Many don't agree with the principles of TPB, but Sunde was willing to take risks for what he believed in. He deserves a lot of respect for that no matter what people think about the morality of what he helped to create. Most people go their whole lives without caring strongly about any issue at all, and almost all of those that do care are willing to sacrifice exactly nothing. I'd like to think that I would be willing to give up everything for what I believe is right. But everyone likes to think that. And most of us will never find out, not how Sunde did.
That said, everyone also wants to be a martyr. TPB wasn't about rights or freedoms or standing up to government oppression. People used it primarily to obtain media and software without paying for it. It does sound like a noble crusade when he expands the context to include SOPA or PIPA or net neutrality, but TPB isn't really related to those things and served only as a rallying point for people who feel strongly about them. The ideal of freedom of information is only tangential to fighting the good fights that he listed in the opening of the piece.
The truth is that Sunde didn't have to go to jail. TPB's popularity gave him a platform and helped him to centralize an ideological movement. But there are other ways to do that, significantly more effective ways. Martin Luther King (as an example, not a comparison) went to jail too, but he also went to the right schools, wore a suit and influenced the right people. Creating a popular and morally dubious website is a quick way to put your ideas into the spotlight. But it doesn't last, and it doesn't really change anything. His effort and conviction are genuinely admirable but he's still a long way from winning the battles that matter.
>TPB wasn't about rights or freedoms or standing up to government oppression. People used it primarily to obtain media and software without paying for it. //
I think there is an issue of rights and freedoms.
With a capitalist economy certain elements of culture are effectively reserved for the wealthy. In other state structures those making the cultural artefacts that we use to express our selves, to link, to coalesce on common sentiment, those could be sufficiently supported to make all cultural artefacts free-gratis and free-libre.
The democratisation of media particularly through availability of music and film - which are so central to our cultural experience - means that many who would otherwise be [partially] excluded from participation in today's culture (for better or worse) can take part.
Moreover, copyright was initially set up with a view to ensuring that eventually the wealth locked up in shared experience, cultural introspection, confrontation with new ideas and different aspects of the culture would be freed in to the public domain.
The actions of media corporations, the use of DRM, these things (amongst others I'm sure) act to prevent entry to the public domain. DRM in particular breaks the copyright deal, if we the people aren't going to get our side of the copyright bargain why should we uphold the side that suits those financial interested in media production? Usually with a contract if one side breaks the terms then the contract is nullified - surely this morally should be true too of copyright.
In short, I think to assume that this is solely an issue of 'people who could pay to consume media choosing not to' is wrong, that there is a greater depth to this and that the likes of TPB have made a change to the access to the culture of the age making it [more] available to those of restricted means. I think this can make for more cohesion in society. Possibly too it makes for more homogeneity, that may not be a good thing however if the principle messages being passed (and shared) in society are those coming from Hollywood.
I feel there's much more to say on this. But I'll stop. /rant
I'm not sure I agree with much of anything you said.
>With a capitalist economy certain elements of culture are effectively reserved for the wealthy. [...] The democratisation of media particularly through availability of music and film - which are so central to our cultural experience
There is always going to be a culture. And there are always going to be things off-limits to the non-wealthy that would totally be part of the larger culture if made free. So? I don't think it's particularly important for music or film to be part of the larger, central cultural experience. If those things aren't available then something else will take their place. To the best of my understanding society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago.
I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people. I think people pirate because it's safe, easy, and free. I think most people's participation in piracy can be summed up as "selfish asshole". I think DRM is a blunt, ham fisted enforcement of the copyright deal and I'm curious as to why you think it breaks and should nullify the contract.
And on top of all this the maintainers of Pirate Bay are not benevolent Robin Hood's trying to give culture to the poor. They're making money. Megaupload network generated $175,000,000 in revenue. I don't think there's a damn thing honorable about any of these lot.
> To the best of my understanding society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago.
The current availability of books published last century is actually smaller than the current availability of books published before that. So there is actually a bit of a cultural hole from the 1900's because of materials are still in copyright and not published by their owners. Often it isn't even known who is the current owner of a material. There might come a time where people know more about culture 500 years ago than 100 years ago.
> I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people.
I think we've lived with the concept of copyright and patents for so long that we've forgotten what an artificial construct that it is. We're basically giving exclusively ownership to ideas. There is a good argument for doing that, which is why copyright exists, but it's not a universal truth. Locking way and preventing the sharing, modification, and remixing of ideas has a deep cultural cost now and future generations.
Not having documentation on what culture was X years ago is different from there being no culture X years. I don't think your first example is relevant.
Copyright exists to serve the public. I think it largely achieves that goal. There are fair arguments to be made as to when copyright/patents stop serving the public interests. I don't think DRM as an enforcement of the copyright laws nullifies the protection already given. When it comes to copyright the following quote is long but largely sums of my thoughts.
"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." from An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html
I'm not talking about "documentation". I'm talking about the actual culture: the books, the movies, the songs, and so on from that period. Look at Disney's Frozen, a huge movie based on the out of copyright story, The Snow Queen. Here's some culture from 1800's reproduced in 2014. The same cannot be done for most culture in the early to mid 1900's. Some things you literally cannot read, watch, or hear from that era. You certainly cannot adapt it in a new way. Not unless you want to break the law. That is the situation we are in.
I, however, agree that copyright serves the public and largely achieves that goal. But I think it did so better in it's original incarnation. Big money interests have shifted copyright in absurd directions. And I honestly don't care if Disney retains the rights to Mickey Mouse forever but in lobbying for that right they've dragged along everything else. So now it's impossible to reproduce other completely unrelated works.
A big one personally for me is old video games. I grew up in arcades and I love going through MAME and playing obscure titles that I often don't even remember until I start it up. Sure, if you want to play Pac-Man there are lots of legal options but outside of that a huge part of 80's culture is illegal to own.
> Copyright exists to serve the public. I think it largely achieves that goal.
Even if it didn't, how would you measure it? There is no measurement to determine that this arbitrary definition of property in fact serves the public more than not having it -- which makes me curious. Without this evidence, why did central planners believe copyrights would serve the public? I'm more inclined to think legislators had a financial interest in upholding these protectionist laws than any good will towards "the public".
>society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago //
Society like now used story and music as central elements of cultural expression. 500 and 5000 years ago that was freely shared. 500 years ago in my country (UK) there were poets and playwrights making a living without copyright (though minstrels had closed guilds at at least one point). If you heard a song then you were free to sing it to your friends, make performances of it or whatever.
On the DRM point, the works that are "protected" can't freely enter the public domain. The copyright deal is that the people will - via the government - grant you a monopoly on reproduction/modification (and associated actions) on your work for a limited period in exchange for the work entering the public domain. In order to enter the public domain a work should be free to be enjoyed by all without let or hindrance (beyond that inherent in the format). The point of the DRM is to ensure that the work is never able to be freely used/copied etc., it can't enter the public domain unless it is side-loaded in some way and I can't see any current media corp paying for archiving of all works DRM free and then releasing them at the appropriate time to ensure they keep their end of the bargain. Such a guarantee would be necessary, eg lodging copies with a sort of escrow, for DRM-ed works to be able to provably uphold their end.
>I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people. //
I'm not being as terse at it may seem, but, food? Do you have a right to be fed? If you're not a food producer and don't have the means to produce food, do you still have a right to be fed?
Some will say that one dies without food. I'd argue our form of humanity dies without shared culture - you may find that a good thing?
I'd be interested to know your status, are you wealthy, do you enjoy the arts. I'm poor and work in art & craft primarily.
No. If I do not have food I do not have the right to demand you give me your food.
This has actually come up with a few times with respect to water. No, you do not have a right to water. If you live in the middle of nowhere you do not have a right to water. If you are not given water no one else is responsible or punished. If I can not afford to pay a local utility company for their water access services they are not required to give it to me for free. A city or town can not force a private individual or company to give them water.
Many people are likely to disagree with me here. That's fine. If you think "water is a right" or "food is a right" then quite honestly your sentiment is hollow and void of meaning. You can call something a right all you want but if there is no accountability then it's not much of a right.
The US Bill of Rights is a fantastic document because it largely protects rights, as opposed to giving them. Free speech isn't a right given by the government. It's a natural right that is explicitly protected from being taken away by the government. It's a key difference that is related to food/water rights.
>No. If I do not have food I do not have the right to demand you give me your food. //
You do have that right, if I have plenty you have a right to a share of it. When the Earth was created no man had ownership of any of it. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote quite persuasively on this point. Sure if I take my food and waste it then that right is diminished accordingly.
>If I can not afford to pay a local utility company for their water access services they are not required to give it to me for free. //
So why should you give them the right to take it in the first place. They don't have the right to the water any more than you. Less probably.
How would you consider this as a question of moral obligation, would you say that if you have lots of food and someone else has none that you're morally obligated to give from your plenty?
We've been speaking of rights in the legal context. And laws != morals.
I think there are certain rights to access natural resources. For example the beaches of California are strictly public property. I think there are rights to fair access to natural resources such as water. However I do not think that if I spend considerable resources to build a distribution network for that water that other people have a right to access that network.
I do have plenty. More than I need. Food, water, and shelter. There are people who do not have enough of them. There are many people who have no shelter. We call them homeless. I have more rooms in my house than required to thrive. Does someone who is homeless have a right to enter my home and make use of the excess shelter that I have?
I think this is a very important conversation for us to be having and I don't claim to have anywhere near all of the answers.
However, I do think that your first sentence kind of dodges the question here. The rest of this comment thread was discussing what rights people should have, not what rights they do have.
If we approach this from a legal viewpoint the conversation is over before it starts: Piracy's illegal, you don't have a right to content. You don't have a right to food.
However, when we start looking at it from a moral perspective things are much more open ended: Should we have a right to content? Should we have a right to food?
I think these are more interesting questions and that falling back on the rule of law kind of kills the discussion.
I guess at the end of the day I don't know the best way to handle copyright, but I do know we should have a conversation about it, and that we should come at it from a morality perspective.
>I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people.
You do have such a right, because it is intimately related to the fact that you are human -- a social creature who essentially _requires_ things created by other people for your very survival.
You may not agree that you should have immediate or non-negotiable access, but the mere fact that you are a producer of content and information yourself means that you are in fact paying for that culture.
Just look at how valuable 'being popular' is. It is extremely valuable, and all that value is produced a group of people who are labeled as "consumers", even though they obviously contribute. They "produce" essentially all the value of popularity.
> The actions of media corporations, the use of DRM, these things (amongst others I'm sure) act to prevent entry to the public domain. DRM in particular breaks the copyright deal, if we the people aren't going to get our side of the copyright bargain why should we uphold the side that suits those financial interested in media production?
This is the first time I've ever seen a pro-"piracy" argument that really made me stop and think about whether I was actually opposed to it. I think the copyright system is clearly broken (and more beholden than ever to corporate interests), but somehow never made the connection. Thank you.
> Moreover, copyright was initially set up with a view to ensuring that eventually the wealth locked up in shared experience, cultural introspection, confrontation with new ideas and different aspects of the culture would be freed in to the public domain.
That's not the only theory of copyright. In Europe, copyright has traditionally been viewed in terms of the moral rights of creators to control their work. In many European countries, authors have perpetual rights to, e.g., prohibit alterations of their creative works.
The Statute of Anne which is widely held to be the first iteration of copyright gave authors/printers 14 years exclusive right, then works were to enter the public domain. On application before the end of the first period a further period of 14 years could be granted. The public domain was protected by the legal deposit scheme ensuring that a work could always (barring disaster) fully entertain the public domain.
The Statute of Anne was a compromise as publishers were being refused the reapplication of previous laws as those laws gave them too much power and control of publication preferencing them over the public and the authors.
Moral rights are an important part of copyright too; the right to be named as author being enshrined in the Berne Convention, for example. Nonetheless if the Statute of Anne represents the fore-runner of copyright under English Law traditions then I think my statement is objectively true (within jurisdictions based on English Law).
So it becomes a question of whom copyright is supposed to protect – I like what the U.S. system _used_ to be, in that it was protective enough to allow creators to reap the economic benefits of their work, but was liberal enough that there was less nonsense about "estates" controlling intellectual assets for decades after the creator's death.
I think there should be a clearly delineated point that a work is given to the public, but I can see how that might sound like a radical notion, especially to people who want to make money off of it.
> Sunde was willing to take risks for what he believed in. He deserves a lot of respect for that no matter what people think about the morality of what he helped to create
I find this argument completely fallacious. Does it change the value of a thing if someone takes a risk for it? Ought we respect the causes of suicide bombers, since they gave their lives for them?
Yes, it does. I will never advocate violence but if you look at the reasons that lead to that horrific moment in the suicide bomber's life, then you might see something even more terrifying than the act itself.
Sure, you can blame it on bigotry or ignorance, but it turns out suicide bombers on average are more intelligent and well-educated than those in their society [0]. Camus attempts to explain this in his essay The Rebel. He says a person keeps saying yes until the moment that he says no. The person who rebels is one who thinks the consequences of his actions are less important than those produced by conforming.
So maybe you should consider respecting someone who thinks taking his life and innocent lives to make a point, or at least respect the point he is trying to make.
You can find all sort of things wrong with what I stated above but you cannot possibly ignore the fact that Sunde went to prison on his own for what he believed was right. He didn't hurt anyone except himself. Unless you can explain all these with insanity, which I don't think you have the qualifications to do, you shouldn't completely find this fallacious.
> So maybe you should consider respecting someone who thinks taking his life and innocent lives to make a point, or at least respect the point he is trying to make.
"Even today it takes only the crudity of a persecution to give an otherwise completely indifferent sectarianism an honorable name. How? Does it change the value of a thing if someone gives his life for it? An error that has become honorable is an error which is that much more seductive."
