Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

I don't know about that. When Target or Walmart or whatever credit card processor experiences a data breach and customer data is exposed it's considered data theft and treated as such as well. While we can't compare digital goods with physical goods in a 1:1 manner because they have different properties, so far, aspects as it concerns the law treat them similarly.

Aspects of this may or may not change over time, however, in the meantime they are what they are. It's like physics. Till the consensus changes, current accepted theory applies, even if there are gaps.

In the end, "theft" is just reapplying old nomenclature to new phenomena. We could call it something else, give the behavior a new name and then have society turn around and apply the same laws, would that make things any better?

Nothing about TPB is a breach of security on the parts of rights holders. The transactions taking place on torrent sites never even involve them. In reality, the only relation the law has to what TBP is doing is simply that depending on jurisdiction either:

The original uploader is violating the copyright of the copy he originally procured, but in some countries once he distributes that (and the recipient isn't liable, because it is a very Orwellian thing to claim that a user downloading some arbitrary file from anywhere is liable for the copyright violations involved, albeit if they are on TPB they have less of a defense there - but it is very thought police-y to try to assert that everyone is liable for all the data they download - because everyone is infringing copyright every day with every screenshot of Frozen or the cover art to music albums being pushed from websites to your music player.

All parties seeding are liable, albeit for the same reason I described earlier this seems like a gross dystopian model to use because it means you blame people for non-violent behavior they cannot know is wrong, just because the original provider of the data never disclosed its copyright status. It cannot be the fault of a recipient of information if they were never told it was being shared without a license to share on the part of the sharer, or that they do not then have rights to share.

Either way, that is nothing like hacking Sony's servers and copying movie data off of it. That is a violent intrusion on their digital property, literally, by entering their servers without their permission and with obvious intent to intrude and possibly duplicate or even destroy data.

Until the conversation about information sharing can be had outside of relating it to violence, which it is almost never, and I would never condone, then you can't have a legitimate conversation on this topic. First and foremost must be an acknowledgment that the copyright infringement most sites like TPB are advocating is the voluntary exchange of information one party has to one party that wants it, in violation of a state framework granting a third party to that transaction exclusive rights to control its distribution. That is just objective fact, before any subjective opinions or morality come into the discussion, but without that everyone is operating on false assumptions.

Theft does not imply an unlawful transfer of ownership. For example a person can be charged with theft of service for stealing electricity or cable TV, even though all they did was cause their own electrons in their own cables to oscillate in a certain way.

> Since theft implies an unlawful transfer of ownership.

Not only does theft not imply transfer of ownership, theft is incompatible with transfer of ownership. Stealing something doesn't make you its owner.

Not really since he is a participant in the subject at hand i.e. he is not on the sidelines.

So it becomes a question of whom copyright is supposed to protect – I like what the U.S. system _used_ to be, in that it was protective enough to allow creators to reap the economic benefits of their work, but was liberal enough that there was less nonsense about "estates" controlling intellectual assets for decades after the creator's death.

I think there should be a clearly delineated point that a work is given to the public, but I can see how that might sound like a radical notion, especially to people who want to make money off of it.

The Statute of Anne which is widely held to be the first iteration of copyright gave authors/printers 14 years exclusive right, then works were to enter the public domain. On application before the end of the first period a further period of 14 years could be granted. The public domain was protected by the legal deposit scheme ensuring that a work could always (barring disaster) fully entertain the public domain.

The Statute of Anne was a compromise as publishers were being refused the reapplication of previous laws as those laws gave them too much power and control of publication preferencing them over the public and the authors.

Moral rights are an important part of copyright too; the right to be named as author being enshrined in the Berne Convention, for example. Nonetheless if the Statute of Anne represents the fore-runner of copyright under English Law traditions then I think my statement is objectively true (within jurisdictions based on English Law).

> To the best of my understanding society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago.

