Microsoft Censors Pirate Bay Links in Windows Live Messenger
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.
This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.
edit:
This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry
What makes you think that pattern has finished?
Apple can spend billions to prevent you from downloading Raiders of the Lost Ark except via iTunes.
GOOD LUCK
The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).
These are not the same. Most people do not support the concept of "intellectual property". But for a property to exist in practice, you need majority support, otherwise your property is either just imaginary or you need a totalitarian police state to enforce it.
> the basis of society
The concept of imaginary property is neither supported by a majority of population not in any other way democratically backed. Nobody on this planet has ever voted on it. From its early beginnings, it has been enforced from the top down, decided in shady deals behind closed doors between corrupt officials and industry stake holders and then enforced against the majority.
> steal it
To steal it, you must first reckognize that it is somebody else's property first. But what if you dont consider it property in the first place?
I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
Please don't take the sarcasm personally; it was just the best way to illustrate my point.
This isn't about listening to something or reading something. It's about the ability to remix and build upon it.
> I think it's unreasonable to expect people who make things to be able to profit from them for more than 5 years.
It doesn't matter, because most people don't profit from their works after 5 years, if they ever profit from it at all. The current law helps the Disneys and bestselling authors and has little to no effect on small, independent creators. I don't think we should optimize for corporations, I think we should optimize for everyone being able to reproduce, distribute and build upon their culture - with a period of potential financial motivation to kickstart the creation of new cultural artifacts. If you're still living off your work 5 years on, you're probably already rich.
Girl Talk's music is literally illegal because his instrument comes with a license agreement. What if Stratocasters had come with one?
> Hell, why don't we make all property expire after 5 or 10 years?
This makes no sense. At all. Physical property and my culture are not comparable.
This kind of statement does not help your case at all.
Pirate Bay is not about remix culture. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Saying that it is just makes every single thing you say on the topic suspect.
I'm not in favor of the kind of restriction we see dicussed in this article. I'm against sopa/pipa/acta style approaches. But I also know that copying music and movies is 99.99% about getting something for free, not about remixing. So please. Be honest here.
Otherwise you just make the other side's arguments more powerful.
Yes, those pirate bay users are all about remixing and building upon stuff... /s
How about inventing something new?
Nonsense. It's still not possible to copyright the idea of a "love story involving two feuding families," or something. You can't copyright ideas.
How many hollywood movies feature extremely similar plots?
IANAL, but I personally have no doubt that Shakespeare would have been sued if today's copyright culture had existed then. He even copied the characters' names (and yes, characters can be covered by copyright), not to mention most of the major plot elements. It wasn't just "Oh, this general idea is kinda similar to that one."
It's the skill of Shakespeare's story telling that made him so great, not the stories themselves. But the stories are protected by copyright, not the skill.
Well, kind of. But when I suggest creating something "new", I'm not saying don't remix/use old ideas, I say don't remix/use actual previous existing artifacts.
And let's be clear here, the Pirate Bay is not about creating, it's about consuming.
And you don't make a remix with an mp3. Seriously, that's just silly. If you're looking to remix music, which is what I'm mostly talking about, you need to separate tracks to manipulate them and it's damn near impossible to separate out the drums from the vocals from the keys, etc. if you're working from any listening format like mp3 and the like. Remix culture my foot.
I'm not sure why there's such a disparity between patents (which cost thousands of dollars and expire after 20 years), trademarks (which cost thousands of dollars, and have to be actively defended), and copyright (which costs nothing, is automatic, and expires after your grandchildren are dead).
Patents are applications of scientific discoveries. Other people are likely to make the same discoveries and want to apply them in a similar way, and that's legitimate.
Copyright covers things that are purely creations of the author. The author holding a copyright on something doesn't prevent or restrict anyone, except people who want to directly use the copyrighted work, which they wouldn't have come up with anyway (e.g. even if I write a novel about wizards, it would not be Harry Potter).
I agree that 5-10 years is probably too short of a period for intellectual property to be protected. Honestly, putting an arbitrary span of time on the duration is a suboptimal way of accomplishing the goals of copyright law. Why not protect an artist’s creation as long as he or she is alive, and then release it into the public domain upon his or her death? One of the main problems with the current system is that corporations (e.g. Disney) can monopolize culturally-significant works for decades after their creator’s death.
So? How is it a problem that Disney has a monopoly on Pocahontas or Aladdin?
Because both of those already existed long before Disney 'reinvented' them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas
and
You can't tell a story about Disney's Pocahontas or Aladdin, true. But you can about your own version of those characters.
Because if you try to tell any of those stories today, you'll have Disney's lawyers knocking on your door (if not the FBI knocking down your door). And don't forget those stories were already old when Walt Disney was a little boy.
