We'll be seeing a lot more of this in the next couple of years. The RIAA and the MPAA will get more and more desperate and will call in more favors with industry buddies as they get closer to the recognition that they are losing the war in spite of winning a couple of battles.
In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.
This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.
We'll know it's over when the music industry distributes music via torrent, by which time they'll be lobbying against direct brain transfer from band to listener.
I think that trend will continue in the future. Either other companies or the Government itself trying to bypass laws by just partnering with other private companies to censor stuff for them. (Remember what happened with Amazon/Paypal/Visa and Wikileaks?)
I'm disappointed to see the destruction of property rights (intellectual or otherwise) being lauded on HN.
The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).
> destruction of property rights (intellectual or otherwise)
These are not the same. Most people do not support the concept of "intellectual property". But for a property to exist in practice, you need majority support, otherwise your property is either just imaginary or you need a totalitarian police state to enforce it.
> the basis of society
The concept of imaginary property is neither supported by a majority of population not in any other way democratically backed. Nobody on this planet has ever voted on it. From its early beginnings, it has been enforced from the top down, decided in shady deals behind closed doors between corrupt officials and industry stake holders and then enforced against the majority.
> steal it
To steal it, you must first reckognize that it is somebody else's property first. But what if you dont consider it property in the first place?
> Yeah, because I just can't stand to pay an enormous amount like $10 or $20 for that book or album I really have to have.
This isn't about listening to something or reading something. It's about the ability to remix and build upon it.
> I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
It doesn't matter, because most people don't profit from their works after 5 years, if they ever profit from it at all. The current law helps the Disneys and bestselling authors and has little to no effect on small, independent creators. I don't think we should optimize for corporations, I think we should optimize for everyone being able to reproduce, distribute and build upon their culture - with a period of potential financial motivation to kickstart the creation of new cultural artifacts. If you're still living off your work 5 years on, you're probably already rich.
Girl Talk's music is literally illegal because his instrument comes with a license agreement. What if Stratocasters had come with one?
> Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
This makes no sense. At all. Physical property and my culture are not comparable.
"This isn't about listening to something or reading something. It's about the ability to remix and build upon it."
This kind of statement does not help your case at all.
Pirate Bay is not about remix culture. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Saying that it is just makes every single thing you say on the topic suspect.
I'm not in favor of the kind of restriction we see dicussed in this article. I'm against sopa/pipa/acta style approaches. But I also know that copying music and movies is 99.99% about getting something for free, not about remixing. So please. Be honest here.
Otherwise you just make the other side's arguments more powerful.
Copying is at least about 60% simplicity and convenience, and about 30% better quality and lack of commercial BS. Free is a nice bonus, but I have cheap tastes and more money than I need, so it's really not a driving force as long as the commercial stuff is reasonably priced. I really don't want to hunt through 4 websites/apps to find something. The fact that I know one will have something and no idea if one of the legal alternatives will is the crux of it - I don't have time for the results of their licensing games. It's the same reason I only shop Amazon with Prime.
There is nothing new under the sun. Nearly everything is a remix of older ideas. Even many of Shakespeare's plays were retellings of popular contemporary stories — we wouldn't have Romeo & Juliet if not for the less copyright-crazy era that he lived in. Your suggestion would work better if it were in response to "20 years isn't long enough for a copyright term."
Yes. But Romeo and Juliet apparently borrowed heavily from works from 1562 and 1582[1]. Since he wrote the play in 1591, both works would have been under today's copyright.
I hope this doesn't sound overly aggressive, but you don't seem to have a very firm understanding of how copyright law works. Derivative works are covered as well. You don't have to literally copy every piece of something with full fidelity to fall under it; borrowing heavily can be quite sufficient. For example, an unauthorized encyclopedia of the Harry Potter universe got stomped because it borrowed heavily from the Harry Potter books. It wasn't actually a copy of any book, but it took enough to get slapped down.