> you cannot possibly ignore the fact that Sunde went to prison on his own for what he believed was right
Yes, but I don't find that in itself worthy of respect. Martyring yourself is a dramatic pose, a type of moralism that appeals to emotion and not reason. What Sunde did with his own personal life has absolutely nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of TPB (btw I am entirely in favor of that sort of filesharing).
But this childish fetish our society has with idolizing people who "feel strongly" and "sacrifice" does us no credit. It just muddies the already murky waters of whatever topic is under debate. The fact that someone makes a sacrifice in favor of some belief or conviction simply makes no difference whatsoever as to the rightness or wrongness of that belief. It is only a symptom of the type of person s/he is. And I see no reason to respect the willingness to sacrifice as a virtue in itself, since one could sacrifice for "evil" (bad/stupid/harmful) ends.
I guess we just differ massively in our perception of people.
To me when an individual person sacrifices himself for a reason, any reason, then it is either that person is crazy or he has a point to make. I often attempt to understand his point and his reasons better. A cause is as strong as people who understand it. If he gets my attention and make realise something that I haven't previously, then the cause becomes stronger.
There is no absolute righteousness. Your point only makes sense if there is a divine set of rules that makes some things right and others wrong. I don't believe there is such a thing.
> Your point only makes sense if there is a divine set of rules that makes some things right and others wrong.
There's a difference between absolutism (which I am arguing against, btw, and my argument against conviction is consistent with my position against absolutism) and abject relativism, where the value of a thing is equivalent to its acceptance. How about the empirical demonstration of the goodness/badness of a thing? (amount of overall harm caused, assuming harm is considered bad, etc).
> A cause is as strong as people who understand it
This is essentially my objection. This is relativism. If you were right here, then all the religious zealots in the world believing in creationism would render that position valid, and the strength of their conviction would be in some sense an asset to that position. My point is that all of that is nonsense. A thing is wrong/false/stupid independently of its believers' numbers, or their zeal or conviction. You don't need to appeal to some divinity to make that point, you can appeal to common empirical demonstrability (aka science). It is more complicated when dealing with "purely" ethical matters, but only more complicated - it is our choice whether we reduce issues to "pure" ethics or not, and I suggest that we should not.
> I don't believe there is such a thing.
Neither do I. I just reject the "feel-good" position that peoples' convictions are all meaningful and valid, and that we have to respect things that people believe strongly in. To me that is nonsense. Plenty of things are simply wrong, stupid and contemptible. You can be kind to people holding those positions without forcing yourself to believe that there is some worth in their ideas simply because they feel strongly about them.
I'm not sure which side of this I'm on, to be honest, but I haven't seen any evidence that there isn't _any_ economic damage done by illegal downloading.
> Sunde went to prison on his own for what he believed was right
This may be true, but it's not like this wasn't a winning venture for him. At a certain point, it could have just been a question of whether he was willing to gamble that he'd gain millions of dollars rather than get locked up.
> I haven't seen any evidence that there isn't _any_ economic damage done by illegal downloading.
Burden of proof is on the accuser and no I don't think X number of people pirated it, it costs $Y, therefore, it caused $X * Y is a proof.
> it could have just been
Exactly. But don't you think it seems quite unlikely given that he is demonstrably a pretty smart individual and large corporations with deep pockets are coming after him. He should have completely failed to anticipate the consequences.
Try re-reading the post you replied to. The author does not want you to respect the cause for which he has taken the risk, but the fact that he felt strongly enough about it to put his life on the line for it.
And yes, even suicide bombers deserve a bit of respect if they do their thing out of conviction, and not because they have been brainwashed about 72 virgins in next life.
> The author does not want you to respect the cause for which he has taken the risk, but the fact that he felt strongly enough about it to put his life on the line for it
Again, I fail to see how conviction is by itself worthy of respect. Surely it is only respectable if the content of the conviction is also respectable.
In other words: if I risk my life for something stupid or wrong or immoral or criminal, but I felt strongly enough about it to risk my life over it, are you obliged to respect my conviction, even though the content of my conviction was not respectable? I think having respect for the notion of conviction itself is utterly stupid. I would rather respect having the calmness and clarity of thought to act without the need for moral zeal.
> Surely it is only respectable if the content of the conviction is also respectable.
Point in case: Would we be having this discussion if Sunde went to jail for a strong conviction in believing that a given race is inherently and naturally inferior to his own? I would submit a vote of "not likely", because I doubt very many people would find themselves respecting his conviction, if that were the case.
> But there are other ways to do that, significantly more effective ways. Martin Luther King (as an example, not a comparison) went to jail too, but he also went to the right schools, wore a suit and influenced the right people.
And he was making a moral argument founded in religious principles. He was literally risking martyrdom in order to fight for justice in the name of his God. And he ultimately was murdered for his work.
It might not sound relevant to an agnostic or atheist, but I don't see how you can get there from here if "there" is Dr. King and "here" is a secular argument for the right to share files.
At the end of the day, in his theology, King would have enjoyed success just for fighting even if his efforts changed zero minds and were swept away in a flood of racism and indifference. It's the difference between "we can make a difference" and "we are making a difference... let's see how much more we can do".
fwiw, he might concede that illegal downloads are theft, but assert that digital property is also theft. In that case, I could see TPB defending those goals, or at least attacking their opposition.
(not an endorsement just pointing it out, blah blah blah)
I don't anyone should concede that copying data is theft. Since theft implies an unlawful transfer of ownership. Copying data and deleting the original is theft.
I don't know about that. When Target or Walmart or whatever credit card processor experiences a data breach and customer data is exposed it's considered data theft and treated as such as well. While we can't compare digital goods with physical goods in a 1:1 manner because they have different properties, so far, aspects as it concerns the law treat them similarly.
Aspects of this may or may not change over time, however, in the meantime they are what they are. It's like physics. Till the consensus changes, current accepted theory applies, even if there are gaps.
In the end, "theft" is just reapplying old nomenclature to new phenomena. We could call it something else, give the behavior a new name and then have society turn around and apply the same laws, would that make things any better?
The actual crime is the fraud committed when someone pretends to be someone else and runs up debts in their name with "stolen" credit card numbers.
There are ancillary crimes that revolve around trying to keep credit card numbers secure, but taking my credit card number doesn't mean I don't have it anymore.
My examples could result in fraud, but aren't the kind you're talking about. You getting a hold of thousands, millions of credit cards without consent or some other agreement is a criminal offense. Let's get away from CC numbers. Just get a hold of thousands, millions of people's PHI through the same means. Get a hold of BEA's secret blue prints for future products.
Nothing about TPB is a breach of security on the parts of rights holders. The transactions taking place on torrent sites never even involve them. In reality, the only relation the law has to what TBP is doing is simply that depending on jurisdiction either:
The original uploader is violating the copyright of the copy he originally procured, but in some countries once he distributes that (and the recipient isn't liable, because it is a very Orwellian thing to claim that a user downloading some arbitrary file from anywhere is liable for the copyright violations involved, albeit if they are on TPB they have less of a defense there - but it is very thought police-y to try to assert that everyone is liable for all the data they download - because everyone is infringing copyright every day with every screenshot of Frozen or the cover art to music albums being pushed from websites to your music player.
All parties seeding are liable, albeit for the same reason I described earlier this seems like a gross dystopian model to use because it means you blame people for non-violent behavior they cannot know is wrong, just because the original provider of the data never disclosed its copyright status. It cannot be the fault of a recipient of information if they were never told it was being shared without a license to share on the part of the sharer, or that they do not then have rights to share.
Either way, that is nothing like hacking Sony's servers and copying movie data off of it. That is a violent intrusion on their digital property, literally, by entering their servers without their permission and with obvious intent to intrude and possibly duplicate or even destroy data.
Until the conversation about information sharing can be had outside of relating it to violence, which it is almost never, and I would never condone, then you can't have a legitimate conversation on this topic. First and foremost must be an acknowledgment that the copyright infringement most sites like TPB are advocating is the voluntary exchange of information one party has to one party that wants it, in violation of a state framework granting a third party to that transaction exclusive rights to control its distribution. That is just objective fact, before any subjective opinions or morality come into the discussion, but without that everyone is operating on false assumptions.
Theft does not imply an unlawful transfer of ownership. For example a person can be charged with theft of service for stealing electricity or cable TV, even though all they did was cause their own electrons in their own cables to oscillate in a certain way.
You act like one of those guys he talks about in the article. Judging people from the sidelines and telling them what they should have done without remotely knowing the story.
But on the other hand "I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?" judges me from the sidelines without remotely knowing my story because I didn't go to jail.
> I'd like to think that I would be willing to give up everything for what I believe is right. But everyone likes to think that.
This is so very true and why I can't stand it when people say things like "I may disagree but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." That person will do no such thing. She will not go risk her life for the right of Westboro Baptist Church, the Klan or Bill Cosby to have their say. If a law was passed muzzling Dick Cheney, she would not be in the streets rioting. It's melodramatic, preening, self-serving nonsense.
There are several elements that make up ethical, effective support for a cause. Willing to put the cause ahead of your own well-being is sometimes one of them. Also important is to change strategy/tactics as a result of new information; to consider new ideas/arguments; accepting that the ends don't justify the means; and be willing to live for the cause, rather than die for it.
I'm sorry, but downloading entertainment is not a human right. He didn't exactly feed starving people by breaking the law. He put up a torrent aggregator to, mostly, Hollywood movies and shoved aggressive and high-revenue porn and malware ads into every nook and cranny of that site.
HN and those passionate about internet freedoms deserve better heroes than guys like Sunde, Dotcom, and Ulbricht. These guys very much enriched themselves via what was essentially a web based business and any "freedom fighter" argument is pretty disingenuous at this point.
Personally, I see malware coming from ad networks and other dirty tricks TPB did as a bigger issue than being able to watch Spiderman 3 without paying. Honestly, now he's painting himself as a some anti-spying hero when his site was the #1 vector of aggressive spy and malware onto people's computers? I mean, it fucking took over the search box when you clicked on it and launched a download to suspicious-toolbar.exe immediately. What link actually took you to the torrent? Not the dozen of so "DOWNLOAD NOW" buttons Sunde happily populated his site with. We need less of that stuff, please.
> I'm sorry, but downloading entertain is not a human right.
Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right. Maybe certain entertainment business models aren't sustainable in the internet age. It's not like we'll run out of entertainment. Most cat-based YouTube videos are better than the Real Housewives of Schenectady anyway.
And to extort and imprison people for the sake of a business model is terrible.
Human rights exist regardless of whether a particular legal framework honors them. Everyone has the right to speech, including the right to the private transmission of data, the right to assemble to pursue common interests, etc. Those rights have limitations when it comes to harming people, but people aren't being harmed by any particular copy of Duck Dynasty S06E03.
The thing being harmed here is a business model. I vehemently disagree that someone should be fined or imprisoned in the name of a business model, especially an entertainment one. If the law says that's what happens, the law is unjust.
That being said, copying things that aren't yours without permission is a jerk thing to do. That shouldn't make you a criminal, however.
Do business models not pay people's salaries? Is this not an interest worth protecting? I think you're view is in trouble (or at least, extremely radical) if it depends on the premise that no law that protects only financial interests can result in imprisonment.
I think this is actually the one (perhaps only) point where copyright infringement is actually analogous to theft. Why do we prohibit shoplifting? Because shoplifting prevents a business owner from profiting off of the thing he had intended to sell, in addition to depriving him of his investment in the inventory (of course, no business owner cares much about his inventory for its own sake, he cares about it because it represents potential profit).
As many will be eager to point out, intellectual property is not finite. But this only means that you're depriving the IP owner of less profit than you would be if it were a tangible good, not that it deprives him of none. You might just as well say, oh well the thief would never have bought that DVD anyway, and the business owner has millions of them (and insurance!), so it's not really something the law should worry about... Also see mc32's sibling comment with some other excellent examples.
I am distinguishing between financial interests and financial prospects. Financial interests are a form of property: shares in companies, contractually entitled benefits, etc.
Financial prospects are things like next year's record sales. "Past performance does not necessarily predict future results" and all that.
Business models exist to help predict the future. That's why their called business models and not business facts. To imprison someone because she didn't fall in line with your plans for the future is a terrible thing to do.
Contrast this with actual theft of real money. It was yours, now you don't have it. That's harming your financial interests and violating your inalienable rights to property and the freedom to use it at your own discretion.
grandparent said that he disagreed with people being imprisoned or fined for copyright infringement.
Those are punishments.
Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute.
Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to require someone to pay up is a bad idea too.
That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.
> That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.
Except then you have to have a great big state bureaucracy to arbitrarily allocate tax funds.
No, the correct solution is still free information - but all it takes is a change of perspective and mindset on the parts of content creators.
You have a valuable, scarce, useful asset. It is not the infinitely reproducible digital information at the end of the process that you use a legal framework to restrict distribution of. People want that, but information is no longer scarce, and to try to restrict it is unethical.
The valuable resource you have is your creativity. Your ability to produce that digital information is a scarce resource that few possess. The current model that most creators pursue is that an investor of some sort seeks to take advantage of the arbitrage the artificial implications that copyright imparts upon free markets to profit off the perpetual legal ownership of information, and pays you either a fixed salary or a fraction of the returns to actually produce the work, in exchange for the up front funding.
Kickstarter, patreon, gittip, etc are demonstrating the ability for consumers of information to also pay the scarce resource - the creation - themselves. And it would make a lot more sense for consumers to just pay for the culture they want to be made directly, and then everyone can experience it - rather than having some state institution doing it.
No, those current platforms are not appropriate to replace copyright. Of course they are not. They exist under copyright. We cannot conceive of what it would look like to have a legitimate free culture patronage service because one cannot exist right now. But I wrote this post and a bunch of others and keep debating the topic because I fundamentally have faith it would work, and that the ongoing cultural death of western civilization since the advent of perpetual copyright is much more detrimental to society than the free availability of Jersey Shore.
