7 ms·

When someone posts about a GPL violation, people are quick to decry it, and rightly so. But this repo demonstrates, right in the first image, this tool being us

When someone posts about a GPL violation, people are quick to decry it, and rightly so. But this repo demonstrates, right in the first image, this tool being used to violate copyright, and we applaud that. Why do we have this double standard?

arianvanp 10y ago
They're the exact opposite from my ethic point of view. Gpl violation is a violation where the person didn't share information. Torrentting 'illegally' is the act of sharing information. If you're all for sharing an free flow of information.. I don't see how these two conflict I my ethical point of view.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  The tricky bit is that GPL is built on top of copyright. In effect it use the legal precedence of copyright against itself.
  - cyborgx7 10y ago
    They weren't arguing from a legal, but from an ethics point of view.
  - eeZah7Ux 10y ago
    It's not "tricky", it's by design.
- dibstern 10y ago
  In both scenarios the person's property is being stolen. Their property might be in the form of information, sure. But one product being more widely distributed does not make any ethical difference. The fundamental is that the information/property has been stolen in both cases.
  - dozzie 10y ago
    It's not a property in the first place. It's nowhere near like physical belongings and it shouldn't be treated as such.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    There are a lot of things common to both scenarios, and a lot of things different. People understand that what makes the difference to you is whether someone has the legal right to use something, but it's just been explained to you that the spread of information is what is important to some other people (because you asked.) Your ethics don't define ethics and are not fundamental. People break the GPL in order to steal from the public. People break copyright in order to steal for the public.
  - e12e 10y ago
    > In both scenarios the person's property is being stolen. With material theft, the person that is stolen from looses access to what is stolen. This is true in the case of a GPL violation. But not in the case of classic copyright violation. You might argue that copyright violation prevents extracting profit - but it doesn't mean the victim loses access to their property.
  - cyborgx7 10y ago
    Copyright infringement has as much in common with stealing as it does with sharing. Both of them are ideological terms to paint the action in a certain light and neither give a complete picture.
- afarrell 10y ago
  It's not a matter of stealing. Theft is a poor metaphor. Its a matter of preventing the economic systems that support sound engineers, voice actors, grips, actors, and makeup artists from earning enough of a living to produce art. Consider what has happened to journalism since smaller papers lost the ability to support professionals.
xiaoma 10y ago
Mostly because the RIAA and MPAA managed to make themselves universally hated in the late 90s. The backlash extends far beyond the perennially frugal teenage downloaders and all the way to at least one prominent Harvard Law School professor. https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_stran...
- biot 10y ago
  Your philosophy is that, as a society, we shouldn't enforce laws if the person/entity being affected by illegal behavior is unpopular?
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    I have not commented at all on my own philosophy and I have not studied this topic even a tenth as deeply as the law scholar I mentioned in a sibling comment. I do think he made a compelling case that criminalizing the behavior to begin with has some corrosive effects, though. "This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can't kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them "pirates." And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea. That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison." http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122367645363324303 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122367645363324303 Possibly of interest, Lessig lost a US Supreme Court case regarding the constitutionality of the a copyright extension act in a split decision 14 years ago. https://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp https://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_l... He authored the Creative Commons license and is currently a possible candidate for the Supreme Court himself. Note that he's not arguing for copyright infringement, but for a reform of copyright law.
minitech 10y ago
The GPL cases tend to be someone making money off their violation. Not that piracy is okay, but the situations aren’t too similar.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  That you even use the term "piracy" to mean file sharing rather than murder and pillage on the high seas is testament to the past efforts of content industries.
msl 10y ago
I really cannot see copyright being violated in that screenshot. It is just a listing of torrent files available on one of the indexed sites. You could use Google search to produce a similiar effect (showing links to torrent files being hosted on some web site). Edit: I'm not trying to be snarky or overtly pedantic, and the list of supported sites does suggest that this might be intended to facilitate piratism. Still, this is interesting and potentially useful technology, and seeing it merely as a tool for copyright infringement misses an important point.
- brian-armstrong 10y ago
  Google does not advertise itself as a way to violate copyright. This repo does, though.
  - Frenchgeek 10y ago
    How so? If indexing the content of some sites is seen as advertising copyright violation, so does Google. If the content of the sites are the problem, well why would Google get a free pass on that point too? The goal of the application itself, just like Google's, doesn't have anything to do with copyright violation, it just can be used that way.
    - brian-armstrong 10y ago
      Have a look at this repo for yourself if you don't believe me. The image demonstrates the tool being used for copyright violations. It's billing itself that way, no?
      - msl 10y ago
        Are we looking at the same image? The one I see shows a search for the term "hdtv" with some results from an idexed site. I really can't see how the user has in any way violated anyone's copyright. Edit: Removed an irrelevant addendum.
        10y ago
DanBC 10y ago
There is no we. Some of the people decrying GPL violation also decry this kind of copyright infringement. But, also, GPL has a clear purpose and limits itself to that purpose. The traditional rights protection organisations have sought to extend copyright laws in weird ways. In the UK "format shifting" (eg ripping a cd you bought to mp3) has gone in and out of law. I think it's currently unlawful to rip a CD that you have bought to mp3. Backing up my purchased media should not be a copyright infringement, and I have no problem breaking the law to do so.
- brian-armstrong 10y ago
  It's not uniform, but the zeitgeist certainly supports GPL or tech copyrights and disavows music and movie copyrights. And why are you bringing up backups? What does that have to do with torrenting?
  - gyger 10y ago
    It does support GPL, at least in the tech "bubble". I agree with movie copyrights, but not longer than 10 years and perhaps 25 for music/texts. The industry has lobbied so hard that the good will of the younger generation is gone. (It gets better now with Netflix and offers like this). But I don't feel that somebody broke the law when he downloaded music/videos and I am part of this younger generation that grew up like this.
