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> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Why should an individual be treated so differently to what a company would? When was Youtube's office raided? To this day, Youtube holds immense collections of music for which nobody has bothered to file even an automated takedown notice.

The point that the parent made is that copyright is only criminally enforceable if held by the moneyed few. The power that has been handed to large corporations by the back door is immense and there is very little symmetry; even when the magnitude of the damage is orders of magnitude greater.

In the UK they have effectively been granted the power to block domains for customers of the ISPs that represent a significant majority of the UK market. This is in a court that routinely allows pre-hearing legal costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Unless you work for the media companies and have insider knowledge, how can you even be so sure that the media companies are not acting with the complete contempt of due process that they have repeatedly demonstrated.

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.

Only fairly recently, and not without controversy from the people that observed it.

I don't work there, but it seems naive to think that YouTube hasn't worked with law enforcement or these industries directly to remove these copyrighted works. If your rip is simple or obvious enough, YouTube blocks it immediately before it's published. That seems very different from hosting a site specifically for pirating copyrighted works.

Your argument is based on intent. YouTube shows their intent to not infringe by the effort they put into removing infringing content.

But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent.

Likely, somewhere in the middle is more reasonable. But the parent is correct in that the volume of infringing content on YouTube appears to be significantly larger than just about anywhere else, and no one is raiding their offices. No one is going to jail.

So the asymmetry is striking. If it were all purely civil rather than criminal, I'd get it.

>But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent.

I said no such thing to be clear.

I don't see how else to read this:

> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail?

You couldn't have continuously operated OiNK without the intention of enabling mass copyright infringement, which was clearly the raison d'etre of the site.

Does great Britain? I know the US has the DMCA which among many other things says people can't be held labial for infringing content hosted on their site if they respect and follow DMCA take down requests.

Good point about intent. That's something that seems lost on much of the general public. The entire notion of "mens rea" is overlooked by many, yet it is critical. It's what differentiates between different crimes or levels of crimes (i.e. degrees of murder) and it's what keeps hotel employees and landlords out of jail on aiding and abetting charges when they are unknowingly giving a fugitive a place to sleep.

The fact that GP discards intent as a relevant point makes his/her whole argument invalid - that's the whole point, in our society and law intent matters a lot, it's one of the most important things in determining whether something is a violation and if so, how severe it is.

An argument based on intent is an argument about the reality we live in, an argument that ignores intent might as well be about a fictional world and isn't relevant to ours.

>YouTube shows their intent to not infringe by the effort they put into removing infringing content.

I'd disagree, I think that Youtube shows their intent to allow infringing based on the gross amount of copyrighted content they allow on their website.

When I referred to repeated demonstrations of contempt of due process I was largely thinking about the over-zealous takedowns where fair use has applied and that it is just as likely that with being granted direct blocking of an ever-increasing number of domains that some claims are over-exaggerated to the court and the threshold for evidence lowered.

I acknowledge that youtube seems very different from hosting a site specifically for unlawfully distributing copyrighted works. But there was a time when Youtube arguably blurred the line and gave publicity to the "our users just posted it and we didn't know about it" defence.

There's a real societal risk to treating what would formerly be called culture as intellectual capital and granting extreme powers to owners of that capital. Though the costs of distribution have never been lower there comes a point where the cost of distribution exceeds the expected returns. Even if the work is distributed for free, there is still a cost.

If we're going to allow the whole one download equals 0 < x <= 1 lost sales thing that seems to be increasingly accepted now, then you are implicitly allowing that it is the lost sale that is the problem. As such, distribution of out of print material without fee is as damaging because if I listen to n hours per week of material then I am not buying that n hours of material and I have deprived a sale. The same can be said for any intellectual capital, even copyleft, that does not make money. Effectively, it becomes a divine right to have customers which is a bizarre line of thinking that seldom seems to be explicitly stated.

