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What if I replaced "Online piracy" with "Gunshot deaths" and "digital goods" by "guns": Gunshot deaths are not a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-ef

by jayzee 15y ago

What if I replaced "Online piracy" with "Gunshot deaths" and "digital goods" by "guns": Gunshot deaths are not a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap guns.

mkr-hn 15y ago
First you have to show how shooting someone is like copying a file.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jayzee 15y ago
  No. I did not imply that. I am just saying that his logic does not make sense.
  - iamdave 15y ago
    "No. I did not imply that." I think you did the minute you made that analogy.
  - mkr-hn 15y ago
    You did it with a faulty analogy. The analogy compared a permanent physical harm to an indefinite harm. Two things have to be analogous to fit an analogy.
    - the-cakeboss 15y ago
      The argument he was responding to was unsound. The parent comment attempted to refute the claim that piracy is a legitimate problem by pointing out the ease at which it is done. Jayzee's analogy was never meant to compare shooting someone with sharing a song in terms of severity. Rather, it was demonstrating how flawed that line of thinking is.
      - nitrogen 15y ago
        The line of thinking isn't necessarily flawed. Digital copying is fundamentally different from any act that can be performed in the physical world, and no combination of analogies can ever do justice to that fact. Some of us who grew up in the digital world, and consider ourselves "citizens" thereof, want to see it allowed to develop independently of the arbitrary restrictions of the physical and political world. Regardless of the fact that servers and networks exist in physical locations, the actual subjective experience of using the Internet is like being in another place entirely, where those physical locations and borders cease to exist entirely.
- andylei 15y ago
  actually, you're looking at the wrong parts of the analogy. he's comparing guns to copying files and online piracy to murder. but i'll take the bait and show why online piracy is like shooting someone. first: they are both "unavoidable side-effect[s] of having easy and cheap" <something>. second: they both might be bad. shooting someone could be good (maybe that person is trying to blow up a school). it could be bad (maybe the person being shot is just a random person off the street). online piracy might be good (maybe it encourages freedom or exposes government corruption or something). copying a file might be bad (maybe you sharing this movie with all of your friends makes it impossible for the indie director to make further more movies). of course, you're also totally missing the point: just because something is unavoidable doesn't mean you shouldn't write laws to mitigate it. murder is unavoidable side-effect of human impulses. we should write a law saying murder is illegal. i actually don't think we should pass draconian laws to deal with online piracy, but that doesn't make the argument valid. if something is bad, we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods. Wake me up when such methods exist. Right now they don't and politicians who represent a small group of copyright owners instead of a much larger contingent of content consumers are proposing bad laws to protect those who feed them. The analogy also breaks because murder or theft deprive someone of something (in the case of murder, something irreplaceable) while content piracy only deprives content owners of a sale they most likely would never make.
bad_user 15y ago
Guns are physical products and the comparison isn't apples to apples, unless you're talking about distribution on a massive scale. Building and distributing on a massive scale, means that the whole operation will be illegal. Otherwise the state will make sure that you can only sell to licensed individuals and will also make sure that those guns won't be cheap. To manufacture guns you need the materials required, like steel, wood, ceramic, ABS plastic and so on and you need to get them cheaply. To produce them cheaply you also need a heavily automatized factory that accommodates lots of processes like forging, stamping, milling, welding, riveting, casting and drilling. You can also outsource work, but to produce cheap guns you're better off controlling the whole stack. Of course, you could steal or buy those guns from the black market, like from the former Soviet Union arsenal, but doing so implies that you have connections and money to bribe people. Supply is also limited. And the risks are higher, since there are always people looking for those missing guns. So you're better off building your own factory, which of course has to be shielded from the local authorities (more bribes). To distribute guns, you need a distribution network. And because illegal distribution is illegal and leaves traces, such a line of work is very high-risk. Like, you can always hire junkies to do the street-level distribution for a small price, but junkies are often getting caught by the police and then become valuable witnesses. Lots of mobsters got caught because of junkies. Also, if you want to cross the borders of a country with your merchandise, then things get really complicated. So if you want distribution on a massive scale, then it isn't going to be without a high price. Compare to the Internet: communications can be encrypted with no way to eavesdrop without the key, it has very few single points of failure (e.g. DNS) and eavesdropping on peer to peer communications is a bitch, all this while copying and distributing has an absolute zero cost and can be done on a freakishly big scale. 4 days ago I wrote an article on my personal blog ~ 10,000 people viewed it in a single day, even though I'm a nobody. When you, as an individual, will be able to showcase your guns to 10,000 people in a single day, then it will be an apples to apples comparison (and you could use the Internet for that, but distribution and availability is location-dependent, you can't just click "download gun").
- sklipo 15y ago
  I think his point was that just because a crime is easy to commit, it doesn't mean that it's okay to do it. Just because pirating things is easy, doesn't mean that it should be okay, in the same way that if getting guns and killing people was easy, it wouldn't mean that doing so is okay.
seagreen 15y ago
It's probably better not to bring up any of the traditional wedge issues (guns, abortion, etc.) during discussions on SOPA. We're incredibly vulnerable to them due to the diversity of our little coalition and they'll just derail the discussion (and even if they don't half the readers won't understand your point). EDIT: fixed italics.

