SOPA (maybe?) DroppedFollow

And the few formats that a stock computer can't play are easily remedied by a simple codec pack and, at worst, a new media player. All for free. And even if you don't want to go through that minimum amount of trouble, you can eventually find any format with a little leg work like you said. The biggest limiter ends up being personal preference. I, for one, prefer the Matroska Video format.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 8:56pm by lolgaxe

Scary, isn't it?

Don't worry, the nightmares go away after a while.

The thing that's amusing me about this thread (other than Joph agreeing with Gbaji) is that some of you have such weak arguments that you're putting up this lovely straw man that Joph is agreeing with SOPA when he has said pretty clearly that he did not.

I'm in the same boat. Artists and writers deserve protection for their IP, same as anyone else who makes a living by the sweat of their... brain. What form that takes is the very thing that needs to be negotiated, but throwing up your hands and wailing "it can't be done without ruining EVERYTHING!" is just reactionary and stupid.

(In response to Samira)

Sure they do, but I really don't think there's any legislative solution that will prevent wide scale piracy. The problem is that everyone think it's OK to breach it.

Tangentially, I struggle to think of a single piece of law reform motivated by the need to 'crack down' that has been effective or useful. I can think of lots that are either pointless or outright harmful.

Edited, Jan 21st 2012 2:32am by Kavekk

Eh, I don't think asking the big names in the creative industry to try a little harder to get with the times in terms of pricing and delivery is a straw man - it is a legitimate ask.

I also don't think it is unreasonable to look at copyright critically and ask if it couldn't stand to be tweaked a bit.

Looking at the historical context - how many books would we have lost through the middle ages if people weren't just allowed to *gasp* copy them? Would we even have the bible as we know it?

What about the millions of works which are orphan? Should they just disappear because no one wants to make money off them?

I admit I download music, but I almost exclusively download vinyl rips of bands that have been long out of print. The only market where I can buy this music is the secondary market - the artists, their descendants and music labels get nothing whether I buy it from the thrift store or download it from the net.

Other than that, I download remixes. Yeah, people messing with other people's music. I don't know what to say - I love remixes, and a lot of really good ones are made by ordinary people who don't have permission to play with the song. I am unabashedly unashamed to support remixing as a concept and I really resist any definition of copyright that precludes people from making new clothes out of old cloth, so to speak.

As a collage artist in real life - I cut up other people's works of art and make them into my work of art. I don't have permission to create new things out of old things, but I like doing it - and what I make is completely different than the parts themselves.

The concept of authorship itself is not even cut and dry if you look at in a broader context of culture and history. Myth and oral history inform almost all literature - it just seems odd to lock stories up now, when they have been free to share for eons before.

I think there are enough examples of artists taking a relaxed view towards copyright/opening the floodgates to sharing who still make a very good living. So if artists can make a living and big labels are raking in money, and hollywood is still solvent... what exactly is so broken here? I guess that is my question...

I am not saying we can't have any copyright at all, I would just like to see it looked at in a fair and rational way, and I want to ensure it doesn't inadvertently contribute to works of art disappearing. I'd also like the companies that are complaining so much to try a little harder before they make proposals like SOPA and PIPA which we can all agree are pretty over the top and ineffective. They deserve as much of the blame as anyone - by being so extreme they are just fueling the other extreme.

Yeeeeah. I think we're past the point where monks need to laboriously copy out "Twilight". Isn't the point of this discussion that in the digital age it's too easy to copy stuff? Not a great example.



Copyrights do expire. That's what public domain is all about.

Sure; and this is one of the examples where in my opinion corporations should not be treated as persons under the law. When Walt died, his heirs had the option of renewing those copyrights. After some point they revert to the public domain.

When an essentially immortal corporation is the heir, though, that never happens. (This is, of course, horribly oversimplified.)

I hear you. Do they EVER credit the brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen? They do not.

Also, much of the flap over IP would go away if the sponsors of the damn bill knew what it was and kept their mitts off it themselves.

That's certainly true, and I'd say SOPA is an example. What I'm thinking of is along the same lines but slightly different.

Take the Knives Act 1997 as an example. It was enacted due to some widely reported stabbing or other. The problem with the act wasn't that it was too extreme, really, more that it was useless; lasst I checked there were about fifty convictions under it. The problem was rather using law reform to solve a problem it couldn't do much about (especially in the way it tried to). People don't get stabbed because the law fails to condemn stabbing or the possession and sale of knives, they get stabbed because there are angry people with an urge to stab that cannot realistically be prevented from accessing knives.

