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

wired.co.uk

191–200 of 372 posts

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

#191
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not allowed to sell stolen property, and I don't think you have a right to distribute code that was obtained illegally. Now if someone got a copy from the author with his/her permission, say by buying it, and then gave you a copy, you might have a defensible point.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, it was a lot different from Reddit or HN. Please stop trying to support the "pirating is okay". It's not. It's theft. You do not need or have to see those shows. You want to watch them and you fulfill that want by pirating. That pirating may cause purchases later is a horrible argument for theft.

>It's theft.

Stop repeating that. It isn't. Even the courts agree on this one.

And TPB did not engage in it either way.

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

#193
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

The correct analogy is: Ford doesn't sell a Ford in Argentina, but a legal owner of a Ford car offered to give you a copy of hers/his, and you accepted it.

Except that your friend can't just click a button and send you a copy of their Ford. Your analogy makes no sense, Fords aren't made of bits.

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

#194

I'm sorry, but downloading entertainment is not a human right. He didn't exactly feed starving people by breaking the law. He put up a torrent aggregator to, mostly, Hollywood movies and shoved aggressive and high-revenue porn and malware ads into every nook and cranny of that site. HN and those passionate about internet freedoms deserve better heroes than guys like Sunde, Dotcom, and Ulbricht. These guys very much e…

I think if you're doing something illegal, you should assume that you are putting yourself in danger. TPB is like walking down a dark hallway to score some drugs. There are loose women, people trying to scam you, and people trying to lead you astray.

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

#195
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And "Nobody says copyright holders should be forced to publish their works." should be a warning flag to you. Once you get to a position that twisty, you should think to yourself there's probably something wrong with it. Strange, because that's exactly how the patent/business secrets laws work; a company is free to decide what they want to do with their new invention; they can keep it secret and risk someone else r…

What's being said here is that if you want to keep the rights to something, you must keep it to yourself. If you publish it, you must lose control. That's exactly the opposite of what patents say. Patents say if you want to publish something, you can still have protection for it.

Yes, that's correct. A patent is a legal construct that temporarily gives the creator more protections than they would "naturally" have. This is specifically done to encourage people to publish their ideas. After a time, this protection goes away and things are back to normal.

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

#196
post #102

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?

> 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…

>Why should they be compensated?

I watch plenty of stuff without paying for it so I don't want to pretend that I am on some high moral horse here, but i don't get this mindset.

Of course just putting in effort doesn't give me the right to compensation. If so, I could just start digging holes and ask the world for payment. However, if I made something and you want to see it, I think I am in my good right to set a price. If you don't like that price, you are free to move along. There are plenty of files on my laptop that I created that I don't want to show anyone. They are going to stay there and nobody has the right to see them other than me. And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents.

If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.

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

#197

I'm sorry, but downloading entertainment is not a human right. He didn't exactly feed starving people by breaking the law. He put up a torrent aggregator to, mostly, Hollywood movies and shoved aggressive and high-revenue porn and malware ads into every nook and cranny of that site. HN and those passionate about internet freedoms deserve better heroes than guys like Sunde, Dotcom, and Ulbricht. These guys very much e…

>It tilted people's brains into knowing that tomorrow, their favorite TV show must be downloaded somewhere else.

Not sure how I feel about this. Regardless of how things have played out, I don't think people should expect free TV shows especially in the day and age of PVR/DVR/TIVO etc. I still think creators should be credited/paid for their work.

EDIT - To expand, I think you can disagree with the cable companies and how they distribute programs (large packages of channels you want and some you don't) but I don't think you can disagree that the actors, cameramen, writers, riggers etc shouldn't be paid for their work.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct analogy is: Ford doesn't sell a Ford in Argentina, but a legal owner of a Ford car offered to give you a copy of hers/his, and you accepted it.

Except that your friend can't just click a button and send you a copy of their Ford. Your analogy makes no sense, Fords aren't made of bits.

Exactly. I was trying to show that analogies between digital content and physical things don't make sense.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> That's an argument against the entire idea of personal property.

It doesn't seem to be inherently an argument against the entire idea of "personal property", it seems to be inherently an argument against the idea that property (personal, real, or otherwise) is a matter of absolute right, rather than a matter of an exchange in which owners are granted privilege at the expense of restrictions on everyone else's freedom because of a perceived social benefit to that exchange -- where the parameters, then, of the particular privileges of owners become subject to analysis of whether the exchange really does have net social value.

In regards to intellectual property of the types dependent, in US law, on the Constitution's so-called "Copyright Clause", this is pretty explicitly the premise in the US Constitutional system; in addition, the differences in the privileges and limitations of real and personal property rights (and the particular parameters of particular subclasses of each), as well as things like eminent domain, are very hard to conceptualize under a model of property-as-absolute-right unless you simply define each feature as its own axiom of property rights, except the ones you don't like and define them as violations of axiomatic rights, whereas the whole regime of property rights and its evolution makes a lot more sense under a social benefit exchange view with an evolving view of what provisions actually provide social benefit.

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