I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
The issue with copyright infringement is that trying to combat it with legislation instead of offering a superior product just ends up with the IP owner offering an inferior product for a higher price. Examples vary from games with DRM, movies with area restrictions and unskippable commercials/bullshit anti-piracy adverts etc., while all the superfluous crap is stripped from the pirated copies. Now add in the mix things like delayed releases for different parts of the world, distribution issues, prices, etc. and the legitimate supplier is offering an inferior product for a higher price than what the pirate gets. Inconveniencing the legitimate customer while having no effect on the pirate.
Some companies deemed that wasting money on trying to combat piracy for hypothetical returns was sub-optimal in comparison with trying to offer a superior product. Hence many games are offered DRM-free, with some people opting to buy exclusively those. Combine this with all sorts of other incentives, be they community related(forum stuff etc.), physical goodies, interaction with the developers in some way, etc. and you get a product people will pay for over pirating it. Approaching the consumer base as potential customers instead of potential pirates endears you to them, and goodwill is a fantastic motivator in deciding whether someone will pay for the product or pirate it. Legislating for IP protections and treating the consumer base as filthy thieves does not engender positive feelings towards the IP-owner/developer, and won't help to reduce the numbers. Having the public good will on your side is the most effective deterrent to piracy and motivator for increasing sales.
Thomas Babington Macaulay put this in words already in 1841 regarding a limited length of copyright and its enforcement and the degree of public respect for those protections:
I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesmen of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrims Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich, for the advantage of the greatgrandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honorable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time this day six months.
World of Goo and Demigod disprove your "customers will support the companies who don't use DRM" point. Second, the "t-shirt" argument has been flogged to death, and has a lot of evidence against it. Third, you competely avoid the pesky fact that a lot of people are making money off piracy - it's just that none of it goes to the people who create the content in the first place.
And I can start quoting you examples of games that have been positively impacted by their handling of piracy to "prove" my suggestion. Which you also summarized in a way that loses part of the point. The point is that piracy is something that won't disappear, so the way it is handled should be the way with optimal consequences for the IP owner. By the "t-shirt" argument I suppose you mean bands selling t-shirts at a concert? Obviously different media requires a different approach to reduce the impact of copyright infringement. There is no magic bullet to solve the issue universally. Pretending that there is some sort of general solution that covers several media with different ways of functioning is ridiculous.
I avoided the pesky third fact of yours because it was not directly related to the point I was trying to make about the approach of companies towards the public. I was not responding to anyone either, so that issue is irrelevant to my post. It's a separate, if closely related issue. David Lowery seems to be talking about what you are talking about, specifically the issue of certain online delivery platforms raking in the advertising revenue instead of the artists, which is a separate issue worth its own discussion. Which I was not discussing in my post. Which I may comment on later.
Lowery also confuses patents and copyright in general as being equivalent due to both being under the umbrella of intellectual property. This alone makes his arguments shaky, as there are significant legal differences between the two, and falsely equating the two just shows his lack of understanding of what he is commenting about. I understand what he is trying to say, but he does come across as an insufferable snarky asshole due to having a corporate management-grade love for bullshit buzzwords. He is also exclusively complaining about the part of piracy crowd least likely to buy media regardless of its pricing/availability, and equating it as the entire population. That is patently ridiculous.
Yes, the issue of various entities (mainly corporations and companies of various sizes) are essentially diverting income from the artists to themselves, and the artists should be compensated for that. It is a separate issue from what I was trying to comment on, namely the appropriate response to mitigation of damages from piracy. Sadly, we cannot know exactly to what extent piracy is actually affecting sales of various media, due to next to no impartial studies being available. It is also a highly complex issue with many variables, and difficulty in data collection.
Again, saying that piracy will never be eliminated is a red herring - yes, you will never be able to eliminate piracy completely. But you can mitigate it, and in doing so protect your ability to earn revenue. Furthermore, considering how much of modern piracy is built around for profit models, if we break those models, a lot of the casual piracy we see today would go by the wayside. Which leads to the other red herring, about DRM not working. This is only true if you define "not working" as "can't keep piracy from happening ever". But as it turns out, the goal isn't "stop it from happening ever", but "preserve the key sales window right after release". And in that goal, DRM does work well.
