file sharing.
No I do not mean copyright should be abolished. No It's fundamental security guard for producers. But as you mention current situation with copyright handling is a mess.
File sharing must be a right and this desire should be fulfilled via content producers. Making people ache for buying content and going after people making it easier is not a way to make consumers happy.
Nobody wants to watch 15 minutes of undesired videos and adds. Instead they go pirate. Nobody wants to buy physical media anymore. Nobody likes DRM content which disables them even using two different players for their enjoyment. Even yet, Hollywood and Music producers are making more and more money.
This is where the producers are making the wrong. They believe they have the every sole right to put their consumers to agony. And if someone tries to lower this pain, it's in no way can be rightful. They just try to punish them for their efforts. As we have seen with Hulu.com, Groveshark.com or last.fm. The producers are greedy. If these sites pay royalties or not, they are not happy and they do want more. They want them to make their way of restriction for their customers. In the first place these sites are here for not using that restrictions.
So everytime the consumers lose. Government and producers could sit on a table with piratebay or btjunkie and think how could the situation be solved by working together. Everybody could win.
For the SOPA side of the story,
I'm living in Turkey. And I do know what could SOPA do to Internet. Because we have 5651 and BTK and living in agony. Turkish government department for information security mails websites to do self-censorship. They do hijack dns without court orders and without reasoning. SOPA is not about filesharing. It's about Governments and Producers right for censorship.
And by the way these two subjects are really not related.
I agree with the majority of this post. It would benefit everyone involved if those who produce content would get up to speed with technology.
However!
> This is where the producers are making the wrong. They believe they have the every sole right to put their consumers to agony.
They are not putting us through agony by producing content and then fumbling the delivery. They have no obligation to us to produce the content we want in the way we want to consume it: At worst they are not affecting us at all. We can simply not consume the content. If you consume content in a way that agonizes you, that is your own decision.
> And by the way these two subjects are really not related.
Presumably you mean SOPA and btjunkie are not related?
This discussion thread is stemming from the claim that they are related. I assumed that was where you were coming from.
I'm sorry about saying these subjects are not related. I was wrong.
But consumers are why these producers are in business. They must fulfil their needs and desires to stay in business. But you are right about not consuming. But this would be possible if there are alternatives. But there is a war on alternatives because they can not be legal, or they are pushed to their limits where they can not compete with the mainstream players.
By the way, by saying producers, most of the time I mean, distributors or production companies. Not actors or musicians.
By the way, by saying producers, most of the time I mean, distributors or production companies. Not actors or musicians.
A lot of the times, and for a lot of popular content, the production company IS the producer/artist and not the actor or director. I.e the whole "vision" of the thing is not artistic in any way, just a scheme by some marketing guys in a production company to make some dough. Like almost all blockbuster movies, lots of top-10 billboard artists, teen idols, etc. Those aren't much "created" as they are "produced", usually by committee.
So If I started a website that only catered to the distribution of illegal credit card numbers (but not the actual stealing of those numbers) and your number was on the site, would you fight for my right to keep the site up?
I'm merely pasting numbers on a website, which isn't illegal.
Well yes, they kind of did have those powers, thanks to the passing of the Pro IP act in 2008, which allows them to take town .com, .org and .net websites. SOPA would've just allowed them to take down foreign sites. They already have the power because the Internet wasn't awake enough at the time.
But that's alright. What's important is that first we stop this trend - not a single law like this passes anymore. And then we try to reverse the trend - repeal Pro IP, overhaul copyright laws, etc.
* A company like Zynga who runs a completely legal business and employ thousands of people with good wages and benefits by copying game concepts is generally considered evil.
* A torrent tracker or file locker that makes a handful of employees rich by ripping off thousands of artists, musicians and filmmakers and serving spammy aggressive popup ads shut down and are considered martyrs.
A lot of hackers view "content" as raw grist for their business mills, measured in gigabytes and intrinsically "free". Not surprisingly, many of us that have worked in industries that produce this "content" and know how much work it takes to produce are less glibly generous about piracy.
I'd vote for both as evil because I also don't see much social benefit in hooking people into clickfarming their way through mindless reward loops. But pirate sites are the lowest because by abusing internet freedoms they give censors the ammunition they need to lobby for tools that will inevitably be abused to restrict more important freedoms.
A lot of hackers view "content" as raw grist for their business mills, measured in gigabytes and intrinsically "free". Not surprisingly, many of us that have worked in industries that produce this "content" and know how much work it takes to produce are less glibly generous about piracy.
Or said in another way, a lot of hackers understand that in a market, value is unrelated to cost of production, while others who produce "content" don't.
Antiques that were made of high quality materials by skilled craftsmen are more expensive now for the same reasons they were originally. A tailored wool suit costs more than a t-shirt and jeans. A hand-painted painting by a skilled artist cost more than a sweatshop knockoff.
Supply is a function of profit potential. Production cost isn't the only factor but pretending it's irrelevant is ridiculous.
Torrent site serves up 1000 pirated DVDs, making $20 in the process. Only 1 out of those 1000 pirates would pay the $10 required to buy a DVD [1]. Assuming as little as 2 cents of consumer value per pirated DVD, this scenario has generated $10 more income for 'businesses' and $10 more consumer surplus.
