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He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's pai

He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. The civil court system is useful for many things, but it is limited to monetary damages, which is not very helpful when the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. The penal power of the criminal system is not appropriate for individual people downloading music, but it certainly is for a sophisticated operation involving the illegal distribution of millions of copyrighted works to hundreds of thousands of users. == Edit == Some responses, since I'm rate-limited: >In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader. Two points. 1. How do you think the current copyright holder got the copyright? They acquired it from the creator by either paying in advance or after the fact or as part of some ongoing deal. 2. If you run a market that you know is used almost exclusively by people selling contraband, do you think that's legal just because you're not the buyer or the seller? In case you don't know, it's not, and you'll go to jail just as if you had sold the contraband. >If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions? Yes, intellectual property isn't worth anything without government enforcement. But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society. And as for the first point, how much you make by violating other people's rights isn't that relevant. If I steal a truckload of iPhones and give them away for free, I still stole them. I realize IP is very different from physical property, but the profit of the crook isn't that relevant in either.

otempomores 9y ago
Eh need gave the right? There is a whole humanity out there with nothing to spend but time and electronic drugs are basically a implementation of the freeze and hibernate proposed in the eighties to solve overpopulations resource consumption. Sorry if a individuals luxery was trampeled to give the world another peacefuller day.
Spearchucker 9y ago
Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no?
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  >Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no? What are you actually arguing, other than pointing out that he was acquitted? A jury's determination of a person's guilt in a particular case doesn't tell you what the law is, or what it ought to be. Edit: gnode, that’s not true. Only determinations of law, which are only made by judges, are precedent. A jury verdict, which only determines questions of fact, is not precedent at all.
  - gnode 9y ago
    In a common law system, findings of a court set precedent for future trials. So yes, juries do tell you what the law is by telling you how to interpret it.
b3lvedere 9y ago
"What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work." In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader. That is exactly the weird paradox that has been going on, especially with the infamous Pirate Bay. The users think they are a super server with super hero admins that "give back to the man". The justice system thinks some super tech criminal is earning millions. They think that, because organisations like the MPAA give out an estimate on what "could have been earned if all those people would actually pay full price for the content they are now consuming". Numbers are magic.. especially if there's a currency sign before them.
humanrebar 9y ago
> ...depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work... i.e., messing up their business model > Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. Sure, but there's a strong case that copyright infringement shouldn't be felony. > ...the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?
- icebraining 9y ago
  If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions? I don't think he should go to jail, but this is an odd rebuttal. If I steal your car and sell it for $300, because I don't really need more money, will you claim just that amount as your loss? Obviously copyright law pushes up the price, by introducing scarcity, but that doesn't really have anything to do with how much he made.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Isn't the corollary to your position here that as I can only afford about £6 per month on media that any claim for a greater amount in a copyright infringement case is thus wrong. Yes in the analogy the person will claim for the cost of replacing the vehicle. But a company claiming they lost media revenue to me of anything greater than what I can afford is also wrong. In a world of perfect copyright infringement prevention I'd just miss out on most of the mainstream social culture.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Usually these companies attack uploaders (even if just due to regular p2p seeding) or, as in this case, people who run systems that "facilitate" infringement. The claim is not based on what you should have paid, but on all the money that the people who got a copy from you would have paid. In a fair system they'd have to prove those damages, but alas, copyright laws often include "statutory damage" provisions to help them avoid that requirement.
ekianjo 9y ago
> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter Oh yes? Copyright infrigement is pretty much a victimless crime - nobody is removed from any of their property - at most they might be losing some monetary compensation, but that's something that can be evaluated and compensated if that is the case. Not sure how you can justify putting folks in jail based on that fact.
- eli 9y ago
  Couldn't you say the same for embezzlement or tax fraud?
  - shakna 9y ago