And no, you can't divorce the fact that modern piracy is just as much about money as its ever been. One, it changes the moral calculus dramatically, especially considering many pro-piracy advocates try to portray themselves as supporting the creators. Second, it shows that there is actual value in these works.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
Why does it matter at all how likely someone is to buy media. If they don't pay for it, they don't have the right to consume it. Full stop.
Is anyone in here seriously arguing that BitTorrent isn't primarily a platform for piracy because Blizzard uses it? That reeks of bad faith. If we ban BitTorrent, Blizzard will need to spend more money on proper distribution infrastructure. Ironic to see the pro-piracy crowd defending corporate profits.
I will not argue that a significant use of BitTorrent is piracy. I will, however, strongly defend the existence of BitTorrent because it does have legal and legitimate uses. We both live in the USA, where one of the central tenentof governance is "Innocent until prove guilty". Take a slash'n'burn approach to BitTorrents (or anything else) shows a flagrant disregard for this tenent.
And let's not forget that bands like Metallica never would have become popular if people hadn't been distributing pirated copies of their cassettes back when they first got started.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
+1
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
This answer has nothing to do with my post.
It has absolutely everything to do with your post. You look rather silly trying to portray the scenario as "Big Media beats up on individual users" while ignoring Big Tech sitting on your side, and their willingness to reshape laws to suit them.
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
Yes, and I will go to jail, and when I get out I will be more radical.
Yes, I with my text editor and compiler are the root of all ills. Forceing those poor innocents to suffer as I dastardly encrypt my datas!
Encryption isn't illegal. Neither is the math. Tor is just a fancy multi-hop VPN. How are you going to ban that?
In law, something like:
1) No technologies may be used to obfuscate the source of internet traffic, except:
a) Legal exemptions for ISPs
b) Legal exemptions for web hosts
..
zzz) Legal exemptions for law enforcement.
2) Knowingly running software that enables other to the obfuscate internet traffic except:
3) Unknowingly running...
4) Installing software that allows obfuscation on a third party's computer...
In practice? Open up Tor and start prosecuting people identified by their IP addresses, which are plainly visible.
Congratulations, you just made using a anything with a VPN illegal! Also web servers that make requests on your behalf. All proxies and problably some other useful stuff too
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
It takes a bold thinker to come out against the criminals in the French Resistance.
What part of "breaking laws is inherently wrong" do you not understand?
Always.
EDIT: This is sarcasm for fuck's sake. Great, now I'm SKFM's sig.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't really have a good idea about how things like Tor work. Can ISPs see that you are using it, or is it impossible to detect that it is even in use? If the former, why not just ban their use altogether?
Forgive me if this has already been covered, since I haven't read the whole thread yet, but Tor and similar programs are used by internet users in authoritarian states like Iran and China to evade firewalls and protect anonymity when engaging in "subversive" activity. Ignoring the impracticality of "banning" such programs, they provide a clear benefit to free speech and political action. Does the potential for use for piracy outweigh those benefits so much that the programs themselves should be banned?
I don't see the benefits. You are just saying that inaddition to one set of laws, they also let you break another set. . .
Do you see "breaking the law" as an inherently bad thing? Laws restricting freedom of expression are bad, thus I see ways to get around those laws as good. The benefit is that anonymity software allows people to speak freely in places where an oppressive state does not.
There is a wrong inherent in all violations of law, in that they help to normalize rule violations and lessen general compliance with the law, and knowing that people will normally follow the law is a major, major good, since it lets you plan your life on the expectation that people will follow the laws and so you don't need to always watch your back or stay home with a shotgun protecting your stuff.
I do not agree that it is a good to enable people to circumvent the laws of the PRC, even if they are different from America's laws.
How are people living states like China or Iran ever supposed to gain freedom of expression if they don't flaunt the laws restricting it? Should people just wait until their autocracies become sufficiently enlightened that they allow more freedom out of their own good will? When laws are imposed by a governing body that does not represent the will of the people, what gives those laws legitimacy? Your mindset essentially condemns the entire practice of civil disobedience and places an undeserved and dangerous amount of faith in authority.
