Gottfrid Svartholm is currently being held in solitary confinement in Denmark, Peter Sunde is arrested in Sweden. I thought these countries were like role models.
Speaking of Norway in particular, there is also the question of less clear-cut rights against regarding invasion of privacy etc. than the United States constitution provides. The counterweight is a very educated and well-respected police force.
There is plenty to criticize in our contries, criticism which should definitely have a more prominent place than it does today. And I am saying this as a pretty strong supporter of the way Norway does things. The "damages" conviction of the TPB guys is another case in point: The ruling is in effect (1) a sentence to lifelong economic slavery or (2) a sentence to lifelong banishment from Sweden. Take your pick. This is not the way a modern democratic legal system should function. Similarly, criticism could also be made for the way these cases (and also the Julian Assange case, for instance) were started through external pressure rather than the regular state of affairs. Plenty of stuff that should be discussed more openly.
It was also sad that the bribed policeman who did the investigation was not only given a free pass, but the police chief said "it shown that the policeman work in the case was appreciated".
Only sentences that we personally consider unjust. That's how the law works, isn't it?
So no, scandinavian countries aren't the worst, but they certainly aren't bright shining stars either.
-- another dane.
I'd say it looks fairly likely that he had something to do with these crimes. Also I wouldn't say they have no evidence just that they probably don't have enough to convict. The arguments for continuing to hold him are pretty thin. He already had unsupervised meetings with family and friends so holding him because they are afraid of evidence tampering seems questionable.
Essentially you are saying, My information is mine and should be under my control because privacy. But your information is "imaginary property" and anyone should be able to take it whenever they wish, because dying business models corruption crooks. Hilarious!
When you torrent a file, you are never participating in an involuntary transaction. And very little torrented material is procured through breaking into secure networks - an example of that would be the half life 2 prerelease source break in.
These are people performing legal valid transactions with businesses (be they physical discs, or digital downloads) and then they share the information they now posses, but under copyright do not own (you never own it unless you are the creator or rights holder) with others that want that information.
Like I said, if you break the encryption on someones private network to steal their data that is still a violation of their property rights because you are breaking in. You aren't stealing, but the act of breaking in is still violating their property rights, or in this context their right to security.
In movie terms, it would be fine for a movie studio to create a film, and never distribute it. Then it is theirs, privately, and nobody has the right to forcibly take it from them, even if the encoded information is valuable to someone or useful. But when they start selling DVDs outside the studios front door, and you buy one and go home with it, rip it and share it on TPB, there is never a violation of voluntary exchange or property rights besides you breaking an implied contract with the media distributor that nobody understands exists and thus no market in the world is operating without it. People also break contracts all the time, and that usually doesn't result in a jail sentence, it results in a secession of business. And IP is ridiculous in how you enter perpetual contracts by having a sequence of polarized magnetic splotches on a composite disk.
Hell, when people try to release software public domain (like sqlite) there is a massive legal morass and their disclosure license is pages long just to cover all the corner cases.
Note that contrary to your implicit belief, your information is not always locked away, undistributed, in a vault in your basement either; it's all over the place, in the form of every government record on you, every bank account you have, every financial transaction you make and every online account you have. Especially the latter: every move you make on the Internet is tracked by those who monetize it. You are not "sharing" your information, but it exists out there.
And yet you feel violated when somebody accesses it without your consent. Ask yourself why that is. It's simply because you left that information there with an implicit understanding that that information would be used only for purposes that you agree to.
And the same goes for content creators: they don't "voluntarily give away their information", they distribute it with the understanding that those who experience it would compensate for them for it. And they, similarly, feel violated when people access it without due recompense.
IP and privacy are both flip sides of the same coin. After all, the only thing the NSA has on you is a sequence of polarized magnetic splotches on a composite disk.
> have no idea what "breaking and entering" has to do with this.
That should be clear now. The only way for others to obtain the decrypted contents of the transmissions between careful friends in the above situation is with some kind of breaking and entering. The fact that most people don't do this, most of the time, is irrelevant; it is important that we are able to do it if we need to.
