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Pirate Bay Court Loss Won't Stop the Flow of Files
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Apr 19, 2009 03:39 AM
from the magic-eight-ball-seems-to-be-working dept.
from the magic-eight-ball-seems-to-be-working dept.
Adrian Lopez writes "According to PC World, 'Hollywood may have won a battle, but the war against piracy is far from over. Unauthorized file sharing will continue (and likely intensify), if not through The Pirate Bay, then through dozens of other near identical swashbuckling Web sites. ... What Hollywood needs to remember is sites like The Pirate Bay are like weeds. When you try to kill one, they grow back even stronger. In this case, The Pirate Bay already moved most of its servers to the Netherlands, a move that could keep the site running even if The Pirate Bay loses its appeal.'"
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Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
I can look forward to a future with no more big-budget movies or mainstream e-books. What a relief!
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
OMFG people will stop buying bottled water!!!!
you think bottled is good, I've got the stuff on tap...
seriously though, wasn't FM radio supposed to be the death of recording industry, and VHS the death of movies?
oh my god! humanity is progressing!
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
True, but parchment was the death of the stone tablet industry back in the day. They must still be hurting, I guess.
No they just updated their business model...
And they're so popular that people are dying just to get one...
Unless you prefer cremation of course.
GrpA
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most urns around here get a stone on the grave as well.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the train was, but thanks for this prime example of early lobbying to save an outdated business.
Do you know why most train stations are outside of towns, or at the outskirts of towns (or where the outskirts were a century ago, respectively)? Because of the carriage driver lobbying. When tracks were built across the countries, the coach industry was heavily lobbying to keep them away from towns. From at least somewhat real concerns (like the fumes that are dangerous... ignoring of course the industries that are nearby being at least as polluting) to outright ludicrous claims (like watching a fast moving train giving people seizures), anything was tried to keep trains as far away from towns as possible, to at least retain the business of moving people from their homes to the train stations.
When cars came into existance, we got another load of bullshit laws, like the ones of people having to walk in front of an automobile with a flag to announce its coming, or that cars are to stop when a horse is passing so it won't spook it, etc.
Did it save or solve anything? Nope. The stage coaches went extinct. Because nobody needed them anymore.
Imagine they had the same lobbying power the media industry has today. Can you imagine cars that must not go faster than 20 mph and train tracks that have to be moved further and further away from towns just to keep the coaches in business? Anyone would say it's silly at best, blocking progress and having a generally negative impact on industrial development.
Why is something like this tolerated in another industry that is simply as outdated as horse coaches?
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
...and the printing press would make a lot of monks unemployed as well. They wrote all the books by hand.
Maybe 'unemployed' is the wrong word here. It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
The exact same thing is happening again, but with different players. When music started to be broad-casted on FM radio, the media industry lost control of their products. Same thing with VHS.
The Internet is probably the scariest thing that can happen to the media industry. Because Internet is built without any central point and any node can broadcast. (Compare with a radio or TV station; one central point for broad casting and many passive listeners.) This is a tremendous loss of control for the media industry. The industry can not say this in public and that is why they always bring back the same culture-will-die ghost from the closet.
It is not about culture, it is about control.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is a very wrong analogy. No media industry is censoring you from producing and selling your own music or movies. You are perfectly able to do that either in a traditional business model (selling individual copies using copyright law to protect yourself) or using one of the "new" b
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
piracy is not a required part of that and the monk analogy does not fit piracy.
Of course, the other reason that the monk analogy does not fit that seems to be oft overlooked is that the monks did not make record profits as printing became increasingly common. My anecdotal evidence, and quite a few studies, show that:
A) Downloading music and movies and games for free actually makes people more likely to buy them, not less - my movie collection was tiny back when I just had to watch whatever was on TV or the cinema. A couple of months ago I had to buy a new set of shelves to keep my new DVDs on.
B) Probably most importantly in this argument my money is now freed up to spend on other stuff, and no, by that I do not mean pizza. I mean that since I can download a discography of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for free while I actually only own four or five albums of theirs that the $50 or so (?) I just saved can be spent going to see / buy albums from less well known bands that need the money to pay rent and bills, rather than buy another Bugatti Veyron so when their friends come round they can race.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
Noone should make millions from doing a small amount of work, payment should be proportional to the level of effort required to do the work and should cease when someone stops working. In most other industries this is already the case.
