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Have you seen the front page of Pirate Bay?
- jotto 18y agoTo be fair, the Pirate Bay is almost exclusively tracking pirated software. It's also unfair to compare tapes and radio to the mass distribution and indexing ability of the Internet.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoI agree, which is also why I think this spectrial was a mishap to begin with. They should have not attacked torrenting in general, they needed to attack the fact that Pirate Bay did nothing to remove torrents even by request. They also needed to show that Pirate Bay tracks almost exclusively pirated software/movies/music. They went after the wrong thing, because torrenting isn't inherently bad. It's only bad if people use it in the wrong way. Which, granted, happens a lot.
- mrtron 18y agoClearly a technology is not to blame, or Google would be at fault for linking to them as well. But using torrents the 'wrong' way? File sharing is legal in Sweden, which is why they have been able to operate for this long in a very transparent way (in terms of who runs the massive site). Downloading music/movies is legal for personal use for me in Canada. Annoyingly, we pay a tax, but that is a whole other can of worms. Why would the Pirate Bay remove torrents by request? They are doing nothing wrong. The MPAA/RIAA's course of action should have been to try and track down and sue individual downloaders in the US. The reason they aren't keen on that anymore is the bad publicity of suing regular folks and especially children. I also really dislike the term 'wrong' here because it is not clear that it is wrong to copy a file. Downloads can lead to higher sales through exposure, and to me the rampant litigation to fight change (as demonstrated by the cartoon) is wrong.
- jotto 18y agoThere is no interpretation necessary, it is illegal/wrong to pirate MPAA and RIAA works. It doesn't matter if you think what they do is wrong - they have the law on their side.
- vetinari 18y agoIllegal? Yes. Wrong? Not so sure. You should be able to download Queen songs or Steamboat Willie cartoon from the Internet. I see it as a form of civil disobedience against bought law. No matter how many trials the industry goes through, it will be not respected, because it is not balanced.
- mrtron 18y agoTapes went well beyond what you are giving them credit for - the mixtape scene in rap pre-released compilations of hits and were massively popular. Many artists claim they went the equivalent of platinum on mixtapes in NY alone. The distribution chains were also quite complex and well defined. However - it also served as a method for new artists to gain exposure so artists would actually leak their own material to good DJ's, sometimes even paying them to use their material. So it was a symbiotic relationship, like downloading music is. It wasn't just teenage kids recording the radio. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_Tape:_The_Art_of_Cassette_Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_Tape:_The_Art_of_Cassette_C... if you want way too much information on it.
- fabjan 18y agohttp://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=pirate+bay+80+percent http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=pirate+bay+80+percent
- zaius 18y agoLawrence Lessig did a speech a while ago about the read-write web: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbRE_H5hoU In that, he talks about how, when the phonograph came out, people were up-in-arms that it would destroy the performance and enjoyment of music as a social thing, which clearly happened. The music world is changing back to that again, and I'm kind of glad. Also, he does a bitching powerpoint.
- timcederman 18y agoI love this as an illustration of how nothing changes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevernameless/320619642/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevernameless/320619642/
- jimbokun 18y agoI like the phrase "authorized jobber." Much more catchy than "middleman."
- rms 18y agoGood article by a defense attorney on Torrentfreak: http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-understanding-finreactor-090223/ http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-understanding-f...
- calvin 18y agoSmall print on the image says, "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By..." I love it.
- devinnived 18y agoIt says "This cartoon is NOT Copyright By Dylan Horrocks '09". Dylan is a cartoonist from New Zealand. Here is a high resolution version of the comic ( http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/not-copyright.html http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/not-copyright.html ) , and a post about the NZ Copyright Amendment Act that inspired it ( http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/why-i-oppose-s92-of-the-copyright-amendment-act.html http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/why-i-oppose-s92-o... ).
- jim-greer 18y agoHear hear. It's about time that someone pointed out that downloading gigs and gigs of movies, games, and music is just like posting a video of a kitten with copyrighted music in the background.
- vaksel 18y agoThats MPAA/RIAA's fault. They spent so much effort enforcing bullshit aspects of copyright, that they lost the goodwill of people to enforce the non-BS portion.
- jonursenbach 18y agoNo, it's our fault for having an archaic copyright system that people are still trying to enforce instead of fixing the root issues.
- kajecounterhack 18y agoPray tell me, what are these root issues you speak of? I'm mostly in agreement with vaksel. I don't see how the copyright system has anything to do with how the MPAA/RIAA tries to enforce it's copyright upon meaningless things like dancing videos of babies. Which by the way happened http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turns-tables-on-music-industry/ http://www.switched.com/2008/08/21/dancing-baby-lawsuit-turn...
