281–289 of 289 posts
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Why is it fair that you get to be subsidized by everyone who does pay? Imagine a world where everyone had the same attitude as you and did not pay for any media. Pirates get to pirate only because most people don’t. So why are you so special?
I've bought more media than you. Why is it fair that you get to be subsidized by me?
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> Because they're statutory damages, because the actual point of the exercise is to make an example of the person breaking the law. That's quite inaccurate. Punitive damages are typically treble damages, i.e. three times the actual amount, not 750 to 150,000 times the actual amount. The actual point of statutory damages is that proving actual damages is hard, and then if you caught someone with a pirate printing pres…
> That's quite inaccurate. What is? My claim is that regardless of the exact wording the intent behind the law in this specific case is to make an example of violators. Do you dispute that? If so, on what basis? Because I believe the past several decades of results speak for themselves. > The problem is they then applied that to P2P networks and people who were on average making a single copy. A person retains a sing…
The notion that statutory damages were intended to exceed actual damages by such an unreasonable factor on purpose (hundreds to hundreds of thousands, when the standard for punitive damages is 3) rather than the ridiculous result of applying a law written with one circumstance in mind to an entirely different circumstance.
> A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively participate in the creation of many other copies (potentially hundreds of thousands as you say).
Many of the early P2P networks (and some of the current ones, especially for small to medium files) don't have more than one user participating in any given transfer. If you wanted to download something on Napster it would connect to one other person and download the entire file from them, with no other users being involved.
That is also what happens in practice in modern day even for the networks that try to download different parts of the same file from different people, because connections are now fast enough that as soon as you connect to one peer, you have the whole file. A 3MB MP3 transfers in ~30ms on a gigabit connection, meanwhile the round trip latency to a peer in another city is typically something like 100ms (even for fast connections, because latency is bounded by the speed of light). So it's common to connect to one peer and have the entire file before you can even complete a handshake with a second one, and rather implausible for a file of that size to involve more than a single digit number of peers. Hundreds of thousands would be fully preposterous. And then we're back to, the number of uploads divided by the number of users is ~1, so if the average transfer involves, say, four peers, the number of uploads the average peer will have participated in for that file will also be four. Not hundreds, much less hundreds of thousands.
Meanwhile you're back to the problem where splitting the files should be splitting the liability. If four people each upload 25% of one file to each of four other people, the total number of copies is four, not sixteen. If you want to pin all four on the first person then also pinning all four on the second person is double dipping.
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> Well there's also the issue of enablement. If you're overly enthusiastic to turn a blind eye to illegal conduct you end up being labeled an accomplice. That's something the industry made up out of whole cloth. If someone sells ski masks that can be used for both keeping the wind off your face when you're skiing and hiding your face when you're committing burglary and has no means to know what any given person inten…
> That's something the industry made up out of whole cloth. No, that's how the law (at least in the US) generally works across the board. Your ski mask example is misplaced. There are legitimate uses for the product and it isn't immediately apparent to the store why someone might be purchasing a given item. It's not their job to invade their customer's privacy. Your logic regarding torrents only works if we assume th…
You seem to be implying that nothing is ever legitimately fair use.
> Your logic regarding torrents only works if we assume that a significant number of peers are engaging in fair use.
What evidence do you have that this isn't the case? Not evidence that someone is doing it for the wrong reasons, evidence that no significant number of people are doing it for any legitimate reason.
There are a lot of things that are plausibly fair use. If you subscribe to a streaming service with a plan that includes 4k content but their broken service won't play that content on your 4k TV, can you get a 4k copy of the thing you're actually paying for? If you're a teacher and the law specifically says you can make copies for classroom use, but the copy you have has copy protection, can you get a copy that doesn't from someone else? If you're an organization trying to make software that can automatically subtitle videos based on the audio so that hearing impaired users can know what's being said, and you need a large amount of training data (i.e. existing video that has already been subtitled) to do machine learning, can you get them from someone else? What if you're an archivist and you actually are making backup copies of everything you can get your hands on to preserve the historical record?
What alternative do such people even have for doing the legitimate thing they ostensibly have a right to do?
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> That's quite inaccurate. What is? My claim is that regardless of the exact wording the intent behind the law in this specific case is to make an example of violators. Do you dispute that? If so, on what basis? Because I believe the past several decades of results speak for themselves. > The problem is they then applied that to P2P networks and people who were on average making a single copy. A person retains a sing…
> What is? The notion that statutory damages were intended to exceed actual damages by such an unreasonable factor on purpose (hundreds to hundreds of thousands, when the standard for punitive damages is 3) rather than the ridiculous result of applying a law written with one circumstance in mind to an entirely different circumstance. > A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively partic…
I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent of swarms) but I won't belabor it.
I'll also ask how you reasonably expect a court to go about performing the partial attributions you describe for data torrented from a large swarm. Like how would that even work in practice?
You make an interesting point about overall averages yet it seems to entirely miss the point of the law. Damages aren't reduced if I only illegally reproduce 25% of a book. A single chapter and the entire work are treated as equivalent here. It's the act and intent that the law is concerned with, not the extent (at least within reason).
