I really hope this bill ISN`T passed

[Grimlock]

http://torrentfreak.com/senate-passes-bill-to-quash-pirate-websites-101118/

Now we can all agree on that we stand different on the fileshearing issue some think its an evil thing that should be abolished as quickly as possible, others like me think that its something the market should have adopted long time ago.

Also since i don,´t live in America i could say well i don,´t care as long as it STAYS in the USA they can do what ever the fuck they want, its up to the American people to deal with that.

However the way i read this, it won,´t just effect USA, but the entire Internet.

Amongst others Wikileaks and from there its just a stone throw away from Chinese censorship.

 

[lrkun]

I understand where they are coming from, but the net persona in me wishes for this bill to dissipate into oblivion.

 

[duclicsic]

The problem with this sort of legislation is not whether or not it's right, it's whether or not it's viable. The internet is so successful because of the simplicity of what it does, that being to take a string of ones and zeros and deliver them to some computer elsewhere in the world in a fraction of a second. As long as this remains true it will be impossible to stop the sharing of copyrighted material, and the only way to stop it would mean fundamentally breaking the internet.

If I take a piece of music and translate it into a digital format, all I have is a string of bits. This string could be interpreted in any way you please. It could even be used to represent a single number, albeit a very large one (> 10^150000), and who's to say they can claim ownership of a number? What if I take a single byte from this string, does the copyright holder own that? There are only 256 possible ways to arrange 8 bits, so that same string will certainly occur other times in the same file, and in files representing other musical works, or images, or videos..
What if I do a logical NOT operation on every bit, the resulting file wouldn't work in your mp3 player. I could even go so far as to generate a totally random string of the same length and perform a logical operation between bits of the same position. The resultant string would be impossible to distinguish from random data, and when combined with the real random string and the operation reversed I would have the original playable file. Surely nobody can stop you from distributing random strings of binary?

I could take absolutely any string of binary with sufficient information in it and with the right method of interpretation produce something akin to an existing copyrighted work. No one piece of digital information can be objectively implied to represent any image, sound, or anything else until we invoke an interpreter in the form of a decoder or some other algorithm. I could make some such algorithm that makes a picture using the information in an mp3, so does that mean the copyright holder on that track also owns the image?



Ok so clearly what I'm trying to get across here is that the current model is woefully insufficient in the modern information driven world. These rules and bills are conceived by those in the recording industry and government, and not many of them have a good understanding of the nature of information in a digital context. The unfortunate result is that they cling to outdated concepts which are no longer relevant, and the laws end up being just as archaic and irrelevant.

 

[Nashy19]

For mp3s I think they would do much better if they treated an mp3 as a single thing and assume it will be shared, not many things that can be sold individually like CDs. That means they would have to accept a one-off price instead of the money rolling in and they would have to be open about the money they want to make. But it's not that hard to think of new business models (not begging/donations).

Would the USA really pass something that would significantly harm the country?
I don't understand US politics either, but I doubt it's that easy to pass something like this.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Cool... I just wish they could enforce it more strongly.

 

[borrofburi]

Cool... I just wish they could enforce it more strongly.

I think I have to disagree:

Aside from classic 'pirate' websites, the bill also conveniently provides an effective backdoor to take the whistleblower site Wikileaks offline, or its domain at least. After all, Wikileaks has posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States.

If the bill is accepted it will change the Internet and how domain names are controlled for good. Thus far, no central government has the power to take over domains. This power belongs exclusively to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Over the last weeks, several digital rights groups including the EFF have voiced their concerns over the new legislation, calling it an "unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech and a threat to innovation" and claiming it "would break the Internet."

I tend to side with the EFF on most issues, and this one does not seem to warrant an exception.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Cool... I just wish they could enforce it more strongly.

I think I have to disagree:

Aside from classic 'pirate' websites, the bill also conveniently provides an effective backdoor to take the whistleblower site Wikileaks offline, or its domain at least. After all, Wikileaks has posted thousands of files that are owned by the United States.