- tutwabee 18y agoThe DMCA seems to legally broaden the intellectual property rights of mega-corporations in nasty ways. The RIAA, MPAA, and many electronics corporations frequently abuse these rights, while staying within the law. Maybe the RIAA and MPAA are the good guys. They're just stress-testing the system to work out bugs. Legal loopholes and kinks will be discovered, abused, and patched up much more hastily this way.
- Xichekolas 18y agoWell just to throw it up for consideration, I think granting exclusive rights to a work for "life + 70 years" for an individual and 120 years for a corporation is rather absurd. If the point of copyright was really to encourage artists/writers to produce content, don't you think 25 years would be sufficient time to capitalize on a work? Although I'd even settle for simply "life". The original copyright terms (in 1790) were 14 years with an option to extend once for 14 more. The current system is in place so corporate copyright owners can continue to profit off their long-dead artist's creations... ahem Disney. Nothing made since 1923 has entered the public domain. So yeah, the MPAA/RIAA definitely make bone-headed enforcement decisions, but the underlying system is also broken.
- sketerpot 18y agoThose guys have style, and always have.
- chacha102 18y agoI loved reading their Legal page that showcases how dumb companies are. When will companies get a clue that if they make it inconvenient for customers, people are going to torrent it. (One of the reasons iTunes is widely used, its easy to pay a buck for a song instead of torrenting it)
- apag 18y agoFor posterity (hopefully this link will last longer than the front page), here’s what was on it: http://static.thepiratebay.org/doodles/cartoonish.gif http://static.thepiratebay.org/doodles/cartoonish.gif
- johnbender 18y agoI think its time to create a gui in visual basic and put the ever-loving-smackdown on the RIAA
- Jem 18y agoThis isn't reddit. The CSI gui gag is not likely to get you massive upvotes here.
- ObieJazz 18y agoAnd yet, a link to a one-sided propaganda comic strip gets 103 upvotes.
- Jem 18y agoThe comic strip is relevant to current news. The CSI episode in question aired months and months ago and has been done to death. (Google: 1,820 from reddit.com for gui visual basic)
- dgordon 18y agoBut saying "This isn't reddit" will get you a few.
- Jem 18y agoWasn't my intention - just trying to save the newbie some massive downvoting in the future :)
- sharkbrainguy 18y agoJust to make it blatantly obvious that this comic was not specifically made about this situation. http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/getting-ready-for-the-blackout.html http://dylanhorrocks.vox.com/library/post/getting-ready-for-... P.S. not strictly relevant but Dylan Horrocks is a really great guy and you should all read Hicksville
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoThe problem with digital distribution is that it fucks with our already imperfect understanding of how an economy functions. Our explanations of how price works generally relies upon supply and demand as well as the cost of production. How do you analyze these variables when supply is infinite and the cost of production is zero? This scares a lot of people. The more your business model relies on the status quo the more it scares you.
- lvecsey 18y agoI think it's wrong to assume that the economy, with the cash transaction at the heart of it, is somehow an immortal or god given / evolutionary design. Imagine if it was replaced with a smart-card where your transaction had a programmable, algorithmic component to it. Now all of a sudden the system can become a lot more creative, and even carry a 'vote' like characteristic that will survive multiple successive transfers.
- ashleyw 18y agoThe right to violate copyright is part of our human rights? Now I'm an occasional pirate (mainly TV, since I'm not in the US), but these guys are bonkers; I know pirating is wrong, however these guys seem to think that nobody should have the rights to their own work, and anyone should be allowed to take what they want without giving anything back to the owner. Is it just me, or is that absurd?
- alexfarran 18y agoI think the point is that there are other rights besides copyright, the right to privacy for example, and that where they come into conflict copyright should not automatically supersede all other rights.
- tocomment 18y agocopyright violates free speech, no? If I'm forbidden from singing happy birthday to you, isn't that censoring my speech?
- doki_pen 18y agoCopyright is not a human right. This is why it runs out. It was meant to be a way to encourage people to create a long time ago. Sharing, on the other hand, is a human right. People were willing to sacrafice this right when they had no means of sharing. Many things have changed since then and we need to think of what rights we sacrifice and what we get in return.
- mjgoins 18y agoIf you're not happy about how "one sided" this is, I'd suggest http://questioncopyright.org http://questioncopyright.org if you want a more reasoned argument. The gist of it is that if we all abandoned copyright, we'd lose a few things, but the gains would outweigh the losses. I agree, but I also don't like big-budget movies, and don't lay any closed-source games, so I guess I'm in the tiny minority.