7 ms·

The middle ground is certainly not imaginary. Life is not black or white. The people I associate with don't share things, because they almost universally re

The middle ground is certainly not imaginary. Life is not black or white. The people I associate with don't share things, because they almost universally recognize that if people don't financially support movie studios/music studios/authors - that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight. The right approach to managing copyright infringement is to continue to pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources. I applaud google's approach - which is to make it increasingly difficult to find these sites which persistently make copyright-infringing material available. Hopefully the other major search engines will do so as well; though, last time I checked, DuckDuckGo got a significant portion of it's content through Yahoo BOSS, and Yahoo get's it's content through Bing - so, in theory, if Bing adopts the same copyright friendly search indicators, then 90%+ of the search engines will now be obscuring this material)

harshreality 14y ago
Everyone is a publisher. You're in favor of lawsuits against people who run bittorrent clients in a swarm, then, for $22k a song, or even $1000 per song? Any amount enough to be worthwhile as a deterrent is punitive and has the potential to wreck someone's life. Or what about blogs or forums with posted links to copyrighted material on filehosting sites?
- ghshephard 14y ago
  The challenge here is to recognize there is a happy medium. " pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) " There is a difference between someone who sells indexed warez/books/movies/music on a retail site, and someone running a bit torrent client. Aggressively pursue the first, and educate the second. Simply having the ISP send a warning notice of copyright infringement to the account holder of an IP address, without in any way communicating back to the rightsholder _who_ that IP Address holder was, is a nice medium. Note - just because it's easy to run a bit-torrent client sharing the latest GameOfThrones Books (all available via Kindle, or the library) doesn't mean it's legal (or even ethical). Re: Posted Links to copyrighted material - depends on how organized / indexed those links are. If it's a casual site with a few links pointing out, clearly that falls under fair use. If it has carefully indexed/searchable database of 750,000 songs, and 35,000 movies,, and 250,000 books in such a way that you just have to visit that site, click a link, and download the content - well, perhaps there needs to be a conversation. But reasonable people can come up with reasonable solutions. It doesn't have to be "All Sharing, All the Time" - nor does it have to be "Idiotic Draconian RIAA $22K/Song to some random bit torrent user"
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    It's easy to sit on the fence until you have to get specific. Everything you've said here is reasonable. Politician style reasonable. All the hard decisions that would need to be made to do anything in practice are covered by "educate the second" and "perhaps there needs to be a conversation". In my opinion, you are wrong in expecting that these few large index/hosting sites or "worst offenders" will continue to be the bulk of the infringing traffic. We are moving away from that very quickly already.
    - Silhouette 14y ago
      There is, as you seem to realise to some extent, exactly one logical conclusion to the everyone-does-it, distributed-everything world you describe: prohibit the very act of conveying digital information in encrypted form, and require the infrastructure providers to help with identifying and prosecuting those who break the law. Personally, I don't think that would be a very nice world to live in. That means effort has to be put into promoting legitimate alternatives and educating people about why these issues matter. This has been done before, many times, with driving offences for example. Not so long ago, you could go past a pub at lunchtime and find plenty of obviously impaired people cheerfully getting into their cars to drive back to the office. Today, drunk-driving is socially unacceptable, licensed establishments run promotions for designated drivers, and police action is relatively rare because it is mostly unnecessary. This was achieved almost entirely through education, and in particular demonstrating the real consequences of the illegal act that do affect real people rather than allowing the perceptions of a "victimless crime" or "fighting the system" to continue unchallenged. I see no reason a serious, credible campaign could not successfully explain that copyright is there to support the artists who create the works we want to enjoy and isn't just about lining the pockets of big businesses who have been price gouging since forever. If the laws were also changed to bring copyright terms back to sanity and those big businesses suffered a few high profile legal defeats over their track record of anti-competitive behaviour at the same time, a lot of good might result. [Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that this would completely eliminate all illegal copying. However, as I've just posted separately, I think it leads to a reasonable compromise that gives sensible options to people who just want to enjoy creative works and allows rightsholders to chase down large-scale infringement effectively without having to prohibit personal encrypted communications.]
freshhawk 14y ago
That's an awfully fuzzy definition of what's acceptable and what's not for something being dealt with at a political level. > while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources And who's going to force the rights-holders to do this? > that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight Funny, art has survived quite a few shakeups in distribution and access throughout history and so far has kept getting better. Don't get me wrong, this is a huge problem right now. Artists deserve to, and society needs them to, get paid. But people will share bits with each other in ways that are indistinguishable from free speech. Going after the worst offenders works now, but those offenders are getting smaller and more distributed all the time. Even if they never go away, that group will soon be the biggest offenders. Trackerless torrents and distributed torrent search is here, and gaining in popularity. A lot of people in the HN community are working on new, easier ways to share bits with friends right now. Can you define a middle ground that can identify and stop (or at least slow) the p2p distribution of copyrighted material that does not involve monitoring that p2p traffic to scan it for infringing content? That seems like a paradox.

