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While I do not support piracy, I am worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common.

Reventlov 2y ago
Step 1: Don't use CloudFlare MITM as a service Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service Really, I see no downside to this court decision.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?
- adolph 2y ago
  Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
  - gruez 2y ago
    This analogy is absurd. Steel and rubber can't break laws either, but police regularly seize guns and vehicles used for committing crimes. Most developed countries also have some sort of sanctions regime that bars its citizens from transacting with certain entities. In most cases such sanctions don't even require a court order, the executive branch can usually unilaterally add entities to sanction lists.
    - nepthar 2y ago
      Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses
      - StressedDev 2y ago
        In the United States, Gun sales are heavily regulated and require background checks. Manufacturers and stores cannot just sell a gun to anyone.
      - gabeio 2y ago
        > gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them Uh... https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/smart-gun-police-gun-control-safety-benefits-carry-real-costs/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/smart-gun-police-gun-... There actually had been some attempts to make smart guns mandatory while not completely working out all of their "kinks" yet. But to your point they actually have attempted this, to some degree. At first they were thinking only to prevent police from having their weapons used against them, but they had attempted to expand the scope. Although after the cops didn't want it either and the push for them seems to have waned.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Internet companies aren't being asked to proactively block piracy sites either. They're asked to block IP addresses associated with known piracy sites, as determined by the courts. >Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses ...only because the government aren't nervous about "ores and parts" getting in the hands of criminal or rival states. For many other items, suppliers are required to seek export licenses for certain goods[1], which is arguably an equal or higher bar than what you're describing. Such items aren't limited to stuff like explosives or munitions, it also includes benign stuff like certain metal alloys, and semiconductors. Also, Banks and other financial institutions are required to proactively look for sanctions evasion activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
      - toofy 2y ago
        gunsmiths are absolutely regulated on who they can’t sell guns.
    - adolph 2y ago
      > police regularly seize . . . Yes, civil forfeiture would be absurd if it weren’t a farce of force. https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/asset-forfeiture-abuse https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
      - gruez 2y ago
        Police seizures would still exist without civil forfeiture. Moreover, in this case, unlike civil forfeiture, there's actually a court order backing the action.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    They do if they're made illegal. Laws are just made up anyway and only relevant because people with the means to enforce them (aka guns) exist. I think intellectual property laws need radical overhaul and reduction, and I think the current iteration is based on shakey philosophical principles anyway, but you won't get very far with straw men arguments, over-reductionism, or bad legal advice.
    - adolph 2y ago
      To recap: >>> . . . worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common >> On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking? > Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws? I’ll restate the point: laws that address the means and not the behavior are ripe for abuse. That some exist doesn’t justify their expansion.
  - emptiestplace 2y ago
    I can't see either scenario really bothering anybody, just get some paper towel or whatever.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    I think there's photons on the wire (or thereabouts) too. Electrons don't travel very fast.
- JellyBeanThief 2y ago
  At a 10 year length of copyright.
  - badlibrarian 2y ago
    Cool. Now work through the implications for open source licenses.
    - jolmg 2y ago
      That after 10 years, what was licensed as open becomes even more open? I think only a minority of licensors and licensees would have a problem with that.
      - badlibrarian 2y ago
        If that were the case, we wouldn't need GPL, we would just call it public domain. So why didn't we do that?
        jolmg 2y ago
        I think the GPL is a good license, both v2 and v3, for the restrictions they place to promote more FOSS and ensure software users the rights I would hope everyone believes they ought to have (e.g. the 4 freedoms to the software of devices they own via the anti-tivoization clauses). Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit? Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see: $ pacman -Qq | xargs pacman -Qi | grep -Po 'Licenses *: \K.*' | sed -E 's/ +/\n/g' | sed 's/-.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '$1 > 100' 242 MIT 277 LGPL 348 GPL 381 BSD However, looking at https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/ https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on..., I see: | 1 | MIT | 44.69% | | 2 | Other | 15.68% | | 3 | GPLv2 | 12.96% | | 4 | Apache | 11.19% | | 5 | GPLv3 | 8.88% | | 6 | BSD 3-clause | 4.53% | | 7 | Unlicense | 1.87% | | 8 | BSD 2-clause | 1.70% | | 9 | LGPLv3 | 1.30% | | 10 | AGPLv3 | 1.05% |