The current availability of books published last century is actually smaller than the current availability of books published before that. So there is actually a bit of a cultural hole from the 1900's because of materials are still in copyright and not published by their owners. Often it isn't even known who is the current owner of a material. There might come a time where people know more about culture 500 years ago than 100 years ago.

> I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people.

I think we've lived with the concept of copyright and patents for so long that we've forgotten what an artificial construct that it is. We're basically giving exclusively ownership to ideas. There is a good argument for doing that, which is why copyright exists, but it's not a universal truth. Locking way and preventing the sharing, modification, and remixing of ideas has a deep cultural cost now and future generations.

>society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago //

Society like now used story and music as central elements of cultural expression. 500 and 5000 years ago that was freely shared. 500 years ago in my country (UK) there were poets and playwrights making a living without copyright (though minstrels had closed guilds at at least one point). If you heard a song then you were free to sing it to your friends, make performances of it or whatever.

On the DRM point, the works that are "protected" can't freely enter the public domain. The copyright deal is that the people will - via the government - grant you a monopoly on reproduction/modification (and associated actions) on your work for a limited period in exchange for the work entering the public domain. In order to enter the public domain a work should be free to be enjoyed by all without let or hindrance (beyond that inherent in the format). The point of the DRM is to ensure that the work is never able to be freely used/copied etc., it can't enter the public domain unless it is side-loaded in some way and I can't see any current media corp paying for archiving of all works DRM free and then releasing them at the appropriate time to ensure they keep their end of the bargain. Such a guarantee would be necessary, eg lodging copies with a sort of escrow, for DRM-ed works to be able to provably uphold their end.

>I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people. //

I'm not being as terse at it may seem, but, food? Do you have a right to be fed? If you're not a food producer and don't have the means to produce food, do you still have a right to be fed?

Some will say that one dies without food. I'd argue our form of humanity dies without shared culture - you may find that a good thing?

I'd be interested to know your status, are you wealthy, do you enjoy the arts. I'm poor and work in art & craft primarily.

>I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people.

You do have such a right, because it is intimately related to the fact that you are human -- a social creature who essentially _requires_ things created by other people for your very survival.

You may not agree that you should have immediate or non-negotiable access, but the mere fact that you are a producer of content and information yourself means that you are in fact paying for that culture.

Just look at how valuable 'being popular' is. It is extremely valuable, and all that value is produced a group of people who are labeled as "consumers", even though they obviously contribute. They "produce" essentially all the value of popularity.

> He didn't hurt anyone except himself.

I'm not sure which side of this I'm on, to be honest, but I haven't seen any evidence that there isn't _any_ economic damage done by illegal downloading.

> Sunde went to prison on his own for what he believed was right

This may be true, but it's not like this wasn't a winning venture for him. At a certain point, it could have just been a question of whether he was willing to gamble that he'd gain millions of dollars rather than get locked up.

> So maybe you should consider respecting someone who thinks taking his life and innocent lives to make a point, or at least respect the point he is trying to make.

"Even today it takes only the crudity of a persecution to give an otherwise completely indifferent sectarianism an honorable name. How? Does it change the value of a thing if someone gives his life for it? An error that has become honorable is an error which is that much more seductive."

> you cannot possibly ignore the fact that Sunde went to prison on his own for what he believed was right

Yes, but I don't find that in itself worthy of respect. Martyring yourself is a dramatic pose, a type of moralism that appeals to emotion and not reason. What Sunde did with his own personal life has absolutely nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of TPB (btw I am entirely in favor of that sort of filesharing).

But this childish fetish our society has with idolizing people who "feel strongly" and "sacrifice" does us no credit. It just muddies the already murky waters of whatever topic is under debate. The fact that someone makes a sacrifice in favor of some belief or conviction simply makes no difference whatsoever as to the rightness or wrongness of that belief. It is only a symptom of the type of person s/he is. And I see no reason to respect the willingness to sacrifice as a virtue in itself, since one could sacrifice for "evil" (bad/stupid/harmful) ends.

