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

bbc.co.uk

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

#211

Post by philwelch »

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…

> 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.

That's not an argument against copyright, really. As empiricists, we should be automatically skeptical of any social change that hasn't been tested or observed before, since we can't meaningfully predict its results.

The fact remains that while it may be unenforceable to use copyrights to restrict personal use of content, commercial use is a totally different animal. This includes things like film screenings in a commercial cinema, live musical performances, broadcasting, adaptation to other media, and use in advertising. It's not hard to imagine a future where content creators compete to emphasize these over merely selling copies of their work.

> Of all the industries, film has been subject to upheaval approximately never.

Not true. Television and VCR's were major upheavals comparable to the impact of the internet today.

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

#212

Post by rbanffy »

philwelch wrote: post #211
zanny wrote: 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…

> 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. That's not an argument against copyright, really. As empiricists, we should be automatically skeptical of any social change that hasn't been tested or observed before, since we can't meaningfully predict its results. The fact remains that while it may be unenforceable to use copyri…

> Not true. Television and VCR's were major upheavals comparable to the impact of the internet today.

And they fought both as if the world would end and, when they failed, they got wonderful profits from both.

What they can't stand is another player controlling distribution channels. They realize they are not in the content creation business - they distribute content.

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

#213

Post by Joakal »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #189

That's It. I finally broke. I have been reading for going on two years about SOPA, PIPA, GCHQ snaffling everything in sight. And this is the straw that broke the camel's back. I have just ... written to my MP. Dammit. It will achieve nothing, but I am going to keep pushing. I know why they are doing this, but ... please please please, stop choking off industries that might just help us compete against the global behe…

Try them: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/ They also believe in other saner intellectual property laws.

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

#214

Post by weavejester »

DanBC wrote: post #207
weavejester wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the law isn't so black and white, and depends a lot upon intent. Thinking about the technicalities isn't so important; what matters to the court is whether the individuals involved intended to commit a crime.

Upthread people are mentioning images of child sexual abuse. It's important to mention that in the UK this is an absolute offence. If the image is in your possession then it doesn't matter how or why it's there - intent is irrelevant. This is important for people responsible for various servers, for example.

Intent still matters. For instance, say someone emails you a image and then contacts the authorities. If merely having such an image in your possesion was an automatic "go to jail, do not pass go", you can be certain there would be a lot of politicians and other unpopular individuals being led away in cuffs.

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

#215

Post by tptacek »

Locke1689 wrote: post #179
tptacek wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes nerd opinions about the law are worth paying attention to. Sometimes they aren't. Part of what put me on my recent CISPA jihad is that CISPA is a case where I think nerds actually had a chance of collecting the context required for informed debate; unfortunately, the CISPA debate got hijacked by militant activism. But there are cases where nerds clearly have little to offer. Look at the old Reiser threads i…

It seems to me that the most appropriate role for domain experts (including computer science) is anticipating results in that domain. For example, my primary objection to SOPA was not the original justification for the law, but merely the likelihood of unintended consequences and broadening of the law beyond reasonableness. The ramifications of a law on a technical domain (like DNS, say) seem more appropriate for exp…

To an extent. I think tech experts have a tendency to get carried away with consequences, and I think some tech/legal issues are deceptively legal-heavy and tech-light, such as unauthorized access.

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

#216

Post by Tycho »

Flimm wrote: post #198
Tycho wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gives two hoots about backing up DVDs, singing happy birthday, or painting Hobbits.

I do.

I meant nobody cares to prosecute copyright for trivial, personal activities like making backup copies or fan art, so it's quite disingenuous to continually bring them up when the topic of piracy/file-sharing arises.

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

#217

Post by DanBC »

weavejester wrote: post #214
DanBC wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upthread people are mentioning images of child sexual abuse. It's important to mention that in the UK this is an absolute offence. If the image is in your possession then it doesn't matter how or why it's there - intent is irrelevant. This is important for people responsible for various servers, for example.