I think I could support such a thing. But I also think GGP needs to come up with something better than "no criminal punishment for interfering with another's profit" to support it. That cuts far too wide to be plausible, I think. Why not this more narrow and, I think, more obvious claim? Prison is disproportionate to the harm caused by copyright infringement.
Depriving someone of profit isn't a crime though. If I choose not to buy your product, I am depriving you of that profit. If I make a better product and consumers choose mine over yours, I'm depriving you of profit. Neither of these things is or should be illegal.
But everything is a "business model." If you get paid for work performed, that's a "business model". Should I be free to upset that business model? Can I talk to someone's employer and convince them to pay me 20% of someone's salary without their permission?
Rihanna shows up for an event, a promoter promised her 50,000 for showing up and singing 60 seconds of a song and signing a few autographs. Can this promoter turn around and say, sorry, I was kidding, I don't have money for you, it was just entertainment, here's your cab and airfare?
We can reduce things till they lose some of their properties and our arguments appear reasonable, but most people will disagree with that reduction, I think.
I'm not arguing against business models as a concept. I'm arguing that any particular business model does not overrule the natural rights to speech, privacy, and property (arguably, legal DRM cartels violate my right to own and modify my own property).
All your examples involve fraud, so they don't really apply here. If I promised to pay someone for work and didn't pay them, I deserve to lose a lawsuit and be forced to make restitution. In certain circumstances, the fraud is criminal and I deserve jail time for preying on the vulnerable or uninformed.
There may be counterexamples worth addressing, though. Can someone can come up with one? They probably involve at least the threat of tangible harm in some form. And arguably, there are already laws against those things, such as your fraud examples.
>arguably, legal DRM cartels violate my right to own and modify my own property
I think DRM is more analogous to leasing. I don't like DRM, there being alternatives I'd go with the unDRMed product/service. But it's up to us the consumers to say, yeah, I'll make that deal or no, I won't make that deal because it's unfair to me. We could also call for legislation to make DRM unattractive to DR holders as well -but unilateral action is not the solution.
>All your examples involve fraud, so they don't really apply here.
True, but if an artist or distributor in essence "says" I'll exchange music with you for compensation but you don't hold your end of the understanding, that's arguably fraud. In the Rihanna example, let's say the promoter says, in lieu of cash, I'm giving you exposure which I think is equivalent to 50,000 that does not absolve the promoter? She expected cash, not exposure to an audience who might represent future sales.
Making money from media is NOT a legal right. You don't have a right to profit.
You have the right to attempt to profit from it and exclude others from doing the same with your work.
That's all copyright provides. A limited right to an opportunity to make money, granted to you by society so you can make more of that work if society (by proxy of "The Market") deems your works as successful.
This right is granted to you because it's considered beneficial to society as a whole, because it incentivizes you to create more and ultimately have all the things you produced released into the public domain once your limited right expires.
So you're not getting the right to copyright because it's a natural right, you're getting it as part of a contract with society. The question is whether that contract is worth it to restrict speech, to have all the side-effects of the DMCA, to put people in prison, to slap families who pirated a few songs with 200k$ fines etc.
Let's say some people are questioning the tradeoff being made, at least in its current state.
> Making money from media is NOT a legal right. You don't have a right to profit.
> You have the right to attempt to profit from it and exclude others from doing the same with your work.
I think this is a distinction without a difference when the context is whether someone can interfere with your "attempt" to profit by violating your right to exclude others.
The context is that it's just a legal right and not a human one. It's one that society constructed for a purpose and then got extended further and further over time for commercial purposes.
People's moral compass does not always align with what's legal and at some point they may simply start ignoring the law.
> Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right.
I don't know why you claim this is some sort of absolute fact. Whether "human rights" are made up or inherent, it seems plausible to me that being able to take ownership of creative works could be a natural right the same as having ownership of physical property would be.
I've explained it elsewhere, but a business model is a projection of future results, it's not actual property. I think the burden of proof is on the claimant when someone says that protecting business models is more important than protecting freedom of speech (sharing documents), freedom of privacy (no combing through my documents), or the freedom of movement (not being in prison).
As far as a critique on whether human right exist or what they are if they do, that's way out of scope for this topic. But I'll say that it's hard to have any morality without some concept of human rights, whether that term is used or not.
I didn't say a business model was property. I said that intellectual property is plausibly property or something that people could have a right to. In fact, since copyright as intellectual property is a virtually infinite, highly-dimensional landscape, it should arguably have more absolutist protection than physical property, because monopolizing a unit of intellectual property won't prevent other people from getting their own.
And real property ownership interferes with freedom to travel the same way that copyright property interferes with freedom to send arbitrary bit sequences, only moreso. All of that was claimed and defended by violence too, so if you're going to make an argument along those lines you're going to have to find something that distinguishes copyright property from real property. From what I can see copyright seems like a much more benign form of ownership.
> But I'll say that it's hard to have any morality without some concept of human rights, whether that term is used or not.
No it isn't. You could just go pure utilitarian, or you could say people have no intrinsic rights but we should be nice to them anyways.
What makes entertainment so special? How is a hollywood movie different from any other product, like your laptop, smartphone, or even your web-app you charge money for?
Great example! With AWS the incremental cost of supporting each additional user approaches $0. So it's okay for people to use your $10/month web app, paying you the $0.05 or whatever covers their AWS costs? After all, as long as your hosting costs are covered, you're not any worse off, you've just lost the opportunity to make a sale.
The rightful owners of stolen physical property lose their possessions. The owners of copied data aren't deprived of their data.
Using a web-app without permission usually falls under contract violation or fraud. Maybe trespassing in some exotic cases.
Preventing the scraping the data from a web app (actually a political issue in Spain and Germany right now) shouldn't be more important than basic human rights like the freedom of speech. Nobody has the right to ownership of facts, for example.
>It tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else.
Not sure how I feel about this. Regardless of how things have played out, I don't think people should expect free TV shows especially in the day and age of PVR/DVR/TIVO etc. I still think creators should be credited/paid for their work.
EDIT - To expand, I think you can disagree with the cable companies and how they distribute programs (large packages of channels you want and some you don't) but I don't think you can disagree that the actors, cameramen, writers, riggers etc shouldn't be paid for their work.
They should be paid for their work. They (their bosses at least) shouldn't have the power to cripple technology, limit the free flow of information, or throw people in jail to get paid.
Again, we're talking about entertainment. The people working on these works are doing really cool things, but they don't have a right to get paid to do cool things. On the other hand, people should have the right to copy arbitrary bits from point A to point B. If for no other reason than freedom of speech and freedom of privacy.
I'm trying to figure out how you distinguish something like pirating a movie versus if I were to torrent your diary (assuming it did not involve breaking and entering your home, or whatever. Let's say you left it on a table and I copied it when you were in the bathroom). I'm assuming you would assert some control over those words. But when you object, I can say, "Well, look, you aren't losing anything, so nothing wrong really occurred here. You aren't deprived of your data."
So ok, instead of a diary, now let's say you work with a couple guys on a piece of fiction and someone 'releases' it before it's done. Why is that different? So ok, now I get together with 1,000 people and make a $180M movie. How is that different? At what point of these examples does a piece of information go from being OK to secure (diary) to not? (a movie)
I agree that torrent technology should be allowed. The Pirate Bay allowed for that and likely should be able to exist, however let's call a spade a spade. Many of the material on torrent sites is copyrighted material, the founder in his piece says people can't download their TV show tomorrow, acknowledging the fact that copyrighted material drives the site.
Yeah, it's copyright infringement, and there's a lot of wink, wink, nudge, nudge going on that adds up to dishonesty if not outright lying. I don't claim otherwise.
I just don't think copyright is an inalienable right like freedom of speech is. And being duplicitous should make you unreliable or scummy, not criminal. Barring actual fraud, of course, and I don't think all this winking adds up to fraud.
> I still think creators should be credited/paid for their work.
This has nothing to do with:
> I don't think people should expect free TV shows
The information was created. The actual creators in most cases were paid, on a salary, by a company. They did get their money. The company funding them just expects perpetual returns using the copyright framework of the host countries legal system. It is an artificial investment industry, but that is how it works for probably 99% of sold copyright works by volume.
Just remember, while copyright imparts a false scarcity upon (through modern technology) non-scarce information, there is a scarce good involved, the time and effort of skilled creators, and that like in every other industry ever you can bill for that as much as any other skill, regardless of who is paying you to do it.
I agree that some people wouldn't watch the show if they couldn't download it, but why do they have that right to get it for free? I understand that torrent technology is great, but TPB founder is using downloading TV shows as an example of how things will change.
As I said in a comment below, you too have it backwards. It's not about the "right of the people to download shit for free". It's about the right of the corporations to go to hell and beyond to justify a few bucks; putting people in jail and corrupting the judicial and political system in the process... for what is essentially a harmless offence.
I think the level of penalty related to torrents and downloading copyrighter material is a matter of opinion. I don't know enough to say jail time is too harsh/not enough.
"Harmless offence"? Really? Maybe harmless in the fact that no one died, but it's not harmless that people's work is being stolen. What if people stole your work? I don't think you can point to the rich people in Hollywood and say "They have enough money already, they can afford to lose some people to torrents" because for every rich actor/screenwriter/producer, there are 100 other entertainment workers that don't make $100,000 per episode.
When I go on Pirate Bay and type "Metallica", I get a bunch of songs and downloading and playing them is illegal (in some countries).
When I go on YouTube and type "Metallica", I get the same thing on completely unofficial channels and it's so legal that I can relink it to you here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqtaKkvCFaQ
The end result is the exact same thing: A non-paying user listened to an unofficial source for a song. Don't even try to argue that it's harmful because it's not. Don't even try to argue that one warrants jail time while the other does not... because you will be wrong, and this is not a subjective issue anymore.
YouTube has allowed for content producers to leverage those eyeballs and get people paid for their work. What actually needs to be talked about is solutions like YouTube and Spotify for content producers.
And all of this is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make... it's still not about the "right to download". It's about the right of the corporations to abuse and corrupt the system the way they do.
> The end result is the exact same thing: A non-paying user listened to an unofficial source for a song.
YouTube has functionality for content owners to identify their content being distributed unofficially on YouTube and either choose to permit and monetize it (via advertising) or choose to forbid it and have the content removed.
I'm well aware and this is what I was talking about... but from a user's point of view, the end result is the same. So let's stop talking about whether or not jail time is right.
So, when a movie has made $100 million and I buy a download for $5, how much of that goes to the ordinary workers (not rights holders, not first rank actors)? I'm going with none. Once the show breaks even the people who worked on it have been paid their wages. There's no argument of loss of income to make. Sure you can argue the rights holders deserve their extra millions (or cents) but your argument on loss of wages is void then.
So I torrent a movie, Avatar say, and now I should go to jail for several years and pay a fine that bankrupts me?
Whilst if I take a packet of cigarettes from a shop - about the same sales value - I get a fine of $20 and maybe if I'm really unlucky a night in a cell.
This is a complete disparity of punishment. The only reason for it to be like this is media interests owning the political process to such an extent that they can buy preferential treatment before the law.
And what's worse, is that the shop owner will get nothing, no police will help with their loss despite it being a physical good. Whilst for the movie rights holder, despite the actual loss being virtually zero (if not actually negative as sales can follow directly from the action) they get massive aid from the legal system and incomprehensibly large punishments on their behalf. Copyright infringement should by rights be a tort too.
Residuals (ongoing income from films/tv) go to much of the crew. Above the line people get residuals in the form of direct payments. Below the line people get them in the form of payments to their unions to sustain benefits, such as insurance and retirement funds.
I think if you're doing something illegal, you should assume that you are putting yourself in danger. TPB is like walking down a dark hallway to score some drugs. There are loose women, people trying to scam you, and people trying to lead you astray.
What's with people assuming TPB is only for porn and movies?
There are SO MANY THINGS that can be found on TPB: books, code, courses, videos. I don't understand why people on HN only focus on one thing.
Shouldn't information be freely accessible? Why should poor people or people that live in certain places not be able to access a book about, let's say, nanoparticular physics? Why can't these people watch Ironman and observe foreign values?
I personnally don't really care that TPB is down, too bad for plebs.
- Written from my Samsung Galaxy S3, cause I'm American, and am worth more than plebs.
PS: Sometimes, people piss me off from all their selfishness.
You do understand that the Malware has nothing to do with the website? and by that I mean that it's an adnetwork that controls what adverts that are displayed, and that many many adnetworks have been used to malvertise.
TPB chose the types of ads they are willing to display. I consider spyware and malware the exact same thing. TPB isn't a victim of the ad networks. They hired them to put up those misleading spyware and malware ads.
Well, it's TPB. They might not have had much of a choice about what ad networks they were allowed to participate in. I mean, if you're running an ad network, you need to appear respectable to get respectable clients. In that case, running ads on a torrent site is the exact opposite of what you want to do.
Most companies are not going to want to be associated with TPB, so most ad networks are not going to want to assocaite with TPB. So, the bottom of the barrel, scummiest ad networks are going to be what it would have to use to keep the lights on.
You sure talk a lot about how he was putting malware into people's computer through ads, when he himself said he's glad TPB is gone mostly because of how horrible its ads were[1].
You have a point (to the extent that it can be a point - it's just not really worth talking about anymore): downloading entertainment is not a human right. You make a very poor case of arguing that point.
But I don't think anyone really argues that "downloading movies" is a human right (and those that do are full of it). The problem is very much in reverse. The problem is the lengths that Hollywood and music studios will go to PREVENT people from doing those things. And the only defense is that those things are "morally dubious", and yet a lot of people do it. Hell, it's common knowledge that Spotify did it to get their business started.
