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US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

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Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#271

Post by a1369209993 »

abakker wrote: post #270
a1369209993 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, by that logic I assume you're in favor of legalizing things like crack cocaine and methamphetamine? After all, if someone is a against such products, they have the choice to not buy them. (Not entirely rhetorical - I can imagine a internally consistent position with those principles, I just don't think you actually hold it.)

I think it is pretty easy to allow consistent viewpoints which hold that crack and copyrights are different things. But, yeah, I think we might find some common ground on legalizing drugs and treating addictions as medical conditions. banning them hasn’t really had fantastic outcomes.

> But, yeah, I think we might find some common ground on legalizing drugs and treating addictions as medical conditions. banning them hasn't really had fantastic outcomes.

Fair point, yes.

As a better example, I am quite happy to sacrifice slave traders's jobs for my ideals. (As a added bonus, this one is actually ontologically related via the notion that it's possible to have legitimate property interests in (parts of) a person or persons.)

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#272

Post by thatcat »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #46
toyg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal. I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotco…

Let me say as an artist who has watched his hard work being openly pirated, I disagree. Piracy destroys jobs, opportunity and initiative. If these cretins want to distribute art for free, they can get off their butts and make their own. No one is stopping them. The world needs more voices, but piracy encourages these loafers to do nothing.

Why do you think you’re entitled to a certain business model?

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#273

Post by s1artibartfast »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #175
philipov wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright law has a place, but as it currently stands, it doesn't protect independent artists sufficiently, while giving large media firms disproportionate power. This ultimately hurts small content producers a lot more than it helps them, because they have to compete with companies much larger than them that can afford to use their economies of scale to bully independent artists into submission. The fact that it's s…

> Copyright law has a place Yes, in a pre-computer and pre-internet society. It has no place in the 21st century. > allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright.…

>You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright.

This seems to me to be a very strange mindset. Someone else has created content you want, is not offered for sale to you, so you it is in your right to seal it? What makes this OK and where does it end?

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#274

Post by philipov »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #273
matheusmoreira wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright law has a place Yes, in a pre-computer and pre-internet society. It has no place in the 21st century. > allowing large corporations to use legal action to shelter themselves from having to improve their offering hurts both consumers and small businesses You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright.…

>You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright. This seems to me to be a very strange mindset. Someone else has created content you want, is not offered for sale to you, so you it is in your right to seal it? What makes this OK and where does it end?

> What makes this OK and where does it end?

What makes it okay is that intellectual property can be copied infinitely without depriving the original owner of it, and the fact that they refuse to sell it to you means you're not even depriving them of potential income, so there's no way of claiming there was any damage done.

It ends when you start talking about actual property that has limited physical supply. Intellectual property isn't real. It naturally has infinite supply, so its market value should be zero.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#275

Post by brigandish »

philipov wrote: post #274
s1artibartfast wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You know what sucks? Wanting to buy something, being willing to pay for it and finding out that what I want is not available to me. Because of copyright. This seems to me to be a very strange mindset. Someone else has created content you want, is not offered for sale to you, so you it is in your right to seal it? What makes this OK and where does it end?

> What makes this OK and where does it end? What makes it okay is that intellectual property can be copied infinitely without depriving the original owner of it, and the fact that they refuse to sell it to you means you're not even depriving them of potential income, so there's no way of claiming there was any damage done. It ends when you start talking about actual property that has limited physical supply. Intellec…

Its market value should be whatever people in the market are willing to pay for it given that the owners are willing to sell it at that price.

There are lots of things that have artificial scarcity through the simple act of ownership and this is one of them.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#276

Post by anoncake »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #256
anoncake wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a silly question. Of course I think there are situations where a taxi driver should be jailed. For example, when they commit terrorism. Being a taxi driver does not justify immoral acts. That would be absurd. Illegal acts, however, don't need to be justified. The fact homosexuality was once illegal should be proof enough that doing something illegal is not a sufficient condition for deserving punishment. > The…

>The fact homosexuality was once illegal should be proof enough that doing something illegal is not a sufficient condition for deserving punishment. That there is an example of a thing is no argument that all things follow that pattern. So what if some past law was bad. That is not evidence a current one is also bad. By that simplistic reasoning, if I pointed out a law in the past was a good law, I could then conclud…

> That there is an example of a thing is no argument that all things follow that pattern.

Of course not. Nowhere did I argue that there are no good laws. Every law should be evaluated on its own merits.

> And as far as the law goes, yes, something illegal does mean something deserves punishment, under the law.

