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Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
31–40 of 372 posts
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#32I feel this is a very important article with a very important message, but I'm just not sure what I can do to help! They have money, guns, political support, media and very powerful, highly emotional rhetoric. The only thing I can do is hack on software, but most people don't care enough about "geeky stuff". I feel that the only way this issues will get resolved is if they get much, much worse first (i.e. high-profil…
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Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#33The man choosed to do what he did, but when they were heavily fined I already felt an obligation to pay a part of it, as I was a regular user before that. About the future of the web and other larger social questions, I find it hard to believe.. when it's mostly movies and tv shows (even though there was some hard to find vintage content on it sometimes). Lastly, as for anything, when technology N is unavailable, we go back to N-1. We won't stream the latest show from the other side of the planet right from peers in real time but well.
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't put Sunde in the same category as Snowden and Manning. The Pirate Bay isn't some noble cause like the latter two. It did have a minor effect of disrupting the industry and accelerating the inevitable change in business model for the film and movie industry.
> The Pirate Bay isn't some noble cause Consider it as a litmus test for free speech. Providing links to pirated content, not even the content itself, can easily be seen as free speech.
I think you're really stretching it there.
Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas using one's body and property to anyone who is willing to receive them.
Not sharing hashcodes to copyrighted works over the internet.
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Freedom on the Internet != Piracy. I can't really remember this guy doing anything for freedom, except freedom to download Hollywood entertainment for free. I mean, sure, I pirate, but I sure don't pretend it's virtuous.
So the guy ran a website which greatly increased the chances of him going to jail, while at the same time being hardly the best way to increase his personal wealth (even just switching to a "locker site" would be much more profitable). It's fine to think it's wrong, but why is that so hard to believe he's sincere, and not just "pretending"?
Just because someone's sincere doesn't mean he's not an idiot. Just because something doesn't make a profit doesn't mean it's virtuous. The Doom floppies I gave out in high school didn't make me a profit (I only charged as much as the floppies cost), but that didn't make it virtuous.
Which I don't see why everyone thinks TPB was a non-profit. They were pulling in hundreds of thousands a month via ads, way more than their costs, I would think. But we won't know, because there was no transparency.
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#36When did stealing other peoples' life work segue from a guilty necessity to a noble cause? I missed that.
When did imprisoning people for standing up for free speech not become a noble cause?
Also, show me one thing he copied without permission.
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Freedom on the Internet != Piracy. I can't really remember this guy doing anything for freedom, except freedom to download Hollywood entertainment for free. I mean, sure, I pirate, but I sure don't pretend it's virtuous.
Hollywood is just the testbed. If you can transmit Hollywood stuff to the masses without a way for them to stop you, then you can transmit other more important information when the time comes.
Tinfoil much?
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#38He went to jail for creating a website that enabled people to download music and movies without paying for them. Jail is a harsh punishment IMO for that. ACTA/SOPA etc. are all terrible things that we can't allow and we can't allow the internet to become more centralised/controlled by government. But that's not why he went to jail. Enabling illegal downloads of content has little to do with those causes.
Gandhi went to jail for picking up salt from a beach, which was also illegal. Legality of some act is not a fundamental law of science and shouldn't be treated as such.
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#39I feel this is a very important article with a very important message, but I'm just not sure what I can do to help! They have money, guns, political support, media and very powerful, highly emotional rhetoric. The only thing I can do is hack on software, but most people don't care enough about "geeky stuff". I feel that the only way this issues will get resolved is if they get much, much worse first (i.e. high-profil…
Well you can always hack on decentralised, encrypted, hidden peer to peer chat, or other open software alternatives of high quality for all the services we use every day and so forth. If media is a problem, work on solutions for anonymous publishing etc.. if the software is good enough (including having a good ui and whatnot), it's less geeky. After all, people adopted BitTorrent, which is quite geeky!
Providing technical workarounds for broken policy can only do so much. It doesn't fix policy. It can only help avoiding enforcement.
Which might lead to court cases where they try to make an example of a poor sap they have caught. This has already happened to some extent with peer to peer file sharing.
a) only few individual users get caught and dragged through the courts, but they get slapped with damages in the hundred-thousands[1].
b) there is no big mafia boss responsible for everything they could hold accountable. So now they go after companies making software[2] or after sites such as TPB. Not on the premises that they did anything illegal themselves but that they enabled others to do so.
So who says that the net of what's illegal won't get cast even wider in the future if someone were to develop something that's even harder for them to prosecute? Or one could even argue that evasion through technology leads to policy becoming even more restrictive, even if that restrictive policy remains largely ineffective except for those few that actually get hit by it.
I'm not saying that the technology shouldn't be developed, I'm just saying that it doesn't automatically make society more free by itself. It just provides an underground in which one may move.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_....
Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'
#40He went to jail for creating a website that enabled people to download music and movies without paying for them. Jail is a harsh punishment IMO for that. ACTA/SOPA etc. are all terrible things that we can't allow and we can't allow the internet to become more centralised/controlled by government. But that's not why he went to jail. Enabling illegal downloads of content has little to do with those causes.
And what's the alternative ? The world is not the United States, in most countries of the world, there is simply no legal way to get a movie/tv show on the Internet. I'm not even talking about 3rd world countries here, Netflix (the only service which is good enough to compare to Torrents) just barely arrived in Europe and their list of movies is so poor, it's not even worth talking about it. Torrents are not working…
> there is simply no legal way to get a movie/tv show on the Internet.
Yes, how dare someone not sell their widget everywhere! If Ford won't sell me a car in Argentina, I'll just go steal it!
It's a freedom issue! I must be able to legally watch Friends!