The only way to really prevent the above scenario is to make it illegal to do some of the above things: to own a general-purpose computer that won't snitch on you, to meet a friend and exchange something secret without having your person searched, to send encrypted information through the internet, to live in a place that doesn't have cameras watching to see if you're viewing illegal material, etc. (I suppose paying a reward to people for reporting on their neighbors, friends, and family for possessing or distributing illegal material might be reasonably effective too.) IP law is only really enforceable with a police state.
> It's simply because you left that information there with an implicit understanding that that information would be used only for purposes that you agree to.
Actually, sometimes the understanding is reasonably explicit. For example, Gmail has a privacy policy. It says, "We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google unless one of the following circumstances applies: [with your consent, with domain administrators, for external processing, for legal reasons]", and later it says, "If Google is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any personal information".
A website's terms of use take the form of a contractual agreement between the user and the company; the whole thing is a bit laughable, since usually the company doesn't have a human negotiating with the user and the user doesn't read the policy, but the subsequent exchange of valuable services for valuable data can be construed as grounds for some kind of enforceable agreement, and the words of the ToS should at least be a first approximation to what that agreement is. And people justifiably feel violated if someone ... violates the terms of a contract under which they've given up valuable items.
> IP and privacy are both flip sides of the same coin.
Nope. In case you're wondering, if a Google sysadmin decides to publish my emails to the internets, I will be offended and expect him to at least lose his job, and I may have some complaint against Google, but I do not believe I have the right to subsequently prevent anyone else from making copies and spreading them around; they were not bound by any contractual agreement with me. And I expect that, in practice, my emails will probably remain private: the few who could read them (Google employees, the NSA) risk negative consequences (firing, bad press and Google fixing their security breach) if they do anything to reveal they've done it.
By contrast, those who favor IP and use it hope to make exchange-contracts with thousands or millions of strangers, each one of whom is expected to have intimate contact with the information. Reliably preventing any of them from sharing it requires the active intervention of the law and a lot more.
> And they, similarly, feel violated when people access it without due recompense.
It is unfortunate that IP laws and rhetoric have given them such an expectation. I understand some people feel violated when gay people get married in their church or when someone buys a copy of a holy book and burns it. However, to let their feelings control the force of law would have unacceptable consequences for human freedom.
IP law is only really enforceable with a police state.
Non sequitur and false dichotomy. It is also possible to get away with murder [1] or robbery [2] or rape [3]. Does that mean it's useless to enforce murder or robbery or rape laws? All laws are only perfectly enforceable with a police state.
But we don't need perfectly enforceable laws, only practically enforceable laws. And as you yourself admit, pretty much nobody goes through that trouble of keeping their communications secret, and that is why people only need to look to find the IP addresses of all those pirating content.
If everyone had to go through the process of encrypting pirated content and walking over to their friends' and then downloading that content, you can bet piracy rates won't be in the range of terabytes per month in the US alone. I'd guess that's a level of enforcement people can live with.
> ... if a Google sysadmin decides to publish my emails to the internets, I will be offended and expect him to at least lose his job, and I may have some complaint against Google, but I do not believe I have the right to subsequently prevent anyone else from making copies and spreading them around; they were not bound by any contractual agreement with me.
You choose a facile example with "emails", because that has little economic impact to you. What about your social security number? Credit card numbers? You have to give that information out everywhere to all kinds of third parties with no explicit "contractual agreement" in place. Yet once it leaks to nefarious parties, the more widely that private information is spread around, the more pain you will experience.
> It is unfortunate that IP laws and rhetoric have given them such an expectation.
It is not IP laws and rhetoric that have given them such expectation, it's just the age old tradition of being expected to get paid when you produce something of value to somebody else. What is unfortunate is that just because it's so easy to get away with piracy, people have the expectation that they are entitled to taking somebody else's work.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_deaths#Unsolve...
You're right that I've described a tradeoff and simply assumed the case is closed - I mean, where does this right to privacy come from even? And to me, the answer that settles that question is physics - as long as one-way functions exist, then so does encryption (and it's generally believed that one-way functions exist). So preventing this privacy means restricting general communication, and we all know how that works out.
(PS. It's easier to have an honest debate when you don't knock down straw men with dismissive snide marks like 'Hilarious!'. You might even end up understanding a different point of view - and don't worry, that does not mean you need to agree with it.)
