Live data from Hacker News

High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

bbc.co.uk

141–150 of 221 posts

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#141
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every argument against copyright infringement assumes there is some evil destitute world on the other side of having it in place. We have never in the modern age in any modern first world country ever had an extended time WITHOUT copyright to see what would happen. Everyone just assumes every artist, developer, and investor would disappear overnight and everyone would turn to stone as content is freely distributed. O…

Or maybe we would just go massive kickstarter style (with some kind of contract guarantees unlike the current system) where the funds people have pay people to make the stuff they want, which is then free for everyone to consume since it is free to reproduce. The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record.For someone trying to connect with an audience the…

The Kickstarter model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much.

The restrictive copyright model works fantastically well for creative people that already have a following/track record. For someone trying to connect with an audience the first time, not so much. Even the few musicians who hit it big with a debut album have actually worked very hard beforehand to persuade a record label to sign them, with very little reward.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#142
post #119
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five ISPs - Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media. Sixth ISP, British Telecom, has requested a few more weeks to further consider its position and the claimant, BPI has agreed. However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this affects the whole UK.

> However, since these ISP, in particular Virgin Media, cover by far the largest broadband users in the UK, for most intents and purposes this affects the whole UK. It will cover the majority of non-piratebay users. The piratebay users will just switch to one of the ISPs that is not one of those five.

Err... No, they won't. Switching ISPs is the most time-consuming thing to do when all you want to do is visit a site that is being blocked. There are many more practical approaches.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#143
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not with censorship, it's with what they are censoring. Very few people here would take issue with this court order if it was about a site that exclusively hosted child porn. Therefore yes, the context of "is what TBP does illegal?" To extend your (frankly poor) metaphor, he wouldn't be a drug dealer if all he did was hold up a sign pointing you towards your nearest drug dealers and he never actually gav…

Oh, message board legal debates; how would we occupy our days without you? I love you most of all, "If I just did X, they couldn't charge me with Y" argument! 18 USC § 2 - PRINCIPALS (a) Whoever commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, is punishable as a principal. (b) Whoever willfully causes an act to be done which if directly performed by…

I was correcting a bad metaphor and pointing out that the question of legality is important, not just the question of whether censorship is ever OK, I wasn't arguing for or against the legality.

Regardless, what's wrong with discussions about legality. A huge feature of any discussion board is that people can share opinions, debate, and correct each other when wrong.

I'm not sure if I'm mis-remembering you or if you used to have a different attitude on here, because in my head when I see your username I think of someone who's helpful and a good contributor to HN, but lately the comments I've seen from you are snide, snarky and not useful. I hope that either I'm just seeing the bad ones and missing the great ones, or that you're just going through a patch and will be back to your old self. Or perhaps I'm just wrong and being unfair to criticise you, but just calling it like I see it - if it was someone unknown making these comments I just feel they'd be getting downvoted to hell and for the most part ignored.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's getting tricky to tell but, in theory at least, 18 USC shouldn't apply to the UK.

You are a Wikipedia paragraph away from knowing how irrelevant that objection is. Finding it (I'm staring at it now) is left as an exercise for the reader. Another fun quirk of message board legal arguments, besides the propensity for participants to sincerely believe that only computer programmers possess the ability to reason about rule-based systems, is the belief that laws they don't like (or, more likely, that a…

No one is saying nor implying that computer programmers possess a superior moral compass to make judgements on the rule-based systems as you have stated.

The laws are fucked up because of pervasive unethical political practices in the U.S. (and the entire world for that matter) where laws are made from the top down by those with the most money as opposed to the bottom up as our founding fathers intended via our representative democracy. (Side note, the internet is changing all of the above through the forums you denote as irrelevant as well as social media)

In regards to programmers calling the shots, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a group of people as intellectually capable percentage wise to make unbiased judgements on the nature of our laws.