- aftbit 2y ago
  Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did. I'm not sure that's the right line for society, but it's my personal line.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did. Both examples aren't exactly clear lines. The walmart example arguably affects "actual human beings" by raising prices, or at the very least, making the shopping experience worse. See: stores in the US where anything vaguely high value is locked up and you need to call an employee over to open it. The car window smashing example could result in no economic loss for the owner, if the owner has comprehensive 0 deductible insurance, or if the car is a company car. There's also plenty of activity that we ought to ban even if there's no "actual human being is harmed", eg. speeding, or tax evasion.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Even if you have insurance, it just raises everyones rates just a little.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    While I understand that this is your personal line and your decision, I don't understand how you mean "an actual human being is harmed". Clearly no human being is harmed by smashing the windows of a private car. (assuming that neither the smasher nor anyone else gets hurt in the actual act of the smashing.) As a first order of approximation no human got harmed, they weren't even there when their car's window got smashed. As a second order approximation obviously we know the private car's owner will need to replace the windows which will cost them. At the same time shoplifting from Walmart is also a cost which is born by everyone who shops at Walmart. Walmart will put that cost into the price of items. They will also put the cost of anti-theft items in the price of things too. Plus those anti-theft measures will harm the non-thieves by inconveniencing them. So everyone will pay just a bit more because of the shoplifting. These costs and inconveniences add up quickly. Why is one of these costs within the line and the other is outside the line? What makes one of them "actual human being is harmed" while the other not?
- sureglymop 2y ago
  No law is being broken by downloading/consuming what's commonly referred to as "pirated content" here in Switzerland. Downloading music, TV shows, movies and ebooks is legal for private use. Companies which import storage media (e.g. DVDs) pay levies which are meant to be paid out to the rights holders. These rights can be asserted through collecting societies, e.g. Suissimage for filmmakers. https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#art_20 https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar... Interestingly the article right after that one is about the "decoding of computer programs" and says: Any person who has the right to use a computer program may obtain, either personally or through a third party, necessary information on the interfaces by decoding the program code using independently developed programs.
athrowaway3z 2y ago
While I do support piracy. Services like Cloudflare already locked up most of the free internet you're imagining.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  I see this and I don’t quite understand how. You don’t have to use their services. You can host your own whenever and wherever you’d like. The amount of providers now is greater than ever and even home internet connections are getting fast enough for some reasonable hosting.
  - xethos 2y ago
    It's not a complaint of how you (or I) can self-host and avoid Cloudflare, it's a complaint about how so many others use do Cloudflare. Especially what happens if Cloudflare doesn't like the way your IP address or browser look, or doubt your humanity.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      This was my response as well. The number of people hosting websites that large numbers of people visit is much smaller than people of this forum would like to admit. The vast majority of web users don't visit Joe's self-hosted blog, they view Joe's content on the various social platforms. It doesn't make sense for Joe to host his own site.
      - IgorPartola 2y ago
        Ok so if it doesn’t make sense for Joe to host his website because it’s just not interesting enough for people to visit then how is others using different CDNs than CloudFlare going to solve that?
        xethos 2y ago
        We (or I, at least) aren't asking Joe Blogman to host his own site (though if he does, I'll cheer them on just the same). We're asking other, bigger sites, the ones that large groups of people visit, to avoid Cloudflare. These tend to be the "infrastructure" websites; the ones that, if you can't access them, you have a harder time that day because you have an actual task you have to do - and the company behind the website that Cloudflare is blocking you from, has reduced other avenues of completing the task because "customers can use the website". It is in this way that Cloudflare is bad. It's bad for consumers being blocked because Cloudflare doesn't like their browser, IP, or local weather (because who the hell knows exactly why they're being blocked), and it's bad for businesses too: both competing CDNs that can't compete with CF's scale, and businesses that rely on CF but will be hit with a monopoly-sized price increase once Cloudflare's competition is extinct.
finnthehuman 2y ago
It’s been a foregone conclusion for 10+ years. Piracy is a holdout, not the beginning. Very few people will go to the ends of technical and legal means to stay online.
- naniwaduni 2y ago
  Tell me you weren't raised poor without telling me you weren't raised poor?
  - TheBozzCL 2y ago
    Or outside of Europe/North America, for that matter.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