Civil disobedience <> to breaking the law. It is breaking the law, getting caught, and publicly accepting the punishment to show people how unjust the law is. Something like Tor is the opposite of civil disobedience.
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
Yes, and I will go to jail, and when I get out I will be more radical.
Congratulations, you just made using a anything with a VPN illegal! Also web servers that make requests on your behalf. All proxies and problably some other useful stuff too
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
Right, I am specifically making it illegal to run a Tor node. That's exactly what 2 and 3 make illegal. Open a TOR client and Host, and then shut down anyone in the TOR cloud with a US ip address.
Please do note the exceptions for business needs.
A VPN to resources on a business network doesn't actually do that thing you say.
A tunnel between two business doesn't fall into this either.
Yes, hooking up to a VPN and then accessing stuff on the internet from that network, would unless specifically exempted, but there isn't a whole lot of need to actually do that, though it is nice for security and management purposes. It would probably merit an exemption, with the caveat that the business is responsible for the actions of people on its network.
I specifically listed an exemption for web hosts.
Yes. It would be very horrible and restrictive. Difficult but not impossible to do, if they could also gain control choke points and block access to foreign nodes. I mentioned earlier, I would probably end up in jail fighting it.
Congratulations, you just made using a anything with a VPN illegal! Also web servers that make requests on your behalf. All proxies and problably some other useful stuff too
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
Right, I am specifically making it illegal to run a Tor node. That's exactly what 2 and 3 make illegal. Open a TOR client and Host, and then shut down anyone in the TOR cloud with a US ip address.
Please do note the exceptions for business needs.
A VPN to resources on a business network doesn't actually do that thing you say.
It actually does, it redirects all of your normal traffic over the VPN link to the remote peer. That traffic is then sent normally to it's destination and replies are routed back
A tunnel between two business doesn't fall into this either.
It does if that traffic then escapes the second business' network and if the law as written defines "source" as "machine" then it does in all cases as one machine can't determine what the other machine is (this would also make NAT illegal)
Yes, hooking up to a VPN and then accessing stuff on the internet from that network, would unless specifically exempted, but there isn't a whole lot of need to actually do that, though it is nice for security and management purposes. It would probably merit an exemption, with the caveat that the business is responsible for the actions of people on its network.
I specifically listed an exemption for web hosts.
The loophole is just to have everyone be a "web host" by bundling a http server in it that serves a simple webpage. Unless only businesses can be web hosts? Would I be a criminal for running a proxy on my machine at home?
Maybe we should make a tor version that transmits an encrypted payload in plain http to a decentralized set of webservers located around the globe?
Congratulations, you just made using a anything with a VPN illegal! Also web servers that make requests on your behalf. All proxies and problably some other useful stuff too
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
Right, I am specifically making it illegal to run a Tor node. That's exactly what 2 and 3 make illegal. Open a TOR client and Host, and then shut down anyone in the TOR cloud with a US ip address.
Please do note the exceptions for business needs.
A VPN to resources on a business network doesn't actually do that thing you say.
It actually does, it redirects all of your normal traffic over the VPN link to the remote peer. That traffic is then sent normally to it's destination and replies are routed back
A tunnel between two business doesn't fall into this either.
It does if that traffic then escapes the second business' network and if the law as written defines "source" as "machine" then it does in all cases as one machine can't determine what the other machine is (this would also make NAT illegal)
Yes, hooking up to a VPN and then accessing stuff on the internet from that network, would unless specifically exempted, but there isn't a whole lot of need to actually do that, though it is nice for security and management purposes. It would probably merit an exemption, with the caveat that the business is responsible for the actions of people on its network.
I specifically listed an exemption for web hosts.
The loophole is just to have everyone be a "web host" by bundling a http server in it that serves a simple webpage. Unless only businesses can be web hosts? Would I be a criminal for running a proxy on my machine at home?
Maybe we should make a tor version that transmits an encrypted payload in plain http to a decentralized set of webservers located around the globe?
Go hack the gibson while we make pirating hard enough to make a lot of normal people who don't even know what half these things are give up.