I have listened to works that I could not, even though I strongly desire to, buy on CD or obtain by lawful download. There are some who argue a particular line that has the corollary that the work should be lost forever and I should never have heard them. By the lost sale argument I definitely shouldn't have and should instead have spent money on new culture that personally I find quite grating.

There are books, games, software, songs, albums, movies and TV series for which the copyright persists but there is no lawful distribution channel. This effectively makes it civilly or criminally unlawful to distribute the work for free. In these cases I would certainly think twice before taking on the burden of becoming that distributor.

Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's right-to-share to be far more important to humanity than the authors ability to employ an ill-suited business model to profit off his or her work. There are many ways to generate profit other than to infringe on others' right to share. Humanity does not owe you a successful business model, and certainly not at the expense of it's right to share.

> What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work.

Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.

Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2 cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost more than my two or three months of rent.

My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either.

Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)

Wow that is a name I haven't read or heard in years. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, father of modern anarchism.

> Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam.

The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s.

While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums.

Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.

>> Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.

Well in fairness to Steam, app stores in general (including those run by Apple, MS, and Google) are platforms for shovelware.

Apple is an interesting case. While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream, the big bucks came from adding utility and simplicity to the ubiquitous collections of 'stolen' music. A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music. No strong opinion, but it's a somewhat unique situation in the economics of IP.

> A very small subset of iPods were filled up with the plus +$10K cost of 'legal' music.

But they were actually filled with some legal music, prior to iTunes there wasn't really "one unified place" for purchasing digital music, most mp3's came from physical CD's people ripped privately.

A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.

> While they may have flirted with 'legal' music as a revenue stream

They still have impressive market shares in digital music distribution, they have started to lose ground to streaming services like Spotify and music labels finally adapting to the digital age but afaik iTunes was and still is a major player in digital music distribution.

Certainly. I wanted to provide some insight to the dynamics of the iPod/iTunes situation.

Interestingly as you noted >A couple of flatrate services popped up before/around the same time, but these mostly turned out to be illegal offerings, so it was mostly iTunes which stuck around in the beginning and formed the market.

I think Apples success at creating this market was a byproduct of it being fundemental pairing for the iPod's sucesss. Without the iPod, iTunes would likely have gone the same way as the rest of the early legal digital music sellers.

Without the existence of a large collection of mostly 'pirated' mp3's sitting on home desktops and office networks across the globe, the iPod probably would not have taken off.

Apple provided great utility for those collections by selling the iPod. Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.

> Apple only briefly had any barriers to allowing the seamless transfer/sharing of entire iPod collections of copyrighted music, before concluding it would be much more lucritive to embrace the prevelance of 'pirated' music collections by investing in software to clean & organize it, and simple to use hardware that makes it portable.

True enough, and you most certainly have a point about the iPod also helping, that's something I haven't really factored in that much.

To me, iTunes was mostly a great example how usability, pricing, and ease of legal access to content matters. Much earlier versions of iTunes UI was very reminiscent of mp3 sharing clients popular at that time (Limewire/Napster/Whatnot) by sorting titles in long lists and making getting them as easy as pressing a "download" button right next to it.

The choice of pricing, single songs for $.99 [0], also felt like it contributed a lot to a paradigm shift how music is sold and consumed, acknowledging established trends in priacy by allowing legitimate customers more freedom in paying for only those songs they want.

[0] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/03/04/28/1723226/apple-intr...

>> Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values.

This can even be a gray area for content creators who care about copyright, but only for their own profession.

I regularly see stories of famous musicians improperly lifting photographers' work for their marketing or social media efforts.

I also see professional photographers using unlicensed music for slide shows.

It's really quite bizarre to see content creators fighting each other for not respecting each other's copyrights when they themselves should know better.

"What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work."

In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader.

That is exactly the weird paradox that has been going on, especially with the infamous Pirate Bay.

The users think they are a super server with super hero admins that "give back to the man".

The justice system thinks some super tech criminal is earning millions. They think that, because organisations like the MPAA give out an estimate on what "could have been earned if all those people would actually pay full price for the content they are now consuming".

