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Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

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Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are a content creator, you create ONE copy. This does not entitle you to ANY other copies. Copying is not theft, but copyright sure is.

A Content Creator is first creating _the master_. Copies are what happens after. Unless you are talking about serial editions, etc.

Copies =/= the original object

This is a TRIVIAL distinction even a child can make. The copyright industrial complex is also perfectly capable of making this distinction, but it chooses not to because this allows it to make huge sums of profit.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of your comments are just snark. You need to fix your attitude.

Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh. However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people…

> Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles.

They are made to make money. The ones that 'keep people as uneducated imbeciles' are an unfortunate byproduct.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#113

Maybe this is just a detail of Vice's way to sell their articles, but how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?

Inhibiting development by providing imports at prices that are difficult to match by local offerings, that's about as colonialistic as it can get. In the case of pirated entertainment on donated bandwidth, the effective price of those imports is zero.

But this is surely not what the article meant by "digital colonialism", so your question remains unanswered.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#114
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda depends. Do the people in the UK who use this service have to abide by laws of other countries, laws that don't exist in the UK? That's the problem here, right?

Can you clarify your comment? My proposition is 'basic income Internet' provided at low cost in each country by $Government and $PreferredSupplier. Lowish bandwidth, possibly with fair use style bandwidth cap. All currently existing legal frameworks remain in place in $Country.

The comment was in response to your last question "am I being colonialist?", and my response was intended to point out that the problem isn't really "here's some free stuff", but "here's some stuff that doesn't cost anything (and may well be donated by people who mean well), that comes with other strings attached"

It isn't really classic colonialism of course (we're not talking about enslaving a nation and stealing their goods). But if the basic income internet were not in fact provided by $Government, but instead by $corporation or $otherGovernment, and carried with it strings - "abide by $otherGovernment's laws while using the internet here in this country", then you could argue that's a colonialist approach. It's especially problematic when governments are subverted to transmit corporatist legal frameworks.

In your example in the most basic sense, it's not colonialist - it's just good sense, a government providing a basic level of access to the internet to all.

On the other hand to all of this, I feel like sometimes we're missing the mountain while staring at molehills. Yes, facebook's free basics seem like a naked grab for users and an attempt to stifle homegrown innovation in countries that don't have a lot of network infrastructure. On the other hand, we're still very much dealing with actual colonialism in our global economy. The fact that it's cheaper to ship cotton to Bangladesh to make t-shirts that in turn get shipped back to the US for me to wear (than, say, making the shirt in the US where the cotton is grown) says a lot about the influence of north/western economies on the rest of the world. We (meaning northern and western nations for the most part) still extract tremendous value from the countries we used to explicitly call "colonies". This is probably a much bigger problem (both ethically and in terms of long-term sustainability of our markets)

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#115

Maybe this is just a detail of Vice's way to sell their articles, but how is providing free services to people who could otherwise not afford them 'colonialism'?

The concept is basically that facebook is trying to establish a colony of users by drastically undercutting the competition in terms of $/byte. They establish an unequal playing field tilted in their favor.

IMO the real losers are facebook competitors.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh. However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people…

I don't disagree with #1 (cf my other comment in the thread regarding Adobe's MO). But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all. Re #2: That's the funniest conspiracy theory I've heard all year. But don't take it from me - I edit tvtropes so I'm in on it too. Oops. That was snark. :)

I write snarky comments targeting opinions that express my thinking in a concise and funny (for me at least) way. Then you come and tell me to fix my attitude, directly judging my person. At no point did I judge you or used ad hominems.

>But you'll get your point across better if you quit the snark, that is all.

I'm not interested in getting my point accross, just in having fun. People have different objectives. Why do you want so much to tell me what I should do?

Now regarding your #2, there are many links between TV exposure and bad school grades. Everybody on HN love to say that you must be a pretty idiot to read the dailymail or watch fox news, so a correlation between low intellectual content media consumption and low intelligence would harly surprise anybody. Yet you reply with "That's the funniest conspiracy theory", a logical fallacy intended to ridicule while avoiding to answer the argument.

As you see, the whole conversation is rather useless, so snark is good enough.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the only purpose of that account is to make me laugh. However, this isn't just gratuitous. Here the issue is similar with the sci-hub one: there's a fairly legitimate motivation for piracy, so there's a lot of comments over "free knowledge so copyright is theft", and a bit of "piracy is theft". But not all piracy is equal, and sharing knowledge (research papers, etc) is useful and participate into making people…

> Popular movies and TV shows are made to keep people as uneducated imbeciles. They are made to make money. The ones that 'keep people as uneducated imbeciles' are an unfortunate byproduct.

I agree, and this was poor wording on my part. I just wanted to point out that this side of piracy ensure that a large part of the population would not benefit much from it because it won't bring them any good (e.g. education, practical knowledge, etc) while providing easy ways to waste away their energy.

The outcome of downloading research papers or educational content is not the same as downloading entertainment.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#118
post #58

They could just create 'share.wikipedia.org' and make that available so everyone can go there to share/distribute whatever files they want using a secret token they put in their FB group instead of hiding them in Wikipedia articles. No need to clean up articles anymore. With a nice retention policy to automatically expire old content it could actually work :)

I think they probably do not want to tacitly approve of the use of Wikipedia as a file-sharing service.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already possible, common and expected for people in one country to subvert the laws of another country - for instance, Americans don't think they should be jailed for spreading Holocaust denialism, do they? Why should Germany not have the obvious right to enforce that law on the entire internet? How do you see that case as different to this one? (Aside, of course, from the money Hollywood is prepared to spend on…

The difference that springs immediately to mind is that holocaust denial is an idea, a concept, where movies and games are intellectual products not intended for free exchange. Apples and oranges.

The distinction between an "idea" and an "intellectual product" doesn't seem very satisfying.

Re: Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference that springs immediately to mind is that holocaust denial is an idea, a concept, where movies and games are intellectual products not intended for free exchange. Apples and oranges.

The distinction between an "idea" and an "intellectual product" doesn't seem very satisfying.

The distinction is whether the creator wants to profit from it or give it away.
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