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While I agree with you in principle, I think that in the long term, piracy issues in the United States are going to go the way of abortion. Just to illustrate

While I agree with you in principle, I think that in the long term, piracy issues in the United States are going to go the way of abortion. Just to illustrate what I mean: I personally oppose women's right to have abortions -- no holds barred -- I think that it's always morally wrong to pursue the termination of pregnancy as an end and practically always wrong to pursue it as a means to some other end (although there are cancer treatments etc that jeopardize the well-being of a fetus that people should not be barred from pursuing simply based on the potential harm). On the other hand, it is very clearly a cultural issue. I believe that on a practical level, to attempt to police abortion would require a Stasi amount of government effort. If the people want the right to abort, the horse is already out of the barn, and the job is not the government's to swing the pendulum back, it belongs to magazine article writers, philosophers, and op-ed journalists. If they should fail, that's okay. It is more important not to live The Lives of Others than to save those children's lives, simply because saving them would not represent a noble Arthurian quest, it would involve spying on pregnant women and assassinating doctors. Disgusting. Intellectual property is a patently less important arena of human activity, but I think in a similar way the policing of the internet should be cultural. There ought to be a cultural directive not to steal things over the internet when you're not a college kid anymore. When you can afford something, and it's reasonably available, I think this cultural directive already exists. This cultural approach is successful and that's the reason that -- for the most part -- torrenting and music sales are weakly correlated. Most of the people that think it's okay to steal things, would not be customers anyhow. I believe that most of the time torrenting represents charity on the part of movie studios and textbook publishers and music labels, providing their wares to those who would not have otherwise been able to afford them, which is not a bad thing, they're hiring cheap brand ambassadors. The ability to work subtle complicated questions like this one out is the power of cultural motivation. TL;DR : When you're talking about the decision to terminate a pregnancy, or the decision to commit online piracy, the power is entirely in the hands of the citizen. It is so easy to pirate, it is so distasteful to set a woman's body against her will. Law-abidingness in these cases requires the cooperation of the potential "criminals". You cannot pursue justice in these cases through traditional law enforcement.

jack-r-abbit 15y ago
Not that I would ever really want to get into a discussion that just compared piracy to abortion and I'm not really sure if I should even continue... but let's gingerly wander down that road for a just a minute. It seems you are wholeheartedly opposed to abortion but are disgusted with combating it by means of spying on pregnant women and assassinating doctors. I think I am safe to assume you would be fine with legislation that strictly tried to make it so inconvenient for abortion clinics/doctors to operate that they would just opt to stop. Or legislation that just made it illegal to do it. You don't need to spy on pregnant women to know if a clinic/doctor is doing abortions. So now let's talk about piracy in the same terms. Spying on internet users to see what they download would be sort of like spying on pregnant women (disgusting). Assassinating doctors... well... I don't think there was any clause in SOPA that involved killing anyone caught with torrents so we'll skip that part. ;) Shutting down the torrent sites would be along the same lines as shutting down the clinic/doctors. If that could be done without spying on your Internet usage, then it seems we have a winner. I think is about as far as I'm comfortable taking that analogy. Sorry.
- bgilroy26 15y ago
  I think the work of writing a good law in this case would involve identifying the proper target. As much as they are the darlings of our young people, sites like sidereel etc exist solely to exploit the creativity of others for the purpose of gathering eyeballs. Do you have ideas for how you could make these sites difficult to run without harming the infrastructure of the internet to the extent that it isn't worth it to put the law on the books? The trouble is that the government can already shut down sites like these in many cases, so the goal isn't to write a law that helps to catch them at all it needs to be enough of an improvement over what we already have to justify the work to create the law and enforce it. Just to throw out there, (because it's easy for me to do, I'm not the one who has to come up with the ideas) but any law that offshore's all of these sites to more lax countries, but leaves sites standing that are easily accessible from the US aren't very effective. At the same time, other nation's sovereignty should not be violated by these laws. The basic situation is that the ease of communication that the internet provides means that law enforcement is facing a sisyhean challenge if it plans to fight this criminality with sticks. The problem is already being solved by the availability of legal alternatives. Adults feel uncomfortable flaunting the law and if somebody allows them to avoid that, they will earn attention.

jack-r-abbit 15y ago

Not that I would ever really want to get into a discussion that just compared piracy to abortion and I'm not really sure if I should even continue... but let's gingerly wander down that road for a just a minute. It seems you are wholeheartedly opposed to abortion but are disgusted with combating it by means of spying on pregnant women and assassinating doctors. I think I am safe to assume you would be fine with legislation that strictly tried to make it so inconvenient for abortion clinics/doctors to operate that they would just opt to stop. Or legislation that just made it illegal to do it. You don't need to spy on pregnant women to know if a clinic/doctor is doing abortions. So now let's talk about piracy in the same terms. Spying on internet users to see what they download would be sort of like spying on pregnant women (disgusting). Assassinating doctors... well... I don't think there was any clause in SOPA that involved killing anyone caught with torrents so we'll skip that part. ;) Shutting down the torrent sites would be along the same lines as shutting down the clinic/doctors. If that could be done without spying on your Internet usage, then it seems we have a winner. I think is about as far as I'm comfortable taking that analogy. Sorry.

bgilroy26 15y ago
I think the work of writing a good law in this case would involve identifying the proper target. As much as they are the darlings of our young people, sites like sidereel etc exist solely to exploit the creativity of others for the purpose of gathering eyeballs. Do you have ideas for how you could make these sites difficult to run without harming the infrastructure of the internet to the extent that it isn't worth it to put the law on the books? The trouble is that the government can already shut down sites like these in many cases, so the goal isn't to write a law that helps to catch them at all it needs to be enough of an improvement over what we already have to justify the work to create the law and enforce it. Just to throw out there, (because it's easy for me to do, I'm not the one who has to come up with the ideas) but any law that offshore's all of these sites to more lax countries, but leaves sites standing that are easily accessible from the US aren't very effective. At the same time, other nation's sovereignty should not be violated by these laws. The basic situation is that the ease of communication that the internet provides means that law enforcement is facing a sisyhean challenge if it plans to fight this criminality with sticks. The problem is already being solved by the availability of legal alternatives. Adults feel uncomfortable flaunting the law and if somebody allows them to avoid that, they will earn attention.