How does one tell the difference between conviction and brainwashing? Or are religious convictions not real convictions?

> The author does not want you to respect the cause for which he has taken the risk, but the fact that he felt strongly enough about it to put his life on the line for it

Again, I fail to see how conviction is by itself worthy of respect. Surely it is only respectable if the content of the conviction is also respectable.

In other words: if I risk my life for something stupid or wrong or immoral or criminal, but I felt strongly enough about it to risk my life over it, are you obliged to respect my conviction, even though the content of my conviction was not respectable? I think having respect for the notion of conviction itself is utterly stupid. I would rather respect having the calmness and clarity of thought to act without the need for moral zeal.

I agree that torrent technology should be allowed. The Pirate Bay allowed for that and likely should be able to exist, however let's call a spade a spade. Many of the material on torrent sites is copyrighted material, the founder in his piece says people can't download their TV show tomorrow, acknowledging the fact that copyrighted material drives the site.

I'm trying to figure out how you distinguish something like pirating a movie versus if I were to torrent your diary (assuming it did not involve breaking and entering your home, or whatever. Let's say you left it on a table and I copied it when you were in the bathroom). I'm assuming you would assert some control over those words. But when you object, I can say, "Well, look, you aren't losing anything, so nothing wrong really occurred here. You aren't deprived of your data."

So ok, instead of a diary, now let's say you work with a couple guys on a piece of fiction and someone 'releases' it before it's done. Why is that different? So ok, now I get together with 1,000 people and make a $180M movie. How is that different? At what point of these examples does a piece of information go from being OK to secure (diary) to not? (a movie)

I agree that some people wouldn't watch the show if they couldn't download it, but why do they have that right to get it for free? I understand that torrent technology is great, but TPB founder is using downloading TV shows as an example of how things will change.

Human rights exist regardless of whether a particular legal framework honors them. Everyone has the right to speech, including the right to the private transmission of data, the right to assemble to pursue common interests, etc. Those rights have limitations when it comes to harming people, but people aren't being harmed by any particular copy of Duck Dynasty S06E03.

The thing being harmed here is a business model. I vehemently disagree that someone should be fined or imprisoned in the name of a business model, especially an entertainment one. If the law says that's what happens, the law is unjust.

That being said, copying things that aren't yours without permission is a jerk thing to do. That shouldn't make you a criminal, however.

Making money from media is NOT a legal right. You don't have a right to profit.

You have the right to attempt to profit from it and exclude others from doing the same with your work.

That's all copyright provides. A limited right to an opportunity to make money, granted to you by society so you can make more of that work if society (by proxy of "The Market") deems your works as successful.

This right is granted to you because it's considered beneficial to society as a whole, because it incentivizes you to create more and ultimately have all the things you produced released into the public domain once your limited right expires.

So you're not getting the right to copyright because it's a natural right, you're getting it as part of a contract with society. The question is whether that contract is worth it to restrict speech, to have all the side-effects of the DMCA, to put people in prison, to slap families who pirated a few songs with 200k$ fines etc.

Let's say some people are questioning the tradeoff being made, at least in its current state.

I've explained it elsewhere, but a business model is a projection of future results, it's not actual property. I think the burden of proof is on the claimant when someone says that protecting business models is more important than protecting freedom of speech (sharing documents), freedom of privacy (no combing through my documents), or the freedom of movement (not being in prison).

As far as a critique on whether human right exist or what they are if they do, that's way out of scope for this topic. But I'll say that it's hard to have any morality without some concept of human rights, whether that term is used or not.

> even your web-app you charge money for?

Great example! With AWS the incremental cost of supporting each additional user approaches $0. So it's okay for people to use your $10/month web app, paying you the $0.05 or whatever covers their AWS costs? After all, as long as your hosting costs are covered, you're not any worse off, you've just lost the opportunity to make a sale.

The rightful owners of stolen physical property lose their possessions. The owners of copied data aren't deprived of their data.

Using a web-app without permission usually falls under contract violation or fraud. Maybe trespassing in some exotic cases.

Preventing the scraping the data from a web app (actually a political issue in Spain and Germany right now) shouldn't be more important than basic human rights like the freedom of speech. Nobody has the right to ownership of facts, for example.

> people didn't want to pay for the value I provided

Well, that simply sounds like a failed product, no? Not everything is successful. Given finite resources (human labor in this case) not everything can be successful.

Just because some people would take it for free does not mean they would take it at the cost it takes to make the product profitable.

That job interview would be your epiphany. That nobody paid for it because you didn't really provide any value at all. Welcome to the real world, where your actions are most likely insignificant and valueless, except for you.

Has there ever really been a documented case of people being driven to poverty as a direct result of their content being put on file sharing networks? It's a very common piece of emotional demagoguery that I see, but I've never seen any sources that substantiate it.

Because Hollywood is just barely scraping by from the lack of revenue....

Let's forget for a moment that, as you tell all those people your sorrows, you will in fact figure out that your product failed not because of piracy but because the product was not giving adequate value for its price...

This is about movies and music at large. Software piracy is a solved problem. In games, the majority of people now use Steam and nobody really cares about the few that look for it on random torrent websites or some such because: 1. They are a much more likely source of malware (you don't just play files, you run executables). 2. Games that care have adopted an online-only DRM model (which has its own problems but that's a story for another thread) 3. A lot of games have an audience comprised entirely of non-paying customers (children without credit cards). Parents are not expected to pirate, and if kids do then no harm done.

In office software, Photoshop and MS Office are the two big names in piracy and both MS and Adobe silently encourage piracy on their products to enforce lock in. And while that sounds scummy when I put it like that, it is an excellent demonstration of what I was mentioning earlier: You have eyeballs/ears which you can easily turn into wallets.

So please, give me a break, your company did not go under because of piracy. And Hollywood/the RIAA have more digits in their bank accounts than total employees.

Well, it's TPB. They might not have had much of a choice about what ad networks they were allowed to participate in. I mean, if you're running an ad network, you need to appear respectable to get respectable clients. In that case, running ads on a torrent site is the exact opposite of what you want to do.

Most companies are not going to want to be associated with TPB, so most ad networks are not going to want to assocaite with TPB. So, the bottom of the barrel, scummiest ad networks are going to be what it would have to use to keep the lights on.

Just my two cents though.

Just because someone's sincere doesn't mean he's not an idiot. Just because something doesn't make a profit doesn't mean it's virtuous. The Doom floppies I gave out in high school didn't make me a profit (I only charged as much as the floppies cost), but that didn't make it virtuous.

Which I don't see why everyone thinks TPB was a non-profit. They were pulling in hundreds of thousands a month via ads, way more than their costs, I would think. But we won't know, because there was no transparency.

That's the theory. Turns out, though, that anything that's not really popular is hard to get hold of on TPB. It's usually easier to get hold of obscure content commercially.

Tinfoil much?

And "enabling" copyright infringement was not illegal in many jurisdictions until the content industry either created case law or lobbied for laws to be altered. Policy changes he opposes.

The issue for me is then, where do we draw the line of "enabling" copyright infringement? I'm pretty sure that if certain industries had their way in the 90s, peer2peer communication between regular people would be illegal for "enabling" copyright infringement.

Considering that the US government forbade the export high level encryption, it's not hard to think they would also forbid any peer2peer communication not going though a "certified and approved" server, if the winds had gone that way.

The bottom line is, crimes should be illegal, tools should not be illegal, even if they enable crime. If you have a tool that can ONLY be used for illegal purposes, you might have a good case, but even pirate bay had links to legal content, that got taken down along with the links to the illegal content.

This whole argument disappoints me. Every manufacturer of a DVD or CD Writer has "enabled" illegal copying and potential distribution of copyrighted content. I haven't seen any of those entities reprimanded for their product manufacture.

The comment you're replying to defines both how Sunde's, Snowden's, & Manning's actions are different and provides context for the very limited comparison being made.

If you don't agree, you should just argue your point because your straw man is just pathetic.

There is a watertight rights basis for opposing copyright. Copyright is a major structural threat to our freedoms.

Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder.

You might say - that's just words.

But it's not. Both in software and law, when you have permissions systems that mix up positive and negative rights with one side ruining the other one.

That is what we see with copyright. A continuing encroachment on our positive rights on the basis of the state's desire to enforce the anti-right. The state will invade your house, jail and deport you... because of things you're doing with publicly released information and magnetic signals in the privacy of your own home.

Once a positive right has been eroded by a single case of an anti-right winning, that serves as precedent for removing it in other cases.

Have a think about it the next time you're working on a permission system and are tempted to create a permission that denies a right to someone. As you follow it through, you'll find you've created an unholy mess. Stick to positive rights.

Update: hi, haters. Feel free to be constructive, too.

> The Pirate Bay isn't some noble cause

Consider it as a litmus test for free speech.

Providing links to pirated content, not even the content itself, can easily be seen as free speech.

It isn't some noble cause because you presumably believe copyright is moral. To those who believe copyright, copyright in its current form, is an immoral restriction on free speech, it may very well be.

For the wellbeing of civilization over the next century, copyright and freedom of speech will probably affect everyone to a greater degree than war crimes, or even pervasive spying.

Also consider that Sunde has made a number of comments which are critical of TPB and how that project has turned out. So while TPB isn't necessarily the ideal, maybe more of a failed or partially-failed attempt.

> It did have a minor effect of disrupting the industry and accelerating the inevitable change in business model for the film and movie industry.

So? Why would any individual industry be exempt from disruption?

How are the people who created Facebook compensated?

I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook.

Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)

Well, I get paid to create that information and help use it. Others get paid to distribute it personally, usually in a stage. Others yet simply get money from public grants or private donations.

There are really too many ways to list here.

> And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?

Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not.

If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism?

Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this.

Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive.

I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.

Why? Nobody is saying that copyright holders should be forced to distribute their work for free. Only that people, after having acquired copies, should be able to share it with others.

If you want to distribute copies of all the work I've ever published, or work made by me and published by the company I work for, you're free to do so. It's all under Free licenses.

> It's like saying designer clothes should be free.

I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.

> But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products.

It did no such thing. It provided a searchable list of user-generated content. It was no different than hacker news or reddit. It was used in a fashion that facilitated "crimes", but so are computers, Internet, and cash in general.

Fair enough. I can see how someone would not think they are information.

In this case we can use the word "culture" instead of "information", and the original point still stands. And I am sure we can all agree that TV and movies are culture.

Your argument is implicitly based on an assumption that piracy/sharing reduces income/profits. I'm not so sure this assumption is correct; at least it hasn't been demonstrated as true (AFAIK). A strong argument speaking against it is the fact that there are many examples that say the contrary; Avatar is one of the most pirated movies and also one of the most successful ones, and earned a huge amount of money just on cinema tickets. You have e.g. Zynga, King and Rovio who have earned lots of money on free games.

I used to pirate stuff much more when I was younger (a poor student). Now, I often pay for music that I really like, to support the artists! Other music I just watch on YouTube. If I was sure that Netflix would provide a better service than downloading (i.e. good quality, little wait time, superb selection, offline viewing, no geo-restrictions), I would subscribe.

One important difference between giving designer clothes free and your favorite video game free is that that former is a constant sum game while the latter is not. Sharing software products does not prevent anyone else to access it. It does not even cost money for the producer as the distribution is handled by seeders.

All in all it's a terrible analogy.

EDIT: By all means go ahead and downvote, but don't forget to explain why the analogy doesn't fail.

The correct analogy is: Ford doesn't sell a Ford in Argentina, but a legal owner of a Ford car offered to give you a copy of hers/his, and you accepted it.

Maybe a better analogy:

If <insert big pharma here> won't sell cancer drugs for reasonable prices in my country then we will have local companies ignore patents and produce knockoffs instead and sell them at production cost.

Which is exactly what's happening in india for example. Remember that you're not stealing anything. Just making copies.

Of course treating cancer does not have the same societal value as getting hollywood entertainment, but it's still a market failure when the content industry cannot satisfy demand in those countries. And at least turning both eyes is a much better approach than criminalizing millions.

How is that stealing? If they won't sell you the wiget then why should they get to claim copyright?

Copyright only exists to promote selling content, take that away and copyright vanishes right along with it.

> You might want to give them your money, they might not want it.

Actually in such case piracy doesn't need any justification, since it doesn't harm anyone. With only two alternatives - either to download content illegally or to not get it at all, content owners get exactly the same: nothing.

I don't really think a justification is needed. Yes it's illegal but so is driving faster than the speed limit, yet most people does it because they feel entitled. You can ticket people for breaking the rules but it isn't very effective as people value arriving at a red light 3 seconds faster higher than the risk of getting caught.

Get real no one who has ever pirated anything is going to buy a DVD over pirating simply because buying the DVD is a really shitty service compared to the piratebay alternative.

What steal? Copyright only exists so that people have motivation to make more content.

If the content is anyway not available, that argument vanishes and you are left without copyright.

Copyright is not some fundamental right that always exists, it only exists in certain limited circumstances.

(And seriously? Dangerous thinking?)

No matter what you think about it, copyright infringement isn't theft.

My friend in the US has bought and paid for a show, and wants to send me a copy. Why shouldn't they be able to? The one who wants to prevent that is the one who's entitled.

I'm not sure if your first sentence is very accurate. Where did you get that information?

While users have not the obligation to investigate the source of a movie in detail, depending on your juristdiction there are laws about "obvious illegal sources" (like sites where one can download crappy copies of movies still in cinema for free, extremly shaddy ads, covered by public media as being illegal). For example if Netflix turned out to not have a license in my country I could argue that I as a user could not have known that since they made looked and acted like a regular respectable company. If on the other hand I download a torrent containing a recently released movie for free and an accompanying txt file allowing me to "share it to the world", my chances of defending that in front of a judge are not the greatest.

Yes! Comparisons exist for pointing out the similarities between two things and inviting some "compare and contrast" critical thinking.

Comparisons don't have to assert equality, which is why people that say things like "Godwin's Law" are the worst. Either you can articulate the difference between an aspect of the Nazi regime and whatever you're arguing for, to move the conversation onto those differences, or you can't. Godwin is only useful when the conversation has run it's course and devolved into a flamewar.

You're already implicitly comparing the two when speak dismissively of the idea of "comparing" them. There are better ways of nipping a tangent in the bud.

Wouldn't it be online pirates to tax evaders?

> Torrents (and illegal downloads in general) are a strong incentive for copyright owners to improve their game. Otherwise it'd be a stagnant monopoly.

I'm not sure breaking the law (whether you agree with it or not) is the proper way to fight monopoly (?) or to push companies to "improve their game".

Btw, there is no monopoly in the music or gaming industry (not that I know of, at least). There are laws for monopoly issues.

Way to put words into my mouth.

I said makes it accessible.

Non technical users also don't care about encryption/security and what not.

> I'm not going into the "sharing links vs sharing content" debate.

That's fine, because I see no problem with sharing content either. I'd rather debate on those terms.

If you don't want information shared, don't release it to the public. If your livelihood is based on placing artificial constraints on the work of artists for profit, then maybe you should consider a career change. The middle men are becoming increasingly useless as we become more connected. Artists can raise money on their own and distribute their art for free, and they can still earn a living charging for actual physical things like merchandise and seating at venues.

Why? It's not like the most downloaded TV series are also the ones making the most money.