I think there's too much law and not enough interest for law to be much use at sending messages, save through tangible effects on people's lives. I assume you agree with that, as you focus on it being made harder to infringe. But I don't see how you'd make it anything more than temporarily inconvenient while the will to pirate is so high. I think that needs to be tackled first.

But I think the main thing is that I feel the law has the balance of responsibilities about right, and that copyright infringement can be tackled within them (so there's no reason to make them wrong). An expansion of powers would hurt the internet unneccessarily and probably not prove very helpful.

Maybe I'm turning into a small-c conservative law dude already.

Sure. But the relevance of TOR to the purpose you're ascribing to it is exactly what I wrote. It allows you to direct your traffic to a third party point and have that relay said traffic to the blacklisted site. What TOR does in this regard isn't magic. It's just set up so that it's a bit harder for the individual nodes to ***** with the data folks are sending on it.

I could just as easily purchase a computer in any random foreign country, log onto that computer from my home computer, and the launch a browser on that computer (with perhaps an encrypted display) and connect to the blacklisted site. Download whatever I want to my remote computer, then download from that computer to my computer at home. The point being that from any point in the US, there are zero packets traveling from my home computer to or from the target blacklisted site.

This is not rocket science. Anyone *can* do it. But most aren't going to. TOR makes this a bit easier in some ways, but opens up other problems as well. The very act of making it a bit more user friendly (but only a bit), makes it possible to track packets as well (if one really wants to). It's just a network of computers set up all over the world which transmit packets between themselves with the true target IP data concealed within. Thus to any external examination, all packets only travel between peer computers acting as TOR routers. But once the packets arrive "near" where their real destination is, the true destination is revealed and the packet travels across the network as normal.


You could accomplish the exact same thing with a handful of computers located around the world and some relatively simplistic NAT rules. The problem is that you have to trust every computer in the network with your data and traffic. The only thing really neat or special about TOR is that it encrypts the true traffic destination and source in the packets. That way an arbitrary number of random people can install the software and configure their systems as TOR routers and you don't have to trust them. But that relative simplicity also opens up other means of tracking.



The bill will stop the customers of the pirates though. Which I keep telling you is the real point. And 99% of them aren't even going to know that TOR exists, much less ever bother to configure it. And it's not really even about technological capability. It's also about plausible deniability. There's a psychological angle to this that is forgotten here. Most folks who download that stuff justify it to themselves as it "just being a copy", and "I'm not doing anything wrong". Hell. many probably think "if it were illegal, why is it right here on this site where I can just browse for it and download it"?

Most people will not install something like TOR for that purpose because they can no longer lie (even to themselves) that they didn't know that what they're doing is wrong. You'd be surprised how important that is to most people.




But most of the customers of that content aren't going to do that. I've explained this to you several times and you've skipped past it each time. The target of that part of the law isn't specifically the pirate sites but the millions of "normal" people who download stuff from them. And while the hard core followers of pirated stuff will get around it easily, the average person wont. Remember that the point here is to reduce the losses suffered by content creators by piracy of their work. The people who are most likely to buy the work from the legal owner in the absence of easily available free alternatives are the same exact people who are least likely to go through any active effort to work around the methods used by the law to block the sites.


That's why the method will work if implemented.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 7:41pm by gbaji

It's never industry's job to fix it's problems, is it.

Edited, Jan 20th 2012 10:40pm by Timelordwho

More's the pity.

Massive EMP strikes worldwide at the backbone routers. Aside from that, life finds a way...

Your description can be achieved by almost any proxy chain, nothing about it hinted at a reference specifically to TOR.



The term you're looking for here is Proxy. I hear Linux OSs are pretty good at that sort of thing.



TOR's a bit more prevalent than you think it is, but that's not the point. The point is the tools exist and they're easy enough to use that a novice can be walked through the process.



You're assuming the bulk of the problem is idiots inside the US who don't know any better. China is notorious for pirated software and movies, this isn't going to touch them. At best the pirates don't find ways to easily make it available to Americans and the average US pirate stops seeking it out, you've still only dealt with a fraction of the problem. And at what cost? You're opening the door to censorship for piracy? You really want to go down that path for a temporary band aid solution that gives a single industry an excessive amount of power over the internet? We did that with the DMCA, let's not do it again.