Intent still matters. For instance, say someone emails you a image and then contacts the authorities. If merely having such an image in your possesion was an automatic "go to jail, do not pass go", you can be certain there would be a lot of politicians and other unpopular individuals being led away in cuffs.

You either possess the image or you do not. It is a strict liability offence.

There are narrow exemptions - "I did not view the images and I did not know they existed" is one; "The images were unsolicited and I did not keep them" is another.

(See page 4)

(http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/3249_Child_pornograp...)

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

#218

Post by zanny »

comex wrote: post #200
Flimm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm concerned about individual rights too. In fact, it's my concern for individual rights that leads me to reject overly restrictive copyright, (among other things). I find these rights to be valuable: freedom of speech, freedom of creativity, and property rights. (To be clear, by property, I do not include imaginary property like copyright.) Why shouldn't I be able to make back-up copies of the DVDs that are bought…

Why shouldn't anyone be able to download the game some indie studio bet the farm on and is selling DRM-free for $20, and play it for free? There's a difference between sharing culture and outright ripping people off; if you think this should be prohibited, you aren't really categorically against copyright, only its current implementation.

You need to take that in perspective. Someone legally purchased the game, and then shared it with someone else. It is the exact same thing people would do with cassette taps 2 decades ago, when the RIAA decried mix tapes would kill music. 2 decades later, that industry is bigger than ever.

The difference is that one cassette is much more expensive than 15 megabytes of magnetic storage, and the gas to go from a friends house to let you copy their tape is much more expensive than the electricity and internet bills to transfer the data.

But it is such a common misconception that it is stealing - it is duplicating bits of data on magnetic storage that, by nature of the physical properties of the device, are extremely easy to replicate.

Yes, it is "hard" to understand the concept that once released, the content is no longer under the control of the creator. But defying the physics of physical storage only causes what we have now - big corporate lobbies are pushing to destroy all personal privacy to make sure no one uses the inherent properties of the technology developed in ways they don't desire.

And that will destroy the internet and society at large if left unchecked. You can't take away personal privacy and expect anything less than collapse. The only solution is to accept the reality that digital content is infinitely reproducible for free, and go from there. The old brick and mortar model just does not work.

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

#219

Post by pbhjpbhj »

NLips wrote: post #208
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #136

I can't stand it. How can the BBC claim to be impartially reporting copyright infringement when they call it "piracy"? It's illegal, it's often immoral, it's not shooting people and stealing their stuff though and sufficiently different, in a moral sense, to make such a claim preposterously immoral in itself.

'Piracy' is as valid a term as 'copyright infringement': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Pirac...

Your link shows historic use of piracy as a term referring to unauthorised manufacture and sale (ie for profit). It gives no support for using the term for giving away content, nor for simple consumption, against the rights holders wishes - both of these are properly, legally and dispassionately described as IPR infringement.

Even if booksellers in the past had tried to make an emotional attachment between book copiers and pirates I would still find its use in a supposedly unbiased report to be objectionable.

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

#220

Post by pbhjpbhj »

hythloday wrote: post #163
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is it ok then to create a CP linking website? // Strictly speaking I don't think it would be illegal as long as no content on the site itself contravened the law. If you can differentiate it from a search engine that gives the links in SERPs then I'd back it being made illegal though - if you can't then Google/Bing/etc. are illegal if you can make the SERPs return a link to illegal content. Indeed a link site would…

The Copyrights, Designs & Patents Act 198 has "fair dealing" clauses which specifically permits back ups (Section 50(A)) and time-shifting (Section 70). I'm not aware of any case law that limits these permissions; the Copyright & Related Rights Regulations of 2003 does forbid you from circumventing a technical protection measure, which is in opposition to CDPA.

SS50(A) in CDP as amended refers to backups for computer programs. I'm thinking backups of media, DVDs, CDs. Time-shifting is allowed as you note but it limits you to view a single recording a single time, so you can watch a recording of a TV show but you must never "deal with" the copy once you've viewed it; moreover this only applies in domestic settings.

To consider UK "fair dealing" anything akin to US "fair use" is to not understand the scope of either IMO.

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