Filesharing site revealed to be anti-piracy ‘honeypot’

Original: http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/28303485

(I am also attaching the entire long-ishly written comment here for retaining a cogency to the discussion, that link hopping might disrupt)

Comment

Except... this will get people at the bottom of the food chain. The type of people who upload to web based download sites without proxying are likely to be school kids, people with limited technical knowledge (splitting a large file up in winrar really doesn't count as being technically proficient!), who want to share a movie with their family/friends, or people who use websites who index these sort of things (in the vague belief they are immune to the law, but facilitating piracy is now an offence), and offer people who upload additional privileges.

They distribute to very few people (compared to say bittorrent). No big fish are being fried in this action. No release groups will be caught. Few (if any) mass-uploaders will be caught.

This is a cheap sideshow in which a bunch of nobodies get a bunch of ACS Law type letters demanding somewhere approaching (or above) £1k to avoid criminal action, and those who fight it will likely find the case dropped (there are so many untested defences, and nobody wants to test them. If the defence of "wasn't me gov, my router got hacked" became a valid defence, everyone for eternity would welcome their day in court and use the same defence!).

People share on the internet, either ideas, opinions (even in comments like this), music, movies, etc. That's how people are. You have to remember that before big (or even small!) business arrived on the web and made trillions, people were already here, on the internet or (pre-web) on bulletin boards; sharing "stuff". Not just other people's ideas and inventions, but writing entire applications and even protocols. The web itself was based (and became successful) on this very idea of sharing, being unregulated and being free.

We are a social race and we like to share the things we like with others, and the internet is the perfect platform for us to do that.

Obviously that cannot be allowed to happen unfettered, or the major movie and games industries will be wiped out (there has to be seen to be some control, but they'd have to shut down most of he internet to wipe out piracy. It will always happen, no matter how many "honeypot" sites and bit-torrent tracking companies are running).

If internet bandwidth (to the home) continues to grow at the current pace then there will be real problems in 10/15 years. You could download every album that was EVER in the charts in less than an hour (you can already download group discographies in under an hour, even ones who kicked out A LOT of music). You could download a studio's entire back catalogue of movies in less than a day (100s of films, every day!). Rather than making the "piracy funds terrorism" crap and suing people for 10s and even 100s of thousand of dollars (these cases have mostly happened in the US), they could embrace technology.

Despite all the negative numbers and constant deluge of misinformation we are being sold (as a lie - enough is never enough in this world!), game sales, music sales and movie sales (or sales of movie services) have NEVER been higher than they are now, and we are still on an upward trajectory.

Many (most?) people who can afford movies/games/music (and maybe we should add books to that) will pay for digital copies, or access to digital rentals/services, as long as the price is right and the service is good.

Steam (a service for legally downloading PC games - which were on the edge of dying out because of mass-piracy) now has an estimated 70% of the market/$4 Billion market share. Founder Gabe Newell famously said:

In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the U.S. release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty

What I saw was not that 'normal' stuff. It was clearly prepubescent and sexual in nature.

iPhone phones home with its location? NSA's most likely listening.

Googled for something naughty? NSA's most likely listening.

Chatting on an open Internet Relay Chat server? Yup.