The Pirate Bay - 9 years and still bloody runnin

These are ethical concepts that are easy to understand without resorting to consulting the law. The law in these cases is just an imperfect encoding of these obvious ethics. For the sake of governing, they work decently. However using them in an ethical discussion is using them for a purpose that they were not designed. There are so many better sources that we can look to in order to facilitate discussion.

Trying to use laws as a vehicle to discuss ethics is like examining Cheese Wiz to learn about dairy.

However, you have now drawn a parallel to a different group of people (people who make clients, as opposed to people who build search engines), and I think the results there are more easy to see. For context, I run Cydia, the alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iPhones. We specialize (and in fact only really care about) software that is not an "App" (and thereby could not ever be submitted for sale in the App Store); however, as Apple rejects many apps, we tend to often get people coming to us with their submissions that they feel Apple should not have rejected from their store.

Many of these rejected products are torrent clients, and when they come to Cydia, we now blanket reject them as well. The reason is that the people who write these clients really are attempting to promote piracy in a way that the gun shop owner is not attempting to promote murder: the majority of their users are using them to pirate, they know that this is the case and are profiting directly off of the result, and prominently feature piracy in their marketing by showing screenshots of people pirating along with "see how easy it is?".

This latter point is very important: the firearm shop in your example was probably started by someone who either likes explosives, likes the history of war, likes hunting, or feels some need to protect himself and his community from the government or thieves or any other random threat; the person who owns the shop probably is not himself out killing people, he probably did not make the shop to make it easier for himself to get guns, and he probably did not build a business with the idea "most of the people I sell these guns to are murderers".

The result is that you don't see firearm shops that have giant signs on the front of their store with a picture of themselves killing someone as marketing for how simple and effective their guns are. When someone comes into their shop asking how to more effectively kill someone with their gun, they do not happily and cheerfully help them with their support issue. They also don't run community events (to draw a parallel to web forums) for people to mingle and discuss how much fun they have killing people.

However, this kind of thing is what happens when people start selling a torrent client: these two situations are quite obviously not the same situation, and yet I keep seeing this firearm example come up in defense of selling torrent clients as "if I can sell firearms that someone might use to murder someone, why can't I sell torrent clients that someone might use to commit copyright infringement". I seriously dare people to temporarily ignore the moral issues (as they are irrelevant for this specific discussion) and assume that murder and copyright infringement are equivalent crimes (alternatively, replace murder with something like "stealing candy from babies" or some other humorous and petty physical crime), and then think about how the mindsets and activities of these two actors can be discerned.

Regardless, the result is that you simply can't be successful selling a torrent client unless you pander to the pirates in your advertising and support because the pirates are nearly all of your user community; thereby, I found that without constant vigilance every torrent client I accepted ended up going down this path where I'd find the vendor's official Twitter account promoting piracy, the description on the products would keep ending up with more and more demonstrations of piracy, and I'd find out from users that they were specifically helping with piracy-related use cases via e-mail. Now, whether the law makes these people particularly "guilty" is another question: as someone whom these laws have occasionally threatened to smack down (and who has had friends actually get smacked), the position of Cydia is to simply not risk the result and reject the app (especially as you can always just host it yourself or with another party, and you can take payments for it yourself: it is a truly open ecosystem).

(Now, of course, I make this argument, and thanks to "howcan" and people like him, will have to add a giant hedge: nothing in this argument is trying to draw a parallel between the moral ramifications of taking a human life and copying a song; to the extent that you would like to have that argument you should not only have it somewhere else, but you should not have it with me, as the implication of taking that stance is that I am attempting to put myself in the "maybe I'm a murderer" category, which is both insulting and silly given what I do: it is the kind of argument that causes people who, in entirely well-meaning capacity, bring up an analogy from World War II, and then derail into "did you just call me a Nazi?!", when in fact nothing of the sort was implied by the relevant parts of the metaphor.)

I think his point is that the same legal principle applies. TPB is clearly "in-league" with copyright violators. I will not weigh in on whether this is right or not, but it's obvious from their past behaviors (blog posts, etc.). They are guilty of "conspiracy to commit copyright violation".

2. Blending in with the crowd. If the speed limit is 55 but everybody is going 75, it is safer for you to drive at 75 in smooth traffic flow rather than go 55 and create waves of darting and merging traffic trying to go around you.

3. Speed limits are sometimes applied dishonestly in the name of safety, when the real goal is revenue generation from violators. Such a law is immoral and unjust - government abusing its monopoly cartel power - and breaking it represents civil disobedience. This is more what the ancestor posts are getting at.

  “There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any 
  government has is the power to crack down on criminals. 
  Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. 
  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes 
  impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” 

As a young driver, speed limits on open highways -- or simply the idea that an untrained, politically-appointed bureaucrat in Washington, DC has any insight into what's optimal for drivers on I-10 in West Texas -- were my very first encounter with the idea she's referring to.

I think you must be thinking of a different DRM. DRM means Digital Rights Management, and describes any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that are not desired or intended by the content provider. And that's it.

I'm guessing you're thinking of Sony's 2005 rootkit incident, which was an example of DRM implemented in a completely stupid and dangerous way. And it wasn't legal at the time nor is it now - Sony was forced to recall the CDs and settled a class-action lawsuit. But regardless of this, the fact that the program "gained access to private systems" was completely secondary to its goal of making the CD's content uncopyable.

I'm not saying I support it, but you're not helping your cause by telling hyperbolic lies about what DRM is.

I think many Americans have a general idea that the food they eat is the product of a corporate farming system that can be pretty sketchy. We expect the government to get involved when the practices of food producers create a food safety issue, but otherwise we leave it up to consumers to choose. And some consumers do choose to buy grass-fed beef, free-range chickens, and organic produce, and pay extra for it.

There are probably some parallels to be drawn with respect to product labeling. (Should Amazon and iTunes be forced to warn consumers that the movie they're about to buy includes some type of DRM?)

More importantly, though, both of these situations require consumers to be educated in order to make informed decisions about which product to buy. If we as a culture want our farming system to be more humane to animals and better stewards of the earth, we need to teach our peers how to read food labels and understand what they mean. If we as a technical community want DRM to not be forced into the files we buy, we need to educate our peers on the drawbacks of DRM and persuade them to make it an issue.

Wikipedia's definition is quite good, but is a little too long to repost here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

In any event, we're talking about technical solutions to licensing problems.

I haven't read any reports of Google or Amazon's cloud music players adding DRM to files after they've been uploaded. Has anyone heard differently? I thought the whole reason they were legally in the clear is because they're basically file lockers with playback functionality.

The "Digital Audio Recording Devices and Media" amendment to the AHRA may be an example of the Recording Industry's lobbying efforts being rewarded more than we'd like, but DRM it is not.

As for your warning letter from the RIAA: did they have reason to believe you wouldn't be paying your publishing royalties? I imagine your record label probably works with the Harry Fox Agency all the time. Was there something that was unusual about your case?

But just so we're clear, it is possible to talk about FOSS itself (the software) in a meaningful way. It's not like the term is oxymoronic or something, in fact, the two descriptions are nearly redundant when it comes to describing the rights you get as a user, which is what you should be concerned with as a user of the software.

Why shouldn't we apply this to projects as well? I guess the questions I would ask to clarify the point are: 1) What do you call a project that would like to empower users with software freedom but would also like to embrace the development style of Open Source? 2) Given that there are so many projects out there that embrace exactly that combination, shouldn't we have a name for that?

Admittedly it's not music and I'm not familiar with the pirating in that arena, but it seems to me that pirating is a more complex beast than most people paint it.