So you're arguing the wrong problem. Now you tell me, is it a "right" for those companies to go above and beyond everything to prosecute and intimidate people who want entertainment they provide but are not willing to pay for it? Keeping in mind that:
- Said people are not directly costing the companies anything
- It's impossible to know whether said people would have paid for the content otherwise
- It's impossible to know whether said people would have even known about the content were it not for illegally acquiring it
The following is my subjective opinion:
You are a fool if you're angry about piracy on your pet project. You should be glad people go out and look for it. You have an audience.
That audience may not be entirely composed of people willing to pay for your work, but looking for such an audience is not a viable business plan. What you're getting is free advertising. What you're seeing on torrent sites is the very primitive equivalent of what happens on, for example, YouTube where you have channels and networks making more than they can ever dream off ads and sales just because they have the ability to reach so many people at such convenience.
Ears and eyeballs can directly translate to wallets, given the means. But instead of Hollywood/RIAA solving that problem, we have them prosecuting potential fans. We have them shutting down audiences by raiding sites that are full of actual fans. We have them corrupting judicial and political systems one after the other. We have them influencing international treaties and agreements, taking us all for brainless cashcows.
> You are a fool if you're angry about piracy on your pet project.
I'll tell my employees that as our company folds from lack of revenue. I'll tell my wife that as we apply for food stamps. I'll tell the that to the next person interviewing me for a job because people didn't want to pay for the value I provided.
> people didn't want to pay for the value I provided
Well, that simply sounds like a failed product, no? Not everything is successful. Given finite resources (human labor in this case) not everything can be successful.
Just because some people would take it for free does not mean they would take it at the cost it takes to make the product profitable.
The infuriating part is that the people that don't think the software is worth the value they would pay then also feel entitled enough to pay nothing and use it anyway. Don't want to use my software because you don't think it's worth the cost? That's fine, but you don't get to act high and mighty about using it without paying for it.
While I can understand the frustration it's not really lost sales, it's just purchases that never would have been made in the first place.
It's the same with music piracy. Sure, one might buy 1 CD. Even 10 CDs. But very few people would buy those 20GB+ of worth of music they hoard on their harddrives. It's something they take for free but would never pay for.
The difference with music is that you can make a partial purchase because the product is sliced into small enough pieces. I may have the whole discography of a band spanning decades, but I only buy one or two of their albums. At least they still get some money that way, so maybe they don't have to feel the same frustration that you do.
In that sense piracy enables some sort of involuntary "set your own price" scheme. But that only works if the product can be sliced down into small enough units enabling the consumers to set their own price.
For software this is more difficult, but not impossible. For example adobe products or microsoft office get pirated in private environments but paid for in commercial settings. The private copies serve to entrench the product in the market, even if they don't generate a direct profit by themselves. So even there is a difference between what people are willing to pay and the retail price of the products.
>While I can understand the frustration it's not really lost sales, it's just purchases that never would have been made in the first place.
This is really splitting hairs. Yes, I acknowledge that it wasn't _just_ piracy that caused the company to shut its doors. But to say that I can't be frustrated about people using the results of my work for free? In what other industry is it acceptable to say, "Yes, we like your product, but no, we're not going to pay, and if you try to make us pay we're going to throw our toys out of the pram about how evil the software developers are!" That's taking it to a whole new level, and that's really the point I was responding to.
Let's forget for a moment that, as you tell all those people your sorrows, you will in fact figure out that your product failed not because of piracy but because the product was not giving adequate value for its price...
This is about movies and music at large. Software piracy is a solved problem. In games, the majority of people now use Steam and nobody really cares about the few that look for it on random torrent websites or some such because:
1. They are a much more likely source of malware (you don't just play files, you run executables).
2. Games that care have adopted an online-only DRM model (which has its own problems but that's a story for another thread)
3. A lot of games have an audience comprised entirely of non-paying customers (children without credit cards). Parents are not expected to pirate, and if kids do then no harm done.
In office software, Photoshop and MS Office are the two big names in piracy and both MS and Adobe silently encourage piracy on their products to enforce lock in. And while that sounds scummy when I put it like that, it is an excellent demonstration of what I was mentioning earlier: You have eyeballs/ears which you can easily turn into wallets.
So please, give me a break, your company did not go under because of piracy. And Hollywood/the RIAA have more digits in their bank accounts than total employees.
>Let's forget for a moment that, as you tell all those people your sorrows, you will in fact figure out that your product failed not because of piracy but because the product was not giving adequate value for its price.
That may be, but that doesn't mean that people have the right to unilaterally decide that the price should be zero against the wishes of the seller. They may have the technical ability to do so, but that does not make it moral or ethical to do so in the most general case. I'd like to have a lower electrical bill. Electricity is a non-tangible good, like bits. Does that mean that I should be able to tell the electric company to shove off just because I think they charge too much for electricity? Why is that any different?
If my software fails because nobody wants it at the price it's at then that's a signal that I should lower prices. If my software fails because a large group decides to void the social contract and get my software for free because they disagree with their pricing then I have every right to get angry about it. The software I produce took time and money to produce. It's okay if you don't want to pay for it. Then don't use it. You don't get to have all of the benefit for none of the cost. That's the part that's the most infuriating.
>Software piracy is a solved problem.
How do you make that logical jump?
>You have eyeballs/ears which you can easily turn into wallets.
Not if people are used to and can continue to get the software for free. That relies upon the generosity of some other person down the line to actually pay for the software. Some companies may choose to make that decision. Good for them! But the assumption that all companies will or must or otherwise be ethically or morally bankrupt is a bad one. I'd love to spend all of my time building software for others and let them pay what they want for it, but I have to eat and have a family to support.
Software piracy doesn't hurt big shops or new developers as much as it hurts the smaller guys. Big shops price it into their software costs, and as you said, industry standard software (Office, Photoshop) rely upon it to bring in new users because their target market is saturated. New developers are just happy to get their name out there in many cases - it's a cost of doing business that they can afford.
The small shops in the middle get it the worst. Not enough name recognition to be an industry leader yet enough people that feel entitled to their software for free. The vast majority of them can't win and fold. Is that what meritocracy is? Subject to the whims of an entitled core of freeloaders?
Those small shops you keep mentioning, they don't exist anymore. There was a very small decade during which they did exist... shareware shops. Those were really crap. Boy I'm glad they're gone. You know what replaced them? Web apps shops (online-only, no piracy there) and mobile apps shops (where piracy has a much, much higher barrier of entry and is comparatively non-existant).
So as I said, software piracy is more or less a solved problem.
>Web apps shops (online-only, no piracy there) and mobile apps shops (where piracy has a much, much higher barrier of entry and is comparatively non-existant).
Well thank goodness you're here to solve all the world's ills! Believe it or not, there are still significant numbers of people that either aren't connected or use software in a situation where they're not connected to the net. That totally screws the usefulness of webapps.
Nice cynicism, but this is about companies and the effect piracy has on them... not about whether or not web apps are useful for people without internet.
That job interview would be your epiphany. That nobody paid for it because you didn't really provide any value at all.
Welcome to the real world, where your actions are most likely insignificant and valueless, except for you.
Has there ever really been a documented case of people being driven to poverty as a direct result of their content being put on file sharing networks? It's a very common piece of emotional demagoguery that I see, but I've never seen any sources that substantiate it.
Yeah, Sunde's far from being the martyr he's trying to portrait.
"8 months in jail in Sweden" is not that much of a big deal, I mean, jail is still jail but he's writing it as if he were some kind of digital Mandela, far from it, I'd argue that the publicity associated with his sentence was extremely beneficial in terms of exposure of the site and thus economical revenue.
Yesterday's post about him not being OK with what TPB had become (a sexist 10th anniversary party, a site full of ads) really show how twisted the guy's mind is; he truly believes (or wants the public to believe) that his ideals are good and pristine and that the business he created had spontaneously (and against his will, yeah) became something else. Well done is better than well said; I'll believe his statements the day he spends a major part of his wealth in supporting actual charity or at least some kind of net-neutrality non-profit projects. This guy is Kim Dotcom all the way.
He went to jail for creating a website that enabled people to download music and movies without paying for them. Jail is a harsh punishment IMO for that. ACTA/SOPA etc. are all terrible things that we can't allow and we can't allow the internet to become more centralised/controlled by government. But that's not why he went to jail. Enabling illegal downloads of content has little to do with those causes.
And Manning went to jail for revealing government secrets about government crimes. And Snowden cannot return home because he revealed that people are being spied on.
It's very easy to say, "he went to jail because what he did was illegal". It's harder to say "he went to jail despite what he did was right".
I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free.
But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. And they are not essential products, you can live just fine without TV series or movies. People don't die because they can't play their favourite video game. It's like saying designer clothes should be free.
Information should be shared without profit, yeah, that's what wikipedia is doing fine.
But video games are not information, so are TV shows, movies, etc. They are products which cost money to produce. It doesn't make economical sense to give it away for free hoping to get money from ads or whatever. Mobile games do that, and mostly they are unplayable without purchasing credits, etc. Even then, the quality is often very poor.
You can point to open source, but people producing open source software are minority of all engineers.
What you are saying might be morally 'right' but unfortunately being morally right doesn't pay the rent, bills and food.
> It's like saying designer clothes should be free.
I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.
Well, yes, but you can't download clothes using torrents ;)
Similar idea would be that ideas of movies and video games should not be copyrighted. IANAL, but there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements unless you create a video game with almost identical name, etc.
>there are many many similar movies and video games and don't think there are any copyright infringements //
That's because they're copying the ideas and not the implementation, copyright protects implementations ("works") and not the ideas behind them (at least that's the intention).
Similar names would be trademark law rather than copyright FWIW.
Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy/sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK). A strong argument speaking against it is the fact that there are many examples that say the contrary; Avatar is one of the most pirated movies and also one of the most successful ones, and earned a huge amount of money just on cinema tickets. You have e.g. Zynga, King and Rovio who have earned lots of money on free games.
I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student). Now, I often pay for music that I really like, to support the artists! Other music I just watch on YouTube. If I was sure that Netflix would provide a better service than downloading (i.e. good quality, little wait time, superb selection, offline viewing, no geo-restrictions), I would subscribe.
Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy/sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK).
It's absolutely been demonstrated to be true, many many times. Do you think game studios, console makers, movie studios etc put money into DRM because none of them understand their own business?
There are lots of people who spoken either on or off the record who say the same things: the moment their copy protection fails, sales fall off a cliff and you can see it in the data. For video games it's even worse. The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.
Movie studio executives have graphs of sales and you can see the point at which high quality rips were uploaded to the internet.
>The general figure I see for video game piracy on the PC platform is around 90-95% of players are not paying for it, yet, often they are still consuming resources on e.g. multiplayer servers.
Hang on a sec. If you pirate games, you can't get online on the official servers, that's the whole downside to pirating and the reason so many games now require always-online. Once the game is released through a torrent site, that's it, the developer has no more hand in it. The whole point of cracking a game is to cut the umbilical cord of DRM and online-based play.
You can limit the official servers to people who have a license key.
Plus, DRM is its own detriment. Some days ago I saw Child of Light on sale on Steam and was going to buy it, but then noticed it has uPlay DRM. And as we all know uplay means nobuy.
Personally, I'd rather have no DRM and less games, than more games that need to strongarm people into paying.
>>> I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK).
Might be. But the cost to produce Candy Crush Saga and a AAA title is, well, different. But if you try to find a non-digital analogy, e.g. food, it doesn't make it right for me to steel expensive whisky just because I don't agree with pricing model :)
>>> I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student)
Agree with this, I perfectly know what you mean. When I was a poor student, I would buy a video game once a year on my b-day and keep playing it for a year or two :) completely objective, but it felt really better than downloading a batch on games. But that's not the point :)
This is a different problem (pricing, not intellectual property). HumbleBundle sometimes has games by big publishers for $1, Steam has good weekend sales sometimes (grabbed a few relatively new good games for under $15). I think solution to provide poorer markets can be found in this direction.
> But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products.
It did no such thing. It provided a searchable list of user-generated content. It was no different than hacker news or reddit. It was used in a fashion that facilitated "crimes", but so are computers, Internet, and cash in general.
We can quibble over the meaning of the word "distributed," but I don't think this has much to do with anything. At the end of the day, the primary function of TPB is to allow users to download TV shows and movies for free. Indeed, the world-changing consequence of TPB shutting down, according to Sunde himself, is that "[i]t tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else." (Though, granted, he imagines that this will cause people to perceive some sort of slippy slope. His argument here seems to depend, however, on conflating TPB with the BT protocol itself.)
Nor is it especially relevant that computers, cash, the Internet, etc. all facilitate crimes, in some sense. TPB is easily distinguishable because its express purpose, and dominant actual use, is to facilitate crime.
I do respect that Sunde was willing to go to jail for his cause. But given the dubious specific goals of TPB as it was actually operated (despite whatever ideology might have supported or motivated it) I can't say that I'm particularly cowed by his moral courage generally.
No, it was a lot different from Reddit or HN. Please stop trying to support the "pirating is okay". It's not. It's theft. You do not need or have to see those shows. You want to watch them and you fulfill that want by pirating. That pirating may cause purchases later is a horrible argument for theft.
Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions.
As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
Well, sure, you can sell it or give it away for free, that's up to you. But once you give it to someone you give someone a blob of information. Which is identical to the one you still have. That chunk of information is not intrinsically tied to you anymore.
So you can easily control initial distribution. But to restrict further distribution you have to restrict actions of others. You have to limit their freedoms to do with that new copy of information.
Is there a good reason to limit their freedoms? Maybe. But it doesn't occur to me as a natural right. Once you handed over a copy to someone else each of you control an identical set of information. You severed your ties.
So if you want the rights of others restricted then - in my opinion - the burden of constructing a case why they should be is on you.
> "to restrict further distribution you have to restrict actions of others."