Congratulations, you just made using a anything with a VPN illegal! Also web servers that make requests on your behalf. All proxies and problably some other useful stuff too
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
Right, I am specifically making it illegal to run a Tor node. That's exactly what 2 and 3 make illegal. Open a TOR client and Host, and then shut down anyone in the TOR cloud with a US ip address.
Please do note the exceptions for business needs.
A VPN to resources on a business network doesn't actually do that thing you say.
It actually does, it redirects all of your normal traffic over the VPN link to the remote peer. That traffic is then sent normally to it's destination and replies are routed back
A tunnel between two business doesn't fall into this either.
It does if that traffic then escapes the second business' network and if the law as written defines "source" as "machine" then it does in all cases as one machine can't determine what the other machine is (this would also make NAT illegal)
Yes, hooking up to a VPN and then accessing stuff on the internet from that network, would unless specifically exempted, but there isn't a whole lot of need to actually do that, though it is nice for security and management purposes. It would probably merit an exemption, with the caveat that the business is responsible for the actions of people on its network.
I specifically listed an exemption for web hosts.
The loophole is just to have everyone be a "web host" by bundling a http server in it that serves a simple webpage. Unless only businesses can be web hosts? Would I be a criminal for running a proxy on my machine at home?
Maybe we should make a tor version that transmits an encrypted payload in plain http to a decentralized set of webservers located around the globe?
Go hack the gibson while we make pirating hard enough to make a lot of normal people who don't even know what half these things are give up.
1) I was talking about Tor which is the worst possible way to pirate something
2) Very few people need to know the details of how it works and nobody does to just use it
Congratulations, you just made using a anything with a VPN illegal! Also web servers that make requests on your behalf. All proxies and problably some other useful stuff too
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
Right, I am specifically making it illegal to run a Tor node. That's exactly what 2 and 3 make illegal. Open a TOR client and Host, and then shut down anyone in the TOR cloud with a US ip address.
Please do note the exceptions for business needs.
A VPN to resources on a business network doesn't actually do that thing you say.
It actually does, it redirects all of your normal traffic over the VPN link to the remote peer. That traffic is then sent normally to it's destination and replies are routed back
A tunnel between two business doesn't fall into this either.
It does if that traffic then escapes the second business' network and if the law as written defines "source" as "machine" then it does in all cases as one machine can't determine what the other machine is (this would also make NAT illegal)
Yes, hooking up to a VPN and then accessing stuff on the internet from that network, would unless specifically exempted, but there isn't a whole lot of need to actually do that, though it is nice for security and management purposes. It would probably merit an exemption, with the caveat that the business is responsible for the actions of people on its network.
I specifically listed an exemption for web hosts.
The loophole is just to have everyone be a "web host" by bundling a http server in it that serves a simple webpage. Unless only businesses can be web hosts? Would I be a criminal for running a proxy on my machine at home?
Maybe we should make a tor version that transmits an encrypted payload in plain http to a decentralized set of webservers located around the globe?
You're right, rather than source I should have specified the public IP address of source network. yes, this would make you running a single proxy for the purpose of hiding the origin illegal. A webhost could easily defined to require use of a domain name.
I mean, look up legislation limiting spoofing phone numbers. It exists, allows for a lot, but targets specific usages. Given all the horribly worded anti-piracy laws, which are actually applied in a pretty specific senses, do you honestly think legislation like this could not be pushed through congress?
I still don't understand why we are talking about Tor in an IP thread.
there's no way to make IP obfuscation illegal with any kind of enforcement without creating a dystopian police state
There's no reason to want to make IP obfuscation illegal unless you want to effectively create something approaching police state at least in the limited realm of the internet.
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
Not without knowing what they were transferring, because sending data to people isn't illegal
Well, not now. Selling meth was legal once. We can make the use of a transfer protocol illegal. There is a question of if we should, of course, but I think that the case against Bittorrent is pretty clear. Other than Blizzard and some linux distros needing to spend more money hosting files, how much legal use would we really be losing here? Relative to the volume of piracy? I mean, I'm sure there were legal things on megaupload too. Doesn't change that it was mostly a tool for piracy.