If the bill is accepted it will change the Internet and how domain names are controlled for good. Thus far, no central government has the power to take over domains. This power belongs exclusively to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Over the last weeks, several digital rights groups including the EFF have voiced their concerns over the new legislation, calling it an "unconstitutional restriction on freedom of speech and a threat to innovation" and claiming it "would break the Internet."

I tend to side with the EFF on most issues, and this one does not seem to warrant an exception.

Well, OK, I agree with you about the Wikileaks bit. I still want to see all the pirate sites shut down, and the users clubbed like baby seals.

 

[borrofburi]

Well, OK, I agree with you about the Wikileaks bit. I still want to see all the pirate sites shut down, and the users clubbed like baby seals.

The internet changes everything... Unfortunately anything that is strong enough to stop the pirates is strong enough to screw with the very foundation of the internet...

 

[nemesiss]

this is basically a problem because the music/film industry does't want to change/evolve.
if the industry changed their method on serving the public, then maybe pirate-websites wouldn't be so popular.
i think we can think of plenty of feasable changes that would nullify the need for such a bill.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

this is basically a problem because the music/film industry does't want to change/evolve

No, it is a problem because people feel entitled to something for nothing. If people had better ethics, there wouldn't be a problem.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Well, OK, I agree with you about the Wikileaks bit. I still want to see all the pirate sites shut down, and the users clubbed like baby seals.

The internet changes everything... Unfortunately anything that is strong enough to stop the pirates is strong enough to screw with the very foundation of the internet...

Possibly true. On the other hand, it is important to remember that ultimately the pirates are to blame. The fact that governments may react in less-than-efficient ways to deal with the criminal activity of pirates in no way excuses piracy. That would be like saying that intrusive security measures at airports means that we should support terrorists. NO! We can reject some of the action against pirates, but good and decent people also understand that pirates are criminals who should be stopped somehow. We can disagree on methods of course.

 

[DepricatedZero]

No, it is a problem because people feel entitled to something for nothing. If people had better ethics, there wouldn't be a problem.

Not at all. There are a number of reasons for piracy, few of which involve entitlement. In some cases it's as simple as malice, in others it could be as convoluted as needing to learn something. And I would say the ethics issue flies both ways; if companies had better ethics they wouldn't encourage piracy.

While the latter is finally being addressed by most companies who are guilty of intentionally hindering understanding of their own products(Adobe, Microsoft), the former is still very common. Some companies are begging for it, such as Viacom, intentionally distributing their own copyrighted material and then attempting to attack the people they distributed it to.

Moreover, there is so-called pirated material that is not pirated. Perhaps with irony, I never set an alarm off until I went legit. I've had accounts shut down because the company didn't like my operating system, I've had keys invalidated because I built a new computer and reinstalled a game, and I've been banned from accessing an account because I log in from two different states(I live in OH and work in KY). In all of these cases, I was fucked, left with no repercussion, because my behavior was "suspicious" and because of "intellectual property right" laws that say that the above is perfectly legal, because when I buy a piece of software that is protected as intellectual property, the company can revoke my access at any time just because they feel like it.

And so, it isn't that piracy is about entitlement - by far, no, it's about not being robbed by companies like Blizzard, EA, and Microsoft, who can and will arbitrarily revoke your access to their software.

 

[borrofburi]

The internet changes everything... Unfortunately anything that is strong enough to stop the pirates is strong enough to screw with the very foundation of the internet...

Possibly true. On the other hand, it is important to remember that ultimately the pirates are to blame. The fact that governments may react in less-than-efficient ways to deal with the criminal activity of pirates in no way excuses piracy. That would be like saying that intrusive security measures at airports means that we should support terrorists. NO! We can reject some of the action against pirates, but good and decent people also understand that pirates are criminals who should be stopped somehow. We can disagree on methods of course.