    Tax fraud is against the state, those funds that go towards the foundational things required by our society, such as electricity, drinking water, and access to other services. Everyone is a victim.
    - eli 9y ago
      So when you deprive government of funds everyone is a victim, but when you deprive a publisher of funds no one is a victim?
      - shakna 9y ago
        That's a false equivalence, and not the implication of my statement. If you want to read something into it, nothing mentioned in this thread is victimless. Embezzlement hurts the other employees of a company, tax fraud hurts the citizens of a nation, and piracy seems to hurt... A small group. (In fact, large companies seem to benefit from piracy in studies. Small companies can be forced to fold. Take it as you will.)
dpwm 9y ago
> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Why should an individual be treated so differently to what a company would? When was Youtube's office raided? To this day, Youtube holds immense collections of music for which nobody has bothered to file even an automated takedown notice. The point that the parent made is that copyright is only criminally enforceable if held by the moneyed few. The power that has been handed to large corporations by the back door is immense and there is very little symmetry; even when the magnitude of the damage is orders of magnitude greater. In the UK they have effectively been granted the power to block domains for customers of the ISPs that represent a significant majority of the UK market. This is in a court that routinely allows pre-hearing legal costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Unless you work for the media companies and have insider knowledge, how can you even be so sure that the media companies are not acting with the complete contempt of due process that they have repeatedly demonstrated. > Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. Only fairly recently, and not without controversy from the people that observed it.
- tlunter 9y ago
  I don't work there, but it seems naive to think that YouTube hasn't worked with law enforcement or these industries directly to remove these copyrighted works. If your rip is simple or obvious enough, YouTube blocks it immediately before it's published. That seems very different from hosting a site specifically for pirating copyrighted works.
  - dustinmr 9y ago
    Your argument is based on intent. YouTube shows their intent to not infringe by the effort they put into removing infringing content. But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent. Likely, somewhere in the middle is more reasonable. But the parent is correct in that the volume of infringing content on YouTube appears to be significantly larger than just about anywhere else, and no one is raiding their offices. No one is going to jail. So the asymmetry is striking. If it were all purely civil rather than criminal, I'd get it.
gatmne 9y ago
Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's right-to-share to be far more important to humanity than the authors ability to employ an ill-suited business model to profit off his or her work. There are many ways to generate profit other than to infringe on others' right to share. Humanity does not owe you a successful business model, and certainly not at the expense of it's right to share. > What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.
- msc1 9y ago
  Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2 cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost more than my two or three months of rent. My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either. Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
  - omio 9y ago
    Wow that is a name I haven't read or heard in years. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, father of modern anarchism.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    > Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s. While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums. Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.
zouhair 9y ago
You do know he was found innocent.
b3lvedere 9y ago
On paper you are absolutely right. Does it make it right? Maybe so, maybe not. "But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society". Remember Aaron Schwartz?
- lucozade 9y ago
  That's a pretty low blow. You can't just answer a suggestion that the criminal system has some value with this. I didn't know the guy but I'm not sure that using his name to stifle debate is the best use of his legacy. While we're here, I happen to disagree with what he did. I believe that publicly funded research should be publicly available but he went a lot further. What was done to him was heinous and a terrible abuse of the US criminal justice system. And it rightfully brought it into disrepute. But it's going too far to say that it's the last word on the principle of criminal justice.
  - b3lvedere 9y ago
    I do apologize if my response had such an effect. It was meant to express that things societies may have agreed upon in the past might need to evolve rather than keep enforcing them at all costs.
Zigurd 9y ago
This "What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work." is a cynically spurious argument, and you know it. You are engaging in an Ajit Pai-like derailing of the actual argument, which is the ridiculously long copyright terms granted to content publishers. Well, we now know we won't run out of Ajit Pais.

otempomores 9y ago

Eh need gave the right? There is a whole humanity out there with nothing to spend but time and electronic drugs are basically a implementation of the freeze and hibernate proposed in the eighties to solve overpopulations resource consumption. Sorry if a individuals luxery was trampeled to give the world another peacefuller day.