Numbers are magic.. especially if there's a currency sign before them.

> ...depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work...

i.e., messing up their business model

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter.

Sure, but there's a strong case that copyright infringement shouldn't be felony.

> ...the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy.

If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

I don't think he should go to jail, but this is an odd rebuttal. If I steal your car and sell it for $300, because I don't really need more money, will you claim just that amount as your loss?

Obviously copyright law pushes up the price, by introducing scarcity, but that doesn't really have anything to do with how much he made.

Isn't the corollary to your position here that as I can only afford about £6 per month on media that any claim for a greater amount in a copyright infringement case is thus wrong.

Yes in the analogy the person will claim for the cost of replacing the vehicle.

But a company claiming they lost media revenue to me of anything greater than what I can afford is also wrong. In a world of perfect copyright infringement prevention I'd just miss out on most of the mainstream social culture.

Usually these companies attack uploaders (even if just due to regular p2p seeding) or, as in this case, people who run systems that "facilitate" infringement. The claim is not based on what you should have paid, but on all the money that the people who got a copy from you would have paid.

In a fair system they'd have to prove those damages, but alas, copyright laws often include "statutory damage" provisions to help them avoid that requirement.

> If I steal your car and sell it for $300,

If you steal my car, I no longer have a car. I would need to go out and buy another car to replace it.

If you copy my data (a photo, a song, a film), I haven't lost the original. Only my business model has been affected, which was based on scarcity of the data.

But why does that mean the loss is bounded by how much money he happens to have made running the site? I'm not seeing the link.

Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no?

>Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no?

What are you actually arguing, other than pointing out that he was acquitted? A jury's determination of a person's guilt in a particular case doesn't tell you what the law is, or what it ought to be.

Edit: gnode, that’s not true. Only determinations of law, which are only made by judges, are precedent. A jury verdict, which only determines questions of fact, is not precedent at all.

In a common law system, findings of a court set precedent for future trials. So yes, juries do tell you what the law is by telling you how to interpret it.

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter

Oh yes? Copyright infrigement is pretty much a victimless crime - nobody is removed from any of their property - at most they might be losing some monetary compensation, but that's something that can be evaluated and compensated if that is the case.

Not sure how you can justify putting folks in jail based on that fact.

Couldn't you say the same for embezzlement or tax fraud?

Tax fraud is against the state, those funds that go towards the foundational things required by our society, such as electricity, drinking water, and access to other services.

Everyone is a victim.

So when you deprive government of funds everyone is a victim, but when you deprive a publisher of funds no one is a victim?

That's a false equivalence, and not the implication of my statement.

If you want to read something into it, nothing mentioned in this thread is victimless.

Embezzlement hurts the other employees of a company, tax fraud hurts the citizens of a nation, and piracy seems to hurt... A small group. (In fact, large companies seem to benefit from piracy in studies. Small companies can be forced to fold. Take it as you will.)

On paper you are absolutely right. Does it make it right? Maybe so, maybe not.

"But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society".

Remember Aaron Schwartz?

That's a pretty low blow. You can't just answer a suggestion that the criminal system has some value with this.

I didn't know the guy but I'm not sure that using his name to stifle debate is the best use of his legacy.

While we're here, I happen to disagree with what he did. I believe that publicly funded research should be publicly available but he went a lot further.

What was done to him was heinous and a terrible abuse of the US criminal justice system. And it rightfully brought it into disrepute. But it's going too far to say that it's the last word on the principle of criminal justice.

I do apologize if my response had such an effect. It was meant to express that things societies may have agreed upon in the past might need to evolve rather than keep enforcing them at all costs.

This "What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work." is a cynically spurious argument, and you know it. You are engaging in an Ajit Pai-like derailing of the actual argument, which is the ridiculously long copyright terms granted to content publishers. Well, we now know we won't run out of Ajit Pais.

You do know he was found innocent.