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Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

wired.co.uk

71–80 of 372 posts

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#71

Many don't agree with the principles of TPB, but Sunde was willing to take risks for what he believed in. He deserves a lot of respect for that no matter what people think about the morality of what he helped to create. Most people go their whole lives without caring strongly about any issue at all, and almost all of those that do care are willing to sacrifice exactly nothing. I'd like to think that I would be willin…

The willingness to die for your ideas is the main subject of Camus's philosophical writeup "The Myth of Sisyphus".

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#72
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Theft is theft, not free speech.

What is your opinion of the people who shared the DeCSS key? If "46DCEAD317FE45D80923EB97E4956410D4CDB2C2" is free speech, so is a magnet URI

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#73
post #39
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hun…

Non technical users also don't care about encryption/security and what not.

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#74
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a dangerous line of thinking. Just because people in the US have legal access to content doesn't mean you're allowed to steal it. You make the assumption that you're entitled to something if it's commercially available to people in other parts of the world. You're not. Movies and TV Shows aren't basic necessities that you're entitled to. They are luxuries that you can have if companies decide to sell them to y…

No matter what you think about it, copyright infringement isn't theft.

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#75
post #63
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a tax in some countries over blank CD/DVD exactly for that reason, enabling illegal copying. It is a crazy world, anything is possible. Edit: found a link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

So, by that definition, it's not illegal.

Nope, still illegal. You're paying for something you can't legally do.

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#76
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free." And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?

How are the people who created Facebook compensated? I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook. Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few…

> I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies.

It could be; whether it's ideal or not is another question:

* It likely wouldn't make as much money as having people pay for it.

* Imagine how much product placement there would be. If you think it's bad enough now...

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#77
> "What people reveal, what people fight for, are major causes. Freedom of information. Liberty. Democracy. Governmental transparency and due process."

I have a really hard time trying to link this with my experience on TPB. It's all about downloading stuff without paying for it. Honestly, that's it. I'm not proud of that, I'm not saying it's a noble thing to do. I really don't get what trying to "determine" what should or shouldn't be free by sharing other people's stuff without their permission has to do with freedom.

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#78
post #58
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a watertight rights basis for opposing copyright. Copyright is a major structural threat to our freedoms. Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder. You might say - that's just words. But it's not. Both in software and…

> Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder. Every "right" is an "anti-right." It's a restriction on what other people can do. Your right to bodily integrity is a restriction on my natural freedom to do whatever I want with my e…

If you accept the principle of live-and-let-live (raised above), there's a chasm between what constitutes a right and anti-right. If you don't accept live and let live, you've got some explaining to do. It goes back thousands of years, it's well-entrenched in the new testament (defines women as being equal to men; repeatedly scorns class-based rights) and then reiterated in each of the various rights documents that have helped shape western culture since then.

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#79
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Theft is theft, not free speech.

Copying is not theft!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ

Re: Peter Sunde: 'I went to jail for my cause. What did you do?'

#80
post #45
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait wait. You're telling me Sunde is comparable to Snowden and Manning? Wat.

There is a watertight rights basis for opposing copyright. Copyright is a major structural threat to our freedoms. Our governments are founded generally on rights, which extend from a general principle of live-and-let-live. Copyright is an anti-right. Each time it comes into effect, it removes rights away from everyone except the copyright holder. You might say - that's just words. But it's not. Both in software and…

You don't have some fucking inalienable right to my code. If I choose to open source it fine. Just because some cracker asshole gets a copy of it doesn't make it a right.
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