Spearchucker 9y ago

Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no?

marcoperaza 9y ago
>Surely if what you say is true, the courts would have found him guilty, no? What are you actually arguing, other than pointing out that he was acquitted? A jury's determination of a person's guilt in a particular case doesn't tell you what the law is, or what it ought to be. Edit: gnode, that’s not true. Only determinations of law, which are only made by judges, are precedent. A jury verdict, which only determines questions of fact, is not precedent at all.
- gnode 9y ago
  In a common law system, findings of a court set precedent for future trials. So yes, juries do tell you what the law is by telling you how to interpret it.

b3lvedere 9y ago

"What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work." In most cases i read about it's more a matter of the current copyright holder versus the facilitator. Not a matter of the creator versus the actual downloader. That is exactly the weird paradox that has been going on, especially with the infamous Pirate Bay. The users think they are a super server with super hero admins that "give back to the man". The justice system thinks some super tech criminal is earning millions. They think that, because organisations like the MPAA give out an estimate on what "could have been earned if all those people would actually pay full price for the content they are now consuming". Numbers are magic.. especially if there's a currency sign before them.

humanrebar 9y ago

> ...depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work... i.e., messing up their business model > Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. Sure, but there's a strong case that copyright infringement shouldn't be felony. > ...the damages are in the millions and the defendant isn't very wealthy. If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions?

icebraining 9y ago
If the defendant isn't wealthy after distributing all that content, is the content worth millions? Or is the government-enforced business model worth millions? I don't think he should go to jail, but this is an odd rebuttal. If I steal your car and sell it for $300, because I don't really need more money, will you claim just that amount as your loss? Obviously copyright law pushes up the price, by introducing scarcity, but that doesn't really have anything to do with how much he made.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Isn't the corollary to your position here that as I can only afford about £6 per month on media that any claim for a greater amount in a copyright infringement case is thus wrong. Yes in the analogy the person will claim for the cost of replacing the vehicle. But a company claiming they lost media revenue to me of anything greater than what I can afford is also wrong. In a world of perfect copyright infringement prevention I'd just miss out on most of the mainstream social culture.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Usually these companies attack uploaders (even if just due to regular p2p seeding) or, as in this case, people who run systems that "facilitate" infringement. The claim is not based on what you should have paid, but on all the money that the people who got a copy from you would have paid. In a fair system they'd have to prove those damages, but alas, copyright laws often include "statutory damage" provisions to help them avoid that requirement.

ekianjo 9y ago

> Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter Oh yes? Copyright infrigement is pretty much a victimless crime - nobody is removed from any of their property - at most they might be losing some monetary compensation, but that's something that can be evaluated and compensated if that is the case. Not sure how you can justify putting folks in jail based on that fact.

eli 9y ago
Couldn't you say the same for embezzlement or tax fraud?
- shakna 9y ago
  Tax fraud is against the state, those funds that go towards the foundational things required by our society, such as electricity, drinking water, and access to other services. Everyone is a victim.
  - eli 9y ago
    So when you deprive government of funds everyone is a victim, but when you deprive a publisher of funds no one is a victim?
    - shakna 9y ago
      That's a false equivalence, and not the implication of my statement. If you want to read something into it, nothing mentioned in this thread is victimless. Embezzlement hurts the other employees of a company, tax fraud hurts the citizens of a nation, and piracy seems to hurt... A small group. (In fact, large companies seem to benefit from piracy in studies. Small companies can be forced to fold. Take it as you will.)

dpwm 9y ago

> He was running a website that revolved around violating millions of copyrights. Why shouldn't he go to jail? What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Why should an individual be treated so differently to what a company would? When was Youtube's office raided? To this day, Youtube holds immense collections of music for which nobody has bothered to file even an automated takedown notice. The point that the parent made is that copyright is only criminally enforceable if held by the moneyed few. The power that has been handed to large corporations by the back door is immense and there is very little symmetry; even when the magnitude of the damage is orders of magnitude greater. In the UK they have effectively been granted the power to block domains for customers of the ISPs that represent a significant majority of the UK market. This is in a court that routinely allows pre-hearing legal costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds. Unless you work for the media companies and have insider knowledge, how can you even be so sure that the media companies are not acting with the complete contempt of due process that they have repeatedly demonstrated. > Copyright is both a criminal and civil matter. Only fairly recently, and not without controversy from the people that observed it.