IANAL, but I personally have no doubt that Shakespeare would have been sued if today's copyright culture had existed then. He even copied the characters' names (and yes, characters can be covered by copyright), not to mention most of the major plot elements. It wasn't just "Oh, this general idea is kinda similar to that one."
It's the skill of Shakespeare's story telling that made him so great, not the stories themselves. But the stories are protected by copyright, not the skill.
There is nothing new under the sun. Nearly everything is a remix of older ideas.
Well, kind of. But when I suggest creating something "new", I'm not saying don't remix/use old ideas, I say don't remix/use actual previous existing artifacts.
And let's be clear here, the Pirate Bay is not about creating, it's about consuming.
It's sad that you get downvoted for disagreeing. You make a good point. All you have to do is look at their most popular downloads to see that it's a consumer culture. The majority, if not all, of the most popular downloads on Amy given day are all copyrighted music, movies, and software with the odd indie artist giving it out truly for free.
And you don't make a remix with an mp3. Seriously, that's just silly. If you're looking to remix music, which is what I'm mostly talking about, you need to separate tracks to manipulate them and it's damn near impossible to separate out the drums from the vocals from the keys, etc. if you're working from any listening format like mp3 and the like. Remix culture my foot.
It's not like it's unprecedented. Patents expire after 20 years. Many people and organizations get very good use out of that 20 year term.
I'm not sure why there's such a disparity between patents (which cost thousands of dollars and expire after 20 years), trademarks (which cost thousands of dollars, and have to be actively defended), and copyright (which costs nothing, is automatic, and expires after your grandchildren are dead).
Patents are applications of scientific discoveries. Other people are likely to make the same discoveries and want to apply them in a similar way, and that's legitimate.
Copyright covers things that are purely creations of the author. The author holding a copyright on something doesn't prevent or restrict anyone, except people who want to directly use the copyrighted work, which they wouldn't have come up with anyway (e.g. even if I write a novel about wizards, it would not be Harry Potter).
Most property has value without artificial legal limitations.
I agree that 5-10 years is probably too short of a period for intellectual property to be protected. Honestly, putting an arbitrary span of time on the duration is a suboptimal way of accomplishing the goals of copyright law. Why not protect an artist’s creation as long as he or she is alive, and then release it into the public domain upon his or her death? One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
So? How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?
> How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?
Because if you try to tell any of those stories today, you'll have Disney's lawyers knocking on your door (if not the FBI knocking down your door). And don't forget those stories were already old when Walt Disney was a little boy.
It's actually quite interesting to think about with respect to real property. For example, many Native American tribes couldn't conceive of the idea that one person could own the land; it simply didn't match their mental model. As a result, they ended up ceding, practically, the entire lower 48 states to the European immigrants.
Understanding the Native Americans from an anthropological point of view indicated the Land owned them. The Land provided food, water, shelter, warmth, entertainment, animals, and other things.
The trade of Manhattan for wampum beads is a perfect example: The European thought he got a killer deal because an island was worth far more than those beads. The Native thought, 'the land will be here after he dies, as he belongs to the land'. The native got a better deal because it wasn't a trade.
Native Americans of all the tribes had a very strong sense of ownership. If that was not the case, the Natives would have not signed treaties indicating that this is "X's territory".
If you don't like the words, good, go look at the moral foundation that underlies the idea.
It is a fact of reality that it is morally right to give people ownership rights for things they produce (besides, again, being the basis of society). And why not? Paying for something rather than stealing it (or changing the law so it's not officially "stealing" anymore), just isn't that big of a deal.
I can't justify that claim on HN, for the same reason I can't prove the contents of Physics 101 on HN. If you're curious about my claims, you'll have to go investigate more on your own.
While in some deep (and silly) sense you can't prove the laws of physics, the whole point of science is that the scientific method lets us confidently infer that the laws of physics are a good model for reality through experiments. So in that sense, you can "prove" them, and people have. There is no similar justification for copyright, and claiming copyright as an axiom proves nothing.