Zynga copies a game that would have had 1000 customers otherwise. They're Zynga, so they get 1500 customers and the original creators get 100. Unfortunately, this makes the game unprofitable for the original creators and the development dollars Zynga had to spend copying the game are not offset by the 600 extra players they generated. Furthermore, this game is seen as a substitutable good- no real consumer value is generated when Coke is drunk instead of Pepsi.
(Honestly, I think consumer surplus is the intuitive reason people support file lockers and not Zynga. They're probably right.)
[1] This is the only conversion rate I've seen people give actual numbers for. Citation available if requested.
I don't think your Zynga numbers make any sort of sense.
You imply Zynga is able to clone a game before the original even reaches 10% of its expected sales. Even mobile and facebook games tend to make most of their money early in their life. I don't think it's possible for Zynga to identify and clone a game this quickly.
You also imply that once Zynga enters the competition, it takes 90-100% of the sales away from the original. This is enormous. Zynga does add some value to games, and it cutens them up a bit too, but you claim it's mostly substitutable. So why are 90% of the people who would have found and played the original game now choosing the Zynga game?
And finally, you imply that Zynga only attracts a marginal number of players, despite the fact that Zynga spends most of its money on marketing to attract new players.
I don't think your numbers are anywhere near the ballpark.
It's not a flaw so much as having too broad a scope. It is certainly the case that a sizeable subset of people here hold such views, which are in turn upheld by upvotes. When called out they should respond, not fail to appear.
"makes a handful of employees rich by ripping off thousands of artists, musicians and filmmakers" also applies to the companies that the file-lockers were threatening.
it's not a double standard, it's two very arguably different issues that people frequently confuse as the same. the zynga issue is closer to plagiarism, and copying is not the same thing.
people get really upset about plagiarism and see it as dishonesty or fraud, as well as theft. history is rife with good (or at least gray) works of plagiarism that people would miss, such as "make em' laugh" in "singin' in the rain," which is a complete ripoff of "be a clown" by cole porter. not a parody, a ripoff with no attribution. (porter never complained.)
still, you find a larger portion of humanity is pissed off by plagiarism, where more people think copies are copies are copies, at least they help make the author famous or rich as a kind of advertising if attribution stays intact.
plagiarism is less likely to help the author of the original, but it can sometimes. for example, i hadn't heard anything about joe satriani for about a decade until coldplay allegedly plagiarized some guitar riffs from him. i've listened to both and apparently you need to be a musician to tell. at least i couldn't tell.
i like that riffs get reused sometimes, and so i don't think it's always easy to have a black and white view about plagiarism. i've neither defended zynga nor joined in condemnation.
Torrent trackers or file lockers that make a handful of employees rich? Haha. Good one! Oh you're funny oh wait no you don't actually understand the economics of this at all do you
Does anyone else suspect that this shut down was not as "voluntary" as stated? Now is the moment in history where people need to speak up for the protection of their rights on the internet, and before the culmination of these struggles has even begun, btjunkie is throwing in the towel? Do they know something we don't?
Ah, I just made the same point, ish. Should have read further before posting.
I think this is a reaction to megaupload and perhaps an unofficial nudge. This might be the first of a few, or many. The "authorities" are simply scaring people off the web.
I feel like I have been working to train and support people, and giving people legs in the form of networks and software just so they can turn around and kick me with them. Did we do this to ourselves?
There are only finite resources available to pursue prosecution. If the choice is between prosecuting the owners of a site that continues to operate versus one that has ceased operation, I expect the choice would be to go after the one that continues to operate.
It's worth noting that people involved in TPB have been fined millions of dollars, sentenced to jail and fled their country to avoid justice. Not everybody is willing to go those sorts of extremes to run a website.
Last I heard non of them where Swedish residents. Fredrik Neij lives in Thailand and last I heard Svartholm Warg lived in Cambodia of all places. I believe the other two defendants live in Switzerland.
I don't like that analogy. TPB has faced serious legal troubles but has stood up for their principles. I don't necessarily agree with their principles, but I don't think this is fun and games for them.
Wikipedia states that the site was commercial, considering the amount of traffic it had does this mean they were making money from it or was it a volunteer organisation using adverts to cover costs? I've never used the site and Wikipedia doesn't explain any of that.
Isn't there a way to create a database of torrents without using http protocol, by relying only on peer2peer network? It would be much harder to shutdown each peer individually.
Your assumption there is no law against piracy in Russia is false.
Russia is not a great idea, our gov took torrents.ru domain away without any trial as well. They are not so active as in USA, but since Russia is on the way to WTO, btjunkie wouldve been closed rather fast if it would be demanded.
As was the shutdown of Napster, and the shutdown of other trackers like SuprNova (as someone else mentioned). I'm actually surprised that some sites have made it this long. It's not like the MAFIAA hasn't taken down sites in the past. But the last few years seem to have been somewhat quiet on that front. Seems like they were spending their time getting the FBI and Congress to fight their battles for them; the government just moves at a slower pace.
Glenn Greenwald was right about this - we didn't win the SOPA battle; we lost it. The very next day after all the hullabaloo and protests, the government went ahead and showed that the powers that SOPA would have been redundant - it already has those powers anyway.