Understanding the Native Americans from an anthropological point of view indicated the Land owned them. The Land provided food, water, shelter, warmth, entertainment, animals, and other things.
The trade of Manhattan for wampum beads is a perfect example: The European thought he got a killer deal because an island was worth far more than those beads. The Native thought, 'the land will be here after he dies, as he belongs to the land'. The native got a better deal because it wasn't a trade.
Native Americans of all the tribes had a very strong sense of ownership. If that was not the case, the Natives would have not signed treaties indicating that this is "X's territory".
It is a fact of reality that it is morally right to give people ownership rights for things they produce (besides, again, being the basis of society). And why not? Paying for something rather than stealing it (or changing the law so it's not officially "stealing" anymore), just isn't that big of a deal.
I can't justify that claim on HN, for the same reason I can't prove the contents of Physics 101 on HN. If you're curious about my claims, you'll have to go investigate more on your own.
> precisely, like physics.
There is no place in the universe where the laws of physics do not apply, however there were and are societies without a notion of property, much less the moral right to property, thus property rights are nothing like the laws of physics. They are a product of your provincial worldview. Of course, property is a useful human invention, but it's nothing more than that.
You may not be able to prove Physics 101 on HN, but you could link you to Feynman's lectures on Physics which would get the interested layman started. That's the sort of thing I'm asking for, for this pro-IP viewpoint.
Honestly, IP rights aren't a special case (setting aside patents, which isn't the topic of this thread); they're straightforward if you understand AR's theory of rights and property.
Another good reference is [2], but since AR's claims are hierarchial, you can't get the "whole story" very well from just looking up some specific topic.
[1] http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_...
[2] http://aynrandlexicon.com/
Feel free to get in touch if you want to follow up.
Yes, precisely, like physics."
But you are.
No, I suspect it has not.
Now I cannot link to those albums in Microsoft software because they censor all links?
That my friend is as anti free speech as it gets, and this censorship really erodes society not the sharing and copying of files.
That my friend is as anti free speech as it gets, and this censorship really erodes
Actually, by flinging about these terms in an incorrect manner, you are damaging the ability of real defenders of free speech to actually defend free speech. You see, MS is just a company; they can make their software work as they want; that is their right to free speech being excercised. If you don't like it, use different software. Only the government (or, indirectly, entities that have achieved governmental capture) can actually infringe on free speech.
Both are disturbing examples of legally infringing on free speech.
Stop being so pedantic about language.
Though at least Microsoft has the courtesy to tell people when something is banned.
People who attack free speech, as you are, don't deserve it.
No company should be allowed to hinder my free speech.
And no worries, I do not use any Microsoft products, but I can IM people who do use live messenger from Linux IM apps. I am guessing I will be censored anyway, which is just horrible and outrageous.
We've already established why your use of the words "free speech" is invalid, and rather than addressing that, you're just making arbitrary assertions (which, because they are arbitrary, should be ignored).
Until someone can prove a negative impact of piracy on the copyright holders
It's been proven, and is also quite obvious, but again, you're just going on emotion and arbitrary assertion.
I'm responding to gitarr here, not the link itself.
It's not a destruction of property rights. It's the beginning of something new for people that make a living creating things people like to hear and watch.
Speaking as a musician who has had dealings with the RIAA, I won't miss them even one little bit.
I would not be so sure about that. As computer people, we rely on governmental freedom to do what we do, and the politicians and the guys with guns can and will take that away if we stop defending freedom. Which we aren't doing very effectively lately.
Most HNers probably believe some sort of property rights for software (or even blog designs). May here would argue that the GPL is a great license and violators should be punished.
You can also often read that Hollywood and the Music Industry are producing worthless crap, but yet The Pirate Bay is dominated by commercial entertainment, not by Creative Commons content.
Much of it is certainly an emotional reaction to the aggressive behavior of RIAA/MPAA, but it really is sad to see so little capacity to see things from a different perspective.
There are legitimate reasons to be concerned by these constant attempts to attack certain technology or websites. Personally, I think that having a society that thinks that censorship is a good way to deal with ideas you dislike, which is where we're heading if this keeps up, is a lot more dangerous than intellectual property theft.
Hell, it has been known for years that certain ISPs even go as far as to throttle ALL bittorrent traffic and despite what the MPAA would like people to believe some of the bittorrent use is perfectly legal. World of Warcraft actually uses bittorrent for their patches.
As well, there are the facts that: -Laws have been passed that are so excessive in punishment that judges are actually slashing the penalties, and there are even stronger laws that lobbyists are trying to get passed. -This idea of protecting intellectual property at all costs has led to modern electronics devices being very rigidly controlled to the point that if you try to modify YOUR device to just install linux or something, you might be a criminal. -Copyright lasts a ridiculously long time. There should definitely be some rights so that the creator can benefit, but almost a century is too long.