So far as I can tell a lot of the issues with stopping the pirates are similar to the difficulties in "stopping fred phelps" in that stopping one must necessarily result in ills that are worse than the disease.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

So far as I can tell a lot of the issues with stopping the pirates are similar to the difficulties in "stopping fred phelps" in that stopping one must necessarily result in ills that are worse than the disease.

I'm not sure that I can agree with you on that. I've not seen a valid use for pirate sites that would be seriously affected by banning those criminal sites. For instance, you can email pretty large files to specific people, which means that banning pirate sites wouldn't keep people from sharing legal files between them.

 

[borrofburi]

So far as I can tell a lot of the issues with stopping the pirates are similar to the difficulties in "stopping fred phelps" in that stopping one must necessarily result in ills that are worse than the disease.

I'm not sure that I can agree with you on that. I've not seen a valid use for pirate sites that would be seriously affected by banning those criminal sites. For instance, you can email pretty large files to specific people, which means that banning pirate sites wouldn't keep people from sharing legal files between them.

Well first and most importantly you're missing my point: the ability to censor the internet gives the government the power to censor the internet... My original point is not that stopping pirate sites prevents the legitimate activity of those pirate sites (I mean, it does, but as long as you don't ban torrent sites in general (or put insane burdens on torrent sites that effectively ban them in general), then that can continue on elsewhere), but rather that if the government gains the power to stop torrent sites and does so at the bequest of copyright holders (especially without some very serious checks and balances) then the government gains the power to censor the internet... Just as the government having the power (and the legal "right") to shut up fred phelps would be a problem for free speech, the government having the power to stop piracy on the internet would be a problem for the exchange of ideas and innovation on the internet.

But secondly: if you've ever tried to transfer several gigs between computers, especially several gigs to a significant portion of people you'd understand that your "email" solution is silly. There's a reason even Blizzard and Square Enix both use torrent technology (Square Enix actually used .torrent files for the beta of their latest MMORPG (which was sadly not a good game at all)).

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Well first and most importantly you're missing my point: the ability to censor the internet gives the government the power to censor the internet... My original point is not that stopping pirate sites prevents the legitimate activity of those pirate sites (I mean, it does, but as long as you don't ban torrent sites in general (or put insane burdens on torrent sites that effectively ban them in general), then that can continue on elsewhere), but rather that if the government gains the power to stop torrent sites and does so at the bequest of copyright holders (especially without some very serious checks and balances) then the government gains the power to censor the internet... Just as the government having the power (and the legal "right") to shut up fred phelps would be a problem for free speech, the government having the power to stop piracy on the internet would be a problem for the exchange of ideas and innovation on the internet.

But secondly: if you've ever tried to transfer several gigs between computers, especially several gigs to a significant portion of people you'd understand that your "email" solution is silly. There's a reason even Blizzard and Square Enix both use torrent technology (Square Enix actually used .torrent files for the beta of their latest MMORPG (which was sadly not a good game at all)).

You miss my point as well... pirates should be stopped.

Plus, if you need to transfer gigs of data for work reasons, there are ways to do with without using a PUBLIC torrent site. Somehow, I can download all sorts of large files to my XBox or PS3 without resorting to a public torrent site full of asshole pirates.

As far as the government? It isn't censorship to stop thieves from stealing. If the government goes further, we can attack them for that. As long as they are going for copyright-infringing scum, I'm all for the government busting some punks!

 

[borrofburi]

Well first and most importantly you're missing my point: the ability to censor the internet gives the government the power to censor the internet... My original point is not that stopping pirate sites prevents the legitimate activity of those pirate sites (I mean, it does, but as long as you don't ban torrent sites in general (or put insane burdens on torrent sites that effectively ban them in general), then that can continue on elsewhere), but rather that if the government gains the power to stop torrent sites and does so at the bequest of copyright holders (especially without some very serious checks and balances) then the government gains the power to censor the internet... Just as the government having the power (and the legal "right") to shut up fred phelps would be a problem for free speech, the government having the power to stop piracy on the internet would be a problem for the exchange of ideas and innovation on the internet.