... in a way that's not particularly different from the restrictions we place on physical books. JK Rowling doesn't give up her right to control sales/distribution of Harry Potter just because someone bought a hardback edition and owns a scanner or photocopier. Making a pdf or a photocopy of Harry Potter doesn't result in "stealing" any of her physical inventory, but if you resell it or even give it away (private personal use as a backup copy is OK) you can get in serious legal trouble (it would probably be termed "copyright infringement" rather than "theft", but IANAL TINLA.)
If you want to argue that purely digital goods should be handled differently than a digital scan someone made of a physical book, the burden of proof is back on you. Why should Rowling be entitled to sell Harry Potter in dead tree format and be able to treat scans as infringement, but not entitled to sell Harry Potter in digital format while treating unauthorized copies as infringement?
>If you want to argue that purely digital goods should be handled differently than a digital scan someone made of a physical book, the burden of proof is back on you.
I do not. And those restrictions are exactly the same, they are about information. It's not about the dead trees with some pigment sprinkled onto them. It's about the particular arrangement of ink.
And I also say that I am naturally free to do whatever with the book - and the information therein - once I have obtained it.
If my freedom to do anything with it what I want should be restricted - as above, there may be good reasons to do so - then one would have to explain to me why that is, because I see no natural right that the author have over things they passed on to others.
> "I also say that I am naturally free to do whatever with the book - and the information therein - once I have obtained it."
In US law, you are free to resell the book, but you are not free to produce a copy to resell (or to keep the copy and resell the original). You bought a copy of the book, not the rights to redistribute the content as you see fit; those still reside with the author. Others have made the argument about incentivizing content producers by granting those rights, so I will not rehash them.
(I reject your treatment of "natural law" as the only relevant system; I recognize the additional value of "common law" and "positive law".)
But that harm is only financial. It's a harm relative to potential profits they could have made if other people's rights to make copies were restricted in the first place.
If you do not assume such a right then no harm is done.
You trivialize our economic system when you describe it as "only financial." People die over money.
I don't want to defend the actions of the copy-write robber-barons. I do not know what the appropriate response for infringement should be. I ignore violations of my own content. Yet I believe that I have a right to the content that I produce. And I respect the rights of others' content. Do you believe that content producers should not have these rights?
You missed half of my point. It's not only "just financial". It's also "just financial harm only if we are pre-supposing the the rights whose natural existence you're trying to prove in the first place"
I'm not sure if we're even talking about the same thing then.
In a previous post you said
>"As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?"
Which seemed to me like an argument for an intrinsic, natural right that a content creator should have, irrespective of current law.
So either we are arguing over current law, in which case the questions you ask are already settled by courts and we should be discussing whether current law is acceptable.
Or you are arguing about rights that people ought to have, but then you cannot say
>"But that does not mean that these rights do not exist."
If we are arguing about rights that one ought to have then they do no exist a priori, they have to be constructed first.
I dunno. At a low level, piracy is just copying bits. It just so happens that certain bits contain some people's "intellectual property". If we concede that this makes sense and want to fight a losing battle anyway, it becomes a philosophical line-drawing fiesta about the bits you're copying. I propose instead that it's futile for people to try and monetize a certain sequence of bits given a certain interpretation. Then the natural conclusion is to move toward services, like free-to-play games or streaming products where the actual "bits on sale" are free, but the "action of using those bits to bring in the bits you want" is what costs money, rather than whatever the actual bits are.
You could say that about almost any activity in today's digital age. Sending abusive emails, making harassing phone calls, stealing money from people's bank accounts - these are also activities that essentially are also just copying bits.
Describing these in such a way doesn't imply anything about the moral implications.
First, I never said "pirating is okay". Please stop putting words in my mouth. I support the idea that content creators paid for their work. Sometimes, in the context of F/OSS for instance, the creators choose to forgo that directly and often indirectly (e.g. donations).
Secondly, downloading a work under a non-permissive copyright is not theft, and may not even be illegal. Content shifting is a legal thing to do. If I own a DVD one could argue that I could download an already ripped version of the DVD (CSS issues aside).
Third, not everything linked to on TPB was covered under a non-permissive copyright.
Please stop assuming everyone is an idiot and immoral.
Small point, but it actually depends on the country's laws. In New Zealand, it's illegal to do that. It's even illegal to rip a CD you own. It's stupid and would never be enforecd, but it is the law.
What about content that you cannot legally obtain? For instance, TV shows that haven't aired in your country yet (or won't ever) due to greed or a whole load of other reasons?
It's absurd that there are people there are people waiting cash in hand to get content, and they are denied because of some sort of broken mentality on how content should be distributed.
Calling it theft is using a legal concept that is outmoded for the digital world. Theft implies that an object is removed from someone's possession in order to be taken.
You can argue all you like that it deprives content creators of income (although even that is complex, in many contexts), but it is not, and never will be theft.
Fair enough. I can see how someone would not think they are information.
In this case we can use the word "culture" instead of "information", and the original point still stands. And I am sure we can all agree that TV and movies are culture.
One important difference between giving designer clothes free and your favorite video game free is that that former is a constant sum game while the latter is not. Sharing software products does not prevent anyone else to access it. It does not even cost money for the producer as the distribution is handled by seeders.
All in all it's a terrible analogy.
EDIT: By all means go ahead and downvote, but don't forget to explain why the analogy doesn't fail.
Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas using one's body and property to anyone who is willing to receive them.
Not sharing hashcodes to copyrighted works over the internet.
> Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas using one's body and property to anyone who is willing to receive them.
Why do people confuse the concept of free speech with some specific political or legal idea?
There are many other ways in which a reduction of free speech is extremely harmful. Look at the great firewall of China blocking democratic content, look at reviews being censored by websites or posters afraid of lawsuits.
Free speech is important and extends far outside of politics.
So please, tell me, is this number illegal to possess or distribute? What sort of disturbing thought or speech crime is that?
1272705567343948816021070860118743823207760906496
I don't think I want to live anywhere where it's illegal to possess or distribute a number.
And we don't want to live with people who can engage in the intellectual dishonesty that a site dedicated and known for primarily listing numbers pointing to copies of somebody else's work, that they worked hard to create, is harmless.
Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.
> Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.
Does it though? TPB themselves are not doing any sort of piracy, nor are they harming anyone. That exercise is left entirely up to the users.
The only thing they do is distribute numbers, exactly like I just did. Your choice what you do with that. If you choose to use that number to harm someone, that's up to you, not me. I'm not at fault for giving you a number.
Perhaps those users look at it from another perspective: maybe people shouldn't be making money like that. We live in a post-scarcity world with digital resources, we have no need for such people anymore. We've shown time and time again that even without enforcement, some will thrive and profit greatly, some will operate for free, and others will fall. Maybe it's time to just let it happen and give up on the use of coercive force to create a false market.
I can't say whether it's right or wrong, I don't think there's a correct answer there, but you have to understand that different people view these issues entirely differently.
The world isn't theoretical. Context matters, intent matters. It's called the PIRATE bay for fucks sake. Sure, there is plenty of regular sharing on TPB. But the majority of it is pirated content that they are making a hell of a lot easier for people to access.
This thread is really exposing to me the variety of views on the topic. I get your argument, but it's like you're deliberately ignoring the reality of how TPB is used.
Which people are you talking about that we have no need for? The people who make the content? You don't feel we have a need for them? I love cutting out middle men as much as anyone, but eventually somebody has to make the product. I've seen people argue that authors shouldn't be paid for their work, they should do it as a side project of passion and be happy to see somebody reading a copy of their work. I'd much rather do my art all day than have to do it as a side project while I work at something else to pay the bills.
And as an aside, we may live in a post-scarcity world but it sure as hell isn't distributed.
> This thread is really exposing to me the variety of views on the topic. I get your argument, but it's like you're deliberately ignoring the reality of how TPB is used.
I'm simply saying TPB cannot be held directly responsible for how their users behave. Same as any website operator really. Not "deliberately ignoring" anything. TPB doesn't pirate. TPB helps pirates by offering names and comments on hashes. I don't see why that should be illegal at all.
Their name and marketing is simply the best marketing for their platform to get the most ad views. Nothing wrong with that.
> Which people are you talking about that we have no need for? The people who make the content? You don't feel we have a need for them? I love cutting out middle men as much as anyone, but eventually somebody has to make the product.
Simply "working hard" alone should not be rewarded. And as we've seen time and time again, plenty of people are willing to make a product for free, with or without ad revenue or to find alternative ways to profit. Just because 1 business model fails doesn't mean everybody loses out. Just some people. I'm saying the people who _rely_ upon the failing business model should in fact lose rather than being encouraged by archaic laws.
Using Chinese censorship to argue about pirated content is, imo, a variation of the slippery slope fallacy.
If someone obtained your family's credit card numbers and PINs, you would consider them to be in their good right to distribute them freely? They're just numbers, after all.
Well said, it's definitely something that needs to be discussed. That however is separate from distributing simple numbers, which do not ever construct a work, in my opinion.
Somehow you see "links to hashes" as stretching freedom of speech and the ability to arbitrarily ban hashes in strings as the way it's supposed to be?
I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing.
I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing.
Copyright discussions in a nutshell. That's why I only play for sport.
When people have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and when outcomes of creating things like tpb could land one in prison, what does one do if they want to live in an environment where creating things like tpb wont land them in prison?
Theft is a concept that originates from our definition of "property". I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property; I agree that a reasonably short copyright term can encourage the creation of art, but what we have now is outrageous and I don't think the trade-off makes sense for the public.
>> "I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property"
How about a definition like - "If I create something, I own it and have the right to profit from it." Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term? Why should it be ok for someone to copy it just because they have the ability to?
Why should the person who first arrange a series of words in a particular order have the power to prevent other people from arranging words into the same order, in perpetuity?
Copyright prevents the free speech of others. There's some justification for it doing so. But it's not a natural, or absolute, right.
The power to prevent others from copying the arrangement is an incentive to arrange in the first place. But it should be limited. Property rights allow me to restrict your speech when your literally on my government sanctioned land. I don't see much difference when it comes to IP.
Edit: copyright should be more limited than physical property rights, so I'm in agreement. But neither can be absolute when the government only has a piece of paper to abide by that prevents them from being revoked.
There are exceptions to copyright to minimise the impact on free speech (satire, news for example). I guess people's opinions on this will ultimately come down to their views on free speech and that varies throughout the world.
The US Constitution does not recognize ideas as property. Copyrights and patents are limited-time incentives which may be granted by the government to encourage creativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
Your "right to profit" only exists in so far that you can try to profit from it, but naturally that might fail if someone takes your idea and implements it cheaper.
Copyright is only a government-granted, temporary monopoly on that idea to incentivize you to live from creating them in the first place and to create more.
Once you have given your idea to someone else, where does your natural right come from to control what they do with it?
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper [candle] at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
The very idea of idea ownership is a dangerous one. Because most ideas are compositions of other ideas; should you pay if you write a poem because someone else invented the concept of poems?
>Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term?
This is a much broader question about the rationale behind copyright law and the concept of intellectual property. It is really beyond the scope of the question posed (is copyright violation theft?).
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
You are not born in isolation from the rest of us. Everything you create originated from an idea that you learned from somebody else. You have no right of ownership over something that is not entirely yours.
So if you make an apple pie, you don't mind that I come and steal it from your windowsill? You don't own it, after all.
What if you spend a year making a beautiful cabinet? You didn't invent the tree, or the saw, so it's okay if I come by and cart the cabinet over to my house, right?
> That's an argument against the entire idea of personal property.
It doesn't seem to be inherently an argument against the entire idea of "personal property", it seems to be inherently an argument against the idea that property (personal, real, or otherwise) is a matter of absolute right, rather than a matter of an exchange in which owners are granted privilege at the expense of restrictions on everyone else's freedom because of a perceived social benefit to that exchange -- where the parameters, then, of the particular privileges of owners become subject to analysis of whether the exchange really does have net social value.
In regards to intellectual property of the types dependent, in US law, on the Constitution's so-called "Copyright Clause", this is pretty explicitly the premise in the US Constitutional system; in addition, the differences in the privileges and limitations of real and personal property rights (and the particular parameters of particular subclasses of each), as well as things like eminent domain, are very hard to conceptualize under a model of property-as-absolute-right unless you simply define each feature as its own axiom of property rights, except the ones you don't like and define them as violations of axiomatic rights, whereas the whole regime of property rights and its evolution makes a lot more sense under a social benefit exchange view with an evolving view of what provisions actually provide social benefit.
Why should you have that right in the first place?
Note that I agree that you should (or, rather, that as a society we should make sure that it's possible under reasonable conditions), but my reason for agreement is not able to justify perpetual copyright.
My reasoning happens to be similar to what the U.S. Constitution says, but I can imagine others having different reasoning for the same idea.
Let's say you wrote a book and writing books is your only means of putting food on the table - and then one day you sit next to someone on the train who is reading a scanned copy of your book on their tablet. You ask them about it, and they say "yeah I don't buy books really, I downloaded this off torrents". Sure, the book they have is not "stolen" per se, but would you personally not feel like someone "stole" at least some of your work from you?
I believe that this is a very interesting entry point to a discussion, because the immediate reply to this is - that library books don't generate any extra income to the author. And that is also true. But I feel like even without calling it theft it is not entirely fair.
> writing books is your only means of putting food on the table
That's a strange assumption. Many authors fail, or only produce works in their spare time and work other jobs. I mean there's no fundamental right to be a successful author who can live off selling books.
Of course as a society we find it desirable to create an environment where artists can make a living from their works and create more art. That's why copyright exists. It's a tradeoff, all citizens are required to respect the creations of others in exchange for the opportunity for everyone to dedicate their lives to it and make an income with it. (Note: It's just an opportunity to make profit, not a right to profit)
But that societal contract gets perverted by commercial interests to the point where people stop seeing copyright as something positive and instead will refuse to adhere to it.