This is clearly fallacious, I don't know why people keep using this technique, and we really should give it a name so that it can be referred to by shorthand. (Any suggestions?)
If you happen to find a person in the set A intersect B, then you've got a case against that individual. But nobody seems to go to that much effort.
1) they consider their communications private
2) they think that what they type into an IM client will pop out on the other end unchanged
3) they believe that their relationship with the facilitator of their communications media should not be subject to relationships that provider has with other commercial parties.
Where does it end? Being unable to share the link of your favourite restaurant because it hurts the interests of your communications provider?
The amount of modification of any messages by two parties that trust each other enough to engage in one-on-one communications should be set to '0' by default, unless they request otherwise.
More seriously, chat should work so that the client signs and encrypts each message, hiding it from the provider and anyone other than the intended recipient.
Forget the need for deep-packet inspection. If major web services stop users from linking to TPB and other sites, MPAA etc. will have accomplished their goals of restricting legitimate users' activities. Who else is going to follow their lead now?
Between blocking messages "for users' own good" and other technical issues (80% of message I send to certain users are dropped silently), MSNM is by far the least reliable messaging system out there. Nobody should be using that piece of shit in the first place.
Reasonable?
So he doesn't actually tolerate alternate viewpoints, the problem is in the framing. If the discussion board was supposed to facilitate discussion of opposing viewpoints (like IM network is supposed to facilitate private messaging) then it's not reasonable to ban one side's resources.
http://www.conceivablytech.com/8108/products/microsoft-may-a...
a) it will do nothing to stop piracy, and b) it will reduce usage of Live Messenger
Results trump ideals every time.
Moreover, when I last used Windows (XP, 2008), executables could still masquerading as .doc files. This would be easy enough to solve for MS, I think.
Which would be annoying. Users would either block it or ignore it.
> Of course, it should be easy opt out.
If it was easy enough, everyone would, rendering it useless.
[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html#mess...
It's in their best interest not only not to secretly collect user information, they also want to show that they care about stuff like that (because then they can point their finger at others).
Apple cares about credit card info (because that allows them to let their customers easily pay for everything, it lowers the barrier), but Apple doesn't have to covertly collect that, they are far too popular to need such shady tactics. And that's about it. iAds might matter, but it seems to be a flop and Apple isn't exactly heavily invested in it.
Even further, iMessage accounts are tied to existing Apple IDs, which in most cases are tied to the user's iPhone and iTunes Store account. If Apple wanted to profile users of their iMessage system, they don't need to scan private communications, they'll just recommend albums, books and movies based on previous purchase history. It's more relevant to their business domain than trying to gleam whether or not Alice and Bob are in a relationship and expecting a child soon.
Incidentally, I'm not so convinced that collecting user information leads to as big of a PR fallout as HN often suggests. I think it's more likely that the level to which our community -- which is small compared to the general UB -- gets upset makes it easy for us to overestimate public reaction. See: facebook and gmail. I'm not very familiar with Path though. Has there been much of an impact since the phonebook incident?
They have also made other similar moves to the same effect.
Now I just wish they would make it easy for me to set DuckDuckGo as my default search engine in Safari.
1) The "third party cookies block" championed by Safari for one.
2) Refusing to let the publishers get user info without the user opting in first (there was big hoopla about that from the publisher's end):
"As part of a more stringent ruleset regarding customer privacy, Apple has reportedly started rejecting apps which access UDIDs in a practice that will become de rigueur for all review teams".
The only way for fully encrypted conversations is to use a plugin that encrypts messages themselves, or use an ecrypted P2P IM network.
AFAIK there is no defined standard or agreed-upon XMPP extension for the latter. I should have clarified this in the original comment.
From wikipedia: WASTE is a decentralized chat, instant messaging and file sharing program and protocol. It behaves similarly to a virtual private network by connecting to a group of trusted computers, as determined by the users.
* Secured through the trade of RSA public keys, allowing for safe and secure communication and data transfer with trusted hosts.
* WASTE can obfuscate its protocol, making it difficult to detect that WASTE is being used.
* WASTE has a "Saturate" feature which adds random traffic, making traffic analysis more difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE_again
edit: Added relevant details
[1]http://wiki.milkfish.org.sipwerk.com/index.php?n=TheMilkfish...
Making Skype less convenient (by means of censorship) would mean that open and decentralized alternatives like XMPP get more attention, and that's a good thing IMHO.
You have to use software that people are actually comfortable with and operate within that ecosystem. At the moment Skype may well be the best bet. Try finding another piece of software that has end to end encryption and is widely adopted by non-geek's.
> Apparently, the company is actively monitoring people’s communications to prevent them from linking to sites they deem to be a threat.