    - tripzilch 10y ago
      I agree. Also it's not like my favourite artists receive any significant amount of money from Spotify, Youtube or similar services. The vast majority goes to the top 0.5% of the megastars and their record labels. Paying those services shouldn't soothe your conscience one bit when it comes to the poor starving artists and content producers. Instead, when I buy their albums on Bandcamp.com, that particular artist gets 85% of what I'm paying! Also I get to own an actual copy instead of the ridiculous deal streaming offers. Storage is so cheap these days! But don't tell the consumer or we can't sell them streaming services on one end and data bundles on the other. Unless you listen almost exclusively to modern commercial "pop" music--though calling it "popular" has been a misleading term ever since people have been able to listen to music via channels that the "pop" industry turns a blind eye to. Still it's a valid choice, of course, if you enjoy that music! And honestly quite a lot of "pop" music is pretty good. And I presume that the people who produce Justin Bieber's songs are reasonably well-compensated for their work, but not fairly if you look at where the money is going. So you're not really paying to support the content producers here either, a lot of your money is also being spent on unnecessary infrastructure designed to keep out the other content producers and to shove the music into the ears of people that don't even really enjoy it. Someone elsewhere in this thread said to look at the news agencies and journalism doing badly and dropping in quality. The battle here is over advertising versus adblockers. Well here's some news for you: They're supposed to be a mirror of society, a big factor is living in denial of the horror that it can't possibly really be that bad. Another one to think about for a bit: All those poor blocked ad networks, who do you think profits most from those ads? The quality journalists or the listicle clickbait writers filling the web with attention-slurping crap? And at least for the pop-music industry I can kind of understand why the big labels and rightsholders are very quiet about the unfair distribution and very vocal against anything that challenges it (because they profit very much from the listicle-equivalent of music). But for news agencies I think it's strange or just plain stupid to cry about adblockers. People running adblockers hurt the listicle clickbait writers way more than they hurt quality journalists, like disproportionally so. So it's killing off some dead weight competition. On the income side, news agencies, even smaller ones, have sufficient brand identity that they don't need a 3rd-party ad network, they can 1st-party direct sell their ad-space to an advertiser. Adblockers don't tend to block 1st-party ads (and if they do, THAT is something I'd be willing to add an exception for). Cuts out the middle-men, who also royally screw the incentives of being intrusive or not. Can you imagine a direct sale of ad-space going like: ".. and could you please cut up the article in four pages so that people have to click through, so that they load up my ad more often?" Of course not, it hurts both the advertiser as well as the publisher. But add in a middle-man, with a sufficiently clever cost-per-impression scheme, and suddenly the incentives are against almost everybody else: publisher, advertiser and consumer. TLDR; The idea of copyright is badly broken, the industry doesn't understand this yet, advertising is not the answer, the current state of affairs is suboptimal for just about everybody.
StreamBright 10y ago
Actually I am trying to avoid using GPL as much as I can (not very successful) because I do not agree with the intent of the license. This has nothing to do with the fact that in my country there is very limited access of original content, especially purchasing it legally. I watch almost everything in the cinema that I can and keep torrenting (that is perfectly legal here) to the minimum. However, I think the ultimate solution is here, just like in other cases (like music) that distributors get the hell out from the deal going down between a producer and a consumer. Most of the torrenting is coming from the inability of distributors to keep up with technology and have a reasonable distribution mechanism that works globally.
enimodas 10y ago
I think it's because of the power difference. When there's a GPL violation, it's easy to frame it as big greedy company vs selfless small developer. Everybody loves rooting for the underdog. In torrenting, it's small time person vs big greedy company.
kweinber 10y ago
This is because those people are choosing more access for themselves in both cases. They rather have more "stuff" at little or no expense and they dismiss their moral or legal obligations when it becomes inconvenient. If someone truly believed in the moral aims of the GPL then they probably wouldn't pirate media either. That sort of pure and consistent philosophy is an increasingly rare and admirable one.
- yellowapple 10y ago
  This ain't really an accurate portrayal of the aims of the GPL. The FSF believes that all software should be free. The GPL was created to attempt to establish such freedom by leveraging the copyright system. If the copyright system were to be abolished right now worldwide, the GPL would be obsolete, since all software would be free. Piracy is thus not antagonistic toward the goals of the GPL; rather, it's complementary. Piracy does not reduce access to information, and neither does the GPL; thus, neither are at odds with the other. They're simply different implementations of the same goal: one implementation ignores copyright entirely, while the other interpretation uses copyright against itself.
  - kweinber 10y ago
    The GPL uses lawful means to encourage sharing and discourages restricting information. Richard Stallman and the FSF would encourage you to not engage in restricted media if you don't believe in it. . .not disregard the laws that keep the media restricted. Piracy and the GPL are NOT implementations of the same goal. The GPL grants a framework for sharing and encourages others to do the same. . . Piracy is availing yourself of something against the wishes of its author. To say that the GPL and piracy implement the same goal is to suggest that sharing your home with a friend is the same thing as having a stranger squat in your house against your wishes. The sharer and the squatter are not implementors of the same goal.
blunte 10y ago
The goal of copyright law, in the US (from the Constitution, Copyright Clause) was: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. All earthly art is influenced or derived from previous art. Some is outright copied, then modified to produce something "new". Sometimes this is considered valid, but sometimes it's not. Either way, that is how art (which includes music) works. But in the US (and other countries with similar corporate influences), copyright is used both to prevent derivative works and to control the consumption of the art. I could give numerous examples, but with this HN audience I doubt it's necessary. We've all experienced some unreasonable negative related to copyright. So circumventing copyright puts the ethical control back into our hands. Those who are thieves and freeloaders will always exist, but the rest of us will contribute to supporting the art that we consume - even if we download that art "illegally".