The internet making copying so much easier than ever before also skews that tradeoff by making it much more difficult for everyone to respect copyright. Breaking copyright is even easier than jaywalking and I don't think private citizens will stop anytime soon.
So ultimately that scheme to incentivize people to be creative used to be "fair", but now that view has somewhat shifted. And the system needs an overhaul.
I'd very much expect most authors that focus on literature rather than short-form paid-by-the-word non-fiction-work to fail or only receive a minority of their income from writing.
Becoming a writer to make money off literature is pretty much like playing the lottery - the odds are badly stacked against you; if you have "success" most of the time you'll make a pittance, and only a tiny proportion of the people who are successful make it big.
If anything, current incentive structures created by current copyright are bad for most people in the creative fields, as the "hit culture" means they're heavily geared towards disproportionally rewarding a very small subset of people. While the hope of striking it big may lure some people to create, I'm more concerned that the bad odds of being able to make ends meet puts a lot of very creative people off those career choices.
I think very few people feel that depriving some person of the fruits of his or her labor in the way that you describe is a moral or ethical thing to do. But, it is by definition not theft. Perhaps some new law, or some changes to law are needed to fairly deal with the problem. Treating it as theft is an abuse of the law.
I think it is interesting that you use a hypothetical author as an example since even before technology showed up and wrecked the party, copyright law arguably failed (or at least was never very good) at its supposed purpose.
> would you personally not feel like someone "stole" at least some of your work from you?
Absolutely not. If anything, I would be flattered to meet somebody actually reading my book, and I'd probably be eager to have a chat with him, maybe ask for opinions and perhaps tell him about other books I'm working on, if it looks like he could be interested. That'd be an event that could make me very happy.
The reality is that nobody seems to be interested in what I do. Should I feel I'm being treated unfair by all the people in the train who never bought and never used my stuff? Never even heard of me?
They don't have to buy it, but it doesn't change the fact that they are using your work without paying you. It's the same as if you were a street painter selling your work, and someone comes around and takes a picture of what you painted and says "naaah, I'll just print it at home, rather than giving you $50 for it". You are not entitled to any sales. But that person took your work without paying. You have no right to demand that he pays for it, but he had no right to take it without paying.
Context matters. I can yell FIRE in my own home, but I can't go into a crowded theatre and yell it. The hash as you post it here is meaningless. But elsewhere it could be the key to another's property.
Personally I think you should be free to yell "FIRE" in a theater too. If that started a panic and someone came to harm due to it then you might be held partially responsible to that harm, but so should those people who mindlessly trample on others without assessing the situation.
But if nothing happened then there should be no reason to make your exclamation illegal.
Of course you could still be thrown out of the theater for disrupting the performance, providing further disincentive for doing something like that, but that's separate from the legality of your speech.
And it's perfectly useful. Paste it into any BT client, wind up with a copy of... Windows 7 it looks like. Practically the same as finding the link on TPB.
So, is this another's property or not? Did I just make it by appending a short string to turn it into a URL?
For the wellbeing of civilization over the next century, copyright and freedom of speech will probably affect everyone to a greater degree than war crimes, or even pervasive spying.
Also consider that Sunde has made a number of comments which are critical of TPB and how that project has turned out. So while TPB isn't necessarily the ideal, maybe more of a failed or partially-failed attempt.
It isn't some noble cause because you presumably believe copyright is moral. To those who believe copyright, copyright in its current form, is an immoral restriction on free speech, it may very well be.
Sometimes I need to remind people that Dr. King and Gandhi also went to jail because they did things that were illegal.
People should ask themselves whether or not the law is right.
I think that the question here is a very complicated one. One can support copyright status quo but still have a problem with the heavy handed tactics being used against TPB.
If we follow their logic to it's inevitable conclusion, we could find ourselves in a place where "Unauthorized reviews" could be considered copyright infringement.
> And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?
Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not.
If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism?
Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this.
Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive.
I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.
I watch plenty of stuff without paying for it so I don't want to pretend that I am on some high moral horse here, but i don't get this mindset.
Of course just putting in effort doesn't give me the right to compensation. If so, I could just start digging holes and ask the world for payment. However, if I made something and you want to see it, I think I am in my good right to set a price. If you don't like that price, you are free to move along. There are plenty of files on my laptop that I created that I don't want to show anyone. They are going to stay there and nobody has the right to see them other than me. And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.
If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.
> And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.
Sure, this is unconditionally right if we go by the book and agree with the law. No argument here. Though, by going by the said law... The full albums, songs, movies, movie clips, whatever unauthorized there is in YouTube for example for billions of people to see every day creates a huge problem.
For example here in Finland, any person listening to an unauthorized upload of an album on YouTube breaks the law. Practically a huge majority of the youth are criminals as they do this on a daily basis, and take it for granted. Obviously it is utterly senseless to go after these people for what they are doing.
> If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.
But this, of course, is a flawed analogy. A better one would be with an ability to clone material for free. Say, if we were able to build a car, and then clone it for free for everyone. Why wouldn't we? For many goods we could just come up with better and better ones again and again, and people would immediately clone them for themselves and be happy. Sounds good, no?
In the end the main reason I oppose the copyright mafia bullshit is the tendency to limit my ability to use computers as computers. They want to tell me which bit patterns are illegal on my mass storage device or RAM. They want to tell me what CPU instructions I am not allowed to inspect or run. They want to tell me what network data I am allowed to capture and inspect. In essence, they want to own my general purpose computer and make it some form of "special purpose machine" with certain set of bits or instructions, or pixels on the screen. Cory Doctorow gave a great talk about this subject in 28C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
And boy, if someone breaks these rules. Your 9-year-old daughter downloads an album on her laptop, and the police storms in after you refuse to sign NDA and pay a fine from an anti-piracy group which is 30 times higher than the value of the album in question. And I am not bullshitting you -- this really happened two years ago in Finland. See: https://torrentfreak.com/police-raid-9-year-old-pirate-bay-g...
For me personally, whether you, or someone get your living from whatever you do which people may pirate is completely irrelevant in grand scheme of things. The much larger picture is these completely messed up laws with these mafia-like anti-piarcy groups such as MPAA or RIAA, and many domestic ones in almost every country. The issue is way, way much more than just whether something is right or wrong. I see this whole issue very central on a societal level as well as from the point of view of something I'd call "computer/computing culture". I see it as something we as hackers should be very aware and vocal about. See SOPA and PIPA as examples as to why.
Well, I get paid to create that information and help use it. Others get paid to distribute it personally, usually in a stage. Others yet simply get money from public grants or private donations.
How are the people who created Facebook compensated?
I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook.
Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)
My problem with that is that we have the internet - a system that lets us, the people who derive benefit from the content to compensate the people who created it directly. You want to add middle men that don't need to be there. When it comes to profiting from other things (performance etc.) you are forcing people to do something they may not want to do. What if I create a great album of music but don't fancy uprooting my life, travelling the world on a tiny budget, and leaving behind my family for 10 months of the year? With the internet I could have charged a fair amount direct to the consumer but you decided information should be free.
You can't have everything be ad-based, in the end someone has to actually sell something to make money that pays for the ads. I always felt that this is a flaw in the ad-based model, you try to compensate for you own product not having any value by pushing other peoples products.
Anyway, if we're purely taking music, downloading it of TPB or listing to it on Spotify more or less makes the artist the same amount of money.
Software and books are different, because you can't really compensate for lose of sales with performances. Movies I'm unsure of, cinema could make the money needed to cover the prodution cost, but I don't know if that's viable.
You can choose not to sell a thing, or you can choose to sell it. You can even offer it via a contract where people are permitted to do some things with it and not others. But what is really poisonous is the government-prohibited-by-default position of copyright, where people who come into possession of e.g. old, out-of-print books are forbidden from copying them even if noone knows who would or could "own the rights".
If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.
"Their work" presumes ownership. Information does not have inherent ownership, unlike physical objects which can only be controlled one / a few people at a time.
As owners of creative products, the content producers can do as they feel with them. They can choose which characters die, how the story is told, and how the content is presented. That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.
Freedom of information is a great concept, and one which I support. Tax payers should be able to find out how much organization x donated to politician y. But a movie, a creative work, is more than information. It is a product, an investment, and requires a substantial effort from many people.
Please let me know if I am misrepresenting your argument, but it seems that you are using this notion of freedom of information to blanket, what I view as, theft. Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions.
As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
>That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information.
How do they own it if they make a copy and hand over that copy in its entirety to someone else? How do they not relinquish control of that copy?
>what I view as, theft
But nobody is deprived of something when it gets copied. You can still modify your original and I can do as I please with mine.
This is how folk tales and our legends and everything propagates through society. Information, including creative work, flows freely.
>As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
Sure, that's at your discretion. But once you have given them away I don't see any natural reason why you should have any influence over what others do with a thing you have given away.
If you are a wood-carver and make an ornamental table for me, should I not be free to chop it up for firewood if I don't like it anymore just because you think it would be a violation of your work?
Why? Nobody is saying that copyright holders should be forced to distribute their work for free. Only that people, after having acquired copies, should be able to share it with others.
If you want to distribute copies of all the work I've ever published, or work made by me and published by the company I work for, you're free to do so. It's all under Free licenses.
Well, personally, I don't object to NDAs; as long as the person has consented beforehand. But that's just me, don't assume that's what everyone else agrees.
I specifically said everything produced, under any circumstances. Not just work. Everything. After all, if you believe in the free sharing of information...
You're still confusing "freedom to share" with "obligation to share". Being for the free sharing of information and choosing to not publish some stuff is completely coherent. Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works.
So you support spreading the hacked nude photos of celebs? Once someone obtains a copy they should be free to share?
And "Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works." should be a warning flag to you. Once you get to a position that twisty, you should think to yourself there's probably something wrong with it.
> And "Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works." should be a warning flag to you. Once you get to a position that twisty, you should think to yourself there's probably something wrong with it.
Strange, because that's exactly how the patent/business secrets laws work; a company is free to decide what they want to do with their new invention; they can keep it secret and risk someone else reinventing it, or they can publish it (submit a patent) and receive a temporary monopoly on that technology.
Yes, that's correct. A patent is a legal construct that temporarily gives the creator more protections than they would "naturally" have. This is specifically done to encourage people to publish their ideas. After a time, this protection goes away and things are back to normal.
Those celeb photos do not need copyright to be protected from distribution. They need the right to privacy, because that's what's being harmed there.
Copyright just gets used as a tool for takedown because commercial interests have driven the law to make it a much sharper and more immediately applicable tool than privacy laws.
What twist? If you don't want your works to be distributed, don't distribute them. I don't see what's weird about that.
As for the nude celeb pictures, I think the original hack should be illegal. I don't think mere distribution should be. It wouldn't serve any purpose to do so, as we've seen - it is illegal right now, did that help anyone?
That doesn't mean I support it. Life is not a binary choice between "this is a good activity" and "this should be illegal".
The comment you're replying to defines both how Sunde's, Snowden's, & Manning's actions are different and provides context for the very limited comparison being made.
If you don't agree, you should just argue your point because your straw man is just pathetic.
There is a watertight rights basis for opposing copyright. Copyright is a major structural threat to our freedoms.
Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder.
You might say - that's just words.
But it's not. Both in software and law, when you have permissions systems that mix up positive and negative rights with one side ruining the other one.
That is what we see with copyright. A continuing encroachment on our positive rights on the basis of the state's desire to enforce the anti-right. The state will invade your house, jail and deport you... because of things you're doing with publicly released information and magnetic signals in the privacy of your own home.
Once a positive right has been eroded by a single case of an anti-right winning, that serves as precedent for removing it in other cases.
Have a think about it the next time you're working on a permission system and are tempted to create a permission that denies a right to someone. As you follow it through, you'll find you've created an unholy mess. Stick to positive rights.
Update: hi, haters. Feel free to be constructive, too.
> Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder.
Every "right" is an "anti-right." It's a restriction on what other people can do. Your right to bodily integrity is a restriction on my natural freedom to do whatever I want with my environment, which might include you. My right to protect my copyrighted work is a restriction on your same natural freedom. Now obviously punching someone in the face is worse than using the fruits of their labor without their permission, but I don't think the two things are qualitatively different.
If you accept the principle of live-and-let-live (raised above), there's a chasm between what constitutes a right and anti-right. If you don't accept live and let live, you've got some explaining to do. It goes back thousands of years, it's well-entrenched in the new testament (defines women as being equal to men; repeatedly scorns class-based rights) and then reiterated in each of the various rights documents that have helped shape western culture since then.
I checked wikipedia on what is a positive and negative rights. There's a major error through what I've written above here (At best, I've got negative/positive backwards). Treat as suspect. Will brush up some more and come back better prepared for next time.
You don't have some fucking inalienable right to my code. If I choose to open source it fine. Just because some cracker asshole gets a copy of it doesn't make it a right.
You have it backwards. You don't have some inalienable right to government-backed control over what I do with my copy of some code. The original will always be yours, but my copy is mine, and actually I do have a close-to-inalienable right to do whatever I want to with my own property.
So then does the same apply to the copy of your emails that travel across the internet? Once the NSA obtains a copy, do they then have a close-to-inalienable right to do whatever they want with what is then their property?
Yes they do. I would argue for privacy laws, specific exceptions to that right, just as I support trade secret law. But it would be an exception, a deeply unnatural change to the legal norm, and I would have to make the case on its merits that the value to society of such privacy laws was worth that extraordinary curtailment of the NSA's usual rights.
You're not allowed to sell stolen property, and I don't think you have a right to distribute code that was obtained illegally. Now if someone got a copy from the author with his/her permission, say by buying it, and then gave you a copy, you might have a defensible point.