> It is a fact of reality that it is morally right to give people ownership rights
> precisely, like physics.
There is no place in the universe where the laws of physics do not apply, however there were and are societies without a notion of property, much less the moral right to property, thus property rights are nothing like the laws of physics. They are a product of your provincial worldview. Of course, property is a useful human invention, but it's nothing more than that.
In the case that I am not replying to a troll, can you provide any links or references? If I wanted to research your point of view, where should I begin?
You may not be able to prove Physics 101 on HN, but you could link you to Feynman's lectures on Physics which would get the interested layman started. That's the sort of thing I'm asking for, for this pro-IP viewpoint.
I'm an Objectivist, i.e., I agree with Ayn Rand. Here is a good reading list: [1].
Honestly, IP rights aren't a special case (setting aside patents, which isn't the topic of this thread); they're straightforward if you understand AR's theory of rights and property.
Another good reference is [2], but since AR's claims are hierarchial, you can't get the "whole story" very well from just looking up some specific topic.
Has it occurred to you that to many people the issue may not be piracy? I don't use the pirate bay, nor do I endorse copyright infringement, but this development nevertheless greatly concerns me.
Well, at least some of us are against RIAA and MPAA, not because we want to steal their stuff, but because they are trying to kill our technologies and tools - which have fair, legal and genuine uses as well. They brought DMCA, made reverse-engineering illegal (even if no infringement happened), pushed for SOPA and are willing to go even further.
DMCA is more than enough protection than the RIAA and MPAA should ever need. Instead they are going over board and trying to get more and more control.
The products of the RIAA and MPAA generally undermine property rights (viz. "F the Police"). Now that they are the ones being f'd, they turn to the people who respect property rights to protect them. No sale, they deserve to pass into the ash heap of history.
I agree that it's a shame, but rather than blaming the RIAA, I blame it on the pirates. The widespread acceptance of piracy among users of BitTorrent is what is ruining BitTorrent, not people asserting their voluntarily-granted contractual rights (RIAA).
That my friend is as anti free speech as it gets, and this censorship really erodes
Actually, by flinging about these terms in an incorrect manner, you are damaging the ability of real defenders of free speech to actually defend free speech. You see, MS is just a company; they can make their software work as they want; that is their right to free speech being excercised. If you don't like it, use different software. Only the government (or, indirectly, entities that have achieved governmental capture) can actually infringe on free speech.
Sure, Microsoft technically has the right to censor whatever they like, just like pg technically has the right to ban you from Hacker News for writing a comment he doesn't like.
Both are disturbing examples of legally infringing on free speech.
Until someone can prove a negative impact of piracy on the copyright holders all you say is rubbish and plain wrong.
No company should be allowed to hinder my free speech.
And no worries, I do not use any Microsoft products, but I can IM people who do use live messenger from Linux IM apps. I am guessing I will be censored anyway, which is just horrible and outrageous.
No company should be allowed to hinder my free speech.
We've already established why your use of the words "free speech" is invalid, and rather than addressing that, you're just making arbitrary assertions (which, because they are arbitrary, should be ignored).
Until someone can prove a negative impact of piracy on the copyright holders
It's been proven, and is also quite obvious, but again, you're just going on emotion and arbitrary assertion.
Any claim that copyright infringement does not hurt copyright holders is dishonest, and people who make dishonest claims should not be admitted into serious discussions.
I'm responding to gitarr here, not the link itself.
That is quite a blanket statement there, javert. Claims that are well researched with evidence to back them SHOULD be included in the conversation, why not?
So, you assert that any argument against you is inadmissable in the debate. So you're trying to argue that you yourself win this debate no matter what.
That really isn't how this works.
It's not a destruction of property rights. It's the beginning of something new for people that make a living creating things people like to hear and watch.
Speaking as a musician who has had dealings with the RIAA, I won't miss them even one little bit.