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
I don't know enough about the technical details of bit torrent connections to tell you if it will be difficult or not. But I do know enough about what you're proposing to know that it's a police state action in which my presumption of innocence is violated, and a service which has perfectly legitimate legal uses is banned due to some illegal use of it.
It's a case of banning cars to prevent traffic accidents.
And it doubly reeks to me, because it also violates my right to privacy by setting up a legally mandated wire tap on my internet connection.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
I don't know enough about the technical details of bit torrent connections to tell you if it will be difficult or not. But I do know enough about what you're proposing to know that it's a police state action in which my presumption of innocence is violated, and a service which has perfectly legitimate legal uses is banned due to some illegal use of it.
It's a case of banning cars to prevent traffic accidents.
And it doubly reeks to me, because it also violates my right to privacy by setting up a legally mandated wire tap on my internet connection.
No, its a case of banning one specific car that people mostly use for illegal street racing.
Megaupload is a service. Bittorrent is a protocol. The equivalent would be "well people illegally download things off of websites so let's ban HTTP"
I can redefine bittorrent to run over HTTP - the features are already there to request specific regions of files for download resuming. State/presence information just get transformed into POSTs to each other. Boom HTTPorrent. The protocol definition has changed and people would need to update their clients (which they can do automatically since all the major clients push update notifications so this is not hard), but it still works in exactly the same way
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
I don't know enough about the technical details of bit torrent connections to tell you if it will be difficult or not. But I do know enough about what you're proposing to know that it's a police state action in which my presumption of innocence is violated, and a service which has perfectly legitimate legal uses is banned due to some illegal use of it.
It's a case of banning cars to prevent traffic accidents.
And it doubly reeks to me, because it also violates my right to privacy by setting up a legally mandated wire tap on my internet connection.
No, its a case of banning one specific car that people mostly use for illegal street racing.
That'd punish all the owners who aren't street racing, the racers would use that model anyway since banning isn't something they'd care about and they can move on to a different model anyway - so you'll be back to the status quo.
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
I don't know enough about the technical details of bit torrent connections to tell you if it will be difficult or not. But I do know enough about what you're proposing to know that it's a police state action in which my presumption of innocence is violated, and a service which has perfectly legitimate legal uses is banned due to some illegal use of it.
It's a case of banning cars to prevent traffic accidents.
And it doubly reeks to me, because it also violates my right to privacy by setting up a legally mandated wire tap on my internet connection.
No, its a case of banning one specific car that people mostly use for illegal street racing.
Again though, it's that word mostly. It means you're willing to take away my Mustang because other people are being dumbasses with theirs. Where's the fairness, due process, etc with that?
And it's troubling the SKFM more or less wants a police state to stop piracy, as if the social cost of piracy is greater than the social cost of that apparatus
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
I don't know enough about the technical details of bit torrent connections to tell you if it will be difficult or not. But I do know enough about what you're proposing to know that it's a police state action in which my presumption of innocence is violated, and a service which has perfectly legitimate legal uses is banned due to some illegal use of it.
It's a case of banning cars to prevent traffic accidents.
And it doubly reeks to me, because it also violates my right to privacy by setting up a legally mandated wire tap on my internet connection
Blocking all bit torrent would be hard. Blocking a lot of it for home users would be sort of possible, but would screw over power users doing totally legal things. You can go after sites hosting torrent files, but that hasn't worked too well so far.
phyphor is also correct in that they could just significantly change the way the protocol worked. The way he describes would make a lot of networks less secure, take power away from network administrators to prevent BT from working on public networks, and would frustrate efforts to shape traffic. Like, it makes the effects of BT worse for everyone but those using it.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
This answer has nothing to do with my post.
It has absolutely everything to do with your post. You look rather silly trying to portray the scenario as "Big Media beats up on individual users" while ignoring Big Tech sitting on your side, and their willingness to reshape laws to suit them.
I'm not. You talked about entrenched interests and the status quo, and that was a ridiculously one-sided and warped view of the situation, and I called you on it.
The rest is your usual imagination that everyone who does not agree with your ragey one-sided description of something supports evil.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
I'm with Hedgie here. All you need to do it make it hard enough and you win. Right now if someone wants to watch a TV show they fell behind on and type in "watch [show]" they will get tons of pirate sites. If you can just stamp those out so that only legal sits appear from a search like that, I think you've already won.
