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Comment by sarahj | Hacker News Reader

I'll extend my hypothetical.

Lets say there are two groups. One group builds a generic media client - under the guise of better delivery of free educational videos (MIT lectures etc.)

The other group sets up "Movie Copyright Watch" and publishes an up-to-date list of movie torrents - under the guise of occasionally reporting this list back to MPAA and the like.

Now lets say team A decide to adopt the same configuration format as team B uses to publish the list.

Neither team has done anything wrong and the resulting application is capable of infringing copyright - and is essentially equivalent to what popcorn time has.

What is the difference? Tools are tools - it is crazy to ban knives because you can stab people with them.

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"it is crazy to ban knives because you can stab people with them."

That's true when looking at kitchen knifes, but to stretch your analogy: popcorn time is to other media applications as GI Joe's Combat knife is to other knives. It's not made to butter your bread: it's made to stab people.

Popcorn time was made specifically to infringe, that's not to say that the copyright system is not hopelessly broken, but imo this is a legitimate takedown notice.

Yes, it's a similar to gun control arguments. Some guns are more for self-defense, or hunting animals, other guns, like assault rifles, are designed for war.

The reason I said a DCMA takedown doesn't make sense is because they are usually to take down actual media, like a youtube video, not the source code to a tool. But I think they didn't really have options and wanted it done quickly.

> But I think they didn't really have options and wanted it done quickly.

So we live in a world where laws don't matter, only expediency in pursuit of the goals of the copyright cartels?

> Yes, it's a similar to gun control arguments. Some guns are more for self-defense, or hunting animals, other guns, like assault rifles, are designed for war.

This is actually a surprisingly good analogy. People want to ban "guns that can kill people" but revolvers and hunting rifles are no less capable of killing people than an AR-15, so instead they ban "guns that look scary" regardless that they use the same bullets, have the same rate of fire, etc. Look up how an "assault rifle" is defined, it's hilarious.

It's exactly the same problem here. The technical architecture of Popcorn Time could just as well be used as a YouTube competitor as to pirate Hollywood movies. You want to ban the second and not the first but they're really the same piece of software.

"assault rifle" has a particular meaning, and generally specifies that it be capable of multi-round firing on a single trigger pull, which is a useful and meaningful distinction in weapon operation.

I think you're referring to "assault weapon", which was a buzz-word for anything that scared people during the last major gun debate.

You're completely right about the definitions (and it's probably not worth getting any further into the gun control debate to argue about whether "multi-round firing" is any more harmful in practice than "pull the trigger more than once").

But it doesn't really change the point; a firearm that isn't an "assault rifle" or an "assault weapon" is still a completely effective killing tool.

There is no way to make a generic tool that can only be used for authorized purposes. The tool has no way to determine what purposes are authorized.

Oh, I agree with your point.

I just try to correct the language (and complain about it) when I see it used, because people picked "assault weapon" to conflate things that aren't assault rifles with assault rifles. Setting aside merits of the ban, the ban on assault rifles actually targeted a particular technology to ban. We could (in principle, I don't really want to) have a discussion about if that technology makes a difference in the effectiveness of a weapon.

The "assault weapon" ban was just meaningless cosmetic features because people felt scared. I don't necessarily agree with all the gun legislature out there, but if we're going to make it, it should at least be specific and about specific technologies rather than nebulous surface appearance.

Your hypothetical isn't very much like the situation at hand, so what is it meant to reflect on or reveal? Do you want us to try a case over the Internet that looks almost nothing like the topic under discussion here and is based only on vague description?

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