Reventlov 2y ago

Step 1: Don't use CloudFlare MITM as a service Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service Really, I see no downside to this court decision.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?

adolph 2y ago
Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
- gruez 2y ago
  This analogy is absurd. Steel and rubber can't break laws either, but police regularly seize guns and vehicles used for committing crimes. Most developed countries also have some sort of sanctions regime that bars its citizens from transacting with certain entities. In most cases such sanctions don't even require a court order, the executive branch can usually unilaterally add entities to sanction lists.
  - nepthar 2y ago
    Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses
    - StressedDev 2y ago
      In the United States, Gun sales are heavily regulated and require background checks. Manufacturers and stores cannot just sell a gun to anyone.
    - gabeio 2y ago
      > gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them Uh... https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/smart-gun-police-gun-control-safety-benefits-carry-real-costs/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/smart-gun-police-gun-... There actually had been some attempts to make smart guns mandatory while not completely working out all of their "kinks" yet. But to your point they actually have attempted this, to some degree. At first they were thinking only to prevent police from having their weapons used against them, but they had attempted to expand the scope. Although after the cops didn't want it either and the push for them seems to have waned.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Internet companies aren't being asked to proactively block piracy sites either. They're asked to block IP addresses associated with known piracy sites, as determined by the courts. >Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses ...only because the government aren't nervous about "ores and parts" getting in the hands of criminal or rival states. For many other items, suppliers are required to seek export licenses for certain goods[1], which is arguably an equal or higher bar than what you're describing. Such items aren't limited to stuff like explosives or munitions, it also includes benign stuff like certain metal alloys, and semiconductors. Also, Banks and other financial institutions are required to proactively look for sanctions evasion activity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
    - toofy 2y ago
      gunsmiths are absolutely regulated on who they can’t sell guns.
  - adolph 2y ago
    > police regularly seize . . . Yes, civil forfeiture would be absurd if it weren’t a farce of force. https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/asset-forfeiture-abuse https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
    - gruez 2y ago
      Police seizures would still exist without civil forfeiture. Moreover, in this case, unlike civil forfeiture, there's actually a court order backing the action.
- freedomben 2y ago
  They do if they're made illegal. Laws are just made up anyway and only relevant because people with the means to enforce them (aka guns) exist. I think intellectual property laws need radical overhaul and reduction, and I think the current iteration is based on shakey philosophical principles anyway, but you won't get very far with straw men arguments, over-reductionism, or bad legal advice.
  - adolph 2y ago
    To recap: >>> . . . worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common >> On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking? > Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws? I’ll restate the point: laws that address the means and not the behavior are ripe for abuse. That some exist doesn’t justify their expansion.
- emptiestplace 2y ago
  I can't see either scenario really bothering anybody, just get some paper towel or whatever.
- dboreham 2y ago
  I think there's photons on the wire (or thereabouts) too. Electrons don't travel very fast.
JellyBeanThief 2y ago
At a 10 year length of copyright.
- badlibrarian 2y ago
  Cool. Now work through the implications for open source licenses.
  - jolmg 2y ago
    That after 10 years, what was licensed as open becomes even more open? I think only a minority of licensors and licensees would have a problem with that.
    - badlibrarian 2y ago
      If that were the case, we wouldn't need GPL, we would just call it public domain. So why didn't we do that?
      - jolmg 2y ago
        I think the GPL is a good license, both v2 and v3, for the restrictions they place to promote more FOSS and ensure software users the rights I would hope everyone believes they ought to have (e.g. the 4 freedoms to the software of devices they own via the anti-tivoization clauses). Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit? Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see: $ pacman -Qq | xargs pacman -Qi | grep -Po 'Licenses *: \K.*' | sed -E 's/ +/\n/g' | sed 's/-.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | awk '$1 > 100' 242 MIT 277 LGPL 348 GPL 381 BSD However, looking at https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/ https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on..., I see: | 1 | MIT | 44.69% | | 2 | Other | 15.68% | | 3 | GPLv2 | 12.96% | | 4 | Apache | 11.19% | | 5 | GPLv3 | 8.88% | | 6 | BSD 3-clause | 4.53% | | 7 | Unlicense | 1.87% | | 8 | BSD 2-clause | 1.70% | | 9 | LGPLv3 | 1.30% | | 10 | AGPLv3 | 1.05% |
aftbit 2y ago
Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did. I'm not sure that's the right line for society, but it's my personal line.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did. Both examples aren't exactly clear lines. The walmart example arguably affects "actual human beings" by raising prices, or at the very least, making the shopping experience worse. See: stores in the US where anything vaguely high value is locked up and you need to call an employee over to open it. The car window smashing example could result in no economic loss for the owner, if the owner has comprehensive 0 deductible insurance, or if the car is a company car. There's also plenty of activity that we ought to ban even if there's no "actual human being is harmed", eg. speeding, or tax evasion.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Even if you have insurance, it just raises everyones rates just a little.
- krisoft 2y ago
  While I understand that this is your personal line and your decision, I don't understand how you mean "an actual human being is harmed". Clearly no human being is harmed by smashing the windows of a private car. (assuming that neither the smasher nor anyone else gets hurt in the actual act of the smashing.) As a first order of approximation no human got harmed, they weren't even there when their car's window got smashed. As a second order approximation obviously we know the private car's owner will need to replace the windows which will cost them. At the same time shoplifting from Walmart is also a cost which is born by everyone who shops at Walmart. Walmart will put that cost into the price of items. They will also put the cost of anti-theft items in the price of things too. Plus those anti-theft measures will harm the non-thieves by inconveniencing them. So everyone will pay just a bit more because of the shoplifting. These costs and inconveniences add up quickly. Why is one of these costs within the line and the other is outside the line? What makes one of them "actual human being is harmed" while the other not?
sureglymop 2y ago
No law is being broken by downloading/consuming what's commonly referred to as "pirated content" here in Switzerland. Downloading music, TV shows, movies and ebooks is legal for private use. Companies which import storage media (e.g. DVDs) pay levies which are meant to be paid out to the rights holders. These rights can be asserted through collecting societies, e.g. Suissimage for filmmakers. https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#art_20 https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ar... Interestingly the article right after that one is about the "decoding of computer programs" and says: Any person who has the right to use a computer program may obtain, either personally or through a third party, necessary information on the interfaces by decoding the program code using independently developed programs.