So when you're "saying something" to a friend that is gigabytes of an exact copy of a movie that somebody else created, why should you be the only one having complete control over it? Trust me, the "third party" has no interest in listening in to what you have to say if you are "saying" stuff that is of no interest to them. But when you intermingle "somebody else's" information with "your" own, obviously that somebody else will feel entitled to, at the least, "listen in".
> And to me, the answer that settles that question is physics ...
Not sure what the point is, but note that all the encryption in the world (allegedly) didn't keep your information out of the NSA's fingers. All the NSA-rage that gets poured on HN on a daily basis, and nobody realizes that they've been doing the same to the music, movie and game industries since the dawn of computers?
> (PS. It's easier to have an honest debate when you don't knock down straw men with dismissive snide marks like 'Hilarious!'. You might even end up understanding a different point of view - and don't worry, that does not mean you need to agree with it.)
It's not a strawman, you just missed my point: It's always amusing that the same people who are so strongly pro-privacy -- essentially your right to control information that you deem to be your own -- are also so dismissive about others' rights to control what they deem to be their information. The irony is overwhelming.
I don't equate "piracy" to theft (or piracy, for that matter), but I think we're culturally trapped in a very curious mindset. I don't think anyone would argue that the value in a movie or television show or book or any other creative work lies solely in the cost to reproduce a copy -- if anything, we'd be more likely to argue that the cost to reproduce it is incidental to its value. To me, the logical outcome of that is that we should pay for copies of creative materials regardless of the marginal cost because that's never really been what we were paying for in the first place -- and it seems perfectly reasonable to me that, thus, we should honor the wishes of the creators when it comes to price (or the people the creators have ostensibly delegated that responsibility to, i.e., publishers and distributors). But instead we're often arguing that if the cost to copy is effectively zero, the creators and publishers are unreasonable authoritarian police state thugs for saying, "Hey, the cost of the copy isn't where the value lies, and if you're going to enjoy our work you should still pay us."
And, yes, I know all the arguments about publishers (and creators) making unreasonable demands, but I think that makes the line even murkier, not clearer. We don't say "the price you're asking for this physical object is unreasonable, so I'm just taking it without paying for it at all"; why do we think it's fair to say "the price you're asking for this digital object is unreasonable, so I'm making a copy without paying for it?" Yes, the cost to do so is zero, but the value isn't derived from the reproduction cost.
I am actually willing to compromise in that nominal imaginary property isn't the worst idea (especially as applied to the commercial realm), but only after its industries accept its limitations and stop attacking anything that prevents them from having iron-clad absolute control (attacking justice by extorting IP addresses, attacking end-user computing via DRM, attacking communications and privacy through six strikes, attacking self-determination by forcing their laws onto other countries, attacking the distributed Internet through streaming).
Until that happens, they are a malevolent pest that must be starved, as any money sent their way just supports destroying the future.
If all you want to do is preach to the choir, fine, but if you care about making a difference in the world by changing the minds of people who either don't know about these things or are on the fence about it, then your choice of words is going to drive away fence sitters and possibly discredit others who are on your side.
This is exactly what RMS does, and it hasn't exactly worked well for him. Look at the phrases you use: "imaginary property", "attacking justice", "destroying the future". Those are strong words with loaded meaning- just using phrases like that is a rhetorical trick that most people are going to see through immediately. Those kinds of words should be reserved for things which are facepalmingly obvious; simple binary issues which have no gray areas, and are not things on which reasonable people can disagree in any respect. The fact that you present it in such a way is going to be interpreted by the audience in one of two ways:
(1) You really believe that all (or almost all) IP law the world over is really one of those blindingly obvious binary issues relating to basic morality that has few or no gray areas, to the degree that you don't care about changing anyone's mind; in fact, you would like to shame anyone who disagrees with you or is on the fence about any aspect it. You put it up there with pedophilia and ethnic cleansing and all the other things for which there is pretty much absolute consensus on in most of the developed world.
- or -
(2) You know how complicated it all is, and the history and rationale for it and so on, but you think that the people you're talking to are lesser minds who are only going to be swayed by hyperbolic, emotional language and loaded terminology.
