High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by tptacek » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:08 PM UTC

corin_ wrote: post #143

tptacek wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Criticize me as much as you want! I don't take it personally. If you end up being right, I'll benefit from it --- no matter how you choose to phrase it.

I'm sorry you feel I'm being snide. I don't intend to be. Regardless, each successive HN "legality" discussion drives me further towards some conclusions (here I'll use 'nerd' as a shorthand for "people such as myself who come from a tech background and like to argue on HN"):

* Very few nerds have taken the time to learn even basic facts about how the legal system works

* To a nerd, the legal system resembles a rule-based system, like a Sendmail configuration file

* Nerds feel entitled to reason through rule-based systems on nerd terms; in particular, nerds feel entitled to demand that all rule-based systems manifest themselves and are evaluated in the same terms that a programming language is

* Nerds generally feel pissed off when they inevitably discover that no legal system works on nerd terms

* As a result, nerds rarely read actual laws or statutes, and can generally be counted on to read only the first paragraph of any Techdirt story involving the law, enough to confirm their suspicion that the law is a gigantic broken computer program that is being systematically exploited by giant corporations to screw them out of free DVD rips.

Nerds are mostly wrong about this stuff.

MEANWHILE, 'citricsquid isn't even wading into that particular debate. Rather, he's making an argument that nerds should find colloquial. "Don't bullshit us", he says, "because we all know what The Pirate Bay is. We're nerds, for Pete's sake. Most of us could easily build The Pirate Bay ourselves." NO NO NO, says the rest of the thread. Whuh? WE SAID NO, the thread continues, BECAUSE IT'S MORE IMPORTANT TO CAPTURE THE GREATER TRUTH THAT THE LAW IS AN EVIL SCHEME TO SCREW US OUT OF FREE DVDS.

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

#152

Post by tptacek » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:11 PM UTC

wallawe wrote: post #144

tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repre…

I swear to god I read this comment after I wrote that last comment about nerds and the law.

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

#153

Post by trotsky » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:13 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #150

praptak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

things that I like doing::should be legal

things I don't like other people doing::???

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

#154

Post by chc » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:15 PM UTC

wallawe wrote: post #144

tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repre…

You don't think maybe lawyers, who are actually versed in the frameworks on which the laws are built, are more capable than a group that by and large doesn't even seem to understand the difference between different kinds of intellectual property?

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

#155

Post by anigbrowl » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:18 PM UTC

Flimm wrote: post #141

anigbrowl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

Not necessarily true. The label era was dominated by intermediaries (managers, A&R specialists), but those intermediaries were constantly in search of new bands to promote. Many musicians (authors, filmmakers, your_medium_here) don't necessarily have the skills or desire to become experts in publishing and distribution, and the breakdown of existing models also means the breakdown of cross-subsidization for less commercially oriented acts. There are pros and cons to both models; I'm just objecting to the idea that the new publishing landscape is in all ways better than the old.

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

#156

Post by jiggy2011 » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:19 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #97

kaolinite wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright infringement should and must be illegal but it also must be put into perspective. Using copyright infringement to justify censorship, deportation of citizens, multi-million-dollar fines and lifetime prison sentences - that's a symptom of a broken judicial system and governments with bad priorities / corruption. Downloading films + music for personal use? Should get warnings and eventually a small fine if th…

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…

The problem with kickstarter style (under those conditions) is that if you wait long enough you will get it all for free anyway. Unless you have large amounts of money to donate it would be very difficult to get the snowball moving.

For example if you saw something with a $100,000,000 target and $0 in donations, if all you could afford was $20 would you bother to put that in?

Also people are often quite bad at knowing exactly what they want. Let's assume that the iPhone had been a kickstarter project, I'm not sure how much the initial development costs were (for the software part at least) but I'm really not sure whether they would have raised it by just asking people if they wanted a phone with a touchscreen.

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

#157

Post by tptacek » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:21 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #154

wallawe wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repre…

You don't think maybe lawyers, who are actually versed in the frameworks on which the laws are built, are more capable than a group that by and large doesn't even seem to understand the difference between different kinds of intellectual property?

Someone needs to start a site where we can submit HN comment links and then bet on the responses that they're likely to generate.

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

#158

Post by luriel » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:27 PM UTC

gouranga wrote: post #92

It's getting like a nightmare vision of capitalism in the 1980s. You know like Robocop or Gremlins 2 where the city sold out to corporations. Corporate interest over common sense. We'll just have to mail DivXs to each other like we did in the late 90s when bandwith was low...

Copyright is a government granted and government enforced monopoly. Its got little to do with capitalism.

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

#159

Post by tptacek » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:27 PM UTC

fredley wrote: post #54

Dylan16807 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting illegal things: bad Saying where to get illegal things: under dispute

Linking is not a crime.

Probably not, no. In the US, it's more likely to constitute the tort of contributory infringement. Someone should make a "10 Commandments of Nerd Legal Misunderstandings"; #2 or #3 would be "in the law, intent matters hugely".

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

#160

Post by wallawe » Mon, Apr 30, 2012, 7:38 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #154

wallawe wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repre…

You don't think maybe lawyers, who are actually versed in the frameworks on which the laws are built, are more capable than a group that by and large doesn't even seem to understand the difference between different kinds of intellectual property?

Of course they are more capable. But are you saying that these opinions aren't worth listening to as well? "Without understanding your opponent's argument, you can't fully understand your own." If nothing else this can be an educational experience thanks to you and tptacek.