As a nurse, I have to completely agree with this. Be careful what you wish for, if you really want to set a precedent for this, watch the medical community jump on board. "I saved your life yesterday...still alive today? Pay me bitch....." Hey, my work is still being enjoyed....right?
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe 'unemployed' is the wrong word here. It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
There was official censorship long after the introduction of the printing press. My copy of Don Quixote has a notice of approval by the censor, and its first editions were all printed.
Also, even before the printing press, state censors exercised direct control over all written works, not just implicitly through the works' being written by monks. Medieval Jewish texts certainly needed approval by the Christian censors, for instance, despite their being written by Jewish scribes.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Informative)
"Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas."
You think? They may have lost some control over what was actually produced, but the Church and the State compensated for that by introducing draconian laws about things like heresy which effectively forced writers to self-censor. 1401, England, De Haeretico Comburendo - from this point on, heretics would be burned at the stake, which is exactly what happened to poor old William Tyndale when he dared to translate the Bible into English.
If you can't control the actual productions, all you need is to legislate against content you don't like and provide sufficiently harsh penalties for contravention. Plenty of states are still using this model - China, North Korea, Iran, etc.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
And don't forget piano rolls, radio, cassette tape, video tape, etc.
Every single one of them was a harbinger of doom according to the music industry. None of them ever were.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Insightful)
I especially remember "home taping is killing the music industry" warnings featuring such down-on-their-lucks as Sir Paul McCartney, one of Britains richest men, complaining that people who tape some tracks off their mates can destroy an entire industry. Perhaps, with hindsight, he was the wrong person to choose to front the campaign. This was around the time the Musician's Union was actively campaigning against synthesisers and keyboards in case it put people's jobs at risk. Some people don't think before they open their mouths.
You can't polish a turd. You can't expect people to pay £12+ for Robbie Williams or Madonna CDs when even their fans think they're shit now, especially when most of the albums are shit and people are buying them for the singles, which they can just tape off the radio/tv if they're that bothered about it.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure you can. The Mythbusters even managed to get a very nice shine on it.
Mythbusters: Polishing a Turd [discovery.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Citation please. I know that in the UK it was predicted that TV would harm the cinema industry. And as it turns out, it did. Vast numbers used to go to the cinemas for newsreels, weekly serials and others. I'm not aware that there was a general feeling from the industry that there would be "no more media." So as your comment a
Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Interesting)
Nonono. You misunderstood me. Of course I accept your "fact". (Even when you're only a random guy on the net stating something, why would you lie?)
I just meant that it does not matter if the old industry got hurt. Because it did not hurt the people in the long run. The new industry filled the gap. And that new industry created new jobs. Even more than the old industry. So in the end it's a good thing. :)
Sorry if I did not state things clearly enough.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Insightful)
Think the moderation of flamebait is unjustified here - it's a valid point of view and could even be read as funny (depending on whether or not you like the big budget movies or not).
Whether it's accurate is another matter altogether though... you have to consider that a small broadcasting/production house which caters to a niche market, but only has limited broadcast footprint could actually benefit from the torrents - it would be able to reach far further afield right from the outset, which could, in turn lead to more interest on an international scale.
For example, I wonder how many DVD orders for the new Red Dwarf episodes will be placed as a direct consequence of the torrent availability and subsequent 'try before you buy' which it enabled to a much wider audience? Difficult to determine in the case of an established brand perhaps, but I wonder how long it will be before we see new productions which will benefit directly from this model.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
No problems - enjoying the conversation :-)
But I would point out, that at least in hollywood, the tastes of the rich are doing precisely what you're suggesting - everyone from directors, script writers, actors and onwards are working on a basis which is very much like patronage for the vast majority of the content they produce. The marketing people/producers identify a concept and a market to tap and assemble a team to make it happen - there is still creative input, in much the same way as the historical figures you mentioned would have had on their own commissioned works, but it's still 'done to order'. Nothing particularly wrong with it either, providing those who are providing the cash can distinguish the subtle difference between good and bad and a single patron doesn't obtain a monopoly...
I'm not so sure that world of music is so dissimilar - the 'patron' here will sometimes manufacture/commission (boy/girl band type of stuff - aimed at a demographic), but generally, they'll be dictated by their own tastes and understanding of the tastes of others before they'll commission an act of any sort...
Don't know :-) - is it just a case of 'the more things change, the more things stay the same'?
None of this is to condone piracy btw - I just think that p2p/sharing it's the next step in an evolutionary chain which started a long, long time back... and there is money to be made by the existing content providers...