I would not be so sure about that. As computer people, we rely on governmental freedom to do what we do, and the politicians and the guys with guns can and will take that away if we stop defending freedom. Which we aren't doing very effectively lately.
Most HNers probably believe some sort of property rights for software (or even blog designs). May here would argue that the GPL is a great license and violators should be punished.
You can also often read that Hollywood and the Music Industry are producing worthless crap, but yet The Pirate Bay is dominated by commercial entertainment, not by Creative Commons content.
Much of it is certainly an emotional reaction to the aggressive behavior of RIAA/MPAA, but it really is sad to see so little capacity to see things from a different perspective.
I really don't see much/any hypocrisy in the comments I've read. There aren't exactly many people just saying "Pirate ALL the things!".
There are legitimate reasons to be concerned by these constant attempts to attack certain technology or websites. Personally, I think that having a society that thinks that censorship is a good way to deal with ideas you dislike, which is where we're heading if this keeps up, is a lot more dangerous than intellectual property theft.
Hell, it has been known for years that certain ISPs even go as far as to throttle ALL bittorrent traffic and despite what the MPAA would like people to believe some of the bittorrent use is perfectly legal. World of Warcraft actually uses bittorrent for their patches.
As well, there are the facts that:
-Laws have been passed that are so excessive in punishment that judges are actually slashing the penalties, and there are even stronger laws that lobbyists are trying to get passed.
-This idea of protecting intellectual property at all costs has led to modern electronics devices being very rigidly controlled to the point that if you try to modify YOUR device to just install linux or something, you might be a criminal.
-Copyright lasts a ridiculously long time. There should definitely be some rights so that the creator can benefit, but almost a century is too long.
I think it is a reaction to the copyright cartel, but not necessarily an emotional one. The cartel's position is crazy enough and harmful enough that I'm much closer to being on TPB's side than theirs. The enemy of my enemy. Similarly, if a rabid bear got loose in my house, I might temporarily befriend someone who I'd caught taking from my wallet — my interests align more with the thief's than the rabid bear's.
It's interesting, because there are sources on the internet that catalogue a taxonomy for all manner of fallacious arguments (Wikipedia is one obvious example), but there doesn't seem to be a name for claiming that internet posts written by the people in set A are hypocritical because they presumably-contradict either 1) posts by people in set B happened to appear on the same website, or 2) some hand-waving characterization of the zeitgeist of the site's denizens.
This is clearly fallacious, I don't know why people keep using this technique, and we really should give it a name so that it can be referred to by shorthand. (Any suggestions?)
If you happen to find a person in the set A intersect B, then you've got a case against that individual. But nobody seems to go to that much effort.
It's called the ecological fallacy -- the idea that a phenomenon which is observed (or in the GP's case, totally made up) at the population level can be automatically assumed to apply at the individual level. Stereotypes are a common example of this fallacy.
It may not be a rigorous proof that some individual are hypocritical, but I think it is an indication that it is likely that there are some individuals that are hypocritical.
Supporting the GPL but not copyright in general is actually a completely valid stance. The GPL is the inverse of copyright--copyright normally protects the rights of distributors at the expense of customers; the GPL protects the rights of customers at the "expense" of distributors (this is why commercial companies don't like GPL software). The fact that the GPL is based on copyright is incidental. In fact, I suspect many people who support the GPL would be happy if the rights it protected could be given to customers without relying on copyright; unfortunately, that is not the case right now.
It still rests on the assumption that content creators can set the terms for the use of their products. Something that is disregarded by the hacker community when it comes to films and music.
While I'd be willing to bet this is due to some malware flag (as that pretty much always ends up being the case with IM provider X is censoring Y), I am baffled as to why people would consider it scandalous that a multi-billion dollar company who makes pretty much all of its revenue from selling intellectual property licenses might drop links conveyed using its free service to a site that is unabashedly one of the world's foremost facilitators of intellectual property rights violations.
