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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?'

#341

Post by humanrebar »

nogridbag wrote: post #274
humanrebar wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry, but downloading entertain is not a human right. Making money from producing entertainment isn't a human right. Maybe certain entertainment business models aren't sustainable in the internet age. It's not like we'll run out of entertainment. Most cat-based YouTube videos are better than the Real Housewives of Schenectady anyway. And to extort and imprison people for the sake of a business model is terribl…

What makes entertainment so special? How is a hollywood movie different from any other product, like your laptop, smartphone, or even your web-app you charge money for?

The rightful owners of stolen physical property lose their possessions. The owners of copied data aren't deprived of their data.

Using a web-app without permission usually falls under contract violation or fraud. Maybe trespassing in some exotic cases.

Preventing the scraping the data from a web app (actually a political issue in Spain and Germany right now) shouldn't be more important than basic human rights like the freedom of speech. Nobody has the right to ownership of facts, for example.

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

#342

Post by lhc- »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #256
humanrebar wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human rights exist regardless of whether a particular legal framework honors them. Everyone has the right to speech, including the right to the private transmission of data, the right to assemble to pursue common interests, etc. Those rights have limitations when it comes to harming people, but people aren't being harmed by any particular copy of Duck Dynasty S06E03. The thing being harmed here is a business model. I…

Do business models not pay people's salaries? Is this not an interest worth protecting? I think you're view is in trouble (or at least, extremely radical) if it depends on the premise that no law that protects only financial interests can result in imprisonment. I think this is actually the one (perhaps only) point where copyright infringement is actually analogous to theft. Why do we prohibit shoplifting? Because sh…

Depriving someone of profit isn't a crime though. If I choose not to buy your product, I am depriving you of that profit. If I make a better product and consumers choose mine over yours, I'm depriving you of profit. Neither of these things is or should be illegal.

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

#343

Post by zanny »

the8472 wrote: post #271
pdabbadabba wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do business models not pay people's salaries? Is this not an interest worth protecting? I think you're view is in trouble (or at least, extremely radical) if it depends on the premise that no law that protects only financial interests can result in imprisonment. I think this is actually the one (perhaps only) point where copyright infringement is actually analogous to theft. Why do we prohibit shoplifting? Because sh…

grandparent said that he disagreed with people being imprisoned or fined for copyright infringement. Those are punishments. Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute. Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to r…

> That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.

Except then you have to have a great big state bureaucracy to arbitrarily allocate tax funds.

No, the correct solution is still free information - but all it takes is a change of perspective and mindset on the parts of content creators.

You have a valuable, scarce, useful asset. It is not the infinitely reproducible digital information at the end of the process that you use a legal framework to restrict distribution of. People want that, but information is no longer scarce, and to try to restrict it is unethical.

The valuable resource you have is your creativity. Your ability to produce that digital information is a scarce resource that few possess. The current model that most creators pursue is that an investor of some sort seeks to take advantage of the arbitrage the artificial implications that copyright imparts upon free markets to profit off the perpetual legal ownership of information, and pays you either a fixed salary or a fraction of the returns to actually produce the work, in exchange for the up front funding.

Kickstarter, patreon, gittip, etc are demonstrating the ability for consumers of information to also pay the scarce resource - the creation - themselves. And it would make a lot more sense for consumers to just pay for the culture they want to be made directly, and then everyone can experience it - rather than having some state institution doing it.

No, those current platforms are not appropriate to replace copyright. Of course they are not. They exist under copyright. We cannot conceive of what it would look like to have a legitimate free culture patronage service because one cannot exist right now. But I wrote this post and a bunch of others and keep debating the topic because I fundamentally have faith it would work, and that the ongoing cultural death of western civilization since the advent of perpetual copyright is much more detrimental to society than the free availability of Jersey Shore.

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

#344

Post by ultramancool »

terrence_giggy wrote: post #170
the8472 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The hash as you post it here is meaningless. But elsewhere it could be the key to another's property.

Not really, anyone who knows the basic structure of a magnet link can go...

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:529C39CC24553DFE030119BD35E19884F34A65E0

And it's perfectly useful. Paste it into any BT client, wind up with a copy of... Windows 7 it looks like. Practically the same as finding the link on TPB.

So, is this another's property or not? Did I just make it by appending a short string to turn it into a URL?

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

#345

Post by paulhebert »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #323
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. If I do not have food I do not have the right to demand you give me your food. // You do have that right, if I have plenty you have a right to a share of it. When the Earth was created no man had ownership of any of it. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote quite persuasively on this point. Sure if I take my food and waste it then that right is diminished accordingly. > If I can not afford to pay a local ut…

We've been speaking of rights in the legal context. And laws != morals. I think there are certain rights to access natural resources. For example the beaches of California are strictly public property. I think there are rights to fair access to natural resources such as water. However I do not think that if I spend considerable resources to build a distribution network for that water that other people have a right to…

I think this is a very important conversation for us to be having and I don't claim to have anywhere near all of the answers.