arianvanp 10y ago

They're the exact opposite from my ethic point of view. Gpl violation is a violation where the person didn't share information. Torrentting 'illegally' is the act of sharing information. If you're all for sharing an free flow of information.. I don't see how these two conflict I my ethical point of view.

digi_owl 10y ago
The tricky bit is that GPL is built on top of copyright. In effect it use the legal precedence of copyright against itself.
- cyborgx7 10y ago
  They weren't arguing from a legal, but from an ethics point of view.
- eeZah7Ux 10y ago
  It's not "tricky", it's by design.
dibstern 10y ago
In both scenarios the person's property is being stolen. Their property might be in the form of information, sure. But one product being more widely distributed does not make any ethical difference. The fundamental is that the information/property has been stolen in both cases.
- dozzie 10y ago
  It's not a property in the first place. It's nowhere near like physical belongings and it shouldn't be treated as such.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  There are a lot of things common to both scenarios, and a lot of things different. People understand that what makes the difference to you is whether someone has the legal right to use something, but it's just been explained to you that the spread of information is what is important to some other people (because you asked.) Your ethics don't define ethics and are not fundamental. People break the GPL in order to steal from the public. People break copyright in order to steal for the public.
- e12e 10y ago
  > In both scenarios the person's property is being stolen. With material theft, the person that is stolen from looses access to what is stolen. This is true in the case of a GPL violation. But not in the case of classic copyright violation. You might argue that copyright violation prevents extracting profit - but it doesn't mean the victim loses access to their property.
- cyborgx7 10y ago
  Copyright infringement has as much in common with stealing as it does with sharing. Both of them are ideological terms to paint the action in a certain light and neither give a complete picture.
afarrell 10y ago
It's not a matter of stealing. Theft is a poor metaphor. Its a matter of preventing the economic systems that support sound engineers, voice actors, grips, actors, and makeup artists from earning enough of a living to produce art. Consider what has happened to journalism since smaller papers lost the ability to support professionals.

xiaoma 10y ago

Mostly because the RIAA and MPAA managed to make themselves universally hated in the late 90s. The backlash extends far beyond the perennially frugal teenage downloaders and all the way to at least one prominent Harvard Law School professor. https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_stran...