Yes, if you do that impossible thing using methods that don't exist you've won a victory in the war to ensure people cannot easily access the content you want to sell.
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things.
How are pirates entrenched interests and the status quo, but big business and the perpetuation of the IP=physical product model are not?
This is utterly reversed from the actual situation.
As one wag put it, "if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that Mick Jagger isn't The Man." A lot of the modern piracy model is built on making money, which is where the real problem is:
This is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to discuss. Kim Dotcom didn't create MegaUpload for any noble reason, he created it to make money, and not having to pay the people who created the content he used meant more money in his pockets. Breaking the economic model of modern piracy would go a long way in improving the issue, but there are a lot of vested interests who want to preserve that model, for a number of reasons.
I suspect that a large part of why people don't want to look too hard at this is because of what it would mean for Silicon Valley these days (a thought experiment for you - where did Tumblr's $1B valuation come from?), but that's a topic for another thread.
"You can't ever stop piracy" is a herring that is an impressive shade of vermillion. No, you won't be able to shut down piracy 100%. But you can stop it from being treated as a legitimate channel, and you can definitely stop people from profiting from it. Rightsholders would be happy to see piracy driven into the darknet, because the vast majority of the people consuming the wares won't follow.
Oh they indeed certainly wouldn't based on no evidence whatsoever.
The ease of piracy, not just the ability, will stay at about the same level as it is now no matter what you do. yes, stopping direct links and taking down big sites works for a time to reduce traffic, but people aren't idiots and they'll find a way to the folk who found a way around it. So the only real way to convince people piracy is wrong is by convincing them that piracy is wrong. But it seems that at the moment plenty of people actually don't give a fuck. A few percentage points after a major site shuts down isn't going to convince me that people suddenly realised the error of their ways.
First off, a lot of people don't give a fuck because they don't see the damage they're doing. One of the points that Chris Ruen makes in his book Freeloading(which I recommend reading) is that once you point out the problems, people do actually care. Second, it's not about making them care, so much as adding barriers. Piracy today is attractive because it's simple, easy, and appears to be legitimate. Break that, and people will move away. As the people behind the CMU study put it:
While some have argued that you can’t compete with free, we think a more productive view is that competing with free (pirated) content is just a special case of price competition. We know that people are willing to pay a few dollars more to buy books from Amazon, even if the same books could be found for lower prices at other stores (see here or here). This suggests that Amazon’s consumers value things like reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience, and are willing to pay more for products with these attributes.
Applying these results to digital media channels, we would expect that some consumers would be willing to buy through legitimate channels if content in those channels is more valuable than the “free” pirated alternative. In this view a key part of competing with free pirated content is using the same tools that Amazon uses — reliability, ease-of-use, and convenience — to make content on legal distribution channels more valuable than competing content piracy channels.
However, we believe that another key part of competing with free piracy can be making content on illegal channels less valuable to consumers. In this regard, our finding of a 6-10% increase in digital movie revenue suggests that even though shutting down Megaupload didn’t stop all piracy, it was successful in making piracy sufficiently less reliable, less easy-to-use, and less convenient than it was before, and some consumers were willing to switch from piracy to legal channels as a result.
Those things are all true, but don't address my point. Media conglomerates are entrenched interests, professional pirates are a new kind of criminal. The status quo is the current law on IP.
Your post is tremendously ironic:
The problem is that there are entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and they're more than happy to block any attempts to change things
This is literally what is happening, except the parties you describe are switched in reality.
Please, keep ignoring the elephant sitting in Mountain View. And pirates aren't new, they have been around for decades, as any New Yorker can tell you. They just found a new model where they can play the hero.
This answer has nothing to do with my post.
It has absolutely everything to do with your post. You look rather silly trying to portray the scenario as "Big Media beats up on individual users" while ignoring Big Tech sitting on your side, and their willingness to reshape laws to suit them.
I'm not. You talked about entrenched interests and the status quo, and that was a ridiculously one-sided and warped view of the situation, and I called you on it.