But secondly: if you've ever tried to transfer several gigs between computers, especially several gigs to a significant portion of people you'd understand that your "email" solution is silly. There's a reason even Blizzard and Square Enix both use torrent technology (Square Enix actually used .torrent files for the beta of their latest MMORPG (which was sadly not a good game at all)).

You miss my point as well... pirates should be stopped.

Plus, if you need to transfer gigs of data for work reasons, there are ways to do with without using a PUBLIC torrent site. Somehow, I can download all sorts of large files to my XBox or PS3 without resorting to a public torrent site full of asshole pirates.

As far as the government? It isn't censorship to stop thieves from stealing. If the government goes further, we can attack them for that. As long as they are going for copyright-infringing scum, I'm all for the government busting some punks!

I've used torrents, public trackers, to distribute recordings of our own concerts to the participants and fans. But again that's not the issue I'm concerned with at all.

I am bothered by granting the government the power to edit the internet... I guess you could argue (and are arguing) that I'm employing a logical fallacy of slippery slope, but it won't change that it worries me.

 

[DepricatedZero]

IJoe here's the crux of the problem I have with your stance.

While I agree that stopping people from stealing is important, you state:

As far as the government? It isn't censorship to stop thieves from stealing. If the government goes further, we can attack them for that. As long as they are going for copyright-infringing scum, I'm all for the government busting some punks!

Now this is the typical view of someone who's simply unaware of the ramifications of it. You've been gas lighted - companies like Microsoft, Blizzard, EA, RIAA, MPAA, and even Walmart, have been parading about referring to 'intellectual property rights' and 'copyright infringement' in response to petty theft. Now, you're a smart guy, so I'm going to assume you just aren't aware of how they've mislead you. It's actually pretty damned offensive once you realize it.

First off, you can't censor theft. You just can't. There's literally no way that that even makes sense. But you're on the mark - stealing is stealing, whether it's music, software, or lumber. Let me ask you, though: how can you classify theft as copyright infringement? This is important, this is what they're trying to make you ignore. Stealing is not the same as copyright infringement at all.

I'm 100% for stopping thieves and punishing thieves, don't get me wrong, but I believe in fair and proportionate punishment.

The misunderstanding that you're perpetuating by espousing theft as copyright infringement is the difference between a $100 fine and a $1.5 million fine. I wish I was joking, I really do, but the reality is not only that it is possible but that it was upheld just this month.

If I were to go to a lumber yard and steal an 8x4 of birch, I'd be charged with petty theft, get hit with a $100 fine, have to pay for the board or return it.

If I were to go to Wal-Mart and steal a copy of Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness by the Smashing Pumpkins, I would get hit with a $100 fine, have to pay for the album, or return it.

If I were to download all the tracks of Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness, I would get hit with a $1.75 million fine + court costs.

The punishment is not proportionate, and doesn't even make sense.

But wait, there's more. They're pushing legislation that would get me fined $1.75 million for ripping my legitimately purchased copy of Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness. If I were to burn it to new discs so that I could listen without damaging the originals, I could be charged another $1.75 million, even if I have proof that I purchased the original legitimately.

I agree with stopping piracy, and theft, but I don't agree with doing it under the banner of intellectual property rights.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Now this is the typical view of someone who's simply unaware of the ramifications of it.

Dude, seriously... if you want to insult me, at least be decent enough to do it outright, instead of shitting on my face and pretending that you're just trying to make me more informed.

 

[DepricatedZero]

Now this is the typical view of someone who's simply unaware of the ramifications of it.

Dude, seriously... if you want to insult me, at least be decent enough to do it outright, instead of shitting on my face and pretending that you're just trying to make me more informed.

No, I really wasn't trying to insult you. That's why I said that it seems you don't understand the ramifications of it and tried to explain. If I wanted to insult you, trust me, I would have done it outright. I'm trying to show the problem with conflating property rights and copyrights.

edit: I think if you understood the ramifications, you'd see the disparity of those two and wouldn't call petty theft copyright infringement.