biot 10y ago
Your philosophy is that, as a society, we shouldn't enforce laws if the person/entity being affected by illegal behavior is unpopular?
- xiaoma 10y ago
  I have not commented at all on my own philosophy and I have not studied this topic even a tenth as deeply as the law scholar I mentioned in a sibling comment. I do think he made a compelling case that criminalizing the behavior to begin with has some corrosive effects, though. "This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can't kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them "pirates." And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as "criminals." They begin to get used to the idea. That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison." http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122367645363324303 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122367645363324303 Possibly of interest, Lessig lost a US Supreme Court case regarding the constitutionality of the a copyright extension act in a split decision 14 years ago. https://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp https://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_l... He authored the Creative Commons license and is currently a possible candidate for the Supreme Court himself. Note that he's not arguing for copyright infringement, but for a reform of copyright law.

minitech 10y ago

The GPL cases tend to be someone making money off their violation. Not that piracy is okay, but the situations aren’t too similar.

xiaoma 10y ago
That you even use the term "piracy" to mean file sharing rather than murder and pillage on the high seas is testament to the past efforts of content industries.

msl 10y ago

I really cannot see copyright being violated in that screenshot. It is just a listing of torrent files available on one of the indexed sites. You could use Google search to produce a similiar effect (showing links to torrent files being hosted on some web site). Edit: I'm not trying to be snarky or overtly pedantic, and the list of supported sites does suggest that this might be intended to facilitate piratism. Still, this is interesting and potentially useful technology, and seeing it merely as a tool for copyright infringement misses an important point.

brian-armstrong 10y ago
Google does not advertise itself as a way to violate copyright. This repo does, though.
- Frenchgeek 10y ago
  How so? If indexing the content of some sites is seen as advertising copyright violation, so does Google. If the content of the sites are the problem, well why would Google get a free pass on that point too? The goal of the application itself, just like Google's, doesn't have anything to do with copyright violation, it just can be used that way.
  - brian-armstrong 10y ago
    Have a look at this repo for yourself if you don't believe me. The image demonstrates the tool being used for copyright violations. It's billing itself that way, no?
    - msl 10y ago
      Are we looking at the same image? The one I see shows a search for the term "hdtv" with some results from an idexed site. I really can't see how the user has in any way violated anyone's copyright. Edit: Removed an irrelevant addendum.
      - 10y ago

DanBC 10y ago

There is no we. Some of the people decrying GPL violation also decry this kind of copyright infringement. But, also, GPL has a clear purpose and limits itself to that purpose. The traditional rights protection organisations have sought to extend copyright laws in weird ways. In the UK "format shifting" (eg ripping a cd you bought to mp3) has gone in and out of law. I think it's currently unlawful to rip a CD that you have bought to mp3. Backing up my purchased media should not be a copyright infringement, and I have no problem breaking the law to do so.

brian-armstrong 10y ago
It's not uniform, but the zeitgeist certainly supports GPL or tech copyrights and disavows music and movie copyrights. And why are you bringing up backups? What does that have to do with torrenting?
- gyger 10y ago
  It does support GPL, at least in the tech "bubble". I agree with movie copyrights, but not longer than 10 years and perhaps 25 for music/texts. The industry has lobbied so hard that the good will of the younger generation is gone. (It gets better now with Netflix and offers like this). But I don't feel that somebody broke the law when he downloaded music/videos and I am part of this younger generation that grew up like this.
  - tripzilch 10y ago
    I agree. Also it's not like my favourite artists receive any significant amount of money from Spotify, Youtube or similar services. The vast majority goes to the top 0.5% of the megastars and their record labels. Paying those services shouldn't soothe your conscience one bit when it comes to the poor starving artists and content producers. Instead, when I buy their albums on Bandcamp.com, that particular artist gets 85% of what I'm paying! Also I get to own an actual copy instead of the ridiculous deal streaming offers. Storage is so cheap these days! But don't tell the consumer or we can't sell them streaming services on one end and data bundles on the other. Unless you listen almost exclusively to modern commercial "pop" music--though calling it "popular" has been a misleading term ever since people have been able to listen to music via channels that the "pop" industry turns a blind eye to. Still it's a valid choice, of course, if you enjoy that music! And honestly quite a lot of "pop" music is pretty good. And I presume that the people who produce Justin Bieber's songs are reasonably well-compensated for their work, but not fairly if you look at where the money is going. So you're not really paying to support the content producers here either, a lot of your money is also being spent on unnecessary infrastructure designed to keep out the other content producers and to shove the music into the ears of people that don't even really enjoy it. Someone elsewhere in this thread said to look at the news agencies and journalism doing badly and dropping in quality. The battle here is over advertising versus adblockers. Well here's some news for you: They're supposed to be a mirror of society, a big factor is living in denial of the horror that it can't possibly really be that bad. Another one to think about for a bit: All those poor blocked ad networks, who do you think profits most from those ads? The quality journalists or the listicle clickbait writers filling the web with attention-slurping crap? And at least for the pop-music industry I can kind of understand why the big labels and rightsholders are very quiet about the unfair distribution and very vocal against anything that challenges it (because they profit very much from the listicle-equivalent of music). But for news agencies I think it's strange or just plain stupid to cry about adblockers. People running adblockers hurt the listicle clickbait writers way more than they hurt quality journalists, like disproportionally so. So it's killing off some dead weight competition. On the income side, news agencies, even smaller ones, have sufficient brand identity that they don't need a 3rd-party ad network, they can 1st-party direct sell their ad-space to an advertiser. Adblockers don't tend to block 1st-party ads (and if they do, THAT is something I'd be willing to add an exception for). Cuts out the middle-men, who also royally screw the incentives of being intrusive or not. Can you imagine a direct sale of ad-space going like: ".. and could you please cut up the article in four pages so that people have to click through, so that they load up my ad more often?" Of course not, it hurts both the advertiser as well as the publisher. But add in a middle-man, with a sufficiently clever cost-per-impression scheme, and suddenly the incentives are against almost everybody else: publisher, advertiser and consumer. TLDR; The idea of copyright is badly broken, the industry doesn't understand this yet, advertising is not the answer, the current state of affairs is suboptimal for just about everybody.