2) they think that what they type into an IM client will pop out on the other end unchanged
3) they believe that their relationship with the facilitator of their communications media should not be subject to relationships that provider has with other commercial parties.
Where does it end? Being unable to share the link of your favourite restaurant because it hurts the interests of your communications provider?
The amount of modification of any messages by two parties that trust each other enough to engage in one-on-one communications should be set to '0' by default, unless they request otherwise.
That gives me an idea for the most evil chat system ever: modify links to hotels, restaurants etc based on the size of kickbacks from competing establishments.
More seriously, chat should work so that the client signs and encrypts each message, hiding it from the provider and anyone other than the intended recipient.
You've released your chat media out into the world. As far as I can tell that makes them fair game for everyone to look at and download and alter and remix as they desire.
Because now they have taken a role of pro-active censorship/moderation of private communication. Will Hotmail allow such links for long? How about Bing? Can I paste these links in an Excel/Word file on Office365? What about non-free services like MS Lync, Exchange, and Outlook?
Forget the need for deep-packet inspection. If major web services stop users from linking to TPB and other sites, MPAA etc. will have accomplished their goals of restricting legitimate users' activities. Who else is going to follow their lead now?
Microsoft has done stuff like this with MSN messenger for as long as I can remember. At least five years. The specific sites that are blocked frequently includes entirely harmless ones.
Between blocking messages "for users' own good" and other technical issues (80% of message I send to certain users are dropped silently), MSNM is by far the least reliable messaging system out there. Nobody should be using that piece of shit in the first place.
Because people consider what they send in their email to be theirs, not something a faceless corporation has graciously allowed them to utter. People are also beginning to correlate these mega-companies with government-type power, especially over information (hense the use of the word "censor"). Combine these, and you get the outrage.
But IM providers censor malware links and other scams all the time, and your email provider censors or outright blocks spammers for probably up to 50% or more of your mail volume. Clearly people do actually expect certain classes of communication to be actively intercepted.
People expect something that was not intentionally sent by their friends to be actively intercepted. While making the technical distinction may sometimes be tricky, the emotional distinction is fairly straight forward.
You're right, it's an emotional distinction. Let me illustrate. A man operates a gay rights message board that includes private messages. He tolerates alternate viewpoints, but after a particularly bad flamefest he uses a plugin to ban linking to a hate speech site that is especially contrary to the aims of the forum that he pays for out of his own pocket. It extends to PMs. He explains that if you want to trade such links you're welcome to go elsewhere.
But the aim of Microsoft's messenger is not to prevent intellectual property theft.. especially when the users are under the impression that it is to facilitate private communications..
> He tolerates alternate viewpoints, but after a particularly bad flamefest he uses a plugin to ban linking to a hate speech
So he doesn't actually tolerate alternate viewpoints, the problem is in the framing. If the discussion board was supposed to facilitate discussion of opposing viewpoints (like IM network is supposed to facilitate private messaging) then it's not reasonable to ban one side's resources.
To be fair, there is a lot of malware masquerading as The Lion King.torrent. They may not care about the piracy aspect; they may just want their users to have less malware on their computers, especially since Windows machines seem to be a prime target for botnets.
If this is really a serious problem, then they should send an informative email to every user, say once every week about spamming, phising, passwords, etc. Of course, it should be easy opt out.
Moreover, when I last used Windows (XP, 2008), executables could still masquerading as .doc files. This would be easy enough to solve for MS, I think.
If the e-mails are well-written, they will like it. You can't protect people from their own stupidity. Except maybe with censoring like this, but then we have another problem.
The comment section always have people informing if it is malware or not, besides; in that line of logic they would have to censor all file hosting services (those don't even have comment section)
Firsty, comment sections are usually full of noise and it's next to impossible to distill any valuable information out of it. Secondly, don't expect an average person to bother checking for potential malware.
Eh, the comment section very often contains people notifying everyone that a) the torrent contains malware, and b) the torrent does not contain malware. It's such a crapshoot. The uncertainty would put me off pirating as much if nothing else did.
