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When someone figures out how to combat sharing information covered by IP laws without large scale surveillance and censorship systems then maybe it would make s

When someone figures out how to combat sharing information covered by IP laws without large scale surveillance and censorship systems then maybe it would make sense. I can't even see how that would be possible, but who knows? Right now "combating piracy" is a bad thing just like "combating evil thoughts" or "combating hateful speech" is bad, because the only possible way to do it causes much more harm than the stated enemy is causing.

jack-r-abbit 15y ago
> When someone figures out how to combat sharing information covered by IP laws without large scale surveillance and censorship systems then maybe it would make sense. But even if someone did... it seems like all the pitchforks would still come out against it. We don't even know what the Netflix PAC is aimed at yet we're already supposed to hate Netflix for it. It just seems like people just don't want to lose their access to torrents. BTW, combating piracy is not just like combating evil thoughts or hateful speech. Piracy can be defined a bit more clearly than the others. Yes, there are some grey areas of fair use and the like, but it is pretty clear that if you just downloaded a TS of the still in theater "Titanic - 3D" then you have a pirated copy.
- freshhawk 15y ago
  Oh you can define it more clearly, I agree. You can't enforce whatever rules you want to enforce any more clearly. That was my point. I'm not sure the pitchforks would come out against it, some would, some wouldn't but it's impossible to say since most people who have thought about it are very confident there is no solution in this class. If something can be digitized then it can be shared over the same channels as private communication. To "combat piracy" you need to control what people can say, what people can hear and how people can read. To do that you need to examine everything. You need surveillance and censorship, because anything that can be made digital is now either no different from protected speech or can be presented like protected speech to confuse the watchers. It's not great for our artists or our economy that the internet made this a reality but it is. The internet came with a tradeoff for our culture. Large scale calls to "combat piracy" fall into the same bucket as "stamp out communism" or "win the war on drugs" or "stop pornography" or "eliminate blasphemy". Any entity that could do this would either be terrifyingly totalitarian or unable to enforce the rules. So they are either cartoonishly evil, ignorant of the problem and therefore unlikely to help anything or are raising money/political capital using some buzzwords. So someone has to figure out how to support artists that are suffering through this disruptive change and Netflix is actually in a decent place to try innovative potential solutions. Hence the pitchforks coming out when people hear they have decided to support SOPA-style political posturing. I'm not sure they actually are, this is a Russia Today article, it's right next to a story about mind control weapons that will create real life zombies. This site is famous for hilariously innacurate stories.

jack-r-abbit 15y ago

> When someone figures out how to combat sharing information covered by IP laws without large scale surveillance and censorship systems then maybe it would make sense. But even if someone did... it seems like all the pitchforks would still come out against it. We don't even know what the Netflix PAC is aimed at yet we're already supposed to hate Netflix for it. It just seems like people just don't want to lose their access to torrents. BTW, combating piracy is not just like combating evil thoughts or hateful speech. Piracy can be defined a bit more clearly than the others. Yes, there are some grey areas of fair use and the like, but it is pretty clear that if you just downloaded a TS of the still in theater "Titanic - 3D" then you have a pirated copy.

freshhawk 15y ago
Oh you can define it more clearly, I agree. You can't enforce whatever rules you want to enforce any more clearly. That was my point. I'm not sure the pitchforks would come out against it, some would, some wouldn't but it's impossible to say since most people who have thought about it are very confident there is no solution in this class. If something can be digitized then it can be shared over the same channels as private communication. To "combat piracy" you need to control what people can say, what people can hear and how people can read. To do that you need to examine everything. You need surveillance and censorship, because anything that can be made digital is now either no different from protected speech or can be presented like protected speech to confuse the watchers. It's not great for our artists or our economy that the internet made this a reality but it is. The internet came with a tradeoff for our culture. Large scale calls to "combat piracy" fall into the same bucket as "stamp out communism" or "win the war on drugs" or "stop pornography" or "eliminate blasphemy". Any entity that could do this would either be terrifyingly totalitarian or unable to enforce the rules. So they are either cartoonishly evil, ignorant of the problem and therefore unlikely to help anything or are raising money/political capital using some buzzwords. So someone has to figure out how to support artists that are suffering through this disruptive change and Netflix is actually in a decent place to try innovative potential solutions. Hence the pitchforks coming out when people hear they have decided to support SOPA-style political posturing. I'm not sure they actually are, this is a Russia Today article, it's right next to a story about mind control weapons that will create real life zombies. This site is famous for hilariously innacurate stories.