My feeling is that it's just a case of the content providers recognising that people will pay, providing certain restrictions are lifted - personally, I would happily pay for downloadable content on the single proviso that when I have purchased it, I am unrestricted on how I personally choose to watch it - be it on the TV, desktop computer, laptop, mobile phone or my wrist watch... a DVD more or less provides me with that, though without any legal rights of course.. it has become the norm to allow CD -> mp3 conversion, so why the restrictions on video?
I'd also add that it's far greener to have a p2p solution for the transcoded versions :-) - there is quite some heavy cpu use/power consumption involved with decent encodings...
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's another reason big media hates the internet...
The try before you buy aspect of piracy works both ways, if you download it and find it to be shit you delete it and don't buy it. Otherwise you might have bought it, then realized it was shit and that you just wasted your money.
Similarly, in the past even a lousy movie would make big money on the opening weekend before people realized it was shit... Now the first people who watch it will go on sites like twitter and tell all their friends how crap it was, and word soon spreads.
The internet makes it harder for big media producers to sell crap.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
What is wrong with that?
We don't owe Hugh Jackman and Tom Clancy a living. Television has an entertainment model that doesn't have to charge at the point of delivery. Musicians can perform and make a very handsome living if they are worth listening to. Shit artists and holywood can suck my free living balls.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Insightful)
Musicians can perform and make a very handsome living if they are worth listening to.
I always hear this from people who aren't musicians, and who don't know any.
Musicians make nothing. Even the ones you've heard of; even ones you may like and listen to a lot. They are lucky if they make it out of their contract with any profit at all. These are people who have produced a lot and whose stuff has been purchased by many. The fact of the matter is that it is very expensive to get your stuff to the ears of interested listeners, and a million musicians making blogs doesn't make that happen. In fact, it makes it harder.
I'll point to a band I know a little about: DeVotchKa. They are now making decent money. They have been around in Denver for a very, very long time, and they were far from making a "handsome living," despite a lot of local popularity. They toured with Dita Von Teese (burlesque) a lot. Then someone scored his quirky little movie with their work, that quirky little movie did very well (Little Miss Sunshine), and now they are finally living a comfortable life. But it could be over any minute.
Performers cannot make a "handsome living" by performing, okay? Until you are huge, you get screwed by every pissant little venue. Seriously. Hang around with some musicians sometime. Places stiff them all the time, and they can't afford lawyers. No, the way you make a "handsome living" is with a paycheck. You know, the kind of monthly income that happens when you, I dunno, get royalty checks? From people buying your stuff?
I am so sick of this nonsense:
We don't owe Hugh Jackman and Tom Clancy a living.
--You do if you are consuming their products, and no crazy, twisted logic is going to change that. When you pirate media, you are stealing. End of story.
Full disclosure: I live in Japan and steal some US TV. I don't, however, when I can get the stuff legitimately. But I don't pretend like it's my right to see this stuff and suggest that these people don't deserve to make a living because they could be traveling minstrels and gypsies, which is exactly what you are advocating.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Insightful)
I do know musicians. Just because small time bands aren't driving around in gold plated bentleys, doesn't mean they are entitled to. You know nothing about me, asshole.
The rest of us have to struggle for a living. The idea that musicians should be able to live 'comforably' working only a few hours a night is absurd. They essentially work the same hours as barstaff. This means, of course, that if they do require more money they can have a regular job as well as performing.
If making ends meet is a struggle for physicists and sysadmins, why should it be a breeze for guitarists? We don't owe them shit.
You finish off your drooling retard rant with the old chestnut that 'piracy is stealing' - which is true, so long as you are talking about those fellows in Somalia. It isn't true for copying data, and pretend it is makes you look stupid.
Oh, and you file share anyway. So STFU
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Informative)
Well we do know that you you use horrendous double-negative clauses and that you resort to insults at the drop of a hat. Oh, and that you resort to exaggerated strawmen to try and make a point. The GP said nothing about "gold-plated Bentleys' or being entitled to own them. The GP said that the majority of musicians struggle to get by on music alone and are ripped off frequently. That's pretty much true. Your nonsense sentence about gold-plated cars doesn't contradict the GP in the slightest.
