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Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

thepiratebay.org

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Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.

No, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.

Pray tell me, what are these root issues you speak of? I'm mostly in agreement with vaksel. I don't see how the copyright system has anything to do with how the MPAA/RIAA tries to enforce it's copyright upon meaningless things like dancing videos of babies.

Which by the way happened http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turn...

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#12
post #9

To be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software. It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and indexing ability of the Internet.

I agree, which is also why I think this spectrial was a mishap to begin with. They should have not attacked torrenting in general, they needed to attack the fact that Pirate Bay did nothing to remove torrents even by request. They also needed to show that Pirate Bay tracks almost exclusively pirated software/movies/music.

They went after the wrong thing, because torrenting isn't inherently bad. It's only bad if people use it in the wrong way. Which, granted, happens a lot.

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.

No, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.

I totally agree. I feel that if something is important, than the message should not be only available to people who can afford to read/hear the message, but should be readily available for anyone who is willing to learn. Whenever I read a great book, or hear a great song, I try to promote it as much as possible because I think that it is important that the artist's message is heard and understood by as many people as possible. Some of my favourite 'artists' (such as Franz Kafka and Carl Sagan) held day jobs in professional/scientific fields. I realize that their material is copyrighted, but my point is that art and learning/the spreading of ideas should be done for the sake of art itself or learning itself, not for the sake of profit. I chose those two as examples because they made their living (for the most part) by working at their day jobs, and created their art because they wanted to deliver a message, not because they wanted to get rich.

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#15
post #10

Hear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with copyrighted music in the background.

The part about the kitten isn't directly relevant to the pirate bay, I'll give you that. Though I look at the cartoon as more of an over all social commentary about our current state of affairs; not "this is our situation." All too often the copyright lawyers said DMCA takedowns against just such videos. Heck they've sent takedowns to youtube because a person was singing copy written music ( cough viacom cough ). As…

same goes for movies too, most of them nowadays barely go longer than 1:30.

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#16
post #2

Lawrence Lessig did a speech a while ago about the read-write web: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU In that, he talks about how, when the phonograph came out, people were up-in-arms that it would destroy the performance and enjoyment of music as a social thing, which clearly happened. The music world is changing back to that again, and I'm kind of glad. Also, he does a bitching powerpoint.

I love this as an illustration of how nothing changes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevernameless/320619642/

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#17
post #4

Small print on the image says, "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By..." I love it.

It says "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By Dylan Horrocks '09".

Dylan is a cartoonist from New Zealand. Here is a high resolution version of the comic ( http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/not-copyright.html ) , and a post about the NZ Copyright Amendment Act that inspired it ( http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/why-i-oppose-s92-o... ).

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#19
post #9

To be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software. It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and indexing ability of the Internet.

I agree, which is also why I think this spectrial was a mishap to begin with. They should have not attacked torrenting in general, they needed to attack the fact that Pirate Bay did nothing to remove torrents even by request. They also needed to show that Pirate Bay tracks almost exclusively pirated software/movies/music. They went after the wrong thing, because torrenting isn't inherently bad. It's only bad if peopl…

Clearly a technology is not to blame, or Google would be at fault for linking to them as well. But using torrents the 'wrong' way?

File sharing is legal in Sweden, which is why they have been able to operate for this long in a very transparent way (in terms of who runs the massive site).

Downloading music/movies is legal for personal use for me in Canada. Annoyingly, we pay a tax, but that is a whole other can of worms.

Why would the Pirate Bay remove torrents by request? They are doing nothing wrong. The MPAA/RIAA's course of action should have been to try and track down and sue individual downloaders in the US. The reason they aren't keen on that anymore is the bad publicity of suing regular folks and especially children.

I also really dislike the term 'wrong' here because it is not clear that it is wrong to copy a file. Downloads can lead to higher sales through exposure, and to me the rampant litigation to fight change (as demonstrated by the cartoon) is wrong.

Re: Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?

#20
post #9

To be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software. It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and indexing ability of the Internet.

Tapes went well beyond what you are giving them credit for - the mixtape scene in rap pre-released compilations of hits and were massively popular. Many artists claim they went the equivalent of platinum on mixtapes in NY alone. The distribution chains were also quite complex and well defined. However - it also served as a method for new artists to gain exposure so artists would actually leak their own material to good DJ's, sometimes even paying them to use their material. So it was a symbiotic relationship, like downloading music is.

It wasn't just teenage kids recording the radio. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_Tape:_The_Art_of_Cassette_C... if you want way too much information on it.

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