Not exactly the same. But there's a difference between distributing stuff that's obtained legally or illegally. First-sale doctrine doesn't apply to stolen goods, and I think there's a similar distinction that should be made with illicit data.
He believes that information should be free to share.
And you also argue that basically providing links should be illegal. Since TPB doesn't do any of the copying, it does not host any copyrighted content itself, it's just a central index.
So until the content industry got their way in the courts and laws were altered in various countries this wasn't illegal at all. And he is fighting against the meta-information being outlawed. Pretty much the same deal as illegal primes.
The issue for me is then, where do we draw the line of "enabling" copyright infringement? I'm pretty sure that if certain industries had their way in the 90s, peer2peer communication between regular people would be illegal for "enabling" copyright infringement.
Considering that the US government forbade the export high level encryption, it's not hard to think they would also forbid any peer2peer communication not going though a "certified and approved" server, if the winds had gone that way.
The bottom line is, crimes should be illegal, tools should not be illegal, even if they enable crime. If you have a tool that can ONLY be used for illegal purposes, you might have a good case, but even pirate bay had links to legal content, that got taken down along with the links to the illegal content.
And "enabling" copyright infringement was not illegal in many jurisdictions until the content industry either created case law or lobbied for laws to be altered.
Policy changes he opposes.
This whole argument disappoints me. Every manufacturer of a DVD or CD Writer has "enabled" illegal copying and potential distribution of copyrighted content. I haven't seen any of those entities reprimanded for their product manufacture.
You have understood that wrong. In those countries, private copying is legal, and the private copying levy is a tax on recordable media to collect some money from the people who legally practice private copying.
As a further note, the levy is intended for cases where the person doing the copy already has the right to do the copy (for example, recording from radio, recording a tv-show, or making a back-up copy of a movie one already owns a legal copy of). It is not intended to compensate for copying that is currently illegal (such as copies obtained using any form of pirating).
Many people misunderstand this, and think it is a levy to compensate for illegal copying. That is not, and has never been, the purpose. This misunderstanding is also one of the common arguments against the levy, since it gives the impression that even though some copying may be illegal, it is compensated.
Agreed. Freedom on the Internet != Piracy. I can't really remember this guy doing anything for freedom, except freedom to download Hollywood entertainment for free.
I mean, sure, I pirate, but I sure don't pretend it's virtuous.
personally, the use for bittorrent is long tail, niche software that has become obsolete and is no longer viable commercially and therefore not available.
the idea of the few people that have it being able to share it with the many that may eventually need or want it, is something that the centralised "cloud" based services cannot compete with.
so you may think there's no virtue, but there is in spades. you are blinded by your own piracy.
That's the theory. Turns out, though, that anything that's not really popular is hard to get hold of on TPB. It's usually easier to get hold of obscure content commercially.
> It's usually easier to get hold of obscure content commercially.
Unfortunately, your definition of osbscure depends on where in the world you're located. iTunes don't provide the same catalogue in the US and the UK or Ireland, Netflix don't provide the same catalogue. BBC documentaries are freely available in the UK online, but extremely difficult to get in Ireland without buying a physical copy, and up until last year, I didn't have a DVD or Blu ray player in my apartment
it's a fact not a theory in my experience. your experience differs. big deal, fact is - it works for me - it has virtue, the fact that it didn't work for you does nothing to change that.
also i infer from the immediacy with which you changed from niche obsolete software, to "obscure content" leads me to conclude you are talking about ripping off producers of low volume content who are still in business - again - blinded by your own piracy.
Hollywood is just the testbed. If you can transmit Hollywood stuff to the masses without a way for them to stop you, then you can transmit other more important information when the time comes.
So the guy ran a website which greatly increased the chances of him going to jail, while at the same time being hardly the best way to increase his personal wealth (even just switching to a "locker site" would be much more profitable).
It's fine to think it's wrong, but why is that so hard to believe he's sincere, and not just "pretending"?
Just because someone's sincere doesn't mean he's not an idiot. Just because something doesn't make a profit doesn't mean it's virtuous. The Doom floppies I gave out in high school didn't make me a profit (I only charged as much as the floppies cost), but that didn't make it virtuous.
Which I don't see why everyone thinks TPB was a non-profit. They were pulling in hundreds of thousands a month via ads, way more than their costs, I would think. But we won't know, because there was no transparency.
What a narrow view you have. Torrent makes it accessible to see things you have paid for but didn't have time/forgot to watch (TV series). They also make it accessible to get stuff you couldn't (Not because it's available in USA that it is in every country).
That's crazy that someone went to jail for running TPB when the MPAA and RIAA are big monopolies that control how much we should spend on stuff. It's not a free market. Get your head out of the sand.
The only reason the iTunes model has come to exist is because of torrents and illegal sharing.
And people (myself included) buy a lot of stuff from the iTunes Store now.
Netflix exists because of illegal sharing. And even though Netflix is pretty awesome, look at what all the established companies are doing to try to screw with Netflix.
>Netflix exists because of illegal sharing. And even though Netflix is pretty awesome, look at what all the established companies are doing to try to screw with Netflix.
And let us not forget that Netflix is still unavailable in many countries (pick any Eastern European Country, EU countries included). And where it is available, many titles from the US Netflix are not available. Torrents (and illegal downloads in general) are a strong incentive for copyright owners to improve their game. Otherwise it'd be a stagnant monopoly.
> Torrents (and illegal downloads in general) are a strong incentive for copyright owners to improve their game. Otherwise it'd be a stagnant monopoly.
I'm not sure breaking the law (whether you agree with it or not) is the proper way to fight monopoly (?) or to push companies to "improve their game".
Btw, there is no monopoly in the music or gaming industry (not that I know of, at least). There are laws for monopoly issues.
It's "breaking the law" in the same way that violating the speed limit to keep up with the flow of traffic is "breaking the law". The laws we're comparing have some interesting parallels too:
* Usually they're way too strict given the conditions
* They're not re-evaluated often enough
* Their usefulness in modern society is debatable
* Both are often not used for their original purpose
* The consequences for breaking them are usually minimal, unless you're being flagrant, or:
* The enforcers sometimes choose to crack down and make an example out of you, despite the fact that:
* The supposed harm caused by disregarding them is dubious, and in fact:
* Arguments can be made that disregarding them is a net positive
* People who outsource their moral compasses to the legal system usually choose one of these to demonize people for (ignoring that obedience to law isn't an inherently noble thing)
* Said people also usually compare the law to something it's not. (YOU'RE LITERALLY ENDANGERING CHILDREN/YOU'RE LITERALLY STEALING)
> I'm not sure breaking the law (whether you agree with it or not) is the proper way to fight monopoly (?) or to push companies to "improve their game".
Its a rather common approach when the monopoly you are concerned about effectively controls the relevant area of law.
>>The only reason the iTunes model has come to exist is because of torrents and illegal sharing.
TPB is popular because Netflix is still budding. Had Netflix/iTunes been around in the late 90's I doubt file sharing services like Napster would have been half as popular. I dont believe people who have the means to pay for media desire to steal.
The fact is the market failed to keep up with consumer demand.
If you examine how TiVo came to be you will see the main concept is "TV on your schedule". Netflix services this need in a much simpler manner.
Are you saying that people that download the latest version of X TV show all have a cable subscription that includes that show? That, I would say, is completely incorrect.
I didn't put words in your mouth, I asked you if what you meant was that 100% of people that downloaded the latest episode of Homeland pay for it through their cable subscription. The cable companies also provide ways for you to record the TV you pay for, I don't agree that torrents should serve that purpose.
And what's the alternative ? The world is not the United States, in most countries of the world, there is simply no legal way to get a movie/tv show on the Internet. I'm not even talking about 3rd world countries here, Netflix (the only service which is good enough to compare to Torrents) just barely arrived in Europe and their list of movies is so poor, it's not even worth talking about it. Torrents are not working only because it's free but because it's the easier/only option in most places.
Just because people in the US have legal access to content doesn't mean you're allowed to steal it. You make the assumption that you're entitled to something if it's commercially available to people in other parts of the world. You're not.
Movies and TV Shows aren't basic necessities that you're entitled to. They are luxuries that you can have if companies decide to sell them to you.
> If the content is anyway not available, that argument vanishes and you are left without copyright.
Except that if people already has a copy of your work and then you finally manage to secure a deal with a publisher in country x, you now can't sell it. Most of the interested parties already have it.
> (And seriously? Dangerous thinking?)
It's a slippery slope. Content creators should have full control over how their content can be consumed. This goes both ways - if they want it to be free then it should be free. Also, no other company should be able to infringe their copyright and start charging money for it, or modify it, or use it in a context that they haven't approved.
My friend in the US has bought and paid for a show, and wants to send me a copy. Why shouldn't they be able to? The one who wants to prevent that is the one who's entitled.
Because it's a copy. They should be allowed to gift you their copy of the show, sure. Just like if I bought a DVD only available in Australia and gifted it to a friend in France for example.
Well, you're already arguing for something more liberal than current law. The movie companies put a technological mechanism in place to make that not work (in violation of EU regulations, but nothing seems to have happened about that), and got laws passed to make it illegal to circumvent that mechanism. And while sending a DVD from Australia to France as a private individual is legal, doing it as a commercial operation is not.
But making the real argument, if it's my DVD, I should be able to copy it.
> Well, you're already arguing for something more liberal than current law.
Sure, but my point still stands :) Your friend shouldn't be allowed to copy their purchase and send it to you. They should be allowed to send you their purchase as a gift. People need to understand that just because something is digital it's not suddenly ok to endlessly copy and distribute it for free. What gives you the right? It may be unfortunate that the copyright owner of the show you like hasn't secured publishing/distribution rights in your country yet, but that doesn't give you the right to copy it for free because you really want to watch it.
> The movie companies put a technological mechanism in place to make that not work (in violation of EU regulations, but nothing seems to have happened about that), and got laws passed to make it illegal to circumvent that mechanism.
Yes, and I agree on this point. Region blocking sucks and it kills the gifting to an international friend scenario.
> But making the real argument, if it's my DVD, I should be able to copy it.
> People need to understand that just because something is digital it's not suddenly ok to endlessly copy and distribute it for free.
I think you've inverted this. When things weren't digital, it was perfectly ok to e.g. buy a nice table, make a copy, and give that copy to a friend.
The argument for copyright is a balance of positives and negatives, the idea that the benefit to society of incentivising creators outweighs the cost to society of disallowing copying. It's very difficult to argue that this adds up in cases where the creator isn't selling something in a particular region.
> I think you've inverted this. When things weren't digital, it was perfectly ok to e.g. buy a nice table, make a copy, and give that copy to a friend.
I think you've just changed what we're talking about. But I'll run with it. Technically, copying furniture is not ok, it's infringing on the copyright of the design. But since it requires so much effort to copy the table manually, it's not done much, so no one really cares if a guy takes the nice table he bought and hand crafts a copy for his mate for Christmas. If he started a company cranking out copies of this design though, then it's another matter entirely and he would be shut down and sued.
In the case of digital files, copying literally takes half a second and no effort. And this ease makes it something that a lot of people do, which is why people really care about it.
> It's very difficult to argue that this adds up in cases where the creator isn't selling something in a particular region.
You say that like it's a choice for the creator of the work. For a lot of people it isn't, and it's just the way the system works. They have to wait until a publisher in that region of the world wants to publish their work, or wait until legal issues clear up before things can progress etc. I'm not saying it's a great system, but it's what is in place, and freely copying people's works because it isn't available in your region is probably harming the creator of the work since their potential market is taken away from them.
> Technically, copying furniture is not ok, it's infringing on the copyright of the design.
The idea that a design would be something you'd own, license, or keep track of, is a very new one.
> freely copying people's works because it isn't available in your region is probably harming the creator of the work since their potential market is taken away from them.
Sure, but by how much? Does it actually lead to works not being made, to creators going back to their day job? Is the cost actually bigger than the benefit of copying the work?
Also, as a policy this aligns the incentives correctly: it means creators and publishers are encouraged to find a way to distribute their work everywhere as soon as possible. Which is what copyright is supposed to do.
Technically watching movies form internet is perfectly legal in most countries. Some distributor made movie accessible under some sort of license. It is not user obligation (or duty) to investigate wherever all legalities are sorted between producer and distributor.
Plus some countries made it legal to make copy for personal use... and so on.
While users have not the obligation to investigate the source of a movie in detail, depending on your juristdiction there are laws about "obvious illegal sources" (like sites where one can download crappy copies of movies still in cinema for free, extremly shaddy ads, covered by public media as being illegal). For example if Netflix turned out to not have a license in my country I could argue that I as a user could not have known that since they made looked and acted like a regular respectable company. If on the other hand I download a torrent containing a recently released movie for free and an accompanying txt file allowing me to "share it to the world", my chances of defending that in front of a judge are not the greatest.
Well most of the people prosecuted for piracy, maybe even all of them, were because of uploading/copyright infringement, it's usually a very gray area of just downloading/watching a stream, and I've never seen a case of it being illegal per se.
If <insert big pharma here> won't sell cancer drugs for reasonable prices in my country then we will have local companies ignore patents and produce knockoffs instead and sell them at production cost.
Which is exactly what's happening in india for example. Remember that you're not stealing anything. Just making copies.
Of course treating cancer does not have the same societal value as getting hollywood entertainment, but it's still a market failure when the content industry cannot satisfy demand in those countries.
And at least turning both eyes is a much better approach than criminalizing millions.
You're both right. Grandparent is more correct as to why, historically, copyright as a monopoly grant was first created, but parent is correct as to the explicit Constitutional provision granting Congress the power to create copyright (and patents, etc.) in the US system, and generally the most commonly accepted reason for the continuation of copyright in the modern world.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The correct analogy is: Ford doesn't sell a Ford in Argentina, but a legal owner of a Ford car offered to give you a copy of hers/his, and you accepted it.