So, what's the most convenient way to IM with end-to-end encryption? I don't like the idea of it being possible for an intermediate to scan through my private messages.
This pretty surprising. Given the industry standard with mining similar communications I'm surprised that Apple gave up a gigantic pool of user information like that.
Follow the money. Collecting user information is (in most cases) a distraction for Apple that could blow up in their face and lead to a serious PR fallout. See locationgate. See Path's address book shenanigans.
It's in their best interest not only not to secretly collect user information, they also want to show that they care about stuff like that (because then they can point their finger at others).
Apple cares about credit card info (because that allows them to let their customers easily pay for everything, it lowers the barrier), but Apple doesn't have to covertly collect that, they are far too popular to need such shady tactics. And that's about it. iAds might matter, but it seems to be a flop and Apple isn't exactly heavily invested in it.
> iAds might matter, but it seems to be a flop and Apple isn't exactly heavily invested in it.
Even further, iMessage accounts are tied to existing Apple IDs, which in most cases are tied to the user's iPhone and iTunes Store account. If Apple wanted to profile users of their iMessage system, they don't need to scan private communications, they'll just recommend albums, books and movies based on previous purchase history. It's more relevant to their business domain than trying to gleam whether or not Alice and Bob are in a relationship and expecting a child soon.
locationgate is actually what gave me the impression that this would be relevant to them. You make persuasive points though.
Incidentally, I'm not so convinced that collecting user information leads to as big of a PR fallout as HN often suggests. I think it's more likely that the level to which our community -- which is small compared to the general UB -- gets upset makes it easy for us to overestimate public reaction. See: facebook and gmail. I'm not very familiar with Path though. Has there been much of an impact since the phonebook incident?
I'm not sure about that. I saw articles about that on the front page of big news websites. Apple is a big deal, the press will report on them. Even worse: They will report about the scandal but likely not about steps someone takes to mitigate the problem or things that explain the problem. That way we here on HN might know very well every little detail about a scandal (including things that make the scandal less of a big deal) but the general public might not.
Apple almost always puts respect for the end user (the paying customer) as one of its highest priorities. Off the top of my head, some examples would be: not forcing users to enter license keys for software, dropping DRM from iTunes, blocking third-party cookies by default, and their refusal to allow the carriers to pollute the iPhone with their preloaded software.
Now I just wish they would make it easy for me to set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in Safari.
"As part of a more stringent ruleset regarding customer privacy, Apple has reportedly started rejecting apps which access UDIDs in a practice that will become de rigueur for all review teams".
It's kind of sad that most IM clients do not provide OTR out of the box, I would use it all the time but unfortunately most people do not use pidgin or Adium.
There seems to be some confusion about the XMPP definition of OTR as defined in XEP-0136 which does not mention encryption (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html#otr) and the colloquial use of OTR which apparently means "encrypted IM."
AFAIK there is no defined standard or agreed-upon XMPP extension for the latter. I should have clarified this in the original comment.
WASTE was pretty cool and hip but it seems to have been dead for years.
From wikipedia:
WASTE is a decentralized chat, instant messaging and file sharing program and protocol. It behaves similarly to a virtual private network by connecting to a group of trusted computers, as determined by the users.
* Secured through the trade of RSA public keys, allowing for safe and secure communication and data transfer with trusted hosts.
* WASTE can obfuscate its protocol, making it difficult to detect that WASTE is being used.
* WASTE has a "Saturate" feature which adds random traffic, making traffic analysis more difficult.
Port forwarding is still a frustration when dealing with your non-tech friends. It took me 3 months to push my brother to set it up right. Now I'm trying to convince him to setup milkfish[1] on his router, so I can save mobile minutes, but I continue to fail.
Well I for one hope they roll out this "feature" in Skype too, ASAP. I've been preaching to (some of) my buddies for years now why it is not a good idea to rely on a closed, centralized platform for communication, but they keep on telling me that Skype is just "so convenient" and they "don't need anything else".