They are certainly more capable that the majority of clowns in Washington.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#145
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt anybody expects artists would dissappear overnight. People just think it's fair to reward creators for the entertainment value they provided, and unfair to rip it off without paying a dime. And copyright is the best, simplest way to protect fairness in this regard. Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support i…

> Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support it. Are you saying people who defend copyright. Conciously are only being fair to a small subset of the population. But unfair to the majority. And a net loss to humanity. And still they defend copyright? I don't think so. It seems to me, those who defend copyright have th…

You could see a lot of laws that way.

The point is that it isn't necessarily favoritism as anybody could create copyrighted works so I wouldn't see it as 'unfair' unless you had to apply to the government for copyright or something like that.

Besides copyright is a net benefit if it helps intellectual property get produced.

I am not arguing that IP would not get produced if it were not for copyright as that is clearly not true. However I'm not sure it is to everyones benefit if creatives had to work 8 hours a day at 7/11 and then only produce on nights/weekends or that they had to hope for some kind of handout (which could well just be companies wanting to advertise or politicians wanting to create propaganda).

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#146
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt anybody expects artists would dissappear overnight. People just think it's fair to reward creators for the entertainment value they provided, and unfair to rip it off without paying a dime. And copyright is the best, simplest way to protect fairness in this regard. Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support i…

> Not everything has to be 'for the greater good' or for the 'long term benefit of the new age economy' or whatever in order for people to support it. Are you saying people who defend copyright. Conciously are only being fair to a small subset of the population. But unfair to the majority. And a net loss to humanity. And still they defend copyright? I don't think so. It seems to me, those who defend copyright have th…

A lot of the people (me included) defend copyright because it's a net benefit to the individual, and a fair benefit too (not unfair to anyone).

Whether it's a net benefit to humanity, however you measure that, is neither here nor there. It probably is, but those are not the grounds we're arguing on.

It's sort of like defending privacy. You don't defend it cause of some net benefit to humanity. Who knows, maybe the world would be happier if there were no secrets. You defend privacy because it's fair on an individual level.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#147
post #117
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not with censorship, it's with what they are censoring. Very few people here would take issue with this court order if it was about a site that exclusively hosted child porn. Therefore yes, the context of "is what TBP does illegal?" To extend your (frankly poor) metaphor, he wouldn't be a drug dealer if all he did was hold up a sign pointing you towards your nearest drug dealers and he never actually gav…

I have a problem with the censorship of child porn. 1) because it will and has been used as an excuse for more censorship 2) because a lot of non CP has en censored by the filters. They could censor virtually anyone with little to no risk.

Also, from reports I've read it is both ineffective and doesn't actually get rid of the root problem, but the politicians can sleep better at night thinking they did something about it. All censorship does is push the content underground and quite possibly makes it harder to combat.

The child porn argument also strikes me as an appeal to emotion.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#148
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not with censorship, it's with what they are censoring. Very few people here would take issue with this court order if it was about a site that exclusively hosted child porn. Therefore yes, the context of "is what TBP does illegal?" To extend your (frankly poor) metaphor, he wouldn't be a drug dealer if all he did was hold up a sign pointing you towards your nearest drug dealers and he never actually gav…

Child pornography: illegal Copyright infringement: illegal censoring child porn websites: right, censoring copyright infringement website: wrong. Not sure I understand the difference? Either you're for censorship of websites, or you're against it, you can't pick and choose.

You're thinking in legal terms, but in this case, the argument is one of morals.

CP and CI are galaxies apart morally, imho. Also, people's views on copyright infringement seem to immediately swell when it's their copyright being infringed upon.

Re: High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs

#150
post #89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if companies wanted to infringe the copyright of GPLed code that should be allowed?

Yes, if in exchange for that everybody is allowed to infringe on their copyrights. And tivoization should be illegal.

That seem kind of arbitrary , you want the government out of one thing but you want them into something else. If there was no copyright or patents then tivoization would be irrelevant anyway as the hardware could be easily copied.
Post reply on HN