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Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

Why can these apps block "breaking copyright" and discussions about piratebay, but cant stop slave trade?

Why does the justice system hand out huge fines and prison sentances, for copyright infrigiment, but not for slavery?

Why does the US and its lobby organizations, threaten another democratic state with "consequences" (see piratebay raid) for copyright infrigiment. Yet no one bats an eye at this.

But seemingly, you educated person of HN, cant think of a method or reason for trying to stop slavery. Oh yeah.

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I don't know why you are saying this, because all I did was say we should stop slavery. Whether or not we protect copyright or whatever, we definitely should stop slavery. Taking down a post isn't stopping slavery, it's insulating elite Westerners like myself from being aware that slavery is actually happening.

Up until today I was aware of piratebay, copyright issues, etc because it has impacted my life. I was unaware that in some places it was still accepted practice to not only enslave people but to publicly post about it. I imagine a lot of the people who work at the social media companies are similar to myself in that respect.

Last I heard, today’s global slave trade makes the Transatlantic Slave Trade at its peak look like a drop in the bucket. I don’t know if that comparison is accurate, but slavery never died in the world, it merely became illegal.

https://sfpublicpress.org/news/2012-02/human-trafficking-is-...

I really wonder what sort of information sources people are exposing themselves to for "slavery still exists, and tech platforms are used to facilitate it" to be a revelation.

I just don't understand the news-browsing/discovery experience of educated, tech-savvy people who somehow don't even stumble upon global news websites with tons of articles about all the bad shit that happens worldwide, and that it's not isolated incidents but PREVALENT and normal in some places.

Because the crime of "breaking copyright" can be solved by blocking and removing the offending content. Yes, they can move it to another platform, but then again, "breaking copyright" is a crime in on itself, there is no other "root crime" that is the real issue. Every time you remove the offending posts and links, you solve an instance of this crime, which sounds fairly simple.

The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.

> The crime of human trafficking, on the other hand, cannot be solved this way. You don't solve the issue by removing the posts and links, because you will just get rid of a component of the crime that advertises the "root crime" behind it. And the "root crime", in this scenario, is not nearly as easy to solve and track down.

You can theoretically 'solve' it by forwarding those posts and links to the police, after which you can, in the moral view of a lot of people, wash your hands of it. That the police are complicit in a lot of this behaviour is... Well, we washed our hands of it!

The difference between these two cases is that in the case of pirated movies, there's are these organizations called 'publishers' who will shut you down, take your house, and shoot your dog, if you don't remove links to them. There's no advocacy organization for victims of human trafficking that has remotely as much power.

Has anyone succeeded in blocking copyright though? I havn't illegally downloaded anything for years, but I've never been in a position where I couldn't find a copy of copyrighted material if I wanted it.

With the ironic exception of Australian Standards, which Australian's aren't allowed to know about without paying a large fee.

No. The copyright issue has not been solved. It's probably easier than ever, but enough friction has been removed from legal access to content that the vast majority of people will pay.

Slavery is so illegal in the developed world that it's not even an issue. When people engage in human trafficking, the law enforcement apparatus puts the full brunt of its power into punishing the perpetrators. The government spends substantial sums of money preventing these sorts of abuses.

The government wants to stop copyright infringement, but it doesn't want to spend any money doing it. So they implement regulations requiring corporations to do the policing and punishment of copyright infringement for them.

The result is that Facebook, Google et al have sophisticated mechanisms to cheaply enforce copyright at scale, without human intervention in nearly all cases, and the mechanisms to enforce human trafficking violations is the legal office where a highly paid lawyer personally receives subpoenas and manually complies with them by personally escorting the FBI into the server room to verify the chain of custody.

Dealing with countries where human trafficking is as illegal as j walking just isn't something Google has tools for. Highly automated ML mechanisms are fine for when the punishment is your content gets demonetized or taken down, but it's not fine when the punishment is twenty years in federal prison.

And sadly, lots of rich folks with influence buy slaves. Look at what Epstein was doing. Where was he finding those he abused? There must have been a market.

The world is sick. Who knows, perhaps the rich folks are creating sites like Instagram so they can hide their illicit activity among all the data and get away with it.

& yet copyright infringement goes on

The biggest blow to thepiratebay was the golden period where Netflix made it more convenient to go about things legally. Take away: how do you compete with slavery's convenience?

I don't think the two are comparable at all. Labor is fundamentally scarce while copying or streaming media is almost free and not intrinsically limited.

Because the MPAA and RIAA can afford better lawyers than slaves.

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