So by your logic, if you had some advanced skills that you had perfected or trained for over time, e.g. you were an expert UNIX sysadmin, you should be paid the same as bar staff for your hourly rate. So by your logic, Paul McCartney who wrote the most popular song yet written ("Yesterday" is the most played song on radio worldwide) which he says came to him in a morning and was pretty much finished by the end of the day, should have been paid a flat daily rate for the time, perhaps about US$20. Something that has been covered 3,000 times and sold tens of millions of copies, right?
And you think that you yourself should be the arbiter of whether or not something is worth money or not? Because that's vital to your argument. If you don't think that you should be the judge of the value of everything, then you need to let people negotiate for themselves what prices to pay. That's called "buying and selling".
Not if you don't listen to their music or obtain their recordings, no, you don't. But if you don't then why do you care about others being against piracy - it's irrelevant to you. Unless of course you do listen to their music or want their recordings, in which case, yes, they have provided you with something you want and you have given nothing in return.
Yeah - "STFU". A real argument closer. You do realise that your instructions to what people can and can't say are irrelevant to them, yes? Someone takes something without the payment asked? Yeah - sounds like theft to me.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Informative)
Someone takes *a copy of* something without the payment asked?
There's a difference. I don't defend copyrighted file sharing (unless there's no way to legally obtain it), but it's *not* stealing.
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Re:Hooray! (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you determine that an artist is shit?
By listening to their work...
The big media producers would have you buy it, so that even tho it's shit you've already paid them and they have got one over on you.
Piracy enables you to sample for free, meaning that if something is shit you will find out and never consider purchasing it.
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Figureheads (Score:5, Insightful)
All the Pirate Bay is really, is a symbol; I'm not convinced this spectrial was ever about combating P2P, but more about a clash of ideologies.
Re:Figureheads (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree. In the trial itself the prosecutors asked the defendants their views on copyright. Their response? "I thought this wasn't a political trial?".
I think it is a shame they didn't openly state their opinions about it whilst still arguing they are within the law, either way it was a political trial and maybe they should have met it more head-on.
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Evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Development of filesharing solutions is a bit like evolution.
Like new, more advanced life sprung up as a result of each disaster, new, more advanced file sharing solutions pop up each time after the media industry manages to kill one.
As Bittorrent is not a service, but a protocol, it will obviously never die. Darker and decentralized versions of it is evolving already, made strictly for "private" use.
What the industry fails to realize, is that the newer solutions is also *better* for the user than its previous counterparts. Remember Napster? It was only good for people who listened to mainstream chart toppers with crappy sound quality. It was not an option for people really interested in music.
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
Remember Napster? It was only good for people who listened to mainstream chart toppers with crappy sound quality. It was not an option for people really interested in music.
Maybe that's the case with legal Napster but the original "pirate's edition" had MP3s of all levels of quality and everyone was using it so of course you could find rare stuff.
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Can anybody see ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can anybody see ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That may be so, but I'd be surprised if they have managed to sell even one additional CD or one additional movie as a result of their actions.
That is how you measure their performance. Not how much menace they have caused to customers and potential customers.
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Servers may be up, but users might go down (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of 'casual' (non tech.) users are likely to be put off by the increasing application of EU directives against sharing/copyright theft. (The ones that the boys from PB were hammered under).
As EU Govs. progressively try and vote these into law, (a recent attempt in France was defeated at the last minute), users are going to find it harder to use file-sharnig services without getting cut off by their ISP, or worse.
I predict a growing interest in TOR and IRC...
Do what you want cause a pirate is free (Score:4, Interesting)
They can trash on The Pirate Bay all they want, but public sites like that are mostly just for piracy tourists anyway thanks to their notoriously unreliable speeds that make the 'pr0' pirates steer clear of 'em except as a last ditch option. Sure you can try and stem the tide by taking down one of the big, well known ones, but that's really not going to help matters much. Another public site will spring up, having learned from the lessons of the prior one, and will be even harder to take down. The tourists will latch onto it and the whole mess will ramp up even more.
Besides, the guys doing the really heavy duty stuff (i.e. dedicated download boxes with a ritual morning tracker browse through with 24/7 downloading) are all rocking private trackers and encrypted file transfers anyway. Good luck to trying to crack apart the chunk of the piracy community that actually does know what they're doing and aren't 13 year old girls, grandmothers, or drunk, stupid, college kids.
"I am pretty sure that MPAA/RIAA/Big Publishers would like to put the whole filesharing technology back to the bottle until they find a way to monetize it. Then, of course, it would be accepted."