Either way, it's not constructive, and may actually be destructive to the cause (again, see RMS/PETA/Earth First/etc.). I don't think that's where you're coming from- I think you mean well and are probably young and very passionate about this stuff, and for the most part I think you're on the right side and hopefully on the side of history. I just remember spending years with much the same mindset, without even realizing it, and it didn't help anyone. Another danger of using bile and invective and loaded terminology as a form of argumentation is that after a while you might start believing it yourself, in which case (1) and/or (2) become not just what you're mistakenly communicating but what you actually believe. And that is the path to the Dark Side. :(
> This is exactly what RMS does, and it hasn't exactly worked well for him
I disagree. People pick on RMS for weirdness, but he's been providing a steady viewpoint while things continually degrade. "Right to Read" used to be some far off future scenario, seemingly hyperbolic at the time. The reason he's been so constantly spot on is that he hasn't been pandering to the current conditions of the world, but talking directly about abstract concepts and how they clash.
> You really believe that all [copyright] the world over is really one of those blindingly obvious binary issues ... to the degree that you don't care about changing anyone's mind
Yes, I actually don't care about changing anyone's mind about this with rhetoric, as my entire argument is that personal-use copyright will be made obsolete by communication technologies. Lack of copyright innately rubs people the wrong way (especially USians), and so the same effort that will convince one person through this route is better placed convincing several people (in the proper context) to cut the cord and setup vpn+torrent for pure cost reasons.
Since the two concepts are opposed, the corresponding positive idealistic argument is to preserve and promote the Internet (net neutrality, ISP competition) etc, which I do agree it is worthwhile to convince people of at an idealistic level - even if that just empowers them to politically push back against companies they're wed to directly supporting.
That depends on your attitude. Only a very small minority of content creators make a living from that activity. Some people are always going to be cheapskates of varying degrees. Unless they are actually manufacturing and selling counterfeit copies of my books, in my view it doesn't rise to the level of a tort, much less a crime.
Google indexes downloads of my books. What consequences should that have? Same as for Pirate Bay? If you are a poor person in Pakistan, how else are you going to get it? If you are a rich person in a developed country, you are just a jerk if you lack the creativity to ask for a review copy. I don't see a practical way to have a different view of the situation. I could rail against downloads, but what is that going to do?
Publishing is a leaky bucket. If you take the advice of someone like Guy Kawasaki on how to promote a book, you should go with the flow and give away as many copies as you can. Every time I speak at a conference and give away a few dozen signed copies, sales go up. Someday that kid in Pakistan who torrented my book might work for a system integrator that hires me to train them.
If I thought reality wasn't OK, what should I do? Many of the problems in the computing industry come from efforts to deny the reality that content can't be protected beyond the audience's willingness to be honest.
And that's where the entertainment industry's efforts to brainwash people ("you wouldn't steal a car") and to make copyright violation a criminal offense (the longer the sentence, the better) come in: they are all efforts to try to make people so afraid that they'll be honest. What a way to treat their customers.
That's about how O'Reilly views people posting downloads of O'Reilly authors' books. That's why they don't use content protection on the e-books they sell. Content protection mechanisms are poisoning computing.
I personally don't think copyright infringement warrants anything near the level of legal activity it had just a few years ago, so I'm glad the RIAA/MPAA are moving away from suing the pants off of everybody. But a lot of people seem to have the idea that copying digital works is morally right as long as you're stealing from a business, and yet simultaneously believe that copyleft should apply all the time, which is doublethink.
> Content protection mechanisms are poisoning computing.
So we should get rid of EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL in the Linux kernel?
Thievery is an inappropriate description of making copies.
Edit: Here's a concrete example of "At best": http://anton.nordenfur.se/paulo-coelho-destroys-piracy-myths...
In 1999, when I was first published in Russia (with a print- run of 3,000), the country was suffering a severe paper shortage. By chance, I discovered a ‘pirate’ edition of The Alchemist and posted it on my web page. A year later, when the crisis was resolved, I sold 10,000 copies of the print edition. By 2002, I had sold a million copies in Russia, and I have now sold 12 million
http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/4d5ea3314bd7c8600a0...
Do you think people listen to a third of the music they listened to ten years ago? No way!
The vast majority of comments regarded this as outright theft.