The question is what color your bits are. Now how many of them you have or how many different people you obtained them from.
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> What is? The notion that statutory damages were intended to exceed actual damages by such an unreasonable factor on purpose (hundreds to hundreds of thousands, when the standard for punitive damages is 3) rather than the ridiculous result of applying a law written with one circumstance in mind to an entirely different circumstance. > A person retains a single copy for himself. However he does indeed actively partic…
Agreed that the magnitude of the penalty no longer matches the intent of the original law. But note that my original claim was not inaccurate. The point of the law here _is_ to make an example of people. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent…
Whether they're mutually exclusive or not, I don't think that was even the point of the law. The point of statutory damages is supposed to be to address the problem of proving an exact amount of actual damages, by instead providing what was supposed to be a plausible estimate of them. But then they got applied in a context where the number hard-coded into the law is an exorbitant overestimate.
> I believe your claims about network speeds and peer count are largely inaccurate when it comes to torrents (and any other block based protocol that involves the equivalent of swarms) but I won't belabor it.
I'm pretty confident that's accurate for small files like a 3MB MP3. They literally do get fully transferred before the client has time to connect to a non-trivial number of peers. A lot of torrents use a 4MB chunk size, and even when the chunk size is smaller, you're still going to get multiple chunks from any given peer. Even with e.g. a 512kB chunk size a 3MB file has an upper limit of 6 peers, if you can even connect to that many before the first one has sent the whole file.
Large files could use more peers, but "hundreds of thousands" is still a crazy number. There are a non-trivial number of consumer junk routers that will outright crash if you try to open that number of simultaneous connections.
And I regularly use BitTorrent for Linux ISOs (I know it's a cliche but it's true), which are decently large files. The median number of connected peers when seeding really is zero, and the active number rarely exceeds 1, for anything that isn't a very recent release. Even if I leave the thing on indefinitely, until it's no longer a supported release and no one wants it anymore, on a connection with a gigabit upload, the average ratio will end up around 1. Because of course it is, because that's inherently the network-wide average.
> I'll also ask how you reasonably expect a court to go about performing the partial attributions you describe for data torrented from a large swarm. Like how would that even work in practice?
I mean this isn't really that hard, right? If getting the exact number for a specific person is unrealistic, we still know that total copies (and therefore total uploads) per user is ~1. So to do the normal punitive damages amount you take that number and multiply it by 3 instead of hundreds or hundreds of thousands.
> Damages aren't reduced if I only illegally reproduce 25% of a book. A single chapter and the entire work are treated as equivalent here.
But the entire work is being reproduced. The issue is that in the cases where it's a group effort, they're trying to double dip.
Suppose Alice, Bob, Carol and Dan work together to break into your shop like Ocean's 11 and steal four $1 cookies. They each get a cookie and you lost four. (Never mind whether you actually lost them or not.) If you only catch Carol, it's not always reasonable to put her on the hook for the entire amount instead of only her portion of it, but at least you could plausibly argue for it. But if you catch two of them, or all of them, expecting them to each pay the total for the whole group instead of collectively pay the total for the whole group is definitely unreasonable.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the RIAA sued children for downloading Metallica albums on filesharing networks. They sued for $100,000 per song, an absurd amount when you consider that even stealing a physical album would amount only to around $1 per song. What was bizarre was that courts took the figure seriously, even if they typically settled cases for around $3,000, still around 30x actual damages. Th…
Your memory may be failing you. The "maxima" you cite still exist, but they are merely statutory damages provisions. In other words, the plaintiffs can obtain such damages without proof of actual loss, i.e. strict liability. If the plaintiffs succeed in pricing actual damages beyond this level, they can obtain them.
Beyond what level? I am loosing you on that.
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It has been often said that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
Judges often roll this line out, but in criminal court I've seen some defendants get epic deals by going without a lawyer [0] since absolutely nobody in the justice system wants to deal with the guy who has no idea what he's doing and is going to make the most bizarre arguments about being a sovereign citizen. So they give them a really low offer and get them on their way as quickly as possible. [0] I don't like to s…
Im sure a lot has changed no with much criminality in the justice system and government.
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Children can commit crimes too. It's funny, because now in the age of AI, many of the people that support piracy are now trying to stop AI companies from doing the same thing.
We support copyright reform not piracy. The reason we do is because corporate giants have weaponized the system for their own ends and not for our useful promotion of the arts and sciences. So.. I don't think it's appropriate for billion dollar companies to abuse copyrighted authored material for their own profit streams. They have the money. They can either pay or not use the material.
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LLMs make pirated art more accessible, and 2005 pirates allegedly harmed artists by decreasing their sales. The significant change is that 2025 corpo pirates are big corporations, and 2005 personal pirates are individuals. And I think the larger issue is that the big corpo pirates get away with what 2025 personal pirates wouldn’t. Anyways, my opinion is that we should get rid of IP, but only with a replacement that e…
> LLMs make pirated art more accessible lol. The current "AI" industry is in the development phase where the surveillance industry was from 2000-2010 or so. After they're done getting everyone reliant on their products (including giving away many for free), and having installed their regulatory mote, they'll really start tightening the enshittification noose. The original argument is fallacious because it ignores thi…