harshreality 14y ago

Everyone is a publisher. You're in favor of lawsuits against people who run bittorrent clients in a swarm, then, for $22k a song, or even $1000 per song? Any amount enough to be worthwhile as a deterrent is punitive and has the potential to wreck someone's life. Or what about blogs or forums with posted links to copyrighted material on filehosting sites?

ghshephard 14y ago
The challenge here is to recognize there is a happy medium. " pursue the worst offenders (those who knowingly publish copyrighted content) " There is a difference between someone who sells indexed warez/books/movies/music on a retail site, and someone running a bit torrent client. Aggressively pursue the first, and educate the second. Simply having the ISP send a warning notice of copyright infringement to the account holder of an IP address, without in any way communicating back to the rightsholder _who_ that IP Address holder was, is a nice medium. Note - just because it's easy to run a bit-torrent client sharing the latest GameOfThrones Books (all available via Kindle, or the library) doesn't mean it's legal (or even ethical). Re: Posted Links to copyrighted material - depends on how organized / indexed those links are. If it's a casual site with a few links pointing out, clearly that falls under fair use. If it has carefully indexed/searchable database of 750,000 songs, and 35,000 movies,, and 250,000 books in such a way that you just have to visit that site, click a link, and download the content - well, perhaps there needs to be a conversation. But reasonable people can come up with reasonable solutions. It doesn't have to be "All Sharing, All the Time" - nor does it have to be "Idiotic Draconian RIAA $22K/Song to some random bit torrent user"
- freshhawk 14y ago
  It's easy to sit on the fence until you have to get specific. Everything you've said here is reasonable. Politician style reasonable. All the hard decisions that would need to be made to do anything in practice are covered by "educate the second" and "perhaps there needs to be a conversation". In my opinion, you are wrong in expecting that these few large index/hosting sites or "worst offenders" will continue to be the bulk of the infringing traffic. We are moving away from that very quickly already.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    There is, as you seem to realise to some extent, exactly one logical conclusion to the everyone-does-it, distributed-everything world you describe: prohibit the very act of conveying digital information in encrypted form, and require the infrastructure providers to help with identifying and prosecuting those who break the law. Personally, I don't think that would be a very nice world to live in. That means effort has to be put into promoting legitimate alternatives and educating people about why these issues matter. This has been done before, many times, with driving offences for example. Not so long ago, you could go past a pub at lunchtime and find plenty of obviously impaired people cheerfully getting into their cars to drive back to the office. Today, drunk-driving is socially unacceptable, licensed establishments run promotions for designated drivers, and police action is relatively rare because it is mostly unnecessary. This was achieved almost entirely through education, and in particular demonstrating the real consequences of the illegal act that do affect real people rather than allowing the perceptions of a "victimless crime" or "fighting the system" to continue unchallenged. I see no reason a serious, credible campaign could not successfully explain that copyright is there to support the artists who create the works we want to enjoy and isn't just about lining the pockets of big businesses who have been price gouging since forever. If the laws were also changed to bring copyright terms back to sanity and those big businesses suffered a few high profile legal defeats over their track record of anti-competitive behaviour at the same time, a lot of good might result. [Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that this would completely eliminate all illegal copying. However, as I've just posted separately, I think it leads to a reasonable compromise that gives sensible options to people who just want to enjoy creative works and allows rightsholders to chase down large-scale infringement effectively without having to prohibit personal encrypted communications.]

freshhawk 14y ago

That's an awfully fuzzy definition of what's acceptable and what's not for something being dealt with at a political level. > while continuing to make that same content available through non-drm, inexpensive sources And who's going to force the rights-holders to do this? > that this incredible flow of high quality content we all enjoy will disappear, almost overnight Funny, art has survived quite a few shakeups in distribution and access throughout history and so far has kept getting better. Don't get me wrong, this is a huge problem right now. Artists deserve to, and society needs them to, get paid. But people will share bits with each other in ways that are indistinguishable from free speech. Going after the worst offenders works now, but those offenders are getting smaller and more distributed all the time. Even if they never go away, that group will soon be the biggest offenders. Trackerless torrents and distributed torrent search is here, and gaining in popularity. A lot of people in the HN community are working on new, easier ways to share bits with friends right now. Can you define a middle ground that can identify and stop (or at least slow) the p2p distribution of copyrighted material that does not involve monitoring that p2p traffic to scan it for infringing content? That seems like a paradox.