If I make copies of your personal data (credit card info, address, name, SSN) and pass it around the Internet, is it a victim-less crime? I'm merely making copies of bits onto a webpage (the other effects shouldn't matter..according to your logic).
The real victims are the people put out of work due to rampant piracy of software and anything else digital. Information wants to be free. Just don't come looking for me to foot the bill when the unemployment rate increases and people are calling for things like basic income.
I'm honestly tired of the "everything should be free" mantra coupled with "We can't figure out why there are no more jobs left..it must be the greedy companies!!! durr!!"
There is a big difference between personally identifying information and copyrighted works. Same goes for passwords or password hashes and so on. Yes, I believe there are specific kinds of data people should be allowed to keep private, and secret. That is why I don't broadcast my credit card info, address, name, SSN or passwords on Hacker News (even though I've told enough about my life so that a very competent hacker could no doubt figure me out!). I also don't put the said information on a CD and sell it to the public.
> The real victims are the people put out of work due to rampant piracy
I do not believe this is actually happening. Piracy might be happening but the reason that such people would be put out of work (if they ever are) is that people don't want to pay (or donate or whatever). Piracy isn't the reason, piracy is the symptom.
Yes it is, it very much is.
> You're obtaining entertainment
Right. Obtaining copies of recorded entertainment.
> You're using a service
I might be using the "service" provided by the peers who willingly and voluntarily partake in creating copies, with or without requiring a fee. There is no "entertainer" performing a show. He's not serving me. He's not fulfilling any requests I've made; we have no contract. He doesn't even have a computer serving data for me. He's not involved. He could be sitting on a beach sipping beer. People making copies of someone's past performance doesn't make that someone actively serve you.
> You can perhaps argue that semantically sharing is better likened to 'fare evasion' on public transport
Public transport and fare evasion are interesting subjects. But making copies of something is not at all alike. When you sit in a bus going somewhere, there is a very real service happening that very moment. Someone's probably sitting in the front, driving the bus, trying to get you and the rest of the people to their destination safely and on time. By providing that service, the driver (and other people involved) spend their time providing that service. They also spend fuel. Mechanical deterioration of the vehicle takes place. You occupy space in their vehicle!
If, right now, I made a billion copies of someone's song, the artist won't lose a single second of his life. He won't lose a single penny. His guitar doesn't detoriate, he doesn't get tired, he doesn't get hungry. Most likely he wouldn't even know what's happening. He is not performing a service.
In the worst case, it's absolutely possible that you share something with someone, A, which A would have bought and then they don't buy it. In the worst case they don't in the future buy anything from the author/creator etc. In the worst case I'd consider that author/creator a victim in this case, they would have been paid whatever amount A would have paid but now haven't been.
I'm not arguing that's often the case (I don't think it is) but to absolutely rule it out feels like too much of a simplification. There can be a legitimate victim, it almost certainly isn't the person suing you and in most cases there probably isn't - but there can be I think.
Most of the IP abolitionists (myself included) would just argue you should be doing free market information creation, and charging for scarce resources and not erecting some artificial framework mess to destroy a potentially enlightening capability of the information age. If you want to make a movie, seek funding to make the movie. If you want to write software, seek those who want software and ask them to give you money to make it, etc.
That is really inevitably the only way this ends, because IP is incompatible with the modern forms information can take. The ease, rate, and speed of transfer marginal expenses have collapsed to zero, so treating it as a scarce good is only systemically harming society with artificial scarcity.
The thing is, what you're describing as a "victim" wouldn't be considered a victim in any other case.
If I set up a muffin stand and sell you muffins, you might choose to buy my muffins, and not the ones from the bakery across the street. But no one would call the bakery a victim, and call my actions, that lead to a decline in the income of the bakery, a criminal or even immoral act. Hell, I might even be using the bakery's generation-old recipe, and thus be profiting from information created/discovered by the bakery (akin to a digital copy of a movie created by a studio).
Making muffins costs you time and money, copying a digital file doesn't (ignoring an upload limit or something). Selling is different to giving away (and a stand giving away muffins is no more comparable for the above reason). Both apply even if you use their recipe.
It goes the other way too. The bakery have to put employee time and ingredients into making every muffin while of course the film company doesn't into every digital copy. For the record I'd never consider a film company a victim of piracy.