StreamBright 10y ago

Actually I am trying to avoid using GPL as much as I can (not very successful) because I do not agree with the intent of the license. This has nothing to do with the fact that in my country there is very limited access of original content, especially purchasing it legally. I watch almost everything in the cinema that I can and keep torrenting (that is perfectly legal here) to the minimum. However, I think the ultimate solution is here, just like in other cases (like music) that distributors get the hell out from the deal going down between a producer and a consumer. Most of the torrenting is coming from the inability of distributors to keep up with technology and have a reasonable distribution mechanism that works globally.

enimodas 10y ago

I think it's because of the power difference. When there's a GPL violation, it's easy to frame it as big greedy company vs selfless small developer. Everybody loves rooting for the underdog. In torrenting, it's small time person vs big greedy company.

kweinber 10y ago

This is because those people are choosing more access for themselves in both cases. They rather have more "stuff" at little or no expense and they dismiss their moral or legal obligations when it becomes inconvenient. If someone truly believed in the moral aims of the GPL then they probably wouldn't pirate media either. That sort of pure and consistent philosophy is an increasingly rare and admirable one.

yellowapple 10y ago
This ain't really an accurate portrayal of the aims of the GPL. The FSF believes that all software should be free. The GPL was created to attempt to establish such freedom by leveraging the copyright system. If the copyright system were to be abolished right now worldwide, the GPL would be obsolete, since all software would be free. Piracy is thus not antagonistic toward the goals of the GPL; rather, it's complementary. Piracy does not reduce access to information, and neither does the GPL; thus, neither are at odds with the other. They're simply different implementations of the same goal: one implementation ignores copyright entirely, while the other interpretation uses copyright against itself.
- kweinber 10y ago
  The GPL uses lawful means to encourage sharing and discourages restricting information. Richard Stallman and the FSF would encourage you to not engage in restricted media if you don't believe in it. . .not disregard the laws that keep the media restricted. Piracy and the GPL are NOT implementations of the same goal. The GPL grants a framework for sharing and encourages others to do the same. . . Piracy is availing yourself of something against the wishes of its author. To say that the GPL and piracy implement the same goal is to suggest that sharing your home with a friend is the same thing as having a stranger squat in your house against your wishes. The sharer and the squatter are not implementors of the same goal.

blunte 10y ago

The goal of copyright law, in the US (from the Constitution, Copyright Clause) was: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. All earthly art is influenced or derived from previous art. Some is outright copied, then modified to produce something "new". Sometimes this is considered valid, but sometimes it's not. Either way, that is how art (which includes music) works. But in the US (and other countries with similar corporate influences), copyright is used both to prevent derivative works and to control the consumption of the art. I could give numerous examples, but with this HN audience I doubt it's necessary. We've all experienced some unreasonable negative related to copyright. So circumventing copyright puts the ethical control back into our hands. Those who are thieves and freeloaders will always exist, but the rest of us will contribute to supporting the art that we consume - even if we download that art "illegally".