by jayzee 15y ago

What if I replaced "Online piracy" with "Gunshot deaths" and "digital goods" by "guns": Gunshot deaths are not a legitimate problem. It's an unavoidable side-effect of having easy and cheap guns.

mkr-hn 15y ago

First you have to show how shooting someone is like copying a file.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jayzee 15y ago
No. I did not imply that. I am just saying that his logic does not make sense.
- iamdave 15y ago
  "No. I did not imply that." I think you did the minute you made that analogy.
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  You did it with a faulty analogy. The analogy compared a permanent physical harm to an indefinite harm. Two things have to be analogous to fit an analogy.
  - the-cakeboss 15y ago
    The argument he was responding to was unsound. The parent comment attempted to refute the claim that piracy is a legitimate problem by pointing out the ease at which it is done. Jayzee's analogy was never meant to compare shooting someone with sharing a song in terms of severity. Rather, it was demonstrating how flawed that line of thinking is.
    - nitrogen 15y ago
      The line of thinking isn't necessarily flawed. Digital copying is fundamentally different from any act that can be performed in the physical world, and no combination of analogies can ever do justice to that fact. Some of us who grew up in the digital world, and consider ourselves "citizens" thereof, want to see it allowed to develop independently of the arbitrary restrictions of the physical and political world. Regardless of the fact that servers and networks exist in physical locations, the actual subjective experience of using the Internet is like being in another place entirely, where those physical locations and borders cease to exist entirely.
andylei 15y ago
actually, you're looking at the wrong parts of the analogy. he's comparing guns to copying files and online piracy to murder. but i'll take the bait and show why online piracy is like shooting someone. first: they are both "unavoidable side-effect[s] of having easy and cheap" <something>. second: they both might be bad. shooting someone could be good (maybe that person is trying to blow up a school). it could be bad (maybe the person being shot is just a random person off the street). online piracy might be good (maybe it encourages freedom or exposes government corruption or something). copying a file might be bad (maybe you sharing this movie with all of your friends makes it impossible for the indie director to make further more movies). of course, you're also totally missing the point: just because something is unavoidable doesn't mean you shouldn't write laws to mitigate it. murder is unavoidable side-effect of human impulses. we should write a law saying murder is illegal. i actually don't think we should pass draconian laws to deal with online piracy, but that doesn't make the argument valid. if something is bad, we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > we should try and stop (or at least mitigate) it using proportionate and reasonable methods. Wake me up when such methods exist. Right now they don't and politicians who represent a small group of copyright owners instead of a much larger contingent of content consumers are proposing bad laws to protect those who feed them. The analogy also breaks because murder or theft deprive someone of something (in the case of murder, something irreplaceable) while content piracy only deprives content owners of a sale they most likely would never make.

bad_user 15y ago

Guns are physical products and the comparison isn't apples to apples, unless you're talking about distribution on a massive scale. Building and distributing on a massive scale, means that the whole operation will be illegal. Otherwise the state will make sure that you can only sell to licensed individuals and will also make sure that those guns won't be cheap. To manufacture guns you need the materials required, like steel, wood, ceramic, ABS plastic and so on and you need to get them cheaply. To produce them cheaply you also need a heavily automatized factory that accommodates lots of processes like forging, stamping, milling, welding, riveting, casting and drilling. You can also outsource work, but to produce cheap guns you're better off controlling the whole stack. Of course, you could steal or buy those guns from the black market, like from the former Soviet Union arsenal, but doing so implies that you have connections and money to bribe people. Supply is also limited. And the risks are higher, since there are always people looking for those missing guns. So you're better off building your own factory, which of course has to be shielded from the local authorities (more bribes). To distribute guns, you need a distribution network. And because illegal distribution is illegal and leaves traces, such a line of work is very high-risk. Like, you can always hire junkies to do the street-level distribution for a small price, but junkies are often getting caught by the police and then become valuable witnesses. Lots of mobsters got caught because of junkies. Also, if you want to cross the borders of a country with your merchandise, then things get really complicated. So if you want distribution on a massive scale, then it isn't going to be without a high price. Compare to the Internet: communications can be encrypted with no way to eavesdrop without the key, it has very few single points of failure (e.g. DNS) and eavesdropping on peer to peer communications is a bitch, all this while copying and distributing has an absolute zero cost and can be done on a freakishly big scale. 4 days ago I wrote an article on my personal blog ~ 10,000 people viewed it in a single day, even though I'm a nobody. When you, as an individual, will be able to showcase your guns to 10,000 people in a single day, then it will be an apples to apples comparison (and you could use the Internet for that, but distribution and availability is location-dependent, you can't just click "download gun").

sklipo 15y ago
I think his point was that just because a crime is easy to commit, it doesn't mean that it's okay to do it. Just because pirating things is easy, doesn't mean that it should be okay, in the same way that if getting guns and killing people was easy, it wouldn't mean that doing so is okay.

seagreen 15y ago

It's probably better not to bring up any of the traditional wedge issues (guns, abortion, etc.) during discussions on SOPA. We're incredibly vulnerable to them due to the diversity of our little coalition and they'll just derail the discussion (and even if they don't half the readers won't understand your point). EDIT: fixed italics.