They had their chance a loooooong time ago. They thoroughly screwed that pooch and will have to stop basing their businesses on suing the crap out of people, which they really don't want to do (mostly because I think they enjoy it).
prohibition does not work (Score:4, Insightful)
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
I say bring it all out in the open so it can be regulated and taxed. Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites. On top of this, people will always want real world stuff to go with their data (think how much money the Star Wars toys made). On top of that, advertising worked well for existing TV. Good money can be made if free downloading is brought out in the open.
Re:prohibition does not work (Score:5, Insightful)
Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites.
It's rather easy to keep costs low if you're not bearing any of the costs of production.
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Re:prohibition does not work (Score:5, Insightful)
In the UK it's illegal to rip CD's to your MP3 player and yet I'm betting 99% of the MP3 players in the UK have ripped music on them. By criminalising CD ripping you cause people to lose respect for the law, in this case when your average citizen finds out they instantly see it as the fault of the stupid record companies. Which in turn makes it easier to "steal" from those same "greedy" companies.
In comparison most people hate speed camera's but they agree with the idea of having a speed limit and sticking roughly to it. Heck even when I got caught speeding recently my outrage wasn't about getting the speeding ticket but because Dorset/Somerset's police attitudes towards bikers (which borders on harassment) annoyed me. As for doing 40MPH in a 30, well I should have stuck to the limit.
I believe you can have unpopular laws like speed limits but people understand the need for them and so they work. On the other hand people don't understand copyright and its application these days.
The media companies have been so hell bent on treating all customers like criminals and subtracting value, that people see them as an evil faceless corporation (see Slashdots view on Microsoft) and that makes it ok to take from them. This particular ruling has probably done more harm to the Media companies cause then anything they've done. Just go to the BBC's Have your Say section (or any newspapers) and 99% of the comments are against the media companies and how laws can be bought. The sheer amount of effort required to force these companies to provide the customer what they want has annoyed a lot of people.
I believe in copyright, I'm a software engineer I've worked on a variety of TDL and UXV applications and know how expensive and difficult it is make good software. But software/media analogies aren't perfect, if my company didn't keep improving their software and adding new capability to it another competitor would get the future sales. With music/movies you could make one great movie and people will still buy it even if new movies come out. Which is the big difference between software and media.
I honestly hope that in time politicians release than reducing the copyright length to something closer to twenty years (I'd prefer ten) and decriminalising non-commercial copyright, will be in the best interest for everyone. Since it would help maintain respect for law and encourage more media.
As for the internet age stopping the big blockbusters and the current pop stars, I can only hope. Hollywood has fallen into the same black hole as games, where more special effects are the equivalent of adding more polygons. At a certain point it adds nothing new and the fixation often means more important things are forgotten.
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Re:prohibition does not work (Score:4, Interesting)
There is also the issue of the morality of it all. Should something that such a large section of the population do be illegal? Who is the law serving then?
Is this a road we really want to continue down? Seams pretty dark....
So far it seems like we don't have a choice. The lobbyists and governments make billions of dollars from pursuing this dark path. The consumer is too lazy or uninterested to withdraw his funding for that and merely keeps consuming. What the pirates do is a sort of non-violent rebellion on their terms. They still consume but they also demonstrate that they despise the ruling system. Sure majority rule should tell you that what the people want is priority but rationale and observation will tell you that majorities are no longer formed by the number of people but by the number of dollars.
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Not safe in Netherlands (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure that it was such a good idea moving the servers to Netherlands.
The local RIAA (BREIN), have been pretty successful in having the law 'bent' to their will and having various torrent sites closed down.
Even now they've announced that the want to block the Pirate Bay in Netherlands [link is in dutch]:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/59677/brein-wil-na-vonnis-the-pirate-bay-in-nederland-laten-blokkeren.html [tweakers.net]
Rough translation: "Brein will use the guilty judgement against the Pirate Bay operators as a chance to try and convince the government to block Pirate Bay in Netherlands".
The current parliment act as if they're in the pockets of Brein, so I'm not sure why TPB thought it safe to put the servers here.
What we really need is some sort of decentralised torrent client.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also, they're both in the European Union, so the same directive that got TPB in Sweden can be re-used in the Netherlands.
Legal defeat, political victory? (Score:5, Insightful)
I read the Pirate party has received three thousand new members since the verdict was announced. That's a /lot/ of Spartacus.
Re:Legal defeat, political victory? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the number is over 9000, literally.