Everything passes through their servers, it's not P2P and never has been, doesn't everyone know this about WLM? It's how they're able to support offline messaging.
I don't need Microsoft to "protect" me by not allowing me to see something. At most what they should do is warn me that it might contain malware, which is something they used to do with file transfers, too. But today I believe they just outright block most of them - even .rar files, unless they are scanned with some special MSN software of theirs that you need to download.
No thanks, Microsoft.
Maybe one of the big players (Google?) will join this battle for free speech and an open internet. Most of us do not want to be censored in any way.
The Unstoppable Force vs The Immovable Object.
TPB is probably being censored by the software because some automated process to ingest and aggregate threating sites flagged that site as hosting malware. This is just like Google stopping you from clicking thru to sites which they know host virii / trojans. Calm down.
I would love to see this idea in court.
OTOH, who can be sure they do not store IP and login (or other personal information associated with the Live profile) and hand it to anyone with the proper court order?
xmpp/jabber for example are easy to setup, federation is supported by some major parties (google talk for example) and use OTR (or PGP if you can convince your friends) encryption whenever possible.
Pidgin, Adium and others support it out of the box or through easily installable plugins and even your [mom] can use it since the key generation and handshake can be automatic, requiring only optional authentication if you are paranoid.
You could argue that it's for the user's security. Torrent sites do have a lot of sketchy cruft.
I've chosen to chat with you, and you've chosen to say something. Normal human trust mechanisms apply. Censoring our conversation because you think you know what's best is ridiculous.
The minute I thought a chat client was actively thwarting my conversation, I would uninstall it.
Who would believe that argument?
Tech people detect malware with bare eyes,average users do this by installing the malware.
And even then, I'd say they only detect it 50% of the time, at best.
Microsoft is a private company acting on their own will. This censorship is one I might not agree with, but it could just make the case for another uncensored client to become popular.
As long as this type of behavior isn't forced by a government, I actually like it in the long run. I think companies should take a stance on things, and seeing Microsoft act this way just makes me more happy with companies who take the opposite stance. If that favorability change happens with enough people, theoretically Microsoft could hurt financially. This would then make it more profitable to be open and uncensored.
So, in a nutshell, I've seen comments elsewhere about this that were SUPER negative and hateful. I understand them, but at the same time, I think this is just another signal to instead focus on and promote those platforms that focus on and promote freedom. And a big signal, to boot.
(Google's safe browsing database disagrees with me here, though.)
Also, as behavior like this increases in frequency, we'll finally be forced to address the current usability issues with point-to-point cryptography and adopt it more broadly. Microsoft shouldn't be able to read anything you write unless you choose to share it with them.
A world where all communication is encrypted requires more software development effort, but ends up better for everyone in the long run. Calls, emails, text messages - none of them should be intelligible to anyone other than the parties explicitly involved.
If you like propaganda that justifies pirating, keep reading the Torrent freak blog with their red herrings like censorship and their "battle for free speech".
Microsoft is exercising their rights just like we get to exercise ours. It's a private company offering you free software (as in no money exchanged) and they don't want to let you share torrent files and for good damn reason. I'd do that too if I were Microsoft!
Anyone who claims the Pirate Bay is a place to share cool new media that's released for free is just kidding themselves. Look at their most popular downloads. It's primarily all copyrighted music, movies, and software that are being shared without the owner's consent. Sure, there are a decent number of artists sharing their work via TPB and the Pirate Bay do a lot of promoting of that stuff. But make no mistake, the majority of people are just downloading a bunch of free, copyrighted work.
It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all.
Is that not a legitimate concern? To try to stop people from getting your product without paying you? That's reasonable. They put a ton of time and money into developing software and they don't do it for their health. Just because it's digital and takes zero effort to copy doesn't mean that after the first copy is sold everything else should be up for grabs.
Whenever the torrent people start yammering about censorship and free speech and try to sound all hip, smart, and progressive, it's just a distraction. It's really about continuing to operate while ignoring IP laws. Whether you think copyright is okay or not is irrelevant because the laws are on the books and enforced. If all you do in protest of those laws is pirate music and movies you're really just creating more problems for yourself. Piracy alone as a protest only creates more censorship and restrictions of free speech as Torrent Freak would call it. If you really believe in all those nice sounding ideals you have to get up from behind your monitor and write a letter, make a phone call, or actually show up somewhere and do something.
This article was downright laughable. This is just a PR war and damn easy one to win too. It's easy to hate "big evil corporations" and to love getting shit free with little to no effort needed.
Not at all true. Free speech is free speech. Where do you draw the line? This establishes precedent, and frankly it's pretty creepy to think that M$ is monitoring all your communications.
Solution: tell M$ that you're dropping all of their products over this, and actually do it. Then set up XMPP and dump their messaging service.