Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars • Hacker News Board

Re: Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

#51

Post by vacri » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 1:31 AM UTC

carlio wrote: post #47

vacri wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.torrent files make that content available. The simplest counterargument is that if his actions didn't make that content available, what were all the visitors to his site doing? Should a person be able to successfully defend with "What's the problem, I was only giving copies of the vault key to the people who I knew would burgle it. I never handled any of the vault contents myself!"?

Herein lies the problem. While your vault example makes sense, you can also say that someone selling knives or guns can't be responsible for people using them to murder someone else. Where do you draw the line? If you are merely providing something, where is the line where suddenly it's my fault instead of the fault of the user? I think the difference here is that information and objects have an intended purpose - a…

The key part of my analogy is "that I knew would burgle it". It's exactly like being an accessory to a crime. Drive a getaway car and you're not going to be able to use "hey, driving is completely legal, you can't charge me!"

.torrents themselves are perfectly fine, just like knives. I'm not making the argument that the object should be banned. But if a frothing hooligan runs up and asks for your knife because he's going to stab that guy over there, it's pretty clear that if you hand it over you've facilitated a crime.

So it's not the innate nature of the .torrents themselves, but the use of them as a nexus to set people up with illegal content. Like being a middleman selling stolen property, perhaps. You didn't steal it, but you did make it available.

Re: Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

#52

Post by vacri » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 1:34 AM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #43

epo wrote: post #33

A thought experiment: What if he was facilitating access to child pornography rather than Hollywood films would people be as outraged? More so? Less so? If the suggestion of an income of up to £50,000 per month is even in the correct ballpark then this character was in the business of profiting hugely from copyright infringment and the jail time is appropriate. The outrage about this is just windbaggery from thieves…

"depriving people of income is theft" So if someone comes out with a competing product to mine, and splits the market in half, I lose (was deprived of) half my income. Was that theft? I think a more appropriate phrasing is "a government granted exclusive monopoly is a property right -- anyone violating that exclusivity is devaluing that property" which itself may be just as bad as theft (or more likely vandalism -- i…

Too much of this debate is around how to define 'theft'. Really the issue is that folks are accessing a service providing entertainment (movie, tv show, game, music) without paying the requested fee by those who provided it. Whether or not it fits into the various definitions of theft people throw around is largely immaterial.

Re: Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

#53

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 1:37 AM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #44

vacri wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.torrent files make that content available. The simplest counterargument is that if his actions didn't make that content available, what were all the visitors to his site doing? Should a person be able to successfully defend with "What's the problem, I was only giving copies of the vault key to the people who I knew would burgle it. I never handled any of the vault contents myself!"?

Totally right. Google makes copyrighted material available too.. Lock 'em up!

[deleted]

Re: Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

#54

Post by jrockway » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 1:46 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #34

jrockway wrote: post #7

Especially ridiculous is that the judge complains that he has no remorse for "making available" content that "infringes copyright". But of course, he didn't make any such content available. (Do .torrent files "infringe copyright"?)

.torrent files make that content available. The simplest counterargument is that if his actions didn't make that content available, what were all the visitors to his site doing? Should a person be able to successfully defend with "What's the problem, I was only giving copies of the vault key to the people who I knew would burgle it. I never handled any of the vault contents myself!"?

What is your ISP doing, if not "making things available".

Let's stop arguing about whether or not torrents are copyright infringement, and move on to the second point: can one be expected to show remorse for what amounts to computing a mathematical function over an encoded movie file? Even if it's wrong, my human emotions aren't programmed to respond to that.

Re: Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

#55

Post by tptacek » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 1:48 AM UTC

waqf wrote: post #50

tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you either think we should eliminate the ability for defendants to negotiate lesser sentences, or you want to make an entirely orthogonal point about the US criminal justice system. Which is it? Prosecutors routinely have to decide between pressing an ambitious charge with a higher risk of acquittal, or settling for a lesser charge. This happens all the way up and down the spectrum of offenses; for inst…

para 2: I don't understand the issue. Surely the prosecutor should throw everything s/he's got and the judge and jury, who are charged with protecting the interests of the community, decide what sticks? For the prosecutor to be involved in that decision seems a conflict of interest/incentive to corruption (this is the point you are making about private prosecutions, but I would argue that even a public prosecutor is…

It's totally unjust if the world is a computer simulation in which arbiters have perfect information and there's a binary right/wrong answer to every problem. Since that's not the world we live in, I am very glad prosecutors are allowed the discretion to follow human intuition about the grade of offense to charge. Like most other government interventions, there are checks and balances regulation that discretion.

Re: Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

#56

Post by vacri » Sat, Aug 18, 2012, 3:28 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #54

vacri wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.torrent files make that content available. The simplest counterargument is that if his actions didn't make that content available, what were all the visitors to his site doing? Should a person be able to successfully defend with "What's the problem, I was only giving copies of the vault key to the people who I knew would burgle it. I never handled any of the vault contents myself!"?

What is your ISP doing, if not "making things available". Let's stop arguing about whether or not torrents are copyright infringement, and move on to the second point: can one be expected to show remorse for what amounts to computing a mathematical function over an encoded movie file? Even if it's wrong, my human emotions aren't programmed to respond to that.

Do you support the eradication of 'accessory to' crimes, like my getaway driver example below? Intent is an important part of the law. Drive into a pedestrian, killing them - if you didn't intend to, it was an accident, a sad event. If you did intend to, it was murder.

The ISP is providing me with access to the internet, and is not providing me with a list of links to copyright-infringing material, constantly updated for my convenience.

If instead of the .torrent file, it was a list of stolen credit card numbers, the situation would be much clearer. It would be stupid to hold the ISP as equally accountable as the website owner. To hold ISPs as having the same intent as every website owner in the world would make them legally liable for all online fraud. Clearly there's a difference.