The rest is your usual imagination that everyone who does not agree with your ragey one-sided description of something supports evil.
There's entrenched interests on both sides of the issue, so saying that entrenched interests want to maintain the status quo can easily be misleading.
Which is my point. Trying to depict this as "big bad media conglomerates beating up plucky tech startups" is pretty silly at this point, when you look at the size of some of the tech firms in the game.
Posts
Space, you know you're unique in that definion, correct?
Civil disobedience is intentionally breaking laws because of your belief that those laws are unjust or immoral. Usually with the caveat that your actions remain non-violent.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
i consider your definition to be bad behavior, BUT this base line immorality can be very small, and outweighed by the immorality of following the law. doesn't mean the government is wrong to punish you for the breach though.
In this particular case? Either you abide by the law, which limits speech, or you come at the throne, but if the latter, you'd best not miss. . .
Again, saying that piracy will never be eliminated is a red herring - yes, you will never be able to eliminate piracy completely. But you can mitigate it, and in doing so protect your ability to earn revenue. Furthermore, considering how much of modern piracy is built around for profit models, if we break those models, a lot of the casual piracy we see today would go by the wayside. Which leads to the other red herring, about DRM not working. This is only true if you define "not working" as "can't keep piracy from happening ever". But as it turns out, the goal isn't "stop it from happening ever", but "preserve the key sales window right after release". And in that goal, DRM does work well.
And no, you can't divorce the fact that modern piracy is just as much about money as its ever been. One, it changes the moral calculus dramatically, especially considering many pro-piracy advocates try to portray themselves as supporting the creators. Second, it shows that there is actual value in these works.
Right, in revolution that stakes are high. Revolutionaries must be able to organize, communicate and speak out to their countrymen using methods that can been hidden from the eyes and ears of the king.
I wonder what technology could enable that?
I will not argue that a significant use of BitTorrent is piracy. I will, however, strongly defend the existence of BitTorrent because it does have legal and legitimate uses. We both live in the USA, where one of the central tenentof governance is "Innocent until prove guilty". Take a slash'n'burn approach to BitTorrents (or anything else) shows a flagrant disregard for this tenent.
And let's not forget that bands like Metallica never would have become popular if people hadn't been distributing pirated copies of their cassettes back when they first got started.
. . . You are arguing that nations should not prohibit Tor because revolutionaries need it to try and overthrow them?
It is exactly the opposite. It is restoring the ability to do something that would have been stopped through force
I'm arguing that I don't give the slightest fuck if they try to prohibit Tor or not, I will support it and other similar technologies.
And maybe you'll be arrested. And if you are, will you claim that what you did was not wrong, or that the law is unjust?
It has absolutely everything to do with your post. You look rather silly trying to portray the scenario as "Big Media beats up on individual users" while ignoring Big Tech sitting on your side, and their willingness to reshape laws to suit them.
Yes, and I will go to jail, and when I get out I will be more radical.
No, it's saying "I will force you to bow to my will." It's the dark side of digital determinism.
Encryption isn't illegal. Neither is the math. Tor is just a fancy multi-hop VPN. How are you going to ban that?
In law, something like:
1) No technologies may be used to obfuscate the source of internet traffic, except:
a) Legal exemptions for ISPs
b) Legal exemptions for web hosts
..
zzz) Legal exemptions for law enforcement.
2) Knowingly running software that enables other to the obfuscate internet traffic except:
3) Unknowingly running...
4) Installing software that allows obfuscation on a third party's computer...
In practice? Open up Tor and start prosecuting people identified by their IP addresses, which are plainly visible.
And how are you supposed to open up tor anyway? The whole thing is designed to not be able to do that. Unless you just want to prosecute people for being nodes?
What part of "breaking laws is inherently wrong" do you not understand?
Always.
EDIT: This is sarcasm for fuck's sake. Great, now I'm SKFM's sig.
Right, I am specifically making it illegal to run a Tor node. That's exactly what 2 and 3 make illegal. Open a TOR client and Host, and then shut down anyone in the TOR cloud with a US ip address.
Please do note the exceptions for business needs.
A VPN to resources on a business network doesn't actually do that thing you say.
