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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?'

#161

Post by pdabbadabba »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #140
gedrap wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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…

> But what TPB mainly distributed, was not information, it was products. It did no such thing. It provided a searchable list of user-generated content. It was no different than hacker news or reddit. It was used in a fashion that facilitated "crimes", but so are computers, Internet, and cash in general.

We can quibble over the meaning of the word "distributed," but I don't think this has much to do with anything. At the end of the day, the primary function of TPB is to allow users to download TV shows and movies for free. Indeed, the world-changing consequence of TPB shutting down, according to Sunde himself, is that "[i]t tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else." (Though, granted, he imagines that this will cause people to perceive some sort of slippy slope. His argument here seems to depend, however, on conflating TPB with the BT protocol itself.)

Nor is it especially relevant that computers, cash, the Internet, etc. all facilitate crimes, in some sense. TPB is easily distinguishable because its express purpose, and dominant actual use, is to facilitate crime.

I do respect that Sunde was willing to go to jail for his cause. But given the dubious specific goals of TPB as it was actually operated (despite whatever ideology might have supported or motivated it) I can't say that I'm particularly cowed by his moral courage generally.

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

#162

Post by jkaunisv1 »

ultramancool wrote: post #127
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.

> 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. Why do people confuse the concept of free speech with some specific political or legal idea? There are many other ways in which a reduction of free speech is extremely harmful. Look at the great firewall of China blocking democratic content, look at reviews being c…

And we don't want to live with people who can engage in the intellectual dishonesty that a site dedicated and known for primarily listing numbers pointing to copies of somebody else's work, that they worked hard to create, is harmless.

Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.

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

#163

Post by ultramancool »

kristiandupont wrote: post #160
ultramancool wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why do people confuse the concept of free speech with some specific political or legal idea? There are many other ways in which a reduction of free speech is extremely harmful. Look at the great firewall of China blocking democratic content, look at reviews being c…

Using Chinese censorship to argue about pirated content is, imo, a variation of the slippery slope fallacy. If someone obtained your family's credit card numbers and PINs, you would consider them to be in their good right to distribute them freely? They're just numbers, after all.

> Using Chinese censorship to argue about pirated content is, imo, a variation of the slippery slope fallacy.

I was not trying to do so, just using it as an example of freedom of speech being good in other contexts than the purely political.

But yes, credit card numbers are piss poor security wise. That's why banks essentially write replacements off. Compromise is expected.

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

#164

Post by rjaco31 »

danielalmeida wrote: post #119
reubenmorais wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torrenting is an answer to bad service. I want to look up a movie I want to watch, choose between different quality/file size options depending on my bandwidth/hard drive space needs, download an MP4 with decent speeds, watch it, then store it to watch again if I feel like it. I can do this legally for games via GOG or Steam, I can do this legally for (most) software I use, I can do this legally for music (limited ar…

I fully understand what you mean. I saw you're from Brazil too, so you know how awful Netflix is around here and how much we pay for games, for example. I download mostly due to the reasons you mentioned. As much as possible I avoid downloading books and I try to pay for music when I can (some stuff is just too expensive to import and many times really hard to find). I also rely on Steam and digital copies to avoid s…

Why? It's not like the most downloaded TV series are also the ones making the most money.

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

#165

Post by ultramancool »

jkaunisv1 wrote: post #162
ultramancool wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why do people confuse the concept of free speech with some specific political or legal idea? There are many other ways in which a reduction of free speech is extremely harmful. Look at the great firewall of China blocking democratic content, look at reviews being c…

And we don't want to live with people who can engage in the intellectual dishonesty that a site dedicated and known for primarily listing numbers pointing to copies of somebody else's work, that they worked hard to create, is harmless. Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is j…

> Yes, there are rich people who make money off of TV shows, movies, videogames, etc. But there are also regular hardworking people who depend on it for their living, and saying TPB is just exercising free speech really skips over the issue.

Does it though? TPB themselves are not doing any sort of piracy, nor are they harming anyone. That exercise is left entirely up to the users.

The only thing they do is distribute numbers, exactly like I just did. Your choice what you do with that. If you choose to use that number to harm someone, that's up to you, not me. I'm not at fault for giving you a number.

Perhaps those users look at it from another perspective: maybe people shouldn't be making money like that. We live in a post-scarcity world with digital resources, we have no need for such people anymore. We've shown time and time again that even without enforcement, some will thrive and profit greatly, some will operate for free, and others will fall. Maybe it's time to just let it happen and give up on the use of coercive force to create a false market.

I can't say whether it's right or wrong, I don't think there's a correct answer there, but you have to understand that different people view these issues entirely differently.

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

#166

Post by anthony_d »

izolate wrote: post #131
k-mcgrady wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "I oppose the legal definition that copyright == property" How about a definition like - "If I create something, I own it and have the right to profit from it." Why should my right to profit from what I create have a limited term? Why should it be ok for someone to copy it just because they have the ability to?

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." You are not born in isolation from the rest of us. Everything you create originated from an idea that you learned from somebody else. You have no right of ownership over something that is not entirely yours.

That's an argument against the entire idea of personal property. Maybe that's what you want but it's going to be a really tough sell.

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

#167

Post by 84koba »

lorddoig wrote: post #22

When did stealing other peoples' life work segue from a guilty necessity to a noble cause? I missed that.

Roughly about the same time that the scarcity of digitally generated goods became a lie. I'm not stealing from you, I'm getting a fully functional copy that doesn't affect your own copy in any way. It might though affect your capacity to profit from an artificially enforced inefficiency in distribution though, as opposed to finding a manner to attaching an intrinsic value to your trinkets.

The fact that you put a lot of effort into something doesn't equate to it by itself being worth anything.

Reductio ad absurdum: Regardless of how much effort you put into masturbation, your bodily fluids aren't more valuable because of it. And if your business model entails making people pay for viewing them inside a box rigged to make other people around it infertile, your business model is doomed.

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

#168

Post by mzl »

sampo wrote: post #82
solarc wrote: 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

You have understood that wrong. In those countries, private copying is legal , and the private copying levy is a tax on recordable media to collect some money from the people who legally practice private copying.

As a further note, the levy is intended for cases where the person doing the copy already has the right to do the copy (for example, recording from radio, recording a tv-show, or making a back-up copy of a movie one already owns a legal copy of). It is not intended to compensate for copying that is currently illegal (such as copies obtained using any form of pirating).

Many people misunderstand this, and think it is a levy to compensate for illegal copying. That is not, and has never been, the purpose. This misunderstanding is also one of the common arguments against the levy, since it gives the impression that even though some copying may be illegal, it is compensated.

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

#169

Post by rjaco31 »

agumonkey wrote: post #33

The 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…

>We won't stream the latest show from the other side of the planet right from peers in real time but well.

Ain't that what Popcorn Time is doing?

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

#170

Post by terrence_giggy »

the8472 wrote: post #65
icantthinkofone wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theft is theft, not free speech.

529C39CC24553DFE030119BD35E19884F34A65E0 Free speech or theft?

Context matters. I can yell FIRE in my own home, but I can't go into a crowded theatre and yell it. The hash as you post it here is meaningless. But elsewhere it could be the key to another's property.
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