5022 on 4/17/09
4067 on 4/18/09
and counting! [google.com]
Parent
Lots of legitimate downloads at pirate bay (Score:4, Informative)
Hey. Why are the authors' summaries always so assimilated by the MS/Disney/RIAA mindset? Yes, there are some that assert that there are problems with specific torrents, but they (the complainers) and they (the disputed torrents) are not everybody, every country nor every torrent. Stop bleating the technology == piracy mantra spread by Bill and his minions.
There are plenty of legitimate downloads via the Pirate Bay, such as the CCC 25 presentations [thepiratebay.org]. P2P in general is full of legit traffic. Just last week, apt-p2p was mentioned [slashdot.org], though is has been around a while longer [howtoforge.com] -- long enough for HOWTO Forge to pick it up.
Bitter protest against copyrights (Score:5, Insightful)
If I said I didn't have an incentive to grow oranges unless I could plant a tree in your yard,
or if I said I didn't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I could own slaves on the
plantation, most people would see this is these as the worthless shallow arguments that they are.
But if I said I didn't have an incentive to to make beneficial or creative works without a
copyright monopoly, then all of a sudden people just take it on faith, they don't even question
it, they just assume that society would fall apart without them. In my humble opinion, this is
intellectually dishonest, especially considering that the entire Renaissance happened without
copyrights.
The simple fact is, there is no equivalence relationship between copyrights and property rights -
incentive does not a right make. The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the
fact that property has physical limits, while the foundation of copyrights dervives from kings
who granted publishers monopolies in return for not publishing bad things about the monarchy. The
history of copyrights is not one of rights, but control of sharing and restricting the open use
of knowledge.
That is why people who copy are not criminals, thieves, or akin to pirates who board ships and
murder people. No, infact they are really victims of a cruel deception. A deception that
copyrights somehow financially benefit artists and creators. The simple fact is, that for every
artist that makes it "big" there are literally thousands who copyrights haven't helped a bit,
even hindered, or destroyed.
However, this is not the only failure of copyrights - it is just one in many issues related to
copyrights that are just blown off ignored, or glossed over. Like the failures of Hollywood
culture, the failures of big media to provide quality material, the failures to provide
reasonably priced books to college students while tabloids are dirt cheap, and massive anti-trust
behavior in the software industry to name a few.
While the problems associated with copyrights might have been bearable 20 years ago when the
biggest issue was Xerox machines, today we are in the information age where
information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no middle ground. Our society
will either have to control all of it or none of it. Our communications will either have to be
monitored or free, our privacy to be either continuously probed or protected.
In that sense, copyrights are like a vine that will never stop growing to choke off our freedoms
until we cut it off at the root. The DMCA, infinite extensions, billion dollar lawsuits, are all
just symptoms of a poor belief system - not the cause. So the efforts to find a "middle ground"
on copyrights are a failure because they do not address the core issue. That contrary to
copyrights, the right to copy and distribute creative works and knowledge is a right!
Like freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, the right to copy things is a right that
exists above government. It is a moral right, it is an inherent right, it defines the very nature
of the human condition. It is beyond politics and the petition of leaders.
In fact, the entire foundation of politics rests on the notion that it's better to fight wars
with words than wars with bloodshed. But to copy things does not require coercion or violence at
all, the rules are not the same. We will not change the copyright situation by petitioning our
leaders, or voting to change the system. It can only be changed by defiance.
Defiance by holding the belief that people have rights, even if those rights appear contrary to
the popular mob or to the system. Defiance, by shedding off the guilt and shame that those who
try to impose copyrights on us and understanding that they are the ones who should be
guilty and shameful. Defiance by copying and sharing creative works whenever we have access to
them. Defiance by using technologies
I Bet H'wood Would Like to Stop All Sharing (Score:5, Interesting)
This is typical of a situation, where a dinosaur on top of the food chain tries to defend its position.
I am pretty sure that MPAA/RIAA/Big Publishers would like to put the whole filesharing technology back to the bottle until they find a way to monetize it. Then, of course, it would be accepted.
And I can't get over the Swedish court's argument that making the service available is criminal, because it can be used illegally.
Parent
Re:I Bet H'wood Would Like to Stop All Sharing (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure this will be the focus of the appeal.
This trial was a jury trial and juries aren't very good at technical details, mostly it's the lawyer with the best hair/suit that wins and you can be sure the RIAA spent a fortune on theirs.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a shame they didn't manage to buy Sealand.
Re:A move would be pointless (Score:5, Funny)
Parent