Under the law. The law is the opinion of the state. If something deserves punishment under the law, the state believes it deserves punishment. That doesn't mean it actually does.

> Ignoring that lots of items that are counterfeited are also copyright violations? Anything copying custom code is a copyright violation, and a massive amount of products now have some programmed component.

Then why did you bring trademarks into this? They're separate issues, even if they can occur at the same time.

> Nowhere did I make such equivalencies. Please stop with the dramatic metaphors - they're not relevant to the discussion.

Absolutely not. I'll continue to express my opinions and arguments the way I see fit.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#277

Post by Y_Y »

toyg wrote: post #42
tzs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dotcom's company's whole purpose was to make money facilitating movie piracy, under the guise of being an innocent file storage and sharing company. Their internal processes and procedures were designed to make it appear that they took down pirated material when informed of its existence while actually making sure it was still there and accessible via other links that the copyright owner had not yet discovered. They…

mrandish's point is that the amount of effort spent on Dotcom by authorities was disproportionate to the size and importance of the crime, and abusive of the legal system. This might well be true at the same time as the fact that Dotcom was a criminal. I would tend to agree with mrandish, for the simple fact that they don't do that sort of raid even for people who owe the taxman several multiples of the profits Dotco…

You're absolutely right that these two things can be true at once. I commend you for your level-headed evaluation and I wish there were more comments like yours.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#278

Post by frank2 »

dariosalvi78 wrote: post #116
bserge wrote: post #4

Wow, that's a whole lot of work put into this, and I don't understand why... What do these scene members have to gain? If anything, they're doing the media companies a service, free viral campaigns. Without pirated content, a lot of people would never hear or care about their movies, TV shows, music. If they can't afford it, they won't buy it anyway. Microsoft and Adobe seem to have realized this, and now they're mak…

>> Why does Netflix USA/UK/etc have different content? Why do games have region locks and ridiculous DRM? I pay Netflix in the country I live, but I can't find content in my native language, so, guess what? I get pirate movies. Similar reasoning applies to some old films: very hard to find online in any legal way or at a reasonable price. I'd love to pay a fair price to get access to films, but the industry makes it…

>I pay Netflix in the country I live, but I can't find content in my native language, so, guess what? I get pirate movies.

Are most of the movies you pirate in your native language?

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#279

Post by mschuster91 »

bleepblorp wrote: post #60

19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history. It was the destruction of a warez group. In the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, the most important thing on the DoJ agenda was not to follow up on any of the numerous intelligence leads warning that Islamist terrorists were planning…

> 19 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the then-Attorney General appeared before the media to proudly announce the conclusion of the largest operation in DoJ history.

>It was the destruction of a warez group.

In Germany, we have something similar, although with two orders of magnitude less deaths. The conservative Berlin Interior Senator Frank Henkel and his top officers decided in 2016, right in front of the election, to move spies from observing Islamist terrorists to observing a couple of left-anarchist "occupied houses". The result? One of the Islamists was Anis Amri, who half a year later infamously murdered twelve people at Breitscheidplatz: https://taz.de/Anis-Amri-und-die-Rigaer-Strasse/!5510622/

The priority setting of interior politicians seems to be ... messed up across the globe.

Re: US indictments of piracy group members throw top-tier piracy world into chaos

#280

Post by pg_1234 »

sjy wrote: post #242
mrandish wrote: post #23

I'm concerned our justice systems is expending enormous resources investigating and prosecuting these cases as felony crimes on behalf of the MPAA and RIAA lobbies (which have a revolving door of former fed prosecutors as employees/lobbyists). The cases are more properly pursued in civil court where the pirates should be sued for the damages they cause (not agreeing with MPAA's damage assessment, that's for the judge…

> The cases are more properly pursued in civil court ... that is before we even get to the moral and ethical debate about the true damages from purely electronic, not-for-profit media piracy clubs I don’t think it is possible to defer the moral and ethical question about the activities of these groups. Copyright holders have tried the civil option and it does not work. It is too expensive to pursue casual pirates, an…

Perhaps that should be taken as a sign that MPAA and RIAA are overstepping acceptable behaviour and should back off

... rather than abusing international laws intended for serious infractions

The rest of the world should say "did they shoot innocent civilians in a foreign country? ... no, oh well then we'll put it at the bottom of the pile and get back to it when you , the USA, have cleaned house on REAL criminal activity."

Just how screwed up does "justice" have to be to put corporate profits derived from rentseeking on digital goods over war crimes ... ?

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