Netflix isn't the only option. You can use iTunes (which is available in a lot of countries with a large collection). You can buy the DVD online or in a store. You can buy a DVD online from a different country and have it shipped to you. And if ALL of that fails - what right do you have to that content anyway? You might want to give them your money, they might not want it. It sucks but it's a poor justification for piracy.
> You might want to give them your money, they might not want it.
Actually in such case piracy doesn't need any justification, since it doesn't harm anyone. With only two alternatives - either to download content illegally or to not get it at all, content owners get exactly the same: nothing.
I don't really think a justification is needed. Yes it's illegal but so is driving faster than the speed limit, yet most people does it because they feel entitled. You can ticket people for breaking the rules but it isn't very effective as people value arriving at a red light 3 seconds faster higher than the risk of getting caught.
Get real no one who has ever pirated anything is going to buy a DVD over pirating simply because buying the DVD is a really shitty service compared to the piratebay alternative.
>> "Get real no one who has ever pirated anything is going to buy a DVD over pirating simply because buying the DVD is a really shitty service compared to the piratebay alternative."
Of course. My point is don't be self-righteous and use 'it's not available in my country' as justification for trying to make it moral.
Gandhi went to jail for picking up salt from a beach, which was also illegal. Legality of some act is not a fundamental law of science and shouldn't be treated as such.
Yes! Comparisons exist for pointing out the similarities between two things and inviting some "compare and contrast" critical thinking.
Comparisons don't have to assert equality, which is why people that say things like "Godwin's Law" are the worst. Either you can articulate the difference between an aspect of the Nazi regime and whatever you're arguing for, to move the conversation onto those differences, or you can't. Godwin is only useful when the conversation has run it's course and devolved into a flamewar.
You're already implicitly comparing the two when speak dismissively of the idea of "comparing" them. There are better ways of nipping a tangent in the bud.
I think the problem is that no one realizes the internet we grew up with and loved is changing fundamentally and we can't be passivist users of the medium anymore.
If you are you're basically saying you're okay with a future where governments regulate which services you can use and ISPs control how fast you can download bits based on whether you're using their sponsored services or not.
Its bullshit but its what's happening. At its core though, I think its a hardware problem. We REALLY need a decentralized networking solution to replace ISPs and DNS and if we don't get it, the road is going to be really hard going. This still doesn't solve the problem of intercontentinal networking, and I have no idea how we could solve that one without some monopoly/govt controlling everything.
It's not a hardware problem, it's a convenience problem. People like that there's somebody else worrying about this. They are willing to do almost anything it takes so they don't have to worry about issues of basic infrastructure.
We already do this with water, electricity, and other infrastructure. Anything it takes as long as I can get water/power/trash-taken-out just by flipping a switch and paying a bill.
We, as a society, do not want to think about this. As long as the internet is there when we open a laptop or a phone, we don't care how it got there.
I don't think we as a society don't want to think about this. I think that society at large just assumes that the internet IS regulated as a utility. Up until now, the major ISPs haven't taken an active role in speeding up, shaping or censoring content that non-geeks even really know about. When you explain things like the current FCC debacle, when they finally understand the context, they get enraged because its so obviously different and worse than how they thought the system worked.
I agree with everything you've said and might rephrase my statement into a its a "lacking service" problem. But I still think the hardware and technology has to exists - which as far as I know is currently not the case, so that startups and entrepreneurs can provide what you are talking about to customers.
Anyone, who can choose between state survellianced/traffic prioritized internet and a survelliance free/encrypted/net neutral internet will take the later option all other things being equal.
I don't think we as a society don't want to think about this. I think that society at large just assumes that the internet IS regulated as a utility. Up until now, the major ISPs haven't taken an active role in speeding up, shaping or censoring content that non-geeks even really know about.
I feel this is a very important article with a very important message, but I'm just not sure what I can do to help! They have money, guns, political support, media and very powerful, highly emotional rhetoric. The only thing I can do is hack on software, but most people don't care enough about "geeky stuff". I feel that the only way this issues will get resolved is if they get much, much worse first (i.e. high-profile people jailed for what they say, internet controlled China-style, disappearance of middle class, ...).
Well you can always hack on decentralised, encrypted, hidden peer to peer chat, or other open software alternatives of high quality for all the services we use every day and so forth. If media is a problem, work on solutions for anonymous publishing etc.. if the software is good enough (including having a good ui and whatnot), it's less geeky. After all, people adopted BitTorrent, which is quite geeky!
Providing technical workarounds for broken policy can only do so much. It doesn't fix policy. It can only help avoiding enforcement.
Which might lead to court cases where they try to make an example of a poor sap they have caught.
This has already happened to some extent with peer to peer file sharing.
a) only few individual users get caught and dragged through the courts, but they get slapped with damages in the hundred-thousands[1].
b) there is no big mafia boss responsible for everything they could hold accountable. So now they go after companies making software[2] or after sites such as TPB. Not on the premises that they did anything illegal themselves but that they enabled others to do so.
So who says that the net of what's illegal won't get cast even wider in the future if someone were to develop something that's even harder for them to prosecute? Or one could even argue that evasion through technology leads to policy becoming even more restrictive, even if that restrictive policy remains largely ineffective except for those few that actually get hit by it.
I'm not saying that the technology shouldn't be developed, I'm just saying that it doesn't automatically make society more free by itself. It just provides an underground in which one may move.
I don't agree with all (or most) of the principles of TPB, but I can appreciate his criticism of slacktivism. He had his beliefs, stood by them against the law, and served his time for it. It's unjustified to criticise a lack of action on his part.
My only concern with his methods would be if he hurt people in the process (indirectly through TPB). Also I fail to see how it was an effective protest against the things he mentioned in the article (SOPA, PIPA etc).
Last paragraph was biting and very powerful - side note: Who sends a copy of 1984 to Peter Sunde in prison?
"My feeling of some life-altering insight might be nothing but rants on the spoiled, lazy and naive parts of our internet community. And maybe I'm using those terms just to piss people off a little bit more. But hey. I went to jail for my cause and your TV shows. What did you do? You want that copy of Orwell's 1984 returned? I'll take one of the 25 copies I got sent to me in jail and send it back to you. Maybe you'll read it instead of just sending it to someone else to take care of."
You could say the same thing about Youtube in the beginning. Except for the fact that Youtube was even worse because people were uploading copyrighted material there and it was actually hosted by them and existed in the US. Whereas TPB was in Sweden and only linked to files.
The idea that theft can only happen to physical stuff is part semantics and part myth. Things like theft of service don't include physical goods.
Stealing: to take another person's property without permission or legal right
Intellectual property is property in every sense of the word.
The argument, "BUT I'm copying not taking!" is treating the property as the digital file, but that file merely represents the intellectual property.
So is the argument that the person isn't harmed because its merely a copy. First, stealing doesn't have to the mean the person suffered real harm. You can steal something I forgot I own, it won't hurt me but it is theft. But the major issue is that copyright infringement does in the aggregate hurt content creators.
Shoplifting and copyright infringement are essentially the same level of harm to businesses.
While I believe copying without compensation is bad, and not something to feel proud of, I also understand the position of a Chinese or a person from Ghana that have to work 15 times more to be able to access the same item than an American.
The West has used countries like Ghana to dump technological trash that make children get malformations and cancer.
Think on this for a moment: what does 20 dollars means for you, now multiply it x15.
Now if you want to access an important resource for you or your family like a book, what do you do? You pirate it.
Most of the people in this world economic power is closer to the people of Ghana that to the people in California.
Copyright is out of control, it should be like patents 20 years, with the extensions it is becoming eternal and making impossible to reuse any work legally.
> "What people reveal, what people fight for, are major causes. Freedom of information. Liberty. Democracy. Governmental transparency and due process."
I have a really hard time trying to link this with my experience on TPB. It's all about downloading stuff without paying for it. Honestly, that's it. I'm not proud of that, I'm not saying it's a noble thing to do. I really don't get what trying to "determine" what should or shouldn't be free by sharing other people's stuff without their permission has to do with freedom.
Torrenting is an answer to bad service. I want to look up a movie I want to watch, choose between different quality/file size options depending on my bandwidth/hard drive space needs, download an MP4 with decent speeds, watch it, then store it to watch again if I feel like it.
I can do this legally for games via GOG or Steam, I can do this legally for (most) software I use, I can do this legally for music (limited artists) via Bandcamp, but there's NO option for movies, TV series, or most mainstream music. I literally cannot legally watch the latest episode of any of the shows I follow, because when they do have an online offering, it's restricted to the US.
So for me, downloading a movie on TPB is first about convenience, I want to get to the movie and TPB is the means to it. But implicitly it's also sending a message to the gatekeepers of content that I'm interested in their product. The other part of the message is making a habit of looking for and paying for convenient, DRM-free content when it's available.
I fully understand what you mean. I saw you're from Brazil too, so you know how awful Netflix is around here and how much we pay for games, for example. I download mostly due to the reasons you mentioned. As much as possible I avoid downloading books and I try to pay for music when I can (some stuff is just too expensive to import and many times really hard to find). I also rely on Steam and digital copies to avoid stealing (I have no problem calling it that) games.
But by the end of the day, despite being hard to find or expensive or unavailable, it's not mine to take. I understand I have no right to just rip The Flash S01E09 and make it available for free, IMO. Even though I downloaded and watched it yesterday.
> Torrenting is an answer to bad service. I want to look up a movie I want to watch, choose between different quality/file size options depending on my bandwidth/hard drive space needs, download an MP4 with decent speeds, watch it, then store it to watch again if I feel like it.
Totally agree. I own over 1000 CDs, but rather than ripping each one to my hard drive, it's much easier to download them illegally via P2P networks and torrents.
I download music illegally for other purposes too, but I've also spent a much greater portion of my income on music than most. Downloading has likely stimulated my appreciation for music.
Well, to be pedantic, TPB never actually shares content with anybody. It just links people to other people who are sharing content. And it isn't always copyrighted content. The point isn't to help people steal stuff, it's to help people share information, regardless of whatever arbitrary laws exist about sharing information. That's a worthy cause, IMO.
I'm not going into the "sharing links vs sharing content" debate.
> And it isn't always copyrighted content.
True, it isn't ALWAYS, but I guess it's mostly copyrighted.
> The point isn't to help people steal stuff, it's to help people share information, regardless of whatever arbitrary laws exist about sharing information. That's a worthy cause, IMO.
I do think we should be able to share information freely, not necessarily share whatever I want. My problem is with the "regardless of whatever arbitrary laws exist about sharing information" part.
> I'm not going into the "sharing links vs sharing content" debate.
That's fine, because I see no problem with sharing content either. I'd rather debate on those terms.
If you don't want information shared, don't release it to the public. If your livelihood is based on placing artificial constraints on the work of artists for profit, then maybe you should consider a career change. The middle men are becoming increasingly useless as we become more connected. Artists can raise money on their own and distribute their art for free, and they can still earn a living charging for actual physical things like merchandise and seating at venues.
I see many people in this thread debating (1) whether Sunde is some sort of freedom fighter, and (2) the ethics of intellectual property law. In my interpretation Sunde is mainly arguing that people who are criticizing him for not defending TPB should instead get their hands dirty and make something that sidesteps the established internet control structures, for better or worse. I don't think that's such a controversial idea.
The man choosed to do what he did, but when they were heavily fined I already felt an obligation to pay a part of it, as I was a regular user before that. About the future of the web and other larger social questions, I find it hard to believe.. when it's mostly movies and tv shows (even though there was some hard to find vintage content on it sometimes). Lastly, as for anything, when technology N is unavailable, we go back to N-1. We won't stream the latest show from the other side of the planet right from peers in real time but well.
He mentions Snowden and Manning, but he left Dread Pirate Ulbricht off the list of comparative figures. A real shame because that may actually be a more accurate comparison.
What I did was finance a feature film and get it released on DVD. Shame some people think that they can just take all my investment and piss it on to the internet.
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” - Wilhelm Stekel
I think we need Peter Sundes in this world to keep the rest of us vigilant ... I'm not sure going to jail for a cause really helps much either. While I admire him for sticking to his principles, I'd rather he was out in the world doing his work.
Do you think he's being ironic about the cell phones?
Seems like a strange stance on them if he's all in favor of skipping Facebook, for similar reasons and with similar consequences.
I think what most people here are missing is that TPB didn't actually host any illegal content and yet it still got shut down and its members sent to jail. Sunde went to jail for free speech and distributing completely legal files. I think that's implicit and am rather surprised that it's a point missed by so many people. In that sense, it's a lot more egregious than Manning or Snowden because, AFAIK, he did not commit any crimes. Perhaps he wants it to be a warning to people like many of the commenters here who are deriding or belittling his actions yet still claim to support free speech.
If the files he distributed contained freely available chemistry information, would he have been sent to jail for assisting others in making bombs or poison? That seems rather ridiculous, but that's essentially what equating his actions with piracy is actually doing.
That said, everyone also wants to be a martyr. TPB wasn't about rights or freedoms or standing up to government oppression. People used it primarily to obtain media and software without paying for it. It does sound like a noble crusade when he expands the context to include SOPA or PIPA or net neutrality, but TPB isn't really related to those things and served only as a rallying point for people who feel strongly about them. The ideal of freedom of information is only tangential to fighting the good fights that he listed in the opening of the piece.
The truth is that Sunde didn't have to go to jail. TPB's popularity gave him a platform and helped him to centralize an ideological movement. But there are other ways to do that, significantly more effective ways. Martin Luther King (as an example, not a comparison) went to jail too, but he also went to the right schools, wore a suit and influenced the right people. Creating a popular and morally dubious website is a quick way to put your ideas into the spotlight. But it doesn't last, and it doesn't really change anything. His effort and conviction are genuinely admirable but he's still a long way from winning the battles that matter.