tlunter 9y ago
I don't work there, but it seems naive to think that YouTube hasn't worked with law enforcement or these industries directly to remove these copyrighted works. If your rip is simple or obvious enough, YouTube blocks it immediately before it's published. That seems very different from hosting a site specifically for pirating copyrighted works.
- dustinmr 9y ago
  Your argument is based on intent. YouTube shows their intent to not infringe by the effort they put into removing infringing content. But the GP discards intent as a relevant point and says if you host it, you should be thrown in jail, regardless of intent. Likely, somewhere in the middle is more reasonable. But the parent is correct in that the volume of infringing content on YouTube appears to be significantly larger than just about anywhere else, and no one is raiding their offices. No one is going to jail. So the asymmetry is striking. If it were all purely civil rather than criminal, I'd get it.

gatmne 9y ago

Legality aside, whether sharing copyrighted information is amoral or not is determined by one's own values. Some people, myself included, see a person's right-to-share to be far more important to humanity than the authors ability to employ an ill-suited business model to profit off his or her work. There are many ways to generate profit other than to infringe on others' right to share. Humanity does not owe you a successful business model, and certainly not at the expense of it's right to share. > What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work. Users sharing copyrighted work does nothing to prevent authors from profiting off their work. Conflating sharing and business is what got us in this mess in the first place.

msc1 9y ago
Think about 3rd world countries. I'm relatively better off than my peers (2 cars, own a house etc.) but I can no way afford Hex Rays IDA Pro, Burp Site Professional, Navicat Premium or JetBrains and this list goes on... They cost more than my two or three months of rent. My parents are both medical doctors and their medical books are not affordable if they were sold in US prices but they have 3rd world print editions and they can legally buy these copies. Software vendors have to adapt to tthis too. Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. I'm a paying netflix, spotify customer because they are priced for the country they operate and as you can guess I'm not torrenting music or movies either. Internet is global but purchasing power is not. Ethically, I see no problem in torrenting. Human knowledge is "on the shoulders of giants" and in philosophical perspective -I'm not advocating this- even copyright is on shaky grounds (Property is theft! - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon)
- omio 9y ago
  Wow that is a name I haven't read or heard in years. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, father of modern anarchism.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > Gaming companies already adapted this and I've never pirated any games since Steam. The first to adopt this, very successfully, had actually been Apple with their approach to selling mp3s. While everybody was still busy trying to sell overpriced physical albums, complaining about the "digital thievery", Apple took this as an opportunity with iTunes. iTunes made buying music digitally as convenient as it was pirating it, at the same time iTunes allowed customers to only buy specific songs (at reasonable prices), instead of forcing them to buy whole albums. Valve did something similar for gaming with Steam, that's true, but it took Steam way longer to get there than it did take iTunes. Imho Steam has also regressed quite a bit in that regard, it used to be a place for good deals but increasingly feels like a platform to shovel around shovelware for badges and trading cards.

zouhair 9y ago

You do know he was found innocent.

b3lvedere 9y ago

On paper you are absolutely right. Does it make it right? Maybe so, maybe not. "But we've decided to, as individual societies and as an entire world by treaty, to provide such enforcement, because we think recognizing such property rights is good for our society". Remember Aaron Schwartz?

lucozade 9y ago
That's a pretty low blow. You can't just answer a suggestion that the criminal system has some value with this. I didn't know the guy but I'm not sure that using his name to stifle debate is the best use of his legacy. While we're here, I happen to disagree with what he did. I believe that publicly funded research should be publicly available but he went a lot further. What was done to him was heinous and a terrible abuse of the US criminal justice system. And it rightfully brought it into disrepute. But it's going too far to say that it's the last word on the principle of criminal justice.
- b3lvedere 9y ago
  I do apologize if my response had such an effect. It was meant to express that things societies may have agreed upon in the past might need to evolve rather than keep enforcing them at all costs.

Zigurd 9y ago

This "What gives you the right to take someone else's painstakingly created artistic creation and give it away for free to thousands of people, depriving them of the exclusive right to sell their own work." is a cynically spurious argument, and you know it. You are engaging in an Ajit Pai-like derailing of the actual argument, which is the ridiculously long copyright terms granted to content publishers. Well, we now know we won't run out of Ajit Pais.