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

wired.co.uk

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

#101

Post by danielalmeida »

marknutter wrote: post #88
danielalmeida wrote: post #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 sho…

Well, to be pedantic, TPB never actually shares content with anybody. It just links people to other people who are sharing content. And it isn't always copyrighted content. The point isn't to help people steal stuff, it's to help people share information, regardless of whatever arbitrary laws exist about sharing information. That's a worthy cause, IMO.

I'm not going into the "sharing links vs sharing content" debate.

> And it isn't always copyrighted content.

True, it isn't ALWAYS, but I guess it's mostly copyrighted.

> The point isn't to help people steal stuff, it's to help people share information, regardless of whatever arbitrary laws exist about sharing information. That's a worthy cause, IMO.

I do think we should be able to share information freely, not necessarily share whatever I want. My problem is with the "regardless of whatever arbitrary laws exist about sharing information" part.

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

#102

Post by zxcdw »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #57
tomp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Manning went to jail for revealing government secrets about government crimes. And Snowden cannot return home because he revealed that people are being spied on. It's very easy to say, "he went to jail because what he did was illegal". It's harder to say "he went to jail despite what he did was right". I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free.

>> "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?

> And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?

Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not.

If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism?

Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this.

Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive.

I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.

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

#103

Post by zxcdw »

yitchelle wrote: post #95
kruczek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might want to give them your money, they might not want it. Actually in such case piracy doesn't need any justification, since it doesn't harm anyone. With only two alternatives - either to download content illegally or to not get it at all, content owners get exactly the same: nothing.

> since it doesn't harm anyone How did you come this this conclusion?

No "lost potential sale", when the sale wasn't even a realistic possibility?

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

#104

Post by icebraining »

stelonix wrote: post #98
hackerboos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Somehow you see "links to hashes" as stretching freedom of speech and the ability to arbitrarily ban hashes in strings as the way it's supposed to be? I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing.

I believe you and the parent post have fundamentally different views of what's right, just and moral, and any discussion between you and him/her or anyone else with the same views will lead to nothing.

Copyright discussions in a nutshell. That's why I only play for sport.

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

#105

Post by lmm »

happyscrappy wrote: post #80
cturner wrote: 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…

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.

You have it backwards. You don't have some inalienable right to government-backed control over what I do with my copy of some code. The original will always be yours, but my copy is mine, and actually I do have a close-to-inalienable right to do whatever I want to with my own property.

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

#107

Post by EStudley »

verroq wrote: post #73
the8472 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't say that. I'd say they care about encryption/their personal security, but they don't care in the slightest what the implementation is.

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

#108

Post by lmm »

Donzo wrote: post #83
tomp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you believe that content creators should have some say in how their work is distributed? Should they be able to choose whatever monetization system they feel is most appropriate for their work?

You can choose not to sell a thing, or you can choose to sell it. You can even offer it via a contract where people are permitted to do some things with it and not others. But what is really poisonous is the government-prohibited-by-default position of copyright, where people who come into possession of e.g. old, out-of-print books are forbidden from copying them even if noone knows who would or could "own the rights".

If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.

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

#109

Post by icebraining »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #89
tomp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Manning went to jail for revealing government secrets about government crimes. And Snowden cannot return home because he revealed that people are being spied on. It's very easy to say, "he went to jail because what he did was illegal". It's harder to say "he went to jail despite what he did was right". I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free.

Cool. Please link to online repository of everything you've ever produced, under any circumstances, for any purpose.

Why? Nobody is saying that copyright holders should be forced to distribute their work for free. Only that people, after having acquired copies, should be able to share it with others.

If you want to distribute copies of all the work I've ever published, or work made by me and published by the company I work for, you're free to do so. It's all under Free licenses.

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

#110

Post by higherpurpose »

gedrap wrote: post #99
tomp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Manning went to jail for revealing government secrets about government crimes. And Snowden cannot return home because he revealed that people are being spied on. It's very easy to say, "he went to jail because what he did was illegal". It's harder to say "he went to jail despite what he did was right". I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free.

>>> sharing of information But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. And they are not essential products, you can live just fine without TV series or movies. People don't die because they can't play their favourite video game. It's like saying designer clothes should be free. Information should be shared without profit, yeah, that's what wikipedia is doing fine. But video games are not in…

> It's like saying designer clothes should be free.

I wonder if it's not more like "designer cloths shouldn't be copyrighted" - which is actually true in the fashion world. And because of that tens if not hundreds of millions of people can get "cheap cloths" that look good.

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