Making Skype less convenient (by means of censorship) would mean that open and decentralized alternatives like XMPP get more attention, and that's a good thing IMHO.
Of course its a bad idea to rely on a closed platform. Except that the majority of people rely on closed platforms (Windows and iOS) to communicate all the time. MS could prohibit pirate bay links on windows using the automatic update system; but they probably wont't.
You have to use software that people are actually comfortable with and operate within that ecosystem. At the moment Skype may well be the best bet. Try finding another piece of software that has end to end encryption and is widely adopted by non-geek's.
I'm a regular WLM user and this has been happening for years, I've seen innocuous links to small websites blocked too. It's rare that links are blocked but I wouldn't be so quick to suggest this is intentional on the part of Microsoft. The frequency at which a new URL is being shared could have triggered some sort of automatic blocking system because it's assumed to be a worm?
> Apparently, the company is actively monitoring people’s communications to prevent them from linking to sites they deem to be a threat.
Everything passes through their servers, it's not P2P and never has been, doesn't everyone know this about WLM? It's how they're able to support offline messaging.
If this was actually done by mistake by their software, then we can expect TPB links to start working again in Windows Live Messenger any minute now, right?
I don't need Microsoft to "protect" me by not allowing me to see something. At most what they should do is warn me that it might contain malware, which is something they used to do with file transfers, too. But today I believe they just outright block most of them - even .rar files, unless they are scanned with some special MSN software of theirs that you need to download.
As more and more of this surface in critical times of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc. we will see an "outer net" emerging soon based on a p2p solution and highly encrypted. I know there is TOR but it`s not cutting it yet.
Maybe one of the big players (Google?) will join this battle for free speech and an open internet. Most of us do not want to be censored in any way.
Google needs the cooperation of the content industry to make its media service, Google Play, anything approaching successful. If the choice is between censoring content and having a successful product then kowtowing to the other entities will always win.
TPB is probably being censored by the software because some automated process to ingest and aggregate threating sites flagged that site as hosting malware. This is just like Google stopping you from clicking thru to sites which they know host virii / trojans. Calm down.
If Microsoft is able to police conversations carried over Live Messenger, shouldn't it be unable to invoke the dumb pipe defense and be held responsible for any piracy its service allows to happen because its negligence in blocking the evil activity happening on its own network. They even profit from those activities! And not only copyright infringement - bank robberies, terrorist attacks, child molestation, heresy - it's all their fault for not blocking it in the first place.
I would love to see this idea in court.
OTOH, who can be sure they do not store IP and login (or other personal information associated with the Live profile) and hand it to anyone with the proper court order?
MSN/Live Messenger is blocking all URLs ending in .torrent for years already. But blocking a FQDN like thepiratebay.org is even stranger... who makes/maintains these censoring block lists, and why is this not explained to users?
That's why people should move to open and decentralized instant messages networks.
xmpp/jabber for example are easy to setup, federation is supported by some major parties (google talk for example) and use OTR (or PGP if you can convince your friends) encryption whenever possible.
Pidgin, Adium and others support it out of the box or through easily installable plugins and even your [mom] can use it since the key generation and handshake can be automatic, requiring only optional authentication if you are paranoid.
Baloney. This has nothing to do with security. Even if you're chatting with me and you link to www.pleasegivemeviruses.com, nobody at MS should overrule that piece of conversation. Maybe I wanted the link. Maybe we're both security researchers. Or maybe I'm gullible. Who's to decide?
I've chosen to chat with you, and you've chosen to say something. Normal human trust mechanisms apply. Censoring our conversation because you think you know what's best is ridiculous.
The minute I thought a chat client was actively thwarting my conversation, I would uninstall it.
Is there anything stopping them from doing the same in Internet Explorer ? And they're not stranger to issuing automatic updates that mess with Firefox, so..