athrowaway3z 2y ago

While I do support piracy. Services like Cloudflare already locked up most of the free internet you're imagining.

IgorPartola 2y ago
I see this and I don’t quite understand how. You don’t have to use their services. You can host your own whenever and wherever you’d like. The amount of providers now is greater than ever and even home internet connections are getting fast enough for some reasonable hosting.
- xethos 2y ago
  It's not a complaint of how you (or I) can self-host and avoid Cloudflare, it's a complaint about how so many others use do Cloudflare. Especially what happens if Cloudflare doesn't like the way your IP address or browser look, or doubt your humanity.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    This was my response as well. The number of people hosting websites that large numbers of people visit is much smaller than people of this forum would like to admit. The vast majority of web users don't visit Joe's self-hosted blog, they view Joe's content on the various social platforms. It doesn't make sense for Joe to host his own site.
    - IgorPartola 2y ago
      Ok so if it doesn’t make sense for Joe to host his website because it’s just not interesting enough for people to visit then how is others using different CDNs than CloudFlare going to solve that?
      - xethos 2y ago
        We (or I, at least) aren't asking Joe Blogman to host his own site (though if he does, I'll cheer them on just the same). We're asking other, bigger sites, the ones that large groups of people visit, to avoid Cloudflare. These tend to be the "infrastructure" websites; the ones that, if you can't access them, you have a harder time that day because you have an actual task you have to do - and the company behind the website that Cloudflare is blocking you from, has reduced other avenues of completing the task because "customers can use the website". It is in this way that Cloudflare is bad. It's bad for consumers being blocked because Cloudflare doesn't like their browser, IP, or local weather (because who the hell knows exactly why they're being blocked), and it's bad for businesses too: both competing CDNs that can't compete with CF's scale, and businesses that rely on CF but will be hit with a monopoly-sized price increase once Cloudflare's competition is extinct.

finnthehuman 2y ago

It’s been a foregone conclusion for 10+ years. Piracy is a holdout, not the beginning. Very few people will go to the ends of technical and legal means to stay online.

naniwaduni 2y ago
Tell me you weren't raised poor without telling me you weren't raised poor?
- TheBozzCL 2y ago
  Or outside of Europe/North America, for that matter.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]