However, I do think that your first sentence kind of dodges the question here. The rest of this comment thread was discussing what rights people should have, not what rights they do have.

If we approach this from a legal viewpoint the conversation is over before it starts: Piracy's illegal, you don't have a right to content. You don't have a right to food.

However, when we start looking at it from a moral perspective things are much more open ended: Should we have a right to content? Should we have a right to food?

I think these are more interesting questions and that falling back on the rule of law kind of kills the discussion.

I guess at the end of the day I don't know the best way to handle copyright, but I do know we should have a conversation about it, and that we should come at it from a morality perspective.

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

#346

Post by scrollaway »

patzerhacker wrote: post #309
scrollaway wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's forget for a moment that, as you tell all those people your sorrows, you will in fact figure out that your product failed not because of piracy but because the product was not giving adequate value for its price... This is about movies and music at large. Software piracy is a solved problem. In games, the majority of people now use Steam and nobody really cares about the few that look for it on random torrent w…

>Let's forget for a moment that, as you tell all those people your sorrows, you will in fact figure out that your product failed not because of piracy but because the product was not giving adequate value for its price. That may be, but that doesn't mean that people have the right to unilaterally decide that the price should be zero against the wishes of the seller. They may have the technical ability to do so, but t…

>> Let's forget for a moment that ...

Good thing I said "let's forget that", huh?

> How do you make that logical jump?

Please keep reading?

> The small shops in the middle get it the worst.

Those small shops you keep mentioning, they don't exist anymore. There was a very small decade during which they did exist... shareware shops. Those were really crap. Boy I'm glad they're gone. You know what replaced them? Web apps shops (online-only, no piracy there) and mobile apps shops (where piracy has a much, much higher barrier of entry and is comparatively non-existant).

So as I said, software piracy is more or less a solved problem.

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

#347

Post by k-mcgrady »

Benji_San wrote: post #171
k-mcgrady wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix isn't the only option. You can use iTunes (which is available in a lot of countries with a large collection). You can buy the DVD online or in a store. You can buy a DVD online from a different country and have it shipped to you. And if ALL of that fails - what right do you have to that content anyway? You might want to give them your money, they might not want it. It sucks but it's a poor justification for p…

I don't really think a justification is needed. Yes it's illegal but so is driving faster than the speed limit, yet most people does it because they feel entitled. You can ticket people for breaking the rules but it isn't very effective as people value arriving at a red light 3 seconds faster higher than the risk of getting caught. Get real no one who has ever pirated anything is going to buy a DVD over pirating simp…

>> "Get real no one who has ever pirated anything is going to buy a DVD over pirating simply because buying the DVD is a really shitty service compared to the piratebay alternative."

Of course. My point is don't be self-righteous and use 'it's not available in my country' as justification for trying to make it moral.

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

#348

Post by clarry »

pestaa wrote: post #143
clarry wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would you personally not feel like someone "stole" at least some of your work from you? Absolutely not. If anything, I would be flattered to meet somebody actually reading my book, and I'd probably be eager to have a chat with him, maybe ask for opinions and perhaps tell him about other books I'm working on, if it looks like he could be interested. That'd be an event that could make me very happy. The reality is th…

Meanwhile, your family could be starving because you could sell exactly zero copies...

I can't blame people for not wanting to buy my stuff. I'm not entitled to any sales. They don't have to.

So if I'm starving, it's not the fault of the people who aren't interested in buying my stuff. Calling them thieves solves nothing.

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

#349

Post by ElComradio »

karmacondon wrote: post #43

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…

> I'd like to think that I would be willing to give up everything for what I believe is right. But everyone likes to think that.

This is so very true and why I can't stand it when people say things like "I may disagree but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." That person will do no such thing. She will not go risk her life for the right of Westboro Baptist Church, the Klan or Bill Cosby to have their say. If a law was passed muzzling Dick Cheney, she would not be in the streets rioting. It's melodramatic, preening, self-serving nonsense.

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

#350

Post by patzerhacker »

the8472 wrote: post #320
patzerhacker wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infuriating part is that the people that don't think the software is worth the value they would pay then also feel entitled enough to pay nothing and use it anyway. Don't want to use my software because you don't think it's worth the cost? That's fine, but you don't get to act high and mighty about using it without paying for it.

While I can understand the frustration it's not really lost sales, it's just purchases that never would have been made in the first place. It's the same with music piracy. Sure, one might buy 1 CD. Even 10 CDs. But very few people would buy those 20GB+ of worth of music they hoard on their harddrives. It's something they take for free but would never pay for. The difference with music is that you can make a partial p…

>While I can understand the frustration it's not really lost sales, it's just purchases that never would have been made in the first place.

This is really splitting hairs. Yes, I acknowledge that it wasn't _just_ piracy that caused the company to shut its doors. But to say that I can't be frustrated about people using the results of my work for free? In what other industry is it acceptable to say, "Yes, we like your product, but no, we're not going to pay, and if you try to make us pay we're going to throw our toys out of the pram about how evil the software developers are!" That's taking it to a whole new level, and that's really the point I was responding to.

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