This doesn't bother me. Or, I should say, I'm not inherently opposed to it.
Microsoft is a private company acting on their own will. This censorship is one I might not agree with, but it could just make the case for another uncensored client to become popular.
As long as this type of behavior isn't forced by a government, I actually like it in the long run. I think companies should take a stance on things, and seeing Microsoft act this way just makes me more happy with companies who take the opposite stance. If that favorability change happens with enough people, theoretically Microsoft could hurt financially. This would then make it more profitable to be open and uncensored.
So, in a nutshell, I've seen comments elsewhere about this that were SUPER negative and hateful. I understand them, but at the same time, I think this is just another signal to instead focus on and promote those platforms that focus on and promote freedom. And a big signal, to boot.
It's an unregulated private service, they can. It's just that they can no longer claim "commOn carrier" status. If they don't do that for everyone, they are assisting piracy. Let the lawsuits begin.
I think this is totally fine. Live Messenger is a private service, and Microsoft can run it however they want. Users will simply switch to competing services that don't suck. Let the market decide.
Also, as behavior like this increases in frequency, we'll finally be forced to address the current usability issues with point-to-point cryptography and adopt it more broadly. Microsoft shouldn't be able to read anything you write unless you choose to share it with them.
A world where all communication is encrypted requires more software development effort, but ends up better for everyone in the long run. Calls, emails, text messages - none of them should be intelligible to anyone other than the parties explicitly involved.
Any censorship or modification of your "private" communication is a very scary precedent to set. Will they start modifying hotmail emails or bing search results next?
Shortened urls are trivial to check, and could still be easily blocked. Or else the url shortening services will just be flagged themselves as being "bad" links.
Oh give me a break! I hate when they pull the censorship card like that. It cheapens all other real threats to free speech.
If you like propaganda that justifies pirating, keep reading the Torrent freak blog with their red herrings like censorship and their "battle for free speech".
Microsoft is exercising their rights just like we get to exercise ours. It's a private company offering you free software (as in no money exchanged) and they don't want to let you share torrent files and for good damn reason. I'd do that too if I were Microsoft!
Anyone who claims the Pirate Bay is a place to share cool new media that's released for free is just kidding themselves. Look at their most popular downloads. It's primarily all copyrighted music, movies, and software that are being shared without the owner's consent. Sure, there are a decent number of artists sharing their work via TPB and the Pirate Bay do a lot of promoting of that stuff. But make no mistake, the majority of people are just downloading a bunch of free, copyrighted work.
It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all.
Is that not a legitimate concern? To try to stop people from getting your product without paying you? That's reasonable. They put a ton of time and money into developing software and they don't do it for their health. Just because it's digital and takes zero effort to copy doesn't mean that after the first copy is sold everything else should be up for grabs.
Whenever the torrent people start yammering about censorship and free speech and try to sound all hip, smart, and progressive, it's just a distraction. It's really about continuing to operate while ignoring IP laws. Whether you think copyright is okay or not is irrelevant because the laws are on the books and enforced. If all you do in protest of those laws is pirate music and movies you're really just creating more problems for yourself. Piracy alone as a protest only creates more censorship and restrictions of free speech as Torrent Freak would call it. If you really believe in all those nice sounding ideals you have to get up from behind your monitor and write a letter, make a phone call, or actually show up somewhere and do something.
This article was downright laughable. This is just a PR war and damn easy one to win too. It's easy to hate "big evil corporations" and to love getting shit free with little to no effort needed.
>"It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all."
Not at all true. Free speech is free speech. Where do you draw the line? This establishes precedent, and frankly it's pretty creepy to think that M$ is monitoring all your communications.
Solution: tell M$ that you're dropping all of their products over this, and actually do it. Then set up XMPP and dump their messaging service.
Now we know why Microsoft/MSN doesn't have a true "off the record" feature. They want to be able to monitor your conversations and censor you like this.
In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.
This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.
edit:
This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry