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>TPB wasn't about rights or freedoms or standing up to government oppression. People used it primarily to obtain media and software without paying for it. //

I think there is an issue of rights and freedoms.

With a capitalist economy certain elements of culture are effectively reserved for the wealthy. In other state structures those making the cultural artefacts that we use to express our selves, to link, to coalesce on common sentiment, those could be sufficiently supported to make all cultural artefacts free-gratis and free-libre.

The democratisation of media particularly through availability of music and film - which are so central to our cultural experience - means that many who would otherwise be [partially] excluded from participation in today's culture (for better or worse) can take part.

Moreover, copyright was initially set up with a view to ensuring that eventually the wealth locked up in shared experience, cultural introspection, confrontation with new ideas and different aspects of the culture would be freed in to the public domain.

The actions of media corporations, the use of DRM, these things (amongst others I'm sure) act to prevent entry to the public domain. DRM in particular breaks the copyright deal, if we the people aren't going to get our side of the copyright bargain why should we uphold the side that suits those financial interested in media production? Usually with a contract if one side breaks the terms then the contract is nullified - surely this morally should be true too of copyright.

In short, I think to assume that this is solely an issue of 'people who could pay to consume media choosing not to' is wrong, that there is a greater depth to this and that the likes of TPB have made a change to the access to the culture of the age making it [more] available to those of restricted means. I think this can make for more cohesion in society. Possibly too it makes for more homogeneity, that may not be a good thing however if the principle messages being passed (and shared) in society are those coming from Hollywood.

I feel there's much more to say on this. But I'll stop. /rant

Edit: cleaned up some verbosity.

I'm not sure I agree with much of anything you said.

>With a capitalist economy certain elements of culture are effectively reserved for the wealthy. [...] The democratisation of media particularly through availability of music and film - which are so central to our cultural experience

There is always going to be a culture. And there are always going to be things off-limits to the non-wealthy that would totally be part of the larger culture if made free. So? I don't think it's particularly important for music or film to be part of the larger, central cultural experience. If those things aren't available then something else will take their place. To the best of my understanding society had a culture 5, 50, 500, and even 5000 years ago.

I don't think I have a fundamental right to access or own things created by other people. I think people pirate because it's safe, easy, and free. I think most people's participation in piracy can be summed up as "selfish asshole". I think DRM is a blunt, ham fisted enforcement of the copyright deal and I'm curious as to why you think it breaks and should nullify the contract.

And on top of all this the maintainers of Pirate Bay are not benevolent Robin Hood's trying to give culture to the poor. They're making money. Megaupload network generated $175,000,000 in revenue. I don't think there's a damn thing honorable about any of these lot.

> 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.

Not having documentation on what culture was X years ago is different from there being no culture X years. I don't think your first example is relevant.

Copyright exists to serve the public. I think it largely achieves that goal. There are fair arguments to be made as to when copyright/patents stop serving the public interests. I don't think DRM as an enforcement of the copyright laws nullifies the protection already given. When it comes to copyright the following quote is long but largely sums of my thoughts.

"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection." from An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html

I'm not talking about "documentation". I'm talking about the actual culture: the books, the movies, the songs, and so on from that period. Look at Disney's Frozen, a huge movie based on the out of copyright story, The Snow Queen. Here's some culture from 1800's reproduced in 2014. The same cannot be done for most culture in the early to mid 1900's. Some things you literally cannot read, watch, or hear from that era. You certainly cannot adapt it in a new way. Not unless you want to break the law. That is the situation we are in.

I, however, agree that copyright serves the public and largely achieves that goal. But I think it did so better in it's original incarnation. Big money interests have shifted copyright in absurd directions. And I honestly don't care if Disney retains the rights to Mickey Mouse forever but in lobbying for that right they've dragged along everything else. So now it's impossible to reproduce other completely unrelated works.

A big one personally for me is old video games. I grew up in arcades and I love going through MAME and playing obscure titles that I often don't even remember until I start it up. Sure, if you want to play Pac-Man there are lots of legal options but outside of that a huge part of 80's culture is illegal to own.

> Copyright exists to serve the public. I think it largely achieves that goal.

Even if it didn't, how would you measure it? There is no measurement to determine that this arbitrary definition of property in fact serves the public more than not having it -- which makes me curious. Without this evidence, why did central planners believe copyrights would serve the public? I'm more inclined to think legislators had a financial interest in upholding these protectionist laws than any good will towards "the public".

>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.

>Do you have a right to be fed?

No. If I do not have food I do not have the right to demand you give me your food.

This has actually come up with a few times with respect to water. No, you do not have a right to water. If you live in the middle of nowhere you do not have a right to water. If you are not given water no one else is responsible or punished. If I can not afford to pay a local utility company for their water access services they are not required to give it to me for free. A city or town can not force a private individual or company to give them water.

Many people are likely to disagree with me here. That's fine. If you think "water is a right" or "food is a right" then quite honestly your sentiment is hollow and void of meaning. You can call something a right all you want but if there is no accountability then it's not much of a right.

The US Bill of Rights is a fantastic document because it largely protects rights, as opposed to giving them. Free speech isn't a right given by the government. It's a natural right that is explicitly protected from being taken away by the government. It's a key difference that is related to food/water rights.

>No. If I do not have food I do not have the right to demand you give me your food. //

You do have that right, if I have plenty you have a right to a share of it. When the Earth was created no man had ownership of any of it. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote quite persuasively on this point. Sure if I take my food and waste it then that right is diminished accordingly.

>If I can not afford to pay a local utility company for their water access services they are not required to give it to me for free. //

So why should you give them the right to take it in the first place. They don't have the right to the water any more than you. Less probably.

How would you consider this as a question of moral obligation, would you say that if you have lots of food and someone else has none that you're morally obligated to give from your plenty?

As an addendum, do you have plenty?

We've been speaking of rights in the legal context. And laws != morals.

I think there are certain rights to access natural resources. For example the beaches of California are strictly public property. I think there are rights to fair access to natural resources such as water. However I do not think that if I spend considerable resources to build a distribution network for that water that other people have a right to access that network.

I do have plenty. More than I need. Food, water, and shelter. There are people who do not have enough of them. There are many people who have no shelter. We call them homeless. I have more rooms in my house than required to thrive. Does someone who is homeless have a right to enter my home and make use of the excess shelter that I have?

I think this is a very important conversation for us to be having and I don't claim to have anywhere near all of the answers.

However, I do think that your first sentence kind of dodges the question here. The rest of this comment thread was discussing what rights people should have, not what rights they do have.

If we approach this from a legal viewpoint the conversation is over before it starts: Piracy's illegal, you don't have a right to content. You don't have a right to food.

However, when we start looking at it from a moral perspective things are much more open ended: Should we have a right to content? Should we have a right to food?

I think these are more interesting questions and that falling back on the rule of law kind of kills the discussion.

I guess at the end of the day I don't know the best way to handle copyright, but I do know we should have a conversation about it, and that we should come at it from a morality perspective.

>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.

Gimme all your shit

You can have my thoughts for free. They're far more useful and valuable than anything else I have.

You can have all my digital shit. I'll still have it.

> The actions of media corporations, the use of DRM, these things (amongst others I'm sure) act to prevent entry to the public domain. DRM in particular breaks the copyright deal, if we the people aren't going to get our side of the copyright bargain why should we uphold the side that suits those financial interested in media production?

This is the first time I've ever seen a pro-"piracy" argument that really made me stop and think about whether I was actually opposed to it. I think the copyright system is clearly broken (and more beholden than ever to corporate interests), but somehow never made the connection. Thank you.

> Moreover, copyright was initially set up with a view to ensuring that eventually the wealth locked up in shared experience, cultural introspection, confrontation with new ideas and different aspects of the culture would be freed in to the public domain.

That's not the only theory of copyright. In Europe, copyright has traditionally been viewed in terms of the moral rights of creators to control their work. In many European countries, authors have perpetual rights to, e.g., prohibit alterations of their creative works.

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).

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.

> Sunde was willing to take risks for what he believed in. He deserves a lot of respect for that no matter what people think about the morality of what he helped to create

I find this argument completely fallacious. Does it change the value of a thing if someone takes a risk for it? Ought we respect the causes of suicide bombers, since they gave their lives for them?

Yes, it does. I will never advocate violence but if you look at the reasons that lead to that horrific moment in the suicide bomber's life, then you might see something even more terrifying than the act itself.

Sure, you can blame it on bigotry or ignorance, but it turns out suicide bombers on average are more intelligent and well-educated than those in their society [0]. Camus attempts to explain this in his essay The Rebel. He says a person keeps saying yes until the moment that he says no. The person who rebels is one who thinks the consequences of his actions are less important than those produced by conforming.

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.

You can find all sort of things wrong with what I stated above but you cannot possibly ignore the fact that Sunde went to prison on his own for what he believed was right. He didn't hurt anyone except himself. Unless you can explain all these with insanity, which I don't think you have the qualifications to do, you shouldn't completely find this fallacious.

[0] http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/13/1084289823327.html

> 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.

I guess we just differ massively in our perception of people.

To me when an individual person sacrifices himself for a reason, any reason, then it is either that person is crazy or he has a point to make. I often attempt to understand his point and his reasons better. A cause is as strong as people who understand it. If he gets my attention and make realise something that I haven't previously, then the cause becomes stronger.

There is no absolute righteousness. Your point only makes sense if there is a divine set of rules that makes some things right and others wrong. I don't believe there is such a thing.

> Your point only makes sense if there is a divine set of rules that makes some things right and others wrong.

There's a difference between absolutism (which I am arguing against, btw, and my argument against conviction is consistent with my position against absolutism) and abject relativism, where the value of a thing is equivalent to its acceptance. How about the empirical demonstration of the goodness/badness of a thing? (amount of overall harm caused, assuming harm is considered bad, etc).

> A cause is as strong as people who understand it

This is essentially my objection. This is relativism. If you were right here, then all the religious zealots in the world believing in creationism would render that position valid, and the strength of their conviction would be in some sense an asset to that position. My point is that all of that is nonsense. A thing is wrong/false/stupid independently of its believers' numbers, or their zeal or conviction. You don't need to appeal to some divinity to make that point, you can appeal to common empirical demonstrability (aka science). It is more complicated when dealing with "purely" ethical matters, but only more complicated - it is our choice whether we reduce issues to "pure" ethics or not, and I suggest that we should not.

> I don't believe there is such a thing.

Neither do I. I just reject the "feel-good" position that peoples' convictions are all meaningful and valid, and that we have to respect things that people believe strongly in. To me that is nonsense. Plenty of things are simply wrong, stupid and contemptible. You can be kind to people holding those positions without forcing yourself to believe that there is some worth in their ideas simply because they feel strongly about them.

> 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.

> I haven't seen any evidence that there isn't _any_ economic damage done by illegal downloading.

Burden of proof is on the accuser and no I don't think X number of people pirated it, it costs $Y, therefore, it caused $X * Y is a proof.

> it could have just been

Exactly. But don't you think it seems quite unlikely given that he is demonstrably a pretty smart individual and large corporations with deep pockets are coming after him. He should have completely failed to anticipate the consequences.

Try re-reading the post you replied to. 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. And yes, even suicide bombers deserve a bit of respect if they do their thing out of conviction, and not because they have been brainwashed about 72 virgins in next life.

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.

> Surely it is only respectable if the content of the conviction is also respectable.

Point in case: Would we be having this discussion if Sunde went to jail for a strong conviction in believing that a given race is inherently and naturally inferior to his own? I would submit a vote of "not likely", because I doubt very many people would find themselves respecting his conviction, if that were the case.

> But there are other ways to do that, significantly more effective ways. Martin Luther King (as an example, not a comparison) went to jail too, but he also went to the right schools, wore a suit and influenced the right people.

And he was making a moral argument founded in religious principles. He was literally risking martyrdom in order to fight for justice in the name of his God. And he ultimately was murdered for his work.

It might not sound relevant to an agnostic or atheist, but I don't see how you can get there from here if "there" is Dr. King and "here" is a secular argument for the right to share files.

At the end of the day, in his theology, King would have enjoyed success just for fighting even if his efforts changed zero minds and were swept away in a flood of racism and indifference. It's the difference between "we can make a difference" and "we are making a difference... let's see how much more we can do".

fwiw, he might concede that illegal downloads are theft, but assert that digital property is also theft. In that case, I could see TPB defending those goals, or at least attacking their opposition.

(not an endorsement just pointing it out, blah blah blah)

I don't anyone should concede that copying data is theft. Since theft implies an unlawful transfer of ownership. Copying data and deleting the original is theft.

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?

The actual crime is the fraud committed when someone pretends to be someone else and runs up debts in their name with "stolen" credit card numbers.

There are ancillary crimes that revolve around trying to keep credit card numbers secure, but taking my credit card number doesn't mean I don't have it anymore.

That's not to say it isn't a scummy thing to do.

My examples could result in fraud, but aren't the kind you're talking about. You getting a hold of thousands, millions of credit cards without consent or some other agreement is a criminal offense. Let's get away from CC numbers. Just get a hold of thousands, millions of people's PHI through the same means. Get a hold of BEA's secret blue prints for future products.

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.

> 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.

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.

You act like one of those guys he talks about in the article. Judging people from the sidelines and telling them what they should have done without remotely knowing the story.

But on the other hand "I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?" judges me from the sidelines without remotely knowing my story because I didn't go to jail.

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

> I'd like to think that I would be willing to give up everything for what I believe is right. But everyone likes to think that.

This is so very true and why I can't stand it when people say things like "I may disagree but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." That person will do no such thing. She will not go risk her life for the right of Westboro Baptist Church, the Klan or Bill Cosby to have their say. If a law was passed muzzling Dick Cheney, she would not be in the streets rioting. It's melodramatic, preening, self-serving nonsense.

The willingness to die for your ideas is the main subject of Camus's philosophical writeup "The Myth of Sisyphus".

There are several elements that make up ethical, effective support for a cause. Willing to put the cause ahead of your own well-being is sometimes one of them. Also important is to change strategy/tactics as a result of new information; to consider new ideas/arguments; accepting that the ends don't justify the means; and be willing to live for the cause, rather than die for it.

> He deserves a lot of respect for that no matter what people think about the morality of what he helped to create.

One could respect a lot of bad people with this poor reasoning. Is respect the word you mean? Or do you mean awe?

So, so agreed.