Again I don't think the laws are sensible, I don't think the way things work right now is going to continue, it's completely infeasible in the modern world. But I don't think that comparison is a reasonable one to make.
To reply to your answer: no, they just provide a distribution tool. Yes, it is very much used to bypass copyright, but they just provide a tool.
In TPB AKF brokep says "file sharing is here to stay, if you (majors) could just stop fighting us, we could sit together and try to find a way to give money to the artists". And he did, indeed, with flattr.
Anyway, piracy is not good but the real price of renting an online movie, say from iTunes, should be about 0,30 USD. That way no one would bother.
That said, I'm not sure you're the rule. Maybe neither am I, but either way... Software apart, digital media sharing/copying doesn't equal with stealing in THE REAL WORLD that's why people would always do it.
Imagine if I could steal your car and the owner could find it on the parking the next day ;-)
It's an interesting question, especially when you mention software. Because here on HN and other forums I get the impression the majority are in favor of TPB. The more interesting thing is when somebody is caught appropriating a site design, graphics, violates GPL, etc there will be universal rage against them. I guess it is different when you are on the receiving vs. the providing side of things.
GPL says: Do what ever you want with the program so long no one become restricted by your actions.
If you patch it and send a proprietary version to someone, it will still be the same program. The difference will be the added restriction. The software license only uses copyright to enforce a "share, and share alike" concept.
Using copyright to restrict distribution, ala the proprietary model, is not the same as enforcing a share alike concept. They might use the same law, but the underlying concept is completely separate. Free and open source licenses are also not commonly enforced against individuals, but proprietary software is.
Or to summarize: Restrict restrictions is good. Breaking restrictions is good. Ignoring restrictions is good. Each 3 is consistent with each other.
I think that's a messed up attitude personally, but at least it is a consistent attitude towards intellectual property. I could respect somebody for being consistent in their attitude - especially if they themselves are also having their work pirated. Anybody who is pirating music and movies, but they themselves do not tolerate disobeying the license terms of their own work I feel is a hypocrite.
If people ignore content restrictions by pirating works, is that not consistent with the people who uses copyright to prevent content restrictions? Is it not also consistent with people who breaks content restrictions by breaking DRM?
In each 3 cases, content restriction is problem being dealt with. Preventing, ignoring or breaking, either way its dealt with.
You do have a unique opportunity to support TPB, though, as all of your books are available there. Maybe you should put your money where your mouth is and replace your amazon links in your profile with TPB links.
You are implying hypocrisy where none exists, and comparing vile mafia-like tactics that pull police resources away from real crime to the way that most actual content creators deal with downloads.
By the letter of the law: unclear, probably not.
By the spirit of the law: absolutely.
Here are some considerations: - It is legal to watch movies for free on TV, as long as you accept to be brainwashed by advertising. - It is legal to lend your DVD to your friend and it's legal for him to give it to his friend and his friend and so on. - It is legal to bring 90 friends to your house and watch the movie together. Each of them can then borrow the DVD and invite 90 of their friends... - Movies drop in value considerably after being watched once. It's a very poor investment.
Since obviously demand for free material exists, it means that: - there are no alternative legal channels with such diversity and simplicity of use or they have DRM or other restrictions (proprietary formats), which means that you actually rent, not buy.
- the prices demanded are too high, especially for movies which you stop halfway through because they suck (a vast majority)
As a developer, I do not agree with using commercial software for free and so I never download anything and always buy my software.
thepiratebay is the largest distributed backup of cinematography and music in the world. What happens to all these movies if something happens to the Internet (lots of things can make Internet unusable or disconnect parts of the world from it) ? What if the global economy collapses, WW3 starts and Internet companies as well as movie studios go belly up ? Where would all these creations be ? Who would have the copies if there were no torrent sites like piratebay ? But it would be possible to re-create thepiratebay and republish all those movies and music from their hard-drives back to the Internet.
Technically it is not legal to do this. At that point, you're putting on a "public performance", and they may indeed sue you.
Where is the line at which "having a few friends over to watch the game" a public performance? It's up to the NFL's lawyers and the corrupt judges that decades of copyright cartel lobbyists have schmoozed.