A tunnel between two business doesn't fall into this either.
Yes, hooking up to a VPN and then accessing stuff on the internet from that network, would unless specifically exempted, but there isn't a whole lot of need to actually do that, though it is nice for security and management purposes. It would probably merit an exemption, with the caveat that the business is responsible for the actions of people on its network.
I specifically listed an exemption for web hosts.
Yes. It would be very horrible and restrictive. Difficult but not impossible to do, if they could also gain control choke points and block access to foreign nodes. I mentioned earlier, I would probably end up in jail fighting it.
Maybe we should make a tor version that transmits an encrypted payload in plain http to a decentralized set of webservers located around the globe?
Go hack the gibson while we make pirating hard enough to make a lot of normal people who don't even know what half these things are give up.
Define "normal people," please.
2) Very few people need to know the details of how it works and nobody does to just use it
You're right, rather than source I should have specified the public IP address of source network. yes, this would make you running a single proxy for the purpose of hiding the origin illegal. A webhost could easily defined to require use of a domain name.
I mean, look up legislation limiting spoofing phone numbers. It exists, allows for a lot, but targets specific usages. Given all the horribly worded anti-piracy laws, which are actually applied in a pretty specific senses, do you honestly think legislation like this could not be pushed through congress?
I still don't understand why we are talking about Tor in an IP thread.
There's no reason to want to make IP obfuscation illegal unless you want to effectively create something approaching police state at least in the limited realm of the internet.
Would it really be that hard to set up passive detection methods for the use of bittorrent, and then send automatic warnings? And with enough warnings, you get suspended. And then we move onto the next thing and deal with that too, and so on. We never stamp it out and are always one step behind, but at least we are making it harder, which should deter casual piracy. The video streaming websites in particular are a big deal now. And I'm with AH on going after the money.
Well, not now. Selling meth was legal once. We can make the use of a transfer protocol illegal. There is a question of if we should, of course, but I think that the case against Bittorrent is pretty clear. Other than Blizzard and some linux distros needing to spend more money hosting files, how much legal use would we really be losing here? Relative to the volume of piracy? I mean, I'm sure there were legal things on megaupload too. Doesn't change that it was mostly a tool for piracy.
I don't know enough about the technical details of bit torrent connections to tell you if it will be difficult or not. But I do know enough about what you're proposing to know that it's a police state action in which my presumption of innocence is violated, and a service which has perfectly legitimate legal uses is banned due to some illegal use of it.
It's a case of banning cars to prevent traffic accidents.
And it doubly reeks to me, because it also violates my right to privacy by setting up a legally mandated wire tap on my internet connection.
No, its a case of banning one specific car that people mostly use for illegal street racing.
I can redefine bittorrent to run over HTTP - the features are already there to request specific regions of files for download resuming. State/presence information just get transformed into POSTs to each other. Boom HTTPorrent. The protocol definition has changed and people would need to update their clients (which they can do automatically since all the major clients push update notifications so this is not hard), but it still works in exactly the same way
That'd punish all the owners who aren't street racing, the racers would use that model anyway since banning isn't something they'd care about and they can move on to a different model anyway - so you'll be back to the status quo.
Again though, it's that word mostly. It means you're willing to take away my Mustang because other people are being dumbasses with theirs. Where's the fairness, due process, etc with that?
Blocking all bit torrent would be hard. Blocking a lot of it for home users would be sort of possible, but would screw over power users doing totally legal things. You can go after sites hosting torrent files, but that hasn't worked too well so far.
phyphor is also correct in that they could just significantly change the way the protocol worked. The way he describes would make a lot of networks less secure, take power away from network administrators to prevent BT from working on public networks, and would frustrate efforts to shape traffic. Like, it makes the effects of BT worse for everyone but those using it.
I'm not. You talked about entrenched interests and the status quo, and that was a ridiculously one-sided and warped view of the situation, and I called you on it.
The rest is your usual imagination that everyone who does not agree with your ragey one-sided description of something supports evil.
So Google isn't an entrenched interest?
Which is my point. Trying to depict this as "big bad media conglomerates beating up plucky tech startups" is pretty silly at this point, when you look at the size of some of the tech firms in the game.