SOPA (maybe?) DroppedFollow

You're obsessing on the method and not the effect. Theft is when you take the value of something away from the person who owns it. Whether you do that by taking a physical object from someone or by taking the profits that person might have made from something he created, it's still theft.


When the financial value of something is derived by the owner by making copies of it and selling them to people, then if you make copies of that thing and distribute it to people, you are stealing from the owner. Period. And yes, I'm aware of the whole "not everyone who'd take a free copy would have paid for a legal one" argument. It's irrelevant. You can't possibly claim that not one person who would take a free pirated copy of a work would never have paid for a legal copy if the pirated version were not available. It's not about whether everyone wound have, but whether "anyone" would have. And I think it's quite clear that if no option to view some content existed except to pay the legal owner, at least some of the people who view pirated content would do so.


That's theft.

Other industries are broadly covered by patent law instead which serves largely the same practical function: you invested/created it, it's exclusively yours to profit off of for a period of time.

That's really EMI's problem though. And I'm willing to bet they'll make more than $4mil off her album so it'll be money well spent.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 6:48pm by Jophiel

Without having looked at it, I'll take your word for it and say it's an outlier rather than the norm in modern commerce of manufactured goods.

Hell, it's getting to be an outlier in modern commerce of agriculture.

Even in fashion, there's protections though. For example, the Chanel symbol is trademarked. Make a purse covered in interlocking "C"s and you're looking at a legal violation.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 6:51pm by Jophiel

Setting up a torrent program is an easy as installing uTorrent, using whatever default settings it starts with and then selecting "use this program" when you click on the Pirate Bay links.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's as far as the large majority of users take it. And most ripped movies are in a format that plays natively in your stock media programs.

As I said before, it amuses me that most computer users are troglodytes who still think Yahoo! is a neat idea until it comes to downloading movies -- then they become super-savvy computer experts.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 6:55pm by Jophiel

I'm apparently agreeing with Gbaji so I've got that going for me

This is relevant to what Joph was saying, ie middle-ground: http://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

I don't think I'd even heard of TED before all this and it reminds me that I once saw (if not understood) this.

I wonder if the black community is having this same SOPA debate!

Great, don't butcher the internet and suffocate free speech in the process.

I think you're missing what I was talking about. I was answering your claim that it's not the content sites fault if pirated material ends up on their site because they can't possibly monitor it. I'm not talking about someone's ISP. I'm talking about the content management/hosting site itself. They absolutely can watch for pirated material the same damn way that their users find it. You don't need to scan the freaking binary code to do that!



Um... The primary point of those bills was to make it easier (or less ridiculously hard) to do just that. And while some aspects of how they were proposing to do so were slightly problematic, that core objective is still valid. Right now, it's incredibly hard for the owner of copyrighted content to get such sites shut down. It can take weeks to months just to get them to remove the content itself (once someone notices). And as we all know, all that really accomplishes is a name change of the data and a new link location.



If someone were to attempt to dogmatically and illogically apply a literal interpretation of SOPA? Sure. That's why it was a bad bill. But a better written version? Absolutely not. This is the excuse those who manage pirated sites and those who download free stuff from them always claim, but it's just not true. I doubt seriously there are a whole lot of content sites who honestly do not wish to enable piracy but have rampant problems with it. And I can guarantee you that if stiffer laws were coming down the pipe, those who really are honest players would show great effort to eliminate pirated material from their sites.

It's not really that hard to do. If you're really honest. But most aren't.



Uh huh. Sorta like the copyright holder being able to nuke the site (from orbit even!) if their material is found there and isn't removed to their satisfaction. While the process outlined in SOPA was questionable and could possibly have been abused, there will have to be some sort of similar legal process put in place at some point.

Honestly, if you don't want to be subject to those sorts of actions, don't host pirated stuff on your site. It's really not as hard as you're trying to make it out to be. Those sites *could* put much greater effort into monitoring what is on their site. They choose not to. They do that out of a combination of either intentionally wanting pirated stuff on their site, or just not having sufficient incentive to not have it there.

Either way, a law which holds them more responsible for what's on their site and has sufficient teeth to actually do something about it without taking years going through courts, would go a huge way towards fixing the problem.

And as I've already pointed out, there certainly are means for honest legitimate sites to operate. They don't do it this way because currently the financial incentive is to operate in a way which enables piracy. Change that, and the means of operating will change as well.



Um... No. They don't really care much about that stuff. Really? Where the hell did you get this idea? Millions of people downloading torrents with films and music and games running around and you think that the content owners care about a home movie with someone's logo accidentally present? While I'm sure they'll ask for that to be removed if it's pointed out to them (they have to or they may lose their rights), that is *not* the focus here. Not even close.



No. Those sites will either change the way their do things so as to prevent piracy, or they will be taken down. Any site operating as I described above would fear nothing from a "son of SOPA" type law. Heck. It would fear nothing from SOPA. It's fully protected. Only known paying clients can upload content. Each enters into a contract where they promise to upload only public domain and their own works. How can a site be taken down under those conditions. If someone uploads pirated stuff, the site shuts down that clients access, erases all that clients data, and passes that clients contact and billing information to the authorities.


That's complete security. And that's how content sites would start operating (for legitimate artists who want to distribute their work). They don't operate that way precisely because the laws are so weak that they don't have to. And the result is that lots of stuff gets pirated.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 5:41pm by gbaji

Arguments between us are usually less about substantive disagreements and more about the fact that I think you're a bit rubbish.



To be honest, I was making a statement of law rather than of opinion. That said, I don't believe there is a moral equivalence between the two.

Ok, good. It's not my imagination playng tricks on me. You guys are right, btw.

So nobody changes file names or uses encryption? They could always view everything that gets uploaded, but they'll likely lose most of their legitimate users in the process.



I'm sure they would be more diligent about it, but they can't monitor everything all the time. The knee jerk reaction from SOPA and PIPA wouldn't take that into account though.



It would have been abused, that's why it was written the way it was. They don't want to go through the legal process. They want to push a button and make it go away.



While it's not their immediate focus, it will happen because it already happens. Many regular YouTube uploaders have had stuff pulled for copyright infringement at some point, regardless of what it was. I personally know people who have had stuff pulled from Youtube, SoundCloud, and Deviant Art. Stuff I know was their own work because I was there when it was made, that was pulled for no reason other than an ownership dispute or copyright infringement.

US based ISPs would be ordered to change the DNS listing to point to another site.



Sorry, I assumed you knew how TOR worked.



The last pirated movie I handled was around 2003. Good guess.