Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

If you also believe that we should not block or censor sites that primarily share copyrighted material and serve next to no other purpose, you should probably stop reading as well.

I decided to read on anyway. It's clear that the author has put a lot of care into this post and is doing his best to come up with an idea that can bridge the gap to his detractors. Unfortunately, I fear he is still missing the point.

Banning websites will not stop piracy. Just as CD protection, hardware dongles, remote authentication, signed binaries and every other technique under the sun only serves to frustrate legitimate users, so shall the specter of the SOPA DNS censor be memorialized upon the ash heap of history.

The author and those who think website bans are a solution need to realize that bits are the cheapest commodity on the planet. This is a fact of life. There is no getting around it. I said this in the last thread and I'll say it again: if the full value of your work can be represented in totality as a string of ones and zeores, you must accept the reality that computers, the most ubiquitous machines on the planet, are all designed to push around ones and zeores. Any solution to copyright woes that involves attempting to stop the copying of bits will fail, it's like trying to insulate current by attempting to dry water. Every effort in the field of computers over the last half century has been aimed at making it easier to share information, there is no effective censorship solution in a world where information flows freely.

By the time the author's proposed bureaucracy can be established and come into effect, the tech world will have moved on to the next data sharing revolution which will simply render the DNS ban irrelevant for pirates. Those who shall suffer a loss of free speech under the inevitable abuse of DNS bans will simply be fucked (since they follow the law).

Find a way to create value that isn't inherently rooted in the order of your bits.

There is a world of difference between SOPA's "somebody in the stands called strike and you're out" nature (makes "three strikes" laws seem positively lenient), and the proposal here of taking a website down after repeated egregious violations with warning. DNS banning is still relatively light at that point. I suspect any real law would contain criminal penalties. If nothing else it resembles contempt of court.

There is a world of difference

That doesn't matter. Even if abuse wasn't an assured inevitability, DNS bans would not stop piracy, so to what end do we confer such authority?

I suspect any real law would contain criminal penalties

How will they penalize those that exist outside the legal jurisdiction of the USA? Even then, will criminal penalties stop the crime of piracy? Suing college kids into crushing debt has yielded only hatred for four letter media interests as piracy continues to thrive. The co-founder of the pirate bay was brought to trial and even convicted, but his website still stands as a testament to the futility of trying to stop people from sending files over the internet.

I think one way to look at the issue of piracy is to think of it like smoking in that it affects the utility of society--it's a cultural issue that has to be handled by the law but more importantly the newer generations. You can't just "stop it", it has to be grandfathered out because just like smoking was (or even is), the problem is systemic.

People started weighing the utility of smoking--and most rational people came to the conclusion that collectively it probably wasn't something we should be doing so they started picking away at the issue one cig at a time through legislation, programming, education, and taxation. And there was huge opposition too, especially by the people puffing away. It's taken years, and generations, but smoking is in a definite decline--hell, teenagers in my country (Canada) have stopped smoking twofold in the past 10 years as we're down from 24% to 12%--that's a big leap, but again it's a slow process. It's gotten to the point where smoking isn't cool.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the goal shouldn't be to stop piracy right this instant, that's an impossible task because it is so ingrained into our culture (especially young people like me, and yes, "shifty eyes" I said like me) it should be to systemically weed out the issue over time--and what the OP is doing, challenging the status-quo, and offering suggestions on how to help fix the problem is a step in the right direction (there are flaws, but he noted that); one cig at a time. You might think that piracy doesn't affect the greater utility of the world like say smoking does--there aren't health risks, but there are risks of losing our liberties (look at this madness!), risks of penalty and persecution, risk of moral degredation--not to mention the risks we don't even know about. And when I think of what the internet could potentially be because of SOPA I wonder if it's worth the few songs, or movies, or whatever each of us takes from the pile. I am sure there was a time when parents sitting in a crowded restaurant with young kids all around, smoke just filled in the air, wondered if that tiny bit of enjoyment they got from that lit object was worth it at that time too. And just like those parents then, I don't want newer generations to have to deal with long term consequences of my bits of joy.

Anyways Mr. Flores thanks for posting this, I like it when people try to honestly work towards a better future. Your idea probably won't get traction, but think about it as continuing that slow and daunting process of removing one bit at a time.

-signed a dumb kid who's never smoked

Cigarette smoking is in decline because science has demonstrated that cigarettes are decidedly harmful to one's health (though still legal). As far as smoking, piracy is more akin to using marijuana, an illegal activity that is on the rise despite the government's multibillion dollar crusade to make everyone JUST SAY NO. The fact is, similar to piracy, people don't feel bad about smoking pot because nobody is actually harmed in the process. So what happens when the government criminalizes harmless behavior that people enjoy? Many citizens go to jail, and the black market for illegal goods continues to boom. The status of pot in America (ubiquity) is the result of a failed attempt to regulate a risky tangible contraband that has to be carefully cultivated for months in the real world. Now imagine pot with 50x the demand, infinite supply, negligible distribution overhead and you've got yourself a completely ridiculous regulatory agenda.

All the threats you describe come from those who would seek to reverse progress so that they can delay adapting to a world with a computer in every pocket. The culture that needs to change is the one that purports we outlaw the transmission of certain binary sequences because someone else sequenced them "first" (although I'm permitted to transmit an arbitrary sequence of copyrighted bits as long as my work is considered derivative).

> bits are the cheapest commodity on the planet.

People who put bits in an order worth caring about are not. Protecting the bits is not the point. It's protecting the people who turn them into something meaningful.

> Find a way to create value that isn't inherently rooted in the order of your bits.

Sounds like a plan. Let's just abandon all efforts to create value out of information and ideas, and assume that the quality of creations will continue to be the same, even when people cannot spend their full time on them, and others will no longer invest in them. This sounds like a much better idea than making whatever effort we can to protect creators and discourage people from taking what they're not entitled to.

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